Dark Valley Destiny Read online

  Dr. Howard seemed to know that Robert had "lost himself." Perhaps he sensed his son's compulsion—as if there were some kind of destiny laid upon him from which he had no recourse. Dr. Howard believed that his son's fatal attachment to his mother crystallized in his mind when he was a small child because Robert's mother had been the boy's only companion and because he, the doctor, busy with his practice, had had little time to "cultivate and shape" his son's course through the years. All this the distracted father wrote to Robert's friends Frank Torbett and H. P. Lovecraft during the June weeks that followed the tragic day of Robert's death.9

  Robert E. Howard—"Robert" to his family and neighbors and "Bob" to his few close friends—was an enigma not only to his father but also to the young men who knew him best. Tevis Clyde Smith, his first publisher and a staunch friend to the end of Howard's life, often felt distress at Bob's bitterness, his frequent expressions of suicidal intent, and his fear of nonexistent enemies. He reported that Bob's expectation of personal assault was such that he ordered his pants cuffed two inches higher than the current style because he wanted his feet, always encased in high-topped shoes like a prizefighter's, to be free from entangling trouser legs should he have to defend himself.10

  Truett Vinson, another close friend—who, along with Smith, was one of the Brownwood writing group—found incomprehensible qualities in Howard, with whom he briefly became a rival for the attentions of a local schoolteacher. Vinson considered Howard odd, although he could never quite define the nature of this oddness. A restrained and literate man himself, Vinson had little patience with Howard's excesses. He considered his friend's stories "trash" and said so. Consequently the two men rarely discussed their writings.11

  Yet, Vinson continued his friendship with Howard, even though he did not understand him. But then, claimed Vinson, no one else understood him either. Each accepted the other as he was; and on this brusque honesty the friendship rested.

  E. Hoffmann Price reported to Lovecraft that some people considered Howard "freakish, uncouth . . . provincial in some respects." Despite this judgment, Price felt great affection for Howard and added that Bob was "a courtly, gracious, kindly, and hospitable person."12 Still, Price recognized the complexity of Howard's personality, which he described as all light and shadow, deeply ambivalent, paranoid on occasion, full of dreamings and broodings. This very complexity was a challenge to Price, who was still trying to sort it out eighteen years later.13 Price believed that Howard's attachment to home and family had deprived him of the social interaction essential to any child for the development of a clear-cut sense of self and others—an insight widely supported in the psychological literature of today.

  Even Harold Preece, who was introduced to Howard in 1927 by Truett Vinson and who defended Howard's soundness of mind as proved by his creativity, spoke of Howard as "a strange man." "Reading Howard's collected verse made me realize he was always a stranger even if I called him a friend," wrote Preece. He regretted that this "Tristan," as Howard's cousin Maxine Ervin called him, had not found an "Isolde" to separate him from his fixation on his mother.14

  These reported impressions suggest that the determinants of Howard's behavior were deeper and older than his grief over his mother's impending death and that her passing became the occasion for, not the cause of, his suicide.

  Howard had some self-knowledge. When he was in an expansive mood, he tended to identify with his grandfathers, of whom he was understandably proud. He saw himself as a pioneer in his profession, just as his grandfathers had been pioneers of the West. "I was the first," he said, "to light the torch of literature in this part of the country, however small, frail, and easily extinguished that flame may be."15

  His was a lonely task. Howard became a writer in spite of his environment, and he paid the price in isolation. Howard wrote: . . it is no light thing to enter into a profession absolutely foreign to the people among which one's lot is cast."16 So alien, indeed, was his profession that few people in Cross Plains ever tried to understand the lone young man who lived among them. They chose, rather, to ignore him or to dismiss him as merely eccentric.

