Dark Valley Destiny (41 page)

In 1931 Howard launched a series of Dark Age fantasies about an eleventh-century Irishman, Turlogh O'Brien, a man who was outlawed by his clan. It is notable that several of Howard's heroes (whatever the psychological explanation) are men on the dodge from their own clans, tribes, or nations, usually for having killed outside the law. Perhaps they expressed some of the pent-up violence that seethed within the mind of their creator.

Turlogh represents a theme, hinted at in some of the earlier stories, that became increasingly prominent in Howard's later works: the man obsessed by hatred. Into such characters Howard could pour his own feelings toward his "enemies." This roiling emotion gives the stories a peculiar intensity, but the hate-ridden characters are not easy for normal readers to identify with.

Howard sold two Turlogh stories to
Weird Tales
but failed to finish two others of the series. Turlogh, whom fate sends on a mission to rescue a princess from invading Vikings, is a tall, black-haired man, "combining the strength of a bull with the lithe quickness of a panther. . . . From under heavy black brows gleamed eyes of hot volcanic blue."
¹⁸

Readers of Howard stories will meet many heroes of this kind. In fact, this description of Turlogh fits nearly all of Howard's heroes. Although we never learn what shade of blue might properly be called "volcanic," the description fits perfectly the young Isaac Howard, whose great height, black mane, piercing blue eyes, and air of authority have often been remarked upon by those who remember him in his youth. To a small child this huge man, whose eyes, alight with anger, would burn with inner fire, could readily become both the role model of the hero and the man his son would have liked to be.

The Turlogh tales, like so many of Robert Howard's heroic fantasies, are replete with cities of barbaric splendor, strange beasts, evil

serpents, swords, and supermen

priests, human sacrifice, ape-men, and demons. The second story, "The Gods of Bal-Sagoth," is a particularly fine example of Howard's headlong action, theme of universal destruction, and royal purple prose. His poetry disguised as prose soars in this descriptive passage: "Surely black wings beating from moonless gulfs had hovered over its birth, and the grisly souls of nameless demons had gone into its being."
¹⁹

Along with the Turlogh stories, Howard set about developing another series. The rise of the new magazine
Oriental Stories
gave him the opportunity to do something he had long dreamed about: to write historical adventure fiction. He placed his stories in the Near East in the early thirteenth century. For his hero he chose Cormac Fitzgeoffrey. Cormac, half Irish and half Norman, is an exile from his native Ireland and a former comrade-in-arms of Richard the Lion-Hearted on the Third Crusade. He is, as Howard told his friend Harold Preece, "The most somber character I have yet attempted."
²⁰

Like the other heroes, Cormac is a mighty man and a formidable fighting machine, one "to whom the ways of violence and bloodshed were as natural as the ways of peace are to the average man. . . ."
²¹

So used is he to violence that when, in the first story, "Hawks of Outremer," he falls into the hands of Saladin and the Kurdish sultan lets him go, Cormac is amazed. The second Cormac tale, "The Blood of Belshazzar," concerns a great red gem that "pulsed like a living thing."
²²
A third tale of the series was begun but never finished. Such was the fate of many series characters, created and abandoned by Howard when they lost their appeal for him.

Another series of historical stories proved abortive. These were four novelettes about one Cormac Mac Art, an Irish outlaw supposed to have lived in the time of King Arthur, who, according to legend, flourished around 500
a.d
. For this series Howard used as background material the works of Arthur D. Howden Smith, who wrote for
Adventure Magazine
in the 1920s.

Cormac, a failed pirate, adventures with a Danish Viking and his band of reavers—a notable anachronism, since the Scandinavians did not take to seafaring until several centuries after 500
a.d.
and Norse raids on Scotland and Ireland began in the 790s.

Undoubtedly Howard hoped to sell the series to
Adventure.
This Was his unfulfilled dream, because historical adventure stories were in vogue in the 1930s, while fantasies of all kinds remained little known and largely unappreciated. Only in 1974 was the series published under the title of the lead story,
Tigers of the Sea.

