Howard also missed out on the cover for the March 1933 issue, which contained ‘The Tower of the Elephant’. As Howard later explained in a letter written to P. Schuyler Miller, ‘Conan was about seventeen when he was introduced to the public in ‘The Tower of the Elephant’. While not fully matured, he was riper than the average civilised youth at that age.’ The author apparently borrowed the setting for the Zamorian thieves’ quarter from one of his favourite movies, the 1923 version of The Hunchback of Notre Dame.
Conan led an army against a revived wizard in ‘Black Colossus’, his fourth adventure in Weird Tales, in the June 1933 issue. It also marked the first of nine cover appearances Howard’s Conan series would make on the magazine.
Margaret Brundage’s paintings were featured on most of the Weird Tales covers during the mid-1930s, and her cover for ‘Black Colossus’ depicted the naked Yasmela reaching out to touch the seated stone idol. A former Chicago fashion artist, Brundage was paid $90 per cover and usually worked in delicate pastel chalks on canvas. Wright admitted in the magazine that they had to be careful handling the artist’s work: ‘The originals are so delicate that we are afraid even to sneeze when we have a cover design in our possession, for fear the picture will disappear in a cloud of dust.’
‘They were so impressed by the cover that they brought it to the best engraver in Chicago,’ Brundage later recalled. ‘Wright later told me that it generated the most mail ever for a cover for Weird Tales.’
That was probably because her depictions of nude or diaphanously draped women, often in risqué or blatant bondage positions, provoked many outraged letters to ‘The Eyrie’. However, Farnsworth Wright was a smart enough editor and businessman to note that issues which featured a Brundage nude on the cover invariably sold more copies on the newsstands.
In a letter to Clark Ashton Smith postmarked July 22, 1933, Howard told his fellow Weird Tales writer: ‘Thanks, too, for the kind things you said about Conan. I enjoy writing about him more than any character I have ever created. He almost seems to write himself. I find stories dealing with him roll out much easier than any others.’
Originally titled ‘Xuthal of the Dusk’, ‘The Slithering Shadow’ in the September 1933 Weird Tales found Conan in yet another lost city battling an evil Stygian witch and the toad-like god, Thog. The story was also featured on the cover with one of Brundage’s most infamous ‘whipping’ scenes. Future author Henry Kuttner commented in ‘The Eyrie’: ‘Allow me to pan you for your charmingly sadistic cover illustrating ‘The Slithering Shadow’. I haven’t the slightest objection to the female nude in art, but it seems rather a pity that it is possible to find such pictures in any sex magazine, while Weird Tales is about the only type of magazine which can run fantastic and weird cover illustrations and doesn’t.’
Conan joined up with a group of buccaneers in search of a treasure island in ‘The Pool of the Black One’ in the October 1933 issue of Weird Tales. In another letter to Clark Ashton Smith, postmarked December 14, 1933, Howard gave some more background to the creation of his most memorable character: ‘I’m rather of the opinion myself that widespread myths and legends are based on some fact, though the fact may be distorted out of all recognition in the telling … I know that for months I had been absolutely barren of ideas, completely unable to work up anything sellable. Then the man Conan seemed suddenly to grow up in my mind without much labour on my part and immediately a stream of stories flowed off my pen – or rather, off my type-writer – almost without effort on my part. I did not seem to be creating, but rather relating events that had occurred. Episode crowded on 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 story-writing. When I deliberately tried to write something else, I couldn’t do it.’
By now Howard’s stories in the magazine were bringing him the same kind of popularity that such authors as Seabury Quinn and H.P. Lovecraft were also receiving in the letters column. In fact, except for Quinn’s exploits of the psychic detective Jules de Grandin, Conan was the most popular character to ever appear in Weird Tales.
‘Rogues in the House’, which appeared in the January 1934 Weird Tales, was another of those Conan stories which seemed to write itself. This time, the young barbarian thief was saved from a dungeon by a nobleman seeking revenge. As Howard recalled: ‘I didn’t rewrite it even once. As I remember I only erased and changed one word in it, and then sent it in just as it was written.’
Perhaps that was why, in a letter to P. Schuyler Miller written in 1936, Howard admitted that even he was not absolutely certain of the background to his own story: ‘I am not sure that the adventure chronicled in “Rogues in the House” occurred in Zamora. The presence of opposing factions of politics would seem to indicate otherwise, since Zamora was an absolute despotism where differing political opinions were not tolerated. I am of the opinion that the city was one of the small city-states lying just west of Zamora, and into which Conan had wandered after leaving Zamora. Shortly after this he returned for a brief period to Cimmeria, and there were other returns to his native land from time to time.’
Another Conan story, ‘The Frost King’s Daughter’, had originally been submitted to Weird Tales back in 1932 along with ‘The Phoenix on the Sword’. However, Wright had rejected it in a letter dated March 10, in which he declared simply: ‘I do not much care for it’. Retaining its Hyborian Age setting, Howard re-wrote the tale, replacing Conan with a similar hero named Amra of Akbitana. The Amra version finally appeared in Charles D. Hornig’s amateur journal The Fantasy Fan for March 1934 under the title ‘Gods of the North’. The Conan version didn’t see publication until many years after Howard’s death, and then under the title ‘The Frost-Giant’s Daughter’.
