REHupa

     While the deal with Lancer Books was in limbo due to litigation with Martin Greenberg of Gnome Press, L. Sprague de Camp’s attorney advised he write new Conan stories in order to make a better claim to the series. There was a problem— de Camp had failed to resurrect sword and sorcery fiction in the 1950s with his aborted Pusad series nor had he written any new Conan stories. As already pointed out, he was incapable of turning the synopsis of “The Drums of Tombalku” into a novel. He had other weaknesses as a writer. Brian M. Stableford wrote the entry on L. Sprague de Camp for Science Fiction Writers (Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1982) edited by E. F. Bleiler:

“Converting his excellent ideas into workable stories and constructing plots in such a way as to make good use of his erudition were things that continued to cause de Camp problems throughout his career. A great many of his novels are merely episodic accounts of journeys whose protagonists encounter a series of strange situations. This weakness of plot structure and design sometimes results in a lack of dramatic tension.”

     He was going to have to get a collaborator to provide story ideas. In the 1990s, de Camp mentioned in several of his letters to REHupa that he should have asked Leigh Brackett to come on board. This probably would not have worked as Brackett would not have played second fiddle to de Camp nor submit easily to his editorial dictates. She was making better money writing movie screen plays for Howard Hawks than for some bottom tier paperback house. If she was to write Conan stories, she didn’t need de Camp. De Camp was going to have to find someone more pliable. John Jakes had started writing the Brak stories in 1963 for Fantastic Stories. Jakes started in the last years of the pulp magazines and a professional writer in his own right long before this.

I had asked De Camp about Gardner Fox who had some background in sword and sorcery fiction in the 1940s in the pages of Planet Stories. He didn’t even know about Fox at the time.  Enter Linwood Vrooman Carter, a fan who had written several novels before he was finally published. Carter was younger than de Camp and at heart a fan-boy. Carter got his big break during the Burroughs boom of the early and mid-60s. Donald A. Wollheim, editor at Ace Books was reprinting Otis Adelbert Kline, Ralph Milne Farley, and Ray Cummings in order to satisfy the new demand for sword and planet fiction. He also had some new novels by Gardner Fox (Warrior of Llarn), Andre Norton (Witch World), and Lin Carter. Carter’s first novel, The Wizard of Lemuria was in 1965. Carter’s main hero, Thongor, was an imitation barbarian modelled on Conan. The setting is the lost continent of Lemuria 100,000 years ago. The book has been described as a head on collision of Edgar Rice Burroughs and Robert E. Howard. There is little Robert E. Howard influence outside of the antediluvian setting and barbarian hero. Carter’s novel is pure Barsoom to the point of having flying boats present. Thongor is also more passive than Conan ever was tagging along with the elderly good wizard (a Carter staple) to defeat the ancient nefarious Dragon Kings. If you have read Edgar Rice Burroughs’ A Princess of Mars, the story in The Wizard of Lemuria will be familiar to you. The novel must have done well enough to warrant a follow up in 1966—Thongor of Lemuria.

     Not everyone was impressed with Thongor. Harry Harrison had this to say about The Wizard of Lemuria in a book review for Amra #36 (September 1965):

     “Take a Conan-type hero. Set him down on Barsoom; calling it, however, Lemuria. Season thickly with elements reminiscent of Amtor and other heroic locations, including a very watered-down ‘Law versus Chaos’ struggle going on behind the scenes. Strain the whole through a sieve fine enough to remove virtually all elements of (a) characterization and (b) originality….The only distinguishing feature that I am able to discern in THE WIZARD OF LEMURIA is that it is entirely derivative of other works in the genre, with no obvious originality whatsoever. Add to this the absolute lifelessness of the characters—even at his very worse (which could, admittedly, be pretty abysmal at time), Edgar Rice Burroughs never created anybody quite this wooden….He has done such an incompetent job that for a few moments there I thought he was writing a parody of swordplay-and-sorcery….Why does this book offend me? Because there is not an ounce of originality in it. The people, machines, animals, names—everything has been assembled out of an old box of Burroughs and Howard fragments….You and I have read it all before and can exact no pleasure from having the various pieces stirred together—usually at random—and served up as new stuff. Nor has it been written well. Ghu knows we have learned not to expect too much of our authors, but we do expect them to rise above cliche once in awhile. Carter never does….Since Carter doesn’t read his own copy with any attention—why should we?….There is more. There is the awful poetry that alwys seems to adorn bad fantasy. There are the ludicrous similes (Our dreaded dwark has ’slimy saliva, reeking like an open grave.’) I suppose if there were an idiot in the story he would have a needle-pointed head….Am I being cruel? Perhaps. But Lin Carter was cruel to me. He promised me an ‘action-packed novel’ with ‘vivid sword-and-sorcery impact’ and he did not deliver. I read his book and I was not satisfied. I wish he would go away and think about what I have said, then sit down and try to write a more consistent and interesting book of his own. It will take work, but that is what he is being paid for. I enjoy reading good sword-&-sorcery, therefore I will not accept the ersatz stuff.”

     Lin Carter for most of his professional career was most adept at imitating Edgar Rice Burroughs. There are sword & planet fiction fans who consider his Callisto and Green Star series as his best series. I personally don’t like them for reasons that Harrison already mentioned in that review. Another problem that would manifest itself is L. Sprague de Camp was devoid of any ability to write horror, gothic, or weird passages. Neither could Carter; the nearest you got were pastiches of August Derleth pastiching H. P. Lovecraft and thinking mentioning all sorts of doomed families, forbidden books, and elder gods was scary in of itself. Darrell Schweitzer has described Lin Carter as an insincere writer. Carter would attempt to imitate Leigh Brackett, Lord Dunsany, Clark Ashton Smith, Derleth as Lovecraft, Lester Dent. In some of his writings, you got the impression he wanted to belong to the “imaginary worlds” sort of fantasy of E. R. Eddison and William Morris. He never got the Robert E. Howard vibe going in his own fiction. In one interview he thought the Elak of Atlantis stories of Henry Kuttner were superior to Robert E. Howard. He had a fatal attraction towards humor that would further mar a significant portion of his fiction. I have always found this passage from Imaginary Worlds (Ballantine Books, 1973) to be both telling and damning when discussing Norvell Page’s Prester John/Wan Tengri: “Wan Tengri, as Hurricane John is known to his Asiatic friends and foes, differs from Conan in being a more rounded and believable character, possessed of a surprising sense of humor.” This was the man that L. Sprague de Camp had pinned his hopes and efforts on.

Our friends over at The Cimmerian Blog have been taking Arnie Fenner to task for some less-than-laudatory comments he made in his foreword for …and their memory was a bitter tree…, the new collection of Conan stories from Tim Underwood. Fenner has stepped up and responded, but the response is as lame as the original remarks (and strikes me as rather smug).

Personally, I don’t care if Arnie Fenner doesn’t think Robert E. Howard is a great writer, because Arnie Fenner is not a person to whom I look for opinions about literature. He puts together stunningly beautiful art books (Spectrum, Icon), and may or may not know something about art, at least fantasy art and illustration. It’s pretty clear he doesn’t know much about writing.

