The Nemedian Chroniclers #22 [WS16]

REHeapa Winter Solstice 2016

By Lee A. Breakiron
A WORLDWIDE PHENOMENON

Few fiction authors are as a widely published internationally as Robert E. Howard (e.g., in Bulgarian,

Croatian, Czech, Dutch, Estonian, Finnish, French, German, Greek, Hungarian, Italian, Japanese, Lithuanian, Norwegian, Polish, Portuguese, Romanian, Russian, Slovak, Spanish, Swedish, Turkish, and Yugoslavian). As former REHupan Vern Clark states:

Robert E. Howard has long been one of America’s stalwarts of Fantasy Fiction overseas, with extensive translations of his fiction & poetry, and an ever mushrooming distribution via foreign graphic story markets dating back to the original REH paperback boom of the late 1960’s. This steadily increasing presence has followed the growing stylistic and market influence of American fantasy abroad dating from the initial translations of H.P. Lovecraft’s Arkham House collections in Spain, France, and Germany. The growth of the HPL cult abroad has boded well for other American exports of the Weird Tales school, and with the exception of the Lovecraft Mythos, the fantasy fiction of REH has proved the most popular, becoming an international literary phenomenon with translations and critical publications in Spain, Germany, France, Greece, Poland, Japan, and elsewhere. [1]

All this shows how appealing REH’s exciting fantasy is across cultures, despite inevitable losses in stylistic impact through translations. Even so, there is sometimes enough enthusiasm among readers to generate fandom activities and publications. We have already covered those in France. [2] Now let’s take a look at some other countries.

GERMANY, AUSTRIA, AND SWITZERLAND

The first Howard stories published in German were in the fanzines Pioneer #25 and Lands of Wonder
‒ Pioneer #26 (Austratopia, Vienna) in 1968 and Pioneer of Wonder #28 (Follow, Passau, Germany) in 1969. Abridged translations of the Lancer series of Conan paperbacks were published by Wilhelm Heyne of Munich between 1970 and 1972 with covers by Herbert Bruch. Heyne published unabridged versions of these from 1982 to 1992 with photographic covers taken from the 1982 Conan the Barbarian movie.

Heyne also printed translations of Almuric in 1973, The Vultures of Whapeton in 1982, The Pride of Bear Creek in 1986, The Treasure of Tranicos and The Flame Knife in 1992, and The Coming of Conan the

Cimmerian in 2003, as well as the 444-page paperback Das Conan Universum (1992), which included (in

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German) REH’s “The Hyborian Age”; articles on Howard, the Hyborian Age, comics, and films; and a bibliography, all by editor Erhard Ringer; articles reprinted from the American fanzine Amra by L. Sprague de Camp, P. Schuyler Miller, Lin Carter, and John Boardman; and an article by Hermann

Urbanek (see The Robert E. Howard Bibliography of Secondary Sources, Part XXII below for specific contents). Most of REH’s other fantasy was published in German by Erich Pabel of Rastatt between 1975 and 1982 in a series of 17 Terra Fantasy paperbacks with introductions by Hubert Strassl, who wrote under the name Hugh Walker. There were generally two printings, with the second one identified by “2”

in the front cover’s lower left corner. Terra Fantasy #37: Horde aus dem Morgenland (Aug., 1977) had

the first appearance of the “Sword Woman” epigraph separate from the story. Some of this fantasy was reprinted by Walipress of Hamburg and Bastei of Bergisch Gladbach between 1978 and 1989. Pabel also

published several of Howard’s horror stories in Das Haus des Grauens (1977). See HowardWorks.com

for specific contents of these and other REH publications in German.
The most active fantasy fandom group in Germany has been the Follow Fantasy Club (= Fellowship of the Lords of the Lands of Wonder), in 1978 renamed the Erster Deutscher Fantasy Club, in Passau. Follow published the fanzines Follow and Lands of Wonder, the latter becoming the prozine Magira, named after the Sword & Sorcery fantasy world created by its editor Hubert Strassl. Strassl did the most of any German to translate and popularize Howard in Germany through introductions to German REH publications and his editorials and inclusion of Howard’s stories, poems, and letters in Lands of Wonder

Cover by Chris
Achilleos

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(i.e. issues #s 1-3 in 1967 and the 1983 reprint of #s 1-4), Magira (i.e. issues #s 11, 18, 21-36, and 38

between 1972 and 1992), and in the Club’s paperback series Fantasia (i.e. volumes #s 6, 11/12, 17, 18,

19, 27, 28/29, 30/31, 36/37, 93, and 100 from 1980 to 1996); see HowardWorks.com for which has what.

Magira #38 (spring, 1992) contained the first appearance of REH’s poem “The Dance with Death.”

