Sword Woman and Other Historical Adventures (87 page)

It was chance that set Howard on the road to encounter Lamb’s fiction at the age of fifteen, when he bought a copy of
Adventure
magazine. We can’t know whether or not there was a Harold Lamb story in that particular issue, as Howard didn’t mention the issue number. He was hooked by the magazine, though, and Lamb was one of
Adventure
’s stars. Howard could not have read the magazine for very long without stumbling upon Lamb’s work.

Howard describes the moment of discovery himself in a July 1933 letter to H. P. Lovecraft. Although he had always loved reading, books had been hard to come by. “Magazines were even more scarce than books. It was after I moved into ‘town’ (speaking comparatively) that I began to buy magazines. I well remember the first I ever bought. I was fifteen years old; I bought it one summer night when a wild restlessness in me would not let me keep still, and I had exhausted all the reading material on the place. I’ll never forget the thrill it gave me. Somehow it never had occurred to me before that I could buy a magazine. It was an
Adventure
. I still have the copy. After that I bought
Adventure
for many years, though at times it cramped my resources to pay the price. It came out three times a month, then.”

Adventure
endured in pulp form for nearly forty-three years, birthed in 1910 and falling into a feeble senility after a change of format in 1953 before an ignominious death. With its reputation for historical accuracy and its stable of well-known authors,
Adventure
was arguably the most prestigious of all pulp magazines when Robert E. Howard first chanced upon it. Those familiar with magazines of today should not assume
Adventure
was slim, quarterly, or populated with literary fiction. In a time when there were no televisions, America was a nation of readers, and turned to entertainment in these magazines, new issues of which often appeared two or three times a month. Drug store racks and newsstands overflowed with an immense variety of detective and mystery pulps, which were nestled beside magazines devoted to romance, or sports stories, or war stories. A few, like
Argosy
and
Adventure
, published a variety of fiction set in different lands and times, the sole unifying theme of their contents being that the material had to entertain. As for what Howard might have seen when he flipped open a particular issue – one that likely featured an oil painting of a historical warrior dashing into battle, given the typical
Adventure
cover of those years – let’s turn to pulp scholar Robert Weinberg.

Issues from the early 1920s, a favorite period of many collectors, were 192 pages of eye-straining print and usually included a complete novel, two or three complete novelettes (in reality short novels) and a goodly chunk of a serial. There would also be five or six short stories and a bunch of departments like “Old Songs That Men Have Sung,” “Ask Adventure,” and “Lost Trails.” The letter column, known as “The Camp Fire” was perhaps the best letter column published in any magazine, ever. Usually, authors of stories in the issues wrote long essays where they detailed the historical background of their work. Letters from readers argued over facts in previous stories. In an America just emerging from the Wild West and the First World War, the readers of
Adventure
weren’t just arm-chair adventurers spouting theories. A typical letter began, “I enjoyed Hugh Pendexter’s story about the gunfight at the O.K. Corral, but he got some of the details wrong. I was there and remember quite distinctly …” and continue on for three pages about the famous gun battle.
*

Adventure
today is most famous for printing the work of an elite cadre of talented adventure writers: Arthur D. Howden Smith, Arthur O. Friel, George Surdez, and many others, although it is these three and its two most famous contributors, Talbot Mundy and Harold Lamb, whose work has been most often reprinted outside the pulps.

It seems clear that Howard enjoyed both Mundy and Lamb. We can see shades of Mundy’s influence, at least topically, in the tales of El Borak and even in the stories of Conan. But for all that Mundy is mentioned more than twice as often as Lamb in Howard’s surviving correspondence, it is Lamb’s writing that seems to have been the greater inspiration.

If Howard had never crossed paths with
Adventure
until 1921, then he missed the earliest phase of Lamb’s
Adventure
years, when he wrote the first fourteen stories of his signature character, Khlit the Cossack. Howard does not seem to have encountered the aging warrior until Khlit’s return as a secondary character; this is a shame, for the third through the ninth tales of the wandering Cossack are some of the finest adventure fiction ever written. They take the Cossack across the steppes of Asia, into ancient tombs and the citadels of kings, bringing him face-to-face with emperors living and dead, bold comrades, scheming traitors, and lovely damsels. Tempting as it is to speculate that Robert E. Howard devoured these earliest tales, we have no record that he did so, though it is easy to imagine that he would have enjoyed reading them.