In the foreword, he apparently said (I’m going by excerpts quoted by others), “Because, while Robert certainly was a tremendously gifted storyteller with a wholly original voice, capable of spinning an exciting yarn in first draft that could capture his reader’s imagination . . . he simply wasn’t a great writer.” Now, this is merely an opinion, and we can let it pass, though we wonder how long it will be before we can expect to stop seeing this kind of back-handed swipe at Howard in introductions by his supposed fans. Really, was the final clause actually necessary there? (Well, yes, Fenner will contend — because his point was that Howard needed an editor, badly. We’ll address that in a moment.) He could have simply left that final remark out and dropped the “Because, while”, and I daresay no one would have given the comment a second thought.

This business of trying to differentiate between a “storyteller” and a “writer” is a chump’s game. Robert E. Howard did indeed tell stories, on occasion, while sitting by a fire or on a porch of an evening or driving around in a car, keeping friends or relations enthralled. But that is not how he made his living. He made his living by writing. And by the time of his death, at the young age of 30, he was damned good at it. It is no use trying to say that Howard was just getting by on sheer storytelling gusto. Howard keeps us turning pages by the sheer power and quality of his writing, the way he put words on paper. Judging from Fenner’s short list of “great writers,” he apparently likes authors who are trying to do something more than merely entertain, writers who have something important (in his opinion) to say. It happens that many of us do believe Howard had some important things to say — about the inherently savage and violent nature of man, about the ephemerality of our “civilization,” about the need to keep at the hard work of building a civilization rather than letting ourselves slide into decadence, decline and decay — there are messages in Howard’s work that are perhaps even more important today than they were when he wrote them. As I said, though, I’m going to let Fenner’s opinion about Howard’s writing pass. I’m more inclined to accept the judgments of H.P. Lovecraft, Fritz Leiber, Karl Edward Wagner, David Drake, David Weber, and any number of other writers — people who actually know something about good writing.

But Fenner strays off into territory that I know something about — and from the realm of “opinion” to that of “fact” — when he challenges the “pure text” movement and insists that Howard needed a good editor like Farnsworth Wright.

Fenner apparently doesn’t think much of the “pure text” movement, i.e., those of us — I am probably among the most prominent, as series editor of the Wandering Star and Del Rey editions — who are intent upon presenting Howard’s work as nearly as possible as he wrote it, without editorial interference. We believe that for far too long Howard’s Conan, in particular, had been corrupted by the rewriting and pastiching of L. Sprague de Camp and others, sometimes very lightly, but sometimes in ways that worked very much to the detriment of the story, or the series. ( “The Black Stranger” was a particularly egregious example, which I covered, along with “The Frost-Giant’s Daughter,” in “De Camp vs. Howard: Rewriting Conan,” in The Fantastic Worlds of Robert E. Howard.) Simply put, we think Howard’s work should be presented the way he wrote it, with the editing consisting of no more than correcting typos or punctuation. Howard’s prose was generally sound, so there is no reason to alter it.

Fenner says, “The assumption being, of course, that REH didn’t need editing, not by Wright, de Camp, or anyone else—a questionable assertion.” A bit later he opines, “Farnsworth Wright was a good editor for Robert E. Howard…his suggestions and edits improved Robert’s work and helped him to mature as a writer.”

It’s one thing to prefer the de Camp-edited or rewritten versions of Howard stories: that’s a matter of taste. I prefer my Howard straight, rather than filtered through the sensibilities of someone whose worldview was not in synch with Howard’s. (De Camp never let an opportunity pass to extol the virtues of civilization over barbarism.) But to say that Wright’s “suggestions and edits improved Robert’s work”? This is one I’m going to have to ask him to back up with some examples.

I wonder if Mr. Fenner has actually done any textual comparisons, or read any of Patrice Louinet’s notes in the Conan volumes, or studied my text notes in the Del Rey editions? I’m guessing he has not, for if he had, he would know that Farnsworth Wright exercised an exceptionally light editorial hand. Wright’s “editing” was limited largely to accepting or rejecting a story. Some pulp editors — Jack Byrne of Fiction House (and later Argosy) and Harry Bates of the Clayton Magazines come immediately to mind — felt free to make wholesale changes to a story once they’d accepted it, or to return it with specific suggestions about what to do with it ( “I think it would be better if you had this guy here do this….” etc.). Wright, though, very rarely changed anything, at least in Howard’s work, and very rarely suggested any specific changes if he returned a story. He might quietly eliminate strong language ( “damn” and “you bastard!” being very strong language in the early ’30s) or tone down a “sexual” allusion (and of course, what they thought was pretty hot sex in the ’30s is very tame by our more decadent standards), he might change a spelling to conform to house style (he preferred “simitar” to “scimitar” for some reason), he might correct some of the same misspellings or improper punctuation that I, too, am inclined to correct, but he pretty much left Howard’s work alone. So when you read a Howard story in Weird Tales, you’re essentially reading the story the way Howard wrote it. That’s why we “pure text” types accept Weird Tales as being very nearly “pure text,” certainly the next-best-thing to Howard’s original.

Seventeen REH Conan stories appeared in Weird Tales. In the Del Rey editions, we used the Weird Tales text for eleven — or two thirds — of those stories. The stories for which we used Howard’s typescripts were: “The Scarlet Citadel” (a special case, in that Howard had retyped the story after it appeared in Weird Tales, when he wanted to include it in a collection of short stories for an English publisher); “People of the Black Circle” (an incomplete typescript, so some pages were taken from Weird Tales); “A Witch Shall Be Born”; “The Servants of Bit-Yakin” (Weird Tales title, “Jewels of Gwahlur”); “Beyond the Black River”; and “The Man-Eaters of Zamboula” (WT title, “Shadows in Zamboula”).

So, four stories that are included in …and their memory was a bitter tree… should be essentially identical to those in the Wandering Star books, and the other four will make for a good test case: I invite Mr. Fenner to compare the text from REH’s typescripts, as published in the Del Rey Conan books, with the Weird Tales text (presumably that published in Underwood’s book), and report here on specific examples that illustrate how Wright’s editing of these stories helped make Howard’s writing better.

I’m going to go out on a limb here and predict that he won’t be able to find any good examples, because they aren’t there. Wright didn’t really “edit” in the sense of changing a writer’s copy; at most, he sent a story back saying he thought it dragged somewhere, or it didn’t work for him, etc. He left it up to Howard to fix it, or not. “The Phoenix on the Sword” is a good example: we included Howard’s first submitted draft of this story in The Coming of Conan the Cimmerian, and readers can see for themselves the rewrite process at work. Wright’s letter to Howard, rejecting “The Frost-Giant’s Daughter” but asking for some changes to “The Phoenix on the Sword,” is very well-known, and Patrice quotes it almost in its entirety in “Hyborian Genesis,” page 441 of The Coming of Conan the Cimmerian. Wright said, “But THE PHOENIX OF [sic] THE SWORD has points of real excellence. I hope you will see your way clear to touch it up and resubmit it. It is the first two chapters that do not click. The story opens rather uninterestingly, it seems to me, and the reader has difficulty in orienting himself.” There you have Wright’s editorial style — he simply said where he thought the problem was, and asked Howard to try rewriting it. No specific suggestions about what to do to solve the problem. It was Howard who came up with the brilliant “Nemedian Chronicles” opening, to solve the problem of introducing readers to an exotic new world in a few broad strokes. It’s not a bad little piece of writing for an author whose style Fenner believes was “more rudimentary than lyrical.”