  And who can blame the good people of Cross Plains for their lack of understanding? Howard himself did not fully realize the extent of his innovations. He was not only the first person in West Texas to earn his living as a writer; he was also the first American writer to develop a new genre of literature—a genre that has come to be closely associated with his name: heroic fantasy. Only now, after fifty years of relative obscurity, are the best of his works receiving worldwide attention. The heroic sweep of his narratives, the vividness of his imagery, and his ability to convey mood, magic, and mystery mark his writing as exceptional.

  Most noteworthy of all of Howard's many stories are those about the barbarian hero Conan of Cimmeria, who lived in an age of Howard's imagining. Howard tells us:

  . . that between the years when the oceans drank Atlantis and the gleaming cities, and the years of the rise of the sons of Aryas, there was an age undreamed of, when shining kingdoms lay spread across the world like blue mantles beneath the stars—Nemedia, Ophir, Brythunia, Hyper-borea, Zamora with its dark-haired women and towers of spider-haunted mystery, Zingara with its chivalry, Koth that bordered on the pastoral lands of Shem, Stygia with its shadow-guarded tombs, Hyrkania whose riders wore steel and silk and gold. But the proudest kingdom in the world was Aquilonia, reigning supreme in the dreaming west. 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 sandaled feet.17

  Thus did Robert Howard conjure up under the big sky of Texas a continent that never was but might have been twelve thousand years ago. On it he strewed with lavish hand mountains and seas, brooding forests, meadows bright with flowers, and lurking forces of evil older than Time itself. And in this world he set a man, ill-clad and lone but armed with a strong sword and pride and courage, and to him gave the task of overcoming odds beyond the ken of ordinary mortals.

  Yet the time was not ripe for the coming of Conan. For an entire generation, the great barbarian and his Hyborian world lay forgotten and ignored, only to emerge in triumph a few years ago from the crumbling pages of early magazines. Today the pseudo-historical tales about the giant Cimmerian, which captivate untold numbers of readers, have been dubbed "heroic fantasy" and are regarded by many as an escape literature second to none, save only Tolkien's trilogy The Lord of the Rings.

  While millions of readers are already familiar with the great barbarian either through the twenty-odd books about him or through his appearance in the comics and in the first motion picture that bears his name, for those who know little about him a description is in order. Conan is a giant of a man, six and a half feet tall, with the shoulders of a prizefighter and the agility of a leopard. His mien is somber, darkened by long exposure to the elements and scarred by battle; but under his square-cut mane of coarse black hair, his eyes burn with a bright blue fire.

  To anyone familiar with Robert Howard himself, it is evident that the Cimmerian embodies all the attributes that his creator most admired. Conan is enormously strong, lithe, and fast-moving; fearless in battle and adept with both sword and axe; wily, quick-thinking, and self-reliant; yet in awe of the power of the Cimmerian gods and of the wizards who, by their obscene arts, call demons and monsters from the eternal deep. Conan is an adventurer who, untrammeled by the tethers of human relationships, wanders the world at will. Money—-or the gold and gems that serve as a medium for barter—is a concern; but the barbarian solves his problem by seeking great, pulsing jewels set in the eyes of idols, or caches of pirates' loot guarded in hidden caves by deadly ghouls or serpents-

  It is worth noting that, in more than one way, Conan resembles Robert's father. Dr. Howard has been described by those who remember him in his youth as an imposing figure, a tall, dark-haired, choleric man whose bright-blue eyes made a lasting im
pression on all who saw him and whose air of authority, worn casually like a cloak, moved people to admire and obey him. Because of the close proximity of this model, it is probable that, from boyhood, Robert carried Conan in the inmost recesses of his brain. At least we know that, when he began to write the Conan stories, he reported to a correspondent that "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."18

  In another letter, this one to a fellow Weird Tales writer by the name of Clark Ashton Smith, Howard—unmindful of his childhood image of his father—sought to explain the source of his most famous character thus:

  It may sound fantastic to link the term "realism" with Conan; but as a matter of fact—his supernatural adventures aside—he is the most realistic character I ever evolved. He is simply a combination of a number of men I have known, and I think that's why he seemed to step full-grown into my consciousness when I wrote the first yarn of the series. Some mechanism in my sub-consciousness took the dominant characteristics of various prizefighters, gunmen, bootleggers, oil field bullies, gamblers, and honest workmen I had come in contact with, and combining them all, produced the amalgamation I call Conan the Cimmerian.19

  "Conan," an old Celtic name borne by several dukes of medieval Brittany and by a number of characters in Irish legend, made an excellent name for Howard's new hero, being both distinctive and easy to say. As he developed, Conan gave little sign of either his "gigantic melancholies" or his "gigantic mirth." True, in "The Pool of the Black One" he joined a group of buccaneers, he "mixed with the crew, lived and made merry as they did," and showed himself to be one "whose laughter was gusty and ready, who roared ribald songs in a dozen languages. . . ."20 But on the whole he seems an even-tempered man—ever dour, suspicious, irascible, dangerous, and too grimly intent on his objectives for merriment.

  In addition to his search for treasure, the great barbarian devotes his energies to survival when caught in a deadly predicament. In other stories his goal is success in some martial task for which he has been hired. Ofttimes he seeks revenge for some real or fancied wrong, a vivid reflection on the state of mind of his creator. In only two of the twenty-one Conan stories completed by Howard is the mainspring of the action the Cimmerian's lust for a woman.

  This is not to say that the other stories are womanless. In more than half of the tales, Conan is somehow involved with a woman, but even when the tale ends with her in the hero's brawny arms, she usually disappears before the beginning of the following story. This state of affairs need not excite the reader's wonder. For one thing, while there was much fornication in early heroic fantasy, sexual activity was discreetly kept off-stage. More importantly, explicit sexual activity, with its attendant emotional and physical consequences, would spoil the reader's phantasies of a life of carefree, irresponsible adventure.

  With the instinctive insight of a great storyteller, Robert Howard seemed to know that Conan's adventures were a dream—every young man's dream of freedom, power, and unlimited success. He knew, too, that dreams should be amorphous, undefined, only hinted at, so that the dreamer may sketch in his own details. Because his readers are free to combine the artist's larger fantasy with their own less opulent fancies, Conan fans can readily turn Howard's dream into a heroic expression of their own hearts' desires. This, we believe, is the secret of Conan's immortality.

  With equal clarity Robert Howard's vision of his Hyborian World emerged. He saw a land of sun and shadow, dotted with castles and crouching villages and shining cities huddled behind strong walls and towering battlements, from which bright pennants fluttered and horsemen emerged to ride against their foes. It was an age of warriors and pirates, thieves and highwaymen; more than that, it was a world peopled by witches, wizards, careless gods, and forces of evil that stagger the imagination.

  In the frozen northlands, whence came the great barbarian as a youth of seventeen, lay the bleak land of Cimmeria and, near it, the domain of the Aesir, a rugged folk who fought against wolves and supernatural enemies. In the untamed western reaches of the nameless continent lay the Pictish Wilderness, an ancient region of great forests and an elder folk who fought like fiends from Hell and whose shamans conjured up the evil aid of hoary gods.

  Traveling southward, the voyager must ride for endless days through misted mountain passes and topaz grasslands to arrive at last in a place of emerald jungles and ebon giants akin to Howard's imagined Africans. Along the way, perhaps, the wanderer might visit the realm of Stygia, peopled by beady-eyed brown men with shaven pates. Suspect were the intentions of the Stygians, whose magic lore was writ in unknown runes on tattered parchment, but was no less potent for that.

  To all these lands and more came Conan the Cimmerian, sword in hand. His wanderings and adventures were recounted in eighteen tales published during Howard's lifetime and in three more, which remained unsold at the time of his death. These unsold tales and fragments of others discovered by Glenn Lord and completed or edited by the senior author of the present work form the nucleus of the Conan saga.