It seems clear, though, that Howard was a follower of the second, shorter cycle of Cossack stories that Lamb penned, featuring characters named Ayub and Demid. Howard wrote a poem titled with the twain’s name, although the poem is unfortunately lost. Demid is lean, hawkish, quiet, thoughtful; a talented swordsman, he is also a natural leader. Ayub is not as bright – he’d rather act first and then think – but he’s a seasoned veteran and loyal friend, a mighty man who wields a massive two-handed sword and who can drink any fellow under the table.

Readers of the Conan tales can find references to Howard’s Kozaks and it is tempting to credit this influence, and the manner in which certain terms are used, to Lamb. But we should not assume too much. While Lamb’s shadow likely lies over these stories, he wasn’t the only pulp writer to pen Cossack tales.

What we do know is that Howard once sat down with a large stack of Lamb stories and transcribed all of the foreign words for equipment and clothing he found within them. Howard scholar Patrice Louinet found a list of these words in among Howard’s papers and, suspecting they might be from Lamb stories, conferred with me. By searching the texts we discovered that the terms were listed in the same order that they had appeared in several Lamb stories: “The Shield,” “The Sea of Ravens,” “Kirdy,” “The Witch of Aleppo,” “White Falcon,” and “The Wolf Chaser.” Clearly Howard must have found inspiration in these stories, or the stack would not have been so deep. For further evidence that Lamb’s tales struck some primal chord, we need look no further than Lamb’s “The Wolf Chaser.” Howard wrote a five-hundred-word recap of the story, then wrote nearly a thousand words of his own take on the events, reusing the place names and some of the characters.

Preserved in Howard’s body of letters are two that he wrote to
Adventure
. In February of 1924 he wrote the editors to ask more than a dozen questions about Mongolia; Howard wanted to know Mongol names for objects and creatures like swords and tigers, whether or not Mongolians worshipped Erlik, Bon, Buddha, or all three, where exactly the Khirgiz lived, and many other questions besides. He almost certainly had encountered these terms in Lamb’s
Adventure
tales. In July of 1924, Howard again wrote to
Adventure
, though this time he asked questions about Europe, wondering what exactly the rights of a Feudal Baron were, how long the Feudal system flourished in central Europe, and other related matters.

Howard had been drawn to history from a very young age, so we should not think that he found all his desire for writing historical adventure from perusing the pages of
Adventure
magazine. He was keenly interested in Irish history, about which Lamb seems rarely to have concerned himself, and as is well known, wrote widely of a certain Puritan who spent a great deal of time in Africa, another area that never seems to have much interested Lamb.

In Lamb, though, he found a kindred spirit. It is not that the themes Howard so often dealt with in his fiction came first from Lamb, it is that Lamb’s themes resonated so strongly with Howard because the outlook of both men was quite similar. They were drawn to write tales of outsiders and veteran warriors. Both were suspicious of civilization’s strengths and often portrayed rulers and merchants as decadent, greedy, and immoral. Many of Lamb’s heroes were barbarians, or one step removed, just as Howard’s were. And both gloried in bloody action and adventure. Lamb never comes right out and says that barbarism is the natural state of mankind, but in many of his stories it is made clear that civilization will destroy a way of life that Lamb thinks more honorable – that of the folk who protect the borders, who are continually pushed back from the civilization over which they themselves stand sentinel. Overall Lamb was a better plotter (though Howard’s finest stories stand at least shoulder to shoulder with Lamb’s) but Howard was the more gifted storyteller. Lamb’s style is spare and strong, and quite effective, but it rarely rises to the poetic and dreamy heights of Howard’s greatest work.

