Tag Archives: Weird Fiction

The Death of Robert E. Howard in the Pages of Weird Tales

In the “Thief of Forthe” discussion, I posted Clifford Ball’s brief encomium to REH from The Eyrie, Weird Tales‘s enormously important and incredibly interesting letter section, where readers, writers, and editors wrangled with Weird Fiction and discussed the stories, characters, and aesthetics of the genre. It’s an interesting little letter, mostly because it explicitly couches Howard’s death in terms of the loss of stories that readers would never see (one of the most gratifying types of mourning a writer can imagine, honestly). And ol’ Ball wasn’t alone – Howard’s death really rocked the Weird Tales readership, and elicited a lot of shocked and saddened letters from a lot of fans.

What’s fun about ’em, though, is that these letters offer a really interesting ground-level view of both fandom and the way it mediates genre-ification – in a lot of ways, the death of Howard is a crisis that forces people to reckon not only with his work as it was, but the future of both it and writing allied with it. It’s a fascinating archive!

But, before we dive in, here’s a pic of the Big Man himself, enjoying a refreshing big ass beer:

Howard died on June 11th, 1936, and the announcement was made in Weird Tales in the v 28, n. 2 Aug/Sept issue’s Eyrie:

A short but heartfelt tribute from Wright and the Weird Tales staff, highlighting both his imagination as well as his dedication to his craft (something that would get lost in certain later reevaluations of his work; much like what happened with Lovecraft, there were certain parties later on interested in portraying both of them as being weirdo savants who, by accident rather than careful work, produced important and interesting fiction). I’d also point out that, right away, we begin to see certain inaccuracies creeping into the Official Biography – REH did not attend the University of Texas. He took business courses at Howard Payne College, a private Baptist college in Brownwood, TX. By the way, one of those posthumous stories promised in forthcoming issues of Weird Tales included what many consider to be his very best horror story, “Pigeons from Hell.”

The next issue of Weird Tales, v 28, n.3 October 1936, had further semi-official remembrances of Howard’s life and work published in the Eyrie, this time from his friend and voluminous correspondent HPL, as well as E. Hoffmann Price, who actually met him in person:

The Lovecraft excerpt is a pretty important one, I think, and sort of sets the tone for the way Howard has entered the annals of weird literature. His line about Howard having “put himself into everything he wrote” is key, and a point HPL would make over and over (it forms the center of the long in memorium he wrote for the fanzine Fantasy in their Sept 1936 issue too). The idea that Howard was deeply engaged with his writing, producing art even in spite of the commercial conditions, is high praise from someone like HPL. Too, I think both he and REH shared a deep appreciation for their roles as REGIONAL authors, people interested in their specific environments and backgrounds and what it meant for them as both people and writers. And there’s certainly something to HPL statement that Howard had a “unique inner force and sincerity” in his work – read Kuttner’s Elak story or Ball’s Rald stories and tell me that, no matter how fun and possibly good they are, there IS certainly something missing from them.

Also interesting is the appearance (and misattribution) of REH’s death poem there. It’s a bit of a convoluted story, and I’d point you towards Todd Vick’s biography of REH “Renegades & Rogues” for more detail, but it became a major part of REH’s mythology, a suitably literary (and barbaric) poem to mark his passing.

Even more interesting, though, is that the Eyrie is still working through fan letters from people who had written them before they’d known of REH. Take, for example, this letter from Irvin Gould of PA, asking about a map of Conan’s world:

An interesting letter that sheds some light on the way people were reading and enjoying Conan – they love the hints and callbacks and history peppered throughout the stories, suggestive details about the larger world and deeper lore that imbued Howard’s writing with such vitality and sincerity, and want to know more about it! Specifically, they want a damn fantasy world map! While something like that is de rigueur in fantastic fiction now, back then it was a pretty novel request, I think. I know that there were maps in Haggard’s King Solomon’s Mine novel, for instance, and the Oz books famously had fantastic maps, but it’s fun to see people yearning for fantasy cartography because of the stories themselves and the sense of the scale and sweep of Howard’s vision. And maybe even MORE interesting is Mr. Gould’s recognition that asking for such concrete canonicity from weird fiction might not be appropriate! It’s a fun glimpse into the way READERS were engaging with both weird fiction AND Howard’s work particularly, navigating new genre conventions.

