“Bob has a wonderful choice of words, too,” I insisted, “and as far as the content of his stories and of Poe’s, they write the same kind of nightmarish stuff. The main difference is that Poe’s works are in the literature books and Bob’s aren’t … yet. Someday, some English teacher will be telling kids to try and write like Bob.”
“I will have to see that to believe it,” Enid said. “I will certainly have to see that to believe it.”
The Best of Robert E. Howard would enable Enid to see and believe, but handing the two volumes to her would require some time travel. More encouragingly, the readers of today and tomorrow now have the opportunity to verify the “wonderful choice of words” defended by Novalyne Price for themselves in the preceding pages. Those words do indeed deserve to be “in the literature books,” and are closer to getting there thanks to Del Rey’s Library of Robert E. Howard. And while only a few English teachers are telling their pupils to “try and write like Bob” as of yet, he is beginning to be thesis-fodder or a dissertation-magnet, a trend that the overdue-but-impending arrival of his Collected Letters and Complete Poems can only galvanize.
Novalyne’s attribution of “the same kind of nightmarish stuff” to both Edgar Allan Poe and Robert Ervin Howard is a reminder that the Texan is already a redoubtable presence in one pantheon. We can’t be certain that she took her cue from her sometime boyfriend in measuring him against Poe, but we do know that years before Howard met her, in a December 1928 letter he alluded with a sort of self-deprecating bravado to “the school to which Poe contributed and I at present honor with my presence – literarily speaking – I mean the school of fantasy and horror writing.” That he was at the top of his class within that school has been confirmed by generations of fans and a generous entry in the 1997 Encyclopedia of Fantasy, in which John Clute deems him “of central interest in the field of fantasy” and attributes his “huge appeal to later readers” to “considerable invention” and “the feel of the wind of Story.”
Heroic/epic fantasy authors and historical novelists specializing in the edged-weapon clashes of ancient or medieval warfare are often quick to tip their plumed, crested, or horned helmets to Howard. As David Weber recognized in an introduction to a 1995 collection of the Bran Mak Morn stories, “Bran and Cormac and Kull are always ready to teach yet another generation of writers how to tell the high, old tales of doom and glory.”
Howard was more than just a fantasist, although there is no “just” about his achievements in the genre. While it would be silly to label him, or anyone, an American Tolkien, it is not at all silly to alter a few pronouns in one of leading Tolkienist Verlyn Flieger’s observations about the Englishman in order to render her insight applicable to both men: “By looking backward [their] fantasy reflected the present, the temporal dislocation of [their] escape mirrored the psychological disjunction and displacement of [their century].” Flieger goes on to emphasize that “the very act of escape acknowledges that which it flees, and nostalgia, like modernism, must have a ground from which to turn away.” In Howard’s case that ground was American, and therefore controlled by a dominant down-to-earth outlook given to shooting down flights of fancy; the national lore of settlers and strivers usually chased anything more outrageous and fact-flouting out of town.
Brian Attebery’s The Fantasy Tradition in American Literature – essential reading, provided one avoids falling into the book’s Howard-shaped hole – begins with an examination of how fantasy was endangered before the genre could even acquire a tradition in “the country where pragmatism became a philosophy and ‘normalcy’ a point of faith.” Nor should we forget the ur-faith of Puritanism, which ensures that even today places exist in the United States where a burning eagerness to read, say, the Harry Potter novels is met with an eagerness to burn the Harry Potter novels. The Enlightenment so thoroughly incorporated in the Founders’ blueprints was hardly more encouraging; how, for example, is a model home like Monticello to be haunted? The fantastic survived, in Attebery’s words, “as a resistance movement, working to undermine the national faith in things-as-they-are,” one given to “hiding out in the nursery and periodically venturing out disguised as romance or satire or science fiction.”
