Chapter 69
399.third. Two very similar maps were then prepared (see pp. 421-423) as well as the short Notes on Various Peoples of the Hyborian Age (see pp. 375-378).
Of the many countries first described in these essays and maps, several would never actually be used or mentioned in the rest of the series. The term "Border Kingdom," for instance, only appears in these doc.u.ments, and others were simply discarded: "South of Stygia are the vast black kingdoms of the Amazons, the Kus.h.i.+tes, the Atlaians, and the hybrid empire of Zimbabwe." Only the Kus.h.i.+tes would make it to the series. In 1936, Howard would explain his position in a letter to P. Schuyler-Miller:
"I've never attempted to map the southern and eastern kingdoms, though I have a fairly clear outline of their geography in my mind. However, in writing about them I feel a certain amount of license, since the inhabitants of the western Hyborian nations were about as ignorant concerning the peoples and countries of the south and east as the people of medieval Europe were ignorant of Africa and Asia. In writing about the western Hyborian nations I feel confined within the limits of known and inflexible boundaries and territories, but in fictionizing the rest of the world, I feel able to give my imagination freer play. That is, having adopted a certain conception of geography and ethnology, I feel compelled to abide by it, in the interests of consistency. My conception of the east and south is not so definite or so arbitrary."
Howard remained quite faithful to his conception of the Hyborian world as defined in his essay. As he wrote more and more Conan stories, countries or regions were added to it. This did not prevent him, however, from recycling names first used in a discarded story. For example, the name "Punt" was first used in an unfinished story for a city, but was used in later stories as the name of a country.
Just as he had completed these doc.u.ments, Howard wrote an outline for a new Conan story (see
p. 399), in which the Cimmerian was to operate as a thief in the Maul of a Zamorian city.
Howard decided not to flesh out this tale, possibly due to news received from Farnsworth Wright. In a letter dated March 10, 1932, Wright wrote:
"Dear Mr. Howard: I am returning 'The Frost Giant's Daughter' in a separate envelope, as I do not much care for it. But 'The Phoenix of [sic] the Sword' has points of real excellence. I hope you will see your way clear to touch it up and resubmit it. It is the first two chapters that do not click. The story opens rather uninterestingly, it seems to me, and the reader has difficulty in orienting himself. The first chapter ends well, and the second chapter begins superbly; but after King Conan's personality is well established, the chapter sags from too much writing. I think the very last page of the whole story might be re-written with advantage; because it seems a little weak after the stupendous events that precede it."
Given the work Howard was putting into building his new series, the news must have dealt him a temporary blow, the more so since The G.o.d in the Bowl, undoubtedly sent a few days after
400.the first two stories, would be rejected too.
The G.o.d in the Bowl was relegated to the archives. Howard thought highly enough of The Frost Giant's Daughter, however, to give the story to a fanzine a few months later with Conan's name replaced by Amra under the t.i.tle The Frost-King's Daughter. (In the meantime, The Frost-King's Daughter may have been unsuccessfully submitted to another magazine.) By the time The Frost-King's Daughter was published, in 1934, readers familiar with the Conan stories wouldn't fail to note that the name Amra was mentioned in The Scarlet Citadel (published in Weird Tales for January 1933) as an alias for Conan.
Howard then reworked The Phoenix on the Sword according to Wright's suggestions, eliminating the lengthy descriptive pa.s.sages of the Hyborian world and recycling his country- names into the newly-created "Nemedian Chronicles." A few days later Howard sent off the new version, and by April 1932 he could report to Lovecraft:
"I've been working on a new character, providing him with a new epoch the Hyborian Age, which men have forgotten, but which remains in cla.s.sical names, and distorted myths. Wright rejected most of the series, but I did sell him one 'The Phoenix on the Sword' which deals with the adventures of King Conan the Cimmerian, in the kingdom of Aquilonia."
By "most of the series," Howard meant The Frost-Giant's Daughter and The G.o.d in the Bowl.
After having completed and sent the revised version of The Phoenix on the Sword, Howard immediately proceeded to write a new Conan story, one that would be the first to really integrate his new conception of the Hyborian world, and thus to introduce it to the reader. The idea for The Tower of the Elephant was likely born as Howard was revising The Phoenix on the Sword (whose final draft mentions "Zamora with its dark-haired women and towers of spider- haunted mystery"). The new tale was also born on the ashes of the never fleshed-out synopsis mentioned above, in which (as in Tower) Conan is a thief in the Maul of a Zamorian city. The early phase of the creation of Conan was over. Howard now had a firm grasp not only of his character, but also of the universe he was operating in.
