The Conquering Sword of Conan (48 page)

On December 22, 1934, Howard presented Novalyne Price with a most surprising Christmas present: expecting a history book, she was presented instead with a copy of
The Complete Works of Pierre Louÿs
:

“A history?” I asked bewildered.

He shifted his weight in his chair and grinned. “Well, . . . Yeah. It’s a kind of history.”

[...]

Then Bob said the book described very vividly our “rotting civilization.”

[...]

After Bob left, I sat down, unwrapped the book, and began to look at it very carefully. I read the inscription again, trying to make sense out of it : “The French have one gift – the ability to guild decay and change the maggots of corruption to the humming birds of poetry – as demonstrated by this volume.”

Some time later, Novalyne was questioning Howard about this very peculiar present:

“Bob, why did you give me that book by Pierre Louÿs?”

He whirled and looked at me. “Didn’t you like it?”

“It was a little too strong for my blood,” I said defensively. “I didn’t read too much of it.”

“Read it. . . . You lead a sheltered life. You don’t know what’s going on in the world.”

That irritated me. “I don’t care to know things like that,” I said hotly. “It seems to me knowing about them doesn’t make the world a better place; it only makes you a silent partner.”

“You’re a silent partner, whether you like it or not.” He was getting warmed up now. “You see, girl, when a civilization begins to decay and die, the only thing men or women think about is the gratification of their body’s desires. They become preoccupied with sex. It colors their thinking, their laws, their religion – every aspect of their lives.

[...]

“That’s what I’m trying to tell you girl. Men quit reading fiction, because they only want true stories of men’s sexual exploits. . . . A few years ago, I had a hard time selling yarns . . . about sex. Now, I’m going to have to work to catch up with the market. . . . Damn it to hell, girl, sex will be in everything you see and hear. It’s the way it was when Rome fell.”

[...]

“Girl, I’m working on a yarn like that now – a Conan yarn. Listen to me. When you have a dying civilization, the normal, accepted life style ain’t strong enough to satisfy the damned insatiable appetites of the courtesans and, finally, of all the people. They turn to Lesbianism and things like that to satisfy their desires. . . . I am going to call it “The Red Flame of Passion.”

The Red Flame of Passion
was quite evidently the story that was to become
Red Nails
, but Howard wasn’t yet ready to commit his idea to paper. A few months later, around late April or May 1935, Howard had another conversation on the subject with Novalyne:

Bob volunteered that he wasn’t through writing Conan stories. I was sorry about that, for I don’t care much for Conan, what little I’ve scanned through.

Bob said he had an idea for a Conan yarn that was about to jell. Hadn’t got to the place where he was ready to write it. All he’d done so far was make a few notes, put it aside to let it lie there in his subconsciousness till it was fully built up.

“What’s this one about?” I asked.

“I think this time I’m going to make it one of the sexiest, goriest yarns I’ve ever written. I don’t think you’d care for it.”

“Not if it’s gory.” I looked at him a little puzzled. “What do you mean ‘sexy stories’?”

“My God. My Conan yarns are filled with sex.”

[…]

I couldn’t see that the Conan yarns Bob had brought me to read had any sex in them. Gore, yes. Sex, no.

“You have sex in the Conan yarns?” I said unbelievingly.

“Hell, yes. That’s what he did – drinking, whoring, fighting. What else was there in life?”

Red Nails
was still not to be written for another few weeks, though.

One reason was Weird Tales’ shaky financial situation. On May 6, 1935, Howard wrote to Farnsworth Wright: “I always hate to write a letter like this, but dire necessity forces me to. It is, in short, an urgent plea for money.… As you know it has been six months since
The People of the Black Circle
(the story the check for which is now due me) appeared in Weird Tales. Weird Tales owes me over eight hundred dollars for stories already published and supposed to be paid for on publication – enough to pay all my debts and get me back on my feet again if I could receive it all at once. Perhaps this is impossible. I have no wish to be unreasonable; I know times are hard for everybody. But I don’t believe I am being unreasonable in asking you to pay me a check each month until the accounts are squared. Honestly, at the rate we’re going now, I’ll be an old man before I get paid up! And my need for money now is urgent.” Howard’s need for money was real, as his mother’s health was declining at an alarming rate and the medical expenses to care for her were soaring.

