Steve Tompkins: REH Fan, Scholar and Critic
Feb 4, 2019 18:19:01 GMT -5
Post by Deleted on Feb 4, 2019 18:19:01 GMT -5
Here's the first part of a fantastic introduction by Steve Tompkins from The Black Stranger: Original Manuscript Facsimile.
Between the Forest Devils and the Deep Blue Sea
“The Black Stranger” as Pirate Treasure and American Classic
By Steve Tompkins
Introduction
She feared that forest, and that fear was shared my every one in that tiny settlement. Nor was it idle fear - death lurked in those whispering depths, death swift and terrible, death slow and hideous, hidden, painted, tireless, unrelenting.
- Robert E. Howard, “The Black Stranger”
What you’re holding is a heroic fantasy gem as lustrous as the jewels that gleam like “frozen starlight” within its pages. A feverish frenzy of pirates and Picts, hoards and hordes, this Conan novella has been hard to come by and even harder to assess for decades. But now Wandering Star has given Howard enthusiasts and adventure aficionados an unprecedented opportunity to read “The Black Stranger” directly from Howard’s own typescript, one of the few from the Conan series that has survived in its entirety. Like his protagonist, the story has had to do some hard traveling over difficult terrain, but now it has arrived and is ready for a ruckus.
Howard’s has been an imagination that could span eons and drown civilizations, encompassing the crash of empires and the clash of rival peoples or even species. His bleak awareness of the transience of human endeavor was balanced by a bardic respect for the permanence of a champion’s defiance. If there is a grim satisfaction to be had from breaking one’s teeth on the iron collar of fate, Howard is its poet laureate. A cold wind sweeps down from the troll-swarmed heights of the Norse sagas into his work; his pages burn from the same hot sun that gleamed fiercely off the bronzed-encased killers on Homer’s Trojan plain. And yet in Howard’s most famous series, the epic underpinnings are there but something newly impatient and irreverent begins to emerge: Conan - with his conviction that the past is what we choose to take from it and the future is what we choose to make of it.
The epic canvas of Howard’s Hyborian Age borrows its decor, costumes, and nomenclature from a profusion of cultures and centuries, in effect bedecking itself in pirated finery just as Conan does in “The Black Stranger.” Howard expert Rusty Burke has written that “Conan, because he could range freely throughout the world, provided a useful vehicle for a writer trying his hand at new types of fiction,” and there is no better example of Howard’s genre-splicing than the story you are about to read.
Conan
The sort of thing I like to write - no plot construction, no hero or heroine, no climax in the accepted sense of the world, all the characters complete scoundrels, and everybody double-crossing everybody else.
- Robert E. Howard
Though “The Black Stranger” remained inexplicably unpublished in the Thirties and was unacceptably rewritten in the Fifties and Sixties, neither misfortune is any reason to regard the story as an also-ran or afterthought. The Conan series affords no finer example of the Cimmerian at the opposite end of his career from the stripling caught between swagger and shudder, new to the many-citied southlands, his skin bronzed by outland suns but his soul not yet seared by “civilized” barbarities. By the time of “The Black Stranger” Conan has grown into a captain and chieftain to whom the exercise of power is second nature. He is an uncrowned king of the wild frontier and the monarch of all he surveys.
If throughout “The Black Stranger” there is no way he could ever be dead enough to satisfy his numerous enemies, that is because he is so very much alive. In his sublime self-reliance, Conan adheres to the essayist Robert Warshow’s much-quoted description of the typical Western hero: “ His loneliness is organic, not imposed on him by the situation but belonging to him intimately and testifying to his completeness.” Rip-snorting and larger-than-life, Conan cheerfully assures his audience in “The Black Stranger” that “It’ll take a bigger ocean than that one to drown me.” There is so much of him, and to him, that the story can scarcely contain him: “His domination of the situation was not physical alone, though his gigantic shoulders and massive limbs seemed too big even for the great hall.”
During a stare-down in another piratical story, “The Pool of the Black One,” we are told that the Cimmerian “grinned back, as at a jest none knew but himself.” In “The Black Stranger,” that jest has become a world view, the amusement of a man who has achieved complete awareness - what Howard once referred to as Conan’s gigantic mirth.
Conan’s behaviour in “The Black Stranger” is not that of the stereotypical square-jawed, two-fisted prewar American hero; what use is straight-shooting in a crooked world? Instead, he is quick on the draw and even quicker on the uptake. “The Cimmerian had the advantage of a greater intelligence.” Howard tells us at the novella’s outset, and that observation remains true throughout the story, much to our delight.
No other Conan story makes us as aware that the Cimmerian has invited himself into a lethal game, one he proceeds to play with relaxed ruthlessness. Conan is never disorientated in the moral wilderness of “The Black Stranger.” Late in the story he is only too willing to threaten the pirates with the original nightmare of interlopers in the New World: “It’ll be dark long before you reach the beach, if you have to feel your way through the woods, and I’ll follow you and kill you one by one in the dark.”
While the Cimmerian is missing in action for part of the story, it matters little. He could have remained offstage longer than Godot and still dominated proceedings. In “The Black Stranger” every man’s hand - whether it grips cutlass or tomahawk - is against him, but the story remains Conan’s world, and the rest of the characters merely live - or more often die - therein. He resembles the pathfinders and frontiersmen of American lore and legend, but unlike them, Conan doesn’t need to adjust or adapt, for he is not just in, but of, the Wilderness.
