The background of Howard"s tale was probably derived from his then-current readings on Mesopotamian history. The portrayal of Belit (an a.s.syrian name) in Queen of the Black Coast already attests to Howard"s interest in the subject, which would ultimately be fully expressed in his late 1932 story The House of Arabu.
As was the case with Queen of the Black Coast, Black Colossus was originally intended to contain some flagellation scenes: in the synopsis, Howard writes that Yasmela "stripped her most beautiful maid and stretched her whimpering on the altar, but did not have courage or cruelty to sacrifice her," and in the first draft wrote, "On each birthday, up to her twentieth, Yasmela had been laid across the knees of the image in Ishtar"s temple and birched soundly by a priestess to teach her humbleness in the sight of the G.o.ddess" (draft a, p. 13).
Even in its published version the story contains many s.e.xual allusions, from Khotan"s "I will teach thee the ancient forgotten ways of pleasure" to Yasmela"s dubious "It is not fitting that I come before the shrine clad in silk. I will go naked, on my knees, as befits a suppliant, lest Mitra deem I lack humility." As to the story"s conclusion, Howard himself commented in a letter to Tevis Clyde Smith:
"My heroes grow more b.a.s.t.a.r.dly as the years pa.s.s. One of my latest sales concluded with a s.e.xual intercourse instead of the usual slaughter. My sword-wielder grabbed the princess already considerably stripped by the villing [sic] and smacked her down on the altar of the forgotten G.o.ds, while battle and ma.s.sacre roared outside, and through the dusk the remains of the villing, nailed to the wall by the hero, regarded the pastime sardonically. I don"t know how the readers will like it. I"ll bet some of them will. The average man has a secret desire to be a swaggering, drunken, fighting, raping swashbuckler." (REH to TCS, circa December 1932, unpublished)
It is interesting to note that in the first draft, the story ended differently:
For an instant he held her, then he shook himself free.
407.
"Crom"s devils!" he grunted. "Some forty thousand men have perished today, and I linger here cuddling a whimpering chit of a girl! Here put on some garment, and we"ll begone. There"s work to be done."
It is arguable whether Howard himself was an "average man," but when he submitted the story, Wright apparently had no complaints about the s.e.x elements: his only quibble concerned the length of the story, which he probably felt was overworded. Howard himself had been reducing the length with each successive draft, and complied with Wright"s request. But the Texan seemed to have understood that the s.e.xual elements helped sell his Conan stories. What Wright was objecting to, apparently, was "profane" dialogue much more than "evocative" scenes.
The next three Conan stories, Iron Shadows in the Moon,Xuthal of the Dusk and The Pool of the Black One, were written in that order and in very short succession between November and December of 1932. All three feature scantily-clad female characters, irresistibly attracted to the Cimmerian. All three sold immediately. With the exception of The Frost-Giant"s Daughter and The Tower of the Elephant, all previous Conan stories had gone through three or four drafts. In contrast, these three new stories required only two each, a rough and a final version. The sale of Black Colossus had convinced Howard that quality and strong characterization were not the essential elements when it came to selling a Conan story. Not surprisingly, Black Colossus was the first Conan story to be featured on the cover of Weird Tales, in the June 1933 issue, followed in September by Xuthal of the Dusk (published as The Slithering Shadow ). It is amusing to note that neither cover features Conan, but instead portrays the women of the story, as nearly naked as the censors would allow. The Pool of the Black One appeared the following month, while the infinitely superior Queen of the Black Coast would not be published until the May 1934 issue. It is probably not a coincidence that Margaret Brundage, who excelled at depicting scantily-clad women, became Weird Tales"
regular cover artist in 1933.
Of these three routine Conan stories, Xuthal of the Dusk is the most interesting. Commenting on it to Clark Ashton Smith, Howard wrote: "It really isn"t as exclusively devoted to sword- slashing as the announcement might seem to imply." The basic plot of the tale Conan and a woman finding an isolated city peopled by decadent inhabitants and a wicked woman would indeed be considerably enriched and developed in the future Red Nails (July 1935). The theme had profound psychological resonance in Howard"s psyche. In late 1932, however, Howard was not ready to give it the treatment it deserved, and Xuthal of the Dusk pales in comparison with the future Conan tale.
If it had taken only two drafts for Howard to complete his last few Conan tales, Rogues in the House very probably written in January 1933 went one step further. In January 1934, Howard wrote Clark Ashton Smith:
408."Glad you liked "Rogues in the House." That was one of those yarns which seemed to write itself. I didn"t rewrite it even once. As I remember I only erased and changed one word in it, and then sent it in just as it was written. I had a splitting sick headache, too, when I wrote the first half, but that didn"t seem to affect my work any. I wish to thunder I could write with equal ease all the time. Ordinarily I revise even my Conan yarns once or twice, and the other stuff I hammer out by main strength."
