Dark Valley Destiny (3 page)

While millions of readers are already familiar with the great barbarian either through the twenty-odd books about him or through his appearance in the comics and in the first motion picture that bears his name, for those who know little about him a description is in order. Conan is a giant of a man, six and a half feet tall, with the shoulders of a prizefighter and the agility of a leopard. His mien is somber, darkened by long exposure to the elements and scarred by battle; but under his square-cut mane of coarse black hair, his eyes burn with a bright blue fire.

To anyone familiar with Robert Howard himself, it is evident that the Cimmerian embodies all the attributes that his creator most admired. Conan is enormously strong, lithe, and fast-moving; fearless in battle and adept with both sword and axe; wily, quick-thinking, and self-reliant; yet in awe of the power of the Cimmerian gods and of the wizards who, by their obscene arts, call demons and monsters from the eternal deep. Conan is an adventurer who, untrammeled by the tethers of human relationships, wanders the world at will. Money—-or the gold and gems that serve as a medium for barter—is a concern; but the barbarian solves his problem by seeking great, pulsing jewels set in the eyes of idols, or caches of pirates' loot guarded in hidden caves by deadly ghouls or serpents-

It is worth noting that, in more than one way, Conan resembles Robert's father. Dr. Howard has been described by those who remember him in his youth as an imposing figure, a tall, dark-haired, choleric man whose bright-blue eyes made a lasting impression on all who saw him and whose air of authority, worn casually like a cloak, moved people to admire and obey him. Because of the close proximity of this model, it is probable that, from boyhood, Robert carried Conan in the inmost recesses of his brain. At least we know that, when he began to write the Conan stories, he reported to a correspondent that "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."
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In another letter, this one to a fellow
Weird Tales
writer by the name of Clark Ashton Smith, Howard—unmindful of his childhood image of his father—sought to explain the source of his most famous character thus:

It may sound fantastic to link the term "realism" with Conan; but as a matter of fact—his supernatural adventures 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 sub-consciousness took the dominant characteristics of various prizefighters, 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.
¹⁹

"Conan," an old Celtic name borne by several dukes of medieval Brittany and by a number of characters in Irish legend, made an excellent name for Howard's new hero, being both distinctive and easy to say. As he developed, Conan gave little sign of either his "gigantic melancholies" or his "gigantic mirth." True, in "The Pool of the Black One" he joined a group of buccaneers, he "mixed with the crew, lived and made merry as they did," and showed himself to be one "whose laughter was gusty and ready, who roared ribald songs in a dozen languages. . . ."
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But on the whole he seems an even-tempered man—ever dour, suspicious, irascible, dangerous, and too grimly intent on his objectives for merriment.

In addition to his search for treasure, the great barbarian devotes his energies to survival when caught in a deadly predicament. In other stories his goal is success in some martial task for which he has been hired. Ofttimes he seeks revenge for some real or fancied wrong, a vivid reflection on the state of mind of his creator. In only two of the twenty-one Conan stories completed by Howard is the mainspring of the action the Cimmerian's lust for a woman.

This is not to say that the other stories are womanless. In more than half of the tales, Conan is somehow involved with a woman, but even when the tale ends with her in the hero's brawny arms, she usually disappears before the beginning of the following story. This state of affairs need not excite the reader's wonder. For one thing, while there was much fornication in early heroic fantasy, sexual activity was discreetly kept off-stage. More importantly, explicit sexual activity, with its attendant emotional and physical consequences, would spoil the reader's phantasies of a life of carefree, irresponsible adventure.

With the instinctive insight of a great storyteller, Robert Howard seemed to know that Conan's adventures were a dream—every young man's dream of freedom, power, and unlimited success. He knew, too, that dreams should be amorphous, undefined, only hinted at, so that the dreamer may sketch in his own details. Because his readers are free to combine the artist's larger fantasy with their own less opulent fancies, Conan fans can readily turn Howard's dream into a heroic expression of their own hearts' desires. This, we believe, is the secret of Conan's immortality.

