“We of The Islands are all one blood, but of many tribes, and each tribe has customs and traditions peculiar to itself alone. We all acknowledge Nial of the Tatheli as over-king but his rule is loose. He does not interfere with our affairs among ourselves, nor does he levy tribute or taxes.… [H]e takes no toll of my tribe, the Borni, nor of any other tribe. Neither does he interfere when two tribes go to war – unless some tribe encroaches on the three who pay tribute…. And when the Lemurians or the Celts or any foreign nation or band of reavers come against us, he sends forth for all tribes to put aside their quarrels and fight side by side. Which is a good thing. He might be a supreme tyrant if he liked, for his own tribe is very strong, and with the aid of Valusia he might do as he liked – but he knows that though he might, with his tribes and their allies, crush all the other tribes, there would never be peace again….” (from the untitled Kull fragment)
Here are more than passing resemblances. In both instances, the peculiar political turmoil can also be read as a mirror of a similar turmoil taking place in Howard’s psyche, connected to the social situation of his regular protagonists: Kull the king of Valusia and Conan the soon-to-be king of Aquilonia. In both instances, the Picts – only mentioned once so far in the Conan series (in The Phoenix on the Sword) – appear as the necessary catalysts for the change: Brule is a Pict, and the threat they pose to the Aquilonian settlement triggers the events of Wolves Beyond the Border. The Picts – the savages forever present in Howard’s universe – force the Howardian characters to reveal their true nature.
As was the case with the Kull fragment then, Howard did not complete Wolves Beyond the Border. His first draft diminished to part-story, part synopsis, while the second was simply abandoned. The tale was probably at the same time too derivative of Chambers and too much a necessary exercise before Howard could fully tackle this new phase of his character’s evolution.
To say that Beyond the Black River was born on the ashes of Wolves Beyond the Border would be belaboring the obvious. This time, however, Howard got rid almost entirely of the Chambers influence. There is no plot element in Black River which can be traced back to Chambers, and only a few names still show the initial connection (for instance, Conajohara was carried on from Wolves and “Balthus” was derived from the “Baltus” of The Little Red Foot). Beyond the Black River is pure Howard.
The tale was particularly dear to Howard. To August Derleth he remarked that he “wanted to see if [he] could write an interesting Conan yarn without sex interest.” He was a little more explicit with Lovecraft, writing that his latest sale to Weird Tales was “a two-part Conan serial: ‘Beyond the Black River’ – a frontier story… In the Conan story I’ve attempted a new style and setting entirely – abandoned the exotic settings of lost cities, decaying civilizations, golden domes, marble palaces, silk-clad dancing girls, etc., and thrown my story against a back-ground of forests and rivers, log cabins, frontier outposts, buckskin-clad settlers, and painted tribesmen.”
It was to Novalyne Price that Howard fully bared his sentiments toward that story:
Bob began to talk. But he was not berating civilization; instead, he was praising the simple things that civilization had to offer: standing on street corners, talking with friends; walking with the warmth of the sun on your back, a faithful dog by your side; hunting cactus with your best girl.
[…]
“I sold Wright a yarn like that a few months ago.” He turned and looked at me, his eyes turbulent. “I’m damned surprised he took it. It’s different from my other Conan yarns . . . no sex . . . only men fighting against the savagery and bestiality about to engulf them. I want you to read it when it comes out. It’s filled with the important little things of civilization, little things that make men think civilization’s worth living and dying for.”
[…]
He was excited about it because it was about this country and it sold! He had a honing to write more about this country, not an ordinary cowboy yarn, or a wild west shoot ’em up, though God knew this country was alive with yarns like that waiting to be written. But in his heart, he wanted to say more than that. He wanted to tell the simple story of this country and the hardships the settlers had suffered, pitted against a frightened, semi-barbaric people – the Indians, who were trying to hold on to a way of life and a country they loved. . . . But a novel depicting the settlers’ fear as they tried to carve out a new life, and the Indians’ fear as they tried to hold on to a doomed country; why, girl, all that would make the best damn novel ever written about frontier life in the Southwest.
[…]
“I tried that yarn out to see what Wright would do about it. I was afraid he wouldn’t take it, but he did! By God, he took it! ”
Beyond the Black River is considered by many Howard scholars to be his best story, encapsulating the essence of his philosophy: “Barbarism is the natural state of mankind. . . . Civilization is unnatural. It is a whim of circumstance. And barbarism must always ultimately triumph.”
Indeed, all the characters who are not barbarians meet their doom in the tale: Tiberias the merchant, presented as the epitome of civilized decadence, is of course the first example, portrayed with evident scorn as a man unwilling or unable to adjust his civilized ways to life on the Frontier. But even the woodsmen, born to civilization but having lived their lives on the frontier, can not hope to prevail: “They were sons of civilization, reverted to a semi-barbarism. [Conan] was a barbarian of a thousand generations of barbarians. They had acquired stealth and craft, but he had been born to these things. He excelled them even in lithe economy of motion. They were wolves, but he was a tiger.” The frontiersmen, Balthus, and Valannus all died because of this, and Howard’s genius was not to sacrifice his story for the sake of the usual conventions of the genre.