In this same issue there’s also a letter from the famously idiosyncratic fan, Gertrude Hemken. These letters from “Trudy” would become a beloved part of the Eyrie, mostly because she wrote in an absolutely delightful and totally fannish style – they’re a lot of fun, and it’s always fun to run into her in the pages of Weird Tales. Anyway, in the midst of a longer letter, she has this to say about Howard (unaware of his death, of course):

“So-o-o happy. I could gurgle!” should be the blurb they use on any and all Howard books henceforth. But it again speaks the clarity with which Howard presented Conan to the readers – he’s instantly and clearly defined, and folks like what they see!

The November 1936 issue (v. 28 n.4) includes the first fans letter reacting to the death announcement from a few issues back.

This letter’s request for a reprinting of his “best stories” as selected by the WT readership isn’t a bad one, honestly, and shows that, while the pulps were an ephemeral medium, there was a real desire to ensure that their contents lived on and were accessible to readers new and old alike. Later, in the same letter, Hopkins has an interesting thing to say:

It’s an interesting daydream: “The Death of Conan the Cimmerian!” And this musing about what could’ve been, and the extension of the character’s adventures beyond the pen of the creator, is an interesting seed that we’ll see explored more in later letters.

But the desire for a collection of Howard’s work was a common one:

I wonder if Clark’s personally bound collection of Conan stories exists in some attic somewhere?

The December ’36 issues (v. 28, n.5) is mostly dedicated to wranglin’ about the covers and whether they’re too risqué or not, but that leads into an interesting letter from Robert Lowndes about the artistic representations of Conan in The Unique Magazine:

It’d be worthwhile collecting these all together and doing a careful interrogation of each, but there’s no room (or time!) here for it…maybe later. I will grab the Rankin piece that Lowndes speaks so highly of, though, from the Jan 34 issue:

I find the sexualization of Conan by readers (and, to be fair, by Howard) hugely interesting, so the way this letter-writer highlights what it was the women found so damn hot about Conan in the stories is pretty fascinating!

I’ll just highlight one more prescient letter about REH from this issue, by the great Clark Ashton Smith:

The next issue, Jan 1937 v. 29 n.1, opens with Wright reflecting on the “necrology” of Weird Tales:

It’s a sad editorial, particularly in the way Wright’s hopes that no one else will die are pretty quickly about to be dashed. But, as he said, they’ve been getting a lot of letters about REH, and this issue includes some very fascinating ones!

I mean, that’s fascinating, isn’t it? Can’t Weird Tales find someone else to keep writing Conan for them? What a wild question, and I can’t think of any precedent for it at all, can you? On the one hand, there must’ve been fairly widespread knowledge that some “writers” in the pulps were house names with lots of different individuals contributing stories under them (a fairly common practice in particular in the western pulps), but the idea that a writer as singular as REH could be replaced is a wild one. On the OTHER hand, though, weird fiction DID have shared universes, if not shared characters – what is Lovecraft’s Mythos but a shared world with the same gods and aliens and dark books showing up in different stories by different authors? Is that the model this letter writer is drawing from when they talk about Conan continuing without REH? I think you have to give credit to Wright here, who very clearly and definitively answers that no one can write a Conan story except Howard…something later paperback authors should’ve kept in mind, in my opinion!

This same issue includes the Ball letter that we talked about in the last Pulp Strainer blog post, and while Ball certainly isn’t asking for someone else to write Conan stories, as we discussed there is a clear expression of the desire for more stories LIKE Conan’s.

Skipping ahead a couple of issues to March ’37 (v. 29 n.3) we get another plea for a book-length collection of Howard’s work:

These calls for a collection of Howard’s work to be published are pretty insistent, and it’s a shame that Weird Tales got so brutally burned on their one and only book publishing adventure (The Moon Terror) that they couldn’t do something with Howard’s work. Derleth’s Arkham House would, in ’46, put out Skull-Face and Others in 1946, complete with a badass Hannes Bok cover:

This book included some good Conan stories, but it wouldn’t be until the Gnome Press paperbacks of the mid-50s that you’d see a dedicated Conan series. Interestingly, those same Gnome Press editions would see just the sort of “Continuing Adventures of Conan” pastiche stories that (some) people were DEMANDING in there letters:

