Dark Valley Destiny (57 page)

Indeed, Dr. Howard did in time pull himself together. In the fall of 1942, he took a job with the State Health Service, but this he quit after a few weeks. He turned to a colleague in nearby Ranger, a Dr. Pere Moran Kuykendall, who ran a small clinic called the West Texas Hospital. Isaac Howard made an arrangement with Dr. Kuykendall whereby Dr. Howard would live out his days working at the clinic and, in return, would will whatever he had to Dr. Kuykendall.

Dr. Howard thereupon sold his house and its furnishings and, toward the end of November, moved to a boardinghouse near the West Texas Hospital. He reported to the Martins that he found the work satisfactory and that he had had a vision of his wife and son both busy with their typewriters.
¹⁰
Until his death in November 12, 1944, from a coronary thrombosis, Isaac Howard continued to help with the routine work at Kuykendall's clinic.

During the first few years after Robert Howard's death, Otis Kline continued to sell Howard's stories, half a dozen of which appeared in magazines from 1937 through 1939. In addition, several magazines, which had bought all rights, reprinted without payment stories published during Howard's life.

The first book of Howard's stories was published by Herbert Jenkins of London in 1937. But it was not until 1946 that the second hardcover book of Robert Howard's works saw the light of day.
Skull-Face and Others,
a volume of five hundred pages and over a quarter of a million words, was published by Arkham House, a small publishing company set up by August Derleth, a longtime admirer of H. P. Lovecraft.

Derleth defended Howard's work but hinted that he did not much care for the Conan stories. He said that, while he had been asked to publish the whole Conan corpus, "such a collection would almost have to be printed on blood-colored paper and be introduced to readers with appropriate thunderclaps." He also felt that the earlier Howard wrote more skillfully than the Howard who created and exploited the popular Conan.
¹¹

Derleth also reports that he and Otis Kline had trouble with Dr. Howard over the deal:

... we had the devil of a time with old Dr. Howard, then still alive; he had fixed ideas paralleling Bob's—while Bob had delusions of persecution, the old man was convinced that everybody was out to "do" him. OK finally got around him and the deal was on.

It was a common element of Texan folklore that all Northerners were sharpies out to hornswoggle honest Texans. During the oil booms any particularly shady oil deal was called a "New York deal."
¹²

It is to August Derleth that we owe the five volumes of Lovecraft's
Selected
Letters,
published between 1965 and 1976, with parts of twenty-three letters to Robert Howard. When Derleth was compiling these letters, Dr. Howard sent him those that his son had received from his Rhode Island pen pal. After having them transcribed, Derleth duly returned them to their owner. Unfortunately, in cleaning out his house in preparation for the move to Ranger, the old doctor burned the Lovecraft letters. The manuscripts of Howard's unpublished poems also perished; fortunately these had been microfilmed by a young fan, Robert H. Barlow.

The authors of this biography much regret that they were unable to get permission to read the transcripts of the entire Lovecraft-Howard correspondence now in the Arkham House files. Instead we have often had to guess from Robert Howard's rejoinders just what Lovecraft wrote.

The three thousand copies of
Skull-Face and Others
sold slowly and went out of print several years later, after which the dealers' price for this five-dollar book soared into the hundreds of dollars. Still, Conan remained the private enthusiasm of a small circle of old
Weird Tales
readers.

After the Second World War, several small publishers of science fiction and fantasy sprang up. One was Gnome Press of New York. The publisher, Martin Greenberg, undertook to reprint the entire Conan saga, in chronological order, in hardbacked volumes. With editorial help from the longtime Conan fan John D. Clark, he brought out the first volume in 1950. This was the book-length serial, "The Hour of the Dragon," which, for practical reasons, was renamed
Conan the Conqueror,
the name by which the story has ever since been known.

During the next four years, four more Gnome Press volumes of Conan tales appeared:
The Sword of Conan, King Conan, The Coming of Conan,
and
Conan the Barbarian.
The five volumes contained not only the seventeen tales of the great barbarian published in
Weird Tales
in the 1930s, but also three other stories edited by the senior author of the present book, L. Sprague de Camp. De Camp first came to know Conan when his friend and colleague Fletcher Pratt gave him a copy of the newly published
Conan the Conqueror.

