by Unknown
Soon after the loss of his family, Dr. Howard went to the editor of The Cross Plains Review and barked: "I'm going to start a Sunday-school class. Round up all the men for Sunday night!"
Since the formidable doctor was not easily gainsaid, the editor meekly complied. More than a dozen young men met at the Liberty Theater.
Dr. Howard began the meeting thus: "Now, I want every man of you who's ever been drunk or been in a whorehouse to stand up!"
Our informant said: "Well, I stood up, and some of the others stood up; but it sure was embarrassing!"
After a few weeks, attendance dwindled. The doctor lost interest, and the project died.
Isaac Howard's next vagary was to decide to buy a farm in order to become a farmer and "live close to nature." He traveled about the state with Norris Chambers, looking for suitable sites. Chambers reminisced:
We'd carry a post-hole digger with us, and we'd go dig an old farm. He'd first go to real-estate agents, and they'd point out the ones that were available ... and I'd dig holes for him there, and he'd take that soil there, and he'd put it in little bottles, and he'd send it to College Station to have it analyzed. He was afraid he'd get some land that had nematodes in it.3
The doctor need not have worried about nematodes. Most of these threadworms or roundworms, which may be found by the billions in ordinary soil, are harmless. Besides, for a man like Isaac Howard, who had had nothing to do with farming for forty years, the idea of becoming a farmer was pure fantasy—totally unrealistic.
Other crotchets swarmed from Dr. Howard's busy brain like hornets from a broken nest. He thought that he would like to learn to raise bees, but nothing came of that scheme either. He toyed with the idea of writing a biographical sketch of Robert, but this plan likewise came to naught.4
He wrote to E. Hoffmann Price in California, urging the Prices to come to live with him in Cross Plains, where, he assured them, they could write undisturbed. Having quite different plans, the astonished young couple politely declined.
At this the doctor began to give thought to moving elsewhere. He asked Dr. Chambers if he might build a one-room addition to the Chambers house in Brown County and live in it. His old friend was at first good-humoredly receptive to the plan; but when Dr. Howard insisted on undertaking a search of the title to Chambers's land, the Chamberses, offended, dismissed the whole idea. Isaac also approached Calvin Baker with a similar proposal, but the Bakers quickly decided that they were too old to undertake responsibility for the retired doctor.
During these unsettled months Dr. Howard spent a considerable amount of time in correspondence with Robert's friends and pen pals. These letters disclose that the hapless man suffered a heavy weight of guilt about the death of his son. It could not have been otherwise; for he was a trained physician who sensed that his son's threats of self-destruction were cries for help, and he had had no help to offer.
Dr. Howard was well aware that his son intended to commit suicide at the time of his mother's death. A short while before, when his mother had been pronounced too ill to be cured, Robert told his father that he had no plans to live after she was gone. Isaac knew that six years earlier
Robert had left home because he could not bear to witness the death of his pet dog. And as his mother lay dying, the troubled young man had discussed with Dr. Dill, a visitor in his own home, the surest way to fire the fatal shot. Yet, no steps were taken to sedate or hospitalize him.
It is true that Dr. Howard had made some feeble attempts to forestall the act. In a letter to Lovecraft, written June 29, 1936, he relates: "I was watching Robert as this was premeditated, and I knew it, but I did not think that he would kill himself before his mother went." Moreover, we surmise the old man had removed Robert's own pistol from the glove compartment of his car, because the weapon Robert used was a gun of the same model owned by his friend Lindsey Tyson. Other than this, Dr. Howard appears to have done nothing except to beg his son "not to do it."5
His inaction is astonishing. Equally astonishing is the old doctor's stunned disbelief after the deed was done. We have to conclude that Dr. Howard, like the parents of many young suicides who amply signal their intention, refused to take what he heard seriously. In view of the fact that the Howards had always dismissed unpleasant realities, or at least refused to face them squarely, the doctor's inaction seems consistent with the family's long-established attitudes.
In support of this conclusion is another statement Dr. Howard made in the same letter to Lovecraft. He wrote:
As the months grew on, his mother showed some improvement. He accepted her condition as one of permanent improvement and one that would continue. I knew well that it would not, but I kept it from him.6
Instead of preparing Robert's mind for the inevitable and helping him to accept it, his father, as always, kept unhappy realities from his son and thus denied him the chance to express his grief and so to cope with it.
As a matter of fact, Dr. Howard not infrequently shaped the facts to fit his feelings. In the same revealing letter, he both twists the facts and reaches a fanciful conclusion. Speaking of the fatal morning, he reported:
He did not ask a doctor, neither did he ask me, but he asked a nurse if she thought his mother would ever regain consciousness enough to know him, and the nurse told him she feared not. This was unknown to me. Had I known, I might have prevented this, because I know now that he fully had made up his mind not to see his mother die.7
It has been reliably reported that Robert did ask his father the same question the previous day; but even if he did not, what preventive measures could the doctor have taken at that penultimate hour? He had no knowledge at the time that Robert would act as long as his mother lived. Moreover, he had devised no lifesaving plan at all.
The references to the warm family life in the Howard home seem to have been another fiction embellished by bereavement rather than by fact. Admitting that he was seldom home because of the demands of his practice, Dr. Howard told Lovecraft: "Robert loved me with a love that was beautiful. He loved my companionship above that of anyone else and every time opportunity afforded, he spent his time with me in preference to anyone else . .. our hours were spent pleasantly on discussion of men, women, animals, out-door life, adventure, history of long-lived frontiersmen, and such like."8 We can but hope that this roseate fancy helped to console the unfortunate man during his eight remaining years of loneliness.
During the long years after Robert's death, Dr. Howard suffered from cataracts, diabetes, and, as he said, "loneliness indescribable." He wrote: "I do not see why Robert left me. I am so lonely and desolate."9 Strong as E. Hoffmann Price found him, it is hard for us not to pity the cantankerous old man, even though his own attitudes were to some extent to blame for his son's suicide.
The reader may wonder at Robert's callousness in condemning his father to such a fate. But, according to modern psychologists, when a person has determined to take his own life, he becomes so utterly self-absorbed that he no longer cares about the feelings of his friends and family or about his career. Besides, in his vivid phantasy life, Robert viewed his father as an archetypical Westerner, a man who by definition could take care of himself.
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 paperback 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.