Imaginary Worlds - The Man Behind the Sword

Episode Date: February 21, 2019

Conan the Barbarian is generally thought of as a muscle-bound brute who fights his way through a made-up ancient world. But the character actually has a deep, rich history. I talk with experts Rusty Burke, David C. Smith, Jeffrey Shanks, Jonas Prida, and Nicole Emmelhainz about why Conan the Barbarian is more relevant than ever, and how the character's journey reflects the author Robert E. Howard's real life struggles.  Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

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Imagine it is the early 1980s and a recent movie that you really liked was Conan the Barbarian. This was Arnold Schwarzenegger's first big role. That's right, it wasn't The Terminator. That was 1984. It was Conan from 82. Conan, what is best in life? To crush your enemies, see them driven before you, and to hear the lamentation of the women. your enemies, see them driven before you, and they hear the lamentation of the women. Arnold also could barely speak English, but that didn't matter because Conan was cheesy and fun, and it spawned a ton of other imitators.

The sword and the sorcerer. They were the barbarians. All these movies and TV shows about loincloth-wearing, beefcake, sword-wielding, indestructible action heroes. As a kid in the 80s, I loved that stuff. In fact, my favorite cartoon at the time was Thundar the Barbarian. It never really occurred to me back then to ask where Conan the Barbarian had first come from. But if you were intellectually curious, you might have gone to your local library or bookstore and found the original Conan stories written by Robert E. Howard in the 1930s.

You might have also found the only biography about Howard at the time, which was called Dark Valley Destiny by L. Sprague DeCamp. L. Sprague DeCamp had been controlling Howard's estate for years, although he didn't think that Howard was a good writer. He thought he was a hack, described his writing as juvenile and careless, and DeCamp actually rewrote some of the Conan stories himself. But the real influence that DeCamp had on Howard's legacy was this biography, which was actually the culmination of years of writing and research. See, Howard had committed suicide in 1936 after learning that his mother was terminally ill. And DeCamp really believed that Howard had a massive edible complex. He wrote about this a lot,

and other media outlets picked up on this theory because it makes for a great story. And if that is all you knew about Conan, was that he was an inarticulate brute created by a mama's boy, then you would have been wrong. Although you wouldn't have been alone. That's what most people thought for decades. But Conan is actually a really rich character who wrestles with issues that resonate just as deeply now as they did 10,000 years ago for Conan, or 80 years ago for the guy that invented him. You're listening to Imaginary Worlds, a show about how we create them and why we suspend our disbelief. Today's episode, the true story of Conan the Cimmerian.

Yep, that is his original title, not Conan the Barbarian. That is all after the break. Now, before I started learning about Robert E. Howard, I did not have any preconceived notions about him. But I was still surprised to learn that the guy who created Conan was from deep rural Texas. When Howard was living in Cross Plains, Texas, most of the men either worked in the oil fields or they were farmers. His father was a country doctor. But Howard was a professional fiction writer. He was also a voracious reader in a town that did not have a library.

My first impression when I first went to Howard's hometown of Cross Plains, Texas, was that it was just this remote, flat, sort of the most unpromising environment for a fantasy writer that you could imagine. Rusty Burke is part of a group of scholars that have spent years trying to restore Howard's literary reputation. You think, how in the world did this guy create this character and this world out of what appeared to be very little in the way of raw materials. What a staggering imagination Howard must have had to have created these worlds with only this stuff to look at.

Now, Howard did have friends, but most people in town thought he was strange. And later on, just to kind of like deliberately poke him in the eye, he would act kind of strange. David Smith wrote a biography about Robert Howard. Sometime in the mid-30s, he bought a sombrero, and he grew a mustache, and he'd wear this thing into town and kind of like act out. You know, his friend Clyde Smith,

they were going to go walk into town. They were going to go into town one afternoon. He said, let me wear that sombrero. And Howard said, no, no, no, no, no, that's for me. We don't want them thinking you're kind of weird. You know, that's just for me. Kind of like when I'm playing with him, you know. Since most people in town thought that Howard was weird, it's quite appropriate that he found the outlet for his stories in a pulp fiction magazine called Weird Tales, which was based in Chicago. Now, Conan was not the only character that Howard created,

