The Conquering Sword of Conan (46 page)

H
YBORIAN
G
ENESIS
P
ART
III

Notes on the Creation of the Conan Stories
by Patrice Louinet

As he was completing
A Witch Shall Be Born
, Robert E. Howard probably felt that he could sell almost any Conan story he submitted to Weird Tales. By 1934, after several years of hardship, including two years early in his career during which he did not sell a single story, Howard had become one of the stars of the magazine.
Witch
was, according to editor Farnsworth Wright, the “best” of the Conan stories submitted to date; praise for Howard and his Conan stories could be found in the letter column of almost every issue of Weird Tales, and, by far the most revealing factor, the Texan was present in ten of the twelve issues published in 1934, eight of these featuring Conan, with the last four winning cover privilege, an impressive record.

Howard had been immersed in Conan for months:
People of the Black Circle
had been written in February and March;
The Hour of the Dragon
was begun just afterward and sent to its intended British publisher on May 20; and
A Witch Shall Be Born
had been completed by early June. Howard’s sole respite during those months was the short visit of his colleague E. Hoffmann Price in April. Early in June, then, Howard took his first vacation in a long time. He later informed his correspondent August Derleth that he had “completed several weeks of steady work,” and told him that “a friend and I took a brief trip into southern New Mexico and extreme western Texas; saw the Carlsbad Caverns, a spectacle not to [be] duplicated on this planet, and spent a short time in El Paso. First time I’d ever been there. . . .”

The friend in question was Truett Vinson, one of Howard’s best friends since high school, about whom more later. The two men left Cross Plains, Howard’s hometown, in early June and were gone for a week. That the trip proved enjoyable is attested by mentions of it in almost all of Howard’s letters of the following weeks, with the visit to the Carlsbad Caverns in New Mexico as the high point of the short holidays. Howard was particularly impressed by these natural wonders and waxed at length about them to his correspondents, notably H. P. Lovecraft:

I can not describe the fantastic wonders of that great cavern. You must see it yourself to appreciate it. It lies high up among the mountains, and I never saw skies so blue and clear as those that arch titanically above those winding trails up which the traveller must labor to reach the entrance of the Cavern. They are of a peculiarly deep hue beggaring attempts at description. The entrance of the Cavern is gigantic, but it is dwarfed by the dimensions of the interior. One descends seemingly endlessly by winding ramps, for some seven hundred feet. We entered at ten thirty o’clock, and emerged about four. The English language is too weak to describe the Cavern. The pictures do not give a good idea; for one thing they exaggerate the colors; the coloring is really subdued, somber rather than sparkling. But they do not give a proper idea of the size, of the intricate patterns carved in the limestone throughout the millenniums…. In the Cavern natural laws seem suspended; it is Nature gone mad in a riot of fantasy. Hundreds of feet above arched the great stone roof, smoky in the mist that eternally rises. Huge stalactites hung from the roof in every conceivable shape, in shafts, in domes, in translucent sheets, like tapestries of ice. Water dripped, building gigantic columns through the ages, pools of water gleamed green and weird here and there. . . . We moved through a wonderland of fantastic giants whose immemorial antiquity was appalling to contemplate.

Shortly upon his return to Cross Plains, Howard set out to write yet another Conan story,
The Servants of Bit-Yakin
. The story is not a particularly memorable one, with a rather unconvincing plot and insipid heroine, but it has a setting markedly different from the other Conan tales, taking place entirely in a vast natural wonder, filled with caves and subterranean rivers, which was evidently greatly inspired by Howard’s visit to the Carlsbad Caverns. As he concluded to Lovecraft: “God, what a story you could write after such an exploration! . . .
Anything
seemed possible in that monstrous twilight underworld, seven hundred and fifty feet below the earth. If some animate monster had risen horrifically from among the dimness of the columns and spread his taloned anthropomorphic hands above the throng, I do not believe that anyone would have been particularly surprized.” Howard probably decided he could write the tale himself, after all.

