Fantasy Masterworks - The Conan Chronicles 2 Part 44

Having pretty much ignored him for most of his life, on the day of his death the local newspaper reprinted one of Howard's last Western stories, along with a 6,ooo-word article and an obituary - more s.p.a.ce than any citizen of Cross Plains had ever received.

On June 24, 1936, Howard's beloved library of some 300 books and file copies of all the magazines which contained his stories were donated by his father to Howard Payne College to form The Robert E. Howard Memorial Collection. Nine months later Dr Howard reclaimed all his son's magazines because they were falling apart.

In a letter dated June 29, 1936, Dr Howard wrote to Lovecraft: '. . . Robert was a great admirer of you. I have often heard him say that you were the best weird writer in the world, and he keenly enjoyed corresponding with you. Often expressed hope that you might visit in our home some day, so that he, his mother and I might see you and know you personally. Robert greatly admired all weird writers, often heard him speak of each separately and express the highest admiration of all. He said they were a bunch of great men and he admired all of them very much.'

Lovecraft's own 'Robert Ervin Howard: A Memoriam' was published in the September 1936 issue of Julius Schwartz's Fantasy Magazine: 'The character and attainments of Mr Howard were wholly unique. He was, above everything else, a lover of the simpler, older world of barbarian and pioneer days, when courage and strength took the place of subtlety and stratagem, and when a hardy, fearless race battled and bled, and asked no quarter from hostile nature. All his stories reflect this philosophy, and derive from it a vitality found in few of his contemporaries. No one could write more convincingly of violence and gore than he, and his battle pa.s.sages reveal an instinctive apt.i.tude for military tactics which would have brought him distinction in times of war. His real gifts were even higher than the readers of his published works would suspect, and had he lived, would have helped him to make his mark in serious literature with some folk epic of his beloved southwest ... Always a disciple of hearty and strenuous living, he suggested more than casually his own famous character - the intrepid warrior, adventurer, and seizer of thrones, Conan the Cimmerian. His loss at the age of thirty is a tragedy of the first magnitude, and a blow from which fantasy fiction will not soon recover.'

While writing those words, Lovecraft could hardly have realised that the world of fantasy fiction would soon be mourning the impact of his own premature death, at the age of forty-seven, little more than nine months later.

Howard's father continued to correspond with E. Hoffman Price until he died, a lonely old man suffering from diabetes and cataracts in both eyes, on November 12, 1944. As Price later recalled: 'Whenever I think of Dr Howard, well into his seventy-fourth year, and with failing eyesight, having for these past eight years faced alone and single-handed a home and a world from which both wife and son were taken in one day, I can not help but say, "I wish Robert had had more of his father's courage."'

The notice of Howard's death appeared in the August-September issue of Weird Tales: 'As this issue goes to press, we are saddened by the news of the sudden death of Robert E. Howard of Cross Plains, Texas. Mr Howard for years has been one of the most popular magazine authors in the country ... It was in Weird Tales that the cream of his writing appeared. Mr Howard was one of our literary discoveries .. . Prolific though he was, his genius shone through everything he wrote and he did not lower his high literary standards for the sake of mere volume.'

At the time, the magazine still owed Howard $1,350 for stories it had already published.

Regular Weird Tales cover artist Margaret Brundage remembered how she learned of the author's death: 'I came into the offices one day and Wright informed me of Howard's suicide. We both just sat around and cried for most of the day. He was always my personal favourite.'

Robert Bloch, who had previously criticised Howard in the magazine wrote: 'Robert E. Howard's death is quite a shock - and a severe blow to WT. Despite my standing opinion of Conan, the fact always remains that Howard was one of WTs finest contributors.'

Although it is true that Robert E. Howard never wrote nor published the Conan stories in any particular sequence, in a letter dated March 10, 1936, to science fiction writer P. Schuyler Miller, the author responded to an attempt by Miller and chemist Dr John D. Clark to put the Conan series into chronological order with his own concept of Conan's eventual fate: 'Frankly I can't predict it. In writing these yarns I've always felt less as creating them than as if I were simply chronicling his adventures as he told them to me. That's why they skip about so much, without following a regular order. The average adventurer, telling tales of a wild life at random, seldom follows any ordered plan, but narrates episodes widely separated by s.p.a.ce and years, as they occur to him.'