and it wasn't even the only genre that he wrote in. He wrote a lot of Westerns too. But one of the reasons why Conan took off was because the readers of Weird Tales were captivated by the world that Conan lived in. It was a world that Howard called the Hyborian Age. was a world that Howard called the Hyborian Age. Now Howard was mostly self-taught. I mean, he was an autodidact. He was obsessed with history. He wanted to write about ancient Rome, ancient Egypt, Mesopotamia, but all at once. So he mashed them all together into this fantastical time period, changing the names and the details so that he could tweak these worlds how he wanted them. And then he was also deliberately anachronistic. You know, he threw in Vikings or Native Americans. Jeff Shanks is another Howard scholar, and he looks at these stories a little bit differently because Jeff is also an archaeologist. And it's obvious to him why

Howard is inventing the Hyborian Age in the 1930s. This was a time when people were fascinated by the ancient world. The tomb of King Tut had just recently been discovered, along with a bunch of other huge archaeological sites. He was also bringing in not just sort of the standard archaeology of the times, the more mainstream archaeological ideas and historical ideas. He was also bringing in what today we would sort of call pseudoscience or pseudoarchaeology. He was bringing in some of the ideas that were popular at the time in occult circles and theosophical circles, ancient lost civilizations like Atlantis and Lemuria. And what that did was, even though he was creating these sort of

fantastic fictional prehistoric worlds, it felt real. It made it easier for the reader to suspend their disbelief because he worked really hard to try and make even his most fantastic ideas fit in with the legitimate ideas in archaeology and history that were going on at the time. the legitimate ideas in archaeology and history that were going on at the time. So where does Conan fit into this world? Well, he's from the most uncivilized part of the Hyborian Age, an area called Samaria, although some people pronounce it Chimeria. Either way, the publisher of Weird Tales, Farnsworth Wright,

thought Samaria or Chimeria just sounded really wonky, so he came up with a sexier title for this character, Conan the Barbarian. But the first time that we meet this character, he is not the beefcake, loincloth-wearing, muscle-bound warrior that we're used to seeing. He's middle-aged. He's still lethal, but past his prime. And he's not wandering around anymore looking for adventure. He's actually a king with everything to lose. The first scene in the very first published Conan story, the Phoenix on the Sword, when the Conan is introduced, right? We think of Conan, you know, especially after Schwarzenegger as sort of a dumb muscled brute, right? In Phoenix on the Store, this first story, Conan is introduced sitting at a desk, drawing a map out of the world and filling in the areas where he's traveled that aren't on their maps, right? So he opens up with a pen in his hand, right? Not a sword, a quill.

That's how Conan is introduced to us. Now, one of the most interesting things to me about Conan is that the stories are told out of order. So when we read about Conan as this young barbarian in later stories, those are flashbacks. In fact, that's part of his origin story. Robert E. Howard said he liked to imagine Conan as like an old cowboy telling these tall tales about the frontier at a bar. You're never sure whether this guy's really telling the truth, but you also don't care because the stories are so good. telling the truth, but you also don't care because the stories are so good. And everybody that I spoke with described Conan as a quintessentially American character, which surprised me because, you know, he's from long time ago, far, far away magic land, not Texas. Jonas Prida

is an assistant provost at Park Point University in Pennsylvania. And he says the function of Conan in a lot of these stories is a lot like a cowboy who breezes into town, discovers a problem, solves it with surgical violence, and then moves on to explore new territory. I also think that Conan's very American because he fundamentally starts from nothing and becomes the king of Aquilonia.

So it's easy to see the American success story written into what Conan's doing. Yeah, that's so interesting because I wouldn't think about that. But a European writer would be very unlikely to be like, and of course, Conan eventually becomes king because he earned it. Yes. Yes, exactly. Another Conan person that I've met a couple of different times, he's always talked about it. It's really easy to see that J.R.R. Tolkien is like he's English, right? That, you know, it's very pastoral and Lord of the Rings stuff. It's kind of has like that class-based system in a way that Conan never does, where Conan's always disruptive.