So far as surviving correspondence or other evidence tells us, after “Phoenix” no other Conan story was sent back to Howard for revisions. They were apparently either rejected or accepted, as submitted. So if there is any evidence in the Conan stories of Wright’s editing improving Howard’s work and helping him mature as a writer, it will show up as a difference between the original Howard text and the Weird Tales text. I urge Mr. Fenner to share with us the results of his comparisons.

I’ll briefly address one more point made by Fenner in the excerpt quoted above: that REH was “capable of spinning an exciting yarn in first draft…” Oh, it’s true, it’s true, as any number of stories published long after his death certainly prove. And among the Conan tales, “Rogues in the House” is an excellent case in point, a fine story produced in a single draft. But it seems to me that Fenner’s point in adding that “single draft” business must have been to hint that Howard was a hasty writer, that he turned in first drafts, and therefore an editor had to clean them up. However, a quick look at the lists of extant Conan typescripts, included in the appendices of each Del Rey volume, will show that “Rogues in the House” was the only Conan story produced in a single draft. Every other story went through at least two, sometimes three or more, drafts. That, it seems to me, suggests a writer at work, not just a “storyteller”.

When I first saw …and their memory was a bitter tree… announced, I wondered why we needed it. It doesn’t include all the Conan stories, only eight of them. (The announcements I’ve seen say there are nine stories. Coming Attractions (08 August 2008) says the book “contains nine essential Conan stories along with a full-length Conan novel,” while Bud Plant says it “collects nine of his most electrifying Conan adventures.” There are only eight stories in the book, according to those who’ve actually seen it. Either way, barely half the Conan series.) It isn’t a “best of Conan,” unless someone genuinely believes that “Jewels of Gwahlur,” “The Devil in Iron,” and “Shadows in the Moonlight” are better than “The Tower of the Elephant,” “Rogues in the House,” or “Beyond the Black River.” I can’t make out any particular rhyme or reason behind the selection of contents. I thought it might have been influenced by the paintings, but as a friend pointed out, three of the best Frazetta Conan paintings illustrate stories that aren’t in this book: “The Frost-Giant’s Daughter” (Conan of Cimmeria), “Rogues in the House” (Conan), and “The Scarlet Citadel” (Conan the Usurper). A few have suggested it’s supposed to be an “art book,” but heck, if it’s the Frazettas you want, why not buy Icon, edited by Arnie and Cathy Fenner and also published by Underwood, much more Frazetta bang for your bucks?

So, if Mr. Fenner cares to enlighten us about the specific editorial changes by Wright that improved Conan stories, perhaps he can also take a moment to explain to us why we need this book. Before this flapdoodle erupted, I really did want to want it, if nothing else because I’m an incurable fanboy. But I prefer to support the work of publishers who show real respect for Robert E. Howard, both as a writer and as a person. Mr. Fenner’s foreword — or those parts of it that I have seen quoted — does not.

For those who want to support publishers who show respect for Robert E. Howard, good news.

Bill Schafer of Subterranean Press reports that the slipcases for their edition of Kull: Exile of Atlantis are reported to be on their way to him, and the books are finished and ready to go, so as soon as he gets the slipcases the books will start going out, possibly by the end of this week.

The books are the same size as the Wandering Star editions (6.25″ x 9.25″), smythe sewn (not glued), printed on 80# Finch Opaque paper, with the dust jackets printed on 100# enamel. The slipcases, as with the WS editions, will have artwork pasted onto them. Unlike the WS editions, the Subterraneans will have a portfolio section for the color art in the back of the book, rather than having it interspersed throughout. Bill says that would have been too expensive, and he wanted to keep the price of the books down. For the same reason, the top edges are not gilded. Anyone who has seen Subterranean’s books knows they do beautiful editions.

Justin Sweet used the opportunity of this edition to touch up a few of the color and b&w pieces. You can see samples of some of the color plates at the Subterranean Press Kull page.

Owners of the Wandering Star editions have an opportunity to get the same numbers with the Subterranean editions, but you’d better act quickly, since unclaimed numbers may be shipped, and of course at that point they’ll be irretrievable. The limited edition is selling for $150, the 50-copy leatherbound deluxe edition for $400.

The next volume will be The Best of Robert E. Howard, Volume One: Crimson Shadows, which they’ve begun work on. The specs will be the same, though Bill adds that he’s commissioned the Keegans to produce color artwork which will be exclusive to the Subterranean edition. With luck, it will be published around the end of this year, or early next.

While you’re visiting the Subterranean website, check out some of their other offerings, too. There is much that will be of interest to at least some Howard fans. Former REHupan Charles de Lint has turned in the third volume of his Collected Early Stories, Woods & Waters Wild, and I’ve got my beady little eyes on The Best of Lucius Shepard. Their online magazine, Subterranean, offers fiction by Mike Resnick, Jay Lake, Joe Lansdale and others. All in all, an impressive line-up.

       L. Sprague de Camp had his paperback deal and he had books to flesh out. De Camp had already converted four Robert E. Howard stories into Conan stories a decade earlier. He drifted out of science fiction instead writing popular science books and articles and a handful of historical novels. Now he had to get back into the fantasy fiction writing game. His Pusad series had sputtered out probably due to a lack of ideas. Most of those stories were dependent on a joke at the end. There was a bit of luck when Glenn Lord tracked down a box of unpublished Robert E. Howard stories in 1966. Included were four  incomplete stories with synopses, a synopsis for another story, and one fragment.  De Camp was able to create the stories “The Drums of Tombalku,”The Snout in the Dark,” “Wolves Beyond the Border,” and “The Hall of the Dead” from these incomplete stories.  

     The publication of the incomplete stories, synopses, and fragment in the Del Rey editions allows any reader to contrast the old Lancer/Ace stories to the Howard source material. I can remember reading “The Drums of Tombalku” in Conan the Adventurer and thinking it was not up to par. Yet, I just read the Howard synopsis for the story in The Bloody Crown of Conan and was getting enthused. The old magic was back. Also, the synopsis for “The Drums of Tombalku” is longer than the synopsis for “The Hour of the Dragon.” That means Howard had meant for the story to be a novel. There is certainly enough going on in the synopsis for a novel in skilled hands. De Camp rushed through the story in his usual five mini-chapters. He didn’t even fully explore  the story that Howard had laid out. This could have been a complete novel, another paperback in the series but de Camp could not do it.

