Fantasy Masterworks 01 (77 page)

Conan was the leader of a band of outlaws who battled a giant god 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 illustration … 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 circumstance. 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 sex 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 God’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 Tales.

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

Robert E. Howard

(1906-1936) Robert Ervin Howard was born and raised in rural Texas, where he lived all his life. The son of a pioneer physician, he began writing professionally at fifteen. Written between 1932 and 1935, for Weird Tales magazine, Howard’s complete adventures of Conan arc collected into two Fantasy Masterworks volumes. Howard killed himself in June 1936, on learning that his beloved mother had slipped into a terminal coma.