You know, he's just coming in there because he's going to like rip the crown off the king as opposed to like what's going on in Return of the King, where it's, I mean, it's built into the title, right? The king's returning, right? You know, social order's been restored. Looking at the role that Conan takes in these stories, especially as a hero, brings me to the reason why I find him so fascinating. I think that Conan's creator, Robert E. Howard, is wrestling with an issue that a lot of people are talking about today. And to use very current language that Howard would never use, I think that he's exploring how to embrace traditional masculinity without it becoming toxic masculinity. Now, again, Howard did not have the kind of job that most people

in his town would consider a real man's job. He sat at a typewriter all day, coming up with fantasy stories. But then Howard also became a boxer. He got really into physical fitness, which I've always thought was his way of kind of making up for that. And Howard is writing these stories during the Depression. Millions of men are out of work, can't provide for their families. And the definition of work is changing because of automation. Also, World War I had destroyed a lot of classical notions of heroism. So a lot of men are feeling disconnected from the old ways. They want problems

they can take care of with their bare hands. Nicole Emmelelheinz is an assistant professor at Christopher Newport University in Virginia, and she thinks that Conan really reflects that struggle. And she likes the character because he's not a mountain of muscles. He's flexible and swift, physically and mentally. One of the interesting things about Conan is that he doesn't always turn to violence as a solution to a problem that he's facing. So in the very beginning of The Tower of the Elephant, for example, when he's in the tavern

and he's talking to the local thieves, they are kind of poking fun at him and a little bit of insulting toward him. And throughout the beginning and even through most of that encounter, he remains very calm. He's asking questions that he thinks are important. He's trying to have a dialogue and a conversation with them. And it's on the part of the thieves that keep ramping up the insults towards Conan. And so he knows when to wield violence and when to wield other means to get what he needs. And she thinks the fact that the stories are told out of order is actually part of a bigger narrative about how this character of Conan changes over the years and learns from experiences,

especially supernatural experiences, where his sword doesn't do any good. where his sword doesn't do any good. And all these little moments are what eventually will allow him to move through his life to take on that role as king. So he has to be able to experience doubt or uncertainty or pity and sadness for others. And so he grows the way that I think we all grow, which is not dramatically all at once, but through a combination of different experiences. Because that's how we think about our lives. And in kind of retrospect, we don't think about them in order, we think about the important moments, or what's now later on appear as important moments. Now, the scholarship around Robert E. Howard is overwhelmingly male. It was interesting talking to Nicole about him.

Even though the Hyborian Age is a place where women are often called wenches, there are plenty of damsels and vixens, Nicole thinks that Howard's view on gender was actually progressive for his time and place. In fact, she likes to point to a short story that Howard wrote that is not set in the Hyborian Age. It's actually set during the Renaissance, and it's about a character called Sword Woman. There is such a powerful scene at the very beginning

when she is being asked to marry against her will, and her sister comes into the bedchamber and sister hands her a knife. And she says, you know, kill yourself. You don't want to be trapped in a marriage, you know, forced to labor and bear children. It's not the kind of life that you want. Then she realizes that she doesn't have to kill herself and she kind of fights her way out of the village and she goes out into the wilderness and then the next day she declares that she was not going to live as a woman anymore she was going

to live as a man and she takes up this new persona and it's just so wonderful because you can see Howard, he's really kind of playing around and challenging what he may have perceived as a limited type of expectation for the women, you know, of the day. Now, the way that Robert Howard was really questioning social norms ties into a bigger topic that he was obsessed with, how civilizations rise and fall. And I think this is actually a variation on the idea of toxic masculinity, but it's more about how a society can become toxic over time. And Jonas says this was really personal for Howard. The town where he lived, Cross Plains, got caught up in the oil boom of the early 20th century, and Howard saw how his sleepy little town was transformed overnight

and how money could change people. You get a lot of just what Howard would talk about, just the swindlers and the con men and the braggarts and the tough guys coming into town because that's who needs to be there for an oil boom to work. And so being able to have that boom happen and then see what happens when the boom is done also impacts Howard. Because when oil sort of collapses, then you're just, you got the leftovers. You had this town, it was big, it collapses in on itself, and you're kind of just left with the remnants. And so you sort of see the best and worst of the so-called civilized in a two to three year period. And that's how Howard came to sort of create this chart of human progress.