‘Shadows in the Moonlight’ in the April 1934 Weird Tales was originally titled ‘Iron Shadows in the Moon’ by Howard. This time Conan and his female companion escaped from a battlefield slaughter, only to find themselves menaced by iron statues imbued with life by the rays of the full moon. According to one reader from Rockdale, Texas, in the June 1934 issue: ‘As usual Conan provided some real thrills in Robert E. Howard’s story, ‘Shadows in the Moonlight’. In my humble opinion Conan is the greatest of WT’s famous characters.’
Conan fell in love with the female pirate Bêlit, leader of the Black Corsairs, in his next adventure. After keeping Conan off the cover for several issues, Wright used a Margaret Brundage painting for ‘Queen of the Black Coast’ on the May 1934 Weird Tales. It featured a delicate-looking Conan with a diaphanously draped damsel throwing her arms around his neck as he warded off a flying attacker with an ineffectual knife.
Meanwhile, the Brundage debate continued to rage in ‘The Eyrie’: ‘I do not think it would be at all an easy task to find anything to compare with Brundage’s representations of sheer feminine loveliness without the touch of vulgarity and suggestiveness which usually accompany nudes in magazines,’ commented a male reader from El Paso, Texas, in the June 1934 issue, adding: ‘The cover illustrating “Black Colossus” was about as beautiful a piece of art as I have seen in a long time.’
However, in the same issue, a female reader from Oregon declared: ‘I do enjoy Weird Tales and usually manage to acquire one each month, even though I do tear off the cover immediately and stick it in the nearest receptacle for trash. Are such covers absolutely necessary?’
Like Wright, Howard also knew his markets, and he knew how much he could get past his editor and still be certain of an eye-catching cover: ‘Another problem is how far you can go without shocking the readers into distaste for your stuff – and therefore cutting down sales … 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. The torture of a naked writhing wretch, utterly helpless – and especially when of the feminine sex amid vol
uptuous surroundings – seems to excite keen pleasure in some people who have a distaste for wholesale butchery in the heat and fury of a battlefield.’
Conan was the leader of a band of outlaws who battled a giant god of living metal in ‘The Devil in Iron’ in the August 1934 issue. It was the tenth Conan story to appear in Weird Tales and was voted by the readers as the best in that issue, despite another feeble Brundage cover depicting an unlikely-looking Conan entrapped by the coils of a giant green serpent while a semi-naked blonde looked on.
A much better Brundage cover was used for the first instalment of ‘The People of the Black Circle’, a three-part serial set in exotic northwest Asia which ran in the September, October and November 1934 editions of the magazine. This time the artist ignored Conan in favour of the beautiful princess Yasmina being held in the clutches of an evil sorcerer.
This is how Wright introduced the serial to his readers: ‘Rough, and at times uncouth, Conan is a primitive man, who will brave almost certain death against terrific odds to rescue a damsel in distress; yet he will just as quickly give her a resounding slap on the posterior or drop her into a cesspool if she displeases him. But rude though he is, he possesses a sort of primordial chivalry and an innate reverence for womanhood that make him wholly fascinating.’
Obviously the readers agreed, as this short novel was again voted the best story in the magazine and editor Wright revealed that ‘Robert E. Howard’s spectacular and original hero, Conan the barbarian adventurer and fighting-man, has captured the fancy of our readers by his brilliant exploits and his utter humanness.’
However, not everyone was so enamoured with the mighty Cimmerian. In the November 1934 Weird Tales, the following letter appeared in ‘The Eyrie’: ‘I am awfully tired of poor old Conan the Cluck, who for the past fifteen issues has every month slain a new wizard, tackled a new monster, come to a violent and sudden end that was averted (incredibly enough!) in just the nick of time, and won a new girlfriend, each of whose penchant for nudism won her place of honour, either on the cover or on the interior illustration … I cry: “Enough of this brute and his iron-thewed sword-thrusts – may he be sent to Valhalla to cut out paper dolls.”’ The author of this anti-Conan diatribe was none other than seventeen-year-old Robert Bloch, later to find lasting fame as the author of Psycho, whose own first story would be appearing in the January 1935 edition of ‘The Unique Magazine’.
When ‘A Witch Shall Be Born’, with its memorable crucifixion scene, was published in the December 1934 issue of Weird Tales, Brundage instead went for another of her suggestive ‘whipping’ scenes on the cover, this time involving two near-naked women and a cat-o’-nine-tails.
Editor Farnsworth Wright’s lengthy introduction announced that since Howard’s first publication in the magazine back in 1925, ‘he has had forty stories in Weird Tales alone, and has gained an enormous following among the readers of this magazine. Many thousands of readers eagerly buy any magazines that feature one of Mr Howard’s stories … He has the faculty of making real characters of his heroes, not mere automatons who act as they do merely because the author pulls the strings.’
