Dark Valley Destiny (42 page)

Assuring his readers that his was not a serious theory of human prehistory, Howard set his Hyborian Age about twelve thousand years ago, when an imaginary group of tribes overran an earlier civilization and built new kingdoms on the ruins of the old. The lands roughly resembled Europe and the northern half of Africa. His imagined world, however, replaced the Mediterranean Sea with a vastly enlarged Caspian Sea (the Vilayet Sea), and most of West Africa lay under the Western Ocean.

This world Howard peopled with farmers, artisans, merchants, and innkeepers in addition to the usual warriors, wizards, and imperiled maidens of fantasy. With a palette of vivid hues, he painted their fields
ind
rutted roads, their towns and frowning fortresses. The hero, like most of Howard's heroes, would be an idealization of himself—a lithe
and
wily giant, dark-haired and blue-eyed, a self-educated barbarian, but
one
with a rude code of honor to which he remained true.

The theme of the new series, like that of the Kull stories, would be the rise of a barbarian adventurer to kingship over a civilized land. Howard determined that most of the stories would narrate the hero's trials and achievements before he attained the throne, for Howard had discovered that it cramps a writer's style to begin the tale with his hero already a reigning monarch.

The nation of his hero's birth Howard named Cimmeria, after the fogbound western land visited by Odysseus in the
Odyssey.
Howard pretended that his Cimmerians were the descendants of the Atlanteans and the ancestors of the Celts, thus in fancy tracing his own descent from Kull and Conan. And Crom, the god of the Cimmerians, he derived from Crom Cruach, a pagan Irish idol destroyed by St. Patrick.

HOWARD'S CONAN STORIES IN ORDER OF PUBLICATION

Beyond the Black River Shadows in Zamboula The Hour of the Dragon (Conan the Conqueror)

Red Nails

May, June 1935

November 1935

December 1935; January, February,

March, April 1936 July, August,

September 1936

Published in
The Fantasy Fan
(with hero's name as Amra)

The Frost Giant's Daughter March 1934

(Gods of the North)

completed but unsold

The God in the Bowl The Vale of Lost Women The Black Stranger

(The Treasure of Tranicos)

left unfinished

The Hall of the Dead The Hand of Nergal The Snout in the Dark

Drums of Tombalku Wolves Beyond the Border

Howard & de Camp Howard & Carter Howard, de Camp & Carter

Howard & de Camp Howard & de Camp

non-conan stories, unsold and later rewritten as conan tales

Hawks Over Shem

(REH: Hawks Over Egypt) The Road of Eagles The Flame Knife

(REH: Three-Bladed Doom) The Bloodstained God

(REH: The Trail of the Blood-Stained God)

Howard & de Camp

Howard & de Camp Howard & de Camp

Howard & de Camp

Home
from his trip to the Rio Grande, Howard plunged into the new
Rftries.
A steady stream of Conan stories began to pour out of his type
writer.
In all, Howard completed twenty-one Conan stories, of which
seventeen
were published in
Weird Tales
during the remaining four years
®f his
literary career. For many months he was so involved with Conan
that
he sometimes worked the night through. He wrote:

For weeks I did nothing but write of the adventures of Conan. The character took complete possession of my mind and crowded out everything else in the way of story-writing. When I deliberately tried to write something else, I couldn't do it.
⁹

Howard
made no attempt to tell Conan's history in chronological order.
In
some stories he appears as a youth; in others, as a middle-aged man.
The
hero finds himself in a wide variety of situations: a thief in a thieves'
quarter,
a pirate captain, a commander of an army, the leader of a band
of
outlaws, the savior of war-threatened settlers, and so on. Howard felt
that
the hero himself was relating the adventures to him and thus
defended
their lack of continuity:

The average adventurer, telling tales of a wild life at random, seldom follows any ordered plan, but narrates episodes widely separated by space and years, as they occur to him.
¹⁰

As
he
wrote, Howard's picture of Conan evolved into the towering,
lOUsled,
black-haired, blue-eyed super-hero who appeared in earlier sto
ries.
As with most of Howard's heroes, Conan never really has a friend.
He
sometimes speaks of a friend, as early in "Queen of the Black Coast,"
bttt we
never meet him. Although Howard himself had several good fHends, nearly all of his heroes are isolates. Perhaps such characters
Appealed
to Howard, or perhaps they reflected Howard's own inner
fieling
of isolation.

The personality of Conan did not develop all at once. Although in BI08t stories women are merely playthings of the moment, in "Queen of
the
Black Coast" Conan falls in love with the female pirate Belit, and the becomes the true love of his early life.

I , When Conan struggles with a gigantic serpent, a winged monster, Uick giants, or a sinister magician from some distant eastern shore, we |!|iiy speculate—although we cannot be sure—that Conan's adversaries

k 267
were inspired by those "enemies" who, according to Howard, lay in wai! at all times to ensnare him.