  So vividly did Howard describe the snow-capped peaks, wide-flung deserts, and sapphire seas of this imaginary world that a reader might map the kingdoms as their geography unrolled before his ensorcelled eyes. In fact, two readers of Weird Tales did so. John D. Clark and P. Schuyler Miller, the first a physical chemist and the second a school administrator, drew a detailed map of the Hyborian World and sent it to Robert Howard. The Texan studied the sketch, made a couple of minor corrections, and told his admirers that their map was almost exactly as he had pictured it.21 It is a map derived from this original that appears in every volume of Conan stories.

  Sometimes people ask us: Why has Conan the barbarian such an abiding appeal to lovers of tales of high adventure? Conan is the prototype of man against the universe—a hero who is dauntless against mortal enemies but withal fearful of unseen sinister forces beyond the control of his powerful arm. After decades of reading stories of puny bumblers who succeed through luck despite their manifold inadequacies, tales of epic heroes, like Conan, stir our blood and make us realize that each of us ' has but himself to rely on and and must learn to march breast-forward, ' free of self-doubt or cringing fear. ;

  Some readers have viewed Conan as nothing more than a walking killing machine, glorying in carnage, as insensitive to the people around him as he is to pain, a character without development. This is not so in our opinion; nor was it so to Robert Howard. Conan grew in stature— slowly, it is true—from a homeless thieving boy, unable to read or write and ignorant of the ways of the civilized world, into a king who ruled over the most splendid realm of the Hyborian Age, the kingdom of Aquilonia. Conan killed often and without remorse, but he seldom killed for wanton pleasure. He fought with murder in his heart and blood on his body; but he fought to protect himself or a follower or to take possession of some property he felt was his by right of conquest.

  Conan developed his own code of behavior and stuck to it. Like his creator, he had few friends, except those by whose side he fought. To those friends he was loyal. He trusted few men and fewer women, but with these few he was honest and open. He had, by implication only, some relative of whom he was fond living in the savage land of Cimmeria; for on several occasions he returned thither. With this exception he had no family ties until he had reached his years of maturity.

  Toward women his simple code of honor was strict, as was that of his creator. Save on one occasion in his youth, Conan never attempted to force a woman or violate her, despite the scanty clothing that she wore in both the story and the illustrations.22 Of course, upon her invitation, he would willingly dally in her company, even though he risked his life to do so. Still, in the long run, his attachments were shallow. With the exception of Belit, the beautiful black-haired pirate maid whom he truly loved, and the young palace serv
ant whom he promised to make his queen, each story finds him cheerfully taking a new love and cheerfully leaving her when the tale is told. Even when a woman betrays him, Conan stays his hand, growling about what he would do if she were a man. Once, however, his gallantry deserts him. On that occasion he tosses a murderous and faithless girl from a balcony into an open cesspool in the courtyard of an inn.23

  Perhaps it is this combination of brute strength and compassion for those who seem to be the weaker sex that speaks to those male readers who dream of casting off the ways of civilization to trample the hostile world into submission beneath their booted feet. Such a course and such an outcome are only impossible dreams, as anyone would know if he, like Conan, had endured endless nights in rain or snow, gone barefoot and ill-clad through blazing sands, been forced to starve or eat raw muskrats, or defended himself with only a broken sword. But what splendid dreams they are!

  There are other reasons for the continuing success of the Conan stories. For one thing, Howard's passionate intensity carries the reader along on a galloping steed. Conan's gigantic angers and consuming hates recreate for us the tangled emotions that surged through Howard's own soul. His perception of the beauties of nature, from the broad sweep of the big skies of Texas to the tiny petals of a buttercup, enrich our own perceptions. His fiend-ridden vision of demons, ghosts, and writhing creatures from the nether world, which enfold each man or woman, seeking to destroy, is so impelling that even the most materialistic person shudders a little in the dark of night. And Howard's world of the imagination, in which he spent so much of his life in order to escape the prison of reality, stimulates our feebler imaginings so that we, for a little time, may flee from the humdrum world into the boundless lands of heroic fiction.