   The original Howard synopsis for what became “The Hall of the Dead” describes Conan encountering a “monstrous being.” Reading the synopsis, I was thinking of Clark Ashton Smith’s “The Tale of Satampra Zeiros” which is a scary story. I imagine Howard had something along similar lines in mind. L. Sprague de Camp turned the “monstrous being” into a GIANT SLUG!!! Slugs are not scary unless they are eating your tomatoes. They are not carnivorous-they eat vegetables and they love burdock. This coming from someone who lectured readers on how snakes can’t ram with their snout. I used to kill big slugs in Texas with a dash of salt. Was de Camp trying to slip in some sort of joke on unsuspecting readers? Instead of getting a shoggoth or Tsothuggua, we get a mollusc that is regularly eaten in some countries. The Howard synopsis has Conan hacking apart the “monstrous being” after throwing blocks of stone on it. In the de Camp version: “A sword, Conan thought, would be of little use against such a monstrosity.”  You also get de Camp’s stopping of the story to engage in a lecture. Ever the engineer, he describes the gate as having “two valves.” In another passage you get: “So meticulous had been the construction of this building, however, that close inspection was needed to show that it was not an ordinary composite stucture.” The sliderule is never far away with de Camp. This story was actually published in The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction for the February 1967 issue. The magazine has a long history of being one of the most literate science fiction and fantasy magazines. Edward L. Ferman had become the editor the year before and started to publish some sword and sorcery. Anthony Boucher would have never allowed Robert E. Howard into his magazine. Ferman first published Jack Vance’s stories that became The Eyes of the Overworld and then Howard’s “For the Love of Barbara Allen” for the August 1966 issue. He would publish scattered sword and sorcery including Tanith Lee’s Cyrion during his tenure as editor. Ferman must have wanted a Robert E. Howard sword and sorcery story or a Conan story.

     “Wolves Beyond the Border” has a very typical de Campian touch when he takes over. The Wizard has swamp demons in a bag that is stolen by Gault Hagar’s son. When released the demons will attack only those who are upright. The Howard synopsis has “turn their magic against them, and rout them.” Again de Camp is having fun at the expense of the story. It reminds me of his The Clocks of Iraz in which an enemy uses a tower with a clock on each wall to coordinate attacks. They are  foiled by having each clock showing a different time. Clever but not the stuff of great sword and sorcery.

    The fragment that became “The Hand of Nergal” had originally been in de Camp’s hands. In the end he couldn’t write a story without a Howard synopsis to guide him. It was turned over to Lin Carter who created a story out of the fragment. The story is very typical Lin Carter with the deus ex machina climax that he was so fond of using. Conan becomes a bystander while two magic talismans battle it out. Carter claimed to have written “The Hand of Nergal” after carefully studying Robert E. Howard’s style and storytelling but the result of all that study was very Carteresque. Had the name been changed from Conan to Thongor and inserted into a Lin Carter book, no one would have noticed. 

     “The Snout in the Dark” is longer than “The Drums of Tombalku” even though there is less story. It also has a horrible title. There is a reason for its length. First you have a Howard draft for the first four chapters in addition to a synopsis for what would become a seven chapter novelette. Secondly, Lin Carter was brought in as an indespensible third wheel. De Camp made changes to Howard’s story. The Howard story has Diana to be presented to the King. Diana is kidnapped by Tananda. De Camp changed this in having Diana presented to Tananda. De Camp just removed an element of tension from the story. Who wrote the line “Not every shaft hits the butt?” Was it de Camp or Carter? My guess is it was Carter. “Spells and spooks” is another term in the de Camp & Carter Hall of Shame. Another line of gruesome prose is: “You cannot do anything with these people; they are as hide-bound and as thick-headed as the barbarians of my own north country—the Cimmerians and Aesir and Vanir.” Robert E. Howard would have never written a line like that. You hear of  Hollywood screenplays that get rewritten by someone other than the original author. Then that version gets rewritten by yet another all the while as it gets worse with each change. “The Snout in the Dark” reminds me of those Hollywood screenplay disaster stories.

     De Camp’s efforts in fleshing out these stories are perfunctory to say the least. These stories are routine and superficial. He removed elements from Howard’s plots that weakened the stories. The end result was boring in comparison to the original Howard source material. He managed to screw up Robert E. Howard storylines. De Camp just was not cut out to be a writer of sword and sorcery. He needed a cowriter and worse was to follow.

     A big part of the de Camp controversy is the role of the paste up Conan stories he wrote, pastiches as they are known. These non-Robert E. Howard stories were entwined with the original material for decades. The stories themselves are polarizing but more so the concept of non-Howard fiction inserted as co-equal with the original Howard fiction. I know of some who hate all pastiches as a result of the original de Camp & Carter stories. Interestingly, pastiche defenders I have known generally evade discussing any merits or demerits of the de Camp & Carter stories. I have seen some who squeal like the proverbial stuck pig when a thread of pastiche bashing gets started. My own psychoanalysis is these people have thought of writing their own Conan story at some time and internalize any pastiche demolition as a personal attack on themselves.

     L. Sprague de Camp is a strange case for moving into Howardian sword and sorcery. De Camp started in John W. Campbell’s Astounding Science Fiction in 1937 when the magazine was still Astounding Stories and Campbell was working under editor F. Orlin Tremaine. He had helped John D. Clark plot two stories that eventually ended up in Astounding. He decided to give it a try and became a regular. De Camp was writing almost as much non-fiction for the magazine as fiction from an early stage. Some of his science fiction holds up, “Living Fossil” and “Employment” remain favorites of mine. “Lest Darkness Fall” pretty much established the sub-genre of alternate history with “The Wheels of If” solidifying the field.  De Camp wrote some stories for Unknown with Fletcher Pratt about Harold Shea who travels to various fantasy worlds based on myth. De Camp would later use this series as reason for him being a pioneer of sword and sorcery with Howard, Kuttner, Leiber, Page, Moore etc. I have said in the past that de Camp was the master of the “Ribald Action Nerd Story.” Another term I have invented for Harold Shea is “Sword and Sliderule.” I personally hate these stories. They don’t hold up well, the humor is dated and I wonder if they were funny even for the time (early 1940s). More often than not, the stories are boring. Most of de Camp’s fantasy from Unknown lies unreprinted today. “Solomon’s Stone,” “The Undesired Princess,” “The Stolen Dormouse” have not been reprinted in close to 45 years. Guess no one is interested in reading them. Humor was the De Camp hallmark and the distinguishing feature of his fiction to this day. A word that pops up repeatedly to describe de Camp’s fiction is silly or “silliness to it all.”

    De Camp himself stopped writing while serving in the Navy in Philadelphia in WWII.  He slowly began producing in 1946 after a three year absence from fiction writing. Perhaps an indication of the future was his creation of his Viagens/Krishna series. De Camp thought Brazil would be the dominant nation of the future (did he ever get that one wrong) and Portuguese would replace English as the lingua franca of Earth (wrong again). He created a planet called Krishna that was his attempt at writing sword and planet but without Burroughs’ “lapses of logic.” “A Queen of Zamba” (Astounding Science Fiction, 1949) was the first novel in this series. A typical Krishna story is an accountant has to go to Krishna to find somebody thought lost. Earthmen have to disguise themselves as a native who are at a pre-industrial level of technology.