As we have remarked before, Howard was least successful when he adopted settings from other contemporary writers or tried to write in their style. He was at his best when he created his own fantasy world and let his own imagination lead him whither it beckoned. It was his misfortune that the type of writing at which he excelled became popular almost fifty years after his death, a fate accorded to artists in many different fields.

The first of Howard's Cthulhoid stories, published in the April—May 1931
Weird Tales,
amply illustrates this point. At Lovecraft's urging, Howard, along with other writers of the Lovecraft circle, made liberal use of Cthulhoid elements in some of their fiction. "The Children of the Night" is perhaps the least well-conceived of all the stories Howard sold in his lifetime. In imitation of Lovecraft's style, Howard ends the tale when his hero, obsessed with hatred for a pre-Pictish aborigine who seems part Mongoloid and part reptile, plans to slay the foul being because

... he pollutes the clean air and leaves the slime of the snake on the green

earth. The sound of his lisping, hissing voice fills me with crawling horror

and the sight of his slanted eyes inspires me with madness.
²³

And yet, another of Howard's Lovecraft imitations, "The Black Stone," is an effective story, which has been reprinted many times. In it appears a theme often repeated in Robert Howard's poetry. After witnessing a night of Mongoloid folk celebrating a primitive Sabbat, replete with wild yells and dances, flogging, human sacrifice, and the appearance of otherworldly beasts, the narrator wonders "
What nameless shapes may even now lurk in the dark places of the world?"
^24.

During his period of preparation for the coming years of full maturity as a writer, Robert Howard wrote several stories that do not fall into any particular group or series. "The Fearsome Touch of Death" is a non-supernatural horror story—in contradistinction to his Lovecraft imitations—even though
Weird Tales
published it. In it a man, who volunteered to sit the night with the corpse of a friend, feels what he believes to be the hand of the dead man reaching for him and dies of heart failure.

Although classed as a horror story, this tale is perhaps Howard's most successful venture into realism. Here he paints an arresting word picture of slowly rising fear. He may have drawn on his remembered night terrors when he slept in the attic of that empty boardinghouse in Brownwood.

Another tale worth noting is "The Iron Man," one of the very few serious boxing stories that Howard ever sold. While the tale lacks style, it contains a good analysis of character. A heavyweight fights to support his girl in finishing school; but out of pride, avarice, and stubbornness, he refuses to quit after he earns plenty of money. His girl finally forces him out of the ring before he is battered into feeblemindedness.

Howard also undertook several collaborations with his friend Tevis Clyde Smith. "Eighttoes Makes a Play" told about a sledge-dog race in the Yukon, with scenery from the novels of James Oliver Curwood and other romancers of the Frozen North. But the only collaboration that sold was "Red Blades of Black Cathay," in which a Crusader seeks the fabled kingdom of Prester John in Central Asia.

Writing effective and salable fiction takes skills that do not develop overnight. Just as a fine sword blade is wrested from raw iron only through repeated heating, pounding, folding of hot metal, cooling, and baking for weeks in a bed of warm coals, so splendid writing is only hammered out through years of lonely practice, painful trial and error, rejections, discouragement, sometimes ridicule, and occasional glimmerings of success.

Despite the national turmoil brought about by the Great Depression and the great drouth, and despite the family distress resulting from Mrs. Howard's continuing decline, the years between 1929 and 1932 vouchsafed Robert Howard the quietude in which to polish his skills, experiment with stories of various kinds, and to attain sufficient financial rewards to reassure him about his abilities as an author.

What do I know of cultured ways, the gilt, the craft and the lie? I, who was born in a naked land and bred in the open sky. The subtle tongue, the sophist guile, they fail when the broadswords sing;

Rush in and die, dogs—I was a man before I was a king.
¹

The year 1932 proved eventful for Robert Howard, both as a writer and as a man. It was in 1932 that he wrote and sold his first Conan story, "The Phoenix on the Sword," which is rated as one of the better stories in the series. In the same year he met the only woman, aside from his mother, with whom he ever had a close and prolonged friendship.

