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ROBERT E. HOWARD: In His Own Words
To honor the American release of The Coming of Conan the Cimmerian : Book One
from Del Rey Books (which reprints the out-of-print Wandering Star edition),
we are presenting an "essay" by Robert E. Howard on his best-known literary creation.
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The following text is an excerpt from Glenn Lord's THE LAST CELT, an "autobibliography" of pulp writer Robert E. Howard (1906–1936), the creator of Conan of Cimmeria and numerous other adventuresome heroes. As literary executor of the Howard estate, Lord was uniquely positioned to shed light on Robert E. Howard's life, work habits, and creative vision. This "essay" was constructed by Lord from Howard's voluminous personal correspondence. Never straying far from his home in Cross Plains, Texas, Howard was a dedicated letter writer, particularly to fellow members of the Weird Tales fraternity such as H.P. Lovecraft, Clark Ashton Smith, and E. Hoffman Price.
Writing has always been a means to an end I hoped to achieve: freedom. Personal liberty may be a phantom, but I hardly think anybody would deny that there is more freedom in writing than there is in slaving in an iron foundry.
My sole desire in writing is to make a reasonable living. I may cling to many illusions, but I am not ridden by the illusion that I have anything wonderful or magical to say, or that it would amount to anything particularly if I did say it. I have no quarrel with art-for-art's-sakers. On the contrary, I admire their work. But my pet delusions tend in other directions. I took up writing simply because it seemed to promise an easier mode of work, more money, and more freedom than any other job I'd tried. I wouldn't write otherwise.
I'm provokingly indolent in writing. I work in bursts and spurts. I may turn out a month's output in a few days, and then loaf for weeks. I have written 12,000 words in a day, but I couldn't keep up such a pace. I sell so little, that I have to produce a great deal in order to make a living at all.
The nearest I came to college was the business department where I studied such non-literary things as shorthand, typing, business arithmetic, commercial law, and the like. A literary college education probably would have helped me immensely.
As a boy and a youth in my teens, I read purely for the love of reading. I can say with confidence that no man ever loved reading for its own sake more than I. I did not read because of any particular urge for learning, or to merely pass the time, or to escape the realities of life. I read simply because I loved reading for its own sake alone. The printed page was like wine to me. Books were scarce in the country. I could not go into a library or bookstore and select what I wanted. I had to read whatever came to my hand.
Magazines were even more scarce than books. I well remember the first I ever bought. I was fifteen years old; I bought it one summer night when a wild restlessness in me would not let me keep still, and I had exhausted all the reading material on the place. I'll never forget the thrill it gave me. Somehow it never had occurred to me before that I could buy a magazine. It was an Adventure. I still have the copy.
After that I bought Adventure for many years, though at times it cramped my resources to pay the price. It came out three times a month then. I earned my first money when I was ten years old, but between that time, and the time when I began to find comparatively steady employment, at about the age of seventeen, there were many stretches of enforced idleness when my pockets were empty.
During the idle stretches, scrimped and saved from one magazine to the next; I'd buy one copy and have it charged, and when the next issue was out, I'd pay for the one for which I owed, and have the other charged, and so on. So I generally owed for one, but only one. I inherited a distaste for debt which is still strong.
I remember the first story I ever wrote—at the age of about nine or ten—dealt with the adventures of one Boealf, a young Dane Viking. Racial loyalties struggled in me when I chronicled his ravages. Celtic patriotism prevented him from winning all his battles; the Gael dealt him particular hell and the Welsh held him to a draw. But I turned him loose on the Saxons with gusto and the ways he plundered them was a caution; I finally left him safely ensconced at the court of Canute, one of my childhood heroes.
I was eighteen when I wrote "Spear and Fang," "The Lost Race," "The Hyena"—nineteen when I wrote "In The Forest of Villefere" and "Wolfshead." And after that it was two solid years before I sold another line of fiction. I don't like to think about those two years. I wrote my first (professional) story when I was fifteen, and sent it to Adventure, I believe. Three years later I managed to break into Weird Tales. Three years of writing without selling a blasted line. (I never have been able to sell to Adventure; guess my first attempt cooked me with then forever!)