It took yet another serious incident in Howard’s life to make the story jell: early in the summer, Novalyne Price began dating one of Howard’s best friends, Truett Vinson, without telling him. Howard discovered this a few weeks later, just as he and Truett were about to take a trip together to New Mexico. Vinson and Howard were gone a week, and we can only imagine Howard’s state of mind during those few days.

The high-point of the visit was Lincoln, home of the famous “Bloody Lincoln County War.” It was during this visit that Howard found the last elements he needed to write
Red Nails
: for all their pseudo-Aztec names, Xuchotl and its inhabitants found their origin not in Lake Zuad, but in the little New Mexican town. The following passage from Howard’s July 23,1935, letter to Lovecraft is a lengthy one, but it is indispensable to understanding what Howard was trying to do in
Red Nails
.

[Vinson and I] came to the ancient village of Lincoln, dreaming amidst its gaunt mountains like the ghost of a blood-stained past. Of Lincoln Walter Noble Burns, author of The Saga of Billy the Kid has said: “The village went to sleep at the close of Lincoln County war and has never awakened again. If a railroad never comes to link it with the far-away world, it may slumber on for a thousand years. You will find Lincoln now just as it was when Murphy and McSween and Billy the Kid knew it. The village is an anachronism, a sort of mummy town. . . .”

I can offer no better description. A mummy town. Nowhere have I ever come face to face with the past more vividly; nowhere has that past become so realistic, so understandable. It was like stepping out of my own age, into the fragment of an elder age, that has somehow survived…. Lincoln is a haunted place; it is a dead town; yet it lives with a life that died fifty years ago…. The descendants of old enemies live peacefully side by side in the little village; yet I found myself wondering if the old feud were really dead, or if the embers only smoldered, and might be blown to flame by a careless breath.

[...]

I have never felt anywhere the exact sensations Lincoln aroused in me – a sort of horror predominating. If there is a haunted spot on this hemisphere, then Lincoln is haunted. I felt that if I slept the night there, the ghosts of the slain would stalk through my dreams. The town itself seemed like a bleached, grinning skull. There was a feel of skeletons in the earth underfoot. And that, I understand, is no flight of fancy. Every now and then somebody ploughs up a human skull. So many men died in Lincoln.

[...]

Lincoln is a haunted town – yet it is not merely the fact of knowing so many men died there that makes it haunted, to me. I have visited many spots where death was dealt whole-sale. . . . But none of these places ever affected me just as Lincoln did. My conception of them was not tinged with a definite horror as in Lincoln. I think I know why. Burns, in his splendid book that narrates the feud, missed one dominant element entirely; and this is the geographical, or perhaps I should say topographical effect on the inhabitants. I think geography is the reason for the unusually savage and bloodthirsty manner in which the feud was fought out, a savagery that has impressed everyone who has ever made an intelligent study of the feud and the psychology behind it. The valley in which Lincoln lies is isolated from the rest of the world. Vast expanses of desert and mountains separate it from the rest of humanity – deserts too barren to support human life. The people in Lincoln lost touch with the world. Isolated as they were, their own affairs, their relationship with one another, took on an importance and significance out of proportion to their actual meaning. Thrown together too much, jealousies and resentments rankled and grew, feeding upon themselves, until they reached monstrous proportions and culminated in those bloody atrocities which startled even the tough West of that day. Visualize that narrow valley, hidden away among the barren hills, isolated from the world, where its inhabitants inescapably dwelt side by side, hated and being hated, and at last killing and being killed. In such restricted, isolated spots, human passions smolder and burn, feeding on the impulses which give them birth, until they reached a point that can hardly be conceived by dwellers in more fortunate spots. It was with a horror I frankly confess that I visualized the reign of terror that stalked that blood-drenched valley; day and night was a tense waiting, waiting until the thunder of the sudden guns broke the tension for a moment and men died like flies – and then silence followed, and the tension shut down again. No man who valued his life dared speak; when a shot rang out at night and a human being cried out in agony, no one dared open the door and see who had fallen. I visualized people caught together like rats, fighting in terror and agony and bloodshed; going about their work by day with a shut mouth and an averted eye, momentarily expecting a bullet in the back; and at night lying shuddering behind locked doors, trembling in expectation of the stealthy footstep, the hand on the bolt, the sudden blast of lead through the windows. Feuds in Texas were generally fought out in the open, over wide expanses of country. But the nature of the Bonito Valley determined the nature of the feud – narrow, concentrated, horrible. I have heard of people going mad in isolated places; I believe the Lincoln County War was tinged with madness.