The Tower of the Elephant is one of the best Conan stories, in which Howard masterfully inserted as many elements of the Hyborian world as was possible. He opened his story in a tavern of ill-repute and peopled it with as many representatives of the Hyborian nationalities excepting, of course, another Cimmerian as he could:
"Native rogues were the dominant element dark-skinned, dark-eyed Zamorians, with daggers at their girdles and guile in their hearts. But there were wolves of half a dozen outland nations there as well. There was a giant Hyperborean renegade, taciturn, dangerous, with a broadsword strapped to his great gaunt frame for men wore steel openly in the Maul. There was a
401.Shemitish counterfeiter, with his hook nose and curled blue-black beard. There was a bold- eyed Brythunian wench, sitting on the knee of a tawny-haired Gunderman a wandering mercenary soldier, a deserter from some defeated army. And the fat gross rogue whose bawdy jests were causing all the shouts of mirth was a professional kidnapper come up from distant Koth to teach woman-stealing to Zamorians who were born with more knowledge of the art than he could ever attain."
In a later portion of the tale, Howard had Yag-kosha explain to Conan and the reader the most important phases of the creation of the Hyborian world:
"We saw men grow from the ape and build the s.h.i.+ning cities of Valusia, Kamelia, Commoria, and their sisters. We saw them reel before the thrusts of the heathen Atlanteans and Picts and Lemurians. We saw the oceans rise and engulf Atlantis and Lemuria, and the isles of the Picts, and the s.h.i.+ning cities of civilization. We saw the survivors of Pictdom and Atlantis build their stone age empires, and go down to ruin, locked in b.l.o.o.d.y wars. We saw the Picts sink into abysmal savagery, the Atlanteans into apedom again. We saw new savages drift southward in conquering waves from the arctic circle to build a new civilization, with new kingdoms called Nemedia, and Koth, and Aquilonia and their sisters. We saw
Howard sent the new story late in the month, and he could report to Lovecraft a few days later that:
"Wright took another of the Conan the Cimmerian series, 'The Tower of the Elephant,' the setting of which is among the spider-haunted jeweled towers of Zamora the Accursed, while Conan was still a thief by profession, before he came into the kings.h.i.+p."
In the sole month of March 1932, Howard, "without much labor on [his] part," had written an estimated 250 pages of Conan material, to sell only two stories.
It appears that Howard did not work on Conan for the next several weeks. Presumably he did not wish to deluge Weird Tales with more Conan stories until those which had been accepted were scheduled. But the Hyborian world was quite present in Howard's mind.
402.
One of the elements from the prototypical phase of the series had apparently disappeared: the remembrance/reincarnation theme that had been present in People of the Dark, Cimmeria and the early drafts of The Phoenix on the Sword. This was surprising given the importance we have ascribed to this theme in the very inception of what was to become the Conan series. In fact, as he had just completed the first Conan tales, Howard mentioned to Lovecraft that he was also "working on a mythical period of prehistory when what is now the state of Texas was a great plateau, stretching from the Rocky Mountains to the sea before the country south of the Cap-rock broke down to form the sloping steppes which now const.i.tute the region." The story alluded to here was Marchers of Valhalla, in its first version. The story would be rejected in May by Farnsworth Wright. Marchers of Valhalla was the first of the James Allison stories.
Allison is a crippled Texan of the post-oak country, condemned to a drab life, who acquires the ability to relive his past, heroic, lives. In October 1933, Howard wrote to Clark Ashton Smith that The Garden of Fear another James Allison story was "dealing with one of my various conceptions of the Hyborian and post-Hyborian world." To fully understand the implication, Smith would have had to be familiar with one of the drafts for Marchers of Valhalla, where Ishtar's dialogue was quite different than in the published version of the tale:
"Listen, and I will tell you!" she cried, hitching toward me on her knees and catching at the skirt of my tunic. "Only listen, and then grant me the little thing I ask! I am Ishtar, a daughter of a king in dim Lemuria, which the sea gulped so long ago. Thoth-amon, the sorcerer of Stygia, hated my father, and to spite him, he put the curse on me of Life ever-lasting!