Much has been written about the exact signification of the last paragraph of the story. Many erroneously credit the statement to Conan, as if it were his sentiment, but it is not Conan but an unnamed forester who utters these words. That the barbarians always ultimately triumph is a simple report of what has just transpired: only Conan and the Picts have survived the ordeal, because it was their nature to survive. That Conan had in fact more in common with the Picts he was fighting than with the Aquilonians had been made clear by Howard earlier in the story:
“But some day a man will rise and unite thirty or forty clans [of the Picts], just as was done among the Cimmerians, when the Gundermen tried to push the border northward, years ago. They tried to colonize the southern marches of Cimmeria: destroyed a few small clans, built a fort-town, Venarium, – you’ve heard the tale.”
“So I have indeed,” replied Balthus, wincing. . . . “My uncle was at Venarium when the Cimmerians swarmed over the walls. . . . The barbarians swept out of the hills in a ravening horde, without warning, and stormed Venarium with such fury none could stand before them. Men, women and children were butchered. Venarium was reduced to a mass of charred ruins, as it is to this day. The Aquilonians were driven back across the marches, and have never since tried to colonize the Cimmerian country. But you speak of Venarium familiarly. Perhaps you were there?”
“I was,” grunted the other. “I was one of the horde that swarmed over the walls. . . .”
[…]
“Then you, too, are a barbarian!” he exclaimed involuntarily.
The other nodded, without taking offense.
“I am Conan, a Cimmerian.”
The import of this passage was not merely to give some additional biographical information on the Cimmerian, but rather to make explicit the connection between Conan and the Picts. Conan is a barbarian “as ferocious as the Picts, and much more intelligent” and this is why he will survive. The insistence on Conan’s elemental nature, much more marked than in any of the previous tales of the Cimmerian, very probably provoked the emergence of Balthus as the character readers – and Howard himself – could relate to. Critic George Scithers once noted that Howard had undoubtedly projected hims
elf and his dog Patches into this story under the guise of Balthus and Slasher. As a civilized man himself, Howard could no more hope to prevail in the Hyborian Age than his civilized characters.
It was a rare thing indeed in pulp fiction to see a tale concluding with so bleak an ending, in which most of the characters die and the situation is worse at the end of the story than it was at its beginning. Howard was here trying to deliver a message much more than to simply add another Conan story to his bibliography.
Beyond the Black River was bought by Farnsworth Wright in early October 1934. It was published as a serial in the May and June 1935 issues of Weird Tales, but without the honors of the cover. Either Wright wanted to add some variety to his covers (he hadn’t granted The Servants of Bit-Yakin cover privilege either), or the lack of a semi-naked heroine prevented him from doing that. The cover for the May 1935 issue did not feature an undressed woman, though, so that question must remain unanswered.
In the months of October and November 1934 Howard was apparently too much occupied with his romance with Novalyne Price to devote any time to writing new Conan tales. At about the time Beyond the Black River was accepted, though, Howard received bad news from England: “Just got a letter informing me that the English company which had promised to bring out my book [the Conan novel The Hour of the Dragon] had gone into the hands of the receiver. Just my luck. The yarn’s in the hands of the company which bought up the assets, but I haven’t heard from them.” The novel was, however, soon returned. Howard very probably touched it up very slightly, sent it to Weird Tales later in the year, and soon received news that it was accepted, probably in early January 1935. Wright was apparently satisfied that Howard was returning to less experimental tales: “Wright says it’s my best Conan story so far.”
In December, as he was informing Lovecraft of the sale of Beyond the Black River and commenting on its unusual tone, he added: “Some day I’m going to try my hand at a longer yarn of the same style, a serial of four or five parts.”
It appears that Howard didn’t wait very long before writing this serial. The Black Stranger is one of those Howard stories for which we have no information regarding composition, but the writing date can be estimated around January and/or February 1935 thanks to the partial drafts of other stories found on the backs of the pages of several drafts. On the back of The Black Stranger are found several pages for stories composed in December 1934 and early 1935. It seems reasonable enough to suppose that Howard began work on that serial after his revision – and the acceptance – of The Hour of the Dragon.
The Black Stranger was evidently conceived as a follow-up of sorts to Beyond the Black River featuring once again Conan opposed to the Picts, and once again it was a very experimental tale, as the Cimmerian isn’t introduced until halfway through the novelette-length story. (He is, of course, featured in the first chapter, but his identity is not revealed to the reader.)
The Black Stranger has never received the critical attention it is due, primarily because it was not published in its original form until 1987, when Karl Edward Wagner included it in an anthology. In all its previous appearances, the story had been mercilessly butchered. The tale is simple enough on its surface, mixing elements of piratical adventure and Indian warfare, but should definitely not be dismissed in a cavalier way, as has been done sometimes. The Black Stranger is an extremely complex tale once one has understood that it is replete, consciously or unconsciously, with autobiographical elements, much more so than any of the stories Howard had written to date.