Upon returning to Cross Plains, in late June 1935, Howard at last sat down to write the story which had been germinating in his mind for so many months. If the Bloody Lincoln County War, his handling of sex in the Conan stories, the particularly strained situation between Novalyne, Vinson and himself, and his mother’s rapidly deteriorating health furnished the immediate background to the new Conan story, several prototypes also helped give form to the tale.

More than two years earlier, he had completed the Conan story
Xuthal of the Dusk
, which has justly been considered a precursor of sorts to
Red Nails
. The arrival of Conan and a woman in a city cut off from the rest of the Hyborian world, in which they have to face an evil woman and decadent inhabitants, is the basic framework common to both stories.
Xuthal of the Dusk
is a rather inferior Conan tale, probably because Howard was not yet an accomplished enough writer to give it the treatment he felt it deserved. The heroine was insipid and the story was clearly exploitative. However, Howard commented to Clark Ashton Smith that “it really isn’t as exclusively devoted to sword-slashing as the announcement might seem to imply.”

Among Howard’s papers was also found a synopsis for a Steve Harrison detective story that bears strong similarities to the Conan tale. The synopsis is undated, but was probably written only a few months before the Conan story: “[T]here had been an old feud between the Wiltshaws and the Richardsons, of which the present sets were the last of each line. Another family, the Barwells, had been mixed up in the feud until, harried by both Richardsons and Wiltshaws, the last of that line, a grim, gaunt woman, had gone away with her infant son, thirty-five years before, swearing vengeance on both clans. . . . Eventually [Harrison] discovered that Doctor Ellis was really Joe Barwell, who had returned and lived in the town ten years to consummate his vengeance. . . .”

Howard had no problem amalgamating the two Barwells of the Harrison synopsis into Tolkemec. Another character in the Harrison synopsis, Esau, “a tall, gangling man of great awkward strength . . . a neurotic, really strong as a bull,” was a probable inspiration for Olmec, “a giant, with an enormous sweep of breast and the shoulders of a bull,” with the Biblical association of Esau’s name reinforcing the connection to the hairy Olmec.

Red Nails
is the counterpart to
Beyond the Black River
. With the latter, Howard wrote his ultimate “Barbarism versus Civilization” tale, with the conclusion that “barbarism must always ultimately triumph.” He also stated that “Civilization is unnatural.”
Red Nails
was the story in which he would expand on that theme. In all the stories he had written on the subject, the decadent and decaying phase of his civilizations, kingdoms, countries, or cities was never allowed to be carried out in its entirety: once divided and thus weakened, the civilized people were systematically wiped out by hordes of barbarians waiting at the gates. In
Beyond the Black River
, the Picts played that part; in
The Gods of Bal-Sagoth
, a 1930 tale whose construction is quite similar to that of
Red Nails
, the “red people” carried out the destruction.
Red Nails
would be different in the sense that no tribe of barbarians would be lurking at the gates of Xuchotl. For the first time in Howard’s fiction, the civilizing process, with its decadent and decaying phases, is carried out to its inevitable end. Xuchotl is an “unnatural” city, in the sense implied in
Beyond the Black River
. To be civilized is to be entirely removed from nature and its forces. This is the reason why the city is not only cut off from the rest of the Hyborian world and its barbarian tribes, it is also, and equally importantly, cut off from nature itself: Xuchotl is completely paved, walled and roofed; the light is artificial and so is the food: the Xutchotlans eat “fruit which is not planted in soil, but obtains its nourishment out of the air.” As to the Xutchotlans themselves, all – save Tascela – were born in the city. Xuchotl is the epitome of a decayed civilization as Howard conceived it. It is the place where, as he had it, “the abnormal becomes normal.” Given these premises, the outcome of the story is not a surprise. As had been the case with
Beyond the Black River
, Howard had a message to deliver and he was ready to follow his assigned course right to the end.