Conan Compilation - The Coming of Conan the Cimmerian Part 67

"Let me see her," commanded Thuthmes, and Shubba left the room, returning a moment later leading a girl by the wrist. She was supple, her white skin almost dazzling in contrast with the brown and black bodies to which Thuthmes was accustomed. Her hair fell in a curly rippling gold stream over her white shoulders. She was clad only in a tattered s.h.i.+ft. This Shubba removed, leaving her shrinking in complete nudity.

Thuthmes nodded, impersonally.

"She is a fine bit of merchandize. If I were not gambling for a throne, I might be tempted to keep her for myself. Have you taught her Kus.h.i.+te, as I commanded?"

"Aye; in the city of the Shemites, and later daily on the caravan trail, I taught her, and impressed upon her the need of learning by means of a slipper, after the Shemite fas.h.i.+on. Her name is Diana."

Thuthmes seated himself on a couch, and indicated that the girl should sit cross-legged on the floor at his feet, which she did.

"I am going to give you to the king of Kush as a present," he said. "You will nominally be his

382.slave, but actually you will belong to me. You will receive your orders regularly, and you will not fail to carry them out. The king is degenerate, slothful, dissipated. It should not be hard for you to achieve complete dominance over him. But lest you might be tempted to disobey, when you fancy yourself out of my reach, in the palace of the king, I will demonstrate my power to you."

He took her hand and led her through a corridor, down a flight of stone stairs and into a long chamber, dimly lighted. The chamber was divided in equal halves by a wall of crystal, clear as water though some three feet in thickness and of such strength as to have resisted the lunge of a bull elephant. He led [her] to this wall, and made her stand, facing it, while he stepped back.

Abruptly the light went out. She stood there in darkness, her slender limbs trembling with an unreasoning panic; then light began to float in the darkness. She saw a hideous malformed head grow out of the blackness; she saw a b.e.s.t.i.a.l snout, chisel-like teeth, bristles as the horror moved toward her she screamed and turned and ran, frantic with fear, and forgetful of the sheet of crystal that kept the brute from her. She ran full into the arms of Thuthmes in the darkness, and heard his hiss in her ear: "You have seen my servant; do not fail me, for if you do he will search you out where ever you may be, and you can not hide from him." And when he hissed something else in her quivering ear, she promptly fainted.

Thuthmes carried her up the stairs and gave her into the hands of a black wench with instructions to revive her, to see that she had food and wine, and to bathe, comb, perfume and dress her for her presentation to the king.

383.

Hyborian Names and Countries

The following is a list of names, countries, kings, etc., that was prepared in March 1932. The two names in italics were typed and later erased by Howard, though they are still visible on the original typescript.384.

385.

Hyborian Age Maps386.

387.

Appendices388.

HYBORIAN GENESIS.

Notes on the Creation of the Conan Stories by Patrice Louinet

In a December 1933 letter to fellow author Clark Ashton Smith, Robert E. Howard recounted the creation of his most famous character, Conan the Cimmerian:

"I know that for months I had been absolutely barren of ideas, completely unable to work up anything sellable. Then the man Conan seemed suddenly to grow up in my mind without much labor on my part and immediately a stream of stories flowed off my pen or rather off my typewriter almost without effort on my part. I did not seem to be creating, but rather relating events that had occurred. Episode crowded on episode so fast that I could scarcely keep up with them. 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."

Writing that his characters and stories came easily to him was customary with Howard, who almost never mentioned unfinished or unsold stories in his correspondence. In the case of the Kull series, for example, only three tales had been published while a dozen others were either left unfinished or rejected. Yet Howard wrote to Lovecraft:

"Thanks for the kind things you said about the Kull stories, but I doubt if I'll ever be able to write another. The three stories I wrote about that character seemed almost to write themselves, without any planning on my part; there was no conscious effort on my part to work them up.

They simply grew up, unsummoned, full grown in my mind and flowed out on paper from my finger tips."

In fact, drafts survive for almost every Kull story, indicating that much more work was involved than Howard suggests. How then can we give credence to his intimation that the creation of the Conan stories was virtually a case of automatic writing? Things were not as easy and straightforward as Howard would have Clark Ashton Smith and us believe.

In October 1931, Howard completed the first version of a story t.i.tled People of the Dark and sent it to Clayton Publications' new magazine, Strange Tales of Mystery and Terror, a direct compet.i.tor to Weird Tales. Editor Harry Bates liked the story, but asked for some rewriting.

Howard complied and a few weeks later Bates accepted the story, along with another tale Howard had sent him, The Cairn on the Headland.

389.

People of the Dark is a remembrance/reincarnation story. In this first-person narrative, protagonist John O'Brien tells of re-experiencing an episode in the life of one of his previous incarnations, one "Conan of the Reavers," a black-haired Gael who swears by the Celtic deity Crom. It is tempting indeed to see in this Conan a direct prototype for his more famous namesake (and in fact some commentators have done so), were it not for the fact that People of the Dark is a first-person remembrance/reincarnation story, while the Conan stories are not.

Or are they?

With the sale of People of the Dark, Howard had found a new market one that, unlike Weird Tales, paid on acceptance. When the money arrived a few weeks later, Howard was overjoyed:

"I finally made Claytons'. I sold them a couple of yarns in a row, and while they kept me waiting awhile for the dough, they paid well when they did pay $134 for one, and $144 for the other. Short stories too. I hope to gosh I can sell them a long novelet." (REH to Tevis Clyde Smith, ca. February 1932)

Thus in February 1932 Howard was suddenly richer by $278, and it was probably this, rather than any lack of inspiration, that was behind his decision to take a vacation to the southern parts of Texas.

