by Unknown
Although classed as a horror story, this tale is perhaps Howard's most successful venture into realism. Here he paints an arresting word picture of slowly rising fear. He may have drawn on his remembered night terrors when he slept in the attic of that empty boardinghouse in Brownwood.
Another tale worth noting is "The Iron Man," one of the very few serious boxing stories that Howard ever sold. While the tale lacks style, it contains a good analysis of character. A heavyweight fights to support his girl in finishing school; but out of pride, avarice, and stubbornness, he refuses to quit after he earns plenty of money. His girl finally forces him out of the ring before he is battered into feeblemindedness.
Howard also undertook several collaborations with his friend Tevis Clyde Smith. "Eighttoes Makes a Play" told about a sledge-dog race in the Yukon, with scenery from the novels of James Oliver Curwood and other romancers of the Frozen North. But the only collaboration that sold was "Red Blades of Black Cathay," in which a Crusader seeks the fabled kingdom of Prester John in Central Asia.
Writing effective and salable fiction takes skills that do not develop overnight. Just as a fine sword blade is wrested from raw iron only through repeated heating, pounding, folding of hot metal, cooling, and baking for weeks in a bed of warm coals, so splendid writing is only hammered out through years of lonely practice, painful trial and error, rejections, discouragement, sometimes ridicule, and occasional glimmerings of success.
Despite the national turmoil brought about by the Great Depression and the great drouth, and despite the family distress resulting from Mrs. Howard's continuing decline, the years between 1929 and 1932 vouchsafed Robert Howard the quietude in which to polish his skills, experiment with stories of various kinds, and to attain sufficient financial rewards to reassure him about his abilities as an author.
XI. THE TRANSCENDENT BARBARIAN
What do I know of cultured ways, the gilt, the craft and the lie? I, who was born in a naked land and bred in the open sky. The subtle tongue, the sophist guile, they fail when the broadswords sing;
Rush in and die, dogs—I was a man before I was a king.1
The year 1932 proved eventful for Robert Howard, both as a writer and as a man. It was in 1932 that he wrote and sold his first Conan story, "The Phoenix on the Sword," which is rated as one of the better stories in the series. In the same year he met the only woman, aside from his mother, with whom he ever had a close and prolonged friendship.
The new year began inauspiciously. After months of high-speed production, Robert found himself unable to write anything of value. This unsettling drainage of creativity often befalls writers of fiction and results in depression or even sheer panic. Looking back on this experience a year later, he wrote: ". . . for months I had been absolutely barren of ideas, completely unable to work up anything sellable."2 He decided to take a vacation, and in February 1932 he set forth by bus for San Antonio.
In San Antonio, he shopped for knives and swords for his collection. He fell in with an East Indian who had spent most of his life in China. From him Howard learned of the "ghastly tortures of the Orient." The man also mentioned that he had seen "scores of Chinese Communists beheaded in the open streets." This Howard reported to Lovecraft, adding: "The mere thought of such a spectacle slightly nauseated me."3
From San Antonio, Howard traveled southward to the Rio Grande Valley, where he experimented with Mexican food and wandered up the valley as far as Rio Grande City. It was there, in all probability, that he replaced the cloth cap that he had always worn with a huge black Mexican sombrero. This headgear, which appears to have been a size too large so that it rested on his ears, aroused comment in Cross Plains, where men wore western-style hats. One man remembers that the sombrero made Howard look like a mushroom: "Lord, that thing just engulfed him!"4
Later, Howard became self-conscious about the hat. When Clyde Smith came to visit and asked to wear it uptown as a joke, Bob demurred. " These people around here think I'm crazy as hell, anyway,' he said, 'and I don't want to add to it.' So," said Smith in relating the episode, "we . . . simply donned our caps and took off."5
While Howard was enjoying "tortillas . . . and Spanish wine"6 along the Border, the most memorable fictional idea of his life began to form. Howard decided to write a series of prehistoric adventure fantasies, not unlike the Kull stories, for such a setting would eliminate the need for accurate historical research. This time he planned to work out a detailed map and history of his imaginary world before starting the tales. He undoubtedly also decided to work out a rough plan of his hero's life, so that the character could show development as the hero aged.
