The Literary Influences of Robert E. Howard: Arthur O. Friel by Todd B. Vick

Adventure June 3, 1921

Adventure magazine played an integral part in Robert E. Howard’s life as a writer (and reader). According to Howard, he discovered the magazine on a summer evening when he had “exhausted all the reading material on the place.” (CL 3.87) He apparently walked to downtown Cross Plains and ventured into one of the shops (possibly Higginbotham or one of the local drug stores; he never reveals the locale), and discovers the magazine on the rack. The stories in Adventure dazzled him so much he continued to purchase the magazine for years.

As best as I can determine, the Adventure magazine Howard purchased that summer evening was most likely the June 3, 1921 issue. The issue featured two writers who would make a lasting impression on fifteen-year-old Howard: Arthur O. Friel and Rafael Sabatini. Both writers are similar in style and content (e.g. swashbuckling sword fights, etc.), though the settings of their adventure stories are worlds apart; many of Friel’s stories are typically set in South America (Amazon/Brazil) and Sabatini’s in various different locales. Howard would utilize (and mimic) both writer’s style. From Friel, Howard borrows vast jungle settings, from Sabatini Howard borrows rapier sword duels (and other things). Sabatini also fueled Howard’s passion for pirate stories. We will examine Rafael Sabatini’s influence on Howard in a future post. For now, let’s turn our attention to Arthur O. Friel.

That June 3 1921 issue of Adventure was most likely the first time Howard had encountered Arthur O. Friel’s work. Friel’s story “The Barrigudo” was in that issue. After this first encounter with the magazine, Howard indicated that he continued to purchase Adventure for years, when he could afford it. By fall of 1921, October the 10th to be precise, Howard began reading Friel’s four-part series “The Pathless Trail.” The subsequent parts appeared in these issues of Adventure: October 20 (part 2), October 30 (part 3), and November 10 (part 4). This series and other stories by Friel would be paramount for Howard’s stylistic prose for several of his Solomon Kane and his latter adventure fantasy stories (e.g. Conan) stories.

Arthur Olney Friel

For sheer adventure in faraway uncharted Amazonian jungles, Friel was the consummate writer for Adventure. In fact, he had quite a large readership. Friel’s descriptive prose and quick paced action narrative would apply a deep brand on Howard’s early published works.  Now, back to Friel’s four-part series “The Pathless Trail.” I chose this series by Friel because Howard indicated that he read it (REHB appendix 2), and to a large degree, Howard mimics Friel’s narrative style and structure in several of his Solomon Kane stories. Howard uses this style and structure throughout his career in various places until he perfects it and places his own stamp on it, coupling it with his own signature prose rhythm and pace. He then uses it later in his Conan stories. This style also influences Howard’s writing voice throughout his publishing career. There are a handful of writers who influenced Howard in this fashion, and Friel is one of them.

The columns below show the similarities between Friel’s and Howard’s use of language, description, style, and sentence structure.

“Day by day the downflowing jungle river pushed steadily, sullenly against its prow, as if striving to repel the invasion of its secret places.” From Friel’s “The Pathless Trail”	“He gazed at the huts, wondering why the thatch roofs of so many were torn and rent, as if by taloned things seeking entrance.” From Howard’s “Wings in the Night”
“The bushman turned at once and stole away. The others turned the canoes, transported the necessary duffle to the base of the hollow tree, made camp, and squatted against the trunk to smoke, watch, and wait. Several times they heard calls receding in the distance. Then came silence.” (Ibid)	“When all were buckling from exhaustion. The sun dipped, night rushed on, and a halt was called. Camp was pitched, guards thrown out, and the slaves were fed scantily and given enough water to keep life in them – but only just enough.” From Howard’s “The Footfalls Within”
“Worming around gigantic columns, crawling over rotting trunks, changing directions abruptly when blocked by some great butt too high to be scaled, sinking ankle-deep in clinging mud, the venturesome band wound along through the wilderness. The general trend of the march was southeast, but impassable obstacles encountered at frequent intervals necessitated not only detours, but sometimes actual backtracking.” (Ibid)	“The littoral of the great river altered. Plains turned into swamps that stank with reptilian life. Where fertile meadows had rolled, forests reared up, growing into dank jungles. The changing ages wrought on the inhabitants of the city as well. They did not migrate to fresher lands. Reasons inexplicable to humanity held them to the ancient cities and their doom.” From Howard’s “Queen of the Black Coast”

These examples demonstrate that Howard, as a reader of stories and writers he loved, paid attention to what he was reading. Friel’s influence on Howard’s early and later writing style is certainly present in these three examples. There are a host of other examples between the two writers, but these three examples work well to drive home my point.

