From today's UFO Roundup:
quote:1932: SLOUCHING TOWARDS VALHALLA
Rio Grande City, Texas is a small town on the USA-Mexico border, about 180 miles (300 kilometers) south of San Antonio and 60 miles (100 kilometers) west of Brownsville. Nowadays it's famous for citrus fruits, duty-free shops and maquiladoras. Yet Rio Grande City is famous for something else, as well.
It's the birthplace of Conan of Cimmeria, the fictional hero of author Robert E. Howard (1906-1936). As to how the brawling, black-haired, blue-eyed Cimmerian came into existence...well, that in itself is an interesting paranormal tale.
In 1931, following a sickly childhood and a succession of briefly-held, low-paying jobs, Robert Ervin Howard was finally starting to come into his own as a writer. He was regularly selling his short fiction to the pulp magazines in New York City and, at age twenty-five, was making almost as much money annually as the banker in his hometown of Cross Plains, Texas.
"The year 1932 proved eventful for Robert Howard, both as a writer and a man. It was in 1932 that he wrote and sold his first Conan story, "The Phoenix on the Sword," which is rated as one of the better stories in the series."
"The new year began inauspiciously. After months of high-speed production, Robert found himself unable to write anything of value. This unsettling drainage of creativity often befalls writers of fiction and results in depression or sheer panic. Looking back on this experience a year later (in 1933--J.T.), he wrote, '...for months I had been absolutely barren of ideas, completely unable to work up anything sellable.'"
"He decided to take a vacation, and in February 1932 he set forth by bus for San Antonio."
"In San Antonio, he shopped for knives and swords for his collection. He fell in with an East Indian (a Hindu--J.T.) who had spent most of his life in China. From him Howard learned of the 'ghastly tortures of the Orient.' The man also mentioned that he had seen scores of Chinese Communists beheaded in the open streets."
(Editor's Comment: Apparently Bob's Hindu friend was in Shanghai in April 1927 when Chiang Kaishek's Kuomintang Party broke with their one-time allies, the Chinese Communist Party, and, with the aid of the Triad societies, massacred the Chinese Reds. The big question, of course, is...what brought this fellow to Texas?)
"This Howard reported to (his friend and fellow author Howard Phillips) Lovecraft, adding, 'The mere thought of such a spectacle slightly nauseated me.'"
"From San Antonio, (Robert E.) Howard traveled southward to the Rio Grande Valley, where he experimented with Mexican food and wandered up the valley as far as Rio Grande City...While Howard was enjoying 'tortillas...and Spanish wine' along the Border, the most memorable fictional idea of his life began to form."
One day in February 1932, while taking an after-lunch siesta in Rio Grande City, "Howard dreamed he was sitting by a campfire out on the prairie when out of the darkness stepped a barbarian wearing (black) chain-mail armor and a horned helmet."
By Robert's own account, the entity said, "I am Conan, a Cimmerian. I wish to tell you of my adventures."
Upon awakening, "Howard decided to write a series of prehistoric adventure fantasies, not unlike (his 1929) Kull stories, for such a setting would eliminate the need for accurate historical research."
Unknown to Robert, however, a similar "contact" had already taken place three years earlier, in 1929, in Bucuresti (Bucharest), Romania.
"Awakened from a sound sleep in his apartment," journalist Corneliu "Codreanu was confronted by a glowing entity in knightly armor that identified itself as 'St. Michael the Archangel.'"
The self-styled "archangel" ordered Codreanu to go to Jassy, the site of the Romanian Army's last stand in World War One, and raise a new military force to save the nation. Thus was born the Legion of St. Michael the Archangel, also known as the Iron Guard, which played a key role in the Holocaust during World War Two.
(Editor's Comment: The experiences of REH and Codreanu, along with Antonio Rivera's nighttime visit from a quadruped alien in Barcelona in 1930, certainly qualify this period as "the Era of Strange Contacts.")
"Since Howard was not good at inventing names, he often based personal and place names on historical figures and localities. He liked to assume that ancient and medieval names were derived from those of his imagined prehistoric realms, postulating that the records of the prehistoric civilization had been destroyed by invasion or natural catastrophe, surviving only in myths and legends. He wrote, 'If some cataclysm of nature were to destroy that civilization, remnants of what knowledge and stories of its greatness might well evolve into the fantastic fables that have descended to us.'"
Howard repeatedly hinted at just such a natural catastrophe in prehistory in many of his stories. Consider this passage from the Conan tale A Witch Shall Be Born:
"So thought many," answered the woman who called herself Sakome. "They carried me into the desert to die, damn them. I, a mewling, puling babe whose life was so young it was scarecely the flicker of a candle. And do you know why they bore me forth to die?"
"I--I have heard the story--" faltered Taramis.
Salome laughed fiercely and slapped her bosom. The low-necked tunic left the upper parts of her firm breasts, and between them there shone a curious mark--a crescent, red as blood."
"The mark of the witch!" cried Taramis, recoiling.
"Aye!" Salome's laughter was dagger-edged with hate. "The curse of the kings of Khauran! Aye, they tell the tale in the market places, with wagging beards and rolling eyes, the pious fools! They tell how the first queen of our line had traffic with a foul fiend of darkness and bore him a daughter who lives in foul legendry to this day. And thereafter, in each century, a girl baby was born into the Askhaurian dynasty, with a scarlet half-moon between her breasts, that signified her destiny."