I haven't been any kind of success, financially, though I have managed to get by. I could have studied law, or gone into some other occupation, but none offered me the freedom writing did— and my passion for freedom is almost a obsession. I honestly have paid the price of freedom by living with Spartan simplicity, and doing without things I really wanted. Of course, I've always hoped to some day make more than a bare living out of the game, and I was beginning to do that, when the markets started cracking up.
One problem in writing bloody literature is to present it in such a manner as to avoid a suggestion of cheap blood-and-thunder melodrama—which is what some people will always call action, regardless of how realistic and true it is. So many people never have any action in their own placid lives, and therefore can't believe it exists anywhere or in any age.
Another problem is how far you can go without shocking the readers into distaste for your stuff— and therefore cutting down sales. I've always held myself down in writing action stories; I never let my stories be as bloody and brutal as the ages and the incidents I was trying to depict actually were.
I think sometimes I'll let myself go—possibly in a yarn of the Middle Ages—and see if I can sell the thing. I don't know how much slaughter and butchery the readers will endure. Their capacity for grisly details seems unlimited, when the cruelty is the torturing of some naked girl, such as Seabury Quinn's stories abound in—no reflection intended on Quinn; he knows what they want and gives it to them.
The torture of a naked writhing wretch, utterly helpless—and especially when of the feminine sex amid voluptuous surroundings—seems to excite keen pleasure in some people who have a distaste for wholesale butchery in the heat and fury of a battlefield. Well, to me the former seems much more abominable than the cutting down of armed men—even the slaughter of prisoners in the madness of fighting lust.
I have lived in the Southwest all my life, yet most of my dreams are laid in cold, giant lands of icy wastes and gloomy skies, and of wild, wind-swept fens and wilderness over which sweep great sea-winds, and which are inhabited by shockheaded savages with light fierce eyes. With the exception of one dream, I am never, in these dreams of ancient times, a civilized man. Always I am the barbarian, the skin-clad, tousle-haired, light-eyed wild man, armed with a rude axe or sword, fighting the elements and wild beasts, or grappling with armored hosts marching with the tread of civilized discipline, from fallow fruitful lands and walled cities. This is reflected in my writings, too, for when I begin a tale of old times, I always find myself instinctively arrayed on the side of the barbarian, against the powers of organized civilization.
When I was about twelve I spent a short time in New Orleans and found in a Canal Street library a book detailing the pageant of British history from prehistoric times up to—I believe—the Norman conquest. It was written for schoolboys and told in an interesting and romantic style, probably with many historical inaccuracies. But there I first learned of the small dark people which first settled Britain, and they were referred to as Picts.
I had always felt a strange interest in the term and the people, and now I felt a driving absorption regarding them. The writer painted the aborigines in no more admirable light than had other historians whose works I had read. His Picts were made to be sly, furtive, unwarlike, and altogether inferior to the races which followed—which was doubtless true. And yet I felt a strong sympathy for this people, and then and there adopted them as a medium of connection with ancient times. I made them a strong warlike race of barbarians, gave them an honorable history of past glories, and created for them a great king—one Bran Mak Morn.
I must admit my imagination was rather weak when it came to naming this character, who seemed to leap full-grown into my mind. Many kings in the Pictish chronicles have Gaelic names, yet in order to be consistent with my fictionized version of the Pictish race, their great king should have a name more in keeping with their non-Aryan antiquity. But I named him Bran for another favorite historical character of mine—the Gaul Brennus, who sacked Rome. The Mak Morn comes from the famous Irish hero, Gol Mac Morn. I changed the spelling of the Mac, to give it a non-Gaelic appearance, since the Gaelic alphabet contains no "k," "c" being always given the "k" sound. So while Bran Mac Morn is Gaelic for "The Raven, Son of Morn," Bran Mak Morn has no Gaelic significance, but has a meaning of its own, purely Pictish and ancient with roots in the dim mazes of antiquity; the similarity in sound to the Gaelic term is simply a coincidence!
Bran Mak Morn has not changed in the years; he is exactly as he leaped full-grown into my mind—a pantherish man of medium height with inscrutable black eyes, black hair, and dark skin. In reading of the Picts, I mentally took their side against the invading Celts and Teutons, whom I knew to be my type, and indeed my ancestors.
