Kull: Exile of Atlantis (46 page)

It was Howard scholar and Wandering Star editor Rusty Burke who unearthed the influence Paul L. Anderson had on a young Robert E. Howard. Anderson (1880–1956), now completely forgotten, had several novelettes published in Argosy in the early 1920s, beginning with
The Son of the Red God
in the 31 January 1920 issue. The tale was preceded by a note which explained how he had found a Crô-Magnon parchment in a cave in France and that his story was nothing more than a translation from the original. The subject of the tale is a favorite of the era: how the Crô-Magnons supplanted the Neanderthals. That Howard enjoyed Anderson is attested by his borrowing of several names, found in a series of tales and poems probably dating from 1922 or 1923. Anderson’s “En-ro of the Ta-an” and “Land of the Dying Sun” are echoed in Howard’s “Am-ra of the Ta-an” and “Land of the Morning Sun,” among several other borrowings. Howard’s first professionally published story,
Spear and Fang
written in 1924, shows remarkable similarity to Anderson’s first tale.

Howard wrote several stories or poems dealing, directly or indirectly, with Am-ra of the Ta-an. In one of these, of which only two pages have come to us, Am-ra has a dispute with a woman named Ah-lala. Both names are echoed in the future Kull stories, with Am-ra appearing in the first Kull story and a Lala-ah appearing in the longest of the unfinished tales. How Am-ra the Crô-Magnon could become Am-ra the Atlantean was explained by Howard himself in a 1928 letter to his friend Harold Preece:

About Atlantis–I believe something of the sort existed, though I do not especially hold any theory about a high type of civilization existing there–in fact, I doubt that. But some continent was submerged away back, or some large body of land, for practically all peoples have legends about a flood. And the Cro-Magnons appeared suddenly in Europe, developed to a high state of primitive culture; there is no trace to show that they came up the ladder of utter barbarism in Europe. Suddenly their remains are found supplanting the Neanderthal Man, to whom they have no ties of kinship whatever. Where did they originate? Nowhere in the known world, evidently. They must have originated and developed through the different basic stages of evolution in some land which is not now known to us.

The occultists say that we are the fifth–I believe–great sub-race. Two unknown and unnamed races came, then the Lemurians, then the Atlanteans, then we. They say the Atlanteans were highly developed. I doubt it. I think they were simply the ancestors of the Cro-Magnon man, who by some chance, escaped the fate which overtook the rest of the tribes.

All my views on the matter I included in a long letter to the editor to whom I sold a tale entitled “The Shadow Kingdom,” which I expect will be published as a foreword to that story–if ever. This tale I wove about a mythical antediluvian empire, a contemporary of Atlantis. (
Selected Letters, 1923–1930,
Necronomicon Press, 1989, p. 20)

Sadly, the letter to the editor has not survived. However, Howard’s “views on the matter” may be discerned in a story which had been rejected in March 1926 by Farnsworth Wright, editor of Weird Tales. A lengthy part of
Men of the Shadows
is devoted to early history and prehistory, and notably to Atlantis, Lemuria and the Crô-Magnons:

To those islands came the Nameless Tribe [i.e., the Picts]…they were the first Men…Then the Lemurians, the Second Race, came into the northern land…Now the Atlanteans (Crô-Magnons) were the Third Race. They were physical giants, finely made men, who inhabited caves and lived by the chase…then from the North came the Celts, bearing sword and spears of bronze…And they were the Fourth Race. (
Bran Mak Morn: The Last King,
Del Rey, 2005, pp. 23–26)

The “great sub-races” Howard alludes to suggest he was familiar with the ideas of Helena Blavatsky and Theosophy, either having read the books or having heard about these theories from his father or a friend who was interested in occultism. The most important point of the letter (and of the Bran story) however, is the fact that Howard was convinced that there was a linkage between the Crô-Magnons and Atlantis, and that the latter was historical, an empire belonging to Earth’s past, not an imaginary one. As early as 1923 Howard had casually mentioned Atlantis as a historical empire, contemporary to Accad, in a letter to his friend Tevis Clyde Smith. The likeliest source for Howard’s idea of an Atlantean/Crô-Magnon connection is Lewis Spence, a British folklorist. Spence was convinced of the former existence of the continent of Atlantis and wrote several books in which he “proved” his theory. His
The Problem of Atlantis
(1924) and
Atlantis in America
(1925) may very well have influenced Howard. The identification of Atlantis as the source of Crô-Magnon man and his culture seems to have been original with Spence.

The Kull series was thus born at the time Howard discarded the entirely “historical” setting–i.e., Atlantis–in favor of one mixing the historical and the imaginary. This is why the first Kull story is also the last of the Am-ra the Atlantean tales. Both characters are very similar: Kull is “a counterpart of [Am-ra], except for the fact that he [i]s slightly larger–taller, a thought deeper of chest and broader of shoulder.” Kull is basically a character who wants to flee reality–his reality–in favor of the pursuit of what is presented as a dream in that first story, a country dreamed of, spoken of, but otherwise unknown: Valusia. When Howard dropped Atlantis for Valusia, he dropped Am-ra for Kull. In a nutshell, he stopped writing “historical” tales in favor of fantasy tales.

