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James Dean and the Philosophy of Conan the Cimmerian

11/11/2020

16 Comments

 
I have now sent my agent the final revision to my book proposal for my book about James Dean, flying saucers, and midcentury panics. My agent seems confident that publishers will be interested, and it is out of my hands now. I imagine this is the point when I urge Apollo and the Muses to intervene. “Happy is he whom the Muses love: sweet flows speech from his lips. Hail, children of Zeus! Give honor to my song!”
In working on my book, I ran into a question I am not able to readily answer, and of all things it involves a connection between James Dean and the Lovecraft-inflected adventure fiction of Robert E. Howard. That this happened is only to be expected. I can’t escape Lovecraftian ancient mysteries no matter how far from them I try to run.
 
The issue in question involves something Dean said in one of the love letters he wrote to Barbara Glenn in the summer of 1953. “Love letters” might be laying it on a bit thick. Mostly, he wrote about himself and occasionally how he missed having her talk about him, too. He was the kind of fellow who would try to prompt her to tell him about the “handsome guys” he was sure she was hooking up with, or who would write her a long prose-poem about how sad he felt visiting a strip club while she was away. You know, standard stuff you tell your girlfriend.
 
Anyway, in one of these letters he decides, as one does, to meditate on the illusory nature of material reality. “Lamas and scientists may fume and quander,” he wrote. “Everything is not illusion. You are my proof.”
 
Now this turns out to be an interesting line. One of Dean’s biographers, who dismissed his writing as “feeble and pathetic,” marked it up with “sic” and a question mark and very clearly thought that Dean was writing about South American llamas and not Tibetan holy men and thought the whole thing nonsense. He also assumed Dean was semi-literate and had mangled some other word into “quander.” “Quander” is a fine English word, albeit an obscure one, in use since at least the eighteenth century. Dean used it not just with grammatical correctness but also in the correct connotative sense. My perverse sense of humor finds it amusing that the judgmental types are actually the ignorant ones, but then again, I have a good vocabulary, so I wasn’t ever confused. I don’t know where Dean got the word, but if my own random Victorian accretions are any indication (oh, how many times people bitched at me for using “lest”), it’s probably the remnants of some old book read long before.
 
However, the more interesting thing is that the sentiment seems very clearly to be taken from Robert E. Howard’s 1934 story “Queen of the Black Coast,” a Conan the Cimmerian story featuring primeval mysteries, ancient astronauts, prehistoric ruins, etc. In that story, Howard has Conan describe his philosophy of life: “Let teachers and priests and philosophers brood over questions of reality and illusion. I know this: if life is illusion, then I am no less an illusion, and being thus, the illusion is real to me. I live, I burn with life, I love, I slay, and am content.” Dean’s phrasing and syntax are so similar that it is difficult to imagine they are unrelated. Nevertheless, the vocabulary shows that he wasn’t directly copying. It reads like a paraphrase from memory. Dean purposely inverted Howard’s sentiment to make a romantic statement out of pretending to deny his own oft-stated belief that the physical world was a dream or an illusion and a better world lay beyond it. (The biographers, making no connections and ignoring context, imagine this was just a random attempt to sound poetic.)
 
But this creates a challenge. How did he pick up the Howard line? If this were an isolated incident, I might dismiss it. It’s part of a pattern. For example, when he tried giving a promotional interview for a Broadway play to a radio reporter, he instead talked about Aztec human sacrifices and the space between free will and foreordination—as, of course one does—and used language borrowed from Superman comics or the old intro to the Superman radio show. (He didn’t own a TV, so I doubt it was the Superman TV show.) He was constantly referencing lines from books, plays, and movies.
 