     It was right after the start of the Viagens/Krishna series that he discovered Conan. He liked the idea of sword and sorcery so much he created his own Hyborian Age called Pusad. Set in a prehistoric time with a portion of Atlantis still afloat (Pusad) with a panoply of various kindoms, tribes, and nations. “The Eye of Tandyla” (Fantastic Adventures, May 1951) was the first. It is the typical humorous de Camp fantasy that you see throughout his career. De Camp used the skeleton of Hour of the Dragon for “The Tritonian Ring” (Two Complete Science-Adventure Books, Win. 1951). This could possibly be de Camp’s best novel. I remember when I read it I couldn’t put it down. Unfortunately, the rest of the Pusad stories just don’t hold up. “The Owl and the Ape” (Imagination, Nov. 1951), “The Stronger Spell” (Fantasy Fiction, Nov. 1953), ”The Hungry Hercynian” (Universe, Dec. 1953), and “Ka the Appalling” (Fantastic Universe, Aug. 1958) all depend on a joke at the end of the story. Three of the stories feature Gezun of Lorsk who is an oaf and a boor. During this time de Camp was writing more non-fiction for magazines than fiction. The Pusad series petered out pretty quick showing de Camp couldn’t keep up any momentum of his own creation. 

The next stage was converting some unpublished Robert E. Howard adventure stories into Conan stories for Tales of Conan (Gnome Press, 1955). In this case, de Camp was boxed in by having to follow Howard’s storyline and couldn’t change the stories too radically.  A close reading of them will reveal some problems. “Hawks Over Shem” has action taking place in a Shemite city-state. There is mention of a “square of Adonis” which jars the reader who is aware that Adonis is Greek and really doesn’t belong. Couldn’t a “square of Melkart” have sufficed which is of Semitic origin? In “The Road of the Eagles,” he has a Yuetshi exclaiming “Khosatrel Khel!” You can almost see the character slapping his knee and toothless gums flapping in the breeze. Talk about breaking the mounting tension in the original Howard cossack story.

     De Camp moved out of science fiction and fantasy fiction completely by 1959 writing only some non-fiction sporadically for science fiction magazines during the late fifties and early 60s. De Camp had a fairly successful period of writing historical adventures, all set just before or during Hellenistic period. The discovery of sword and sorcery may have spurred de Camp into writing something in that he had a degree of competence. An Elephant for Aristotle (1958), The Bronze God of Rhodes (1960), The Dragon of the Ishtar Gate (1961), The Arrows of Hercules (1965), and The Golden Wind (1969) may be among the best things he ever wrote. Elephant and Dragon are my two personal favorites and also the two most heroic. This was the closest that L. Sprague de Camp ever got to writing straight sword and sorcery without a cowriter. Leon of Atrax (Elephant) and Bessas of Zariaspa (Dragon) are heroic characters. A characteristic of de Camp’s fiction is to poke fun at his heroes. This is almost not present in An Elephant for Aristotle but mildly present with The Dragon of the Ishtar Gate. These novels play to de Camp’s strengths as a writer with the ancient history, architecture, science, zoology, political machinations etc. De Camp’s style is stright forward, not poetic, but perfectly servicable. His last two novels have increasing cynicism and lack the heroic element of the first three. I think de Camp felt comfortable writing about this period with its Greek adventurers discovering the first elements of science. You would never have him writing a novel set in Dark Ages Europe. These are the novels I send people to if they are looking to discover de Camp. If there is a literary reputation for posterity, these novels are at the core.

     If someone had predicted in 1948 that L. Sprague de Camp would morph into the writer of the new adventures of Conan—no one would have believed him. There is nothing in de Camp’s fiction output up until “The Eye of Tandyla” and “The Tritonian Ring” to indicate this radical new direction. It would be like having Isaac Asimov all of a sudden deciding to write Elak of Atlantis stories after Henry Kuttner died. If someone familiar with the field would have been asked to produce a list of writers who could have taken up the mantle of Conan, I doubt de Camp would have been in it. Bryce Walton, Frederic Arnold Kummer, Jr., Norvell W. Page, Leigh Brackett all come to mind as being closer to Robert E. Howard in content and outlook. P. Schuyler Miller would have been higher up the list than de Camp. Miller had written the letter to Howard including a map of the Hyborian Age and chronology of Conan’s career in 1936. Miller himself was no slouch as a writer producing blood and thunder cave-man genocidal warfare in “People of the Arrow” (Amazing Stories). A few years later, Miller cowrote “Genus Homo” with L. Sprague de Camp. It is unusual to have an established writer switch gears like this. I will leave it to others to speculate on the motive.

     I had some inquiries regarding the L. Sprague de Camp letter to REHupa that included a psychoanalysis of de Camp non-admirers. Here it is, Sept 8, 1991:

“We have had visitors, one of whom, Dr. Lynne Hazard, is a first-cousin-once-removed-in-law.  A consulting psychologist, she looks as lady scientists do in stories but rarely in real life: tall, blond, and gorgeous.

     I asked her about a psychological curiosum I have often met in my biographical work on Lovecraft and Howard. Why should a grown man form so intense an emotional tie to another, whom he never knew personally and who in fact died before he was born, that if anyone says anything about his idol that does not present his hero in a wholly saintly and heroic light, the admirer is furiously resentful, takes the statment as a personal affront that he is duty bound to avenge, and spends years trying to ‘get even’ with the author of the statement? Since the resentful one never knew his idol, his infatuation is not with the real man but only with his mental image he has built up from what he has heard or read.

     Dr. Hazard said yes, she had met such obsessions. She said the worshipful follower was usually conscious of a ‘void’ within himself. This might be a lack of some quality he desired, or an egregious failure in business, trade, profession, or personal relationships. So the follower identifies himself with his adoree and cannot admit that his hero has any flaws, like those of other human beings, whatever, since that means confessing his own short-comings.

     I won’t apply this diagnose to any present or former fellow REHUPANs, but others may if they wish.”

If you didn’t know any better, you would think someone had written a caricature of de Camp like the semi-famous “Blond Negroes and Noble Cabbages” passed around at a science fiction convention in the late 1970s.

     One of the most infuriating aspects of L. Sprague de Camp to some people is de Camp’s indulgence in posthumous psychoanalysis. An examination of de Camp’s writing on Robert E. Howard uncovers a habit going back almost to de Camp’s discovery of Howard.

     De Camp’s introduction to King Conan (Gnome Press 1953) includes the tale of de Camp going over to Oscar J. Friend’s apartment and meeting Harold Preece: “Preece told me how frustrating Howard had found life in Cross Plains, Texas; how he could never get very far away because he supported his parents by his writing and because his mother had kept him too closely tied to her apron-strings. This excessively close relationship proved fatal to Howard…Preece echoed my own thoughts: ‘If he’d only gotten away…If he’d only gone out with girls the way the other boys did.’” De Camp also included the line: “And, without doubt, Howard was a psychological case-study…Howard suffered from delusions of persecution, and his end constituted a classic case of Oedipus complex.” De Camp included this line in The Science Fiction Handbook in 1953 also. So right off, de Camp is figuratively peeing in the swimming pool.

     In 1963 with Swords & Sorcery, the first of the sword and sorcery fiction anthologies include the line “Although a big, powerful man like his heroes, he suffered delusions of persecution and killed himself in an excess of emotion over his aged mother’s death.” He did the same thing with the introduction to the H. P. Lovecraft story (”The Doom That Came to Sarnath.): “He dwelt with two aged aunts, seldom ventured abroad save at night, and indulged in many obsessions and affectations.” The other dead writer, Lord Dunsany, on the other hand is described as “the kind of lord than many people would like to be if they had the chance. He was 6′4″ tall, and a sportsman, soldier, traveler, and a man of letters, with a grand gift of poetic speech.”

