 The beating heart near the center of almost every Conan story written by Robert E. Howard is a conflict between civilization and barbarism. The lost and decaying / wicked and villainous / decadent and ignorant cities of the Hyborian Age represent civilization, while Conan the Cimmerian represents the barbarism. For Howard, barbarism wins every time. I'm not the first person to write about that. We've seen these civilizations often by this point, 37 stories into this chronology by my count. The seedy taverns in Zamora. The secretive lairs in Stygia. The almighty dollar-driven Messantia. The wasteful decadence of Shambullah. Conan's been to all of them, and he always comes out on top, never really letting the traits of civilization affect him. It's clear that Howard's admiration for "barbarism" is a sort of rugged individualism. To him, Conan represents the Occam's razor of life: to be barbaric is simpler and better. It keeps Conan strong and quick. It eschews the temptations that turn men evil, as Conan only occasionally needs money or engages in vices like gambling and drinking before he's thrust back out into the wilderness. Conan has an innate aversion to all things he sees as unnatural, like sorcery. As Conan said a few stories ago in "The People of the Black Circle," his view on civilization at best is that it's overcomplicated and restricting:
"This exhibition of primordial fury chilled the blood in Valeria's veins, but Conan was too close to the primitive himself to feel anything but a comprehending interest. To the barbarian, no such gulf existed between himself and other men, and the animals, as existed in the conception of Valeria. The monster below them, to Conan, was merely a form of life differing from himself mainly in physical shape. He attributed to it characteristics similar to his own, and saw in its wrath a counterpart of his rages, in its roars and bellowings merely reptilian equivalents to the curses he had bestowed upon it. Feeling a kinship with all wild things, even dragons, it was impossible for him to experience the sick horror which assailed Valeria at the sight of the brute's ferocity."  "Red Nails" was written in mid-1935, and was clearly the confluence of a lot of strife going on in Howard's life at the time. Patrice Louinet in his essay "Hyborian Genesis" lays out the long sequence of events that would form "Red Nails" in Howard's mind. That previous Christmas, instead of getting his girlfriend, Novalyne Price (shoutout to a fellow English teacher), a history book as she asked, he pigheadedly bought her The Complete Works of Pierre Louÿs, which he insisted was "a kind of history" of our "rotting civilization." Frustrated by the fact that money hadn't been rolling in for his writing (Farnsworth Wright at Weird Tales owed him at least eight hundred dollars), Howard perceived vice to be the problem: people wanted gory, sex-filled stories, which he promised to Novalyne by describing the future "Red Nails" story as, “I think this time I’m going to make it one of the sexiest, goriest yarns I’ve ever written." It's clear that Howard chafed against what he perceived to be this new norm, saying, "I’m going to have to work to catch up with the market... Damn it to hell, girl, sex will be in everything you see and hear. It’s the way it was when Rome fell." Somewhat paradoxically though, Howard apparently perceived his stories to already be very lurid, saying to Novalyne, "My god. My Conan yarns are filled with sex." Which I find pretty hilarious because there's a lot of leering at women (a fun but perhaps dangerous drinking game would be taking a shot every time Howard describes a woman as having a "supple figure") and pulling soft flesh into Conan's iron arms, but there are never any explicit sex scenes. In the summer of 1935, Howard and a friend named Truett Vinson took a trip to New Mexico, which obviously was inspiring for REH. Not only did he load up on Aztec names, but he was fascinated by the Lincoln County War in which Billy the Kid fought. Seeing a feud play out in a town that felt stuck in time was interesting enough to him to become to bones of "Red Nails." "You will find Lincoln now just as it was when Murphy and McSween and Billy the Kid knew it. The village is an anachronism, a sort of mummy town... Much to Howard's chagrin, he also realized that Novalyne Price had started seeing Truett Vinson romantically, so it's not a huge leap of logic to understand that the possessive, volatile Howard was probably feeling particularly betrayed and distrustful at the time. So Howard was frustrated with modern life, which he saw as a godforsaken Babylon. He'd become fascinated with a feud that tore a town apart into a shell of its former self, and an interest in Aztec-sounding names. And he was feeling wary of women. These factors form "Red Nails."  