With equal clarity Robert Howard's vision of his Hyborian World emerged. He saw a land of sun and shadow, dotted with castles and crouching villages and shining cities huddled behind strong walls and towering battlements, from which bright pennants fluttered and horsemen emerged to ride against their foes. It was an age of warriors and pirates, thieves and highwaymen; more than that, it was a world peopled by witches, wizards, careless gods, and forces of evil that stagger the imagination.

In the frozen northlands, whence came the great barbarian as a youth of seventeen, lay the bleak land of Cimmeria and, near it, the domain of the Aesir, a rugged folk who fought against wolves and supernatural enemies. In the untamed western reaches of the nameless continent lay the Pictish Wilderness, an ancient region of great forests and an elder folk who fought like fiends from Hell and whose shamans conjured up the evil aid of hoary gods.

Traveling southward, the voyager must ride for endless days through misted mountain passes and topaz grasslands to arrive at last in a place of emerald jungles and ebon giants akin to Howard's imagined Africans. Along the way, perhaps, the wanderer might visit the realm of Stygia, peopled by beady-eyed brown men with shaven pates. Suspect were the intentions of the Stygians, whose magic lore was writ in unknown runes on tattered parchment, but was no less potent for that.

To all these lands and more came Conan the Cimmerian, sword in hand. His wanderings and adventures were recounted in eighteen tales published during Howard's lifetime and in three more, which remained unsold at the time of his death. These unsold tales and fragments of others discovered by Glenn Lord and completed or edited by the senior author of the present work form the nucleus of the Conan saga.

So vividly did Howard describe the snow-capped peaks, wide-flung deserts, and sapphire seas of this imaginary world that a reader might map the kingdoms as their geography unrolled before his ensorcelled eyes. In fact, two readers of
Weird Tales
did so. John D. Clark and P. Schuyler Miller, the first a physical chemist and the second a school administrator, drew a detailed map of the Hyborian World and sent it to Robert Howard. The Texan studied the sketch, made a couple of minor corrections, and told his admirers that their map was almost exactly as he had pictured it.
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It is a map derived from this original that appears in every volume of Conan stories.

Sometimes people ask us: Why has Conan the barbarian such an abiding appeal to lovers of tales of high adventure? Conan is the prototype of man against the universe—a hero who is dauntless against mortal enemies but withal fearful of unseen sinister forces beyond the control of his powerful arm. After decades of reading stories of puny bumblers who succeed through luck despite their manifold inadequacies, tales of epic heroes, like Conan, stir our blood and make us realize that each of us ' has but himself to rely on and and must learn to march breast-forward, ' free of self-doubt or cringing fear. ;

Some readers have viewed Conan as nothing more than a walking killing machine, glorying in carnage, as insensitive to the people around him as he is to pain, a character without development. This is not so in our opinion; nor was it so to Robert Howard. Conan grew in stature— slowly, it is true—from a homeless thieving boy, unable to read or write and ignorant of the ways of the civilized world, into a king who ruled over the most splendid realm of the Hyborian Age, the kingdom of Aquilonia. Conan killed often and without remorse, but he seldom killed for wanton pleasure. He fought with murder in his heart and blood on his body; but he fought to protect himself or a follower or to take possession of some property he felt was his by right of conquest.

Conan developed his own code of behavior and stuck to it. Like his creator, he had few friends, except those by whose side he fought. To those friends he was loyal. He trusted few men and fewer women, but with these few he was honest and open. He had, by implication only, some relative of whom he was fond living in the savage land of Cimmeria; for on several occasions he returned thither. With this exception he had no family ties until he had reached his years of maturity.