Since Howard was not good at inventing names, he often based personal and place names on names of historical figures and localities. He liked to assume that ancient and medieval names were derived from those of his imagined prehistoric realms, postulating that the records of the prehistoric civilization had been destroyed by invasion or natural catastrophe, surviving only in myths and legends. He wrote:
If some cataclysm of nature were to destroy that civilization, remnants of what knowledge and stories of its greatness might well evolve into the fantastic fables that have descended to us.7
When Howard wrote his essay "The Hyborian Age," setting forth the pseudohistory of this imagined period, he sent a copy to Lovecraft. The latter, who did not approve of Howard's system of nomenclature, passed the article on to a fan-magazine publisher with a letter:
Dear Wollheim:
Here is something which Two-Gun Bob says he wants forwarded to you for The Phantagraph, and which I profoundly hope you'll be able to use. This is really great stuff—Howard has the most magnificent sense of the drama of "History" of anyone I know. He possesses a panoramic vision which takes in the evolution and interaction of races and nations over vast periods of time, and gives one the same large scale excitement which (with even greater scope) is furnished by things like Stapledon's "Last and First Men."
The only flaw in this stuff is R.E.H.'s incurable tendency to devise names too closely resembling actual names of ancient history—names which, for us, have a very different set of associations. In many cases he does this designedly—on the theory that the familiar names descend from the fabulous realms he describes—but such a design is invalidated by the fact that we clearly know the etymology of many of the historic terms, hence cannot accept the pedigree he suggests. E. Hoffmann Price and I have both argued with Two-Gun on this point, but we make no headway whatsoever. The only thing to do is to accept the nomenclature as he gives it, wink at the weak spots, and be damned thankful that we can get such vivid artificial legendry. Howard is without question the most vigorous and spontaneous writer now contributing to the pulps—the nearest approach (although he wouldn't admit it himself) to a sincere artist. He puts himself into his work as none of the regulation hacks do.
Best wishes—
Yours most sincerely, HPL8
While Howard's invented names show linguistic naivete and are often unpleasingly repetitious, there is much to be said in defense of his use of names from historical and mythological sources in the Conan stories. Names from ancient sources convey a glamour of antiquity without being too unfamiliar to the modern reader. Besides, few are knowledgeable enough to be troubled by the true derivation of names in a fantasy tale, even when they recognize the sources.
Assuring his readers that his was not a serious theory of human prehistory, Howard set his Hyborian Age about twelve thousand years ago, when an imaginary group of tribes overran an earlier civilization and built new kingdoms on the ruins of the old. The lands roughly resembled Europe and the northern half of Africa. His imagined world, however, replaced the Mediterranean Sea with a vastly enlarged Caspian Sea (the Vilayet Sea), and most of West Africa lay under the Western Ocean.
This world Howard peopled with farmers, artisans, merchants, and innkeepers in addition to the usual warriors, wizards, and imperiled maidens of fantasy. With a palette of vivid hues, he painted thei
r fields ind rutted roads, their towns and frowning fortresses. The hero, like most of Howard's heroes, would be an idealization of himself—a lithe and wily giant, dark-haired and blue-eyed, a self-educated barbarian, but one with a rude code of honor to which he remained true.
The theme of the new series, like that of the Kull stories, would be the rise of a barbarian adventurer to kingship over a civilized land. Howard determined that most of the stories would narrate the hero's trials and achievements before he attained the throne, for Howard had discovered that it cramps a writer's style to begin the tale with his hero already a reigning monarch.
The nation of his hero's birth Howard named Cimmeria, after the fogbound western land visited by Odysseus in the Odyssey. Howard pretended that his Cimmerians were the descendants of the Atlanteans and the ancestors of the Celts, thus in fancy tracing his own descent from Kull and Conan. And Crom, the god of the Cimmerians, he derived from Crom Cruach, a pagan Irish idol destroyed by St. Patrick.
