The Coming of Conan the Cimmerian

by Robert E. Howard

  Howard sent the new story late in the month, and he could report to Lovecraft a few days later that:

  “Wright took another of the Conan the Cimmerian series, ‘The Tower of the Elephant,’ the setting of which is among the spider-haunted jeweled towers of Zamora the Accursed, while Conan was still a thief by profession, before he came into the kingship.”

  In the sole month of March 1932, Howard, “without much labor on [his] part,” had written an estimated 250 pages of Conan material, to sell only two stories.

  It appears that Howard did not work on Conan for the next several weeks. Presumably he did not wish to deluge Weird Tales with more Conan stories until those which had been accepted were scheduled. But the Hyborian world was quite present in Howard’s mind.

  One of the elements from the prototypical phase of the series had apparently disappeared: the remembrance/reincarnation theme that had been present in People of the Dark, Cimmeria and the early drafts of The Phoenix on the Sword. This was surprising given the importance we have ascribed to this theme in the very inception of what was to become the Conan series. In fact, as he had just completed the first Conan tales, Howard mentioned to Lovecraft that he was also “working on a mythical period of prehistory when what is now the state of Texas was a great plateau, stretching from the Rocky Mountains to the sea – before the country south of the Cap-rock broke down to form the sloping steppes which now constitute the region.” The story alluded to here was Marchers of Valhalla, in its first version. The story would be rejected in May by Farnsworth Wright. Marchers of Valhalla was the first of the James Allison stories. Allison is a crippled Texan of the post-oak country, condemned to a drab life, who acquires the ability to relive his past, heroic, lives. In October 1933, Howard wrote to Clark Ashton Smith that The Garden of Fear – another James Allison story – was “dealing with one of my various conceptions of the Hyborian and post-Hyborian world.” To fully understand the implication, Smith would have had to be familiar with one of the drafts for Marchers of Valhalla, where Ishtar’s dialogue was quite different than in the published version of the tale:

  “Listen, and I will tell you!” she cried, hitching toward me on her knees and catching at the skirt of my tunic. “Only listen, and then grant me the little thing I ask! I am Ishtar, a daughter of a king in dim Lemuria, which the sea gulped so long ago. Thoth-amon, the sorcerer of Stygia, hated my father, and to spite him, he put the curse on me of Life ever-lasting!

  “Oh, man, I have lived for so many, weary, weary ages! I saw Atlantis and Lemuria sink below the waves, and the rise of the Hyborians. But for over a thousand years I have dwelt in this domed chamber, beneath the golden dome of the temple of Khemu, whither a galley of distant Khitai bore me…” (unpublished draft)

  The “Hyborian Age” was thus on the verge of becoming much more than just Conan’s world, and would have been included in the James Allison stories. Somewhat later, Howard also began, but didn’t complete, a story set in modern times that mentions the “Hyborian Age” (fragment published in The Howard Collector, 1979), and soldThe Haunter of the Ring, yet another reincarnation story, which mentions Thoth-amon, his ring and Stygia.

  In the spring of 1932, Howard began work on The Scarlet Citadel (Weird Tales, January 1933). The story was the second to concern Conan’s reign as king of Aquilonia, but it had much more of the medieval to it than The Phoenix on the Sword. The Scarlet Citadel is the first Conan story to display Howard’s interest in history and epic. It seems probable that an anecdote in Bulfinch furnished the idea for the beginning of the story, in which Conan and his army are led to an ambush by supposed allies. While describing the Battle of Roncesvalles, Bulfinch writes:

  “Marsilius began by lamenting, not as to the ambassador, but as to the friend, the injuries which Charles had done him by invading his dominions, charging him with wishing to take his kingdom from him, and give it to Orlando; till at length he plainly uttered his belief that, if that ambitious paladin were but dead, good men would get their rights. Gan […] exclaimed: “Every word you utter is truth; die he must, and die also must Oliver, who struck me that foul blow at court. […] I have planned everything,– I have settled everything already with their besotted master. Orlando will come to your borders,– to Roncesvalles,– for the purpose of receiving the tribute. Charles will await him at the foot of the mountains. Orlando will bring but a small band with him: you, when you meet him, will have secretly your whole army at your back. You surround him, and who receives tribute then?” (Bulfinch, p. 801)