     The Spell of Seven in 1965 repeats the formula as Mark Finn has pointed out in a previous post. It is here the infamous “Maladjusted to the point of psychosis” line is trotted out. That line was reused in 1967 with Conan (Lancer, 1967). I am in the medical field and a comment of this nature is called “editorializing.” If you were to say this about someone living, you would probably get sued. My Legal Encyclopedia and Dictionary describes libel as: “Any malicious defamation expressed in printing or writing and intended to blacken the memory of one who is dead or the reputation of one who is living and expose him to public hatred, contempt, or ridicule is a libel.” A good attorney could probably make a case of libel in this instance.

     Conan also included the oft repeated line by de Camp: “His personality was introverted, unconventional, moody, and hot-tempered given to emotional extremes and violent likes and dislikes.”

     An essay entitled “Conan’s Ghost” (The Conan Grimoire, Mirage Press, 1968) recycles introverted personality line and also an inadvertantly funny line from Alan Nourse, M.D.: “That sleep-walking alone indicates a profoundly neurotic personality–probably hysteric and hyper-suggestible…It’s obvious that here was a fellow who wasn’t wired up just right in the matter of sex.”

     “The Miscast Barbarian” (Literary Swordsmen and Sorcerers, Arkham House, 1976) is a splicing of “Memories of R.E.H” (Amra, Vol II, #38) and “Skald in the Post Oaks” (Fantastic, Oct. 1972) and recycles previous comments. De Camp paraphrases himself: “It seems obvious that the dominating factor in Howard’s life was his devotion to his mother, which answers to the textbook descriptions of the Oedipus complex.” With incredible hubris de Camp then denies doing what he just did: ”We must bear in mind, however, that posthumous psychoanalysis is at  best a jejune form of speculation.” Let us not forget the line— “It is plain he was not a well-balanced human being.”

     Dark Valley Destiny (Bluejay Books 1983) does not show anything in the way of growth of understanding of Robert E. Howard by L. Sprague de Camp. You don’t get the “maladjusted to the point of psychosis” line but plenty of lines similar in tone. Here is a montage: “Robert’s many lapses into phantasy in order to liquidate discomfort.” “Together these elements nurtured the violent phantasies of a youthful writer who never learned to cope with reality.” “Much more real to Robert Howard were the demons and goblins from the depths of hell, the strange and evil creatures from other worlds, and the hate-filled, unregenerate humanity–the larcenous oil men, the prostitutes, and the witches who passed as fellow mortals along the streets of Cross Plains.” “Conversely, girls were not likely to be fascinated by Robert. His repute as the town eccentric, his unconventional views, and his spells of misanthropy and moroseness made him unattractive to the local girls.” “Her son’s pathological dependence on her.”

     L. Sprague de Camp was an engineer by education, not a psychologist, not a psychiatrist. The big question is why did he engage continuously in dressing up his writing with faux psychology? Some have attributed sinister motives. Examing de Camp’s writings on other authors, there is a pattern. If the writer was alive, you got a pass. If you were dead, the psychoanalysis would creep in. The more de Camp wrote on a subject, the more psychoanalysis. He engaged in it with the Lovecraft biography. S. T. Joshi wrote in his H.P. Lovecraft: A Life (Necronomicon Press, 1996: “Whenever de Camp encounters some facet of Lovecraft’s personality that he cannot understand or does not share, he immediately undertakes a kind of half-baked posthumous psychoanalysis. Hence refers to Lovecraft’s sensitivity to place as ‘topomania’—as if no one could be attached to the physical tokens of his birthplace without being considered neurotic…He was out of his depth: and this makes his schoolmasterly chiding of Lovecraft all the more galling…these value judgements were arrived at through inadequate understanding and false perspective.” You could take out Lovecraft’s name in that passage and insert Howard’s and be correct.

     De Camp does it to Henry Kuttner in “Conan’s Compeers”: “A mature writer, however, assimilates these influences, so that his writings no longer betrays imitation. Kuttner never reached this stage. This fact, together with his lavish use of pen names, suggests a deeply-rooted lack of self-confidence.” After Lin Carter died, de Camp started the comments about Lin Carter saying he never grew up.  In the early nineties, de Camp was even asking the opinion of a psychologist when describing some de Camp non-admirers in REHupa. He then published the doctor’s opinion in one of his letters of one of the mailings.

    I think at the end of the day, de Camp used the psychological mumbo-jumbo to give a patina of authority to his opinions. For whatever reason, he could not just give his opinion and leave it at that, he had to dress it up with pseudo-scientific sounding language as a defense mechanism. I would never think of trying to diagnose a condition of someone dead based on subjective comments given to me by other people. Interestingly, Karl Edward Wagner was a Medical Doctor who did his residency in psychiatry. If anyone could have waded into this area, it was him. His forewords and afterwords for the Berkley Conan books have not a word of psycho-babble.

     I was looking over the John D. Clarke, P. Schuyler Miller, and Lin Carter introductions to Gnome Press and Lancer Conan books. There are none of the judgements rendered found in the de Camp introductions. Lin Carter, effusive idiot that he was, was giddy in his appreciation of Howard.

     In going over his writings on Robert E. Howard the person, de Camp does not come off as a person capable of much sympathy for others. I deal all the time with family members who are caretakers of failing elderly parents. I have seen the exhaustion and frustration in dealing with a situation that is only going to get worse. Often caretakers have depression after the death of the parent. All that work ultimately does not alter the final outcome, it just makes the passing easier. Robert E. Howard was a caretaker.  Whereas L. Sprague de Camp sees an Oedipus complex and being tied to his mother’s apron strings, I see somebody with a sense of responsibility to take care of a chronically ill parent while at the same time working to bring in money to support the family. That is a hard thing to keep up for years. I have seen it wreck the health of people. It probably never entered de Camp’s mind to talk to people who work in hospice to get an idea of  dealing with terminal illness. He was more interested in psychological spot comments to back up his judgements. There is a consistency in print by de Camp from 1953-1983. It was once said of the Bourbons of France that they forgot nothing and refused to learn anything, the situation is similar here.

     I happened to notice when looking over the list of people that de Camp thanks in the introduction to Dark Valley Destiny for help included Richard Lupoff. In Lupoff’s The Great American Paperback, he wrote one of the most offensive spot comments on Robert E. Howard I have ever read using the psychotic crazy man description. Those are the results when de Camp’s judgements seep out into popular culture.

Hot off the e-mail presses comes this announcement:

In a very welcome turn of events, Hippocampus Press will publish the
correspondence of famed weird fictioneers H. P. Lovecraft and Robert
E. Howard. Both sides of the correspondence will be presented,
allowing readers to follow the intense and often heady exchange of
ideas between these two titans of literature. Meticulously edited and
exhaustively annotated by reigning Howardian and Lovecraftian
scholars Burke, Joshi, and Schultz, and presented with appropriate
indices and appendices, this release marks a milestone in the study
of both Howard and Lovecraft.