"'Every century a witch shall be born.' So ran the ancient curse. Some were slain at birth, as they sought to slay me. Some walked the earth as witches, proud daughters of Khauran, with the moon of hell burning upon their ivory bosoms. Each was named Salome. I, too, am Salome. It was always Salome, the witch. It will always be Salome, the witch, even when the mountains of ice have roared down from the pole and ground the civilizations to ruin, and a new world has risen from the ashes and dust--even then there shall be Salomes to walk the earth, to trap men's hearts by their sorcery, to dance before the kings of the world, and see the heads of the wise men fall at their pleasure."
Howard wrote an essay entitled "The Hyborian Age" and sent it off to H.P. Lovecraft in Providence, R.I. Lovecraft, "who did not approve of Howard's system of nomenclature, passed the article on to a fan-magazine publishers with a letter:"
"Dear Wollheim,
"Here is something which Two-Gun Bob (HPL's nickname for Howard--J.T.) says he wants forwarded to you for The Phantagraph, and which I hope you'll be able to use. This is really great stuff--Howard has the most magnificent sense of the drama of 'History' of anyone I know...The only flaw in this stuff is R.E.H.'s incurable tendency to devise names too closely resembling actual names of ancient history--names which, for us, have a very different set of associations."
(Editor's Comment: "For us"...right! You and six Oxford dons, HPL!)
"In many cases he does this designedly--on the theory that the familiar names descend from the fabulous realms he describes--but such a design is invalidated by the fact that we clearly know the etymology of many of the historic terms, hence cannot accept the pedigree he suggests. E. Hoffman Price and I have both argued with Two-Gun on this point, but we make no headway whatsoever. The only thing to do is to accept the nomenclature as he gives it, wink at the weak spots, and be damned thankful that we can get such vivid artificial legendry."
But was it "artificial?" The incredible wealth of detail about Hyborian nations, kingdoms, cultures and customs in the Conan stories written exclusively by REH is in a class by itself. Such detail is missing from Howard's earlier Kull stories. There are the usual palace intrigues, plenty of violence, sporadic references to "barbarian" Atlantis and the "elder" mainland kingdoms like Valusia and Commoria, but the depth of detail is not there. It's as if the Kull and Conan stories were written by two different people.
And what are we to make of Howard's stubborn refusal to alter the characters' names, as Lovecraft suggested?
"Howard plunged into the new series. A steady stream of Conan stories began to pour out of his typewriter. In all, Howard completed twenty-one Conan stories, of which seventeen were published in Weird Tales during the remaining four years of his literary career," which ended with his apparent suicide in June 1936.
"Howard made no attempt to tell Conan's history in chronological order. In some stories, he appears as a youth; in others, as a middle-aged man."
In their biography of REH, L. Sprague de Camp, Catherine Crook de Camp and Jane Whittington Griffin, listed the published Conan stories in the sequence of their appearance, showing the white heat in which the Texan author was churning out the saga. Here they are, in order of their appearance:
The Phoenix on the Sword December 1932
The Scarlet Citadel January 1933
The Tower of the Elephant March 1933
Black Colossus June 1933
The Slithering Shadow September 1933
The Pool of the Black One October 1933
Rogues in the House January 1934
Shadows in the Moonlight April 1934
Queen of the Black Coast May 1934
The Devil in Iron August 1934
The People of the Black Circle September 1934
Jewels of Gwahlur March 1935
Beyond the Black River May 1935
Shadows in Zamboula November 1935
The Hour of the Dragon January 1936
Red Nails July 1936
When you consider that The People of the Black Circle, The Hour of the Dragon and Red Nails were full-sized novels serialized over three and four-month periods in Weird Tales, REH completed a staggering amount of fiction during his brief "Conan" period.
"For many months he was so involved with Conan that he sometimes worked the night through. He wrote, 'For weeks I did nothing but write the adventures of Conan. The character took complete possession of my mind and crowded out everything else in the way of story-writing. When I deliberately tried to write something else, I couldn't do it."
(Editor's Comment: It all sounds a bit like automatic writing, doesn't it?)
Three other Conan stories were completed but did not sell. These included The God in the Bowl, The Vale of Lost Women and The Black Stranger. Howard had just begun writing for the Western pulp magazines when his life came to a sudden and tragic end.
Howard had some familiarity with Theosophy. In 1919, his father, Dr. Isaac Mordecai Howard, brought home a copy of Madame Blavatsky's Isis Unveiled, and both his son and wife devoured it. Having some familiarity with the concept of "world-ages," Howard might have discussed it with his mysterious Hindu friend during that February 1932 trip to Rio Grande City. "Racial memory," another pet idea of REH, might have come up in the conversation, as well.
Some of us would like to know more about the mysterious Hindu who befriended Robert E. Howard during his vacation trip to southern Texas. But that is a mystery that remains buried in Rio Grande City.
While researching this article, your editor wondered if there was any sort of paranormal link to Rio Grande City. I did some extra reading and came up with a "possible."
Further up the Rio Grande Valley is an ancient stone ruin in Boquilla Pass, not far from Panther Junction and Hot Springs, Texas. It sits overlooking a millenia-old Native American trail leading north from Mexico. When I saw an old photo of the "stone fort," I had to blink twice. I had seen a structure like this before--in the Andes. The Incas called it a tampu.
What it's doing in the Rio Grande Valley is anybody's guess.
(See Dark Valley Destiny: The Life of Robert E. Howard by L. Sprague de Camp, Catherine Crook de Camp and Jane Whittington Griffin, Bluesky Books Inc., New York, N.Y., 1983, pages 262 to 267; The Mighty Barbarians, edited by Hans Stefan Santesson, Lancer Books, Inc., New York, N.Y., 1969, pages 171 and 172; Fortean Times No. 132 for March 2000, page 50; and Texas: A Guide to the Lone Star State, Hastings House, New York, N.Y., revised edition 1969, page 606.)
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