HOWARD'S CONAN STORIES IN ORDER OF PUBLICATION
Published in Weird Tales
Issue of Magazine
The Phoenix on the Sword
December
1932
The Scarlet Citadel
January
1933
The Tower of the Elephant
March
1933
Black Colossus
June
1933
The Slithering Shadow
September
1933
The Pool of the Black One
October
1933
Rogues in the House
January
1934
Shadows in the Moonlight
April
1934
Queen of the Black Coast
May
1934
The Devil in Iron
August
1934
The People of the Black Circle
September, October,
November
1934
A Witch Shall Be Born
December
1934
Jewels of Gwahlur
March
1935
Beyond the Black River Shadows in Zamboula The Hour of the Dragon (Conan the Conqueror)
Red Nails
May, June 1935
November 1935
December 1935; January, February,
March, April 1936 July, August,
September 1936
Published in The Fantasy Fan (with hero's name as Amra)
The Frost Giant's Daughter March 1934
(Gods of the North)
completed but unsold
The God in the Bowl The Vale of Lost Women The Black Stranger
(The Treasure of Tranicos)
left unfinished
The Hall of the Dead The Hand of Nergal The Snout in the Dark
Drums of Tombalku Wolves Beyond the Border
Howard & de Camp Howard & Carter Howard, de Camp & Carter
Howard & de Camp Howard & de Camp
non-conan stories, unsold and later rewritten as conan tales
Hawks Over Shem
(REH: Hawks Over Egypt) The Road of Eagles The Flame Knife
(REH: Three-Bladed Doom) The Bloodstained God
(REH: The Trail of the Blood-Stained God)
Howard & de Camp
Howard & de Camp Howard & de Camp
Howard & de Camp
Home from his trip to the Rio Grande, Howard plunged into the new Rftries. A steady stream of Conan stories began to pour out of his typewriter. In all, Howard completed twenty-one Conan stories, of which seventeen were published in Weird Tales during the remaining four years ®f his literary career. For many months he was so involved with Conan that he sometimes worked the night through. He wrote:
For weeks I did nothing but write of the adventures of Conan. The character took complete possession of my mind and crowded out everything else in the way of story-writing. When I deliberately tried to write something else, I couldn't do it.9
Howard made no attempt to tell Conan's history in chronological order. In some stories he appears as a youth; in others, as a middle-aged man. The hero finds himself in a wide variety of situations: a thief in a thieves' quarter, a pirate captain, a commander of an army, the leader of a band of outlaws, the savior of war-threatened settlers, and so on. Howard felt that the hero himself was relating the adventures to him and thus defended their lack of continuity:
The average adventurer, telling tales of a wild life at random, seldom follows any ordered plan, but narrates episodes widely separated by space and years, as they occur to him.10
As he wrote, Howard's picture of Conan evolved into the towering, lOUsled, black-haired, blue-eyed super-hero who appeared in earlier stories. As with most of Howard's heroes, Conan never really has a friend. He sometimes speaks of a friend, as early in "Queen of the Black Coast," bttt we never meet him. Although Howard himself had several good fHends, nearly all of his heroes are isolates. Perhaps such characters Appealed to Howard, or perhaps they reflected Howard's own inner fieling of isolation.
The personality of Conan did not develop all at once. Although in BI08t stories women are merely playthings of the moment, in "Queen of the Black Coast" Conan falls in love with the female pirate Belit, and the becomes the true love of his early life.
I , When Conan struggles with a gigantic serpent, a winged monster, Uick giants, or a sinister magician from some distant eastern shore, we |!|iiy speculate—although we cannot be sure—that Conan's adversaries
k 267 were inspired by those "enemies" who, according to Howard, lay in wai! at all times to ensnare him.