That said, there seem to be four possibilities:

  1. This is a complete coincidence. This seems least likely due to the similarities of phrasing, but stranger things have happened.
  2. He read “Queen of the Black Coast” in the 1953 Gnome Press omnibus edition of Howard’s Conan stories. I would have gone with that possibility except that as best I can tell the book wasn’t on sale until the end of 1953, too late for this letter.
  3. He read the story in the only other place it had been printed since 1934, the Avon Fantasy Reader No. 8, a digest magazine published in 1948. If that were the case, imagine how important that sentence must have been to stick with him since high school. I have a sentence from F. Scott Fitzgerald’s This Side of Paradise that stuck with me the same way, and as the years passed, it got polished and worn down. Its source is recognizable, but the version that bubbles to the surface is more my prose than Fitzgerald’s now, and I have to keep looking up the right phrasing.
  4. The last possibility is that he picked up the Avon reader at one of the used book stores he frequented in New York. It seems strange to buy a five-year-old old periodical, though I guess 126-page digests were treated more like paperback books than magazines.
 
Unless there is some buried information somewhere inaccessible to me, I don’t think this is a question that has a good answer. It’s just a weird, strange sidelight. One of Dean’s old teachers spoke of him reading pulp fiction stories about space aliens and pyramids, so I should have expected as much. Someday, perhaps, I’ll write a book without Old Ones and Nephilim lurking around the edges.
16 Comments
The Rooster
11/12/2020 01:01:26 am

I'm not quoting a single thing from up there.

If I have to read that again? I'll be weeping.

I'll just watch Princess Bride, or maybe Conan again. To get that out of my system. Arnold/Conan? Please try and argue with me? It rocks!

K. Jason?

Don't make an old man cry like that.

You are it.

Done deal.

👍

Man? You just drove it straight into the floor. This JD shit is gonna be cool.

❤️

Reply
Brian
11/12/2020 06:25:48 am

It's rather pointless to speculate, but don't forget old copies of Weird Tales were always floating around, lying about in people's attics, discovered passed about among the 30s-40s versions of nerdy teens, even in Indiana. Growing up in the early 60s I stumbled on old pulps in thrift shops, garage sales, and used bookstores, 10-25 cents each.

Reply
Jason Colavito link
11/12/2020 07:58:17 am

Certainly possible. As a kid, he had found a big box of old books and magazines and read them all. Its contents, however, are lost to time.

Reply
E.P. Grondine
11/12/2020 10:18:56 am

Your muse has got you by the short and curlies.

I would have gone with Brando, Dean, Mineo and Vampira. There isn't a ham around who would not be trying to get in that sandwich.

While doing serious work, I often had mcguffins that I had to write down just to get them out of my head. Fool that I am, with the new production outfits due to the new television distribution method, I intend to head to LA sometime and hook up with the senior writers project. But that will be a while yet.

Good luck.

Reply
Jason Colavito link
11/12/2020 06:41:43 pm

Hardly. I apply the same scrutiny to every incident in my book. That's why I know which Chicago Tribune articles Joe McCarthy's speechwriter used for McCarthy's famous speech that launched the Red Scare, for example. However, much of this information is not amusing enough to warrant discussing in a blog post.

Reply
T. Franke link
11/12/2020 12:32:27 pm

I just wondered how the science is called which produces such books as this. It is not literary studies. More about film making. And biographical. But more than this. Rather about the spirit of the times, so .... a kind of historiography. Contemporary history. But a special one. Around cultural icons. Contemporary cultural icono-historiography?

Reply
Jason Colavito link
11/12/2020 06:42:16 pm

It's called "narrative nonfiction" in current publishing terminology.

Reply
T. Franke link
11/13/2020 05:41:48 am

Narrative nonfiction makes absolute sense. A non-fictional narration tells by its nature a story which is history, so historiography is implicitly a part of it, though it is not necessarily the "big" history.

Goodreads has a special "shelf" called "Historical Narrative Nonfiction Books":
https://www.goodreads.com/shelf/show/historical-narrative-nonfiction

Some of your books fit perfectly into this shelf, some others not.

Nick Danger
11/12/2020 01:56:23 pm

Way to write a provocative headline, Mr. Colavito!

In my experience, people who enjoy that type of literature (I include myself) pick it up in the oddest places. I'd go with 3, or more likely 4.

