Fantasy Masterworks - The Conan Chronicles 1 Part 37

E. Hoffman Price was one of the few writers and fellow correspondents who actually visited Howard. In 1934 he drove down to Cross Plains and recalled years later meeting a '... broad, towering man with a bluff, tanned face and a big, hearty hand, and a voice which was surprisingly soft and easy, instead of the bull-bellow one would expect of the creator of Conan and those other swashbucklers ... Robert Howard was packed with whimsy and poetry which rang out in his letters, and blazed up in much of his published fiction but, as is usually the case with writers, his appearance belied him. His face was boyish, not yet having squared off into angles; his blue eyes, slightly prominent, had a wide-openness which did not suggest anything of the man's keen wit and agile fancy. That first picture persists - a powerful, solid, round-faced fellow, kindly and somewhat stolid.'

However, Hoffman also discovered that there was a darker side to Howard whilst his host was driving Hoffman and his new wife, Wanda, to the nearby town of Brownwood for a shopping and sightseeing trip: 'Suddenly, he took his foot off the throttle, c.o.c.ked his head, idled down. We were approaching a clump of vegetation which was near the roadside. He reached across us, and to the side pocket. He took out a pistol, sized up the terrain, put the weapon back again, and resumed speed. He explained, in a matter-of-fact tone, "I have a lot of enemies, everyone has around here. Wasn't that I figured we were running into anything but I had to make sure."'

Some time later Howard confided to Novalyne Price Ellis that a man with as many enemies as he had needed to be careful. 'Anybody who is not your friend is your enemy,' he explained pleasantly to her.

Howard had written his first story - a historical adventure about a Viking named Boealf - at the age of nine or ten, and he was fifteen when he began writing professionally. 'I took up writing simply because it seemed to promise an easier mode of work, more money, and more freedom than any job I'd tried. I wouldn't write otherwise.' He sent off his first effort to Adventure, but it was rejected, and it was another three years before Howard made his professional debut in the pulp magazine Weird Tales.

Originally selling for just twenty-five cents on newsstands, and printed on low-grade 'pulp' paper, Weird Tales was the first magazine devoted exclusively to weird and fantastic fiction. It ran for 279 issues, starting in March 1923 and finally giving up the ghost in September 1954. Although just one t.i.tle amongst many hundreds being published at that time, it carried the subt.i.tle 'The Unique Magazine', and during its original thirty-two-year run (the tide has been revived - unsuccessfully - on several occasions since) it presented all types of fantasy fiction, from supernatural stories to Gothic horror, sword and sorcery to science fiction. Among some of its most famous contributors were H. P. Lovecraft, Ray Bradbury, Clark Ashton Smith, Robert Bloch, Seabury Quinn, C. L. Moore, Henry Kuttner, Manly Wade Wellman, Jack Williamson, Henry S. Whitehead, and even Tennessee Williams.

At the time Howard began submitting ma.n.u.scripts, Farnsworth Wright had replaced Edwin F. Baird as editor of the Chicago-based magazine, after founder and owner J. C. Henneberger was forced to reorganise the t.i.tle owing to debts. From the November 1924 issue onwards, Weird Tales began to flourish under Wright's guidance, and he edited 179 copies before retiring after the March 1940 edition. He died from Parkinson's disease in June that same year.

Written when Howard was just eighteen, 'Spear and Fang' was a story about the struggles between prehistoric man. Wright published it in the July 1925 issue and paid its teenage author a fee of $16.00 at half-a-cent a word. Even in pre-Depression Texas that would not go far, and Howard quickly realised that he would have to work at a variety of jobs to supplement his meagre income from writing. These included picking cotton, branding cattle, hauling garbage, working in a grocery store and a law office, jerking soda in a drug store, trying to be a public stenographer, packing a surveyor's rod and working up oil-field news for some Texas and Oklahoma papers. However, by his own admission, he '. .. wasn't a success at any of them'.