He saw three basic stages, savagery, barbarism, and civilization. These are certainly not terms that any anthropologist would use today, but his thinking around these ideas is still pretty interesting. Again, here's Dave Smith. His view of the barbarian is that of a human being who is living in this perfect little arc of time. People are honest and forthright. You live one with nature. you hunt in your fish,

you know, you take care of the things that matter to your tribe or your people or whatever, that eventually those, that sort of civilization or society can then grow into civilization as we know it. But what inevitably happens then in his view is that dangers from within or softness from within or corruption or whatever settle into this society. And it slides all the way back down the rail, the scale of history or whatever, to become very primitive and corrupt and nasty. And that's what he saw, of course, happening in Texas and across plains. People would say he says the barbarian is superior. I say he doesn't say the barbarian is superior. He says that the barbarian is inevitable.

Again, here's Rusty Burke. He had a number of poems, things like Never Beyond the Beast, where it's like, in our core, we are apes. He said civilization is a whim of circumstance. We have to really work at not being apes. Howard was constantly debating this topic with his favorite pen pal, H.P. Lovecraft. Yes, that Lovecraft, the upper crust New England writer who invented the monster Cthulhu. The two men had never met in person.

They read each other's stories in Weird Tales magazine and became big fans of each other's work. They even created a shared universe where Cthulhu ends up in the Hyborian Age and vice versa. But when it came to this idea of barbarism versus civilization, they never saw eye to eye. And this was not an esoteric debate for them. At the time, Mussolini and Hitler were coming to power, but Lovecraft was just enamored with German and Italian civilization. Howard thought that the fascists were proving his point, civilization. Howard thought that the fascists were proving his point, that civilizations can grow corrupt, decadent, and abusive. Jonas Prita thinks this may be another reason why Howard's stories and his depiction of barbarism resonated so deeply with people at the time.

Barbarism is a simple answer to complex social questions. You don't have to worry about paying your taxes very frequently, right? You might have a lord that you have to go on a raiding party with and he gets part of the furs that you've gotten. But you don't have to work your way through your 1040. Yeah. Do you think that Howard overly romanticized barbarism? I think he goes through periods of that. In his letters with Lovecraft, there are moments where he has self-reflection when he's talking to Lovecraft about it, where he's just like, don't get me wrong, I'm glad I don't live in a barbarous time because my skills necessarily, the fact that I'm a writer, wouldn't be valued.

But then there's also periods where he's like, no, no, no, barbarism, that's the natural state of humanity. I mean, looking at Howard's life, I can see why he fantasized about a character like Conan, who is the ultimate survivor without deep ties to anyone, who can mold the world to fit his needs. Now, in real life, Howard's mother, Hester, was very sick. She had tuberculosis. Ironically, his father couldn't be around to care for her because he was a country doctor. He was always traveling. Now, at this point, Howard is 30 years old, still living with his parents, which is another reason why the future biographer L. Sprague de Camp thought that Howard had an Oedipal complex.

But this is rural Texas in the Great Depression. It's a lot more cost effective for him to live at home. And from what I've read, Hester was actually quite protective of her son's writing career. She was worried that potential love interests could get in the way of him making deadlines and even just staying focused. Again, Dave Smith. He was very close to his mother because she was his best friend through all these years when he was growing up, and he learned poetry from her and so on and so forth. His father was gone a lot, so when his mother did start to become sick, he was the guy who had to stand in and take care of her and that kind of stuff.

And Rusty Burke says that Howard couldn't afford to ship his mother off to a convalescent home. For several months, as he watched his mother decline, he had been more and more taken up with her care. He complained that the people that they hired to take care of her to do the cooking and so forth were constantly coming in and interrupting him and asking questions and stuff. And so he couldn't get any work done. Now, Howard did have one significant romantic relationship in his life with a school teacher named Novelin Price. 50 years later, she wrote a memoir about their romance. And that book was turned into a movie called The Whole Wide World, starring Renee Zellweger as Novelin Price and Vincent D'Onofrio as Robert E. Howard.

Well, you know those tiny farmhouses we passed on the way out? Those are the people I want to write about. Not me. I can't write about a man who tore along on a farm, get drunk, Beat up a wife who can't fight back. Well, just because you're poor and you work hard doesn't mean you're hateful. You've lived a sheltered life. You don't know these people out here. I do. Well, your stories sell. So people must want to read about muscle men who wrestle monsters and girls in skimpy dresses

who don't do a darn thing to sit around and watch. But the relationship didn't last. Howard was wrestling with too many demons. And when he eventually learned that his mother was on the verge of death, Howard committed suicide. Everybody that I spoke with said that they really wished his mother died. I mean, while that was certainly a sad occasion, it could have also liberated Howard to move out of his parents' home, start a family of his own. But tragically, his mother's death freed him to do the

thing that he really wanted to do, which was to end his life. Or as Jonas put it. I think like a lot of writers from that period, they would be helped now by mental health professionals, right? That he could have gone to see a doctor who probably would have given him something for his manic depression, and it would have allowed him to ride the ship long enough to not make the decision he made.