Lands and Magira sell anywhere from $10 to $70 each, mainly on the sites ABEbooks.de and eBay.de.
Magira #33 (fall, 1980) reprinted an article, from Follow #84, giving the account of a visit to

Howard’s hometown of Cross Plains, Texas, in 1979 by a few Austrians (it’s never clear how many), including the article’s author, Jonny Winter. Below is my translation. You have to admire Winter’s good

humor about their provincial hosts. Note the confusion the townspeople had between Austrians and Australians, which I believe accounts for the fact that, during a 1986 visit there with their fellow REHupans, Thomas Kovacs and Steve Ghilardi, though Swiss, were continually asked, “Where’s the fella from Australia?” [3] This is the guy they were talking about.

Cover by Nikolai Lutohin

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TO FIND THE ONE AND ONLY CONAN
By Jonny Winter
Cross Plains is located in the heart of Texas, a few dozen miles from Abilene. It is, at just under 1200 residents, a rather small town. The name could come from the fact that Cross Plains, Texas, in the vast Plains, lies at the crossing of two secondary roads. Apart from gravel roads they are the only the streets of the village. The pride of the populace is a traffic light at this same intersection, which given the low traffic is not used but will be, and is the only one for miles around, providing the flair of a metropolis. One of the two streets in the local area is Main Street.

Since in all of Cross Plains, according to American custom, there is no sign saying
VISIT THE HOME OF THE FAMOUS ROBERT E. HOWARD or THE PLACE WHERE CONAN WAS BORN, I decided to make inquiries at the drugstore. I was greeted kindly and gave my spiel ‒ name, origin, and intention. The druggist tumbled over himself in his helpfulness and drummed up his woman and children, as well as two or three customers, to help the Australians who asked about Robert E. Howard. When I gently corrected them about Austria, which is in Europe, the riot was even bigger: They had never seen real exotics. Although all knew where Howard's house was, they agreed that to find it was too complicated, and therefore took me across the street to the editorial office of the Cross Plains Review. I was sure they would draw me a sketch. Later I figured out that it was probably just a bad trick to get rid of me while giving the sensation of the year to the newspaper people. Or else they take European mountaineers ‒ AustroYetis ‒ to be too stupid for the simple explanation: go two hundred yards down Main Street, at the traffic light go a hundred yards to the right, and then left to the white house.

The editor and the printer of the Cross Plains Review look something like newspaper editors with printers usually look in Westerns: left and right, a window etched with the newspaper name, in between a glass door and inside a wooden gate that separates the audience from the staff‒in my case the sole editor of the newspaper, who therefore was also the chief, and in the full consciousness of his media power sat at a high desk, wearing a green eyeshade and sleeve protectors, while in the background the second employee, an old negro, was cleaning a printing press that was older yet. A considerable part of the Cross Plains population crowded in front of me, behind me, and especially next to me in the newspaper office. The Lord Chief Editor scurried from behind his lectern, a cold glint in his eyes, as if you had prodded him with sharp images of Nessie. He was quick to describe the way to Howard’s house, which lasted a quarter of an hour because he strove diligently in between to draw information out of me, of the kind that would be suitable for printing‒understandable if you know the Cross Plains Review. The two-to-three times-weekly newspaper is restricted exclusively to local news, such as that Mrs. Anthony B. Threstlemaker III yesterday had her appendix removed and under the circumstances you should refrain from visits yet, or that Miss Elvira Gonzales, daughter of Mr. and Mrs. Pablo Y. Gonzales, would tomorrow be betrothed to Mr. Aaron T. Feinstein Jr., son of Mr. and Mrs. Aaron T. Feinstein, owner of Feinstein’s Delicatessen‒ interrupted by the latest cereal prices and special offers from the supermarket. Any further news was restricted to the national newspapers, such as the Dallas Daily

Mudslinger.

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In between, I was given the opportunity to ask a few questions and learned, for example, that Howard was not buried in Cross Plains, but in Brownwood. (We did not visit the grave because we continued in a different direction). Also, I heard that the only man in the place that had known Howard well had for two or three years charged fans up to $5 for more or less truthful stories about REH. In addition, Howard, a previously unknown writer, was apparently now enjoying a renaissance, but the names of Conan, Breckinridge Elkins, and King Kull were not known there because nobody had ever read anything by Howard, and his home had been inhabited for several years by a certain Floyd Carter (no relation to Jimmy). Also, I received the sad news that the third man of the Cross Plains Review, its owner and publisher, had gone fishing, a sad fact, because I would otherwise, in spite of the huge amount of work, have searched old issues of the newspaper from the archive, specifically those numbers that contained the account of Howard's suicide and various detailed obituaries. But of course they said it would be possible to look up the item for me in a few days, photocopy it, and send it to my home address. And of course we could use the items in our magazines! Now, my eyes began to glitter–very wrongly, as you dear readers will learn in the epilogue.