Shortly thereafter, in 1951, a historical fantasy by Howard, originally titled "The House of Arabu," appeared in the magazine
Avon Fantasy Reader
as "The Witch from Hell's Kitchen." Howard had written it late in 1932, after he had completed the major portion of his Conan stories; and Farnsworth Wright, the editor of
Weird Tales
, had rejected it in January of 1933. Realizing that this tale of the adventures of a blond Greek mercenary serving a Sumerian city-state could easily have been converted into a Conan story, Sprague de Camp found more unpublished manuscripts lying buried in a carton in the possession of Oscar J. Friend, the literary agent who had inherited the Howard account upon the death of Otis Kline.

These, "The Frost-Giant's Daughter" in its original form, and the unpublished yarns "The God in the Bowl" and "The Black Stranger" were edited, arranged for magazine publication, and included in the Gnome Press series, the last one with its name changed to "The Treasure of Tranicos."

The Gnome Press Conan books, each printed in an edition of three thousand to five thousand copies, did not sell out until the early 1960s. Still, they met with sufficient success so that Oscar Friend proposed to Dr. Kuykendall that a living author be enlisted to carry on the series. Dr. Kuykendall replied by offering to sell to the literary agent all rights to Conan for three thousand dollars. When Friend, after some dickering, rejected the idea, he was told to go ahead and find a ghost writer.
¹³

Accordingly it was suggested to de Camp that he rewrite some of the unpublished non-Conan manuscripts still in Friend's custody. De Camp chose two stories set in modern Afghanistan, one tale of medieval Egypt, and one laid in the Turkish Empire. These "posthumous collaborations," which involved changing the names of people and places to those of the Hyborian Age and eliminating anachronisms like gunpowder, were published in the volume
Tales of Conan
in 1955 as "The Bloodstained God," "The Flame-Knife," "Hawks Over Shem," and "The Road of the Eagles."

Then Greenberg received the manuscript of a novel,
The Return of Conan,
written by Bjorn Nyberg, a young lieutenant in the Swedish Air Force, who wished to practice his English. This novel, rewritten by de Camp, was added to the saga in 1957, making seven Gnome Press books in all. Although the number of Conan fans was growing in a modest way, the great barbarian was a stranger to the general run of readers of fantasy, who knew little and cared less about Howard's works.

By 1964 Gnome Press had become inactive; and Sprague de Camp
Undertook to
try
to
sell the paperback rights
to
the series. Ace, which
A
year
earlier had published
Conan the Conqueror
as half of one of
its
famous
"Ace Doubles," along with a novel by Leigh Brackett, was not encouraged to bring out more books about Conan. Several other paper
back
editors, at least one of whom later confessed that his decision had
been
a ghastly mistake, also turned down the proposal. Finally, in 1964,
de
Camp signed a contract with Lancer Books, on behalf of the Howard
heirs
and himself, for the publication of the first two volumes of a series
of
Conan stories.

During the next three years, several things happened. Gnome Press brought legal action to block the sale, claiming rights under its old contracts with the Howard heirs. Oscar Friend died, and his daughter
decided
to liquidate the literary agency. De Camp undertook litigation
to
defend the new contracts and recommended Glenn Lord as agent for
the
heirs. And Glenn Lord tracked down and secured the trunkful of Howard papers, which had been lost or mislaid after journey all the way
to
California.

These papers included six then unknown Conan manuscripts, one
a
complete story—"The Vale of Lost Women"—and the rest in the form
of
unfinished tales, fragments, and synopses. To complete this unfinished work so that the stories might appear in the projected Lancer series, Sprague de Camp enlisted the help of Lin Carter, a young writer in the fantasy field. Working separately and together, the two put the five incomplete tales into publishable form.

Since litigation with Gnome Press was still pending, de Camp's legal advisers urged him to add more stories to the saga to strengthen the legal position of the heirs and himself. De Camp and Carter were thus persuaded to write several additional stories following Howard's original plan of Conan's life. As the Gnome Press case was being settled out of court, in 1966 publication of the Lancer series began. It proved highly successful. Because of the demand, de Camp and Carter wrote more Conan stories, including two novels, until there were twelve books in the Lancer series. These pastiches had a mixed reception from admirers of Robert Howard, although they sold about as well as the authentic Howard Conan stories.

