Our friends over at The Cimmerian Blog have been taking Arnie Fenner to task for some less-than-laudatory comments he made in his foreword for …and their memory was a bitter tree…, the new collection of Conan stories from Tim Underwood. Fenner has stepped up and responded, but the response is as lame as the original remarks (and strikes me as rather smug).
Personally, I don’t care if Arnie Fenner doesn’t think Robert E. Howard is a great writer, because Arnie Fenner is not a person to whom I look for opinions about literature. He puts together stunningly beautiful art books (Spectrum, Icon), and may or may not know something about art, at least fantasy art and illustration. It’s pretty clear he doesn’t know much about writing.
In the foreword, he apparently said (I’m going by excerpts quoted by others), “Because, while Robert certainly was a tremendously gifted storyteller with a wholly original voice, capable of spinning an exciting yarn in first draft that could capture his reader’s imagination . . . he simply wasn’t a great writer.†Now, this is merely an opinion, and we can let it pass, though we wonder how long it will be before we can expect to stop seeing this kind of back-handed swipe at Howard in introductions by his supposed fans. Really, was the final clause actually necessary there? (Well, yes, Fenner will contend — because his point was that Howard needed an editor, badly. We’ll address that in a moment.) He could have simply left that final remark out and dropped the “Because, while”, and I daresay no one would have given the comment a second thought.
This business of trying to differentiate between a “storyteller” and a “writer” is a chump’s game. Robert E. Howard did indeed tell stories, on occasion, while sitting by a fire or on a porch of an evening or driving around in a car, keeping friends or relations enthralled. But that is not how he made his living. He made his living by writing. And by the time of his death, at the young age of 30, he was damned good at it. It is no use trying to say that Howard was just getting by on sheer storytelling gusto. Howard keeps us turning pages by the sheer power and quality of his writing, the way he put words on paper. Judging from Fenner’s short list of “great writers,” he apparently likes authors who are trying to do something more than merely entertain, writers who have something important (in his opinion) to say. It happens that many of us do believe Howard had some important things to say — about the inherently savage and violent nature of man, about the ephemerality of our “civilization,” about the need to keep at the hard work of building a civilization rather than letting ourselves slide into decadence, decline and decay — there are messages in Howard’s work that are perhaps even more important today than they were when he wrote them. As I said, though, I’m going to let Fenner’s opinion about Howard’s writing pass. I’m more inclined to accept the judgments of H.P. Lovecraft, Fritz Leiber, Karl Edward Wagner, David Drake, David Weber, and any number of other writers — people who actually know something about good writing.
But Fenner strays off into territory that I know something about — and from the realm of “opinion” to that of “fact” — when he challenges the “pure text” movement and insists that Howard needed a good editor like Farnsworth Wright.
Fenner apparently doesn’t think much of the “pure text” movement, i.e., those of us — I am probably among the most prominent, as series editor of the Wandering Star and Del Rey editions — who are intent upon presenting Howard’s work as nearly as possible as he wrote it, without editorial interference. We believe that for far too long Howard’s Conan, in particular, had been corrupted by the rewriting and pastiching of L. Sprague de Camp and others, sometimes very lightly, but sometimes in ways that worked very much to the detriment of the story, or the series. ( “The Black Stranger” was a particularly egregious example, which I covered, along with “The Frost-Giant’s Daughter,” in “De Camp vs. Howard: Rewriting Conan,” in The Fantastic Worlds of Robert E. Howard.) Simply put, we think Howard’s work should be presented the way he wrote it, with the editing consisting of no more than correcting typos or punctuation. Howard’s prose was generally sound, so there is no reason to alter it.
Fenner says, “The assumption being, of course, that REH didn’t need editing, not by Wright, de Camp, or anyone else—a questionable assertion.” A bit later he opines, “Farnsworth Wright was a good editor for Robert E. Howard…his suggestions and edits improved Robert’s work and helped him to mature as a writer.â€
It’s one thing to prefer the de Camp-edited or rewritten versions of Howard stories: that’s a matter of taste. I prefer my Howard straight, rather than filtered through the sensibilities of someone whose worldview was not in synch with Howard’s. (De Camp never let an opportunity pass to extol the virtues of civilization over barbarism.) But to say that Wright’s “suggestions and edits improved Robert’s work”? This is one I’m going to have to ask him to back up with some examples.
I wonder if Mr. Fenner has actually done any textual comparisons, or read any of Patrice Louinet’s notes in the Conan volumes, or studied my text notes in the Del Rey editions? I’m guessing he has not, for if he had, he would know that Farnsworth Wright exercised an exceptionally light editorial hand. Wright’s “editing” was limited largely to accepting or rejecting a story. Some pulp editors — Jack Byrne of Fiction House (and later Argosy) and Harry Bates of the Clayton Magazines come immediately to mind — felt free to make wholesale changes to a story once they’d accepted it, or to return it with specific suggestions about what to do with it ( “I think it would be better if you had this guy here do this….” etc.). Wright, though, very rarely changed anything, at least in Howard’s work, and very rarely suggested any specific changes if he returned a story. He might quietly eliminate strong language ( “damn” and “you bastard!” being very strong language in the early ’30s) or tone down a “sexual” allusion (and of course, what they thought was pretty hot sex in the ’30s is very tame by our more decadent standards), he might change a spelling to conform to house style (he preferred “simitar” to “scimitar” for some reason), he might correct some of the same misspellings or improper punctuation that I, too, am inclined to correct, but he pretty much left Howard’s work alone. So when you read a Howard story in Weird Tales, you’re essentially reading the story the way Howard wrote it. That’s why we “pure text” types accept Weird Tales as being very nearly “pure text,” certainly the next-best-thing to Howard’s original.
