Part 39 (2/2)
This country needs to be written about There are all kinds of stories around here”
The author to who inspiration for this new tale was one of his favorites: Robert W Chambers Howard's library included three of this author's novels dealing with the American Revolution: The Maid-at-Arms (1902), The Little Red Foot (1921) and America, or the Sacrifice (1924) These novels were to provide the background and inspiration for Howard's next tale of the Hyborian Age, Wolves Beyond the Border A lot of confusing and erroneous information on Howard's use of the Chambers material had appeared over the years until Howard scholar Rusty Burke set the record straight All the conclusions on the exact degree of that influence originate with Burke's research or are derived fro efforts
As he had done in 1932 when he ive more coherence to his Hyborian world, Howard first proceeded to jot down a series of notes that would help him feel more at ease with the events and locale he was to write about (see page 285) There can be no doubt at all that Chambers' novels were very much in Howard's mind when he wrote this Almost all the names are taken nearly verbatim from the novels: Schohira for Schoharie, Oriskany for Oriskonie, Caughnawaga for Conawaga, etc The situation and events Howard describes in his document also clearly evoke Chambers' dramatization of the American Revolution More names derived from Chambers would find their way into Wolves Beyond the Border
Wolves is one of the , a Conan story It was not the first ti different with Conan and, as we are about to see, not the first time he experi to feel ”out of contact” with one of his creations
Shortly before he wrote his novel The Hour of the Dragon, Howard had attee presence for a significant part of the tale In that case, however, Conan's absence was confined to the first chapters of a story which was envisioned 351
as a novel; as the synopsis for the complete story attests, the Cimmerian was intended as a proonist of the story The situation can be seen as a parallel to that of A Witch Shall Be Born, in which the Cie But in the case of Wolves Beyond the Border, the situation is markedly different, most notably due to the fact that this is a first-person narrative, in which Conan h he is mentioned several times in the course of the story
A very similar situation had arisen a few years earlier in Howard's career, andcomparison In 1926, Howard created Kull the Atlantean, his first epic fantasy character, about whoan a dozen tales In 1928, however, Howard apparently started to lose interest in his character He then began but never coated to a minor role, but his friend Brule, the Pictish warrior, whose characteristics were markedly different in that tale than in his previous appearances Kull was apparently beco character in his own series, in quite the same fashi+on Conan seems to be in Wolves Beyond the Border Howard never coment, but from that moment on the character of Kull underwent a drastic evolution It is quite striking to see that in those two frage characters are barbarians who have becos of civilized countries And in both fragonists when it co: The people of Conajohara scattered throughout the Westera, or Oriskawny, but many of them went southward and settled near Fort ThandaraThere they were later joined by other settlers for whom the older provinces were too thickly inhabited, and presently there grew up the district known as the Free Province of Thandara, because it was not like the other provinces, royal grants to great lords east of the marches and settled by them, but cut out of the wilderness by the pioneers themselves without aid of the Aquilonian nobility We paid no taxes to any baron Our governor was not appointed by any lord, but we elected him ourselves, fro We manned and built our forts ourselves, and sustained ourselves in war as in peace And Mitra knoas a constant state of affairs, for there was never peace between us and our savage neighbors, the wild Panther, Alligator and Otter tribes of Picts (from Wolves Beyond the Border) ”We of The Islands are all one blood, but of many tribes, and each tribe has custoe Nial of the Tatheli as over-king but his rule is loose He does not interfere with our affairs a ourselves, nor does he levy tribute or taxes [H]e takes no toll of my tribe, the Borni, nor of any other tribe Neither does he interfere when two tribes go to war unless some tribe encroaches on the three who pay tribute And when the Len nation or band of reavers coainst us, he sends forth for all tribes to put aside their quarrels and fight side by side Which 352
is a good thing He ht be a supre, and with the aid of Valusia he ht, with his tribes and their allies, crush all the other tribes, there would never be peace again” (fro resemblances In both instances, the peculiar political tur place in Howard's psyche, connected to the social situation of his regular protagonists: Kull the king of Valusia and Conan the soon-to-be king of Aquilonia In both instances, the Picts only mentioned once so far in the Conan series (in The Phoenix on the Sword) appear as the necessary catalysts for the change: Brule is a Pict, and the threat they pose to the Aquilonian settleers the events of Wolves Beyond the Border The Picts the savages forever present in Howard's universe force the Howardian characters to reveal their true nature
As was the case with the Kull fragment then, Howard did not complete Wolves Beyond the Border His first draft diminished to part-story, part synopsis, while the second was simply abandoned The tale was probably at the same time too derivative of Chambers and too much a necessary exercise before Howard could fully tackle this new phase of his character's evolution
