Part 68 (1/2)
”Good,” grunted the king, ”but kiss Numa's dancing girls for yourself only, lest you involve the states!”
His gusty laughter followed Prospero out of the chamber. The carven door closed behind the
392.Poitanian, and Conan turned back to his task. He paused a moment, idly listening to his friend's retreating footsteps, which fell hollowly on the tiles. And as if the empty sound struck a kindred chord in his soul, a rush of revulsion swept over him. His mirth fell away from him like a mask, and his face was suddenly old, his eyes worn. The unreasoning melancholy of the Cimmerian fell like a shroud about his soul, paralyzing him with a crus.h.i.+ng sense of the futility of human endeavor and the meaninglessness of life. His kings.h.i.+p, his pleasures, his fears, his ambitions, and all earthly things were revealed to him suddenly as dust and broken toys. The borders of life shrivelled and the lines of existence closed in about him, numbing him.
Dropping his lion head in his mighty hands, he groaned aloud.
Then lifting his head, as a man looks for escape, his eyes fell on a crystal jar of yellow wine.
Quickly he rose and pouring a goblet full, quaffed it at a gulp. Again he filled and emptied the goblet, and again. When he set it down, a fine warmth stole through his veins. Things and happenings a.s.sumed new values. The dark Cimmerian hills faded far behind him. Life was good and real and vibrant after all not the dream of an idiot G.o.d. He stretched himself lazily like a gigantic cat and seated himself at the table, conscious of the magnitude and vital importance of himself and his task. Contentedly, he nibbled his stylus and eyed his map. (The Phoenix on the Sword, first submitted draft, see pp. 360-361)
When Howard said that ”the man Conan seemed suddenly to grow up in my mind without much labor on my part,” he was probably telling the truth. What he did not realize was that this act of creation obeyed deep-seated motives: Conan's ”gigantic melancholies” echo Howard's ”black moods,” as he called them, just as Cimmeria echoes Dark Valley. And just as Dark Valley was a haunting memory for Howard, ”a gloomier land” than Cimmeria never existed for Conan.
Howard's Conan, at least in the early phases of his creation, was thus much more a projection of what Howard was, than what he wanted to be.
The poem Cimmeria is not, strictly speaking, part of the Conan canon, but it is the piece of writing that helped bring about the Conan stories: Conan or Howard can only ”remember”
Cimmeria; it is a terrible land, the mere evocation of which brings unhappy recollections and invites forgetfulness. This is why no Conan story can take place in Cimmeria and why no other Cimmerian is or could be ever featured in any of the Conan tales. In Queen of the Black Coast, Conan will explain to Belit that ”[i]n 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 what the Conan series is really about then, a
393.wish to drown oneself in a turbulent life. Conan's intense physical life appears as a desperate attempt to forget Cimmeria and whatever frightful memory is a.s.sociated with that country.
Perhaps the same can be said of Howard's intense writing activity, which could be seen as an attempt to forget Dark Valley. When Conan is inactive as is the case at the beginning of The Phoenix on the Sword and reminded of Cimmeria, his first reflex is to seek oblivion and drink his gloominess away. Different solutions to the same problem.
Once Cimmeria was written, after having expressed the need to flee that country and to forget it as much as possible, Howard was psychologically ready to compose the first of these action- filled Conan stories.
When Howard returned to Cross Plains in February 1932, there still remained the task of creating what was to become known as the ”Hyborian” world.
The reasons behind the invention of the Hyborian Age were probably commercial. Howard's sole market up to 1929 had been Weird Tales, but in the early thirties several new markets opened up to him, notably Oriental Stories and the short-lived Soldiers of Fortune. Howard had an intense love for history and the stories he sold to Oriental Stories rank among his best. At the same time he recognized the difficulties and the time-consuming research work involved in maintaining historical accuracy. By conceiving a universe that was not ours but that may once have been ours, by carefully choosing names that resembled our past history, Howard skirted the problem of anachronisms and the need for lengthy explanatory chapters. Lovecraft later criticized him for this, but concluded that: ”The only thing to do is to accept the nomenclature as he gives it, wink at the weak spots, and be d.a.m.ned thankful that we can get such vivid artificial legendry.” (Letter to Donald Wollheim, used in the introduction to The Hyborian Age, 1938).
Howard was perfectly able to come up with imaginary names when he wanted to: the Kull stories that Lovecraft so much admired feature strange-sounding empires such as Zarfhaana, Valusia and Grondar. But by dubbing Howard's method ”artificial legendry,” Lovecraft had touched upon one of the most important factors presiding over the creation of the Hyborian Age.