Finally in possession of a roadmap, we reached Howard’s House (see photo on page
8), talked to Floyd Carter (no relation to Jimmy, he declared). And we messed up his worldview because we insisted that Austria is not surrounded by the Great Barrier Reef. After lunch, some purchases, and unsuccessful attempts with the natives to talk about Howard, we were on our long way back to New York. The highlight of our trip was over, and a certain sadness came over us at the idea that we found that Conan was probably born there, but he certainly never lived in Cross Plains.

EPILOGUE
After our trip to the U.S., we are at least one experience richer, namely that Americans are extremely helpful, friendly, and reliable, just so long as you are close to them. Otherwise the principle is apparently: out of sight, out of mind! Despite a letter sent to the Cross Plains Review, and the text being ready to go, thanking the editors and the general public for their help, including a small donation, and in spite of friendly urgency from Europe, we have not had a word from there for half a year after our visit to Cross Plains. There is a possibility, though unlikely, that a letter carrier, far away from here, between koalas and kangaroos, seeks to deliver photocopies, according to Mr. Winter.

The article contains a photo of the Howard house, and more photos of Cross Plains are in Follow #84.

In one of the Erster Deutscher Fantasy Club’s Fantasia paperbacks, namely the 444-page #30/31: Ein

Träumer aus Texas: Leben & Werk Robert E. Howards [A Dreamer from Texas : Robert E. Howard’s Life

and Work] of March, 1987, edited by Franz Schröpf, there are, among other things, the 222-page title essay about REH by Bernd Karwath (mostly based on de Camp’s biography Dark Valley Destiny: The Life of Robert E. Howard), ten other articles about Howard and his works by Kovacs and others, German

versions of “Musings of a Moron” and “The Ghost of Camp Colorado,” 26 letters from Howard, his

father, or E. Hoffmann Price, all in German, and 47 REH poems, most both in English and German.

Three of the poems had been overlooked in the compilation of Paul Herman’s bibliography The Neverending Hunt. Three others were only given as “Untitled” and rendered only in German. One poem, “A Dungeon Opens,” made its first appearance in this book. See The Robert E. Howard Bibliography of

Secondary Sources, Part XXII below for specific contents.

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Fantasia #93: Rauher Sand und Wilde Eichen [Rough Sand and Wild Oaks] published by the Club in

the spring of 1995, contains Howard’s semi-autobiographical novel Post Oaks and Sand Roughs, the

story “Spear and Fang,” the poem “A Man” (its first appearance), an article on the boxer Kid Dula, and

some drawings, all by Howard, as well as seven letters from or to REH and forewords by long-time REH heir agent and scholar Glenn Lord, Kovacs, and Howard’s sometime girlfriend Novalyne Price Ellis. Everything is in German except for some of the letters, which are in English or both German and English,

and Novalyne’s foreword, “Der Mann, der Robert Howard War” (“Robert Howard the Man”), which is in

both languages. The latter was written especially for this publication and has never been reprinted. I have reproduced the English version below. Dennis McHaney has suggested that it be used in the upcoming REH Foundation reprint of Post Oaks. I hope it is.

Cover by Bodo Schäfer

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ROBERT E. HOWARD THE MAN
By Novalyne Price Ellis
Robert E. Howard always contended that he hated the business of writing. What he meant by that is different from the way most people understand it. To him the business of writing meant the problem of hunting fur the right market, sending a manuscript out, getting it back for revision in order to begin the cycle all over again. Staying at the typewriter from six to eighteen hours a day “hammering out a story” was the thing he most enjoyed. It was something he had wanted to do all his life. Jobs in stores, working in an office, taking dictation were chores he wanted to avoid at all cost.

During the last two years of his life, 1934 to 1936, we were good friends. I listened to his protestations about the “sorry business of writing,” but I did not take him seriously. People who read his novel Post Oaks and Sand Roughs should realize that as a writer, and a good one, he sometimes exaggerated as all writers do to add clarity and give believ-

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ability to a story.
Yes. The character of Steve Costigan is Robert Ervin Howard. To those of us who called him friend, he was Bob, a selling writer whom we envied. He claimed he was Bob Howard, forced into work he hated.

In the 1930s, in the little town of Cross Plains and in the country near Brownwood, where I had lived all my life, a man or woman sitting at a typewriter all day writing stories was thought to be too lazy to get out and get a real job. That may be one reason why Bob talked about hating being at the typewriter all day.

In his book, Post Oaks and Sand Roughs, Bob paints himself as a very moody person.
Like all young people, he did have moods ranging from normal to a stage of feeling low, then to feelings of elation when a story sold or something else happened that he was interested in. What normal young person has not had the same feelings and moods?