To say that Beyond the Black River was born on the ashes of Wolves Beyond the Border would be belaboring the obvious This tiot rid almost entirely of the Chambers influence There is no plot element in Black River which can be traced back to Chambers, and only a few names still show the initial connection (for instance, Conajohara was carried on from Wolves and ”Balthus” was derived from the ”Baltus” of The Little Red Foot) Beyond the Black River is pure Howard
The tale was particularly dear to Howard To August Derleth he remarked that he ”wanted to see if [he] could write an interesting Conan yarn without sex interest” He was a littlethat his latest sale to Weird Tales was ”a two-part Conan serial: 'Beyond the Black River' a frontier story In the Conan story I've atte entirely abandoned the exotic settings of lost cities, decaying civilizations, golden doirls, etc, and throwncabins, frontier outposts, buckskin-clad settlers, and painted tribesmen”
It was to Novalyne Price that Howard fully bared his sentian to talk But he was not berating civilization; instead, he was praising the si on street corners, talking with friends; walking with the war by your side; hunting cactus with your 353
best girl
”I sold Wright a yarn like that a few o” He turned and looked at me, his eyes turbulent ”I'm damned surprised he took it It's different fro against the savagery and bestiality about to engulf them I want you to read it when it cos of civilization, little things thatfor”
He was excited about it because it was about this country and it sold! He had a honing to write more about this country, not an ordinary cowboy yarn, or a est shoot 'eh God knew this country was alive with yarns like that waiting to be written But in his heart, he wanted to say more than that He wanted to tell the simple story of this country and the hardshi+ps the settlers had suffered, pitted against a frightened, se to hold on to a way of life and a country they lovedBut a novel depicting the settlers' fear as they tried to carve out a new life, and the Indians' fear as they tried to hold on to a dooirl, all that would make the best damn novel ever written about frontier life in the Southwest
”I tried that yarn out to see what Wright would do about it I was afraid he wouldn't take it, but he did! By God, he took it! ”
Beyond the Black River is considered bythe essence of his philosophy: ”Barbarism is the natural state of mankind
Civilization is unnatural It is a whim of circumstance And barbarism must always ultimately triumph”
Indeed, all the characters who are not barbarians meet their doom in the tale: Tiberias the merchant, presented as the epitome of civilized decadence, is of course the first exa or unable to adjust his civilized ways to life on the Frontier But even the woods lived their lives on the frontier, can not hope to prevail: ”They were sons of civilization, reverted to a seenerations of barbarians They had acquired stealth and craft, but he had been born to these things He excelled them even in lithe econoer” The frontiersmen, Balthus, and Valannus all died because of this, and Howard's genius was not to sacrifice his story for the sake of the usual 354
conventions of the genre
Much has been written about the exact signification of the last paragraph of the story Many erroneously credit the statement to Conan, as if it were his sentiment, but it is not Conan but an unnamed forester who utters these words That the barbarians always ultimately triumph is a simple report of what has just transpired: only Conan and the Picts have survived the ordeal, because it was their nature to survive That Conan had in factthan with the Aquilonians had been made clear by Howard earlier in the story: ”But some day a man will rise and unite thirty or forty clans [of the Picts], just as was done a the Cimmerians, when the Gundero
They tried to colonize the southern marches of Cimmeria: destroyed a few small clans, built a fort-town, Venarium, you've heard the tale”
”So I have indeed,” replied Balthus, wincing”My uncle was at Venarium when the Cimmerians swarmed over the wallsThe barbarians swept out of the hills in a ravening horde, without warning, and stormed Venarium with such fury none could stand before them
Men, women and children were butchered Venarium was reduced to a mass of charred ruins, as it is to this day The Aquilonians were driven back across the marches, and have never since tried to colonize the Cimmerian country But you speak of Venariurunted the other ”I was one of the horde that swarmed over the walls”
”Then you, too, are a barbarian!” he exclai offense
”I ae was not raphical information on the Cimmerian, but rather to make explicit the connection between Conan and the Picts Conan is a barbarian ”as ferocious as the Picts, and ent” and this is why he will survive The insistence on Conan's elemental nature, much more marked than in any of the previous tales of the Cience of Balthus as the character readers and Howard hie Scithers once noted that Howard had undoubtedly projected hiuise of Balthus and Slasher As a civilized man himself, Howard could no e than his civilized characters
It was a rare thing indeed in pulp fiction to see a tale concluding with so bleak an ending, in which most of the characters die and the situation is worse at the end of the story than it was at its beginning Hoas here trying to deliver a e much raphy
Beyond the Black River was bought by Farnsworth Wright in early October 1934 It was published as a serial in the May and June 1935 issues of Weird Tales, but without the honors of the cover Either Wright wanted to add soranted The Servants of Bit-Yakin cover privilege either), or the lack of a se that The cover for the May 1935 issue did not feature an undressed woh, so that question must remain unanswered
