…to the airport, Austin bound, where I will meet up with Cimmerian contributor Brian Leno and have a nice dinner at Rudy’s BBQ before making the trek northward to Cross Plains. Two of your other Cimmerian bloggers will be there, too, leaving Steve Tompkins here at Cimmerian central to blog by his lonesome.

Stay tuned to this site for some news and pics of the event, especially the results of the 2007 Cimmerian Awards, which will be announced live this Friday evening. Some great races this year, with a wide selection of winners both repeat and new. It’s always cool to see how the vote shakes out, and what is deemed Best of the Year by the most knowledgeable group of Howard fans in existence.

If someone has an internet connection and a laptop, perhaps I’ll be able to arrange for some live blogging during the event. If not, you’ll here more when I get back next week. Until then, in the words of Indy Cavalier: May Crom ignore you.

Rob’s clarifications in his Breckinridge Elkins post helped me nail down what Breck books to get and why — but also have me dwelling somewhat sullenly on what I call The Great Tragedy of REH Publishing. Howard scholars have all the texts and pulp tearsheets necessary to put together a complete uniform collection of REH. Howard fans have literally grown old and died waiting for this stuff. And yet decade after decade goes by without this happening. Why?

Primarily, the reasons are legal. I’ve been privy to all sorts of behind-the-scenes conversations and correspondence between the editors and publishers of Howard, going back many decades. At every turn, worthy ideas and projects are stymied by convoluted contracts between various parties, all warring over their claim to Howard’s work. Publisher #1 can’t print a Complete This because two of the stories have been licensed to Publisher #2 for an Incomplete That.

Then there are the editorial decisions. Things like how to design your book, what cover and font to use, how to edit it, what front matter and appendices to include. This series of books had pure texts — but died from lack of funds. That series of books didn’t die — but the texts were substandard. Almost without fail, every attempt to make a nice set of Howard material has been marred by poor decision-making.

Most of my colleagues in this field think I’m just being picky and a spoil-sport, but I am far from alone in these criticisms. I was perusing a copy of the new issue of Black Gate magazine the other day, which contains among much else an illuminating review of Del Rey’s Bran Mak Morn: The Last King. The reviewer, Jackson Kuhl, is a fantasy fan who is not a member of the Howardian inner circle of scholars, collectors, and admirers. To us insiders, of course, Bran is a major Howard hero, period. As such, any book that gives us every story and fragment along with the kitchen sink is a good thing. But listen to Kuhl’s gripes:

The Last King…holds only brief excitement for those simply desirous of pulp adventure. The book comprises a mishmash of Howardania…here’s the kicker: of the seven complete stories, only three actually feature Bran Mak Morn. The shadow of the character looms over a fourth but he never appears onstage. A $16 for the volume, that’s four bucks a pop…the editors can only work with what Howard produced. Yet the decision to dedicate an entire omnibus to a character in three (perhaps four) finished stories is strange — a move suitable for Wandering Star’s collector’s series, maybe, but not for a general audience TPB. All four could have been easily inserted within a broader collection of barbarian tales (like Wandering Star’s own The Ultimate Triumph).

Kuhl ends with the assessment that, “Readers hungry for sword-&-sorcery will find The Last King more gristle than meat.” Elsewhere in the review he does go out of his way to repeat what we all think: that getting some pure texts into print is a notable and worthy achievement. But when you have fervent fantasy fans like Kuhl — who you would think are the perfect target audience for Del Rey’s Howard books — leveling such pointed criticism at a volume containing some of Howard’s very best work, something is wrong. How many other fans have dutifully purchased these Wandering Star/Del Rey releases, growing more frustrated not only at the meat-to-gristle ratio, but at the repetition of stories among different books? By the time the two-volume Best of REH is released this year, some of the stories will have been republished no less than three separate times in this series. At what point does a fan — a general reader shelling out real money — get sick of paying for the same stories, or for hundreds of pages of incomplete material and editorializing they don’t care about?