People LOVED Conan man, and that’s all there is to it. Howard had made something new and exciting, had carved out a real niche for himself in weird fiction, and the idea that there wouldn’t be any more Conan stories was a hard pill for some people to swallow. It’s interesting that everyone is explicitly couching these as more CONAN stories…they don’t want imitations, they don’t want other characters by other people, they want CONAN doing CONAN things. In some ways, then, it’s actually quite laudable that people like Kuttner tried to do SOMETHING a little different, even while trying to reverse engineer REH’s own unique approaches to his stories. Also, again, I think you have to salute Wright’s firm “nope” here too – he has a very clear aesthetic vision for weird fiction, and it doesn’t include the bloodless imitators of an inimitable writer like Robert E. Howard.

In the next issue of the Eyrie (v29 n.4) Wright publishes a letter from H. Warner Munn, a Weird Tales author famous for his “Werewolf of Ponkert” story, which was a favorite with readers, that really offers the Last Word on whether Conan should have further adventures written by other people:

Pretty succinctly and strongly put, I’d say, and a position I support. Wright obviously thought so too, and even seems to have used Munn’s letter as the punctuation on the chapter of Official Mourning for Howard. In the next issue (May 1937, v. 29 n.5), there’s only a single, passing mention of “the late Robert E. Howard” in one of the letters, and it’s clear that they’re turning the page on the sorrowful demise of a beloved author…

…and then, in v.29 n.6, the June ’37 issue of Weird Tales:

Goddammit!

With regards to REH, I think there’s something really interesting in getting to read these letters from readers of his stories; you can see the huge enthusiasm for his work and his creations, Conan in particular, a real glimpse into the phenomenon that would become fantasy literature in general and sword & sorcery in particular. There’s a little tinge of sadness here, though – you can only hope that Howard had a sense of just how beloved his work was while he was still alive. Writers are a touchy, morose lot in general, given much to self-recrimination and disappointment, often absolutely certain that they’ve wasted their time and largely failed to achieve what they wanted to with their work. It’s something REH certainly struggled with – his letters include many gloomy reflections on his work and the struggle of writing, even when he’s arguably at the height of his career. It’s something people always talk about, but it bears repeating: if there’s someone out there whose work you like, tell ’em! Even something as simple as a nice note can mean a lot to someone, and you never know when it’ll be too late to tell them!

There’s also something extremely valuable to be had by reading these letters in the Eyrie, I think – they’re such a rich archive of READERS and their reactions to/thoughts about the stories and authors and genre as a whole. In the wake of REH’s death you really start to see the way they were ENGAGING with his work, and with Conan in particular, and it’s a real granular way to interrogate the formation of what would, eventually, become “Sword & Sorcery.” There’s ALSO a really interesting tension between what people want (more Conan!) and what they would eventually get (some pastiche-y early attempts by Kuttner, for example, and then Fafhrd & the Gray Mouser – but not in Weird Tales, of course…).

Some other stray observations – it’s interesting how CONAN focused the readers’ letters generally are, isn’t it? I mean, there’s other stuff mentioned for sure, but the Cimmerian is front-and-center, and it’s his adventures that people are clamoring for more of. Partly that’s got to be simple chronology – after all, Howard’s death is announced with “Red Nails,” one of the best Conan stories of all time, and there’d been a lot of Conan recently too, while his other characters like Solomon Kane and Bran Mak Morn hadn’t appeared for years. But there’s something about Conan’s special alchemy at work there, I think, and particularly the sense of a real, lived in, vital WORLD around him that just grabbed readers.

Finally, I’d point out how often people with talent and knowledge would point out just how inimitable Howard was as a writer. Wright is very firm in his explanations about why there’d be no more Conan stories by other people – he was a singular talent writing singular tales, and no one else could do them. Similarly, I think HPL’s oft-cited “there’s a piece of Howard in every one of his stories” is a perfect way to capture the kind of ineffable qualities of his work (and HPL’s, for that matter). It’s easiest recognized by its absence in, for instance, Kuttner’s S&S work, and really underlines the absolutely necessary quality of a writer finding their authentic voice if they want to produce art. For all the problems with Howard’s work (and there’re a lot!), the one thing you can absolutely say is that they are the products of a writer who was absolutely sincere in his efforts at communicating the things he thought were important and interesting. That he succeeded is shown by the many heartfelt letters we see in The Eyrie.