The result is not quite satisfying, but it was paving the way for greater things to come: for the first time in the series, Howard was weaving elements of his own country into his Conan tales. It was a timid first step to be sure, but an important one nonetheless. The story is not mentioned in any of the extant Howard letters and no record of submission survives. It was accepted by Farnsworth Wright for $155, payable on publication, and published in the March 1935 issue of Weird Tales. Some confusion exists as to Howard’s original title for the tale. The story first appeared in Weird Tales under the title
Jewels of Gwahlur
. Howard wrote three drafts: the first is untitled, while the second and third are titled
The Servants of Bit-Yakin
. The third draft has come to us as a carbon of the version sent to Weird Tales, hence the definitive one. A third title,
Teeth of Gwahlur
, appears in a listing found among Howard’s papers long after his death (from which the information on the price paid by the magazine comes). This listing was not prepared by Howard himself, though evidently derived from either an original Howard document or series of documents. From internal evidence, it appears that this page was prepared well after the story was published and was very probably intended as a listing of stories sold to Weird Tales to establish what was owed to Howard’s estate by the magazine, following his death. In his listings of sales, Howard, as a general rule, would always give the published version’s title rather than his own, which is the case in this document (
The Slithering Shadow
over
Xuthal of the Dusk
,
Shadows in the Moonlight
over
Iron Shadows in the Moon
). It seems quite probable, then, that
Teeth
was simply an error: perhaps Howard himself, in giving the title, was remembering the name of the necklace in the story, and the later transcription carried forward the error.

In the weeks that followed, Howard once again decided to experiment with his Conan stories. The attempt itself did not result in a complete story, but it led to a major evolution in the series. If
The Servants of Bit-Yakin
timidly borrowed from a place Howard had visited, this time the Texan opted for a definitely American setting, at the price of an eviction of the Cimmerian himself from his Hyborian world.

In the second part of 1934, it was possible to detect a growing distancing of Howard from his Cimmerian creation, notably in the conversations he had with Novalyne Price, whom he began dating in August. In October, he confided to her that he was “getting a little tired of Conan. . . . This country needs to be written about. There are all kinds of stories around here.”

The author to whom Howard looked when it came to finding inspiration for this new tale was one of his favorites: Robert W. Chambers. Howard’s library included three of this author’s novels dealing with the American Revolution:
The Maid-at-Arms
(1902),
The Little Red Foot
(1921) and
America, or the Sacrifice
(1924). These novels were to provide the background and inspiration for Howard’s next tale of the Hyborian Age,
Wolves Beyond the Border
. A lot of confusing and erroneous information on Howard’s use of the Chambers material had appeared over the years until Howard scholar Rusty Burke set the record straight. All the conclusions on the exact degree of that influence originate with Burke’s research or are derived from his pioneering efforts.

As he had done in 1932 when he made the decision to write
The Hyborian Age
to give more coherence to his Hyborian world, Howard first proceeded to jot down a series of notes that would help him feel more at ease with the events and locale he was to write about (see page 285). There can be no doubt at all that Chambers’ novels were very much in Howard’s mind when he wrote this. Almost all the names are taken nearly verbatim from the novels: Schohira for Schoharie, Oriskany for Oriskonie, Caughnawaga for Conawaga, etc. The situation and events Howard describes in his document also clearly evoke Chambers’ dramatization of the American Revolution. More names derived from Chambers would find their way into
Wolves Beyond the Border
.

Wolves
is one of the most intriguing Conan fragments precisely because it is not, strictly speaking, a Conan story. It was not the first time Howard had attempted to do something different with Conan and, as we are about to see, not the first time he experimented with another character because he was starting to feel “out of contact” with one of his creations.