In his 1931 biographical sketch he told Wright: 'Pounding out a living at the writing game is no snap - but the average man's life is no snap, whatever he does. I'm merely one of a huge army, all of whom are bucking the line one way or another for meat for their bellies - which is the main basic principle and reason and eventual goal of Life. Every now and then one of us finds the going too hard and blows his brains out, but it's all in the game, I reckon.'

Thanks to Wright and Weird Tales, things soon began to change for Howard. In just three years his income from writing jumped from $772.50 to $1,500.26. The prolific author also began to sell other types of fiction - Westerns, sports stories, horror tales, 'true confessions', historical adventures and detective thrillers - to pulp markets besides Weird Tales, while at the same time he began to develop a series of characters with whom he would for ever be identified with: the English Puritan swordsman Solomon Kane (actually created while he was still in high school); the king of fabled Valusia, King Kull; Pictish chieftain Bran Mak Morn; prize-fighter Sailor Steve Costigan; Celtic warrior Turlogh O'Brien; soldier of fortune Francis X. Gordon, also known as 'El Borak'; humorous hillbilly Breckenridge Elkins; and of course the mighty barbarian, Conan.

Conan quickly became his most popular character, and Howard set his savage exploits in the Hyborian Age, a fictional period of pre-history '... which men have forgotten, but which remains in cla.s.sical names, and distorted myths'. He detailed Conan's world in a pseudo-historical essay ent.i.tled 'The Hyborian Age', which ran as a serial in Donald A. Wollheim's amateur magazine The Phantagraph in the issues dated February, August and October-November 1936. However, the fanzine only published the first half of the essay, and it finally appeared in its complete form as a mimeographed booklet in 1938.

According to his creator, Conan '... was born on a battle field, during a fight between his tribe and a horde of raiding Vanir. The country claimed by and roved over by his clan lay in the northwest of Cimmeria, but Conan was of mixed blood, although a pure-bred Cimmerian. His grandfather was a member of a southern tribe who had fled from his own people because of a blood-feud and, after long wanderings, eventually taken refuge with the people of the north. He had taken part in many raids into the Hyborian nations in his youth, before his flight, and perhaps it was the tales he told of those softer countries which roused in Gonan, as a child, a desire to see them.

'There are many things concerning Conan's life of which I am not certain myself. I do not know, for instance, when he got his first sight of civilized people. It might have been at Vanarium, or he might have made a peaceable visit to some frontier town before that. At Vanarium he was already a formidable antagonist, though only fifteen. He stood six feet and weighed 180 pounds, though he lacked much of having his full growth.'

However, despite what Howard would claim later, the mighty-thewed barbarian did not leap fully formed into his creator's mind. The June 1932 issue of Strange Stories contained Howard's story 'People of the Dark', whose hero was a pirate named Conan the reaver, who was physically similar to the later Conan and also swore 'by Crom!'

The first published Conan story, 'The Phoenix on the Sword', is one of the final adventures in Conan's chronology, set after he had become king of Aquilonia. Wright conditionally accepted it in a letter dated March 10, 1932, describing it as having '... points of real excellence. I hope you will see your way clear to touch it up and resubmit it.' It eventually appeared in the December 1932 issue of Weird Tales and was an instant hit, as indicated in the February 1933 edition of the letters column, 'The Eyrie', where readers and writers alike were invited to air their comments and opinions about the magazine: ' "The Phoenix on the Sword" fairly took my breath away with its fine intrigue and excellent action and description,' exclaimed a reader from Denver, Colorado, adding: 'It was a magnificent story. Mr Howard never writes but that he produces a masterpiece.' In fact, the story was a reworking of an unsold King Kull tale ent.i.tled 'By This Axe I Rule!', which finally saw print in its original form in the 1967 collection King Kull.

