Part 1 (2/2)

It can be said that Robert E. Howard had been a protege of Weird Tales editor Farnsworth Wright. Wright nurtured the young Texan's burgeoning talent and would later describe him as one of his ”literary discoveries,” as well as a ”genius” and a ”friend.” Wright was indeed an unusual editor. In a world of formula and cliche-ridden pulp magazines, Weird Tales often lived up to its subt.i.tle, ”The Unique Magazine,” walking a fine line between the magazine's commercial imperatives and Wright's literary inclinations. While Lovecraft would often have his tales rejected, unable or unwilling to submit to Wright's editorial requirements or suggestions, Howard was more flexible. Studying and antic.i.p.ating his editors' needs, he had no problem turning out dozens of formula stories with the occasional gem here and there for such generic magazines as Fight Stories or Action Stories. On the other hand the Texan had genuine literary leanings, most evident in his poetry, but for which there was no viable market.

Weird Tales came at the right time for the young writer. This atypical magazine published a large number of Howard's poems as well as the cream of his fiction: the tales of Solomon Kane, Kull, Bran Mak Morn and Conan the Cimmerian. Not coincidentally, of all his rather numerous characters, Howard wrote poems about only those four (if we accept Cimmeria as a poem about Conan's homeland). The Texan was evidently more involved when writing Conan tales than he was when writing for more generic markets.

It is significant to note that the first Conan story was a rewrite of a Kull story, By This Axe I10.Rule!, completed in 1929. Like the Conan tales, the Kull stories were centered around the exploits of a barbarian adventurer in exotic countries of Earth's mythical past, but there ends the similarity: between 1929 and 1932, Howard had developed new ambitions for his fantasy stories. He had, first of all, succeeded in selling some historical fiction, which gave him the occasion to write on the epic scale. Howard infused those stories with an intensity that has been rarely equaled, delivering memorable tales of the later Crusades. He excelled at depicting the slow decay of the once-powerful empire of Outremer, crumbling under internal divisions and external attacks, a prevalent theme of the future Conan stories.

Selling historical fiction on a regular basis, however, proved to be an arduous task. Of his interest in the genre and difficulties in the market Howard wrote in 1933 : ”There is no literary work, to me, half as zestful as rewriting history in the guise of fiction. I wish I was able to devote the rest of my life to that kind of work.... I could never make a living writing such things, though; the markets are too scanty, with requirements too narrow, and it takes me so long to complete one. I try to write as true to the actual facts as possible, at least, I try to commit as few errors as possible. I like to have my background and setting as accurate and realistic as I can, with my limited knowledge; if I twist facts too much, alter dates as some writers do, or present a character out of keeping with my impressions of the time and place, I lose my sense of reality, and my characters cease to be living and vital things; and my stories center entirely on my conceptions of my characters. Once I lose the 'feel' of my characters, I might as well tear up what I have written.”

All these elements were probably at the back of Howard's mind in February 1932 when he transformed By This Axe I Rule! into The Phoenix on the Sword. By dropping the love-interest of the former story and adding a weird touch to his revision, Howard knew what he was doing: unlike his previous series, the first Conan tale was tailored specifically to meet Weird Tales'

requirements. However, taking control of the marketing aspects of the story was one thing; keeping in check the creative forces that brought the barbarian character to life was another entirely: ”the man Conan seemed suddenly to grow up in my mind without much labor on my part and immediately a stream of stories flowed off my pen or rather, off my typewriter 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.”

With a first story featuring Conan as the middle-aged king of Aquilonia, a second as a young barbarian in the northern fringes of the world and a third as a young barbarian thief in the civilized city of Numalia, different periods of the character's life and widely scattered geographic locations in each case, Howard was running the risk of losing himself in this character and his universe. This had happened with the Kull stories, in which the loss of Howard's ”sense of reality” is discernible. He thus decided to have his ”background and setting ... accurate and realistic.”11.