It’s not just fans who are rebelling. As editor of The Cimmerian I get a lot of mail from guys who rank among the most passionate Howard collectors in the world, but who are not public figures in Howard fandom. It is hard to overestimate the rage they feel at Wandering Star for promising them a set of Deluxe books but then leaving them high and dry. Pure text fans paid in many cases $500-$1000 for their copy of The Savage Tales of Solomon Kane, only to later discover that the book actually contains several impure and uncorrected stories. Even ten years later, none of the people involved have released an errata sheet of any kind, adding insult to injury. First edition collectors, meanwhile, looked past this gaffe only to be stunned when — after shelling out $200 each for the first two Conan volumes — the third appeared first from Del Rey as a trade paperback, making that the true first edition, and destroying the first-edition collectability of the Wandering Star volumes. When in V3n11 a Cimmerian reader informed us that while on vacation in Spain he saw a complete set of the WS Conans put out by a Spanish publisher, in Deluxe slipcased editions with all the trimmings, and much cheaper than the WS volumes, it was the cherry on the cake of the American collectors’ nightmare. Hablamos Espanol, amigos?

Scholars should be tossed into this boiling pot as well. Word on the street is that much talk at the Windy City Pulp Convention was dedicated to grumbling about how outrageously bad the first REH Foundation release was. Those who managed to swallow their pride and shell out upwards of $50 (including shipping) for the volume — despite recoiling from the wildly inappropriate Little Red Riding Hood cover — received a tome of disheartening thinness, with poems set against absurdly inept margins that had text running into the middle of the book and leaving vast expanses of white space on the page edge. Didn’t anyone print a test copy, for Pete’s sake? Fifty bucks, gone — and now word is out that another poetry book titled Selected Poems is being released this year, doubtless for another $50 all told. With the first being so anemic, could not the two have been combined? Or better yet, how about releasing The Complete Poems of REH for $50? I know of many Howard fans who find themselves unable to justify buying these books or joining the Foundation due to these problems, myself among them.

All of the above, then, stems from legal issues combined with bad business and editorial decisions, and to this day it has Howard publishing in a stranglehold. I’m convinced that a 95%-99.9% pure REH set could be collected and published over, say, a year. A set containing all the stories, all the poems, all the letters, and then several appendix volumes of fragments, incomplete stories, non-fiction, juvenilia, and other miscellany. A uniform set of hardcovers, with good solid production values. Texts could be restored to eliminate political correctness when we know of it, as in the Breck books Rob wrote of, but production would not be held up for years waiting for original typescripts to surface — the “perfect” would not be allowed to become the enemy of the “good.” As Cimmerian readers learned in V2n2 and V2n3, the Bison series has its share of minor typos, true — but that five-volume series is uniform, elegant, and packed to the gills with solid REH material. What I would give for a similarly imperfect but Pretty Damn Good extension of that set including the rest of Howard’s work.

If I had carte blanche to make my own set, what exactly would it look like? Hard to say for sure until such time as I do it, but I have some general guidelines in mind. Big, full-sized, uniform hardcovers. Big, elegant, readable font. Ribbon bookmark sewn in. Acid-free paper. Black boards with gold-impressed text. No dustjackets, but with paintings pressed into the front cover. Slipcases that actually fit the book comfortably, unlike the maddening too-tight ones that came with the Wandering Star Bran Mak Morn: The Last King.

Covers would be Frazetta paintings for the Conan volumes and for as many of the others as would make sense, and classy photos of REH on the Letters and Poetry volumes. Inside there will be no art, no essays, no footnotes. Just brief introductions giving the reader a bit of context, and maps when necessary in the text or as fold-outs glued onto the back boards, like Tolkien publishers have done for so many years.

Stories would be published only once, and the main volumes would contain only complete stories, arranged for maximum reader impact, not according to some artificial or pedantic chronology. These books would be designed to really wow the Jackson Kuhls of the world, the people who come to REH to read his stories — what a concept. Characters with enough material would get their own volumes, while lesser characters and genres would be combined in various ways.

Incomplete, fragmentary, or otherwise marginal material would be reserved for a set of Appendix volumes at the rear of the set. In the case of poetry, in the main set there would be a big Poetry of Robert E. Howard volume containing only what I judge to be his best verse, the stuff that is to poetry what Conan was to prose. Later, in the Appendix volumes, his more marginal poems — limericks, juvenilia, etc. — would be collected separately, or left to be found in the letters in which they appeared. That way I could hand someone the poetry book without being embarrassed at all the crap mixed in with the gems.