Shortly before he wrote his novel
The Hour of the Dragon
, Howard had attempted another story in which Conan is only an off-stage presence for a significant part of the tale. In that case, however, Conan’s absence was confined to the first chapters of a story which was envisioned as a novel; as the synopsis for the complete story attests, the Cimmerian was intended as a prominent character, if not actually the protagonist of the story. The situation can be seen as a parallel to that of
A Witch Shall Be Born
, in which the Cimmerian acts mostly off-stage. But in the case of
Wolves Beyond the Border
, the situation is markedly different, most notably due to the fact that this is a first-person narrative, in which Conan makes no appearance, though he is mentioned several times in the course of the story.

A very similar situation had arisen a few years earlier in Howard’s career, and makes for an interesting comparison. In 1926, Howard created Kull the Atlantean, his first epic fantasy character, about whom the Texan wrote or began a dozen tales. In 1928, however, Howard apparently started to lose interest in his character. He then began – but never completed – a very intriguing fragment in which the major character was not Kull, who was relegated to a minor role, but his friend Brule, the Pictish warrior, whose characteristics were markedly different in that tale than in his previous appearances. Kull was apparently becoming merely a supporting character in his own series, in quite the same fashion Conan seems to be in
Wolves Beyond the Border
. Howard never completed the fragment, but from that moment on the character of Kull underwent a drastic evolution. It is quite striking to see that in those two fragments, the off-stage characters are barbarians who have become or are becoming kings of civilized countries. And in both fragments, the sentiments of the new protagonists when it comes to politics are about the same. Compare the following:

The people of Conajohara scattered throughout the Westermarck, in Schohira, Conawaga, or Oriskawny, but many of them went southward and settled near Fort Thandara. . . . There they were later joined by other settlers for whom the older provinces were too thickly inhabited, and presently there grew up the district known as the Free Province of Thandara, because it was not like the other provinces, royal grants to great lords east of the marches and settled by them, but cut out of the wilderness by the pioneers themselves without aid of the Aquilonian nobility. We paid no taxes to any baron. Our governor was not appointed by any lord, but we elected him ourselves, from our own people, and he was responsible only to the king. We manned and built our forts ourselves, and sustained ourselves in war as in peace. And Mitra knows war was a constant state of affairs, for there was never peace between us and our savage neighbors, the wild Panther, Alligator and Otter tribes of Picts. (from
Wolves Beyond the Border
)

“We of The Islands are all one blood, but of many tribes, and each tribe has customs and traditions peculiar to itself alone. We all acknowledge Nial of the Tatheli as over-king but his rule is loose. He does not interfere with our affairs among ourselves, nor does he levy tribute or taxes.… [H]e takes no toll of my tribe, the Borni, nor of any other tribe. Neither does he interfere when two tribes go to war – unless some tribe encroaches on the three who pay tribute…. And when the Lemurians or the Celts or any foreign nation or band of reavers come against us, he sends forth for all tribes to put aside their quarrels and fight side by side. Which is a good thing. He might be a supreme tyrant if he liked, for his own tribe is very strong, and with the aid of Valusia he might do as he liked – but he knows that though he might, with his tribes and their allies, crush all the other tribes, there would never be peace again….” (from the untitled Kull fragment)

Here are more than passing resemblances. In both instances, the peculiar political turmoil can also be read as a mirror of a similar turmoil taking place in Howard’s psyche, connected to the social situation of his regular protagonists: Kull the king of Valusia and Conan the soon-to-be king of Aquilonia. In both instances, the Picts – only mentioned once so far in the Conan series (in
The Phoenix on the Swor
d
) – appear as the necessary catalysts for the change: Brule is a Pict, and the threat they pose to the Aquilonian settlement triggers the events of
Wolves Beyond the Border
. The Picts – the savages forever present in Howard’s universe – force the Howardian characters to reveal their true nature.

As was the case with the Kull fragment then, Howard did not complete
Wolves Beyond the Border
. His first draft diminished to part-story, part synopsis, while the second was simply abandoned. The tale was probably at the same time too derivative of Chambers and too much a necessary exercise before Howard could fully tackle this new phase of his character’s evolution.