  From this brief passage, Howard built an epic that owed nothing to Bulfinch. Why borrow when the whole purpose of the creation of the Hyborian world was precisely to be free from historical contraints? Howard’s readings were springboards from which he crafted tales that were entirely his: who could detect, for instance, that Sir Arthur Conan Doyle’s The White Company and Sir Nigel very probably provided Howard with some background data for his story from a reading of the published version of The Scarlet Citadel ? In a letter received August 9, 1932 by Lovecraft, Howard casually mentioned: “Like Samkin Aylward, I warm to a man with the bitter drop in him.” Samkin Aylward is a character in Doyle’s novels, both books taking place in Medieval England and France during the Hundred Years War. In the published version of The Scarlet Citadel, there is a cryptic mention of “the land torn with the war of the barons.” In the first drafts of the story, the passage was much more detailed: “The aristocrats had long memories; they would remember rich merchants who gave freely to Conan’s cause, they would remember the sturdy yeomen with which Conan had broken the power of the feudal lords in the War of the Barons” (from draft b, pp. 29-30). The reason for the toning down is simple: there was an historical “Barons’ War” in England, in the thirteenth Century, alluded to by Doyle in Sir Nigel. A similar example is found in the mention that “six rich merchants, sent as a delegation of protest, were seized and their heads slashed off without ceremony.” (The Scarlet Citadel, p. 108.) This is probably derived from the famous historical episode of the six burghers of Calais, though these actually escaped death. The fact is mentioned by Doyle: “Bethink you how he swore to hang the six burghers of this very town [i.e. Calais], and yet he pardoned them.” Much of the Howard’s story’s medieval terminology, notably that for armor and weapons, may very well have come from Doyle’s novels.

  The Scarlet Citadel was the first story to mention the Hyborian Age’s equivalent of the African coasts, in a scene in which a jailer recognizes Conan as “Amra”: “the name by which the Cimmerian had been known to the Cushites in his piratical days – Amra, the Lion.” Thus in the same way that The Tower of the Elephant followed the mention of Zamora in Phoenix on the Sword, the next Conan story would take place in an exotic region of the Hyborian world.

  Completed around August 1932, Queen of the Black Coast is one of the more famous Conan stories, and understandably so. Its most interesting feature is of course the pirate Bêlit (whose name was originally Tameris in the first draft), the first female character of any importance to appear in a Conan story. It took four successive drafts for Howard to complete this story and it seems, judging from the drafts, that he had little idea as to how the story would end. He probably understood that the real force of the tale lay not in its plot, but in the strange relationship binding Conan and Bêlit.

  In the first draft of the story, Bêlit (Tameris) explicitly states that she has kept herself a virgin: “I am Tameris, queen of the Black Coast, and I have known the embraces of no man! No man, black or white, can say he had the gift of my lips and my love! Always I have kept myself inviolate for the man I knew I would some day meet” (draft a, p. 11).

  The relations between Conan and Bêlit, though of an amorous nature, are far from the stock pulp-fiction romance. Throughout the story, and especially so in the early drafts, a very strong undercurrent of sadism pervades their exchanges. To the published version’s “Take me and crush me with your fierce love” corresponds the earlier drafts’ “
Take me and crush me and bruise me with your fierce love!” This is far from being an isolated example. In the third draft, just following the line of dialogue “‘Very well,’ she said absently, hardly heeding him. ‘I’ll get the loot aboard’ ” were found the following lines:

  “Conan glared at her narrowly, aware of a dim upsurging jealousy, centering on those murky jewels on her ivory bosom. He had a primitive impulse to tear them from her throat and cast them into the river. And for the first time, he felt an impulse to lock his iron fingers in his companion’s black locks and subject her person to moderate violence” (draft c, p. 22).

  We do not know whether it was Howard who toned down the story in his final draft or if this was the result of Farnsworth Wright’s editorial interference. A comparison of the few later Conan stories for which definitive typescripts survive and their published versions shows that Wright systematically censored lines of dialogue that he deemed too “sensual.”