"Oh, man, I have lived for so many, weary, weary ages! I saw Atlantis and Lemuria sink below the waves, and the rise of the Hyborians. But for over a thousand years I have dwelt in this domed chamber, beneath the golden dome of the temple of Khemu, whither a galley of distant Khitai bore me..." (unpublished draft)
The "Hyborian Age" was thus on the verge of becoming much more than just Conan's world, and would have been included in the James Allison stories. Somewhat later, Howard also began, but didn't complete, a story set in modern times that mentions the "Hyborian Age" (fragment published in The Howard Collector, 1979), and soldThe Haunter of the Ring, yet another reincarnation story, which mentions Thoth-amon, his ring and Stygia.
In the spring of 1932, Howard began work on The Scarlet Citadel (Weird Tales, January 1933).
The story was the second to concern Conan's reign as king of Aquilonia, but it had much more of the medieval to it than The Phoenix on the Sword. The Scarlet Citadel is the first Conan story to display Howard's interest in history and epic. It seems probable that an anecdote in Bulfinch furnished the idea for the beginning of the story, in which Conan and his army are led to an ambush by supposed allies. While describing the Battle of Roncesvalles, Bulfinch writes:
403."Marsilius began by lamenting, not as to the amba.s.sador, but as to the friend, the injuries which Charles had done him by invading his dominions, charging him with wis.h.i.+ng to take his kingdom from him, and give it to Orlando; till at length he plainly uttered his belief that, if that ambitious paladin were but dead, good men would get their rights. Gan [...] exclaimed: "Every word you utter is truth; die he must, and die also must Oliver, who struck me that foul blow at court. [...] I have planned everything, I have settled everything already with their besotted master. Orlando will come to your borders, to Roncesvalles, for the purpose of receiving the tribute. Charles will await him at the foot of the mountains. Orlando will bring but a small band with him: you, when you meet him, will have secretly your whole army at your back. You surround him, and who receives tribute then?" (Bulfinch, p. 801) From this brief pa.s.sage, Howard built an epic that owed nothing to Bulfinch. Why borrow when the whole purpose of the creation of the Hyborian world was precisely to be free from historical contraints? Howard's readings were springboards from which he crafted tales that were entirely his: who could detect, for instance, that Sir Arthur Conan Doyle's The White Company and Sir Nigel very probably provided Howard with some background data for his story from a reading of the published version of The Scarlet Citadel? In a letter received August 9, 1932 by Lovecraft, Howard casually mentioned: "Like Samkin Aylward, I warm to a man with the bitter drop in him." Samkin Aylward is a character in Doyle's novels, both books taking place in Medieval England and France during the Hundred Years War. In the published version of The Scarlet Citadel, there is a cryptic mention of "the land torn with the war of the barons." In the first drafts of the story, the pa.s.sage was much more detailed: "The aristocrats had long memories; they would remember rich merchants who gave freely to Conan's cause, they would remember the st.u.r.dy yeomen with which Conan had broken the power of the feudal lords in the War of the Barons" (from draft b, pp. 29-30). The reason for the toning down is simple: there was an historical "Barons' War" in England, in the thirteenth Century, alluded to by Doyle in Sir Nigel. A similar example is found in the mention that "six rich merchants, sent as a delegation of protest, were seized and their heads slashed off without ceremony." (The Scarlet Citadel, p. 108.) This is probably derived from the famous historical episode of the six burghers of Calais, though these actually escaped death. The fact is mentioned by Doyle: "Bethink you how he swore to hang the six burghers of this very town [i.e. Calais], and yet he pardoned them." Much of the Howard's story's medieval terminology, notably that for armor and weapons, may very well have come from Doyle's novels.
The Scarlet Citadel was the first story to mention the Hyborian Age's equivalent of the African coasts, in a scene in which a jailer recognizes Conan as "Amra": "the name by which the Cimmerian had been known to the Cus.h.i.+tes in his piratical days Amra, the Lion." Thus in the same way that The Tower of the Elephant followed the mention of Zamora in Phoenix on the Sword, the next Conan story would take place in an exotic region of the Hyborian world.
404.
Completed around August 1932, Queen of the Black Coast is one of the more famous Conan stories, and understandably so. Its most interesting feature is of course the pirate Belit (whose name was originally Tameris in the first draft), the first female character of any importance to appear in a Conan story. It took four successive drafts for Howard to complete this story and it seems, judging from the drafts, that he had little idea as to how the story would end. He probably understood that the real force of the tale lay not in its plot, but in the strange relations.h.i.+p binding Conan and Belit.
In the first draft of the story, Belit (Tameris) explicitly states that she has kept herself a virgin: "I am Tameris, queen of the Black Coast, and I have known the embraces of no man! No man, black or white, can say he had the gift of my lips and my love! Always I have kept myself inviolate for the man I knew I would some day meet" (draft a, p. 11).