The Cimmerian's adventures appeared as the author imagined them - consequently the first two stories published, 'The Phoenix on the Sword' and 'The Scarlet Citadel', feature an older Conan who has already been crowned king of Aquilonia, while the character appears as a teenage thief in the third published tale, 'The Tower of the Elephant'.

One explanation for this apparently random chronology appears in a letter postmarked December 14, 1933, to writer Clark Ashton Smith, in which Howard hinted at a possible preternatural power behind the creation of his character: 'While I don't go so far as to believe that stories are inspired by actually existent spirits or powers (though I am rather opposed to flatly denying anything) I have sometimes wondered if it were possible that unrecognized forces of the past or present - or even the future - work through the thoughts and actions of living men. This occurred to me when I was writing the first stories of the Conan series expecially ... I do not attempt to explain this by esoteric or occult means, but the facts remain. I still write of Conan more powerfully and with more understanding than any of my other characters. But the time will probably come when I will suddenly find myself unable to write convincingly of him at all. That has happened in the past with nearly all my rather numerous characters; suddenly I would find myself out of contact with the conception, as if the man himself had been standing at my shoulder directing my efforts, and had suddenly turned and gone away, leaving me to search for another character.'

Howard's death did not mark the end of Conan. The unpublished ma.n.u.scripts of four completed Conan stories, which had been rejected by Weird Tales editor Farnsworth Wright, were discovered amongst the author's papers many years after his death.

The first of these, 'The G.o.d in the Bowl', appeared in the September 1952 issue of s.p.a.ce Science Fiction. A combination of murder mystery and magic, it was revised considerably for publication by writer L. Sprague de Camp, who produced yet another version of the story, closer to the original ma.n.u.script, for paperback publication fifteen years later.

Another greatly abridged version by de Camp of Howard's story 'The Black Stranger' appeared under the t.i.tle 'The Treasure of Tranicos' in the February-March 1953 issue of Fantasy Magazine. This 33,ooo-word short novel had been written around the same time as 'Beyond the Black River' and 'Wolves Beyond the Border' and mixed Conan with Picts and pirates. When he could not sell it as a Conan adventure, Howard had attempted to rescue the story by turning the hero into swashbuckling pirate Black Vulmea, but it remained unpublished until 1976, when it appeared in the collection Black Vulmea's Vengeance under the tide 'Swords of the Red Brotherhood'. The complete version finally saw print, exactly as Howard wrote it, in Karl Edward Wagner's 1987 anthology Echoes of Valor.

Originally rejected by Wright in 1932, Howard had submitted an apparently earlier draft of 'The Frost-Giant's Daughter', featuring the Conan-like hero Amra of Akbitana, to the amateur journal The Fantasy Fan, which had published the story in the March 1934 issue as 'G.o.ds of the North'. When Howard's Conan version appeared in the August 1953 issue of Fantasy Fiction, it had been extensively rewritten by de Camp, and it was not until 1976 that the author's original ma.n.u.script finally saw print.

'The Vale of Lost Women' eventually appeared in the Spring 1967 issue of Robert A. W. Lowndes' Magazine of Horror. This story was probably rejected by Wright because of scenes where an older Conan ma.s.sacred an entire village and the heroine had to barter her virginity in order to be rescued. Reaction to its publication was decidedly mixed: 'The so-called "Conan" story with its fantasy domino slightly askew is a thinly masked "p.o.r.ny" of the cheapest sado-s.e.xual variety and doesn't belong in your pages,' wrote one reader to the magazine's letters column, while another was of the opinion: 'I cannot imagine why "The Vale of Lost Women" was not published during Howard's lifetime ... It is certainly one of Howard's better works.'

Howard also left behind a number of fragments and brief outlines for never-completed adventures which various authors, including L. Sprague de Camp and Lin Carter, completed and added to in an attempt to fill in the gaps in Conan's career. Some of these ma.n.u.scripts were Oriental adventures which the writers then converted into Conan stories by changing names, deleting anachronisms and introducing a supernatural element.

In 1953, Ace Books issued Howard's novel Conan the Conqueror as an 'Ace Double' paperback, bound back-to-back with The Sword of Rhiannon by Leigh Brackett, and the following year the book finally made its British debut, exactly twenty years after it had first been submitted by Howard, in a hardcover edition from T.V. Boardman & Co. of London. Unfortunately, the uncredited dustjacket artist decided to ill.u.s.trate the same scene that Margaret Brundage had used for her cover of the December 1935 Weird Tales, with equally wretched results!