The letters will be published in a limited edition two-volume
hardcover set, with Smythe-sewn signatures and illustrated dust
wrapper, and with each volume individually shrink-wrapped.

The Letters of H. P. Lovecraft and Robert E. Howard
Edited by Rusty Burke, S. T. Joshi and David E. Schultz
2009: 2 volume set (individual volumes not sold separately)
ISBN: 978-0-9814888- 0-6
Price $100.00 / Pre-publication discount price: $90.00

http://www.hippocam puspress. com

Looks like 2009 will continue to be a great time to be a fan of Robert E. Howard!

Mark Finn is a guest blogger to the REHupa site today. He wants to weigh in on the de Camp Controversy:

When discussing influential or gateway books into the realm of sword and sorcery fandom, I often see The Spell of Seven listed. This paperback book, first published by Pyramid in 1965, is a collection of seven stories by seven influential authors: Fritz Leiber, Clark Ashton Smith, Lord Dunsany, Michael Moorcock, Jack Vance, Robert E. Howard, and like a linchpin in the middle of all this talent, L. Sprague de Camp. That’s okay, because de Camp is also the editor of the book, and so he can put one of his own stories in if he darn well wants to. De Camp also provides an introduction to sword and sorcery in general, as well as introductions to all of the authors. Finally, the cover of the book as well as seven interior illustrations are by none other than Virgil Finley. It’s no wonder this book was such a gateway for so many older fans.

But let’s take a closer look at de Camp’s contributions to the book. This is one of the few times when we have living and dead authors together with de Camp’s commentary, so that we might better see the Grand Master’s eloquence and verve in action.

In his introduction, “Wizards and Warriors,” we find de Camp extolling the virtues of sword and sorcery:

How would you like to escape to a world of wizards, warlocks, warriors, and wenches—a world where gleaming cities rise their shining spires against the stars, sorcerers cast sinister spells from subterranean lairs, baleful spirits stalk through crumbling ruins, primeval monsters crash through jungle thickets, and the fate of kingdoms is balanced on the blood blades of broadswords brandished by heroes of preternatural might and valor? And where, moreover, nobody so much as mentions the income tax, the school dropout problem, or the virtues and faults of socialized medicine?

In other words, do you feel like saying, “To hell with the world’s problems for a while! Let’s read something for fun”? Then you should read heroic fantasy…

I’ve always had a problem with de Camp’s simplistic take on sword and sorcery, and maybe it’s because the above description is merely the surface gloss to many a Howardian tale. There’s nothing wrong with de Camp’s description, per se, but it sure sounds like an ad for Dungeons & Dragons, rather than a thoughtful reading of, say, “Red Nails.”

De Camp’s first introduction is for Fritz Leiber’s “Bazaar of the Bizarre,” and in it de Camp starts with a brief summary of the world in which Fafhrd and Gray Mouser live. This is followed by some brief remarks about the author, then a contemporary of de Camp and very much alive. Regarding Leiber, he writes:

Thus Fafhrd (rhymes with “proffered”) and Gray Mouser were invented by Fritz Leiber and his lifelong friend, Harry Fischer in correspondence during the lean 1930s. After several abortive attempts, when Lieber was just beginning as a writer, he sold five novelettes about the formidable pair to the lamented magazine Unknown Worlds (1939-1943). After the Hitlerian War, he resumed work on the series and has published nine more Mouser stories in various magazines and a collection of the first seven such tales in book form (Two Sought Adventure, Gnome Press, 1957).

Hmm. Not much going on there, but then again, Lieber is alive and a contemporary of de Camp. They run in the same circles. The rest of the introductions follow this format: talk about the world in which the story is set, and then talk about the author. The next introduction is for one of the best Zothique stories, “The Dark Eidolon,” and the late Clark Ashton Smith. After describing the setting, de Camp states:

On this sinister stage the late Clark Ashton Smith—a retiring, artistic, poetic, self-educated Californian and a member of the Lovecraft Weird Tales Circle—laid fifteen of his ninety odd stories of fantasy and science fiction. Of Smith’s total production, over half appeared in the years 1931-1934, and over half were published in Weird Tales. In his later years, Smith wrote stories only at long intervals. The reason for this decline in output is that he had no strong desire to write prose at all, since he deemed himself primarily a poet. He wrote stories only when he needed money, and he needed it most urgently in the 1930s to support his aged parents….Whether or not Smith appreciated his own gifts as a writer of fantastic fiction, most of his Zothique stories are masterpieces of macabre horror, relieved by flashes of ironic humor and bejeweled by rare words.

Wow. What a nicely sympathetic and complimentary introduction to Smith’s work. There’s not a negative word or phrase in it.  Of course, Smith had passed away just a few years ago, so it’s possible that de Camp didn’t want to seem callous. Up next is Lord Dunsany, and surely, de Camp will uncork a little vitriol here:

Dunsany was a man of towering physical stature, fiery temperament, and poetical sensitivity. He was a writer, soldier, poet, and sportsman, all rolled into one. There was a conflict between his background and upbringing—that of a conventional hunting-shooting-fishing-and-soldiering Anglo-Irish peer—and his personal literary interests and tastes. In view of this contradiction, and his wide ranges of interests, and the fact that he wrote all his long life with a quill pen, his production of sixty-odd books of fiction, verse, essays, autobiography and drama is nothing less than phenomenal.

Dunsany was a writer’s writer. That is to say, he was a careful craftsman, with strong opinions on the fine points of writing, who never attained great mass popularity, but who nevertheless, much influenced many later writers. Nearly all later writers of fantasy, for example, owe something to him.

That’s quite the little love letter, there.  It’s interesting to me to think that by changing five words in the above two paragraphs, you could make it sound an awful lot like the more contemporary picture of young Robert E. Howard.

De Camp’s introduction of his own story from the Tritonium Ring world is a side-step; he displays appropriate humility and grace in including his own story and begs the readers to decide for themselves the appropriateness of the act. Ever the gent, that Mister de Camp. He similarly sidesteps saying much about Michael Moorcock other than to note the story he chose, “Kings in Darkness,” is Moorcock’s least favorite Elric story (at the time, I’m sure) and subsequently, it’s the one the fans like the best, so author’s can’t be trusted to know their best work. Pithy and droll.

Jack Vance also gets a pedestrian write up. After introducing the Dying Earth, de Camp lists the number of jobs Vance held down while trying to start his writing career. Nothing personal, but again, we’re dealing with a live contemporary. Still, the mere inclusion of someone into such a book as this is nod enough, when discussing the pillars of the genre. Certainly no one would disagree with de Camp on Vance having access to the clubhouse.

The seventh, and last, but certainly not least, is Robert E. Howard. The story selected for this collection is the all-time fan favorite…“Shadows in Zamboula.” What? Not “Tower of the Elephant?” Not “Rogues in the House?” I have no idea why de Camp picked that particular Conan tale. It’s very middle of the road, and not representative of Howard at his best.  But that’s a minor niggling point compared to the introduction:

Robert E. Howard, the creator of Conan, was a Texan and a prolific writer of pulp-magazine fiction in the early 1930s. Despite certain literary faults (emphasis mine), Howard was one of the greatest natural story-tellers the genre has produced. Nobody has excelled him in constructing a fast-moving, smoothly-flowing tale of headlong, violent, gripping action. His stories are not only readable, but endlessly re-readable.