The Pulp (of Capitalism) Strainer #29: “Smoke Ghost” by Fritz Leiber, Unknown Worlds, V. 5, n. 3, Oct 1941

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The Big Day is here: All Hallow’s Eve; Samhain; Satan’s Birthday(?); Pumpkinmas. Yes, it’s Halloween, and as is good and right, we’re celebrating the day with a particularly excellent story dissection/discussion/ramble – Fritz Leiber’s “Smoke Ghost” from the October 1941 issue of Unknown Worlds!

We’ve hit Leiber before, of course, discussing his very first story in Weird Tales (“The Automatic Pistol“) as well as the first Fafhrd & the Grey Mouser story in Unknown Worlds (“Two Sought Adventure“) so, obviously, we’re all huge Leiberheads around these parts, just absolutely Fritzpilled. He’s a great writer who had a huge impact across multiple genres – weird fiction, sci-fi, and especially in the genre he named, sword & sorcery. Immensely important figure, and a helluva writer too boot! And man, lemme tell ya – this story today is a killer!

Pretty rad ToC in this issue – the de Camp and Pratt Novel up front is great, one of their “Mathematics of Magic” series that is, I think, criminally underappreciated among fantasy folks. There’s a good Kuttner story in here, a lesser (but still fun) Bloch effort too, as well as some of Hubbard’s usual hackwork. Anyway, a solid issue of the magazine, made more interesting by the editorial (“Of Things Beyond,” on page 6) where Campbell and Tarrant are trying to couch their style of fantasy as something more urbane and, frankly, science fictional than the traditional (i.e., Weird Tales) stuff. It’s always interesting to see the genre discussions going on in the pulps – we tend to take the labels for granted these days, but there was a real tension about what exactly was, say, sci-fi or horror, and the only place to hash them out was in the magazines!

But, anyway, enough! Let’s get down to business with one of my favorite weird stories of all time, “Smoke Ghost” by Fritz Leiber, Jr!

Good, almost “EC Comics” ghastly ghoul there, huh? Cartier is among the top of the heap, especially in the sci-fi magazines, and had a long and storied career as an illustrator, with a fun and playful style that I like. Also really appreciate that this bit o’ art doesn’t give anything away at all, a rarity in the pulps sometimes!

A fantastic opening, isn’t it? A secretary is wondering what the hell is up with her boss, and who can blame her when he’s spouting off truly wild, apocalyptic ideas about the kind of ghosts born into a world of steam and smoke and capitalism. “The kind that would haunt coal yards and slip around at night through deserted office buildings…” I mean, holy smokes, great stuff! And there’s more! Miss Millick is taking dictation from him when he has another odd interlude:

Absolutely killer stuff here, and a good overview of not only the theme of this story but of a lot of Leiber’s fiction, where myths and beliefs and monsters are a dark reflection of the material conditions of life, a kind of instantiation of collective fear and pain whose form and expression comes from the specific types of sordid miseries visited on people. And here, in this story, written at the tale end of the Depression (though who was to know that) and while Europe was engulfed in World War II (with America watching from the sidelines, as yet), Leiber is evoking a particular flavor of modern, industrialized hauntings.

I hope Miss Millick is stealing office supplies, because goddamn that is one grim diatribe to be enduring for thirty-five cents an hour or whatever the going rate for secretarial work was in 1941. She objects that, of course, there’re no such things as ghosts, but this seems to only send Mr. Wran further ’round the bend. With a huge, tight, unnatural smile, he spouts some boilerplate about how of course there’s no such things as ghosts, modern science assures us of this very fact yadda yadda. It’s all very strange for Miss Millick, who nervously runs her hands across the edge of Wran’s desk…and discovered that it’s covered in some kind of weird black smudge or gunk.

Strange how the sight of that dark grime seems to affect him so, huh? When Millick is gone, Wran runs over and examines the black gunk – he’s obviously troubled, because not only does he furiously scrub the stuff off the desk, we also learn that the trash basket is full of similarly inky rags…this weird grimy shit seems to be part of some kind of regularly occurring phenomenon, tied in with other things that Wran, attempted to convince himself, calls “hallucinations.”