Between 1950-57 New York's Gnome Press published seven hardcover volumes of Conan stories. These included several tales either edited by or in collaboration with de Camp, who later explained: 'Late in 1951, I stumbled upon a cache of Howard's ma.n.u.scripts in the apartment of the then literary agent for Howard's estate ... The incomplete state of the Conan saga has tempted me and others to add to it, as Howard might have done had he lived ... The reader must judge how successful our posthumous collaboration with Howard has been.'

However, as author and editor Karl Edward Wagner wrote in 1977, 'The only man who could write a Robert E. Howard story was Robert E. Howard. It is far more than a matter of imitating adjective usage or a.n.a.lyzing comma-splices. It is a matter of spirit. Pastiche-Conan is not the same as Conan as portrayed by Robert E. Howard. Read such, as it pleases you - but don't delude yourself into thinking that this is any more Robert E. Howard's Conan than a Conan story you decided to write yourself. It is this editor's belief that a Conan collection should contain only Robert E. Howard's Conan tales, and that no editorial emendations should alter the authenticity of Howard's creation.' And this coming from one of the better writers of Howard pastiches.

In fact, Weird Tales editor Farnsworth Wright had told his readers much the same thing four decades earlier: 'Sorry to deny your request for some other author to carry on the Conan stories of the late Robert E. Howard. His work was touched with genius, and he had a distinctive style of writing that put the stamp of his personality on every story he wrote. It would hardly be fair to his memory if we allowed Conan to be recreated by another hand, no matter how skilful.'

Amateur publications such as Glenn Lord's The Howard Collector, George H. Scithers' Amra and The Robert E. Howard United Press a.s.sociation (REHupa) rekindled interest in Howard's fiction during the 19605 and '705, and beginning in 1966 Lancer Books in America, and later Sphere Books in Britain, collected the Conan stories into a series of twelve paperbacks, many of which featured distinctive cover paintings by Frank Frazetta. Edited by L. Sprague de Camp, once again Howard's original texts were altered, and the series included revisions, posthumous collaborations, fixed-up novels and totally new pastiches. Over a million copies of the Lancer editions were sold during the first few years of publication, ranking Howard second only to J. R. R. Tolkien in the field of fantasy fiction.

In 1957 a Swedish fan named Bjorn Nyberg had collaborated with L. Sprague de Camp on a new novel ent.i.tled The Return of Conan, and with Howard's renewed popularity, soon other authors were adding original novels to the Conan canon. These included Karl Edward Wagner, Poul Anderson, Andrew J. Offutt, Robert Jordan, John Maddox Roberts, Steve Perry, Roland Green, Leonard Carpenter and John C. Hocking.

Thirty-five years after his creator's death, Howard's mighty Cimmerian had turned into a money-spinning franchise.

In October 1970, Marvel Comics Group launched its hugely successful Conan the Barbarian t.i.tle, written by Roy Thomas and initially ill.u.s.trated by artist Barry (Windsor-)Smith. Many issues adapted or were based on Howard's original stories, and there was even a two-issue crossover with Michael Moorc.o.c.k's character Elric of Melnibone. The following year, Marvel Comics introduced another series of Conan adaptations by Thomas in Savage Tales. Conan the Barbarian King-Size appeared in 1973, and it was followed over the years by such tides as The Savage Sword of Conan, King Conan, Conan the Destroyer and The Conan Saga.

In 1982 director John Milius, along with co-writer Oliver Stone, turned Conan the Barbarian into a multi-million dollar fantasy movie, with Austrian bodybuilder and former Mr Universe Arnold Schwarzenegger cast as the eponymous sword-wielding hero pitted against James Earl Jones' evil shape-changing sorcerer, Thulsa Doom. Two years later Schwarzenegger returned to the screen in Conan the Destroyer for veteran director Richard Fleischer. This time Sarah Douglas' treacherous Queen Taramis sent Conan and his companions on a quest for a magical key to unlock the secret of a mystical horn. Filmed on a lower budget in Mexico, this pulpy sequel was more faithful to the spirit of Howard's characters, probably because it was based on a story by comic-book writers Roy Thomas and Gerry Conway.

Robert E. Howard was not even credited on the 1992--93 half-hour children's cartoon series Conan the Adventurer, in which the brawny barbarian and his comrades set out to undo the spell of living stone cast upon Conan's family by driving the evil serpent men back into another dimension. German weight-lifter Ralph Moeller took over the role for the 1997-98 live-action television series Conan, produced by Brian Yuzna. The pilot film, The Heart of the Elephant, was loosely based on Howard's story 'The Tower of the Elephant' and featured a bizarre computer-created image of the late Richard Burton as the Cimmerian G.o.d Crom.