            A use of hearty pronouns to vividly describe landscapes and action in each of their stories was frequently utilized. In fact, the language and style between the two writers was fairly common among pulp writers. The writers who stood out among the hundreds of pulp writers from this era are, however, the ones who not only utilized these techniques, but chose their words carefully to help control their story’s pace, creating a much better tone and rhythm. Even though other pulp writers like Friel influenced Howard. Howard stood out due to his signature prose, distinct writing voice, and his ability to astutely control the pace of his narrative, taking hold of his reader and pulling them through the scenery and action. In other words, Howard took what he liked in Friel’s work, made it his own, and then wrote better and far more enduring tales.

The Pathless Trail
Time-Lost Series
Centaur Press, 1969

            With all this in mind, it’s interesting that Arthur O. Friel is mentioned only once in all of Robert E. Howard’s letters. In a letter to Carl Jacobi from the Summer of 1934, Howard declares, “I was much interested to note that you are acquainted with Arthur O. Friel. He has been one of my favorite authors for years.” That’s it, one simple statement indicating that Howard had read Friel’s work for years and that Friel was one of Howard’s favorite authors. We have certainly seen why this is the case. Interestingly, Arthur O. Friel never broke free from Adventure magazine into the wider publishing community. Although, in 1950 he managed to publish a collection of his stories from Adventure. Some of these same stories were republished in 1969 by Centaur Press for their Time-Lost series. It’s worth noting that three of the volumes in this same Time-Lost series from Centaur Press are Robert E. Howard collections containing several Solomon Kane tales and fragments. The two writers certainly complement each other in this series and, Howard would be proud to know his work was published in a series of works that included one of his favorite writers, Arthur O. Friel.

Works Cited
CL           Collected Letters
REHB     The Robert E. Howard Bookshelf
The Savage Tales of Solomon Kane     Del Rey, 2004
The Coming of Conan the Cimmerian   Del Rey, 2003
The Pathless Trail   Centaur Press, 1969

A Letter From Seabury Quinn by Bobby Derie

Seabury Quinn—whose longer tales I simply cannot wade through—is the perfect popular ideal—those who differ from him have just so much less chance of suiting cheap editors.
—H. P. Lovecraft to Emil Petaja, 4 Dec 1934, LWP 390

Seabury Quinn was the most popular writer at Weird Tales during his lifetime, and his sales eclipsed those of Robert E. Howard, H. P. Lovecraft, and Clark Ashton Smith. Where those later writers have gained greater respectability in death, and their work published and republished, adapted to comics, film, music, and other media, Quinn’s fiction has only partially and periodically regained the notice of the public, and the study of his life and works largely neglected. In part, this is because unlike Lovecraft, Howard, and Smith, there are very few surviving letters from Quinn’s pen or typewriter, and those are mostly in private hands, unpublished, or lingering in obscure fanzines.

This is one such letter, a relative rarity both in length and content. It was written to Weird Tales fan Emil Petaja in December 1934. Around this period, Petaja had also written to and received letters back from both H. P. Lovecraft, recently collected in Letters with Donald and Howard Wandrei and to Emil Petaja from Hippocampus Press; and Robert E. Howard, the latter incident appearing in Novalyne Price Ellis’ memoir One Who Walked Alone.