All of my idle brainstorming might produce a set that looks like this, with each subject taking up as many volumes as needed:

MAIN SET
Conan
Kull/Bran
Solomon Kane
Sailor Steve Costigan
Breckinridge Elkins
El Borak
Boxing
Westerns
Horror
Historical Adventure
Fantasy Adventure
Modern Adventure
Poems
Letters
____________________
APPENDICES
Juvenilia
Non-Fiction
Miscellany
Drafts

Doubtless there would be a thousand little tweaks to make along the way, but this is a set I would love to own and read. And once something like this is collected and formatted, it wouldn’t be difficult to update the texts for each new printing as better versions are discovered, or to repackage various volumes as meaty and fan-friendly mass market or trade papers, or to extricate certain tales for Best Of or Penguin Classics and Library of America type books. The trick is to do the best job you can, but to complete such a set, now, come hell or high water, even if it means publishing some stories that will surely be corrected in various ways once the typescripts are found and analyzed.

Tolkien publishing has done this for years, putting out the same books in edition after edition, in a variety of different deluxe and mass market formats, with each one more or less improving on the last. At no point did people go crazy over the many, many typos or errors to be found in these books. Lord of the Rings and company were popular, errors and all — the basic achievement was there for all to see and appreciate, crystal clear. It’s the same with REH: of course it’s nice to get more pure whenever possible, but it would be far nicer to have all of his work in a uniform set of hardcovers. When I think of the hundreds of thousands of dollars sunk into the Wandering Star series, with most of the money being spent not on Howard’s words but on goatskin covers, and high-priced comic book art, and specially made paper, and dozens of pages given not to Howard’s words but to the writing of others, I sigh with regret at what could have been. A fraction of that money handed over to a professional editor who knows how to quickly assemble books and get them proofed, and a fraction more dedicated to good solid printing and marketing, and the Robert E. Howard Library of Classics would have been complete and in the hands of fans long ago.

I’ve accepted that this state of affairs is not likely to change in my lifetime, not until everything Howard ever wrote is available in the public domain sometime around 2050. Only then will some enterprising fan who is a true bookman be able to assemble a complete and professional set of Howard’s work, along the way making the proper decisions and creating something special for those of us who primarily value Howard’s words, without obsessing over unattainable perfection. Since I won’t be alive to see that day, I suppose that I’ll end up engaging in a bit of private bookmaking one of these years, to create a personal, one-of-a-kind set. It will sit on my shelf for my enjoyment alone, and thus at long last, a least in one little corner of the world, the Great Tragedy of REH Publishing will become history.

I’m not a compulsive or completist Howard collector, but I can be tempted by curios and divergent packagings, especially from Outremer. The shameful truth is, I own 2 editions of Conan of Aquilonia (two more than can be justified on the basis of sword-and-sorcery merit).

The first is of course the original 1977 Ace Books paperback designed to look as much like the lost Twelth Tribe of Lancer as possible, but with a Boris Vallejo cover painting: Conan (a well-preserved graybeard) and a catamite-resembling Conn confront a Zembabwan spearman atop the least menacing wyvern in reptilian mythohistory.

(Continue reading this post)

Alright, so I finally sat down and worked up a “Howard Days 2007 Information Page,” and popped it up over at rehupa.com. For those of you who have never been to REH Days before, there is a lot of useful tips and suggestions to be found throughout the document. For the rest of you, skimming the old sections and concentrating on the new is your best bet. Here are some highlights to be aware of.

First, notice that the schedule is a bit looser this year, with a few less panels and more free time factored in. This is to give us a bit of a break from the somewhat hectic schedules of years prior, giving us time during the day to take a day trip or two and see a bit more of Cross Plains and its environs than we normally do. You may want to drive down to Brownwood to see the Howard collection at Howard Payne University, then cruise on to Bangs and Clear Creek cemetery to visit Novalyne’s grave, then to Greenleaf cemetery to spend the time to see not only REH’s final resting place, but those of his friend Tevis Clyde Smith (in the back of the cemetery), or of Noah Byers and other historical personages. Or you could drive to Cross Cut and see where Howard lived in his youth. Or you could walk from the Howard house down the road to Turkey Creek, site of a few Howard anecdotes. Or perhaps you’ll just want to take an afternoon nap in your motel room, or chill out at the Dairy Queen, or fan yourself under the pavilion or in the dining room of the Howard Museum. Any way you spend it, I think having a bit more free time is a good thing. Most of us lament that we don’t have enough time to talk to everyone we want to at REH Days, so this should help in that respect as well.

