or a long time there has been too much Conan. It is therefore good to be able to welcome these two new volumes from England, which give us a lot less Conan than hitherto. There is almost nothing in The Conan Chronicles--confusingly, this title has been used before (see below)--except original versions of the Conan stories Robert E. Howard wrote "during his lifetime," almost all of them for Weird Tales.
There are no "collaborations."
There are no continuations by other hands of story notes Howard wrote on the last shirt cuff he wore before shooting himself in the head at the age of 30.
There are no sequels by other hands.
Four stories Howard did not finish are included, but seem to be presented here in versions as close as possible to the original rough or partial drafts. One must say "seem" because Stephen Jones, a British anthologist of quite ferocious energy, has been astonishingly demure about his role as editor in assembling these two volumes.
It is, in fact, an odd performance on the part of Jones and his publishers, though parts of the puzzle are less confusing than they look. Volume 1 was issued in 2000 by Millennium, an imprint of Victor Gollancz, which is itself an imprint of Orion. Volume 2 appeared a year later as a Gollancz book, after the Millennium imprint had been phased out, presumably because it had begun to sound like Twentieth Century Fox; so both volumes do come from the same home.
But there are glitches.
Volume 1 is perhaps the most terribly copy-edited text I have ever seen issued by a professional publisher; Volume 2 is immaculate. Even odder: Jones's afterwords to the two collections follow Howard's career, and the writing of the Conan stories over a feverish three-year span, in chronological order; but he has chosen to publish the stories according to a loose but serviceable internal chronology, beginning with Conan as a molten, pantherish teenager, and ending when Conan is about 45. But. But.
That tale about the older Conan--"The Phoenix on the Sword" (1932)--was the first Howard actually wrote. Jones' comments on "Phoenix" appear in the afterword to Volume 1 in 2000; the story itself only shows up in Volume 2 in 2001. On the other hand, his comments on "Shadows in Zamboula" (1935) appear in Volume 2, though the story itself was already published in Volume 1 a year earlier. Stories are dated in the acknowledgment pages--but are not dated anywhere adjacent to the actual story. So. The reader who wants to see what Jones has to say about any particular story (what he has to say is, by the way, mostly interesting) must first go back to the acknowledgment page; second, check there on the publication date; three, guess which afterword probably contains the editorial commentary; four, guess wrong about this; five, guess correctly through a process of elimination; six, find the right volume under yesterday's newspaper; seven, bellow bingo in the night, eight: consult Jones. This see-sawing happens lots. Duh.
It is, in other words, hard work to use The Conan Chronicles. (It is also confusing, though not perhaps exactly Gollancz's fault, that there is at least one earlier series called The Conan Chronicles, a title Howard never used, perhaps because he never himself published a Conan book. The earlier series is a hodgepodge of Howard, L. Sprague de Camp, Lin Carter and other epiphytes of the Howard Industry.) How lucky for us, then, that Howard himself made all the hard work so worthwhile.
Learning a lesson from Howard's end
Because, in the end, The Conan Chronicles does give us the raw truth: that Robert E. Howard--a terribly unhappy, racist, mother-obsessed, fattish bodybuilder who wore silly hats and waddled down small-town Texas streets as though he were the reincarnation of Teddy Roosevelt though what he was the reincarnation of was in fact Tweedledum, and whose sexuality seems ambiguous now because he never had time in his short life to come out anywhere but in his writing--managed to generate out of the rag-and-bone shop of his brief span a superhero so supernaturally manifest that we cannot shake him loose. Conan is a kind of elemental; in the Land of Fable Eurasia whose scattered satrapies and dominions he ransacks, alone or at the head of warriors, he is described as a barbarian. What he is, in fact, as we read him in 2001, is pure. He is the acts of the dream he
commits.
It may be that Howard wrote better action first paragraphs than anyone else ever has. Here is the opening of "Queen of the Black Coast" (1934), not perhaps the best; but Conan is the horseman:
Hoofs drummed down the street that sloped to the wharfs. The folk that yelled and scattered had only a fleeting glimpse of a mailed figure on a black stallion, a wide scarlet cloak flowing out on the wind. Far up the street came the shout and clatter of pursuit, but the horseman did not look back. He swept out onto the wharfs and jerked the plunging stallion back on its haunches at the very lip of the pier. Seamen gaped up at him. ...
and so on, unstopping, unstoppable. It seems simple but it is not. It is writing which is so concrete, kinetic, manifest, that it seems not to have been cogitated into words. It is full-blown with the hard clarity and momentum of some rare dream not subject to paraphrase, as though Conan and the story that tells the dream were utterly coterminous. It is almost certainly first draft. It does not stop for a second. Conan escapes his pursuers on a ship, which is soon assaulted by pirates under the command of Belit, who is a woman. They fall in love, commit acts of piracy. There is all sorts of action. The dream is unending, until they find a poison, Heart-of-Darkness river and ascend it. Belit becomes Kurtz and dies. Conan mourns. It takes 30 pages.
There are changes as Conan ages, which The Conan Chronicles make it easy to trace. The earlier stories (by internal chronology) are solitudinous; Conan has no Shadow, no companion; no jester or magus light his way. Conan may drink and swive and swear and steal--but off-stage. There are almost no group scenes at all. He has no secret identity: for he is manifest. In the later stories--like "The Hour of the Dragon" (1935-1936), Howard's sole novel, eventually published as Conan the Conqueror (1950)--Howard comes dangerously close to embedding Conan into discourse, for the "barbarian" has become king of one of the countries in the Land of Fable.
But it does not stick, nor should it. "Hour of the Dragon" skids away from the bad house of intersubjectivity, Conan sheds his unlikely paterfamilias guise, lights out for the southern wilderness where he's got to grab something to save the world; and we dive back into the dream, where Howard was.
Out here in the world, we would be his enemy--out here in the world, Howard was a paranoid, a bully, a baby. And by the time he killed himself, he may have been a burnt-out case. In the dream, we can shake his hand because he can shake ours.