Rogues in the House was the last Conan story to draw from Howard"s interest in things a.s.syrian. By this time he was increasingly interested in the history and legendry of the American Southwest. Bran Mak Morn, Turlogh O"Brien, Cormac Mac Art, and Kull now belonged to Howard"s literary past. In a few short months he would inaugurate his most successful series commercially-speaking the western-burlesque Breckinridge Elkins tales.
In April 1932, Howard was already telling Lovecraft: "I"m trying to invest my native regions with spectral atmosphere, etched against a realistic setting; "The Horror from the Mound" in the current Weird Tales was a feeble effort of the sort." Other efforts in a similar vein were The Man on the Ground and Old Garfield"s Heart, in both of which are mixed a Western background and a weird element.
In December 1932, Howard began corresponding with August W. Derleth, a writer of both weird stories and regionalist fiction, and the two men were soon exchanging tales and lore of their respective regions. In a letter postmarked December 29, 1932, Howard asked Derleth: "You"ve heard perhaps of Quanah Parker, the great Comanche war chief, son of Petah Nocona and Cynthia Ann Parker?" Derleth probably hadn"t, and requested Howard to recount the story.
Howard, like most Texans, was familiar with the story; still, he apparently did further research before replying. His lengthy letter to Derleth reads in part:
"In 1836, when the Texans were fighting for their freedom, the Comanches were particularly bold in raiding the scattered settlements, and it was in one of those raids that Fort Parker fell.
Seven hundred Comanches and Kiowas literally wiped it off the earth, with most of its inhabitants.... Fort Parker pa.s.sed into oblivion, and among the women and children taken captive were Cynthia Anne Parker, nine years old, and her brother John, a child of six.
"They were not held by the same clans. John came to manhood as an Indian, but he never forgot his white blood. The sight of a young Mexican girl, Donna Juanity Espinosa, in captivity among the red men, wakened the slumbering heritage of his blood. He escaped from the tribe, carrying her with him, and they were married....."
It was probably in the story of Cynthia Anne and John that Howard found the inspiration for his next Conan story, The Vale of Lost Women (written circa February 1933). In the story, Conan is said to have dwelt for several months among the Hyborian Age equivalent of African
409.tribes. In the village of Bajujh he discovers a white captive, Livia. Just like Cynthia Anne Parker, Livia had a brother "This morning my brother was mutilated and butchered before me" and she and her brother had been captured by a hostile tribe. And just as the sight of Donna Espinosa "wakened the slumbering heritage" in John"s blood, Livia wakens similar ethnocentric considerations in Conan: "I am not such a dog as to leave a white woman in the clutches of a black man." From that moment on the stories diverge. Conan successfully vanquishes the unconvincing devil from the "Outer Dark," then promises to send Lydia back to her people without, of course, marrying her.
Not surprisingly, the story failed to sell. If Howard was trying to discreetly infuse some of his growing interest in Western lore into the Conan stories, he was perhaps too subtle: it is impossible to detect the source without having access to peripheral doc.u.ments. The powerful story of Cynthia Anne and John Parker was lost between the unconvincing supernatural threat and Livia"s penchant for nakedness. As to the racial overtones of the story, while the violent ethnocentricism of the tale is understandable when we recognize its origin in the nineteenth- century Anglo-Saxon settler viewpoint, with the blacks standing in for Indians, it makes for unsettling reading for the modern audience. At any rate, Howard"s first foray into the American Southwest version of the Hyborian Age was a failure, and it would be another year before he made another attempt.
The Vale of Lost Women was probably rejected by Wright, though no records survive regarding its submission. This rejection marked the end of Howard"s first Conan period. He would not return to the character until late in 1933. In a little over a year, he had completed twelve Conan stories, selling nine. While the first tales had been, on the whole, well above average, the later stories showed a definite trend toward the formulaic. They were becoming the kind of stories Robert Bloch would condemn in the letter-pages of Weird Tales.
Of the nine accepted stories, only three had been published by the spring of 1933, and it would take more than a year for Wright to publish the others. It was time for Howard to concentrate on other markets. The Depression was. .h.i.tting the pulp magazine industry hard, and it was becoming imperative for Howard to seek out new markets.
