Kull: Exile of Atlantis

by Robert E. Howard

  This seems to have been an important issue with Howard. Tevis Clyde Smith, in the notes for his projected Howard biography, wrote:

  Hated Disliked Samuel and Respected Saul–(“So Far the Poet….,” Report on a Writing Man & Other Reminiscences of Robert E. Howard, Necronomicon Press, 1991, p. 36)

  Howard even wrote a poem, “Dreaming in Israel,” on the subject.

  In the February letter to Lovecraft, Howard went on to elaborate on his admiration for King Saul:

  I have always felt a deep interest in Israel in connection with Saul. Poor devil! A pitiful and heroic figure, set up as a figure-head because of his weight and the spread of his shoulders, and evincing an expected desire of being king in more than name–a plain, straight-forward man, unversed in guile and subtlety, flanked and harassed by scheming priests, beleaguered by savage and powerful enemies, handicapped by a people too wary and backward in war–what wonder that he went mad toward the end? He was not fitted to cope with the mysteries of king-craft, and he had too much proud independence to dance a puppet on the string of the high-priest–there he sealed his own doom. When he thwarted the snaky Samuel, he should have followed it up by cutting that crafty gentleman’s throat–but he dared not. The hounds of Life snapped ever at Saul’s heels; a streak of softness made him human but made him less a king…Samuel had him in a strangle-hold; not only did the high-priest have the people behind him, but he played on Saul’s own fears and superstitions and in the end, ruined him and drove him to madness, defeat and death. The king found himself faced by opposition he could not beat down with his own great sword–foes that he could not grasp with his hands. Life became a grappling with shadows, a plunging at blind, invisible bars. He saw the hissing head of the serpent beneath each mask of courtier, priest, concubine and general. They squirmed, venom-ladened beneath his feet, plotting his downfall; and he towered above them, yet must perforce bend an ear close to the dust, striving to translate their hisses. But for Samuel, vindictive, selfish and blindly shrewd as most priests are, Saul had risen to his full stature–as it was, he was a giant chained…To one man Saul could always turn–Abner, a soldier and a gentleman in the fullest sense of the word–too honorable, too idealistic for his own good. Saul and Abner were worth all that cringing treacherous race to which they belonged by some whim of chance.

  Most of these sentences echo the general tone and plot of The Shadow Kingdom, where the snake metaphor has given way to actual snake-like characters. They also echo some of Kull’s musings: “As he sat upon his throne in the Hall of Society and gazed upon the courtiers, the ladies, the lords, the statesmen, he seemed to see their faces as things of illusion, things unreal, existent only as shadows and mockeries of substance. Always he had seen their faces as masks, but before he had looked on them with contemptuous tolerance, thinking to see beneath the masks shallow, puny souls, avaricious, lustful, deceitful, a vague horror that lurked beneath the smooth masks. While he exchanged courtesies with some nobleman or councilor he seemed to see the smiling face fade like smoke and the frightful jaws of a serpent gaping there” (p. 41). The “one man” to whom Saul can always turn evokes of course Brule, the spear-slayer. The only notable difference between the two “stories” resides in the absence of an equivalent to the “snaky Samuel”; in Howard’s story, the snake-characters are indistinguishable from one another.

  Upon learning of the acceptance of The Shadow Kingdom in September 1927, Howard reacted in a typical fashion and almost immediately proceeded to write another story starring the same character. (Howard had completed Wolfshead in July 1925, the same month the first story starring de Montour, In the Forest of Villefère, was published. A few months later, he would repeat this, completing the second Solomon Kane story, Skulls in the Stars, upon news of the sale of the first, Red Shadows.) This time the writing took much less time than for the first story: Howard wrote an eight-page draft, polished it by rewriting the last two pages of the story and sent the result to Weird Tales. That second Kull story, The Mirrors of Tuzun Thune, was quickly accepted by Farnsworth Wright for $20. Of that story, generally held in high esteem by contemporary as well as modern readers, Howard offered the following comment to his friend Clyde Smith: “more of the Shadow Kingdom, occult and mystical, vague and badly written; this is the deepest story I ever tried to write and I got out of my depth.”