In the months of October and November 1934 Hoas apparently too much occupied with his ro new Conan tales At about the tih, Howard received bad news frolish co out one into the hands of the receiver Just ht up the assets, but I haven't heard from them” The novel was, however, soon returned Howard very probably touched it up very slightly, sent it to Weird Tales later in the year, and soon received news that it was accepted, probably in early January 1935 Wright was apparently satisfied that Hoas returning to less experiht says it's my best Conan story so far”
In Dece Lovecraft of the sale of Beyond the Black River and co to try er yarn of the same style, a serial of four or five parts”
It appears that Howard didn't wait very long before writing this serial The Black Stranger is one of those Howard stories for which we have no infor date can be estimated around January and/or February 1935 thanks to the partial drafts of other stories found on the backs of the pages of several drafts On the back of The Black Stranger are found several pages for stories composed in Deceh to suppose that Howard began work on that serial after his revision and the acceptance of The Hour of the Dragon
The Black Stranger was evidently conceived as a follow-up of sorts to Beyond the Black River featuring once again Conan opposed to the Picts, and once again it was a very experimental tale, as the Cih the novelette-length story (He is, of course, featured in the first chapter, but his identity is not revealed to the reader) 356
The Black Stranger has never received the critical attention it is due, priinal forner included it in an anthology In all its previous appearances, the story had been h on its surface,elements of piratical adventure and Indian warfare, but should definitely not be dismissed in a cavalier way, as has been done soer is an extremely complex tale once one has understood that it is replete, consciously or unconsciously, with autobiographical elements, much more so than any of the stories Howard had written to date
The story is set on the coasts of the Hyborian Age's equivalent of the United States, at a tihly correspond to our seventeenth century It is the tale of early settlers of a sort on a continent that is still largely doe equivalent of Native Americans A child is prominently featured, a rare occurrence in a Howard tale Tina is quite a mystery to the reader: she is presented as a ”pitiful waiftaken away froe up from the southern coasts” What few children appear in Howard's fiction all share an unhappy youth; all are orphans or have been abandoned by their parents, and Tina is no exception In this case, however, Belesa has apparently adopted the child as her own Ain the forest around the settlers'
stockade
”Art thou like the Black Man that haunts the forest round about us?” asks the heroine of Nathaniel Hawthorne's The Scarlet Letter of her husband, Roger Chillingworth Hawthorne's novel, published in 1850, presents points of remarkable resemblance to Howard's tale Both stories are centered around a woman and her child (real or adopted), forced to live in a hostile environment, victims of the scorn of the s are re heroine of Hawthorne's novel, is a child as strange and fey as Tina In both stories, the child is frightened by a e There is too much similarity to consider this a simple matter of coincidence
Hawthorne was not represented in Howard's library, and he is neverpapers That he had read Hawthorne, perhaps as part of his schooling, seeh: The Scarlet Letter seeer, even though the events the in co of the tale, in which Tina may be seen as a fatherless child, particularly sensitive to the presence of the Black Man Readers faraphy will be even more startled, for in Hawthorne's novel Pearl's mother is named Hester, and the father she does not know, counterpart to Tina's Black Man, is the blue-eyed physician Roger Chillingworth Howard's mother's name was Hester, and she was er apparently failed to sell to Weird Tales, though no record for this survives
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Wright was perhaps irritated by Howard's experimental forays, and, probably around February or March 1935, for the first time in e what he could, and rewrote the story He invented a new character Terence Vulot rid of all the Hyborian references, and submitted the new story, rechristened Swords of the Red Brotherhood, to his agent Otis Adelbert Kline in late May 1935 The new version was circulated for several years, and was sold in 1938, but the azine which was to publish it folded, so this version didn't see print until 1976
The next Conan tale would be anything but experimental The Man-Eaters of Za froes It is a routine Conan story, similar in quality to those Howard had been forced to write when he was in dire need of money Surrounded by such er and the future Red Nails, it more than pales in cos fro at the sa his characters Kirby O'Donnell and Francis Xavier Gordon), while borrowing some of the premises of an unsold detective story, Guests of the Hoodoo Room, which very likely preceded the Conan story by a fewpoor wretches by way of a rigged hotel roo, but Howard probably knew this wouldn't prevent Wright fro the story The scene in which Zabibi/Nafertari dances naked aoal to e's cover illustration for that story is indeed a remarkable one That it does not feature the Ci accusto a Conan story, the Cimmerian himself was portrayed in only three
On December 22, 1934, Howard presented Novalyne Price with aa history book, she was presented instead with a copy of The Complete Works of Pierre Lous: ”A history?” I asked bewildered