[Address - Seabury Quinn] 24 Jefferson Avenue, Brooklyn, N.Y. December 6, 1934. Dear Mr. Petaja: Thanks a lot for the mighty good letter you sent me November 25. I’ve been intending to get an answer off ever since I received it, but the necessity of making a trip over to Cincinnati upset all my plans, and this is my first opportunity to attend to any personal correspondence for some time. About a Ms. I’m sorry, but I haven’t got such a thing around the house.[1] You see, I’m mos casual in my work. My stuff is roughed out in longhand---and very rough it is, too, being little more than a series of notes, set down for the most part in my own private system of shorthand. Then it’s typed, and I make only one copy---no carbons. They are a damned nuisance, and when one is an inexpert typist, such as I, the necessity of doubling all corrections makes the work too heavy for a lazy man. Too, the fact that I’m pretty much a one-magazine man, writing only for W.T., and then only as occasion, inclination and pressure of work permits,[2] I have a rather small output. In 1934, for instance, I wrote only three stories.[3] “The Jest of Warburg Tantavul” was published in September, in January will be another de Grandin yarn, and the last of the year’s output comes out in February, I think. I called it the Web of Bondage, but only God and the NRA[4] know what Farnsworth Wright will decide to call it when he prints it. However, it’s a departure---for me, at any rate. Not about Jules de Grandin --- but I hope you like it. Several of my readers have been kind enough to ask for Mss. and I have suggested that they write to Editor Wright and ask him for his copy when the printers are done with them. He’s a good scout, Wright is, and will let you have a Ms. if he has one available. Then, if you’ll trouble to send me the title page of the thing, I’ll be mighty glad to put my John Hancock on it and mail it back to you and voila, as we occasionally say in Brooklyn, you’ll have the autographed Ms. though only Secretary Wallace and the AAA know what you want of the damned thing.[5] Me, I always want to get rid of ‘em as fast as I can. Just at present I’m seething to go on some more yarns, but just haven’t been able to find time to put ‘em down on paper. I’ve a notebook full of new plot situations, and if I can get around to it, I can turn out a year’s supply for W.T. in a couple of months. The job is to get started, however. I’m not a slow workman. Two thousand words a sitting is my usual stint, and generally a story takes only about a week (evening work) from inception to mailing. Typing is the hardest work of all. If I could bawl ‘em out to a stenographer it would be a lot simpler, but I’ve tried it a couple of times with disastrous results. The darn girls all think they now what I wanted to say better than I did, with the result that dictation meant double duty--- one job of making notes and dictating, a second one of revising and “restoring” the typist’s ms. No luck in that. During October I was down in New Orleans and had a great time poking around a lot of out of the way places. Tried to drink up all the licker in town, too, but failed miserably in the effort.[6] But I came back with a lot of plot suggestions, and 1935 should see some of them germinating into real stories. An afternoon spent in old St. Louis cemetery, reading and coping the French epitaphs was an inspiration in itself.[7] Yeah, I surely feel the birth-pains tearing me right now. Have you read Price’s latest?[8] That feller is surely one great writer, as is Hamilton.[9] I’m a great admirer of Greye La Spina, too. She’s a hot number, and one of my greatest pleasures is to have her over to my place for dinner and a chat. How about Lovecraft? He, personally, is a delightful chap, but I don’t go for his writing in such a big way.[10] Like Hamilton better. Or Price, or Kline.[11] If you’d really like to have one of my Mss. just drop a line to Farnsworth Wright, tell him your desire, and I know he’ll be glad to let you have one. He’s might decent and accommodating that way. And thanks again for your kind criticisms of my work. I’m going to try to merit some more from you and the other W.T. readers in the coming year. Cordially yours, Seabury Quinn [12]

[1] Petaja, like R. H. Barlow, wrote to pulp writers asking for the manuscripts of their stories that appeared in Weird Tales.

[2] While not always a “one magazine man,” Weird Tales was the main outlet for Wright’s pulp fiction in this period, as The Magic Carpet Magazine had ceased publication in 1934.

[3] Probably “The Jest of Warburg Tentavul” (Weird Tales Sep 1934), “Hands of the Dead” (WT Jan 1935), and “The Web of Living Death” (WT Feb 1935).

[4] The National Recovery Administration.

[5] Henry Agard Wallace, Secretary of Agriculture and a supporter of Roosevelt’s New Deal administration, including the Agricultural Adjustment Act (AAA).

[6] Prohibition was repealed in December 1933.

[7] New Orleans formed a backdrop to several of Quinn’s stories, the French epitaphs may have been a possible inspiration for “Pledged to the Dead” (WT Oct 1937). In a letter to Virigl Finlay in 1937 about illustrations for the story, Quinn wrote:

To walk through old St. Louis Cemetery is to turn the clock back two centuries. Even in broad daylight, ladies arrayed as Julie was [...] St. Louis Cemetery in the moonlight --- how H. P. Lovecraft would have reveled in it! (FCA 25)

[8] E. Hoffmann Price, probably “Queen of the Lilin” (WT Nov 1934) starring Pierre d’Artois, his own occult detective. This was the last of the d’Artois stories, and Price wrote in the introduction to Far Lands and Other Days:

Quinn and I conferred. Although my Pierre d’Artois was coeval with his Jules de Grandin, so that neither could be considered as having influenced the other, Quinn’s hero had won such tremendous applause, and had appeared so many times, that I told him I did not wish to be in the position of doing pastiches. I dumped d’Artois. (xvii)

In his memoir of Quinn in the Book of the Dead, Price expanded on this:

Seabury and I exchanged letters, and I said to him, “This is not a matter to debate. As a matter of self protection, I am killing the Pierre d’Artois series, lest someone fancy that I am imitating you. Not that I would not—it is that I could not do a good job of it!” (164)

[9] Edmond Hamilton, better known for his space opera stories, but a Weird Tales regular.