The story is set on the coasts of the Hyborian Age’s equivalent of the United States, at a time which would roughly correspond to our seventeenth century. It is the tale of early settlers – of a sort – on a continent that is still largely dominated by wild tribes, the Hyborian Age equivalent of Native Americans. A child is prominently featured, a rare occurrence in a Howard tale. Tina is quite a mystery to the reader: she is presented as a “pitiful waif . . . taken away from a brutal master encountered on that long voyage up from the southern coasts.” What few children appear in Howard’s fiction all share an unhappy youth; all are orphans or have been abandoned by their parents, and Tina is no exception. In this case, however, Belesa has apparently adopted the child as her own. A mysterious Black Man is hiding in the forest around the settlers’ stockade.
“Art thou like the Black Man that haunts the forest round about us?” asks the heroine of Nathaniel Hawthorne’s The Scarlet Letter of her husband, Roger Chillingworth. Hawthorne’s novel, published in 1850, presents points of remarkable resemblance to Howard’s tale. Both stories are centered around a woman and her child (real or adopted), forced to live in a hostile environment, victims of the scorn of the men around them. The time frame and settings are remarkably similar, and Pearl, the young heroine of Hawthorne’s novel, is a child as strange and fey as Tina. In both stories, the child is frightened by a mysterious Black Man almost always offstage. There is too much similarity to consider this a simple matter of coincidence. Hawthorne was not represented in Howard’s library, and he is never mentioned by Howard in any of the surviving papers. That he had read Hawthorne, perhaps as part of his schooling, seems more than probable, though: The Scarlet Letter seems to have furnished a lot of background for The Black Stranger, even though the events themselves have nothing in common.
All this invites a different reading of the tale, in which Tina may be seen as a fatherless child, particularly sensitive to the presence of the Black Man. Readers familiar with Howard’s biography will be even more startled, for in Hawthorne’s novel Pearl’s mother is named Hester, and the father she does not know, counterpart to Tina’s Black Man, is the blue-eyed physician Roger Chillingworth. Howard’s mother’s name was Hester, and she was married to a blue-eyed physician.
The Black Stranger apparently failed to sell to Weird Tales, though no record for this survives. Wright was perhaps irritated by Howard’s experimental forays, and, probably around February or March 1935, for the first time in many months rejected a Conan tale. Howard decided to salvage what he could, and rewrote the story. He invented a new character – Terence Vulmea, an Irish pirate – to replace Conan, got rid of all the Hyborian references, and submitted the new story, rechristened Swords of the Red Brotherhood, to his agent Otis Adelbert Kline in late May 1935. The new version was circulated for several years, and was sold in 1938, but the magazine which was to publish it folded, so this version didn’t see print until 1976.
The next Conan tale would be anything but experimental. The Man-Eaters of Zamboula was apparently written around March 1935, judging from the stories found on the back of the draft pages. It is a routine Conan story, similar in quality to those Howard had been forced to write when he was in dire need of money. Surrounded by such masterpieces as Beyond the Black River, The Black Stranger and the future Red Nails, it more than pales in comparison. It seems that Howard borrowed the settings from the various Middle Eastern adventures he was writing at the same time (featuring his characters Kirby O’Donnell and Francis Xavier Gordon), while borrowing some of the premises of an unsold detective story, Guests of the Hoodoo Room, which very likely preceded the Conan story by a few months. Guests also featured cannibals capturing poor wretches by way of a rigged hotel room. The plot is rather unconvincing, but Howard probably knew this wouldn’t prevent Wright from accepting the story. The scene in which Zabibi/Nafertari dances naked amid the snakes seems to have been written with only one goal to mind: to win the cover spot. Brundage’s cover illustration for that story is indeed a remarkable one. That it does not feature the Cimmerian was something Howard was growing accustomed to: of the nine Weird Tales covers illustrating a Conan story, the Cimmerian himself was portrayed in only three.
On December 22, 1934, Howard presented Novalyne Price with a most surprising Christmas present: expecting a history book, she was presented instead with a copy of The Complete Works of Pierre Louÿs:
“A history?” I asked bewildered.
He shifted his weight in his chair and grinned. “Well, . . . Yeah. It’s a kind of history.”
[...]
Then Bob said the book described very vividly our “rotting civilization.”
[...]
After Bob left, I sat down, unwrapped the book, and began to look at it very carefully. I read the inscription again, trying to make sense out of it : “The French have one gift – the ability to guild decay and change the maggots of corruption to the humming birds of poetry – as demonstrated by this volume.”
Some time later, Novalyne was questioning Howard about this very peculiar present:
“Bob, why did you give me that book by Pierre Louÿs?”
He whirled and looked at me. “Didn’t you like it?”
“It was a little too strong for my blood,” I said defensively. “I didn’t read too much of it.”
“Read it. . . . You lead a sheltered life. You don’t know what’s going on in the world.”
That irritated me. “I don’t care to know things like that,” I said hotly. “It seems to me knowing about them doesn’t make the world a better place; it only makes you a silent partner.”