The creation of a self-coherent universe was the perfect solution to Howard's needs and aspirations. His decision to people his Hyborian Age with Cimmerians, Vanirs, Nemedians and Afghulis, thinly-disguised names borrowed from history or legendry, was never really understood. Years later, Lovecraft would take Howard to task for this: ”the only flaw in this stuff is R.E.H.'s incurable tendancy to devise names too closely resembling actual names names which, for us, have a very different set of a.s.sociations.” Lovecraft, and a host of others after him, couldn't see that Howard never intended to create a universe removed from our own, as he had done when writing the Kull stories and as so many writers of epic fantasy have done since. By carefully choosing names that resembled those found in our history and legendry, Howard wanted to ensure that no reader would be left wondering what a Turanian looked like, or be unaware that his Vanir and aesir lived in the northern parts of the world. By telescoping history and geography to create a universe that was new and yet familiar, Howard was deliberately striving for efficacy and stereotype, a technique that allowed him to create an exotic background with a minimum of description. He was at the same time answering his own need to have an ”accurate and realistic” background for the series, while creating a method for writing (pseudo-)historical tales without the risk of anachronism or factual errors. The first three Conan stories, completed before The Hyborian Age was written, may be seen as experimental efforts, before Howard had a firm grasp of his character's environment and of the new series' potential. It was with his fourth and fifth offerings The Tower of the Elephant and The Scarlet Citadel that Howard added this epic and (pseudo-)historical dimension to his new series. From this point onward, the Conan stories became something more than the adventures of a barbarian adventurer in an imaginary kingdom, as had been the case with the Kull stories. From story to story, Conan could be a king in Medieval Europe (The Scarlet Citadel), a general in an antique a.s.syria torn with rivalries between city-states (Black Colossus), or a member of the wild kozaks the term is transparent enough of the East. As Howard once wrote: ”My study of history has been a continual search for newer barbarians, from age to age.” With the creation of the Hyborian Age, he had offered himself a universe where all those barbarian peoples could co-exist in the same time-frame, and in Conan the Cimmerian the perfect vehicle to express his views on barbarism and civilization.

In many of these stories, the Cimmerian finds himself in one of the borderlands of the Hyborian Age where barbarism and civilization clash on an epic scale, with armies numbering in the tens of thousands. These large-scale battles find an echo in incidents of a more private order, often providing the stories with memorable scenes and lines of dialogue, such as Conan's recounting his trial in Queen of the Black Coast: ”I choked my ire and held my peace, and the judge squalled that I had shown contempt for the court, and that I should be hurled into a dungeon to rot until I betrayed my friend. So then, seeing they were all mad, I drew my sword and cleft the judge's skull”; or Howard's acerbic aside in The Tower of the Elephant: ”Civilized men are more discourteous than savages because they know they can be impolite without having their skulls split, as a general thing.”

Manifestly, the majority of Howard's work and the Conan tales in particular can be read as12.an exploration of the theme of ”Barbarism versus Civilization,” with Howard standing firmly on the barbarians' side. This deep-rooted interest fueled Howard's writings from the beginning and became the major theme of discussion in the Texan's correspondence with Lovecraft, initiated in 1930. Confronted by the erudite writer from Providence, Howard found himself forced to back his opinions with historical and political data; consequently the Conan tales quite often echo ideas expressed in the correspondence and vice-versa. More aware than anyone else of Howard's positions and convictions, Lovecraft was in a privileged position to fully appreciate the Conan tales and their subtext. Shortly after Howard's death, Lovecraft thus wrote: ”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.” The perceptive author here touched upon a major key to the Conan series explaining at the same time the ”internal force and sincerity” of the tales, and the reason no Conan pastiche could ever hope to attain the level of the original stories. If Howard's Conan tales make for particularly well-crafted escapist fiction, providing the reader with colorful high-adventure stories, the best of them deliver much more. A grim undercurrent pervades the whole series, often leaving the reader with mixed emotions, the sensation of having experienced something at once exhilarating and depressing.

Howard's best Conan stories we may cite The Tower of the Elephant, Queen of the Black Coast, Beyond the Black River and Red Nails are also those that have a sad ending: dark undercurrents flow beneath the veneer of this ”escapist” fiction.

Conan's philosophy is best expressed in one pa.s.sage from Queen of the Black Coast: ”In this world men struggle and suffer vainly, finding pleasure only in the bright madness of battle ...

Let me live deep while I live; let me know the rich juices of red meat and stinging wine on my palate, the hot embrace of white arms, the mad exultation of battle when the blue blades flame and crimson, and I am content. Let teachers and priests and philosophers brood over questions of reality and illusion. I know this: if life is illusion, then I am no less an illusion, and being thus, the illusion is real to me. I live, I burn with life, I love, I slay, and am content.”

This is indeed one of the major characteristics of the Cimmerian. He lives for the moment, savoring each instant, not caring about the past, nor about the future. Yesterday a kozak, today a king, tomorrow a thief. It is in that sense that the Conan stories are escapist literature: their appeal seems universal, transcending generations and cultures. As Howard once confided: ”A man reading [a] story about Conan, then, would feel again in the depth of his being those barbaric impulses; consequently, Conan acted as they felt they would act in similar circ.u.mstances.” What sets the Conan stories apart, however, is the distinct sensation that the thrill of adventure in these stories is but a mask, that it is in fact never really possible to forget the grim realities of the world. Conan's Hyborian Age began with a cataclysm and ended with another cataclysm. Whatever the Hyborians and Conan can accomplish, has no meaning at all in the final a.n.a.lysis, and is eventually bound to destruction and oblivion. Human life and empires are equally transient in Howard. Civilization is not the final phase of human development; it may be an ”inevitable consequence” of that development, but it is a transitory state: civilizations are bound to wither and decay, eventually to be swept over by conquering13.hordes of savages or barbarians who will themselves, after a time, become civilized....