Still king of Aquilonia, Conan was ambushed and shackled in a dungeon, where he encountered an enormous serpent in 'The Scarlet Citadel', published in the January 1933 Weird Tales. Although Howard had already been awarded the coveted cover spot on previous issues of the magazine (his first had been for 'Wolfshead' back in April 1926), the covers for the December and January issues were two out of four, which J. Allen St John produced consecutively for Otis Adelbert Kline's serial 'Buccaneers of Venus'.

Howard also missed out on the cover for the March 1933 issue, which contained 'The Tower of the Elephant'. As Howard later explained in a letter written to P. Schuyler Miller, 'Conan was about seventeen when he was introduced to the public in 'The Tower of the Elephant'. While not fully matured, he was riper than the average civilized youth at that age.' The author apparently borrowed the setting for the Zamorian thieves' quarter from one of his favourite movies, the 1923 version of The Hunchback of Notre Dame.

Conan led an army against a revived wizard in 'Black Colossus', his fourth adventure in Weird Tales, in the June 1933 issue. It also marked the first of nine cover appearances Howard's Conan series would make on the magazine.

Margaret Brundage's paintings were featured on most of the Weird Tales covers during the mid-1930's, and her cover for 'Black Colossus' depicted the naked Yasmela reaching out to touch the seated stone idol. A former Chicago fas.h.i.+on artist, Brundage was paid $90 per cover and usually worked in delicate pastel chalks on canvas. Wright admitted in the magazine that they had to be careful handling the artist's work: 'The originals are so delicate that we are afraid even to sneeze when we have a cover design in our possession, for fear the picture will disappear in a cloud of dust.'

'They were so impressed by the cover, that they brought it to the best engraver in Chicago,' Brundage recalled. 'Wright later told me that it generated the most mail ever for a cover for Weird Tales: That was probably because her depictions of nude or diapha-nously draped women, often in risque or blatant bondage positions, provoked many outraged letters to 'The Eyrie'. However, Farnsworth Wright was a smart enough editor and businessman to note that issues which featured a Brundage nude on the cover invariably sold more copies on the newsstands.

In a letter to Clark Ashton Smith postmarked July 22, 1933, Howard told his fellow Weird Tales writer: 'Thanks, too, for the kind things you said about Conan. I enjoy writing about him more than any character I have ever created. He almost seems to write himself. I find stories dealing with him roll out much easier than any others.'

Originally tided 'Xuthal of the Dusk', 'The Slithering Shadow' in the September 1933 Weird Tales found Conan in yet another lost city battling an evil Stygian witch and the toad-like G.o.d, Thog. The story was also featured on the cover with one of Brundage's most infamous 'whipping' scenes. Future author Henry Kuttner commented in 'The Eyrie': 'Allow me to pan you for your charmingly s.a.d.i.s.tic cover ill.u.s.trating 'The Slithering Shadow'. I haven't the slightest objection to the female nude in art, but it seems rather a pity that it is possible to find such pictures in any s.e.x magazine, while Weird Tales is about the only type of magazine which can run fantastic and weird cover ill.u.s.trations and doesn't.'

Conan joined up with a group of buccaneers in search of a treasure island in 'The Pool of the Black One' in the October 1933 issue of Weird Tales. In another letter to Clark Ashton Smith, postmarked December 14, 1933, Howard gave some more background to the creation of his most memorable character: Tm rather of the opinion myself that widespread myths and legends are based on some fact, though the fact may be distorted out of all recognition in the telling ... I know that for months I had been absolutely barren of ideas, completely unable to work up anything sellable. Then the man Conan seemed suddenly to grow up in my mind without much labor on my part and immethately a stream of stories flowed off my pen - or rather off my type-writer - almost without effort on my part. I did not seem to be creating, but rather relating events that had occurred. Episode crowded on episode so fast that I could scarcely keep up with them. 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.'