In May 1933, British publisher Denis Archer contacted Howard about a possible book publication in England. Howard chose a batch of his better stories and submitted the collection on June 15. Of the eight stories included, two were Conan tales: The Tower of the Elephant and The Scarlet Citadel. The meager number of Conan stories doesn"t reflect Howard"s poor opinion of them, but simply the fact that Weird Tales owned First Serial Rights to the Conan stories. Consequently, most of the Conan stories could not be included among those Howard submitted to another publisher. Since Weird Tales did not return typescripts after publication, Howard retyped The Scarlet Citadel from the Weird Tales appearance, slightly correcting his text in the process, and sent loose Weird Tales pages for The Tower of the Elephant. Not until January 1934 did he hear from Archer, rejecting the collection but suggesting that he submit a
410.novel instead.
It is difficult to a.s.sign a precise date to the Conan fragments that appear in this volume (pp. 405 and 407).
Both were written in 1933, the second after April 1933. It is tempting to see them as false starts toward resuming the Conan series after a lapse of several months. In October 1933, Howard wrote to Clark Ashton Smith: "Wright has three more Conan yarns yet unpublished: "Iron Shadows in the Moon," "The Queen of the Black Coast," and "Rogues in the House." I"m at present working on another which I haven"t yet t.i.tled." A few weeks later he wrote Smith: "Wright recently accepted another Conan yarn, "The Devil in Iron." "
The Devil in Iron, the first Conan story completed since The Vale of Lost Women, was not an entirely original effort, borrowing many elements from Iron Shadows in the Moon, written a year earlier. It was apparently taking Howard some time to re-immerse himself in the Cimmerian"s world after a long absence. As he once wrote to Clark Ashton Smith, concerning his characters: "suddenly I would find myself out of contact with the conception, as if the man himself had been standing at my shoulder directing my efforts, and had suddenly turned and gone away, leaving me to search for another character."
In the spring of 1933, recognizing his need to expand his markets, Howard had retained Otis Adelbert Kline as his agent. Kline immediately asked him to try his hand at different genres to augment the chances for sales.
By the end of 1933, Howard was writing detective, boxing, historical, and western stories, and was also experimenting with longer lengths in his adventure stories. The routine Conan stories were several months behind him, and after a few half-hearted efforts to pick up the series anew, Howard was once again ready to write convincingly about the Cimmerian.
I am particularly indebted to Glenn Lord for his continued help and support, and for providing me with so many copies of Howard"s typescripts. Special thanks to Rusty Burke and Leo Grin for their comments and criticism.
411.
NOTES ON THE CONAN TYPESCRIPTS AND THE CHRONOLOGY.
By Patrice Louinet
LIST OF THE EXTANT CONAN TYPESCRIPTS(March 1932 - October 1933)
The final drafts of the stories published in Weird Tales were probably destroyed after the story was typeset, and thus are no longer extant.
Regarding the terminology used: a draft is "incomplete" when we are missing at least one page; it is "unfinished" when Howard didn"t finish the draft. Sometimes Howard would write a draft and rewrite only a portion of it; such drafts are subdivided with numerals (i.e., draft b2 recycles pages from draft b1). All drafts have been examined for the preparation of this volume.
We are particularly indebted to Glenn Lord for furnishing copies of the typescripts mentioned below, and to Glynn Crain and Robert Weinberg for copies of the typescripts sent to Robert H.
Barlow.
Cimmeria
The only surviving typescript of this 32 line poem was not prepared by Howard; it was obtained from Emil Petaja, to whom Howard had sent the poem, and is presumed to be Petaja"s transcription. A listing of Howard"s poems, made after his death by agent Otis Adelbert Kline, gives the poem"s length as 33 lines.
The Phoenix on the Sword
draft a, incomplete (pp. 1-23 of 24) .
draft b1, 27 pp.
draft b2, incomplete (pp. 7-13, 27, 28a, 28b of 28; pp. 1-6 re-used from b1; 14-26 re-used in version sent to Weird Tales; p. 28a discarded in favor of 28b) .
draft b3, pp. 1-4, 9-10 (rewriting of chapter 1 and end of chapter 2, per Farnsworth Wright"s request) .
draft b4 (final - Weird Tales - version) [lost]The Frost-Giant"s Daughter
412..
draft a, 8 pp.
draft b (final version), 9 pp. [later rewritten into non-Conan story The Frost-King"s Daughter ]The G.o.d in the Bowl .
draft a, unt.i.tled, 16 pp.
draft b, 22 pp. (numbered 1-6, 8-23 in error) .
draft c (final version), 22 pp. + additional p. 8 discarded and immediately rewrittenThe Tower of the Elephant