My interest in the Picts was always mixed with a bit of fantasy, that is, I never felt the realistic placement with them that I did with the Irish and Highland Scotch. Not that it was the less vivid; but when I came to write of them, it was still through alien eyes. Thus in my first Bran Mak Morn story ["Men of the Shadows"]—which was rightfully rejected—I told the story through the person of a Gothic mercenary in the Roman army; in a long narrative rhyme which I never completed, and in which I first put Bran on paper (manuscript lost). I told it through a Roman centurion on the Wall; in "The Lost Race" the central figure was a Briton; and in "Kings of the Night" it was a Gaelic prince. Only in my last Bran story, "Worms of the Earth," did I look through pictish eyes, and speak with a Pictish tongue!
In "Worms of the Earth," I took up anew Bran's eternal struggle with Rome. I can hardly think of him in any other connection. Sometimes I think Bran is merely the symbol of my own antagonism toward the empire, an antagonism not nearly so easy to understand as my favoritism for the Picts. Perhaps this is another explanation for the latter; I saw the name "Picts" first on maps, and always the name lay outside the far-flung bounds of the Roman empire. This fact aroused my intense interest; it was so significant of itself.
The mere fact suggested terrific wars—savage attacks and ferocious resistance—valor and heroism and ferocity. I was an instinctive enemy in of Rome; what more natural than that I should instinctively ally myself with her enemies, more especially as these enemies had successfully resisted all attempts as a subjugation. When in my dreams—not daydreams, but actual dreams—I fought the armored legions of Rome, and reeled back another unborn world of the future—the picture of a map, spanned by the wide empire of Rome, and ever beyond the frontier, outside the lines of subjugation, the cryptic legend, "Picts and Scots." And always the thought rose in mind to lend me new strength: among the Picts I could find refuge, safe from my foes, where I could lick my wounds and renew my strength for the wars.
While I don't go as far as to believe that stories are inspired by actually existent spirits or powers (though I am rather opposed to flatly denying anything), I have sometimes wondered if it were possible that unrecognized forces of the past or present—or even the future—work through the thoughts and actions of living men.
This occurred to me, especially, when I was writing the first stories of the Conan series. I know that for months I had been absolutely barren of ideas, completely unable to work up anything salable. 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 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 storytelling. When I deliberately tried to write something else, I couldn't do it. I do not attempt to explain this by esoteric or occult means, but the fact remains. I still write of Conan more powerfully and with more understanding than any of my other characters.
But the time will probably come when I will suddenly find myself unable to write convincingly of him at all. That has happened in the past with nearly all my rather numerous characters; suddenly I 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.
The last yarn I sold to Weird Tale—and it well may be the last fantasy I'll ever write—was a three-part Conan serial ("Red Nails") 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 have any claim to realism. I have ignored it in all other stories, as one of the taboos, but I did not ignore it in this story. Too much raw meat, maybe, but I merely portrayed what I honestly believe would be the actions of certain types of people in the situations on which the plot of the story hung.
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 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 wrote the first yarn of the series.
Some mechanism in my subconsciousness 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.
[Note: Robert E. Howard wrote over 300 short stories, of which only some 22 were about Conan. And despite his mystical-sounding recounting of Conan's creation, by Howard's own admission he was a pragmatic word-slinger, extremely dedicated—namely, dedicated to making a living at it. Not surprisingly, the first two Conan stories were rewritten yarns of about King Kull, one of Howard's earlier heroes who also had a barbaric origin (the other being Bran Mak Morn). Howard's labors with the typewriter did eventually earn him the financial freedom he sought, a real accomplishment during the height of the Depression (even so, he would never travel far from his home in Cross Plains, Texas). As he indicates, "Red Nails" was indeed Howard's last Conan story. He'd told his editor at Weird Tales that there would be no more of the Cimmerian's adventures until he was paid some of the $1300 the magazine owed him. Subsequently, Howard spent the last year of his life mainly writing Westerns. Two day's after his mother (a long-time tuberculosis sufferer ) slipped into a terminal coma, REH shot himself in the head with a borrowed pistol. He died before his mother, and they were buried in a double-ceremony in a triple-plot that Howard had purchased just days earlier. All of the Conan stories were created over a four-year period.]
Excerpts from Howard letters © 1976 Glenn Lord
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