[10] Quinn and Lovecraft had met in 1931; neither was particularly fond of the other’s approach to fiction, though they recognized their respective talents.

[11] Otis Adelbert Kline, who had some early success with Weird Tales and by the 1930s had largely turned to being an agent, working with E. Hoffmann Price, Frank Belknap Long, and Robert E. Howard among others.

[12] Quinn had a habit of drawing a smiley face (and, less often, a frownie face) in the culminating Q of his signed letters; this is very typical of the signatures in his letters to Virgil Finlay, published in the Fantasy Collectors Annual 1975.

Works Cited

FCA     Fantasy Collectors Annual 1975

LWP    Letters with Donald and Howard Wandrei and to Emil Petaja

The Coincidental Friendship of H. Warner Munn and H. P. Lovecraft by Todd B. Vick

In “The Eyrie” of the March 1924 issue of Weird Tales, H. P. Lovecraft wrote, “Popular authors do not and apparently cannot appreciate the fact that true art is obtainable only by rejecting normally and conventionality in toto, and approaching a theme purged utterly of any usual or preconceived point of view.”[1] A bold statement, to say the least, especially in a magazine whose byline is The Unique Magazine. But Lovecraft demanded his fiction to be unconventionally ‘other than,’ and as original as possible. For him, crafting a story was an art form. In this same letter, Lovecraft goes on to declare:

Wild and ‘different’ as they may consider their quasi-weird products, it remains a fact that the bizarrerie is on the surface alone; and that basically they reiterate the same old conventional values and motives and perspectives. Good and evil, teleological illusion, sugary sentiment, anthropocentric psychology—the usual superficial stock trade, and all shot through with the eternal and inescapable commonplace.[2]

 
Had Lovecraft accepted the job as editor when J. C. Henneberger offered it to him back in 1924, he would have likely been a harsh editor, and the magazine would have taken a decidedly different path. Much of the fiction Edwin Baird and Farnsworth Wright accepted would have, no doubt, been rejected by Lovecraft. But alas, we were rewarded the benefit of Lovecraft the writer. There is no telling exactly which stories or authors Lovecraft was disparaging in this letter to Weird Tales’ editor at the time, Edwin Baird. They may have not been Weird Tales’ authors, though it is likely most were. Even so, Lovecraft is making a valid point regarding breaking away from conventional story writing, creating an original tale, thinking outside the box. At least his creative mind demanded as much. Something he also expected, or at least wanted other writers to do. Some of the readers of The Unique Magazine demanded the same, at least they demanded their stories weird, if not ‘original.’

H. P. L

So, in an effort to promulgate something weird and original, Lovecraft made this suggestion: “Take a werewolf story, for instance—who ever wrote one from the point of view of the wolf, and sympathizing strongly with the devil to whom he has sold himself?”[3]

Those of us who love the pulps and their writers (we all have our favorites, of course), probably know that H. Warner Munn attempted to answer Lovecraft’s request with, “The Werewolf of Ponkert,” Munn’s first published short story. About Munn’s story, Farnsworth Wright claimed, “It was the popularity of Mr. Quinn’s werewolf story[4] that led us to feature The Werewolf of Ponkert, by H. Warner Munn, in last months’ issue.”[5] (italics is Wright’s) “The Werewolf of Ponkert” was the cover story for the July 1925 issue of Weird Tales, the same issue in which Robert E. Howard made his debut with “Spear and Fang.”