By now Howard's stories in the magazine were bringing him the same kind of popularity that such authors as Seabury Quinn and H. P. Lovecraft were also receiving in the letters column. In fact, except for Quinn's exploits of the psychic detective Jules de Grandin, Conan was the most popular character ever to appear in Weird Tales.

'Rogues in the House', which appeared in the January 1934 Weird Tales, was another of those Conan stories which seemed to write itself. This time, the young barbarian thief was saved from a dungeon by a n.o.bleman seeking revenge. As Howard recalled: '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.'

Perhaps that was why, in a letter to P. Schuyler Miller written in 1936, Howard admitted that even he was not absolutely certain of the background to his own story: 'I am not sure that the adventure chronicled in "Rogues in the House" occurred in Zamora. The presence of opposing factions of politics would seem to indicate otherwise, since Zamora was an absolute despotism where differing political opinions were not tolerated. I am of the opinion that the city was one of the small city-states lying just west of Zamora, and into which Conan had wandered after leaving Zamora. Shortly after this he returned for a brief period to Cimmeria, and there were other returns to his native land from time to time.'

Despite being set in the Hyborian Age, 'The Frost-Giant's Daughter' was possibly originally written as a non-Conan story ent.i.tled 'The Frost King's Daughter' and featured a Conanesque hero named Amra of Akbitana. It had originally been submitted to Weird Tales back in 1932 along with 'The Phoenix on the Sword', but Wright had rejected it in the letter dated March 10, in which he declared: 'I do not much care for it'. The Amra version finally appeared in Charles D. Hornig's amateur journal The Fantasy Fan for March 1934 under the tide 'G.o.ds of the North', while the Conan version didn't see print until many years after Howard's death.

'Shadows in the Moonlight' in the April 1934 Weird Tales was originally given the t.i.tle 'Iron Shadows in the Moon' by Howard. This time Conan and his female companion escaped from a battlefield slaughter and found themselves menaced by iron statues imbued with life by the rays of the full moon.

According to one reader from Rockdale, Texas, in the June 1934 edition: 'As usual Conan provided some real thrills in Robert E. Howard's story, "Shadows in the Moonlight". In my humble opinion Conan is the greatest of WT's famous characters.'

Conan fell in love with the female pirate Belit, leader of the Black Corsairs, in his next adventure. After keeping Conan off the cover for several issues, Wright used a Margaret Brundage painting for 'Queen of the Black Coast' on the May 1934 Weird Tales. It featured a delicate-looking Conan with a diaphanously draped damsel throwing her arms around his neck as he warded off a flying attacker with an ineffectual knife.

Meanwhile, the Brundage debate continued to rage in 'The Eyrie': 'I do not think it would be at all an easy task to find anything to compare with Brundage's representations of sheer feminine loveliness without the touch of vulgarity and sugges-tiveness which usually accompany nudes in magazines,' commented a male reader from El Paso, Texas, in the June 1934 issue, adding: 'The cover ill.u.s.tration "Black Colossus" was about as beautiful a piece of art as I have seen in a long time.'

However, in the same issue, a female reader from Oregon declared: 'I do enjoy Weird Tales and usually manage to acquire one each month, even though I do tear off the cover immethately and stick it in the nearest receptacle for trash. Are such covers absolutely necessary?'

Like Wright, Howard also knew his markets, and he knew how much he could get past his editor and still be certain of an eye-catching cover: 'Another problem is how far you can go without shocking the readers into distaste for your stuff - and therefore cutting down sales -1 don't know how much slaughter and butchery the readers will endure. Their capacity for grisly details seems unlimited, when the cruelty is the torturing of some naked girl. The torture of a naked writhing wretch, utterly helpless - and especially when of the feminine s.e.x amid voluptuous surroundings - seems to excite keen pleasure in some people who have a distaste for wholesale butchery in the heat and fury of a battlefield.'