The name “Valusia” appears to be a Howardian coinage. It appears very early in the young author’s career in
Khoda Khan’s Tale
, an incomplete story dating from 1922 or 1923. In that tale, protagonist Frank Gordon is trying to locate an ancient African city, supposedly once inhabited by a strange race of white people. Gordon first discovers “a temple erected to the elephant,” quickly followed by another, fresher looking one, which he soon discovers to be much more ancient than the other:

It consisted merely of a stone wall, round in shape, with an opening at one place. It had no roof. In the center there was a great, carved serpent of stone, coiled on a stone pedestal which [was] decorated by carvings of other, smaller serpents. The stone wall was also decorated by snake-carvings. Gordon went over the ruins carefully. He seemed very much interested and slightly puzzled. “The Carthaginians did not mention another race,” said he, “yet the race that erected this snake-temple did not erect the elephant-temple we found at the edge of the swamp. They represent two distinct forms of architecture, so distinct that it is scarcely possible that the same race erected both temples.” (
The Coming of El Borak,
Cryptic Publications, 1987, pp. 47–48)

As will be the case in
The Shadow Kingdom
, the confrontation is between a white-skinned barbaric race and an older, highly civilized one, closely linked to the Serpent. Earlier in the story, Gordon had indicated that: “The people who inhabited the empire were white, fair-skinned and fair-haired, and the name of the empire was Valooze” (p. 38). Evidently, this “Valooze” was the direct ancestor of Howard’s later “Valusia.”

As to Kull’s name, there is a possibility that the name comes from a poem Howard had read many years prior in Cosmopolitan. On February 4, 1925, Howard wrote R.W. Gordon, editor of the folk songs department of Adventure magazine: “There is a poem which I have been trying to re-discover. I suppose it is out of your department, as it has been published but if any of the readers should know of it, I should appreciate it very much if they could assist me in obtaining a copy of it. It came out in the Cosmopolitan magazine some nine years ago.” This poem, identified by Rusty Burke as
The Search
by Edgar Lee Masters, appeared in the March 1917 issue; it has several allusions to “Old King Cole.” Perhaps even more interesting are the few lines which Howard remembered eight years later as:

By heaven’s breeze unfurled

The lion banner and the dragon banner

Flutter around the world.

and which read in fact:

By heaven’s breeze unfurled

The Tiger banner and Dragon banner

Flutter around the world.

Howard’s memory was an exceptional one, and only one word didn’t match. Readers familiar with Howard’s writings will recognize the tiger as Kull’s totem while Conan is often associated with the lion: in the novel
The Hour of the Dragon
, the lion banner is the emblem of Aquilonia, while the dragon banner is that of its enemy, Nemedia, in a clear homage to Masters.

The last glints of the sun shone on the golden banner of Nemedia with the scarlet dragon, unfurled in the breeze above the pavilion of King Tarascus on an eminence near the eastern cliffs. But the shadow of the western cliffs fell like a vast purple pall across the tents and the army of Aquilonia, and upon the black banner with its golden lion that floated above King Conan’s pavilion. (
The Bloody Crown of Conan,
Del Rey, 2004, pp. 92–93)

It is of course impossible to ascertain the influence of Masters’ poem on the naming of Howard’s character, but it is a tempting possibility. Another will be detailed below.

It is not conclusively known when–or even if–that first Kull story was ever submitted professionally. The original typescript is a peculiar one, written either between July 1925 and January 1926, or between August and September 1926 (that is to say just before Howard began work on what was to become
The Shadow Kingdom
.) The various typographical errors and amateurish corrections would seem in favor of the anterior date, but the fact that the story exists as an original and a carbon would tend to indicate the latter. Early in his career, Howard rarely prepared carbons for his stories, but this probably changed in January 1926 when Weird Tales thought they had lost the typescript for a story which had been accepted for publication. Howard had been unable to provide them with the carbon the editors asked for, not having prepared one. On the other hand, neither the original nor the carbon are titled or signed, usually a sure sign that the typescript was not submitted. The only solutions that present themselves, then, are that Howard thought the story unsuitable for submission and never attempted to title or submit it professionally, preferring to start work on
The Shadow Kingdom
, or that this story was originally the beginning of
The Shadow Kingdom
, whose convoluted history is detailed below.

The Shadow Kingdom
occupies a special place in Howard’s fiction in particular and weird fiction in general, as well as in the author’s heart. In the letter to Alvin Earl Perry, he stated that he “enjoyed writing ‘The Shadow Kingdom’ better than any other tale.” Just after selling the story, Howard confided to Tevis Clyde Smith:

I enjoyed writing it more than any piece of prose I ever wrote. The subject of psychology is the one I am mainly interested in these days. The story I sold before this was purely a study in psychology of dreams and this mss. deals largely in primitive psychology. (REH to Tevis Clyde Smith, ca. October 1927,
Selected Letters, 1923–1930,
p. 9)

Evidence to be found in Howard’s semi-autobiographical novel
Post Oaks and Sand Roughs
enables us to trace the first attempts to complete what would become
The Shadow Kingdom
to 1926. In that novel, Howard’s alter-ego, Steve Costigan “did begin a wild fantasy entitled ‘The Phantom Empire’ (i.e.,
The Shadow Kingdom
),” which he “laid aside partly finished and forgot about” (
Post Oak and Sand Roughs,
D. Grant, 1989, p. 109). Almost a year later, in the summer of 1927, “he came upon ‘The Phantom Empire,’ deserted several months before, completed it, and then laid it aside and forgot about it.” Some time later, “Steve again discovered ‘The Phantom Empire,’ rewrote it, and again laid it aside.” The story was accepted a short while later by Farnsworth Wright and published in the August 1929 issue of Weird Tales.