Dark Valley Destiny (45 page)

Many readers are already familiar with the story. Conan, King of Aquilonia, is the victim of a plot to take over the kingdoms of Nemedia and Aquilonia by means of sorcery. Conan hears of a magical gem, which can restore his throne to him. He travels to the port city of the kingdom of Argos, and thence to Stygia with its shadow-guarded tombs; and in the bowels of a pyramid, he discovers the gem, just as the Stygian priests plan to put its magic to their own necromantic uses. But there is much more to the tale.

In addition to the well-rounded plot,
The Hour of the Dragon
contains some of Howard's best writing. Consider the opening paragraph:

The long tapers flickered, sending the black shadows wavering along the walls, and the velvet tapestries rippled. Yet there was no wind in the chamber. Four men stood about the ebony table on which lay the green sarcophagus that gleamed like carven jade. In the upraised right hand of each man a curious black candle burned with a weird greenish light. Outside was night and a lost wind moaning among the black trees.
²¹

Thus the scene is set in swift, sure, broad strokes. Suspense bordering on fear is conveyed by the eerie rippling of candle flames, shadows, and tapestries; by the sight of a green casket and strange black candles; and by the sound of a lost wind moaning. And all this we learn in five sentences, using simple words made vivid by repetition of black—black shadows, ebony table, black candles, night, and black trees, with a strange green light for contrast. The very suspension of action by any of the participants in the weird business adds to the tension. No reader can fail to sense the deft touch of a master; no writer but must feel a twinge of envy of such skill. When we realize that Howard was completely self-taught, our admiration of him increases a hundredfold.

The last of the Conan stories to be completed by Robert Howard was published just after his death. "Red Nails" appeared in three installments in the issues for July, August, and September 1936. About this 29,500-word novella, he wrote to Lovecraft:

The last yarn I sold to Weird Tales—and it may well be the last fantasy I'll ever write—was a three-part Conan serial which was the bloodiest and most sexy weird story I ever wrote. I have been dissatisfied with my handling of decaying races in stories, for the reason that degeneracy is so prevalent in such races that even in fiction it can not be ignored as a motive and as a fact if the fiction is to have any claim to realism. . . . When, or if, you ever read it, I'd like to know how you like my handling of the subject of lesbianism.
²²

By "degeneracy" Howard referred to homosexuality. In his day the idea that racial decay went hand in hand with homosexuality was commonplace; today it is highly disputable among the social scientists. Robert Howard was not altogether naive about such matters. When he was going with Novalyne Price, he once handed her a book of stories (translated) by Pierre Louys, including
Le Roi Pausole,
saying that only a Frenchman could handle a subject like lesbianism in so delicate a manner.

"Red Nails," at least in its published version, has but the slightest hint of lesbianism. The tale begins when Valeria, a tall young Aquilonian woman, flees from the Stygian military camp where she has been serving as a mercenary soldier and where she slew an officer who sought her sexual favors. Conan follows her. Together they fight off a monster reptile left over from the Mesozoic and discover the jade halls and tunnels of • prehistoric city with a pseudo-Aztec name. Here they become involved with two warring clans.

Although the story is well-constructed, it is certainly, as Howard himself admitted, "the grimmest, bloodiest, and most merciless story of the series."
²³
It is, indeed, so grim that it is less fun to read than most of the others in the Conan canon, despite its thesis that blood feuds are irrational and self-destructive.

Howard was serious in his intent to give up fantasy. In letters to Lovecraft and Derleth during the last half-year of his life, he explained that the pay was so poor that he had decided to devote his time to writing Westerns or doing a history of the West. Rather sadly he added:

I would hate to abandon weird writing entirely, but my financial needs are urgent, immediate and imperious. Slowness of payment in the financial field forces me into other lines against my will.
²⁴

The Conan series proved immensely popular with
Weird Tales
readers. In their monthly votes on which story they liked best, a Conan story, when one appeared, usually took first place. In
The Eyrie,
the magazine's letter column, they lavishly praised the author: "Mr. Howard never writes but that he produces a masterpiece." "Howard has that rare quality of transporting the reader completely away from this mundane old earth and opening up imaginative vistas utterly strange and alien." "The creepy weird adventure tales of Robert E. Howard never grow tiresome." "Conan is the greatest of WT's famous characters."
²⁵

Of course, not all readers agreed. Some praised Howard's work on the whole but found his Conan stories inferior to those about Solomon Kane, King Kull, or Bran Mak Morn. Especially biting was Sylvia Bennett:

Will Robert E. Howard ever cease writing his infernal stories of 'red battles' and 'fierce warfare'? I am becoming weary of his continous butchery and slaughter. After I finish reading one of his gory stories I feel as if I were soaked with blood.... If Mr. Howard would incorporate Solomon Kane into his stories, instead of using this lousy, heroic Conan stuff, he would again find himself perched near the top of
Weird Tales
' outstanding authors instead of slipping swiftly away into oblivion as he is surely doing by turning out his present type of work.
²⁶

Robert Bloch, of later
Psycho
fame, then a skinny young fan with literary ambitions who lived in Milwaukee, was equally mordant:

I am awfully tired of poor old Conan the Cluck, who for the past fifteen issues has every month slain a new wizard, tackled a new monster, come to a violent and sudden end that was averted (incredibly enough!) in just the nick of time, and won a new girl-friend, each of whose penchant for nudism won for her a place of honor, either on the cover or on the inner illustration. ... I cry: "Enough of this brute with his iron-thewed sword-thrusts—may he be sent to Valhalla to cut out paper dolls."
²⁷