Reply
Nerd11135
11/12/2020 04:51:45 pm

For my money: Not close enough to be a direct, conscious quoting. I'd think it's just that he read it at some point (as a lad, probably) and the concept and part of the phrasing just stuck with him.

It's a striking quote. It was the highlight of that awful story and a paraphrase of it is a highlight of the pointless 2011 remake of the 1982 Conan film. It stays with you.

Like the word "quander," it's the kind of thing a moron who wants to sound smart says to a girl he thinks is as dumb as he.

Yeah I know you don't consider Dean a moron but I felt like being snarky.

Reply
Jason Colavito link
11/12/2020 06:49:53 pm

Well, two things can be true at once. Dead finished his freshman year of college at the top of his class, so he clearly was smart. But he was also very sensitive about being perceived as dumb and tended to use inflated language to try to sound better educated. At times, it's painful to read interviews where he was trying too hard. The words and the grammar are technically correct, but it's quite obvious he is drawing on phrasing he had only read in books.

That said, I find myself needing to remind the readers for my book at intervals how young he was. He was 22 when he wrote the letter I quoted above. Too many writers try judging a college-age kid by the standards of a middle-aged author. It's like when they get judgmental because he made a sex joke or played a prank. Have you ever known a frat boy who didn't? It's like they had never been young.

Reply
gdave
11/12/2020 07:05:15 pm

I wonder if the source might not be from a Kull story or one of REH's poems. The Kull stories tended to be much more concerned with the nature of reality, and I think REH dealt with these ideas in some of his poems. At least some of REH's Kull stories and poems were published in his lifetime or shortly after his death, so Dean could have run across them in an old Weird Tales magazine or some such. I poked around a little bit, but couldn't find anything on point, but I'm just a casual fan of REH, not a scholar of his work.

Reply
The Rooster
11/12/2020 09:48:15 pm

"4. The last possibility is that he picked up the Avon reader at one of the used book stores he frequented in New York. It seems strange to buy a five-year-old old periodical, though I guess 126-page digests were treated more like paperback books than magazines."

K. I'm weighing in^^

"I have a sentence from F. Scott Fitzgerald’s This Side of Paradise that stuck with me the same way, and as the years passed, it got polished and worn down."

Like a stone?

...“the test of a first-rate intelligence is the ability to hold two opposed ideas in the mind at the same time, and still retain the ability to function.”

For example, he says you should “be able to see that things are hopeless and yet be determined to make them otherwise.”

-Fitz.

https://www.google.com/amp/s/qz.com/1247378/forget-the-turing-test-give-ai-the-f-scott-fitzgerald-test-instead/amp/

Hope the link works^^

That was just open on my phone when you pulled together this post. I'm sort of freaked out.

I'm going now, to watch Conan. The Arnold "Conan". Some of you might remember the scenes where the set designers were thoughtful enough to add megaliths. Go have a look.

The important thing is that someone, in this case, Jason, remembers what's important, and why we all are hooked in to this.

Plus? Used book-stores? Remember those? My account was always fully fueled and topped-off by my aunt's romance novel trade ins from a very early age.

Thanks J!

❤️

P.S. Paris Review? Pretty sure it's the only really acceptable "digest" left. Right?

Reply
Charles Verrastro link
11/15/2020 09:37:06 pm

A common source is also possible. Howard's mother also read him poetry constantly. And he and his father shared an interest in the writings of William Walker Atkinson (AKA Swami, Yogi, Master Therion) and other New Thought, New Age and Theosophical works. But then like me he had a photographic memory so God knows where he and Dean may have independently stumbled on a common source for the phrasing.

Reply
Kent
11/20/2020 09:19:02 pm

It's been my experience that people who say they have a photographic memory ... don't.

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The Rooster
11/17/2020 01:53:59 am

"But then like me he had a photographic memory..."

I freaking knew it!

Ha!

I knew something was up! You just drop it like it's dirt? Do not try and trick me. I've met your kind. Know your "weak spots".

Bwhaha...

K, I'll stop.

Your memory? Very cool. But not the "be all, end all". Oh no.

Have fun my large-brained Friend!

🖕❤️

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