Second, I have provided some more details about the Thursday trip to Fort McKavett and Enchanted Rock State Park. It was a fun trip the first time I took it in 2005, and I think everyone who goes this year will have a blast. If you’ve been going to Howard Days every year and feel a bit of “same old, same old” creeping in, this excursion should shake things up and provide a welcome change.

The panels this year are all focused far more on Howard’s work and characters than his biography, so general fans will have a lot more to sink their teeth into. From what I’ve heard so far from the panelists, they should be a lot of fun and very informative.

Of course, the Cimmerian Awards will be presented on Friday night, and with the huge influx of Centennial product last year, the races were the most thrilling and competitive ones yet.

And remember, Project Pride needs as many Silent Auction items as they can get. If you are a collector, why not send them some of your duplicates? If you’re an artist, how about sending some nice drawings for them to auction to fans? If you are a Howard publisher, perhaps a signed galley of one of your books could be mailed to them. Even items only tangentially related to REH are fair game. Lovecraft books, Leiber books, Wagner, Saunders, CAS, etc. are all welcome. In past years some people have made Howard woodcuts, Howard jean jackets, Hyborian maps, and many other one-of-a-kind collectibles for the auction. Use your imagination, and do your part towards keeping the Howard Museum in good repair and Howard Days a thriving concern. Send your auction items to:

Project Pride
P.O. Box 534
Cross Plains, TX 76443
ATTN: REH Days Silent Auction

If you are keen to share a rental car or hotel room with someone to defray some of the expense of the trip, post your request on one of the Howard forums listed on the sidebar of this website. Howard Days can be a pretty cheap trip when you utilize some forethought.

So if you can get down to Texas the second weekend of June, you’re in for a very nice time. The Centennial is past, but Howard Days continues as strong as ever. See you in a few weeks.

Despite my best efforts, occasionally an order gets damaged in transit, or affected by even more minor factors. I just received word from one customer that the Cimmerian Library issue from his most recent order made a subtle impression on the cover of his deluxe V4n2, due to the tightness with which both issues were packed together.

Just to reiterate for those who don’t know, I have a pretty liberal return policy. If you are unsatisfied with your issue for any reason, simply mail it back with a note (the package doesn’t have to be fancy, as I’ll be destroying the ish upon receipt anyway), and I’ll send you out a new one along with a cheque covering your postage. In the meantime I’ll be thinking up new ways to solve this latest wrinkle in my shipping procedures.

Our fourth year of production continues with the release of V4n2, an issue that took a long time to put together. It features a deep symposium about the two anthologies released last year, and a lot of research went into the creation of each article. This is the most text-heavy issue I can remember in a long time. Nary a picture breaks up the flow, save of course the art of Andrew Cryer. Just tens of thousands of words that are sure to stimulate your mind and provide you with new avenues of thinking about Howard’s work. I’ll be interested to see how readers like it. It’s probably the most intellectually confrontational and incendiary issue since V1n1 rocketed TC onto the Howardian scene in April, 2004.

Another pleasure to be found in this issue is the poetry. Longtime Lovecraft fan Fred Phillips provides the verse, and I daresay he is one of the more talented poets I’ve featured. I’ve already bought another one from him, and hope he keeps contributing for years to come.

Subscriber orders are all packed and ready to ship — they should get out this weekend. But this month you are in for an added treat. I’m also releasing the fourth volume in my Cimmerian Library line of booklets, and this one is loads of fun, definitely one of the best yet:

Not only does this booklet reprint one of the classic Howard essays, but it offers a number of other articles written by Herron that expand on the themes begun in the original “Conan vs. Conantics.” Karl Edward Wagner comes under some scrutiny, as does Richard Tierney and his fellow pasticher David C. Smith. And of course, L. Sprague de Camp and Lin Carter are analyzed in that way that only Don Herron can pull off. Everyone who has seen the cover thinks this is one of the all-time great cover images, based on pure entertainment value as well as the subtext present, and I’m inclined to agree. Says It All.