Unfortunately, Howard was also maladjusted to the point of psychosis. In 1936, at the age of thirty, he ended a promising literary career by suicide.

The rest of the introduction concerns what Conan stories were published, and by who, and that plans are afoot to bring all of the Conan tales out in print. But that’s not the grabber, here. Let’s go back up and look at that introduction again.

None of the other authors, living or dead, have any literary faults, either defined or undefined by de Camp. Only Howard. No one else’s death is mentioned. Only Howard. No one else is labeled “maladjusted to the point of psychosis.” Only Howard. And no one else had a “promising literary career,” but rather a full one. Only Howard. And, interestingly (because de Camp knew better), why mention that he was a writer in the early 30s? He had made his mark on Weird Tales by 1928 with the publication of “Red Shadows” and the “Shadow Kingdom,” and he was a working professional in point of fact by 1929, if not sooner. What’s so important about the early 1930s in Howard’s professional career? Go on, work it out. I’ll wait…yep, you guessed it. Conan. Reading the above introduction makes it sound as if Howard had been writing for about five years, and was on the way to making something of himself when his loony tendencies got the better of him and he killed himself.

There’s another point to consider, here, as well. De Camp’s phrasing is intentional, and, as we’ve seen, repetitive. He’s not trying to break new ground, cover new territory, or further enlighten us. He’s only trying to drum it in: Howard was a gifted amateur who was, sadly, quite mad, but hey, aren’t these Conan stories really neat?

That this tactic can be laid up against Howard’s fellow writers (and in the case of Smith, a contemporary) introductions is all the more telling. It sticks out like a sore thumb. Now that you can see it, ask yourself: why would he do that? To what purpose? Why does everyone mentioned in The Spell of Seven, from the history of the genre itself, on down, get a pass from de Camp, except Robert E. Howard?

    L. Sprague de Camp’s gamble with Lancer Books proved to be highly successful. A combination of Howard’s prose coupled with the now iconic Frazetta paintings created something new and very exciting. Other factors in the success include having a series of books that ended up topping out at 12. Having that number built some momentum so that even the later pastiche novels sold well. Distribution for Lancer must have been good at this time. Let us not forget that the layout was good for these books. The print type and size made for pleasurable reading. You can’t quibble with this kind of success, or can you?

     In a letter to REHupa dated August 19, 1993 de Camp said: “When in 1966 Lancer published Conan the Adventurer, Frazetta gave Conan hair cut straight across his forehead but hanging halfway to his waist elsewhere. I objected but was overruled. At this time the great youth revolt of the 1960s was gathering stream, and long hair on men had rather suddenly become fashionable among rebellious youth as a symbol of revolt against the hated Establishment. Conan’s artists have been following Frazetta’s example  ever since.”  

    I dare anyone to deny the importance of Frazetta’s artwork on the Lancer Conan paperbacks. De Camp damn near screwed the pooch on this one. What if Larry Shaw had said “O.K, you can have Gray Morrow do the covers for the Conan paperbacks instead?” There may have been far fewer adolescents attracted to those books on the wire racks in the fall of 1966. De Camp failed to see the revolutionary nature of the art and instead of being excited he tried to stop it. He remained adamant on the issue decades later. 

     L. Sprague de Camp was able to pad out some of the paperbacks, add two novels, and have two more in the offing with the aid of Lin Carter. I intend on devoting a seperate part to Carter and de Camp’s writing. Let’s just say for the time being that L. Sprague de Camp would not have gotten those new Conan stories without Lin Carter’s assistance. This partnership had strains after time. The gruesome twosome started what would eventually become Conan the Liberator in 1974 but reading between the lines, it looks that Lin Carter walked away. A friend of mine who knew Carter told me that when Liberator came out, he badmouthed the book saying it was an awful book. Carter also said all he did was flesh out de Camp’s outline after which de Camp would do the final touches. The novel does read mostly like an L. Sprague de Camp novel with little to no Carter personality contained therein. The Bantam collection, Conan the Swordsman contains three stories written by both de Camp and Carter. One story, “The Gem in the Tower,” was originally a Thongor story (”Black Moonlight,” Fantastic Nov. 1976). Two stories attributed to Carter & de Camp according to Loay Hall, a friend of de Camp’s, were actually L. Sprague and Catherine de Camp (”The Ivory Goddess” and “Moon of Blood”). Contractual obligations are supposedly responsible for the Carter & de Camp bylines for those two stories. De Camp told me in a letter that Lin Carter was supposed to help write the novelization for the movie Conan the Barbarian. Carter blew off the job and Catherine de Camp is the cowriter for the novelization. Lin Carter though collected half of the writing proceeds. De Camp seemed angry about that years later.

    In the early ’90s, criticism of Lin Carter was really picking up speed, at least within the pages of REHupa mailings. In a letter February 16, 1995 to REHupa, de Camp stated “I thought my biggest mistake in reviving Conan was taking on Lin Carter as a collaborator without first trying to lure Leigh Brackett into the job.” In an earlier letter dated Jan 26, 1992 he said “I chose Carter because his natural style differed from REH’s in one direction while mine differed in just the opposite; so I thought a collaboration might produce something close to the model…Carter had many virtues and was a very likeable fellow, but such faults as cocksureness and irresponsibility largely nullified them. He never grew up.”

     L. Sprague de Camp’s gamble with Lancer fell apart when the company declared bankruptcy. The publisher that had supposedly sold “millions” of Conan paperback had magically gone under. Glenn Lord has told me that he was never allowed to audit the books and check royalty statments on de Camp’s deal with Lancer. While the Lancer series was in bankruptcy limbo, Lord himself went on to make a deal with Berkley Medallion to put out Conan this time with no pastiche stories. Three paperbacks came out in the fall of 1977 with interesting forewords and afterwords by Karl Edward Wagner. The plan was for six paperbacks. This was not to be. Hollywood was interested in making a Conan movie and wanted one entity to deal with. The two factions were united as Conan Properties, Inc. in 1978. Part of the deal included killing the Berkley Conan series and resurrection of the Lancer series.  Karl Edward Wagner was embittered about that turn of events. Someone needs to interview Kirby McCauley, the agent, had connections with both factions about details of the deal.

     The Lancer version of Conan would live on for more than a decade. Ace eventually let the series go out of print in the late 1980s as sales dwindled and interest faded. CPI was more interested in pushing a new generation of pastiches from Tor starting with Robert Jordan. Robert E. Howard faded away as a new Tor Conan novel came out every few months for over a decade. The majority of these novels are held in poor regard by aficionados of sword and sorcery fiction. Worse—Baen Books wanted to reprint the Robert E. Howard Conan stories with no pastiche stories inserted. L. Sprague de Camp vetoed that idea. He kept Robert E. Howard out of print for a decade by his actions. This may be the single biggest reason that L. Sprague de Camp is viewed negatively by some today. I have to say when I was told of this back in the mid-90s, my opinion changed drastically negative.