Even more unexpected was director Dan Ireland's little 1996 independent film The Whole Wide World, based on Novalyne Price Ellis' book One Who Walked Alone. Filmed on location in Texas, Rene Zellweger portrayed the young schoolteacher who befriended eccentric pulp magazine writer Robert E. Howard, played by Vincent D'Onofrio. It is difficult to imagine a more perfect film biography of Howard's final years.

Howard himself had already hinted in letters that he was planning to move away from fantasy fiction, and there has been much conjecture over the years that, had he lived, he would have made his name as a regional writer, with more mainstream stories or histories set in his native Southwest.

In his Foreword to the 1946 Arkham House collection of Howard's short fiction, Skull-Face and Others, editor August Derleth supports this view: 'The late Robert E. Howard was a writer of pulp fiction. He was also more than that. He had in him the promise of becoming an important American regionist, and to that end he had been a.s.similating the lore and legend, the history and culture patterns of his own corner of Texas.'

We shall never know how he may have developed as a writer. But if he had continued to work in the fantastic field, we can only speculate as to where Howard himself might have taken Conan. In his 1936 letter to P. Schuyler Miller he left behind a number of clues: 'He was, I think, king of Aquilonia for many years, in a turbulent and unquiet reign, when the Hyborian civilization had reached its most magnificent high-tide, and every king had imperial ambitions. At first he fought on the defensive, but I am of the opinion that at last he was forced into wars of aggression as a matter of self-preservation. Whether he succeeded in conquering a world-wide empire, or perished in the attempt, I do not know. 'He travelled widely, not only before his kings.h.i.+p, but after he was king. He travelled to Khitai and Hyrkania, and to the even less known regions north of the latter and south of the former. He even visited a nameless continent in the western hemisphere, and roamed among the islands adjacent to it. How much of this roaming will get into print, I can not foretell with any accuracy.'

Tragically, because of Howard's suicide, none of it ever did.

As we approach the centenary of Robert E. Howard's birth, it is worth noting that these stories - often written for less than a cent per word and published in disposable magazines printed on cheap pulp paper - have remained with us over the decades. Today, through films, television and comic books, Howard's name is more widely known that it ever was during his lifetime. His most famous creation, Conan the Cimmerian, has outlived his creator and, with the exception of Edgar Rice Burroughs' Tarzan, is possibly the best-known character in modern fantasy fiction.

Towards the end of 2000, it was announced that Marvel Comics' Stan Lee had purchased the rights to Conan for $4.3 million through the exchange of common shares in his Stan Lee Media group, and Wachowski brothers Larry and Andy (The Matrix, etc.) were involved in developing a new Conan movie for Warner Bros., with John Milius once again attached to write and direct.

But those who only know the barbarian through his media incarnations have not experienced the real Conan. At his best, Robert E. Howard could sweep the reader away on a red tide of bloodl.u.s.t to lost cities, unexplored jungles and savage pirate galleons, where all a brave man needed was a sharp sword in his hand and a beautiful woman by his side to face whatever hideous horror or supernatural menace confronted him.

These, then, are the original tales of Conan, as fresh, atmospheric and vibrant today as when they were first published more than sixty years ago in the pages of Weird Tales and elsewhere.

As H. P. Lovecraft accurately observed: 'It is hard to describe precisely what made Mr Howard's stories stand out so sharply; but the real secret is that he himself is in every one of them ... He was greater than any profit-making policy he could adopt - for even when he outwardly made concessions to Mammon-guided editors and commercial critics, he had an internal force and sincerity which broke through the surface and put the imprint of his personality on everything he wrote. Before he concluded with it, it always took on some tinge of vitality and reality in spite of popular editorial policy - always drew something from his own experience and knowledge of life instead of from the sterile herbarium of desiccated pulpish standby. Not only did he excel in pictures of strife and slaughter, but he was almost alone in his ability to create real emotions of spectral fear and dread suspense. No author - even in the humblest fields - can truly excel unless he takes his work very seriously; and Mr Howard did just that even in cases where he consciously thought he did not.'

For the discerning reader of fantasy fiction, Robert E. Howard's talent and tragedy will continue to live on through these authentic adventures of his greatest creation, Conan the barbarian.

Stephen Jones London, England December 2000 575.