My next goal is to get the June issue edited and published in time for Howard Days, along with another Cimmerian Library book I think you will all enjoy. I’m still working on the V3 Index, and that might appear soon after Howard Days, perhaps in time to ship out with the August issue. The slipcases for V3 are coming too, but they have proven to be quite expensive and time-consuming to make at this unique extra-large size, and so it’s been slow going. The price on those will likely be $80, due to having a footprint double the size of last year. Making them two pieces rather than a typical one-piece open-faced slipcase also adds $$$ to the cost. I think that for V4, with a standard bi-monthly galaxy of issues, I’ll be able to reuse some of the old dies and designs and get the price back down to $40.

A few months ago I posted an analysis of the photo of Robert E. Howard posed near Galveston with his father and two members of the Chambers family, Dr. Solomon Chambers and his daughter Deoma. When we left off, I was intending to get a scan of the original photo from Solomon Chambers’ son, Norris, along with a scan of the writing on the back of the picture. Here, then, is an update.

The scans Norris sent me aren’t very good, owing to the brightness and contrast apparently being adjusted by the scanner. Nevertheless, there is more detail here than in the best copy of the photo known to date, the one Glenn made of this same original years ago:

Note the nice color tinting on the original photo, and the increased detail in Dr. Howard’s suit and REH’s pants over Glenn’s copy, as well as the details on the ground and in the grass. It appears that the writing that is on Glenn’s was added after he made his copy — or else he made his copy from another copy of the original, one with writing on it — for the original has no writing on the front at all. This original looks a bit worse for wear than the one Glenn copied — the lower left corner is now missing. Unlike other Howard photos I have hunted down the originals for (such as the three photos stored at the Bancroft Library at the University of California, Berkeley), there is no significant difference in cropping between these two.

On the back you can see that someone scrawled some basic information about the photo: “Robert Howard — about 12 yrs / Dr. Howard / Dr. Chambers / Deoma Chambers / in Feb 1918 near / Alta Loma Tx — in Galveston Co. / Tex Chambers Home burned at / sight [sic]” At least I think it says “burned.”

So who wrote this inscription? One of the Chambers family, or one of the Howards? I guess some handwriting analysis will have to be applied by someone with examples from all the primary suspects.

I’ve been doing some more poking around looking for original Howard photos. The pics I would most like to find are the ones Tevis Clyde Smith used in his self-published books on Brown County (Pecan Valley Days, Frontier’s Generation, etc.). But I e-mailed Tom Munnerlyn, who had handled TCS’s papers after he died, and he referred me to Roy Barkley, the heir to Smith’s effects. Roy says the REH shots were not among Tevis’ belongings at his death, and he has no idea where the originals are. Perhaps some distant relative inherited a photo album containing them, or perhaps they are truly lost. If so, that’s a blow. Some of those photos are among the best images of Howard on record, and it would be wonderful to see the originals in all their detail and glory.

At some point we have to hunt down the heirs for Truett Vinson and see if they have any letters or photos. I can’t help but think that they must, that although Truett refused to talk about REH at the end of his life he still may have quietly retained some items of interest. There’s just too much biographical research to still undertake, and not enough people on the trail of the ghosts.

Guest Blogger Fred Blosser adds his two cents to Steve’s recent post on The Star Rover.

FRED: I appreciate Steve’s tip of the hat in his posting today. The other guy who should be mentioned in regard to connecting the dots between The Star Rover and Howard was de Camp. I believe he was the first observer — at least, the first in print, via Dark Valley Destiny in 1983 — to remark on the similarities between The Star Rover and concepts in the Conan and James Allison stories.

With a little more luck and persistence, I might have beat Sprague to the punch by fifteen years, but to paraphrase Robert De Niro, I blew it.

I noticed the proto-Howard details in the London book when I first read it in 1968, and at that time, I asked Glenn if evidence existed that Howard had read the novel. Glenn supplied me with Howard’s “book that goes to my head like wine” comment, and I built on that in writing a college freshman English paper that I titled “Jack London and the Hyborian Age.” Before the fall semester was over that year, I revised the paper a bit and submitted it to Amra. Over Christmas break, I received a card from George Scithers accepting it for publication — but it never appeared, as far as I’m aware.

When I signed with Ted Dikty and FAX in 1976 to write a book about Howard’s weird fiction, I covered the Little People stories and salvaged a bit of “Jack London and the Hyborian Age,” particularly noting the references to Il-Marinen by both authors. I started writing my book in October 1976 and delivered the final portion of the manuscript to Dikty in February 1977. Dikty said he liked it, and sent me a galley of the first chapter to proofread, along with a xerox of artwork by Alex Nino that he said he’d use for the cover.