Admirers of Conan leapt to Howard's defense. When, two months after Bloch's scorching letter, his own first magazine sale, "The Feast in the Abbey," appeared in the January 1935 issue, several Conan fans turned on him. Kirk Mashburn, who also sold to
Weird Tales,
complained: "For one writer, while seeking to establish his own footing, to attack another to the editor—that smacks to me of questionable ethics. Polecat ethics is what I mean."
²⁸

In his reply Bloch pleaded, first, that he had praised Howard's other stories and had attacked only the Conan tales; second, that at the age of seventeen he was hardly a rival of the established Robert Howard; and, third, that when he wrote the letter, he was a mere fan and not a published author.
²⁹

Critical opinions of the Conan stories have varied widely ever since. Fletcher Pratt, himself a major author of heroic fantasy, had no use for the series. Neither had William A. P. White, who, under the pseudonym of Anthony Boucher, wrote fantasy and edited
The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction.
But in 1967, J.R.R. Tolkien, though inclined to be sharply critical of most other fantasists, admitted to the senior author of this book that he "rather liked" the Conan stories.

Whatever one's opinion of the Conan stories, they mark the full development of Howard's writing skills. He no longer had to lean for settings on the bizarre tales of better-known contemporary writers; he had built a splendid imaginary world of his own. Although he still adapted plot elements from writers he admired, he delved into his own recollections of nightmares for elements of horror and drew from his own beliefs vivid and original concepts. He no longer had to model his style on writers ftuch as Lovecraft or on the big names in
Adventure Magazine;
he had developed a distinctive style of his own.

So distinctive, indeed, in both content and style are the stories of the Conan saga—combining as they do precipitous action, spirited iwordplay, blood-chilling magic, ghosts, monsters, and color-splashed lands of sunshine and shadow—that Howard is credited with starting in America the genre of heroic fantasy. He has, not without some justification, been castigated for excessive violence in his stories and for the emotional immaturity of his characters. But when the reader understands the suppressed violence in Howard's nature, the night terrors, the hatreds, the fears of enemies, and the isolation he endured, the wonder is that he could perceive the beauty of a sunrise or a flower or that he could Write with such understanding about animals.

Because there is such a large element of subjectivity in judging a body of writing, even competent editors disagree about the quality of an author's work. We shall, therefore, merely point out certain strengths and weaknesses in Howard's mature writings and allow the reader to make his own judgments.

The reader is immediately struck by the passionate intensity of the Conan stories, a power that derives from Howard's fears, hatreds, and abiding anger. A less emotionally-driven writer would find it almost impossible to achieve the same effect. Although the barbarian is clothed
in
the image of Robert Howard's father, in personality he is partly Howard himself and partly Howard's wish fulfillment—the man Howard thought he would have liked to be.

Howard's fears are rooted in his very early childhood, in his Dark Valley days, where the encroaching woods brooded over his childish head and the creek, babbling beside his home, seemed a mighty river, whose swirling waters brought terror to his heart. These fears were compounded by his mother's timidity in an isolated region, where her husband's practice took him so far from home, and by her constant ill health, often masked by a denial and false jollity. It was compounded,
too,
by the huge man who was his father. The doctor's authoritative air made him seem almost superhuman; his quick and frequent angers gave him the aura of a god or a demon who could not be gainsaid.

These fears revealed themselves in Howard's childhood night ter
rors,
in his sleepwalking as a youth, in his poems of black despair, and
in
the nighted monsters against whom Conan was pitted, fighting for his life. Lovecraft said that Howard put himself into every story that he wrote. He did; and it is Howard's half-conscious sense of desperation thai allows us to shiver in an airless room, or climb the sheer face of a mountain, or struggle for breath within the coils of a giant serpent—in short, to share with Robert Howard the striving, the anguish, and the moments of success that he gives to Conan.

Conan was a somber man, an angry man, a violent man. He did not fear death, or so he claimed; instead, he courted it, even when wealth and beautiful women beckoned him to a life of ease. For Conan the world was hard and unforgiving. It was up to him, alone, ill-clad, ill-armed, to carve his niche in it or die. Howard was expressing his spirit's heavy burden—his feeling of rejection by the world he knew—when he bestowed these attributes on his epic hero; and any reader old enough to have experienced good times and bad cannot fail to sense something of the tragedy that underlies the character of Conan. This underlying sense of man's struggle for survival against fearful odds endows Conan with a universality rarely found in the characters of modern escape literature.

Hatred feeds on anger; on a steady diet of anger, hatred grows fat. This book has made manifest Howard's own pervasive hatreds. His alter ego, Conan, likewise hates and seeks to retaliate against his enemies. Although many of Conan's slayings seem justified, sometimes he deals out death for pure revenge, as when he crucified Constantius or when he threw his faithless love into a cesspor*. But whereas Conan externalized his hatreds or controlled them enough to rise to kinghood, his creator, Howard, turned his hatreds on himself and took his own life.

Such passion makes good reading for people who have repressed violence in their natures or who live in violent times. Gentle heroes seldom are heroic figures; in fact, they tend to seem insipid to young people who are constantly exposed to violence on television and in the press. Had Conan and his creator been among the sensible people who accept the world as it is and abide by its limitations, the tales about the great barbarian would never have become heroic fantasy.

Another reason for Conan's popularity toward the end of the twentieth century is, we think, that the great barbarian represents an ideal of masculine autonomy and a resistance to authority, which appeal to his predominantly male readership. And there is no question that, despite a goodly number of women devotees, the majority of the fans of the Conan saga are male. In a generation that has seen the rise of a militant