And what are the things he’s been “hallucinating?”

I gotta watch out, Leiber is such a good writer I’m in real danger of just copy-pasting the whole damn story onto here. But I mean, c’mon, how evocative and moody and moving is that passage? This bleak, almost nihilistic scenery is as terrifying and as existentially threatening as any of Lovecraft’s Cyclopean ruins, and the psychogeographical connection between it and the troubled times (specifically the “Fascist wars”) is really phenomenal. Also, neat writerly trick of Leiber’s, tying Wran’s observation of this scenery to dusk and twilight only, doubling down on the sense of fading light and ending cycles.

It’s during these Blakean reveries that Wran captures sight of something – it’s nothing at first, just some windswept garbage…and yet…

That’s a real lived-in moment, isn’t it? One summer, when I was doing field work out in Wyoming, I watched the same same pile of antelope bones slowly disarticulate and scatter down hill. It was on the path I would hike to get to some outcrops, and for like two weeks I saw the steady movement of vertebrae and ribs and long bones, starting up near the ridgeline and, as a result of time and curious coyotes and intermittent rain storms, ending up at the foot of the hill in a little dry creek bed. It’s an interesting thing, getting to “know” a bit of ephemeral stuff in the landscape, and Leiber beautifully describes Wran’s fascination with this weird, oddly behaving bag of trash. And of course, the fun part is that Wran doesn’t know he’s in a weird tale (yet), but we do, so we know that the strange peripatetic movement day by day of this horrible bag thing is much more portentous and threatening than poor ol’ Wran does.

Wran finds himself obsessing over the weird bag thing – when it’s not visible one day, he’s oddly relieved, and then becomes annoyed with himself for, apparently, having been worried about seeing the thing. The next evening, he tries to ignore it, but the desire to look out the train window at the thing’s usual spot proves too strong, and he does indeed see something: it looks like there was a head of some sort, peering over the parapet of the roof.

At this point Wran really is justified in his assumption that he’s developing some kind of psychosis – the things is dominating his thoughts, and he develops a weird compulsion about grime and dust and inky grit that he suddenly is noticing everywhere in the office. Similarly, he decides that this is something he has to confront, and so, one evening on the train, he strains his eyes looking out over the grim cityscape.

And so Wran decides to visit a psychotherapist.

Leiber was, like a lot of people, intensely interested in psychiatry/psychology – we now tend to not really appreciate how HUGE and REVOLUTIONARY the idea that the brain was “fixable” had on people in the early 20th century. In our modern world of commodified and wide-spread therapy, it’s kind of taken for granted, but back then there’s a real sense that not only is it possible to interrogate and adjust the human mind, but it could be done scientifically. There’s a reason why people like Sturgeon, Campbell (the editor of the Unknown Worlds), and Philip K. Dick were such devoted believers in PSI/psychic stuff, and why it shows up so often in the science fiction of the day – it was bleeding edge science, doing for the mind what medicine was doing for the body and what physics and chemistry promised to do for the external world. Leiber, who received undergrad degrees in both psychology and biology, was uniquely equipped to integrate these concerns into his fiction.

Wran’s visit to the head-shrinker allows him to relive and explore the “unfortunate incident” that Miss Millick had alluded to earlier in the story. It turns out that ol’ Wran was, apparently, a psychic kid, although that’s really the least important part of the story – what TRULY matters here is the Wran, while apparently clairvoyant, continuously disappointed his mother because he could NOT communicate with the dead. The fact that this “sensory prodigy” could only see real, physical objects and NOT spiritual ones is interesting, in the context of this story.

Childhood Wran’s life as a psychic oddity is interesting – it seems like he mostly hated it, but he desperately wanted to please his mother and other adults, all of whom paid attention to him because of his gifts. This need to please is so great that it maybe ends up sabotaging him; his first public test at a university elicits such anxiety that he ends up psyching himself out and, apparently, loosing the ability totally.