I proofed the galley and sent it back to Ted. Around this time, unfortunately for me, Ted decided to put my book on the back burner and first publish a big, expensive map of the Hyborian Age, along with his wife’s accompanying Gazetteer. I never heard from him again, and I presume the single galley chapter was the only one set in type. My book, like several other promised titles, never saw the light of day. (Not from FAX at least. One of the books that Dikty advertised as in the works, Glenn’s The Howard Collector anthology, later found a home at Ace.)

Looking around for something to submit to The Dark Man in the ’90s, I performed another salvage job and turned the unpublished section about the Little People stories into the article that Steve graciously mentioned. At that point, my product wasn’t exactly groundbreaking, since de Camp, in the meantime, had published his observations about Howard’s debt to The Star Rover in the background to the Allison stories, in the genesis of the Æsir and the Vanir, etc. But I’m glad that Steve seems to have liked it, and I was interested in how he picked up many, many other parallels that I hadn’t noticed.

I’ve seen a couple of new trade paperback editions of the London book in the past few years, including a moderately priced Modern Library version. I hope Steve’s article will prompt new fans to seek it out.

Steve adds: Drat. Had a survey of Howard’s weird fiction possessing the customary Blosserian seriousness of purpose appeared in 1977 or 1978, coinciding with Karl Edward Wagner’s game-changing forewords and afterwords to the Berkley Conans, that would have done a lot to improve the locust years that preceded The Dark Barbarian. I’ll have to file this one next to the history of heroic fantasy Leiber once intended to write on my Should-Have-Been Bookshelf.

Correction: Don Herron, far more knowledgeable about Fritz Leiber than are certain antipodean resurrection men I might mention, has informed me that Leiber hoped to tackle not just our favorite subgenre of fantasy but the whole genre, which leaves me yearning even more to read what was mostly never written.

[redacted] and I seem to have at least a desultory Jack London thread going, so I’d like to crack open The Star Rover for this post. The novel has long had a reputation among Howardists as James Allison’s home away from home, and Fred Blosser planted a Howard studies banner in London’s text a decade ago with “The Star Rover and the People of Night” in TDM #4, May 1997, but as the title of that article hints, Fred’s focus was Rover-ian influence on “The Children of the Night.” I’m fascinated by the novel’s Chapter XVII, which finds London, who as much as anyone other than Robert W. Service made the New World’s North his own, turning his attention to the North of the Old World and affording us an example of a major American writer contributing to “the Northern thing” decades before REH, Fletcher Pratt, Poul Anderson, or Fritz Leiber.

The nativity of the chapter’s narrator, Ragnar Lodbrog (actually an Allison-style past incarnation of Darrell Standing, who is doing the hardest possible hard time in San Quentin solitary), could not be more northern, “tempest-born on a beaked ship,” and “delivered in storm, with the spume of the cresting seas salt upon [him].” “For nursery,” Ragnar tells us, “were reeling decks and the stamp and trample of men in battle or storm.” From birth he earns the enmity of Tostig Lodbrog, alias Muspell (“The Burning”, whose immediate inclination is to drown him in “a half-pot of mead.” To establish Tostig’s badassery, London alludes to the sea-king’s having eaten “the heart of Ngun after the fight at Hasfurth” and “the spiced wine he would have from no other cup than the skull of Guthlaf.” The greatest and grimmest of Northern tales comes in with an invocation of “Gudrun’s revenge on Atl, when she gave him the hearts of his children and hers to eat while battle swept the benches, tore down the hangings raped from southern coasts, and littered the feasting board with swift corpses.” Scope that not-for-the-faint-of-heart verb “raped”; London was as bruisingly powerful aboard a longship as he was alongside a dogsled, and it’s a shame he didn’t write more things like the flashback-chapters of The Star Rover.