I was fortunate to have been friends with all three of the young men given the most prominence in the book: Clyde Smith, Truett Vinson, and Bob Howard. There is much of each of them in this novel. I knew two of Bob's other friends: Lindsey Tyson and Dave Lee, but not well enough to know whether Spike Lafferty is a true picture of Lindsey or not. The Lindsey Tyson I knew was such a nice person, I felt the portrayal of him was not quite accurate. Now, I am not sure because I have learned that Lindsey read the manuscript and helped identify the characters in it. Apparently he didn’t object.

The boxing match between Steve Costigan and Clive Hilton interested me very much.
Boxing was their favorite sport. If the fight recounted here was.as bloody and ferocious as it is described, I am amazed that the people in the neighborhood did not come out of their houses to stand in their yards and watch it. Being the mother of one son, I am also amazed that Clyde’s mother allowed the match to last as long as it did.

Bob was a great talker. He talked about politics and the world as he saw it. He loved to talk about books. He was probably the most fluent when he wove stories about people he didn’t know. For example, if we passed a man riding a horse on a cold day, Bob could weave a fantastic story about the man ... where he came from … where he was going ... the things he dreamed of accomplishing in contrast with the things he would accomplish. He made that man a most interesting character.

.

The memory of him waving his arms and telling a story at the very top of his voice will stay with me forever. I’ve always thought if the stories he wrote was the way he described the people and events around him, those stories had to be fascinating.

Bob’s voice was full, rich, and melodious. You could believe he was telling you a story that had been published although you may have known it was being made up as he went along. His description of the fight with Clive Hilton is interesting and entertaining. But his description of the fight with the roughneck in the drugstore who tried to steal the magazine is more exciting and fascinating. It is realism at its best.

Following the description of the fight with the roughneck, he describes his emotions who as a struggling writer is advised by friends, who did not write, how and what he should do with his writing, his frustration in such cases is understandable. His patience is

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another unpredictable aspect of this book. He does not seem as angry with the friends as he was or should have been in such cases.

Another remark he makes which I’d like to comment on is one that I think is typical of him. He says,

He was tough skinned, but there are sensitive nerves under the toughest skin.
This, I think, is a good characterization of Bob himself. He might pretend not to care what people thought about him, but it seemed to me other people’s opinion mattered very much to him.

Another remark, which I found revealing of his deepest feelings, was that “any writer

has powerful and beautiful thoughts.”

Over and over he makes remarks about how much he dislikes writing or “sitting all day at the typewriter.” However, he also makes frequent remarks about liking his work! Another admission he makes that I think is important is that his rejection of religion is a sham. Many people have written and used some of those skeptical remarks about religion to prove he was not religious. I do not think such remarks should be taken too seriously. As he says in this novel he was a believer, but, in real life, it’s true he was not a confirmed church goer.

He goes to great length to compliment Clyde on his poetry. Although Clyde’s poetry is excellent, I think Bob overdoes it; however, he always admired other people and compared himself unfavorably with them. I will give another example of this tendency of his, which is not in the book but is appropriate to mention here. He used to talk about what a great writer E. Hoffmann Price was.¹In each case he talked about what a poor writer he himself was. While I can agree with Bob on the importance of Clyde’s poetry, he failed to mention another writing project of Clyde’s in which he was interested.

Clyde was writing a history of Brownwood and Brown County. It was a different kind of history because Clyde was going around the county interviewing old settlers or their direct descendants and getting their stories of the times and problems they faced when they were the first settlers in the pristine county. Bob was interested in that project because he placed many of his stories in former times. Since Clyde’s stories were told by eyewitnesses, it was and is valuable to anyone interested in the early history of the country. It was valuable to Bob.²

¹Edgar Hoffmann Price (l898-1988). (Not related to Novalyne Price Ellis.) Howard’s friend and fellow author. Price and his wife visited Howard from 8 to 11 April 1934 in Cross Plains and a second time in mid-October 1935. Price was the only person who met both Howard and penpal H. P. Lovecraft personally.

Concerning the praise, it must be noted that Price was much influenced in his literary development by Howard.

²This book is Frontier’s Generation by Tevis Clyde Smith self-published in 1931. It appeared again in l980, self-published, in an expanded new edition.

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Most of the time, Bob presents himself as a coward. The fact that he faced the man who stole the magazine indicates that he was not the coward he pretended to be.

Another way Bob presents himself unfairly is his leaving the impression that he went home to let his parents take care of him. When he decided to go home and devote his

time to writing, he made a bargain with them. He asked to come home and write. If he was not able to sell anything in a year or two, he would get a job in a store or anywhere he could find one. While he was home, he helped with housework and when his mother became ill, he took the full responsibility of taking care of her. To me, this does not mean that 'he had a mother fixation as some people have suggested.

In the last scene of the book where he talks to Clive and Sebastian before he gets on a bus to begin a round the world journey is a vivid picture of one of his cherished dreams. He dreamed of making a trip around the world. One thing he especially wanted to do was follow the trail that Alexander the Great had followed in his conquest of the ancient world.