Howard himself tried
Adventure
magazine as a market, but never managed to get in. By the time he was writing his finest historical fiction, he’d given up on ever appearing in the magazine – more is the pity – but did have a regular market of his own.

O
RIENTAL
S
TORIES

Unfortunately for all lovers of swashbucklers,
Oriental Stories
, later briefly retitled
Magic Carpet Magazine
, had a short lifespan. In four years, only fourteen issues were produced. Howard seems to have been made aware of the publication by
Weird Tales
editor Farnsworth Wright, who was readying to launch the new historical magazine. Wright wrote to Howard that “I especially want historical tales – tales of the Crusades, of Genghis Khan, of Tamerlane, and the wars between Islam and Hindooism. Each story will be complete in one issue, and we will use no serials. The longer lengths are preferred – that is about 15,000 words.”

To all appearances, Howard seems to have leapt at the chance to write this kind of fiction. He said in a 1930 letter to Lovecraft that:

I think Wright’s “Oriental Stories” bids fair to show more originality than the average magazine dealing with the East, though the initial issue, was, to me, slightly dissappointing – not in the appearance of the magazine but in the contents. However, with such writers as Hoffman-Price, Owens and Kline, I look for better things … For my part the mystic phase of the East has always interested me less than the material side – the red and royal panorama of war, rapine and conquest. What I write for “Oriental Stories” will be purely action, and romance – mainly historical tales. And I greatly fear that my Turks and Mongols are merely Irishmen and Englishmen in turbans and sandals!

Howard was worried that he wouldn’t be able to accurately portray people of other cultures and times, but after his initial forays he showed the humanity of his characters, regardless of their point of origin. Far from sounding like Irishmen and Englishmen with turbans, they walk onto the stage as fully realized people, bearing their courage and their flaws regardless of their nationality. The sainted and knightly are few and far between in these stories. Instead Howard drafted fiction of hard men and hard deeds.

The first historical Howard sent Wright’s way shared a byline with Howard’s old friend Tevis Clyde Smith. In a letter to Smith penned in July or August of 1930, Howard directly quoted what Farnsworth Wright had said about the story, relaying Wright was “very well pleased with Red Blades of Black Cathay, and may use this as the cover design story for our third issue of Oriental Stories.”

It’s easy to see why Wright would be pleased with the tale. A greater mystery is why the already accomplished Howard wrote it with his friend. Smith once said that he’d handled the research while Howard did the writing, which still seems odd, for Howard was not only capable of solid research but enjoyed the process. Howard scholars speculate that the story might simply have been a case of Howard trying to help his friend Smith get into print in the pulps.

“Red Blades” is an engaging tale, and a solid enough sounding blow, though it can only hint at what will shortly follow. It is the only Howard historical that can truly be said to read like a Harold Lamb pastiche. It may be that Howard leaned heavily upon a genre master as he was finding his bearings. Howard is too accomplished to mimic plots, but he borrows and remixes concepts he came across in Lamb’s writing, most particularly within “The Three Palladins.” There is the same search for Prester John – though Howard’s character comes from the west rather than the east – and the discovery of the Keraits (Christians) that Prester John rules only a short time before Genghis Khan invades the region. Just as Sir Hugo sides with natives against the invasion of a Mongol tribe in Lamb’s “The Wolf Chaser,” Howard’s Godric advises the Black Cathayans to hold a narrow pass, though instead of facing off a tribe and antagonists unknown to westerns, he fights against the forces and champions of Genghis Khan, and even meets the mighty conqueror himself. Anyone who has read Lamb’s “The Three Palladins” or “The Making of the Morning Star” or the second and third novels of his Durandal trilogy will be familiar with the portrayal of Subotai, Chepe Noyon, and Genghis Khan, who sound and behave in “Red Blades” very much the way they do when scripted by Lamb. So similar are they in tone and behavior that “Red Blades” can almost be seen as a companion piece in the same fictional universe: nothing within Howard’s tale precludes any of the events within Lamb’s stories, and may even follow naturally from some of them. Howard is no slavish imitator, and goes so far as to invent additional characters and moments, but the influence is unmistakable.