After proto-Howardian observations about Tostig’s entourage like “Their thoughts were ferocious; so was their eating ferocious, and their drinking,” Ragnar escapes and is finally captured by the Romans, where, from the young Robert E. Howard’s point of view, the chapter goes to hell in an imperator‘s chariot. The Northron is made “a sweep-slave in the galleys” but works his way up to “freeman, a citizen, and a soldier.” We even learn that he will eventually rise to command a legion—imagine Howard’s disgust! All of the storms and stroppiness back home are just a preamble to a Gospel According to Jack, as Pontius Pilate, who is enduring a full-court press from the Sanhedrin, Ragnar, and his highborn love interest Miriam debate what should be done with a “vagrant fisherman, this wandering preacher, this piece of driftage from Galilee.” Ragnar digs himself in deeper by insisting to Miriam “The Romans are the elder brothers of us younglings of the north. Also, I wear the harness and eat the bread of Rome.” If London’s novel did indeed “generally [go to Howard’s] head like wine,” as he told Harold Preece, Ragnar’s civis Romanum sum sentiments must have been the undrinkable lees.

(Two pop culture asides: We can’t blame London for the lamentable Revenge of the Sith-associations of the term “younglings,” and thanks to Monty Python, can anyone read or see a scene featuring Pilate or other administrators of Occupied Judaea without instantaneously thinking of Biggus Dickus? I first met B. Dickus in a German movie theater in 1981, where his nom de dubbing was Schwanzus Langus–even funnier, perhaps)

For evidence of the Ragnar chapter’s impact on Howard, we need only consult the novel-fragment published for the first time in the Del Rey version of Bran Mak Morn: The Last King, which it might still be convenient to refer to by the title Glenn Lord assigned in The Last Celt, “The Wheel Turns.” (This is the abortive project referred to in an October 5, 1923 letter to Tevis Clyde Smith–“a book which doubtless would make you tired” Howard’s narrator is Hakon, who crews for Tostig the Mighty, “a terrible warrior and a man whose wish was his only law.” Tostig’s second ship is captained by one Ragnar, and another of the dramatis personae is named Lodbrog. Where a blow from London’s Tostig sends his narrator “dazed and breathless half the length of the great board”; Howard’s Tostig is no less enraged by the narrator’s disobedience, “I caught the blow on an up-flung arm but the force was enough to knock me from my feet and send me rolling along the deck.”

London’s Tostig feasts “under the smoky rafters of Brunanbuhr” and “Jutes” is spelled “Juts” in The Star Rover, a spelling retained by Howard, in the last sentence of whose Chapter 2, “The Viking,” two ships are “sold to the Juts at Brunanbuhr.” Howard’s fragment features an “Angle” ship helmed by Gathlaff–recall London’s reference to Guthlaf and his skull’s afterlife as a beverage holder. Interestingly, this section of “The Wheel Turns” also offers a preview of Conan’s underhanded undermining of Zaporavo in “The Pool of the Black One”:

Cunningly, without speaking against Tostig and giving him an excuse to slay me, craftily, without drawing suspicion of any sort to myself, I turned the Vikings against Tostig, against his arrogance, his over-bearing ways, his cruelty. Many of them hated Tostig anyway, so it was not such a difficult matter.

We know that when Howard was taken by a story, that story was sometimes taken by Howard, who would then make it his own. In his introduction to The Lord of Samarcand and Other Adventure Tales of the Old Orient, Patrice Louinet notes “Howard’s first attempt at writing an Oriental story was contemporary to his reading Lamb’s ‘The Wolf Chaser’ (Adventure Magazine, April 30, 1922). . .The Texan first wrote a short recap of Lamb’s story, then proceeded to write a short story, or rather outline of a story, which apparently didn’t go beyond the second page.” But I think the after-effects of London’s Ragnar chapter outlasted the rather blatant appropriation evident in “The Wheel Turns.” Might not Howard’s later “Men of the Shadows” be a sort of indignant answer-song? If barbarism is the natural state of manking, then it is damn sure the natural, the only permissible state of barbarians, and Ragnar should be ashamed of himself. Against the stark backdrop of the north of Britain, where a “high mountain wind” roars “with the voice of giants,” Howard’s unnamed Scandinavian legionary reverts to his true self as the “real” Romans are Pict-picked off one by one: “By Thor and Wotan, I would teach them how a Norseman passed! With each passing moment I became less of the cultured Roman.” We can sense Howard’s glee as his Viking remarks on “years of Roman culture [slipping] away like sea-fog before the sun” and he can’t divest himself of “all dross of education and civilization” fast enough (I feel the same way when I try to read Cicero). Picture Howard at his Underwood, glaring at his well-thumbed copy of The Star Rover as he types “I was no Roman, I was a Norseman, a hairy chested, yellow bearded barbarian. And I strode the heath as arrogantly as if I trod the deck of my own galley.”