At this point, we have been told a few things about Wran that’re important to the story – he’s a needy little guy, he had a brush with the occult world as a child that has resulted in him turning away from the unknown and towards placid rationality (see, in particular, all his talk about science and his desire for an expert to tell him everything is okay) and, most interestingly, his psychic power ONLY worked on real, physical objects…he never spoke to the ghost a dead person, no matter how hard his mother pushed him.

All this is very interesting, and Wran is even apparently feeling a little better from having taken the talking cure when, suddenly…

Don’t be bothered by the uncomfortable usage of the age here – it’s unfortunate phraseology, but the needs of the story justify it I think and, besides, trust me; in hands other than Leiber’s it could be waaaaay worse. Anyway, the bag thing has obviously followed Wran to the doctor’s office, which is freaky as fuck. Also interesting is that the doctor sees it too – this isn’t something only the “sensitive” can see, it’s a real physical presence in the world!

Obviously, Wran decides it’s time to wrap it up, and he heads out – he’d been hoping modern psychiatry would be enough to solve his delusion, but now he knows that’s all done with. There was no delusion; the bag thing was real. He wanders around the city, taking comfort in crowds and lights, only to find himself wandering back to his office. He realizes that, subconsciously, he’s recognized that he can’t lead the bag thing back to his home, where his wife and child are. Dejected and without a plan, he heads up to the office, mulling over his newfound enlightenment:

His thoughts are interrupted by a sudden phone call! It’s his wife, with some troubling news!

The bag thing is at his house anyway! He hurries out the office and calls the elevator, looking through the grate and down the shaft…

…where he sees the bag thing…

Wran is looking down the elevator shaft, and the thing is three stories below, looking up the shaft, directly at him. I mean, that is some killer, chilling stuff, isn’t it? Just spectacular, and it’s only going to get better – we’re entering the home stretch of the story, and Leiber is just about ready to let us have it.

Wran flees back into the office, locking the door and retreating to his desk, terrified out of his mind. He hears the elevator come up to his floor, and then a silhouette appears in the glass of the office door. Why, no worries! It’s just Miss Millick!

Yeah…poor ol’ Miss Millick has been possessed. This begins one of the scariest sections in basically all of literature. Leiber has made Millick into this terrifying avatar of something inhuman and alien, and it’s just some spectacular stuff:

The tittering, the weird playfulness, the way it starts every sentence with “Why, Mr. Wran…” and then the horrific alteration of Miss Millick’s body, followed by the implacableness of the thing…it’s absolutely spectacular, and the last line of the section (“I’m coming after you”), I mean, it doesn’t get any better than this. Absolute top notch weird horror.

Wran flees to the roof, but of course the thing follows him.

Chilling fucking stuff. There’s even a fun, spooky illustration of Wran’s abjectification:

The thing titters, demanding total abasement from Wran:

The thing, pleased with Wran’s submission, releases its hold on Miss Millick, and Wran is left alone, having pledged himself totally to his new god, The Smoke Ghost. He helps Miss Millick, who for the life of her can’t understand how she ended up on the roof, and then the story closes:

I mean, goddamn, am I right? A hell of a story, and such a rich text, with so much going on. The big picture, at least for me, is Leiber very much recognizing the dark truth of his (and, now, our) times: the age of “rationality” is an illusion. Rather, we live in a haunted world, one stalked by the phantoms of fascism, of capitalism, of industrial gigantism, of smoke and soot and abjection. Wran, confronted by the implicit threat of this world, breaks immediately, begging for his life at the feet of the oppressor and promising to serve and worship it utterly. It’s dark stuff! And kind of a bummer! Sorry!

Setting aside the crushing existentialist horror of the story, though, I think we can all agree that it’s also a homerun in terms of being a technically perfect piece of weird fiction. Not a sour note there, the pacing is great, the build-up is spectacular, the weirdness is solid, and when the horror starts up it gets really good, really fast. It’s also such a great, original take – the Smoke Ghost is a specter of modernity, a being called into existence by a world of rampant, soulless capitalism and wracked by fascist war. There’s even a bit of early environmental critique here – the ghost is a thing of garbage and soot; it’s physical presence is one fundamentally of pollution and corruption.

Obviously, I love this story; it’s definitely one of my favorites, a great example of Leiber’s mastery of weird fiction. A perfect way to celebrate Halloween!