Seventeen REH Conan stories appeared in Weird Tales. In the Del Rey editions, we used the Weird Tales text for eleven — or two thirds — of those stories. The stories for which we used Howard’s typescripts were: “The Scarlet Citadel” (a special case, in that Howard had retyped the story after it appeared in Weird Tales, when he wanted to include it in a collection of short stories for an English publisher); “People of the Black Circle” (an incomplete typescript, so some pages were taken from Weird Tales); “A Witch Shall Be Born”; “The Servants of Bit-Yakin” (Weird Tales title, “Jewels of Gwahlur”); “Beyond the Black River”; and “The Man-Eaters of Zamboula” (WT title, “Shadows in Zamboula”).
So, four stories that are included in …and their memory was a bitter tree… should be essentially identical to those in the Wandering Star books, and the other four will make for a good test case: I invite Mr. Fenner to compare the text from REH’s typescripts, as published in the Del Rey Conan books, with the Weird Tales text (presumably that published in Underwood’s book), and report here on specific examples that illustrate how Wright’s editing of these stories helped make Howard’s writing better.
I’m going to go out on a limb here and predict that he won’t be able to find any good examples, because they aren’t there. Wright didn’t really “edit” in the sense of changing a writer’s copy; at most, he sent a story back saying he thought it dragged somewhere, or it didn’t work for him, etc. He left it up to Howard to fix it, or not. “The Phoenix on the Sword” is a good example: we included Howard’s first submitted draft of this story in The Coming of Conan the Cimmerian, and readers can see for themselves the rewrite process at work. Wright’s letter to Howard, rejecting “The Frost-Giant’s Daughter” but asking for some changes to “The Phoenix on the Sword,” is very well-known, and Patrice quotes it almost in its entirety in “Hyborian Genesis,” page 441 of The Coming of Conan the Cimmerian. Wright said, “But THE PHOENIX OF [sic] THE SWORD has points of real excellence. I hope you will see your way clear to touch it up and resubmit it. It is the first two chapters that do not click. The story opens rather uninterestingly, it seems to me, and the reader has difficulty in orienting himself.” There you have Wright’s editorial style — he simply said where he thought the problem was, and asked Howard to try rewriting it. No specific suggestions about what to do to solve the problem. It was Howard who came up with the brilliant “Nemedian Chronicles” opening, to solve the problem of introducing readers to an exotic new world in a few broad strokes. It’s not a bad little piece of writing for an author whose style Fenner believes was “more rudimentary than lyrical.”
So far as surviving correspondence or other evidence tells us, after “Phoenix” no other Conan story was sent back to Howard for revisions. They were apparently either rejected or accepted, as submitted. So if there is any evidence in the Conan stories of Wright’s editing improving Howard’s work and helping him mature as a writer, it will show up as a difference between the original Howard text and the Weird Tales text. I urge Mr. Fenner to share with us the results of his comparisons.
I’ll briefly address one more point made by Fenner in the excerpt quoted above: that REH was “capable of spinning an exciting yarn in first draft…” Oh, it’s true, it’s true, as any number of stories published long after his death certainly prove. And among the Conan tales, “Rogues in the House” is an excellent case in point, a fine story produced in a single draft. But it seems to me that Fenner’s point in adding that “single draft” business must have been to hint that Howard was a hasty writer, that he turned in first drafts, and therefore an editor had to clean them up. However, a quick look at the lists of extant Conan typescripts, included in the appendices of each Del Rey volume, will show that “Rogues in the House” was the only Conan story produced in a single draft. Every other story went through at least two, sometimes three or more, drafts. That, it seems to me, suggests a writer at work, not just a “storyteller”.
When I first saw …and their memory was a bitter tree… announced, I wondered why we needed it. It doesn’t include all the Conan stories, only eight of them. (The announcements I’ve seen say there are nine stories. Coming Attractions (08 August 2008) says the book “contains nine essential Conan stories along with a full-length Conan novel,” while Bud Plant says it “collects nine of his most electrifying Conan adventures.” There are only eight stories in the book, according to those who’ve actually seen it. Either way, barely half the Conan series.) It isn’t a “best of Conan,” unless someone genuinely believes that “Jewels of Gwahlur,” “The Devil in Iron,” and “Shadows in the Moonlight” are better than “The Tower of the Elephant,” “Rogues in the House,” or “Beyond the Black River.” I can’t make out any particular rhyme or reason behind the selection of contents. I thought it might have been influenced by the paintings, but as a friend pointed out, three of the best Frazetta Conan paintings illustrate stories that aren’t in this book: “The Frost-Giant’s Daughter” (Conan of Cimmeria), “Rogues in the House” (Conan), and “The Scarlet Citadel” (Conan the Usurper). A few have suggested it’s supposed to be an “art book,” but heck, if it’s the Frazettas you want, why not buy Icon, edited by Arnie and Cathy Fenner and also published by Underwood, much more Frazetta bang for your bucks?
So, if Mr. Fenner cares to enlighten us about the specific editorial changes by Wright that improved Conan stories, perhaps he can also take a moment to explain to us why we need this book. Before this flapdoodle erupted, I really did want to want it, if nothing else because I’m an incurable fanboy. But I prefer to support the work of publishers who show real respect for Robert E. Howard, both as a writer and as a person. Mr. Fenner’s foreword — or those parts of it that I have seen quoted — does not.
Gnome Press then published the whole novel as The Return of Conan in 1957. The Gnome Press edition has a cover by Wally Wood. There is something unique about Wally Wood’s art. A shame he did not illustrate more Robert E. Howard though I could have done without the fur jockstrap.