Toward women his simple code of honor was strict, as was that of his creator. Save on one occasion in his youth, Conan never attempted to force a woman or violate her, despite the scanty clothing that she wore in both the story and the illustrations.
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Of course, upon her invitation, he would willingly dally in her company, even though he risked his life to do so. Still, in the long run, his attachments were shallow. With the exception of Belit, the beautiful black-haired pirate maid whom he truly loved, and the young palace servant whom he promised to make his queen, each story finds him cheerfully taking a new love and cheerfully leaving her when the tale is told. Even when a woman betrays him, Conan stays his hand, growling about what he would do if she were a man. Once, however, his gallantry deserts him. On that occasion he tosses a murderous and faithless girl from a balcony into an open cesspool in the courtyard of an inn.
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Perhaps it is this combination of brute strength and compassion for those who seem to be the weaker sex that speaks to those male readers who dream of casting off the ways of civilization to trample the hostile world into submission beneath their booted feet. Such a course and such an outcome are only impossible dreams, as anyone would know if he, like Conan, had endured endless nights in rain or snow, gone barefoot and ill-clad through blazing sands, been forced to starve or eat raw muskrats, or defended himself with only a broken sword. But what splendid dreams they are!

There are other reasons for the continuing success of the Conan stories. For one thing, Howard's passionate intensity carries the reader along on a galloping steed. Conan's gigantic angers and consuming hates recreate for us the tangled emotions that surged through Howard's own soul. His perception of the beauties of nature, from the broad sweep of the big skies of Texas to the tiny petals of a buttercup, enrich our own perceptions. His fiend-ridden vision of demons, ghosts, and writhing creatures from the nether world, which enfold each man or woman, seeking to destroy, is so impelling that even the most materialistic person shudders a little in the dark of night. And Howard's world of the imagination, in which he spent so much of his life in order to escape the prison of reality, stimulates our feebler imaginings so that we, for a little time, may flee from the humdrum world into the boundless lands of heroic fiction.

To investigate the relationship between Robert Howard's life and his art is the purpose of this book. Who was this man who transformed Dark Valley, Texas, into Cimmeria and all West Texas into a continent contemporary with Atlantis? What essence of self was projected into his fictional characters? Was he a barbarian, like Conan? A buffoon, like Breckenridge Elkins, his comical cowboy character? Or was he the desperately tragic hero of his poetry? What events influenced his personal development? What was the impact of the times upon his personality? What assumptions and dispositions determined his values? And, finally, what led him to take his own life when he stood on the threshold of a successful literary career?

At birth a witch laid on me monstrous spells, And I have trod strange highroads all my days, Turning my feet to gray, unholy ways. I grope for stems of broken asphodels; High on the rims of bare, fiend-haunted fells, I follow cloven tracks that lie ablaze; And ghosts have led me through the moonlight's haze To talk with demons in their granite hells.
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Robert Ervin Howard was born on January 24, 1906, in Peaster, Texas, a village in Parker County, ten miles northwest of Weatherford and thirty-five miles due west of Fort Worth.
²
The Howards at that time lived in Dark Valley, a community of some fifty souls in Palo Pinto County, near the Parker County border; but Dr. Howard had taken his wife to Peaster, a larger settlement in the adjacent county, as her confinement drew near. He wished, presumably, to insure adequate medical facilities for her lying-in, as well as the services of Dr. J. A. Williams, the physician who attended Mrs. Howard at the birth of her only child.

Although little is known about his condition at the time of his birth, it is fair to say that Robert Howard's personality was to be determined, not only by his childhood health and the surroundings in which lived, but also by the kind of people his parents were. It is, therefore, instructive to review the family history and to consider his parents' personalities, experiences, and beliefs.

Robert Howard was proud of his mother's family, the Ervins, whose name he bore. He wrote his friend Lovecraft that, whether or not he ever wrote his projected history of the Southwest, people of his blood had had a hand in making it. His kinsmen, he said, were among the riflemen at King's Mountain and with Andrew Jackson at New Orleans. He had three uncles in the gold rush of '49, a Howard and two Martins, one of whom had left his bones on the trail. Both grandfathers, he went on, had ridden for four years with Nathan Bedford Forrest, the Confederate cavalry general. A great-grandfather had served in the Confederate Army, too, as had several great-uncles, one of whom fell in the battle of Macon, Georgia.