  It was some weeks before Howard would return to writing Kull stories. In the first months of 1928, he began what could have been a serial-length Kull story, but abandoned it at the eighteenth page (see p. 65). Howard probably realized that his story was rambling and unconvincing, relegated it to his archives, and immediately began work on another Kull story, which was to be titled Delcardes’ Cat. The history of the composition of this tale is worth detailing: Howard wrote it in two sessions. He titled his first draft Delcardes’ Cat, and only had the idea for the character that was to become Thulsa Doom as he was writing page 22 of a draft that runs 25 pages. The introduction of the new character (whose name was initially Thulses Doom) required a few modifications in the earlier parts of the tale, which of course lacked any references to Thulsa–or Thulses–Doom. Howard, in a particularly unprofessional move, didn’t even rewrite his story, making all his changes on his first draft, and retitled the tale The Cat and the Skull, whose “Skull” is an explicit reference to Thulsa Doom. The story survives as an original (with the modifications) and a carbon (which shows the first stage of the story).

  The story is rather poor and suffers from a lack of cohesiveness, which is not surprising given the late addition of Thulsa Doom. The character of Kuthulos is introduced as a “slave,” but later on Tu, the chancellor, suddenly “remembers” that Kuthulos is “a slave, aye, but the greatest scholar and the wisest man in all the Seven Empires.” In fact, it is quite probable that Howard first intended Kuthulos to be the villain of the story, only discarding the idea when he came up with Thulsa Doom. Last, it took Howard several pages before he gave a name to the slave; and it appears, upon close scrutiny of the typescript, that his original name was not Kuthulos, but Kathulos. Not surprisingly, the story was rejected by Weird Tales, apparently to Howard’s surprise, if this is indeed the unnamed story he is alluding to in Post Oaks and Sand Roughs (p. 133). Undaunted, Howard wrote yet another tale featuring Kull, the second and last featuring Kuthulos: The Screaming Skull of Silence. The story was quickly submitted to Weird Tales and likewise rejected.

  After a false start and two unsold tales, it would be several months before Howard would return to writing Kull stories. In the meantime, he met with commercial success in the acceptance of his longest story to date. Skullface (Howard’s original form of the title) was written during the second half of 1928, and was accepted for $300 later in the year. It would be hard not to notice that in this story, Stephen Costigan and John Gordon are opposed to the deadly “Kathulos of Atlantis,” whose physical description matched that of Thulsa Doom. Kathulos/Kuthulos had disappeared from the Kull stories only to re-enter Howard’s fiction via another story.

  As 1928 was drawing to a close, Howard once again returned to Kull. The Striking of the Gong was the first Kull story not submitted to Weird Tales, but was sent instead to Argosy; The Altar and the Scorpion, a short story in which Kull is only mentioned, was submitted to Weird Tales. Both stories failed to sell. The Curse of the Golden Skull, also barely mentioning Kull, and probably composed in late 1928 or early 1929, likewise met rejection.

  The metaphysical tone of the early Kull stories echoed Howard’s philosophical delvings of the time. In January 1928, Howard was writing Clyde Smith: “The subject of psychology is the one I am mainly interested in these days.” The questions of reality and identity are central to those stories which, due to their short length, writing style, and atmosphere, tend more toward the philosophical fable than the kind of fantasy stories Farnsworth Wright would have bought.

  This passage from a letter to Clyde Smith, for example, resonates with passages in The Mirrors of Tuzun Thune
and The Striking of the Gong:

  Life is Power, Life is Electricity. You and I are atoms of power, cogs in the wheels of the Universal system. Life is not predestined, that is, the trivial affairs of our lives are not, but we have certain paths to follow and we cannot escape them…we are sparks of stardust, atoms of unknown power, powerless in ourselves but making up the whole of some great power that uses us as ruthlessly as fire uses fuel. We are parts of an entity, futile in ourselves. We are merely phases of electricity; electrons endlessly vibrating between the magnetic poles of birth and death. We cannot escape these trails in which our paths lie. We do not, as individual entities, really exist, we do not live. There is no life, there is no existence; there is simply vibration. What is a life but an uncompleted gesture, beginning in oblivion and ending in oblivion?…There is no beginning, nor will there ever be an end to the thing. (REH to Tevis Clyde Smith, ca. February 1928)

  As a matter of fact, all of Howard’s letters to Tevis Clyde Smith from early 1928 contain lengthy passages on philosophy, religion, psychology and similar interests. Howard was undergoing a period of profound introspection, that very naturally found its way into his fiction. Common to all the themes alluded to in the letters is the central motif of identity, the relation of the self to the universe.