In this cycle, it was with the state of barbarism that Howard recognized his kins.h.i.+p. This was not a case, as some commentators have argued, of belief in the superiority of barbarism over civilization or of a conception of the barbarian as a ”n.o.ble Savage”: ”I have no idyllic view of barbarism as near as I can learn it's a grim, b.l.o.o.d.y, ferocious and loveless condition. I have no patience with the depiction of the barbarian of any race as a stately, G.o.d-like child of Nature, endowed with strange wisdom and speaking in measured and sonorous phrases.”

Probably the best metaphor of barbaric life as envisioned by Howard is found in Beyond the Black River, where the protagonists are caught between hammer and anvil: beyond their settlement and the Black River dwell the savage Picts, ready to attack them at any moment; behind it and Thunder River are the forces of civilization, too decadent and divided among themselves to ensure their own survival, much less that of their frontiers. The tale carries this grim predicament to its logical conclusion and Conan, the only one of the characters born into barbarism rather than civilization, is the sole survivor. The civilizing process had severed Conan's allies from their instincts, and not having this elemental aspect, inborn in the Cimmerian, they could not hope to prevail. The tale's concluding lines without a doubt Howard's most quoted statement attest to that: ”Barbarism is the natural state of mankind...

Civilization is unnatural. It is a whim of circ.u.mstance. And barbarism must always ultimately triumph.” The civilizing process bears in itself the seeds of its own destruction by removing itself from what is natural. What is ”unnatural” cannot endure: it will either succ.u.mb to ”natural” forces, as described in Beyond the Black River, or it will slowly decay and destroy itself in a horrible fas.h.i.+on, as exemplified in Xuthal of the Dusk and Red Nails. The reasons behind Howard's fascination with the theme of decaying civilizations, which may very well be at the root of his interest in barbaric life, were probably very complex. Much more than in the evolutionist theories of the time which the stories sometimes echo, it is probably in Howard's biography and psychology that the answer resides. There is indeed something intensely personal in these convictions, which transcends the stories and contributes to much of their strength.

There is no denying that not all the Conan stories are on the same level as those we have mentioned. In a time of financial difficulties, it soon became easy enough for Howard to make of Conan his meal ticket. Most of the more routine Conan stories systematically featuring semi-naked ladies, which had been entirely absent from the series until then were indeed composed between November 1932 and March 1933, at a time when Howard was in dire need of money. (Incidentally, the fact that most Conan pastiches found their ”inspiration” in such stories, and not Red Nails or Queen of the Black Coast, is a testimony to the critical eye of their authors.) Most of these stories have something genuinely Howardian in them as Lovecraft once wrote, Howard ”was greater than any money-making policy he could adopt” but they are clearly exploiting a formula calculated to win the cover ill.u.s.tration.

With the tales of Conan of Cimmeria, Howard was out for more than pulpish fare. While he14.could have turned out story after story of the adventures of a Cimmerian killing monsters and l.u.s.ting after scantily-clad damsels in distress, a.s.suring himself a regular income, Howard decided not to turn his Cimmerian into an industry. The mark of the true author, he didn't hesitate to experiment with new types of stories, to take risks at a time when their sale and commercial success would have been a.s.sured otherwise. If the true work of art is something that at once attracts and disturbs, then the Conan stories are something special, an epic painted in bright colors, featuring heroic deeds and larger-than-life characters in fabled lands, but with something darker lying beneath.

Scratch the veneer at your own risk.

Patrice Louinet 2002.15.Cimmeria Written in Mission, Texas, February, 1932; suggested by the memory of the hill-country above Fredericksburg seen in a mist of winter rain.

Robert E. Howard

Cimmeria.

I remember.

The dark woods, masking slopes of sombre hills; The grey clouds' leaden everlasting arch; The dusky streams that flowed without a sound, And the lone winds that whispered down the pa.s.ses.Vista on vista marching, hills on hills, Slope beyond slope, each dark with sullen trees, Our gaunt land lay. So when a man climbed up A rugged peak and gazed, his shaded eye Saw but the endless vista hill on hill, Slope beyond slope, each hooded like its brothers.It was a gloomy land that seemed to hold All winds and clouds and dreams that shun the sun,16.

With bare boughs rattling in the lonesome winds, And the dark woodlands brooding over all, Not even lightened by the rare dim sun Which made squat shadows out of men; they called it Cimmeria, land of Darkness and deep Night.It was so long ago and far away I have forgot the very name men called me.

The axe and flint-tipped spear are like a dream, And hunts and wars are shadows. I recall Only the stillness of that sombre land; The clouds that piled forever on the hills, The dimness of the everlasting woods.

Cimmeria, land of Darkness and the Night.Oh, soul of mine, born out of shadowed hills, To clouds and winds and ghosts that shun the sun, How many deaths shall serve to break at last This heritage which wraps me in the grey Apparel of ghosts? I search my heart and find Cimmeria, land of Darkness and the Night.17.

The Phoenix on the Sword

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