The new year began inauspiciously. After months of high-speed production, Robert found himself unable to write anything of value. This unsettling drainage of creativity often befalls writers of fiction and results in depression or even sheer panic. Looking back on this experience a year later, he wrote: ". . . for months I had been absolutely barren of ideas, completely unable to work up anything sellable."
²
He decided to take a vacation, and in February 1932 he set forth by bus for San Antonio.

In San Antonio, he shopped for knives and swords for his collection. He fell in with an East Indian who had spent most of his life in China. From him Howard learned of the "ghastly tortures of the Orient." The man also mentioned that he had seen "scores of Chinese Communists beheaded in the open streets." This Howard reported to Lovecraft, adding: "The mere thought of such a spectacle slightly nauseated me."
³

From San Antonio, Howard traveled southward to the Rio Grande Valley, where he experimented with Mexican food and wandered up the valley as far as Rio Grande City. It was there, in all probability, that he replaced the cloth cap that he had always worn with a huge black Mexican sombrero. This headgear, which appears to have been a size too large so that it rested on his ears, aroused comment in Cross Plains, where men wore western-style hats. One man remembers that the sombrero made Howard look like a mushroom: "Lord, that thing just engulfed him!"
⁴

Later, Howard became self-conscious about the hat. When Clyde Smith came to visit and asked to wear it uptown as a joke, Bob demurred. " These people around here think I'm crazy as hell, anyway,' he said, 'and I don't want to add to it.' So," said Smith in relating the episode, "we . . . simply donned our caps and took off."
⁵

While Howard was enjoying "tortillas . . . and Spanish wine"
⁶
along the Border, the most memorable fictional idea of his life began to form. Howard decided to write a series of prehistoric adventure fantasies, not unlike the Kull stories, for such a setting would eliminate the need for accurate historical research. This time he planned to work out a detailed map and history of his imaginary world before starting the tales. He undoubtedly also decided to work out a rough plan of his hero's life, so that the character could show development as the hero aged.

Since Howard was not good at inventing names, he often based personal and place names on names of historical figures and localities. He liked to assume that ancient and medieval names were derived from those of his imagined prehistoric realms, postulating that the records of the prehistoric civilization had been destroyed by invasion or natural catastrophe, surviving only in myths and legends. He wrote:

If some cataclysm of nature were to destroy that civilization, remnants of what knowledge and stories of its greatness might well evolve into the fantastic fables that have descended to us.
⁷

When Howard wrote his essay "The Hyborian Age," setting forth the pseudohistory of this imagined period, he sent a copy to Lovecraft. The latter, who did not approve of Howard's system of nomenclature, passed the article on to a fan-magazine publisher with a letter:

Dear Wollheim:

Here is something which Two-Gun Bob says he wants forwarded to you for The Phantagraph, and which I profoundly hope you'll be able to use. This is really great stuff—Howard has the most magnificent sense of the drama of "History" of anyone I know. He possesses a panoramic vision which takes in the evolution and interaction of races and nations over vast periods of time, and gives one the same large scale excitement which (with even greater scope) is furnished by things like Stapledon's "Last and First Men."

The only flaw in this stuff is R.E.H.'s incurable tendency to devise names too closely resembling actual names of ancient history—names which, for us, have a very different set of associations. In many cases he does this designedly—on the theory that the familiar names descend from the fabulous realms he describes—but such a design is invalidated by the fact that we clearly know the etymology of many of the historic terms, hence cannot accept the pedigree he suggests. E. Hoffmann Price and I have both argued with Two-Gun on this point, but we make no headway whatsoever. The only thing to do is to accept the nomenclature as he gives it, wink at the weak spots, and be damned thankful that we can get such vivid artificial legendry. Howard is without question the most vigorous and spontaneous writer now contributing to the pulps—the nearest approach (although he wouldn't admit it himself) to a sincere artist. He puts himself into his work as none of the regulation hacks do.

Best wishes—

Yours most sincerely, HPL
⁸

While Howard's invented names show linguistic naivete and are often unpleasingly repetitious, there is much to be said in defense of his use of names from historical and mythological sources in the Conan stories. Names from ancient sources convey a glamour of antiquity without being too unfamiliar to the modern reader. Besides, few are knowledgeable enough to be troubled by the true derivation of names in a fantasy tale, even when they recognize the sources.