Between the Forest Devils and the Deep Blue Sea
“The Black Stranger” as Pirate Treasure and American Classic
By Steve Tompkins
Introduction
She feared that forest, and that fear was shared my every one in that tiny settlement. Nor was it idle fear - death lurked in those whispering depths, death swift and terrible, death slow and hideous, hidden, painted, tireless, unrelenting.
- Robert E. Howard, “The Black Stranger”
What you’re holding is a heroic fantasy gem as lustrous as the jewels that gleam like “frozen starlight” within its pages. A feverish frenzy of pirates and Picts, hoards and hordes, this Conan novella has been hard to come by and even harder to assess for decades. But now Wandering Star has given Howard enthusiasts and adventure aficionados an unprecedented opportunity to read “The Black Stranger” directly from Howard’s own typescript, one of the few from the Conan series that has survived in its entirety. Like his protagonist, the story has had to do some hard traveling over difficult terrain, but now it has arrived and is ready for a ruckus.
Howard’s has been an imagination that could span eons and drown civilizations, encompassing the crash of empires and the clash of rival peoples or even species. His bleak awareness of the transience of human endeavor was balanced by a bardic respect for the permanence of a champion’s defiance. If there is a grim satisfaction to be had from breaking one’s teeth on the iron collar of fate, Howard is its poet laureate. A cold wind sweeps down from the troll-swarmed heights of the Norse sagas into his work; his pages burn from the same hot sun that gleamed fiercely off the bronzed-encased killers on Homer’s Trojan plain. And yet in Howard’s most famous series, the epic underpinnings are there but something newly impatient and irreverent begins to emerge: Conan - with his conviction that the past is what we choose to take from it and the future is what we choose to make of it.
The epic canvas of Howard’s Hyborian Age borrows its decor, costumes, and nomenclature from a profusion of cultures and centuries, in effect bedecking itself in pirated finery just as Conan does in “The Black Stranger.” Howard expert Rusty Burke has written that “Conan, because he could range freely throughout the world, provided a useful vehicle for a writer trying his hand at new types of fiction,” and there is no better example of Howard’s genre-splicing than the story you are about to read.
Conan
The sort of thing I like to write - no plot construction, no hero or heroine, no climax in the accepted sense of the world, all the characters complete scoundrels, and everybody double-crossing everybody else.
- Robert E. Howard
Though “The Black Stranger” remained inexplicably unpublished in the Thirties and was unacceptably rewritten in the Fifties and Sixties, neither misfortune is any reason to regard the story as an also-ran or afterthought. The Conan series affords no finer example of the Cimmerian at the opposite end of his career from the stripling caught between swagger and shudder, new to the many-citied southlands, his skin bronzed by outland suns but his soul not yet seared by “civilized” barbarities. By the time of “The Black Stranger” Conan has grown into a captain and chieftain to whom the exercise of power is second nature. He is an uncrowned king of the wild frontier and the monarch of all he surveys.
If throughout “The Black Stranger” there is no way he could ever be dead enough to satisfy his numerous enemies, that is because he is so very much alive. In his sublime self-reliance, Conan adheres to the essayist Robert Warshow’s much-quoted description of the typical Western hero: “ His loneliness is organic, not imposed on him by the situation but belonging to him intimately and testifying to his completeness.” Rip-snorting and larger-than-life, Conan cheerfully assures his audience in “The Black Stranger” that “It’ll take a bigger ocean than that one to drown me.” There is so much of him, and to him, that the story can scarcely contain him: “His domination of the situation was not physical alone, though his gigantic shoulders and massive limbs seemed too big even for the great hall.”
During a stare-down in another piratical story, “The Pool of the Black One,” we are told that the Cimmerian “grinned back, as at a jest none knew but himself.” In “The Black Stranger,” that jest has become a world view, the amusement of a man who has achieved complete awareness - what Howard once referred to as Conan’s gigantic mirth.
Conan’s behaviour in “The Black Stranger” is not that of the stereotypical square-jawed, two-fisted prewar American hero; what use is straight-shooting in a crooked world? Instead, he is quick on the draw and even quicker on the uptake. “The Cimmerian had the advantage of a greater intelligence.” Howard tells us at the novella’s outset, and that observation remains true throughout the story, much to our delight.
No other Conan story makes us as aware that the Cimmerian has invited himself into a lethal game, one he proceeds to play with relaxed ruthlessness. Conan is never disorientated in the moral wilderness of “The Black Stranger.” Late in the story he is only too willing to threaten the pirates with the original nightmare of interlopers in the New World: “It’ll be dark long before you reach the beach, if you have to feel your way through the woods, and I’ll follow you and kill you one by one in the dark.”
While the Cimmerian is missing in action for part of the story, it matters little. He could have remained offstage longer than Godot and still dominated proceedings. In “The Black Stranger” every man’s hand - whether it grips cutlass or tomahawk - is against him, but the story remains Conan’s world, and the rest of the characters merely live - or more often die - therein. He resembles the pathfinders and frontiersmen of American lore and legend, but unlike them, Conan doesn’t need to adjust or adapt, for he is not just in, but of, the Wilderness.