Conan was the leader of a band of outlaws who battled a giant G.o.d of living metal in 'The Devil in Iron' in the August 1934 issue. It was the tenth Conan story to appear in Weird Tales and was voted by the readers as the best in that issue, despite another feeble Brundage cover depicting an unlikely-looking Conan entrapped by the coils of a giant green serpent while a semi-naked blonde looked on.

A much better Brundage cover was used for the first instalment of 'The People of the Black Circle', a three-part serial set in exotic northwest Asia which ran in the September, October and November 1934 editions of the magazine. This time the artist ignored Conan in favour of the beautiful princess Yasmina being held in the clutches of an evil sorcerer.

This is how Wright introduced the serial to his readers: 'Rough, and at times uncouth, Conan is a primitive man, who will brave almost certain death against terrific odds to rescue a damsel in distress; yet he will just as quickly give her a resounding slap on the posterior or drop her into a cesspool if she displeases him. But rude though he is, he possesses a sort of primordial chivalry and an innate reverence for womanhood that make him wholly fascinating.'

Obviously the readers agreed, as this short novel was again voted the best story in the magazine and editor Wright revealed that 'Robert E. Howard's spectacular and original hero, Conan the barbarian adventurer and fighting-man, has captured the fancy of our readers by his brilliant exploits and his utter humanness.'

However, not everyone was so enamoured with the mighty Cimmerian. In the November 1934 Weird Tales, the following letter appeared in 'The Eyrie': 'I am awfully tired of poor old Conan the Cluck, who for the past fifteen issues has every month slain a new wizard, tackled a new monster, come to a violent and sudden end that was averted (incredibly enough!) in just the nick of time, and won a new girl-friend, each of whose penchant for nudism won her place of honor, either on the cover or on the interior ill.u.s.tration ... I cry: "Enough of this brute and his iron-thewed sword thrusts - may he be sent to Valhalla to cut out paper dolls."' The author of this anti-Conan thatribe was none other than seventeen-year-old Robert Bloch, later to find lasting fame as the author of Psycho, whose own first story would be appearing in the January 1935 edition of 'The Unique Magazine'.

When 'A Witch Shall Be Born', with its memorable crucifixion scene, was published in the December 1934 issue of Weird Tales, Brundage instead went for another of her suggestive 'whipping' scenes on the cover, this time involving two near-naked women and a cat-o'-nine-tails.

Editor Farnsworth Wright's lengthy introduction announced that since Howard's first publication in the magazine back in 1925, '... he has had forty stories in Weird Tales alone, and has gained an enormous following among the readers of this magazine. Many thousands of readers eagerly buy any magazines that feature one of Mr Howard's stories ... He has the faculty of making real characters of his heroes, not mere automatons who act as they do merely because the author pulls the strings.'

In early 1935 Howard's mother underwent a serious operation, remaining in hospital for a month before returning home. Novalyne Price Ellis later recalled meeting her: 'Mrs Howard was sitting on the end of a divan. Her hair was nearly white, short, and parted on one side, not stylish. It looked as if she just combed it quickly to get it over with, not to make her look better. She got up with a great effort and stood leaning slightly to one side.' Hester Howard never fully recovered her health, and she would spend the rest of her life visiting various hospitals and sanatoriums or being cared for at home by her husband and son.

'Jewels of Gwahlur' appeared in the March 1935 Weird Tales. It was a minor Conan tale, about the stealing of a cursed treasure from yet another lost city, which Howard had originally tided 'Teeth of Gwahlur'.

However, there was nothing minor about 'Beyond the Black River', the second of Conan's four serial-length appearances in Weird Tales, published in the May and June issues for 1935. Drawing upon its author's Texas background, it was a variation on the American frontier saga, with Howard's fictional Picts standing in for Native American warriors. It was also in this story that Howard had one of his characters famously observe: 'Barbarism is the natural state of mankind. Civilization is unnatural. It is a whim of circ.u.mstance. And barbarism must always triumph.' There is little doubt that the author was expressing his own views directly to the reader.