  It was also in this fierce and grim story that Howard let the reader have a glimpse of the Cimmerian’s philosophy of life, in a discussion on religion and life after death between Conan and Bêlit:

  “What of your own gods? I have never heard you call on them.”

  “Their chief is Crom. He dwells on a great mountain. What use to call on him? Little he cares if men live or die. Better to be silent than to call his attention to you; he will send you dooms, not fortune! He is grim and loveless, but at birth he breathes power to strive and slay into a man’s soul. What else shall men ask of the gods?”

  […]

  “There is no hope here or hereafter in the cult of my people … In this world men struggle and suffer vainly, finding pleasure only in the bright madness of battle; dying, their souls enter a gray misty realm of clouds and icy winds, to wander cheerlessly throughout eternity.”

  From May 7 to July 23, 1932, Collier’s Magazine ran the serialization of Sax Rohmer’s latest novel, The Mask of Fu Manchu. It was published in book form a few weeks later, and made into a movie before the year was over. Rohmer had long been a favorite of Howard, whose library contained many of his books, so surely he noticed the new story, especially under Collier’s particularly attractive cover. The Mask of Fu Manchu details the Chinese mastermind’s failed attempt to revive the cult of Mokanna, “the Hidden One, sometimes called the Veiled Prophet”:

  “(Mokanna), about 770 A.D., set himself up as an incarnation of God, and drew to his sect many thousands of followers. He revised the Koran. His power became so great that the Caliph Al Mahdi was forced to move against him with a considerable army. Mokanna was a hideous creature. His features were so mutilated as to be horrible to see…. He and his staff poisoned themselves in the hour of defeat. From that day to this, no one has known where he was buried” (The Mask of Fu Manchu, chapter 4).

  Rohmer’s novel opens just after Mokanna’s tomb in Khorassan has been brought to light, the relics secured, and the tomb destroyed in a measure of precaution against fanatics. However, “An outcry – ‘Mokanna has arisen’ – swept through Afghanistan… None of the tribesmen who, as you suspect, and rightly, still hold the Mokanna tradition had any idea that you or any human influence had been concerned with the eruption which reduced a lonely shrine to a dusty hollow.”

  From these tantalizing premises, Rohmer built an atmospheric “yellow peril” detective novel revolving around Fu Manchu’s vain attempts to secure the relics so he could pose as Mokanna reincarnated. Howard very probably saw the unexploited potential of Rohmer’s novel, and began an epic story that would recount the successful reincarnation of a “veiled prophet” of the desert, whose first task would be to unite the desert clans in a war of conquest that would soon threaten the Hyborian (i.e. Indo-European) nations. Rohmer was bound by imperatives of historical verisimilitude which Howard’s Hyborian Age could ignore, and thus was born Black Colossus :

  “There were rumors from the desert that lies east of Stygia, far south of the Kothian hills. A new prophet had arisen among the nomads. Men spoke of tribal war, of a gathering of vultures in the southeast, and a terrible leader who led his swiftly increasing hordes to victory. The [Stygian] priests were making magic to fight that of the desert sorcerer, whom men called Natohk, the Veiled One; for his features were always masked.”

  In Rohmer’s novel Mokanna’s tomb lies in “Khorassa,” while Howard’s story begins in “Khoraja”; in his synopsis for the story, this was “Khoraspar.”

  The background of Howard’s tale was probably derived from his then-current readings on Mesopotamian history. The portrayal of Bêlit (an Assyrian name) in Queen of the Black Coast already attests to Howard’s interest in the subject, which would ultimately be fully expressed in his late 1932 story The House of Arabu.

  As was the case with Queen of the Black Coast, Black Colossus was originally intended to contain some flagellation scenes: in the synopsis, Howard writes that Yasmela “stripped her most beautiful maid and stretched her whimpering on the altar, but did not have courage or cruelty to sacrifice her,” and in the first draft wrote, “On each birthday, up to her twentieth, Yasmela had been laid across the knees of the image in Ishtar’s temple and birched soundly by a priestess to teach her humbleness in the sight of the goddess” (draft a, p. 13).