Although he is not represented in Howard's library, nor alluded to in his papers and correspondence, there seems a strong likelihood that Howard's conception of the Hyborian Age originates in Thomas Bulfinch's The Outline of Mythology (1913), acting as a catalyst that enabled him to coalesce into a coherent whole his literary aspirations and the strong psychological/autobiographical elements underlying the creation of Conan.
Bulfinch (1796-1867) had a keen interest in cla.s.sical studies and much of his spare time was spent writing a series of books popularizing cla.s.sical legends and mythological episodes. The
394.Outline of Mythology combines his three most famous books, The Age of Fable (1855), The Age of Chivalry (1858) and Legends of Charlemagne, or Romance of the Middle Ages (1863).
Between the covers of Bulfinch's books were heroic tales set in various places and epochs of history and legendry, that is to say, the very substance of the Hyborian Age. It is thus not surprising to find that many of the names used in Howard's early conception of his imaginary world are found in Bulfinch, beginning with Conan: ”...the next event of note is the conquest and colonization of Armorica, by Maximis, a Roman general, and Conan, lord of Miniadoc or Denbigh-land, in Wales.” (Bulfinch, The Outline of Mythology, p. 388)
Of course, Howard was familiar with the name Conan before the inception of the Hyborian series, since he had already used the name for the protagonist in People of the Dark. But perhaps this only indicates that Howard had already read or was reading Bulfinch by the time he wrote that story.
As to the country of Conan's birth, Cimmeria, Bulfinch offers a description similar to Howard's:
”Near the Cimmerian country, a mountain cave is the abode of the dull G.o.d Somnus. Here Phoebus dares not come, either rising, at midday, or setting. Clouds and shadows are exhaled from the ground, and the light glimmers faintly. The bird of dawning, with crested head, never there calls aloud to Aurora, nor watchful dog, nor more sagacious goose disturbs the silence.
No wild beast, nor cattle, nor branch moved with the wind, nor sound of human conversation, breaks the stillness. Silence reigns there; but from the bottom of the rock the River Lethe flows, and by its murmur invites to sleep.” (Bulfinch, pp. 71-72)
Some commentators have noted the closeness of description between Howard's Cimmeria and Herodotus' description of this country; this could well have come from Bulfinch, who drew some of his material from Herodotus. Bulfinch adds: ”The earliest inhabitants of Britain are supposed to have been a branch of that great family known in history by the designation of Celts. Cambria, which is a frequent name for Wales, is thought to be derived from Cymri, the name which the Welsh traditions apply to an immigrant people who entered the island from the adjacent continent. This name is thought to be identical with those of Cimmerians and Cimbri, under which the Greek and Roman historians describe a barbarous people, who spread themselves from the north of the Euxine over the whole of Northwestern Europe” (p. 529). In March 1932, precisely at the time he was writing the first Conan tales, Howard echoed Bulfinch, writing to Lovecraft that ”Most authorities consider the Cimbri were Germans, of course, and they probably were, but there's a possibility that they were Celtic, or of mixed Celtic and German blood, and it gratifies my fancy to protray [sic] them as Celts, anyway.”
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These elements alone are far from conclusive, but are sufficient to show that Howard may have been using Bulfinch's recountings of widespread legends as a handy reference for his own Hyborian world. Nowhere is this more evident than in the first Conan tale, The Phoenix on the Sword.
Around May of 1929, Howard wrote two drafts of a Kull story ent.i.tled By This Axe I Rule! The story was submitted to and rejected by Argosy and Adventure. Nearly three years later, in March 1932, Howard salvaged this story from the unpublished files and rewrote it as The Phoenix on the Sword. It is impossible to ascertain exactly what was modified between the last draft of the Kull story and the first draft of the Conan one, since the final draft of By This Axe I Rule! has not come to us (the published text is that of the first and only extant draft). At any rate the physical description of Kull was carried over to Conan, with the notable exception of the color of his eyes: grey for the Atlantean, blue for the Cimmerian. The Conan version of the story also dropped the love interest of the Kull tale and replaced it with a supernatural element; understandably so since the Conan story was aimed at a fantasy market while the Kull version had been intended for general fiction magazines. In the three years that had elapsed since the writing of the Kull story, Howard had begun corresponding with Howard Phillips Lovecraft.
Many of Howard's weird stories from the year 1931 were attempts at writing stories in Lovecraft's style. By the end of the year, however, Howard had successfully a.s.similated the influence, and he was now able to include Lovecraftian elements in his stories without aping his Providence colleague. The Lovecraftian monster of this story is a perfect example, as is the fact that the published version's discreet reference to the ”Nameless Old Ones” replaced the first draft's ”Cthulhu, Tsathogua, Yog-Sothoth, and the Nameless Old Ones.”