Lovecraft, as far as I’ve been able to determine, never responded to Munn’s story in “The Eyrie” of any of the subsequent Weird Tales issues. It’s possible that when “The Werewolf of Ponkert” was first published, Lovecraft did not put two and two together and notice that his March 1924 letter in “The Eyrie” was Munn’s inspiration. In fact, it may be that Lovecraft never knew that fact until after he met Munn, and Munn confessed as much. However, there is some evidence from Munn himself that Lovecraft may have recognized Munn’s efforts on behalf of Lovecraft’s letter:

Dear Mr. Jacobi; Cordially, Robert E. Howard by Bobby Derie

Carl R. Jacobi

While a freshman at the University of Minnesota in 1928, one of Carl Richard Jacobi turned in a story he had previously written and published in The Quest, and received an “A+”—and so the anecdote goes:

In a subsequent quarter, one of his fellow students also turned in a previously written composition—not his own work, however, but a pulp story by Robert E. Howard. It too received a top grade. On the last day of class, Jacobi approached the instructor. “I’d like you to know who I’ve been competing against,” he announced. “A professional writer.” “That often happens,” was the professor’s bemused reply. (LRH 9)

Carl Jacobi’s classmate, like Jacobi himself, encountered Howard’s prose in Weird Tales; Howard’s prose hadn’t been published in any other pulp by 1928. After selling “Spear and Fang” (WT Jul 1925), “Wolfshead” (Apr 1926), and “The Lost Race” (Jan 1927), Howard exploded in 1928 with “The Dream Snake” (Feb), “The Hyena” (Mar), “Sea Curse” (May), and the seminal Solomon Kane tale “Red Shadows” (Aug). Perhaps taking the hint, Jacobi’s one first professional sale to the pulps followed in 1928. (LRH 12)

In the fall of 1931, Jacobi’s “The Coach on the Ring” appeared in the Dec 1931/Jan 1932 issue of Ghost Stories, a weak but enduring competitor to Weird Tales. The confessional style of Ghost Stories gave it a poor reputation, but was still a paying market that occasionally attracted good writers—Robert E. Howard had placed a story in there two years previously: “Apparition in the Prize Ring” (GS Apr 1929). Jacobi’s freshman effort was sufficient to attract the notice of August Derleth, who in turn brought him to the attention of H. P. Lovecraft. (ES2.440, 442) Jacobi attained real attention when he landed another story: “Mive,” which appeared in the Jan 1932 issue of Weird Tales. Although it wasn’t voted the most popular tale in the issue (Clark Ashton Smith’s “The Monster of the Prophecy”), the story was highly regarded by Lovecraft, who expressed his enthusiasm to Weird Tales editor Farnsworth Wright. (SL4.24) Robert E. Howard wrote a little later:

If I were to express a preference for any one of the tales, I believe I should name Derleth’s “Those Who Seek”—though the stories by Smith, Long, Hurst and Jacobi could scarcely be excelled. In the latter’s tale especially there are glimpses that show finely handled imagination almost in perfection—just enough revealed, just enough concealed.

— Robert E. Howard, Weird Tales Mar 1932 (CL2.302)

Before long, Lovecraft wrote a letter of encouragement to Jacobi…whether prompted by a letter from Jacobi or Derleth isn’t clear, but Lovecraft volunteered one important piece of information:

The Mirror of E’ch-Pi-El: Robert E. Howard in the Letters of H. P. Lovecraft (Part 2) by Bobby Derie

Lovecraft’s esteem for Howard’s correspondence was such that he expressed the wish that “I’d like to publish all his letters with their descriptive and historical riches.” (SL5.277, cf. LJFM 389, LRS 82), much as August Derleth and Donald Wandrei would later do for Lovecraft himself, noting that “They’d need editing, since they are all replies to specific arguments of mine.” (LRBO 399)—and indeed, having both sides of the argument in A Means to Freedom makes considerably better sense than trying to collate the much-abridged contents of the Selected Letters of Robert E. Howard and the Selected Letters of H. P. Lovecraft.

For all that Lovecraft praised these letters, he quoted rather little from them—as Howard had requested they be kept private (“I don’t have to tell you that a lot of the things of which I speak are in strict confidence.” CL2.416, cf. 3.363), telling Willis Conover “About one of REH’s argumentative letters—he always used to ask me to keep them confidential” (LRBO 399) and F. Lee Baldwin “I’d show you some of his letters if he hadn’t asked me not to let anybody see them.” (SL5.108) Despite this injunction from Howard, Lovecraft did write “I’ll lend you some of his encyclopaedic letters if you think you’d enjoy a sidelight on such an unusual character.” (ES2.524) and a notation on a letter from Howard to Lovecraft ca. December 1932 includes a notation that shows it was “lent out” in this fashion. (CL2.489)