In Stygia, Conan and his crush Valeria defeat a hideous dragon-like creature in a forest, while spotting a city unknown to either of them. In a peculiar fashion, there is a huge length of untilled, dead plain between the edge of the forest and this gleaming city, with no signs of life anywhere. Upon entering the city, the two get embroiled in a feud between two equally strange factions of the city's inhabitants. The city's name is Xuchotl, and it's probably one of Howard's most imaginative settings. It's the size of a city, but instead of streets and buildings, the whole thing is a closed system of great halls, passageways, and chambers. It represents the total divorcing of society from the barbarism Conan knows: there's no connection at all to the outside world. Fruit is raised in unnatural hydroponic-style air crops. All light into the city is refracted through strange glass blocks and mirrors. Everybody in the city was born there and has never once set foot outside of it, with the exception of their princess. As Louinet puts it: "Xuchotl is the epitome of a decayed civilization as Howard conceived it. It is the place where, as he had it, 'the abnormal becomes normal.'"  There are twists and turns around every corner in this city, with plenty of little magical goodies dredged up from the catacombs, all of which seem to have been forgotten for a time and then some enemy figures out its purpose and uses it against his enemies. Conan and Valeria are enlisted into the feud between the Xotalanc people and the Tecuhltli people on the side of the Tecuhltli, and the war is incredibly pointless. It's a real Hatfields and McCoys situation, and as I type this, I'm wondering if that means anything to anyone reading this who's not American. The Xotalanc and Tecuhltli are slowly destroying one another one at a time. The Xotalanc kill a Tecuhltli, so the Tecuhltli kill a Xotalanc in revenge and then the Xotalanc retaliate, to no avail. Conan recognizes this and tries to leave, but he's goaded into helping the Tecuhltli by promises that it will be made worth his while. "'Five red nails for five Xotalanca lives!' exulted Techotl, and the horrible exultation in the faces of the listeners made them inhuman." Both the Xotalanca and Tecuhltli are dwindling in numbers and surely going to destroy themselves, but they fight on. Jason Ray Carney makes an interesting classification of the "stalemate war" in his piece "Dehumanizing Violence and Compassion in Robert E. Howard's 'Red Nails.'" “'The stalemate war' generally consists of two sides locked in a violent, hatred-fueled conflict. At the beginning of the story, the original cause of the conflict is often obscured by the passage of time and has been forgotten by both sides; therefore, the war has become interminable, even absurd. The original injustice cannot be rationally judged and righted because, sadly, no one really understands it or cares about it. Raw thirst for blood now defines the unending conflict. Each sides’ victory conditions have become amorphous, dangerously ill-defined; if they are expressed, victory consists, quite simply, in the complete destruction of the enemy. The war has become one of mutual extermination because reconciliation between the two sides is no longer possible; the conflict has festered to the extent that both sides have completely dehumanized the other side and they have dehumanized themselves as well. A key feature of the trope is that the lives of the combatants have become a kind of strange, ahistorical purgatory, where nothing happens except violent death after violent death. History doesn’t proceed amidst this never ending, bloody melee." Carney lays out several historical examples of stalemate wars, and Howard even takes the time to explore the strangeness of it through the brief dialogue between two guards: "Suppose with their aid we destroy Xotalanc," he said. "What then, Xatmec?"  This society, as unnatural as can be, is devouring itself quickly and absolutely cannot see that it is doing so. I'd imagine that Robert E. Howard felt like the modern world and the Depression-era United States was doing the same thing. So we've seen how Howard is playing out his themes of civilization losing to barbarism through its vice, and the fruits of his trip to New Mexico, but what of his spat with Novalyne Price? From my read of it, this is where the princess Tascela comes in. Tascela is clearly up to something throughout the story: she's the only nonnative inhabitant of Xuchotl, and as a Stygian, Howard's likely to make her the villain anyway. Here's where much of the violence and sex REH was talking about really rear their head. Tascela has been pulling the strings this whole time, draining the life out of those in the city for her own eternal youth. Perhaps this was his dig at Novalyne, feeling used and scorned by a woman. He hints at this in his personal life, explaining to Novalyne at one point: "Girl, I’m working on a yarn like that now—a Conan yarn. Listen to me. When you have a dying civilization, the normal, accepted life style ain’t strong enough to satisfy the damned insatiable appetites of the courtesans and, finally, of all the people. They turn to Lesbianism and things like that to satisfy their desires. . . . I am going to call it ‘The Red Flame of Passion.'" "The Red Flame of Passion" became "Red Nails." There's really only one scene within "Red Nails" that reads to me as really carrying lesbian undertones, and that's when Tascela is about to drain Valeria of her life. I agree with Howard on this one, it's rather steamy if you approach it from that view. She came down from her dais, playing with a thin gold-hilted dagger. Her eyes burned like nothing on the hither side of hell. She paused beside the altar and spoke in the tense stillness. While this is essentially the climax of the "Red Nails" narrative, I have a feeling that's not the only climax Howard was thinking about when he wrote it. Howard was definitely trying to increase the prevalence of his themes of dying civilization and thriving barbarism into this story, writing to HP Lovecraft: "I have been dissatisfied with my handling of decaying races in stories, for the reason that degeneracy is so prevalent in such races that even in fiction it can not be ignored as a motive and as a fact if the fiction is to have any claim to realism. I have ignored it in all other stories, as one of the taboos, but I did not ignore it in this story. When, or if, you ever read it, I’d like to know how you like my handling of the subject of lesbianism." Am I positive that Howard was lashing out against Novalyne by doing the 1930s equivalent of when chuds get rejected and then say, "Whatever, she's probably a lesbian anyway?" Absolutely not. Do I think there's a decent possibility of it? For sure. Did REH end up writing one of the best stories of his career when all bent out of shape about what was going on in his life at this time? Hell yeah, he did. I'm left wondering if what he meant was "decaying races" with "degeneracy" in them is just more garden-variety racism that he was so fond of, or if he means something more like the fall of empires. "Red Nails" is one of the few Conan stories to explicitly place itself in its timeline. Conan mentions having already been a kozak and a chief of the Zuagirs, while also implying that he's currently in the piracy profession, so that pretty solidly places "Red Nails" right around "The Pool of the Black One." Reading the prologue written by L. Sprague de Camp for Conan the Warrior, it says that Conan has spent about two years as the captain of the Wastrel before knocking off to join the Free Companions. If that prologue is to be believed (which sometimes I think it is, sometimes I think it isn't), then Conan's got to be in his late 30s by this time.  "Red Nails" got adapted for Marvel's Savage Tales featuring Conan the Barbarian and was reprinted in Conan Saga, a mag where they recycled old Conan comics, but somehow, it doesn't seem like it was ever adapted in Savage Sword. Maybe it's because Roy Thomas had already adapted it and nobody thought they could one-up him (Spoiler: they'd be right). Ron Perlman was supposed to voice Conan in an animated film version about 20 years ago, but it never materialized. I'm not sure if Howard was completely satisfied with "Red Nails," but it seems as though it had satiated his need to get some of those themes down on paper. He wrote, once again to Lovecraft, "The last yarn I sold to Weird Tales—and it well may be the last fantasy I’ll ever write—was a three-part Conan serial which was the bloodiest and most sexy weird story I ever wrote." Howard was more right than he knew. One June 11th, 1936, when it became clear that Howard's beloved and ailing mother was not going to make a recovery, Howard walked out to his car and shot himself in the head. "Red Nails" would begin its three-part serialization in Weird Tales just a few days later. Thematically rich (hey, I wrote way the fuck more about this story than I have for literally any other Conan story thus far), totally thrilling, and epic in length, "Red Nails" is a top-tier Conan story. The one-off characters like king Olmec and the people of Xuchotl are really fun. Conan's companion Valeria rises above nearly all of Conan's other partners through her skill and personality. I'm winding down this era of Conan's career, as we'll get to his kingship of Aquilonia soon enough. "Is there anything you haven't done?" inquired the girl, half in derision and half in fascination. ★★★★★ 
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
AuthorHey, I'm Dan. This is my project reading through the career of everyone's favorite sword-and-sorcery character, Conan the Cimmerian, in chronological order. 
Archives
December 2025
Categories
All
|
RSS Feed