They got hands and they got bellies.

Robert E. Howard on civilization. (The Commonplace Book Project)

“My characters are more like men than these real men are, see. They’re rough and rude, they got hands and they got bellies. They hate and they lust; break the skin of civilization and you find the ape, roaring and red-handed.” — Robert E. Howard

I have six younger brothers. We grew up in the 1980s. As you can imagine, any movie involving Arnold Schwarzenegger was a big deal in our house.

I turned on the original 1982 Conan The Barbarian movie as I wrote this post and was a little surprised to see boobs in the first 20 minutes. Obviously, my dad was never big on little things like ratings or monitoring what we watched.

There is one scene in Conan that has stuck with me since I first saw it when I was eleven years old. Conan’s family is murdered when he’s a young boy and he’s taken prisoner. He’s chained to a ginormous mill called The Wheel of Pain. He starts turning it (along with a dozen other kids) and turning it and turning it.

And as he turns it, he becomes a teenager, then a very young man, and then finally — Arnold, pushing the mill by himself with giant bulging muscles.

Only, you know, it wasn’t Arnold. I mean. It was. But we didn’t know who he was in 1982. He was purely Conan.

Last night I watched a movie called The Whole Wide World — a biopic about Robert E. Howard, a prolific and successful pulp writer who created Conan in the 1930s as a character in novels and short stories.

In his biography of Howard, Blood and Thunder, Mark Finn writes about the author’s quest in his adolescence to go from a skinny teenager to a more muscular man. I imagine that quest was at least partially responsible for Conan the Barbarian.

His short story “The Shadow Kingdom” is considered to be the story that created the genre we know now as sword and sorcery. He became friends with H.P. Lovecraft, who published in the same magazine that Howard did and became part of the Lovecraft Circle — a literary correspondence group, similar in many ways to The Inklings (which included C.S. Lewis and J.R.R. Tolkien).

Lovecraft delighted in connecting his pulp-writing friends with each other so that they could help each other become better writers.

Seriously. I need a group like that. Really.

After the Great Depression, the pulp magazines were Howard’s stories often showed up start to either fold or reduce their publication. He lost his savings when his bank closed — and after he moved to a different bank, it happened again.

Howard’s strength was in creating worlds. He often wrote about civilizations that had become too successful and soft, and were overthrown by hungrier, harder groups.

His writing had a lyrical quality that was unusual for the genre. During the Depression, he travelled through Texas (his home state) and conceived of a fictional age — the Hyborian Agehttps://amzn.to/2tJCoVu — and a place during that age called Cimmeria.

And, of course, a Cimmerian. Conan the Barbarian.

By the mid-1930s, Howard was writing what would be the most commercially successful genre during his lifetime. Westerns. He was the first writer to create what were known as ‘weird westerns’ or horror/western stories.

In 1936, when his mother fell into a coma and he was told that she would not survive, Robert E. Howard committed suicide. He was thirty years old. Heartbreaking.

I am absolutely fascinated by this author. I’ve ordered Mark Finn’s biography of him.

I’ve also added a collection of his short stories to my reading list.

If you’ve never seen the 1982 Conan the Barbarian, or it’s been ages, it’s worth looking at again. It was written by Oliver Stone, it’s practically Arnold Schwarzenegger’s origin story, and James Earl Jones plays the bad guy — with the voice of both Darth Vader and Mufasa.

Definitely check out the biopic The Whole Wide World. It stars Vincent D’Onofrio as Howard. There’s a fantastic scene that show’s Howard vigorously telling a Conan story to himself as he bangs it out on a manual typewriter. I don’t know if he really wrote like that, but it’s still something to see.

You can see a tiny bit of it at about the 50 second mark in the trailer. (It’s not nearly the love story they tried to make it seem, though. I still really enjoyed it.)

Today’s Short Story:

Stephen King called Howard’s short story Pigeons from Hell “one of the finest horror stories of [the twentieth] century.” You can read it free at the Project Guttenberg.

Today’s Poem:

Cimmeria was Howard’s first exploration of Conan the Barbarian’s homeland.

Cimmeria By Robert E. Howard

It was gloomy land that seemed to hold All winds and clouds and dreams that shun the sun, With bare boughs rattling in the lonesome winds, And the dark woodlands brooding over all, Not even lightened by the rare dim sun Which made squat shadows out of men; they called it Cimmeria, land of Darkness and deep Night.

It was so long ago and far away I have forgotten the very name men called me. The axe and flint-tipped spear are like a dream, And hunts and wars are like shadows. I recall Only the stillness of that sombre land; The clouds that piled forever on the hills, The dimness of the everlasting woods. Cimmeria, land of Darkness and the Night.

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Shaunta Grimes is a writer and teacher. She is an out-of-place Nevadan living in Northwestern PA with her husband, three superstar kids, two dementia patients, a good friend, Alfred the cat, and a yellow rescue dog named Maybelline Scout. She’s on Twitter @shauntagrimes and is the author of Viral Nation and Rebel Nation and the upcoming novel The Astonishing Maybe. She is the original Ninja Writer.