But Conan's personality was not influenced solely by his creator's beliefs and attitudes. Many people fail to realize that during the 1920s and 1930s there were no paperbacked books. And this seemingly unrelated fact had a bearing on the character development of Conan.

Before the coming of mass-market, throwaway paperbacks in the 1940s, during the Second World War, all books published in America were bound in hard covers. Since hardcover books were expensive, comparatively few were published each year; and only the best-known authors were fortunate enough to see their works in bound volumes. Less popular writers, like Robert Howard, had to content themselves with magazine publication.

The magazine market for short fiction was, fortunately, far larger then than it is today. Of all the magazines, two types stand out: the "slicks," magazines like
The Saturday Evening Post
, which was illustrated in full color and printed on glazed paper; and the "pulps," a large assortment of inexpensive magazines, which were usually poorly edited and cheaply printed on low-grade paper. Hundreds of such magazines existed: Western stories, adventure stories, war stories, sea stories, sports stories, detective stories, love stories, and so on. Most of these magazines operated on a shoestring and paid little; yet, they offered American short-story writers a generously varied market for their works. Indeed, since the shrinkage of the fiction magazine market, the American short story as an art form has been on the decline.

Because the pulp-magazine editors of that day demanded strict adherence to certain rules and tabus, they exerted an important influence on the style and content of the stories submitted to them. Who were the readers of the pulps, and what restrictions were imposed on the writers who sold their works in this market?

The pulps of the 1930s catered to a heavily male readership. They featured fast action, two-dimensional characters, and a straightforward narrative style. So imperative was fast action that young writers were warned to "shoot the sheriff in the first paragraph." Violence was an accepted—even an integral—part of every tale. In such action-centered stories, little attention was given to characterization and even less to character development. The stories were designed to entertain the reader, not to express the writer's inmost thoughts or to uplift the sinner.

The tabus were equally strict. Strong language was forbidden. "Darn!" was often used instead of "Damn!"
Adventure Magazine,
an aristocrat among the pulps, printed the exclamation "By God!" as "By—!"

As for sex—well, sex was handled with kid gloves or not at all. There was, it is true, a small group of pulps called the "hots"—magazines like
Spicy-Adventure Stories
—but compared to magazines on the stands today, their treatment of sex was innocuous indeed. In the rest of the pulps, sex might be hinted at when the hero bore off a comely maiden at the end of the story, but nothing was ever written about their private adventures after the story ended. Since all but one of the Conan stories published in Howard's lifetime appeared in
Weird Tales,
this stern and forbidding tabu should be remembered by those readers who note the apparent sexlessness of Howard's heroes.

As a matter of fact, this tabu against explicit sex is helpful to the writer who tries to create an epic hero. Explicit sexual encounters destroy the mythic qualities of a King Arthur, or Odysseus, or Siegfried, or Conan. A blow-by-blow account of a hero's bedroom acrobatics diminishes him—reduces him to the stature of an ordinary mortal. Besides, each reader wants to pretend, for a short time at least, that he is standing in the hero's sandals; and one man's grand passion may be another man's
petit mal.
Because a hint is worth more than a blueprint in stimulating the imagination, this reticence affords Conan's readers the greater opportunity to phantasize.

Howard got many of his ideas from the adventure pulps of his time, notably from
Adventure Magazine
itself, of which he was a faithful reader. Many distinguished writers contributed to these periodicals, among them Harold Lamb, Talbot Mundy, and Arthur D. Howden Smith; but few were eminent enough to have hardcover publishers beat pathways to their doors, as were Edgar Rice Burroughs, Rudyard Kipling, and Jack London.

Howard drew on the works of all these men and others for ideas about distant lands and distant times, for plot elements, for names and characterizations, and for stylistic models. Then, to the ideas he had garnered, he added his own emotions, his colorful if sometimes erroneous beliefs, and his poetry in prose. While most of the men who wrote for the adventure magazines of the 1930s have long been neglected or forgotten, Robert Howard, through his sheer creativity and originality, managed to rise above the limitations imposed on him by the conventions
of
the times and by his isolation. And this was a remarkable achievement.

The Conan stories make use of many situations and many concepts that Howard had developed in earlier tales. Moreover, people familiar with the contents of Howard's library and with early twentieth-century literature can often pick out the very page from which an idea came—a time-consuming but fascinating exercise in literary sleuthing. Thus, a brief look at each of the Howard Conan stories will introduce new readers to the Conan saga and enable longtime fans of Robert E. Howard to explore the working of his mind.

"The Phoenix on the Sword," the first published Conan story, appeared in
Weird Tales
for December 1932. It was not an original tale, but a complete rewrite of a rejected Kull story, "By This Axe I Rule." The story, which ranks among the best of the series, takes place in the latter part of Conan's career, when in his forties he has become king of Aquilonia. Conan is fighting for his life against conspirators who plot to murder him when he receives assistance from an unusual source. This work introduces the reader to Thoth-Amon, the once-powerful Stygian sorcerer who reappears in several other books of the Conan saga.