With 'Beyond the Black River' Howard was still experimenting with the series, as he revealed in a letter to H. P. Lovecraft: 'I wanted to see if I could write an interesting Conan yarn without s.e.x interest . .. I've attempted a new style of setting entirely - abandoned the exotic settings of lost cities, decaying civilizations, golden domes, marble palaces, silk-clad dancing girls, etc., and thrown my story against a background of forests and rivers, log cabins, frontier outposts, buckskin-clad settlers, and painted tribesmen.'

It was around this time that Howard also wrote but failed to sell 'Wolves Beyond the Border', which was set in the same milieu as 'Beyond the Black River' but did not feature Conan directly.

The May 1935 Weird Tales also included another letter from Robert Bloch, whose story 'The Secret of the Tomb' ran in the same issue: 'I have been highly interested in the comments anent my so-called "attack" on Howard in the Eyrie ... At no time have I ever, directly or indirectly, maligned Mr Howard's fine and obviously talented abilities as a writer; I confined myself solely to a criticism of Conan's career.'

Meanwhile, the cost of Mrs Howard's continued medical treatment and the effect it was having on his own practise was draining Dr Howard's finances, and the family were in need of urgent cash.

At the time, Weird Tales still owed Howard more than $800 for stories which had already appeared and were supposedly paid for upon publication. In frustration, Howard wrote to editor Farnsworth Wright on May 6: 'For some time now I have been receiving a check regularly each month from Weird Tales - half checks, it is true, but by practicing the most rigid economy I have managed to keep my head above the water; that I was able to do so was largely because of, not the size but the regularity of the checks. I came to depend upon them and to expect them, as I felt justified in so doing. But this month, at the very time when I need money so desperately bad, I did not receive a check. Somehow, some way, my family and I have struggled along this far, but if you cut off my monthly checks now, I don't know what in G.o.d's name we'll do ...'

In an autobiographical sketch in the July 1935 issue of Julius Schwartz's amateur Fantasy Magazine, Howard told the readers: 'Conan simply grew up in my mind a few years ago when I was stopping in a little border town on the lower Rio Grande. I did not create him by any conscious process. He simply stalked full-grown out of oblivion and set me at work recording the saga of his adventures.'

In a letter that same month to Clark Ashton Smith, Howard continued: 'It may sound fantastic to link the term "realism" with Conan; but as a matter of fact - his supernatural adven aside - he is the most realistic character I ever evolved. He is simply a combination of a number of men I have known, and I think that's why he seemed to step full-grown into my consciousness when I wrote the first yarn of the series. Some mechanism in my subconsciousness took the dominant characteristics of various prize-fighters, gunmen, bootleggers, oil field bullies, gamblers, and honest workmen I had come in contact with, and combining them all, produced the amalgamation I call Conan the Cimmerian.'

Between the early months of 1932 and July 1935, Robert E. Howard wrote twenty-one adventures of Conan the barbarian. These tales varied in length from around 3,500 words to the almost novel-length of 75,000 words. Of these stories, seventeen were published in Weird Taks.

As the author explained: 'Literature is a business to me - a business at which I was making an ample living when the Depression knocked the guts out of the markets. My sole desire in writing is to make a reasonable living. I may cling to many illusions, but I am not ridden by the illusion that I have anything wonderful or magical to say, or that it would amount to anything particularly if I did say it. I have no quarrel with art-for-art's-sakers. On the contrary, I admire their work. But my pet delusions tend in other directions.'

Although Howard's writing career was improving again, his mother's fragile health was not. She had terminal tuberculosis. Also, as Novalyne Price Ellis later observed: 'His mother had him so completely in her power that he hovered over her, even in a store. She was, of course, the only woman in his life.'

Howard's idolisation of his mother would be his downfall. What neither knew was that time was quickly running out for both of them ...

Stephen Jones London, England January 2000