‘The White Stranger’

Robert E. Howard - Conan - The Vale Of Lost Women

Review by James LaFond

Conan & Livia by Mark Schultz

I have read no other story more often than The Vale of Lost Women. Something about its grim progress outward into insanity presses inward upon me. When reviewing this in 2013 with feminist novelist V. J. Waks [imagine doing such a thing today] she was of the opinion that this unsold story was essentially the outline of a novel. Looking at the story with the woman’s yearning for a long, involved relationship with the untamable masculine force of the Conan protagonist [and no character ever deserved to be referred to as a protagonist more than Conan] as the heroine made her way slowly, romantically, adventurously—but unerringly—home from her horrible ordeal, Ms. Waks saw more promise in the Vale of Lost Women as a prologue to Livia’s Great Adventure, than the story had on its own merits. The sheer horror of the tale from the modern feminist perspective begs for it to be eclipsed by Livia earning Conan’s respect, enslaving him with her soft body, leading him with the superior compassion, learning how to ride and fight like a man, choosing a fling with Conan over a life as a queen and then choosing quiet retirement in her home town over a life with Conan.

However, in the masculine universe, in an age before women’s rights, enforced by million-man militaries, when men lived and died by the sword, Livia—or any fair, dainty morsel of maidenhood abducted by a tribe of negro savages—is most likely just a piece of ass. If she’s lucky she might become the sexual property of some man who is both powerful and stricken with an uncharacteristic kindness at the sight of her. If she’s unlucky, she’s dinner. In the hands of Robert E. Howard, the heroine of The Vale of Lost Women, Livia, naïve white girl from the city, abducted by brown bandits, who are slain by black savages, who castrate and kill her young brother before her eyes, the best chance Livia has is for a barbaric white devil, such as Conan, to decide that sheathing his penis in her is worth the trouble of sheathing his sword in some fat black cur.

Throughout the story, spanning only three chapters, Livia is at first realistically helpless in a horrible situation, as she is prepared to be wed to an abominable groom—to share the bed of the grotesque man who ordered her brother’s execution.

Then, on seeing Conan, a white chief among black savages [quite a normal situation in the late 19th and early 20th century, being the era in which Howard’s popular reading was done from boyhood to manhood], Livia—like a modern woman given the vote—sees a lever of man-killing power which she aims to seduce into winning her freedom, bluntly offering her body in return for the Black King’s head.

Finally, in the third chapter, Livia pushes her agency beyond reason and finds herself in deep peril, a supernatural menace which Conan selflessly fights on her behalf, having come to the realization that he had behaved like a dog, callously bargaining for this woman’s freedom when he should have freed her as an expression of racial solidarity.

By asserting the falsehood of feminism in a time when it was barely forming in the collective imagination, and extolling heroics as an expression of racial solidarity, Howard wrote the most taboo story of his career. The initial lack of chivalry on the barbarian hero’s part doomed the story to editorial rejection in his own day, while the sexist and racist elements doom it in our own time.

However, Howard’s sketch of Livia, as a woman ordinary in all ways other than her beauty and determination, places her in the very real dilemma that woman have found themselves in since the beginning of time. By telling this Conan story as the tale Livia’s abduction and escape, Howard did more to document the true, ageless plight of young women as it was before our delicate time and as it will be again when the earth once again turns on its squabbling children. Even today, in 2018, an estimated 2 million women, most of them of white races, are sold into the global sex trade every year, the majority destined for savage societies where women have the rights of a dog. Livia’s outrage, indignity, sorrow and emotional dislocation are evocatively drawn with a compassion rarely matched in literature.

Below are some select quotes from this exceedingly well wrought tale of realistic brevity.

“She accepted the miracle without thanksgiving…”

“…the vividness of her mental pictures made the visible world seem like an unreal panorama of ghosts and shadows.

“…sat a fat squat shape, abysmal, repulsive, a toad like chunk of blackness, reeking of the dank rotting jungle and the nighted swamps. The creature’s pudgy hands rested on the sleek arch of his belly. His nape was a roll of sooty fat that seemed to thrust his bullet head forward. His eyes gleamed in the firelight like live coals in a dead black stump. Their appalling vitality belied the inner suggestion of the gross body.”

Such was Livia’s vision of chief Bajuju, who she stared at so balefully that she thought he should fall dead. From this vision of her husband-to-be, Livia glimpses a brutal hope and it is this encounter, consisting of the second half of the first chapter and the most of second that is at the heart of the story, betraying Howard as a genius of the emotive aspects of the timeless female condition.

Whoever you are or wherever you live on this planet, at some point in the life of your bloodline, a woman who is your ancestor, whose failure to survive would have erased your family from the history of mankind, cringed like Livia in the dark, wondering at the fate that dawn and the “rude hands” of man would bring. Whoever you are in this cruel world, in Livia, Howard has sketched an unflinching portrait of your ancestral mother.

Audio Recording Notes

The savagery of Conan’s diction is superb. The only thing that could have made this recording better would be to have a female reader do Livia’s voice.

Finally, I cannot, with a clear conscience omit quoting the most masculine speech delivered to a demanding woman in fiction:

“You said I was a barbarian, and that is true, Crom be thanked. If you had had men of the outlands guarding you instead of soft-gutted civilized weaklings, you would not be the slave of a black pig this night.”

This is followed by the most savage statement of companionable desire ever uttered by a hero to a damsel in distress and a lecture in realpolitik that ought to be memorized by every urban police cadet in the U.S.

Vale of Lost Women - wikipedia page