But Conan's personality was not influenced solely by his creator's beliefs and attitudes. Many people fail to realize that during the 1920s and 1930s there were no paperbacked books. And this seemingly unrelated fact had a bearing on the character development of Conan.
Before the coming of mass-market, throwaway paperbacks in the 1940s, during the Second World War, all books published in America were bound in hard covers. Since hardcover books were expensive, comparatively few were published each year; and only the best-known authors were fortunate enough to see their works in bound volumes. Less popular writers, like Robert Howard, had to content themselves with magazine publication.
The magazine market for short fiction was, fortunately, far larger then than it is today. Of all the magazines, two types stand out: the "slicks," magazines like The Saturday Evening Post, which was illustrated in full color and printed on glazed paper; and the "pulps," a large assortment of inexpensive magazines, which were usually poorly edited and cheaply printed on low-grade paper. Hundreds of such magazines existed: Western stories, adventure stories, war stories, sea stories, sports stories, detective stories, love stories, and so on. Most of these magazines operated on a shoestring and paid little; yet, they offered American short-story writers a generously varied market for their works. Indeed, since the shrinkage of the fiction magazine market, the American short story as an art form has been on the decline.
Because the pulp-magazine editors of that day demanded strict adherence to certain rules and tabus, they exerted an important influence on the style and content of the stories submitted to them. Who were the readers of the pulps, and what restrictions were imposed on the writers who sold their works in this market?
The pulps of the 1930s catered to a heavily male readership. They featured fast action, two-dimensional characters, and a straightforward narrative style. So imperative was fast action that young writers were warned to "shoot the sheriff in the first paragraph." Violence was an accepted—even an integral—part of every tale. In such action-centered stories, little attention was given to characterization and even less to character development. The stories were designed to entertain the reader, not to express the writer's inmost thoughts or to uplift the sinner.
The tabus were equally strict. Strong language
was forbidden. "Darn!" was often used instead of "Damn!" Adventure Magazine, an aristocrat among the pulps, printed the exclamation "By God!" as "By—!"
As for sex—well, sex was handled with kid gloves or not at all. There was, it is true, a small group of pulps called the "hots"—magazines like Spicy-Adventure Stories—but compared to magazines on the stands today, their treatment of sex was innocuous indeed. In the rest of the pulps, sex might be hinted at when the hero bore off a comely maiden at the end of the story, but nothing was ever written about their private adventures after the story ended. Since all but one of the Conan stories published in Howard's lifetime appeared in Weird Tales, this stern and forbidding tabu should be remembered by those readers who note the apparent sexlessness of Howard's heroes.
As a matter of fact, this tabu against explicit sex is helpful to the writer who tries to create an epic hero. Explicit sexual encounters destroy the mythic qualities of a King Arthur, or Odysseus, or Siegfried, or Conan. A blow-by-blow account of a hero's bedroom acrobatics diminishes him—reduces him to the stature of an ordinary mortal. Besides, each reader wants to pretend, for a short time at least, that he is standing in the hero's sandals; and one man's grand passion may be another man's petit mal. Because a hint is worth more than a blueprint in stimulating the imagination, this reticence affords Conan's readers the greater opportunity to phantasize.
Howard got many of his ideas from the adventure pulps of his time, notably from Adventure Magazine itself, of which he was a faithful reader. Many distinguished writers contributed to these periodicals, among them Harold Lamb, Talbot Mundy, and Arthur D. Howden Smith; but few were eminent enough to have hardcover publishers beat pathways to their doors, as were Edgar Rice Burroughs, Rudyard Kipling, and Jack London.
Howard drew on the works of all these men and others for ideas about distant lands and distant times, for plot elements, for names and characterizations, and for stylistic models. Then, to the ideas he had garnered, he added his own emotions, his colorful if sometimes erroneous beliefs, and his poetry in prose. While most of the men who wrote for the adventure magazines of the 1930s have long been neglected or forgotten, Robert Howard, through his sheer creativity and originality, managed to rise above the limitations imposed on him by the conventions of the times and by his isolation. And this was a remarkable achievement.