  At any rate, in the fourteen months that had followed the sale of The Shadow Kingdom and The Mirrors of Tuzun Thune, Howard had begun or completed six Kull stories, hadn’t succeeded in selling any of them, and none had yet appeared in print.

  Between late 1928 and mid-1929, Howard would not complete another Kull story. That he had not decided to cease his efforts in spite of these failures is attested by the two aborted stories he attempted to complete in the first months of the year.

  There is little to be said about The Black City, a three page fragment that takes Brule and Kull away from Valusia to the city of Kamula. The other, untitled fragment, however, is particularly interesting. In April 1929, an overjoyed Howard wrote Tevis Clyde Smith:

  On my return here I found a returned ms. from Adventure, with a line or two from the assistant editor, telling me to submit some more of my work, and soon after returning I got a letter from Argosy, accepting that story that I told you about…The day after getting that letter I got a check from them for $100. Also a letter from Weird Tales with the advance sheets of a story appearing in the next issue. Farnsworth said he intended publishing a sonnet in the next issue after that and then “The Shadow Kingdom” which is a $100 story, and after that a shorter story [The Mirrors of Tuzun Thune]. I believe he’s paving the way to publish the serial I sold him, but of course I may be wrong.

  As the acceptance of The Shadow Kingdom seems to have occasioned the writing of The Mirrors of Tuzun Thune, it was probably the news of the forthcoming appearance of the two Kull stories that prompted Howard to return once more to the character, but abandoning the more metaphysical aspects in favor of straight-adventure stories set in a Fantasy background.

  His first attempt didn’t go beyond the third page. This untitled draft (see p. 151) is the first Kull story to display Howard’s growing passion for things Celtic, which had become conscious in December 1928. Why Howard did not complete the story is easily understood: not only does the story make mention of the historical Celts (in a story supposedly set thousands of years B.C.), but he also gives blue eyes to the fragment’s protagonist, Brule. Brule had always been mentioned as having dark eyes in previous stories, and logically so since he was a Pictish warrior. Blue eyes were in fact becoming the staple of Howard’s Celtic or pseudo-Celtic heroes, Conan being the most famous, of course. More than a casual mistake, this was a clue as to what was happening to the series: Howard was growing detached from his Atlantean creation, and more and more interested in Brule. In that fragment, Brule explains the mode of government of his tribe, the Borni:

  We all acknowledge Nial of the Tatheli as over-king but his rule is loose. He does not interefere were our affairs among ourselves, nor does he levy tribute or taxes, as the Valusians call it, from any except the Nargi and the Dano and the Whale-slayers who live on the isle of Tathel with his own tribe…Neither does he interfere when two tribes go to war–unless some tribe enroaches on the three who pay tribute. When the war is fought and won, he arbitrates the matter, and his judgment is final…And when the Lemurians or the Celts or any foreign nation or band of reavers come against us, he sends forth for all tribes to put aside their quarrels and fight side by side. Which is a good thing. He might be a supreme tyrant if he liked, for his own tribes is very strong, and with the aid of Valusia he might do as he liked–but he knows that though he might, with his tribes and their allies, crush all the other tribes, there would never be peace again, but revolt as long as a Borni or a Sungara or a Wolf-slayer or any of the tribesmen was left alive.

  The fragment stops at this point, and it is very interesting to compare it to what happens in the next–and last–Kull stories.