In early 1935 Howard’s mother Hester underwent a serious operation, remaining in hospital for a month before returning home. Novalyne Price Ellis later recalled meeting her: ‘Mrs Howard was sitting on the end of a divan. Her hair was nearly white, short, and parted on one side, not stylish. It looked as if she just combed it quickly to get it over with, not to make her look better. She got up with a great effort and stood leaning slightly to one side.’ Hester Howard never fully recovered her health; she spent the remainder of her life in and out of various hospitals and sanatoriums when not being cared for at home by her husband and son.
Meanwhile, ‘Jewels of Gwahlur’ appeared in the March 1935 Weird Tales. It was a minor Conan tale, about the stealing of a cursed treasure from yet another lost city, which Howard had originally titled ‘Teeth of Gwahlur’. But there was nothing minor about ‘Beyond the Black River’, the second of Conan’s four serial-length appearances in Weird Tales, published in the May and June issues for 1935. Drawing upon its author’s Texas background, it was a variation on the American frontier saga, with Howard’s fictional Picts standing in for Native American warriors. It was also in this story that Howard had one of his characters famously observe: ‘Barbarism is the natural state of mankind. Civilisation is unnatural. It is a whim of circumstance. And barbarism must always triumph.’ There is little doubt that the author was expressing his own views directly to the reader.
With ‘Beyond the Black River’ Howard was still experimenting with the series, as he revealed in a letter to H.P. Lovecraft: ‘I wanted to see if I could write an interesting Conan yarn without sex interest … I’ve attempted a new style of setting entirely – abandoned the exotic settings of lost cities, decaying civilisations, golden domes, marble palaces, silk-clad dancing girls, &c., and thrown my story against a background of forests and rivers, log cabins, frontier outposts, buckskin-clad settlers, and painted tribesmen.’
It was around this time that Howard also wrote but failed to sell ‘Wolves Beyond the Border’, which was set in the same milieu as ‘Beyond the Black River’ but did not feature Conan directly.
The May 1935 Weird Tales also included another letter from Robert Bloch, whose story ‘The Secret of the Tomb’ ran in the same issue: ‘I have been highly interested in the comments anent my so-called “attack” on Howard in the Eyrie … At no time have I ever, directly or indirectly, maligned Mr Howard’s fine and obviously talented abilities as a writer; I confined myself solely to a criticism of Conan’s career.’
Meanwhile, the cost of Mrs Howard’s continued medical treatment and the effect it was having on his own practice was draining Dr Howard’s finances, and the family was in need of urgent cash. At the time, Weird Tales still owed Howard more than $800 for stories which had already appeared and were supposed to have been paid for upon publication. In frustration, Howard wrote to editor Farnsworth Wright on May 6: ‘For some time now I have been receiving a check regularly each month from Weird Tales – half checks, it is true, but by practicing the most rigid economy I have managed to keep my head above the water; that I was able to do so was largely because of, not the size but the regularity of the checks. I came to depend upon them and to expect them, as I felt justified in so doing. But this month, at the very time when I need money so desperately bad, I did not receive a check. Somehow, some way, my family and I have struggled along this far, but if you cut off my monthly checks now, I don’t know what in God’s name we’ll do …’
In an autobiographical sketch in the July 1935 issue of Julius Schwartz’s amateur Fantasy Magazine, Howard told the readers: ‘Conan simply grew up in my mind a few years ago when I was stopping in a little border town on the lower Rio Grande. I did not create him by any conscious process. He simply stalked full grown out of oblivion and set me at work recording the saga of his adventures.’
In a letter that same month to Clark Ashton Smith, Howard continued: ‘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 is 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 I wrote the first yarn of the series. Some mechanism in my subconsciousness took the dominant characteristics of various prize-fighters, 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.’
Between the early months of 1932 and July 1935, Robert E. Howard wrote twenty-one adventures of Conan the barbarian. These tales varied in length from around 3,500 words to the almost novel-length of 75,000 words, and seventeen of them were published in Weird Tales.
As the author explained: ‘Literature is a business to me – a business at which I was making an ample living when the Depr
ession knocked the guts out of the markets. 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.’
Although Howard’s writing career was improving again, his mother’s fragile health was not. She had terminal tuberculosis. As Novalyne Price Ellis later observed: ‘His mother had him so completely in her power that he hovered over her, even in a store. She was, of course, the only woman in his life.’ Howard’s idolisation of his mother would be his downfall. What neither knew was that time was quickly running out for both of them.
Despite enjoying an all-time high in sales during 1935, to such diverse pulp magazines as Action Stories, Argosy, Dime Sports Magazine, Spicy-Adventure Stories, Star Western, Thrilling Adventures, Thrilling Mystery, Top-Notch, Western Aces and, of course, Weird Tales, Howard had started talking about taking his own life when it appeared that his mother was dying. As his father, Dr I.M. Howard later recalled: ‘Last March a year ago, again when his mother was very low in the King’s Daughters Hospital in Temple, Texas, Dr McCelvey expressed a fear that she would not recover; he began to talk to me about his business, and I at once understood what it meant. I began to talk to him, trying to dissuade him from such a course, but his mother began to improve. Immediately she began to improve, he became cheerful and no more was said.’
The Complete Chronicles of Conan: Centenary Edition Page 123