The relations between Conan and Belit, though of an amorous nature, are far from the stock pulp-fiction romance. Throughout the story, and especially so in the early drafts, a very strong undercurrent of sadism pervades their exchanges. To the published version's "Take me and crush me with your fierce love" corresponds the earlier drafts' "Take me and crush me and bruise me with your fierce love!" This is far from being an isolated example. In the third draft, just following the line of dialogue "'Very well,' she said absently, hardly heeding him. 'I'll get the loot aboard' " were found the following lines:
"Conan glared at her narrowly, aware of a dim upsurging jealousy, centering on those murky jewels on her ivory bosom. He had a primitive impulse to tear them from her throat and cast them into the river. And for the first time, he felt an impulse to lock his iron fingers in his companion's black locks and subject her person to moderate violence" (draft c, p. 22).
We do not know whether it was Howard who toned down the story in his final draft or if this was the result of Farnsworth Wright's editorial interference. A comparison of the few later Conan stories for which definitive typescripts survive and their published versions shows that Wright systematically censored lines of dialogue that he deemed too "sensual."
It was also in this fierce and grim story that Howard let the reader have a glimpse of the Cimmerian's philosophy of life, in a discussion on religion and life after death between Conan and Belit:
"What of your own G.o.ds? I have never heard you call on them."
"Their chief is Crom. He dwells on a great mountain. What use to call on him? Little he cares if men live or die. Better to be silent than to call his attention to you; he will send you dooms, not fortune! He is grim and loveless, but at birth he breathes power to strive and slay into a man's soul. What else shall men ask of the G.o.ds?"
405.
"There is no hope here or hereafter in the cult of my people... In this world men struggle and suffer vainly, finding pleasure only in the bright madness of battle; dying, their souls enter a gray misty realm of clouds and icy winds, to wander cheerlessly throughout eternity."
From May 7 to July 23, 1932, Collier's Magazine ran the serialization of Sax Rohmer's latest novel, The Mask of Fu Manchu. It was published in book form a few weeks later, and made into a movie before the year was over. Rohmer had long been a favorite of Howard, whose library contained many of his books, so surely he noticed the new story, especially under Collier's particularly attractive cover. The Mask of Fu Manchu details the Chinese mastermind's failed attempt to revive the cult of Mokanna, "the Hidden One, sometimes called the Veiled Prophet":
"(Mokanna), about 770 A.D., set himself up as an incarnation of G.o.d, and drew to his sect many thousands of followers. He revised the Koran. His power became so great that the Caliph Al Mahdi was forced to move against him with a considerable army. Mokanna was a hideous creature. His features were so mutilated as to be horrible to see.... He and his staff poisoned themselves in the hour of defeat. From that day to this, no one has known where he was buried" (The Mask of Fu Manchu, chapter 4).
Rohmer's novel opens just after Mokanna's tomb in Khora.s.san has been brought to light, the relics secured, and the tomb destroyed in a measure of precaution against fanatics. However, "An outcry 'Mokanna has arisen' swept through Afghanistan... None of the tribesmen who, as you suspect, and rightly, still hold the Mokanna tradition had any idea that you or any human influence had been concerned with the eruption which reduced a lonely shrine to a dusty hollow."
From these tantalizing premises, Rohmer built an atmospheric "yellow peril" detective novel revolving around Fu Manchu's vain attempts to secure the relics so he could pose as Mokanna reincarnated. Howard very probably saw the unexploited potential of Rohmer's novel, and began an epic story that would recount the successful reincarnation of a "veiled prophet" of the desert, whose first task would be to unite the desert clans in a war of conquest that would soon threaten the Hyborian (i.e. Indo-European) nations. Rohmer was bound by imperatives of historical verisimilitude which Howard's Hyborian Age could ignore, and thus was born Black Colossus:
"There were rumors from the desert that lies east of Stygia, far south of the Kothian hills. A new prophet had arisen among the nomads. Men spoke of tribal war, of a gathering of vultures
406.in the southeast, and a terrible leader who led his swiftly increasing hordes to victory. The [Stygian] priests were making magic to fight that of the desert sorcerer, whom men called Natohk, the Veiled One; for his features were always masked."
In Rohmer's novel Mokanna's tomb lies in "Khora.s.sa," while Howard's story begins in "Khoraja"; in his synopsis for the story, this was "Khoraspar."