The Strange Case Of... The Mummy's Boy Who created Conan The Barbarian
Meet king of the pulps Robert E Howard.
He is a great swordsman. He can wield any weapon he lays his hands upon. He is skilled in the equestrian arts. And with a body that resembles a condom stuffed full of walnuts, he is as irresistible to the opposite sex as he is able to overpower any man and most beasts. He is Conan, a proud son of Cimmeria. And he is a barbarian.
Poems, novels, short stories, comic books, motion pictures - all of these have been dedicated to the man with the world's furriest underpants. With the most recent Conan film hitting - and missing - as recently as 2011, it's easy to forget the man behind the warrior. And we don't mean Arnold Schwarzenegger or director John Milius or comic artists such as John Buscema. We're talking about the Texan poet and author Robert E Howard.
A fan of pulp fiction magazines like Adventure and Weird Tales from the age of 15, Robert Ervin Howard (born: 22 January, 1906) sold his first stories just three short years later. Obsessed with cavemen and prehistory to being with, he swiftly graduated to sword and sorcery tales. It wasn't until after befriending the acclaimed science-fiction writer HP Lovecraft that Howard stumbled upon the mythical kingdom of Cimmeria where, some six to nine months later, he'd encounter Conan. It was the autumn of 1935. Within three years, Robert E Howard would be dead.
Once he'd fully fleshed out Conan, it seemed Robert Howard couldn't stop writing about him. A novel (The Hour Of The Dragon), short stories, essays, poems - the barbarian fueled all these forms. He also caused Howard to create the Hyborian Age, a fictional mythos to rival that which JRR Tolkien later created.
While both the kingdom and its most celebrated subject were proving hugely popular with the pulp crowd, Howard was experiencing something of a crisis. Much as he liked writing about warlocks and behemoths, he didn't wish to be solely identified with the genre - a native Texan, he longed to write about the American West. And then there was the thing with his mum...
Robert E Howard couldn't have had less in common with his key creation. While Conan was a chiseled man of action, Howard - though very tall - was a doughy, moon-faced man whose hobbies didn't extend much behind storytelling and driving conservatively. The only real passion he had outside of writing was for his mother, Hester. Over the years, biographers have struggled to understand the nature of this relationship. Following his untimely death, it wasn't uncommon for people to diagnose Howard as suffering from some form of Oedipal complex. Robert and Hester's was certainly a very close friendship. Indeed, when local doctors said that Mrs Howard didn't have long to live, Robert - who himself suffered for a weak heart - also entered a period of terminal decline.
The end for Robert E Howard actually came shortly before his mother's passing. Told by nurses that Hester had no chance of regaining consciousness, the author left her bedroom, walked to his car and pulled a revolver from the glove compartment. Upon hearing a gunshot, Howard's father Isaac and the physicians treating his mother rushed to the driveway but it was too late. Robert Howard was dead. He was 30.
Although he lived only a short while, Robert Howard's legacy is remarkably large. If age hasn't done much for his stories of Conan, Red Sonja and Belit, Queen of the Black Coast, they would seem to shine some light upon his interior life - the emphasis on sado-masochism is particular revealing.
It is a film, however - Dan Ireland's The Whole Wide World - that tells us most about the tortured soul with the muscle-bound alter ego. Vincent D'Onofrio (Full Metal Jacket, The Player) stars as the writer while an on-song Renee Zellweger essays Novalyne Price, the one girl Howard is known to have had a relationship with. Could the love of a good woman have steadied his heart and his hand? To paraphrase Conan, Crom alone knows for certain...