Howard commented to Wilfred Blanch Talman a few weeks later: "I spent a few weeks wandering about in the south part of the state, along the Border mainly, and didn't get any work done during that time my main occupation being the wholesale consumption of tortillas, enchiladas and Spanish wine."

If he didn't write any stories or letters probably having left his typewriter behind Howard at least wrote one poem during his stay: Cimmeria. In 1934 Howard sent Emil Petaja a copy of the poem with the comment: "Written in Mission, Texas, February 1932; suggested by the memory of the hill-country above Fredericksburg seen in a mist of winter rain."

We do not know whether Howard already had the idea of Conan by the time the poem was written; certainly both the character and the poem were conceived within a matter of days:

"Conan simply grew up in my mind a few years ago when I was stopping in a little border town on the lower Rio Grande. I did not create him by any conscious process. He simply stalked full grown out of oblivion and set me at work recording the saga of his adventures." (Quoted in Alvin Earl Perry, A Biographical Sketch of Robert E. Howard, 1935)

It has been shown that much of Howard's description of the poem's Cimmeria echoes specific pa.s.sages in Plutarch's Lives. Like Howard, Plutarch linked the Celtic Cimbri to the

390.Cimmerians, saying they "live in a dark and woody country hardly penetrable by the sunbeams, the trees are so close and thick, extending into the interior as far as the Hercynian forest."

The poem is more than mere description, however. The first line of the poem "I remember"

makes it quite clear that we are dealing with the themes of reincarnation and remembrance, as was the case in People of the Dark. The protagonist of the latter, John O'Brien, is an American of Irish stock, living in the American Southwest. He thus clearly evokes Howard himself; and if O'Brien can remember his past life as Conan of the Reavers, did Howard believe, or fancy, he also could "remember" having lived in Cimmeria in a past life?

Inquiring further in this autobiographical vein, one is struck by the strong resonance between the descriptions of Cimmeria in the poem and those found in Howard's reminiscences of the land of his birth, Dark Valley, in Palo Pinto County, Texas. He wrote to H.P. Lovecraft, in October 1930:

"I believe, for instance, that the gloominess in my own nature can be partly traced to the surroundings of a locality in which I spent part of my baby-hood. It was a long, narrow valley, lonesome and isolated, up in the Palo Pinto hill country. It was very spa.r.s.ely settled and its name, Dark Valley, was highly descriptive. So high were the ridges, so thick and tall the oak trees that it was shadowy even in the daytime, and at night it was as dark as a pine forest and nothing is darker in this world. The creatures of the night whispered and called to one another, faint night-winds murmured through the leaves and now and then among the slightly waving branches could be glimpsed the gleam of a distant star."

Similar imagery combining evil, gnarled trees and an aura of terror can also be found in Howard's poem The Dweller in Dark Valley, which concludes with "I go no more in Dark Valley which is the gate of h.e.l.l."

Dark Valley and Cimmeria may thus have been very closely linked in Howard's mind. But the "memory" they evoke is of a very peculiar nature. Howard's memories of Dark Valley are no less fantastic than John O'Brien's of his past life: the Howards left Dark Valley when Robert was barely two years old, and he would not see Dark Valley again until the spring of 1931.

Reincarnation can then be seen as a solution to escape one's biography, just as in Jack London's The Star Rover, a Howard favorite, in which the protagonist is a prisoner who finds relief and escape from torture by remembering his past lives. There is a definite pattern here, since Howard completed his first reincarnation story The Children of the Night the same month he wrote to Lovecraft about Dark Valley, and his second one People of the Dark only a few weeks after having seen Dark Valley again.

All these elements were combined in the first Conan story, The Phoenix on the Sword, where

391.the description of Cimmeria echoes Plutarch, Dark Valley and the poems: "A gloomier land never existed on earth. It is all of hills, heavily wooded, and the trees are strangely dusky, so that even by day all the land looks dark and menacing. As far as a man may see his eye rests on the endless vista of hills beyond hills, growing darker and darker in the distance. Clouds hang always among those hills; the skies are nearly always grey and over-cast.

Winds blow sharp and cold, driving rain of sleet or snow, and moan drearily among the pa.s.ses and down the valleys. There is little mirth in that land, and men grow moody and strange.

(Unpublished draft a, pp. 9-10)

If Howard could attribute the "gloominess" in his nature to what he thought he remembered of Dark Valley, a similar argument can be put forward to explain Conan's own moody temperament. While many readers see in Conan a projection of Howard, what they primarily see is Conan as an idealized version of Howard: the conquering, irresistible, devil-may-care barbarian. The gloominess inherent to the character has pa.s.sed largely unnoticed, and understandably so. This feature was rarely mentioned by Howard himself, at least in the published versions of the stories.

In its final form, The Phoenix on the Sword opens with a pa.s.sage from the "Nemedian Chronicles." It is in those lines that we first see Conan mentioned; the character himself doesn't appear until the second chapter of the story. The pa.s.sage in question reads: "Hither came Conan, the Cimmerian, black-haired, sullen-eyed, sword in hand, a thief, a reaver, a slayer, with gigantic melancholies and gigantic mirth, to tread the jeweled thrones of the Earth under his sandalled feet" (italics mine). "The Nemedian Chronicles" were only introduced into the story because Farnsworth Wright (the editor of Weird Tales) had asked Howard to rewrite and condense his first two chapters. The short extract's function was to replace lengthy pa.s.sages on, respectively, some countries of the Hyborian Age, and some character traits of the Cimmerian.

And if Howard attributed his gloominess to Dark Valley, Conan seems to attribute his own "gigantic melancholies" to his Cimmerian origin:

"Well," grinned Prospero, "the dark hills of Cimmeria are far behind you. And now I go. I'll quaff a goblet of white Nemedian wine for you at Numa's court."