I feel a curious kinship, though, with the Middle Ages. I have been more successful in selling tales laid in that period of time, than in any other. Truth it was an epoch for strange writers. Witches and werewolves, alchemists and necromancers, haunted the brains of those strange savage people, barbaric children that they were, and the only thing which was never believed was the truth. Those sons of the old pagan tribes were wrought upon by priest and monk, and they brought all their demons from their mythology and accepted all the demons of the new creed also, turning their old gods into devils. The slight knowledge which filtered through the monastaries from the ancient sources of decayed Greece and fallen Rome, was so distorted and perverted that by the time it reached the people, it resembled some monstrous legend. And the vague minded savages further garbed it in heathen garments. Oh, a brave time, by Satan! Any smooth rogue could swindle his way through life, as he can today, but then there was pageantry and high illusion and vanity, and the beloved tinsel of glory without which life is not worth living.
Oh, the gauds and the baubles and the frills and the tinsel! All empty show and the smoke of conceit and arrogance, but what a drab thing life would be without them. Hell, man can long for a world of working men all they wish—for a world of common sense and reason—I like the gilt and the silver bells, even if they can never be mine. The cap and wand of the jester, and the blare of the golden trumpets!
Hell, it's all a game, and let us be children and clap our hands when the gallant cavalcade wings by, and not look for the rust on the spears and the stains on the banners—not all the time, at least. I hate the devotees of great wealth but I enjoy seeing the splendor that wealth can buy. And if I were wealthy, I'd live in a place with marble walls and marble floors, lapis lazulis ceilings and cloth-of-gold and I would have silver fountains in the courts, flinging an everlasting sheen of sparkling water in the air. Soft low music should breathe forever through the rooms and slim tigerish girls should glide through on softly falling feet, serving all the wants of me and my guests; girls with white bare limbs like molten gold and soft dreamy eyes.
Oh Hell, may I always be able to laugh at myself. Self mockery is a good wine to drink sometimes. Satan blast my soul. You'll have to pardon all this rambling. I had nothing to say when I started. Answer soon.
Robert E. Howard to Harold Preece, c. Oct 1930
Well, Harold, how did you like my story, The Voice of El-Lil, in the new Oriental Stories? I'm very pleased with the magazine myself. But listen—if you've read the story, you probably noticed a sentence which referred to non-Aryan peoples in Connaught AND Galway. That's the printer's mistake, not mine; I wrote "Connaught and Galloway," meaning, of course, the province of Scotland. I don't know why it was changed.
I find tales of the East extremely fascinating, and am beginning to believe that the old, old theory of Turkish-Gaelic affinity is well bourne out. The races have so much in common cruelty, treachery, loyalty, fatalism, spend-thriftness, beserk fighting rage, a love of music and poetry.
I lately sold a tale to Oriental Stories in which I created the most somber character I have yet attempted. The story is called Hawks of Outremer, and I got $120 for it. The character is Cormac FitzGeoffrey: "Clean shaven and the various scars that showed on his dark, grim face lent his already formidable features a truly sinister aspect. His low, broad forehead was topped by black, square cut hair that contrasted strongly with his cold blue eyes. Son of a woman of the O'Briens and a renegade Norman night, Geoffry the Bastard, in whose veins, it is said, coursed the blood of William the Conqueror, Cormac had seldom known an hour's peace or ease in all his thirty years of violent life. Hated by the Irish and despised by the Normans he payed back contempt and ill treatment with savage hate and ruthless vengeance."
One of the main things I like about Farnsworth Wright's magazines is you don't have to make your heros such utter saints. I took Cormac FitzGeoffrey into the East on a Crusade to escape his enemies and am considering writing a series of tales about him.
The tang of fall is in the air and the whisper of autumn in the skies. Summer is waning into the yellow leaves of all the yesterdays, and the heart of me is thin and old. The sky is deep and blue and mysterious with the changing of the seasons, and strange thoughts stir deep in me, but age forever steals on me in the autumn of the year, and though I am young, my soul is old and wavering like a thread-bare garment outworn.
All that is deep and gloomy and Norse in me rises in my blood. I would go east into the sunshine and the nodding palm trees, but I bide and the dream of the twilight of the gods is on me, and the dreams of cold and misty lands and the ancient pessimism of the Vikings.
It seems to me, especially in the autumn, that that one vagrant Danish strain that is mine, predominates above all my Celtic blood. It is in the autumn that the wanderlust grips me, and my sleeping dreams are not of the lazy palm fringed lagoons, the desert caravans, the loud bazaars and the tropic jungles to which my waking thoughts turn, but of cold blue seas beneath a clear and frosty sky, of clean sandy fens stretching from the cold foam to blue mountains, of boats racing through the flying spray, and fishers' nets, shining like silver on the shore.
I never saw such things; yet they gleam plainly in my dreams. I see them with the eyes of old Samuel Walser, who knew them and loved them in his youth, aye, and with the eyes of a thousand generations of blue-eyed, red-haired fishermen and sailors and Vikings behind him, who were his ancestors, and who were no less ancestors of mine.
Ah, well, I will not weary you with my vagaries.
Bob
To E. Hoffman Price
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Dear Ed:
Sorry to hear Pawang Ali has been banished. I can't imagine why. It was a fine series. However I'm sure you'll find another character to take his place. I haven't time to write much. My mother is very low and I fear cannot survive. I have little heart to speak of writing or anything else, but I will say that I have made several sales recently; the first two of the Pike Bearfield series to Argosy, another Spicy adventure, a Breck Elkins yarn to Action (now a monthly and has expressed a desire for a monthly Elkins) and another of the same type to Popular's Star Western. All these sales were made within the past ten days. Best Wishes,
Bob
To Donald Wandrei
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Dear Mr. Wandrei:
I've been meaning to write to you for some time, but somehow didn't get around to it.
I appreciate your kind comments regarding my Weird Tales stories; though I'm afraid "The Tower of the Elephant" won't stack up very highly against Smith's magnificent "Isle of Tortures."
I have long admired your work in that magazine, as I have indicated in the letters both to the editors and to Lovecraft. Your poetry is absolutely splendid, and your "Lives of Alfred Kramer" is as fine a work of its kind as I have ever read.
I am glad to hear you are enjoying your visit to New York so well. In reply to your question regarding possible East-faring on my part, I'm afraid the matter is very indefinite. If I go anywhere, I'm more likely to take the other direction.
Hoping to hear from you at your convenience, I am,