  Even in its published version the story contains many sexual allusions, from Khotan’s “I will teach thee the ancient forgotten ways of pleasure” to Yasmela’s dubious “It is not fitting that I come before the shrine clad in silk. I will go naked, on my knees, as befits a suppliant, lest Mitra deem I lack humility.” As to the story’s conclusion, Howard himself commented in a letter to Tevis Clyde Smith:

  “My heroes grow more bastardly as the years pass. One of my latest sales concluded with a sexual intercourse instead of the usual slaughter. My sword-wielder grabbed the princess – already considerably stripped by the villing [sic] – and smacked her down on the altar of the forgotten gods, while battle and massacre roared outside, and through the dusk the remains of the villing, nailed to the wall by the hero, regarded the pastime sardonically. I don’t know how the readers will like it. I’ll bet some of them will. The average man has a secret desire to be a swaggering, drunken, fighting, raping swashbuckler.” (REH to TCS, circa December 1932, unpublished)

  It is interesting to note that in the first draft, the story ended differently:

  For an instant he held her, then he shook himself free.

  “Crom’s devils!” he grunted. “Some forty thousand men have perished today, and I linger here cuddling a whimpering chit of a girl! Here – put on some garment, and we’ll begone. There’s work to be done.”

  It is arguable whether Howard himself was an “average man,” but when he submitted the story, Wright apparently had no complaints about the sex elements: his only quibble concerned the length of the story, which he probably felt was overworded. Howard himself had been reducing the length with each successive draft, and complied with Wright’s request. But the Texan seemed to have understood that the sexual elements helped sell his Conan stories. What Wright was objecting to, apparently, was “profane” dialogue much more than “evocative” scenes.

  The next three Conan stories, Iron Shadows in the Moon,Xuthal of the Dusk and The Pool of the Black One, were written in that order – and in very short succession – between November and December of 1932. All three feature scantily-clad female characters, irresistibly attracted to the Cimmerian. All three sold immediately. With the exception of The Frost-Giant’s Daughter and The Tower of the Elephant, all previous Conan stories had gone through three or four drafts. In contrast, these three new stories required only two each, a rough and a final version. The sale of Black Colossus had convinced Howard that quality and strong characterization were not the essential elements when it came to selling a Conan story. Not surprisingly, Black Colossus was the first Conan story to be featured on the cover of Weird Tales, in the June 1933 issue, followed in September by Xuthal of the Dusk (published as The Slithering Shadow ). It
is amusing to note that neither cover features Conan, but instead portrays the women of the story, as nearly naked as the censors would allow. The Pool of the Black One appeared the following month, while the infinitely superior Queen of the Black Coast would not be published until the May 1934 issue. It is probably not a coincidence that Margaret Brundage, who excelled at depicting scantily-clad women, became Weird Tales’ regular cover artist in 1933.

  Of these three routine Conan stories, Xuthal of the Dusk is the most interesting. Commenting on it to Clark Ashton Smith, Howard wrote: “It really isn’t as exclusively devoted to sword-slashing as the announcement might seem to imply.” The basic plot of the tale – Conan and a woman finding an isolated city peopled by decadent inhabitants and a wicked woman – would indeed be considerably enriched and developed in the future Red Nails (July 1935). The theme had profound psychological resonance in Howard’s psyche. In late 1932, however, Howard was not ready to give it the treatment it deserved, and Xuthal of the Dusk pales in comparison with the future Conan tale.

  If it had taken only two drafts for Howard to complete his last few Conan tales, Rogues in the House – very probably written in January 1933 – went one step further. In January 1934, Howard wrote Clark Ashton Smith:

  “Glad you liked ‘Rogues in the House.’ That was one of those yarns which seemed to write itself. I didn’t rewrite it even once. As I remember I only erased and changed one word in it, and then sent it in just as it was written. I had a splitting sick headache, too, when I wrote the first half, but that didn’t seem to affect my work any. I wish to thunder I could write with equal ease all the time. Ordinarily I revise even my Conan yarns once or twice, and the other stuff I hammer out by main strength.”