And at the same time, that may be completely like just biochemical because we know he certainly goes on manic and depressive runs. You know, again, if we wanted to like look back and use our psychiatric license on him, you could easily do that. Right. Because he has those periods of just like incredible work where he's staying up all night banging out stories. And then he'll just have periods where he's just like, oh yeah, life's not worth living. In fact, Dave Smith thinks that Howard's mother may have been the one keeping him alive, not the other way around. We know that he pretty certainly

believed in a life after this one. In fact, he may have believed in reincarnation. He wrote a number of poems, one of which in which he saw moving into the next world is moving into daylight, you know, and leaving the shadows and darkness of this world. I mean, nobody really knows if Howard thought that Conan the Barbarian or a Sumerian would

have a life after he was gone. I mean, back then, pulp fiction magazines were not considered high literature. But the character of Conan would not go down without a fight. In the 1960s, Conan took off again, thanks to the paperback book craze, which actually gave a boost to a lot of fantasy writers. Conan also took on a new visual form. I mean, one of the reasons why these paperbacks were so popular was because the cover art was awesome.

It was done by this guy named Frank Frazetta. I mean, one of the reasons why these paperbacks were so popular was because the cover art was awesome. It was done by this guy named Frank Frazetta. And then in the 1970s, Conan became part of Marvel Comics. He was actually one of the best-selling characters of that decade. Marvel also took an obscure character from Howard's stories called Red Sonja, turned her into a phenomenon. And in 2019, Marvel actually relaunched the Conan comic book series. They even teamed him up with the Avengers. Nicole thinks that Robert Howard doesn't get enough credit for pioneering an entire genre,

which is now called sword and sorcery. His role in creating this genre is really critical to our being able to have the different types of story worlds and novels and movies and games and comic books that we have today. But certainly in the last decade or more, he's getting the recognition that he deserves. So maybe eventually the barbarian title will get dropped and we can just call him Conan, which I think is a good middle ground, right? It's very open-ended then, which I think is how I like to read Conan. He's not just simply a Chimerian and he's certainly not a barbarian, but he's a lot of different things over the course of the stories

and what we get of his lifetime through them. There's been a push to get conan back on the big screen and the small screen there was a conan movie in 2011 that totally bombed starring jason momoa and there was going to be a new amazon series which was going to be very true to howard's original stories but the pilot didn't get picked up. I think one of the problems of bringing Howard's world back to pop culture is that it's already here. I mean, Robert Howard died about three years before The Hobbit came out. And Tolkien said that when he was inventing Middle Earth, he was reading about the Hyborian Age. Gary Gygax grew up reading Conan stories before he co-created Dungeons and Dragons,

and there's so much of Howard in D&D. They're actually role-playing games based on Conan stories. But the most influential Howard fan was probably George R.R. Martin. The world of Westeros is a lot like the Hyborian Age, from the savagery of the wildings, to the barbarism of the Dothraki's, to the grittiness of the sellswords, to the corrupt civilization of King's Landing. We are surrounded by the Hyborian Age. We just didn't know it. Let's hope that Robert Howard's warnings about civilization don't turn out to be equally prophetic. about civilization don't turn out to be equally prophetic. Well, that is it for this week. Thank you for listening. Special thanks to Rusty Burke,

Dave Smith, Jonas Prita, Jeff Shanks, and Nicole Emelheinz. If you want to read more about Robert E. Howard, I highly recommend a biography called Blood and Thunder by Mark Finn. It's really great. Next episode, we're going to dive deep into the history of Weird Tales magazine. Because in the 1930s, it was a big controversy over the racy covers. And that was all before the readers of Weird Tales magazine discovered that this controversial illustrator was a woman. My assistant producer is Stephanie Billman. You can like the show on Facebook, a tweet at emolinski and Imagine Worlds Pod,

and the show's website is imaginaryworldspodcast.org. © transcript Emily Beynon