Bran himself gets in on the de-Romanizing action: “But you are a Roman, to be sure. And yet, methinks they must grow taller Romans than I had thought. And your beard, what turned it yellow?” Is it fanciful to suggest that one reason why the first few pages of “Men of the Shadows” are a real story, rather than a rejection-earning summation of Pictish history, is because Howard was picking a fight with London/Ragnar? We need not drag in Harold Bloom’s theorizing about the anxiety of influence and the patricidal inclinations of authors just starting out to speculate along these lines.

And beyond “Men of the Shadows,” might one of Ragnar’s conversations with Miriam contain an echo-in-advance of Conan and Belît’s conversation as the Tigress glides up-river on the sinister Zarkheba? Here’s London:

Let these mad dreamers go the way of their dreaming. Deny them not what they desire, above all things, above meat and wine, above song and battle, even above love of women. Deny them not their hearts’ desires that draw them across the dark of the grave to their dreams of life beyond this world. Let them pass. But you and I abide here in all the sweet we have discovered of each other. quickly enough will come the dark, and you depart for your coasts of sun and flowers, and I for the roaring table of Valhalla.

As for other possible debts, in London we find “Once I was Ushu, the archer,” in Howard “I was Lakur the archer in the land of Kita.’ In Chapter XXI of The Star Rover, a pre-Ragnarian but equally Aryan reverie, the narrator would have us know “The sword, in battle, sings not so sweet a song as the woman sings to man merely by her laugh in the moonlight, or her love-sob in the dark, or her swaying on her way under the sun while he lies dizzy with longing in the grass.” I can’t prove it, but one of Asgrimm’s disgusted utterances in “Marchers of Valhalla” seems like a direct retort to what might have struck Howard as treacle: “The kisses and love-songs of women soon pall, but the sword sings a fresh song with each stroke.”

Returning for a moment to Before Adam, one last example of Howard redoing London to his own satisfaction possibly occurs in Chapter 1 of “The Wheel Turns,” “Back Through the Ages,” which borrows the senior writer’s term “the Younger World” and evokes “the Swift One” with a character named Swift-Foot. Red-Eye, the throwback more pongid than hominid of Before Adam, gets away with murder and worse. That surely didn’t sit well with Howard, and so we get:

For I saw red rage and there, in the swaying tree-tops, a hundred feet from the ground, we fought hand to hand, the Hairy Man and I, and bare-handed and unaided I slew him, there in tree-tops, when the world was young.

And was this cursorily described incident then one of the kernels of “Spear and Fang”? Food for thought–and in honor of London, a San Francisco treat.

At the grim climax of Before Adam, Jack London’s 1907 novel of “The Younger World,” narrator Big-Tooth describes how he and his proto-hominid kinfolk were hunted into the swamps by the more Cromagnonesque Fire People, who have mastered arson and archery:

We make plaintive querulous noises, look at one another and cluster close together. It is like the meeting of the handful of survivors after the day of the end of the world.

Was the just-quoted passage the ur-version of one of Howard’s favorite reality-heightening similes? Let’s compare:

Slowly through the corpses they came, as ghosts might come to a tryst through the shambles of a dead world. (“The Frost-Giant’s Daughter”)

The survivors stared bleakly and blankly at each other, like survivors after Judgment Day or the destruction of the world. (“Red Nails”)

…until dawn came slowly, sullenly and dimly, and we halted and stared haggardly at each other, like ghosts in the morn after the destruction of the world. (“The Thunder-Rider”)

Now my intent here is not to whittle away at Howard’s artistry. In all three instances he noticeably improves upon the London original. Survivors dematerialize into ghosts, or regard each other “bleakly or blankly,” and the images of “the shambles of a dead world” and a dim and sullen dawn are all Howard. This is just one of many examples of what we’ve known for decades, that London’s work contains whole Klondikes and Yukons wherein Howardist source-hunters can prospect for inspiration-nuggets.

Speaking of the postapocalyptic, congratulations to Cormac McCarthy, the terrible beauty of whose 2006 novel The Road just won him the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction, although I still wonder how readers who take their marching orders from Oprah Winfrey are coping with the roasted-baby-on-a-spit scene.