  By This Axe I Rule! and Swords of the Purple Kingdom were completed in rapid succession, probably in May and June 1929. In many ways, both stories mark a return to the roots of the Kull series. In Exile of Atlantis were mentioned the characters of Ascalante and Ala; these are also the names of characters, albeit different ones, in the 1929 story. More important, the plots of the 1929 tales revolve around an attempted coup d’état, as did The Shadow Kingdom. But if The Shadow Kingdom had its origins in Howard’s reading of the Biblical story of Saul, By This Axe I Rule! was inspired by his reading of a classic playwright.

  In the early months of 1929, Howard had probably been rereading Shakespeare. In March, he included two erotic playlets in a letter to Smith. Of the first, Howard wrote that his “desires wavered between a wish to write straight jovial obscenity and a desire to simply parody Shakespeare and exaggerate and emphasize what I consider show the bastardness of the scut’s nature.” Not surprisingly, Tevis Clyde Smith later indicated that Shakespeare was Howard’s favorite playwright.

  By This Axe I Rule! opens with a scene in which conspirators decide to do away with the king on that same day. The scene takes place late at night, as dawn is nearing. To seal their alliance, all men take an oath.

  Act II, scene 1 of William Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar takes place in Brutus’ orchard. It is night, and dawn is nearing. As the conspirators agree to assassinate Caesar on that same day, Brutus asks them to join their hands and Cassius subsequently proposes an oath, which Brutus refuses. Despite the small difference, this scene is highly reminiscent of its equivalent in By This Axe I Rule!

  After the oath has been sworn, the conspirators of the Kull story depart; Ascalante tells them: “Get back to your places and not by word, deed or look do you betray what is in your minds.” In Julius Caesar, Brutus declares: “Good gentlemen, look fresh and merrily;/Let not our looks put on our purposes”…

  And if Howard had found in Shakespeare the basic plot of his story, it could be that Howard himself was also indeed trying to “kill” his king, i.e., to put an end to the character and the series. The character now little resembled what he was in the early stories, having become an autocratic ruler. If, in The Shadow Kingdom, the menace of the serpent-men was an abhorrent one, in the later story there is little difference between Kull and Ascalante, the leader of the conspirators. What the exile Ascalante wishes to do is exactly the same thing Kull did when he ascended the throne: kill the present and legitimate king. Their method is exactly the same, as shown in this passage from The Shadow Kingdom, which describes Kull’s ascent to the throne, but which applies perfectly to Ascalante and what he is doing in By This Axe I Rule!: “a bold snatching of opportunity, the swift whirl of swords, the slaying of a tyrant of whom men had wearied unto death, short, crafty plotting with ambitious statesmen out of favor at court–and Kull, wandering adventurer, Atlantean exile, had swept up to the dizzy heights of his dreams: he was lord of Valusia, king of kings.” (pp. 18–19). Ascalante and Kull have much more in common than one may presume at first glanc
e. Further, Brule, who was always on hand to save Kull’s life in time of danger, is noteworthily absent from the tale, leaving Valusia as the story opens. His departing words are quite disquieting: “We are barbarians, together, even if we have spent most of our lives in this land. I go, now. You have naught to fear save an attempt at assassination, which is no fear at all, considering the fact that you are guarded night and day by a squad of the Red Slayers.” Strange words from a man who saved Kull’s life numerous times, and especially in The Shadow Kingdom, in which Kull was nearly slaughtered in his room by conspirators while he thought he was guarded by the Red Slayers. It is also in By This Axe I Rule! that we at last learn the name of the tyrant Kull killed to win the throne: Borna. The name’s resemblance to Brule’s tribe, the Borni, is striking.

  It thus very much seems that Howard was losing contact with his creation and, as he would put it in an oft-quoted passage from a letter to Clark Ashton Smith:

  suddenly I would 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. (REH to Clark Ashton Smith, 14 December 1933, Selected Letters, 1931–1936, p. 59)

  By This Axe I Rule! was rejected by Argosy and Adventure, while it is not known where or if Swords of the Purple Kingdom was submitted. The Shadow Kingdom appeared in the August 1929 issue of Weird Tales, followed the next month by The Mirrors of Tuzun Thune. This time, Howard was no longer sufficiently interested in the character to attempt to write new stories.