Stimulated, perhaps, by the stunning success of J.R.R. Tolkien's colossal trilogy of heroic fantasy,
The Lord of the Rings,
which also came out in paperback in the 1960s, the Lancer edition of the Conan tales became best-sellers. Over a million copies were sold in the first years after publication, placing Robert Howard second only to Tolkien in the field of modern heroic fantasy. When, despite the popularity of the Conan books, Lancer went bankrupt in 1973, we were involved in further litigation. Again we felt as if we, like Conan, were struggling within the lethal coils of a giant serpent—certainly not in the fair arms of Justice.

At length the struggle stopped. In 1977, the de Camps and Glenn Lord formed a corporation, Conan Properties, Incorporated. Under the authority of this organization, more books of Conan stories have been published, several by writers hired by the corporation. The Cimmerian now appears monthly in comic books.
Conan the Barbarian,
the first motion picture about the mighty Cimmerian's adventures, was released in 1982, and a second Conan movie is in production. Paperback books about Conan, published by Ace, Bantam, and Tor Books, now number more than two dozen, with more on the way.

While other writers of the 1930s and 40s wrote heroic fantasy before the term was invented—Lovecraft, Clark Ashton Smith, Fritz Leiber, Catherine L. Moore, and the team of Pratt and de Camp among them—it was the success of Tolkien and Howard that touched off the sword-and-sorcery boom of the sixties and seventies. What lies ahead for heroic fiction we do not know; however, the vogue for lusty barbarians and fearless swordswomen is still with us. Many contemporary writers are working in this field, but so far Conan and his mighty deeds tower above the rest.

Whatever the future holds, Robert Howard's work in the genre of popular adventure fiction has shown a staying power and a capacity for arousing lasting enthusiasm far beyond any of his contemporaries, save only Edgar Rice Burroughs, father of the timeless hero Tarzan. Why, we may wonder, has Howard's work enjoyed such a stunning revival a generation after his death, while the tales of most of his contemporaries —some more skillful and experienced writers than he—molder in the crumbling files of ancient magazines?

Although all of Howard's stories are being rushed into print, his current popularity stems from just one set of stories: the Conan tales. We may be sure that, with the possible exception of his humorous Westerns,

Howard's non-Conan fiction would not have been reprinted had not the Conan saga brought Howard to the attention of the public and started the Howard vogue. So it is to Conan and to Howard himself that we must turn to evaluate his work.

People today live in an increasingly mechanized, computer-driven civilization. Because so many jobs are repetitive and confining, people feel that the world has boxed them in. They yearn to be free, to be in command of their fates, to escape from the restraints of their everyday lives. Travel used to be an escape for those who could afford it. But today scarcely any corner of the globe remains unexplored, and even in distant lands exotic costumes and customs are vanishing.

For armchair travelers, heroic fantasy furnishes the purest escape of all—escape from the real world into a world of make-believe. And this make-believe world Howard provided in the Hyborian Age. Troubled by the growing complexity of our industrial civilization, with its ever-multiplying regulations and paperwork, young people—young men in particular—are tempted to dream of a simpler world and a freer, more virile life, which they mistakenly imagine existed long ago and far away. They hug to their bosoms the romantic myth of the strong, fearless barbarian who tramples on convention and scorns civilized men as degenerate and cowardly. Ignoring the fact that the life of the average primitive is "poore, nasty, brutish, and shorte," they yearn to live the life of a barbarian hero.
¹⁴

Of course, during the time that he is conquering the folk of another culture, the barbarian hero can get away with almost anything. He acts like an adolescent freed from his parents' control and not yet fitted into the mold of adult existence. Modern readers, remembering the feeling when, as adolescents, they tried out deeds of daring to see what they could get away with, still hanker for the days when they enjoyed a sense of liberation from all rules and regulations. This sense of freedom is, however, largely illusion. We soon learn that the world—the laws of nature, our fellow men, and our own limitations—imposes as strict a set of rules on us as ever our parents did.