L. Frank Baum paved the yellow brick road for the fantasists that followed, but his Oz is arguably more of a proto-Disneyland than a fully functioning American fairyland, as disinviting to many adults, and adolescents aspiring to adulthood, as it is come-hitherish to children and those other adults who aspire to revisit childhood. Edgar Rice Burroughs afforded Howard his principal model of a dream-life gaudier and boasting the performances of more exotic megafauna than any three-ring circus, but told his most enduring stories on the far, the optimistic side of the First World War, before shell-shock and trench fever went to work on Victorian values. To us Barsoom and Amtor and Pellucidar seem to yield too quickly to empire-building and futures of cultural terraforming rather than terror swarming. Howard’s dark fantasy is more informed by history, as is his history by dark fantasy – witness the Suleyman-who-is-no-longer-quite-so-Magnificent of The Shadow of the Vulture, for whom imminent defeat appears as “a gray plain of the dead, where corpses dragged their lifeless bodies to an outworn task, animated only by the will of their master.”
But Howard’s well-situated alcove in the fantasy pantheon isn’t enough for us; by hook or by crook, or rather by battering ram or skeleton key, we’re looking to get him into another pantheon as well, the one implicit in the argument Novalyne Price had with her cousin Enid: “Poe’s works are in the literature books and Bob’s aren’t … yet.” To highlight what makes Howard an American classic, we must agree on what makes a classic. Although science fiction writer Gordon R. Dickson, in his introduction to the 1980 Howard collection The Road of Azrael, defined a genuine classic as the “golden bell-sound” of a unique voice, that of an author “who has something to give which did not exist in the world before he came into it, and which disappeared forever when he went out of it,” we need credentials to sway those who feign deafness to, or genuinely cannot hear, the golden bell-sound.
Howard’s own words to his friend Tevis Clyde Smith after he received the first of many missives from fellow Weird Tales contributor H. P. Lovecraft could be construed as a warning: “He’s out of my class. I’m game to go the limit with a man my weight, but me scrapping with him is like a palooka climbing into a ring with a champion.” He was wrong as can be about that – geography forced his sparring-partnership with Lovecraft (unlike, say, the bond between Tolkien and C. S. Lewis) to play itself out on paper, and most semi-impartial judges have awarded a majority of the rounds to Howard – but a few too many ill-considered comparisons and we might as well present his literary standing with a one-way ticket to Palookaville. Are we shoving him into the ring against opponents to whom he would be lucky to lose? Do even his most unforgettable stories belong in the same weight class as those of Poe and Hawthorne, Twain and Bierce, Hemingway and Faulkner? Are we being delusional if we borrow what D. H. Lawrence said of Herman Melville – “He was neither mad nor crazy. But he was over the border. He was half a water animal, like those terrible yellow-bearded Vikings who broke out of the waves in beaked ships. He was mad to look over our horizons. Anywhere, anywhere out of our world. To get away, out!” – and apply it to Howard? Well, as Sailor Steve Costigan says of himself and Mike, his throat-seeking missile of a bulldog, in this volume’s The Bulldog Breed, “Always outclassed in everything except guts and grip!”
The American literary pantheon is not on any map (“True places never are,” Melville reminds us in Moby Dick) but just as baseball boasts Cooperstown and rock-and-roll its Hall of Fame in Cleveland, The Library of America is an approximation, a simulacrum, the earthly tabernacle or reliquary for “America’s best and most significant writing.” Like America itself, an American pantheon should be a work in progress, a movable – and expandable – feast. Room is being found for those who never asked to be Americans, or did indeed ask but we
re rejected, and if the Library of America’s seal of approval can be read as the functional equivalent of a pantheon induction, the hospitable welcomes recently extended to H. P. Lovecraft and Philip K. Dick should be cause for Howardist rejoicing. The Library’s blurbage for Lovecraft salutes his “classic stories of the strange and fantastic from the visionary master of cosmic horror” and “intensely personal vision.” The vision of his Texas correspondent was equally intense and personal; the word “impersonal” might as well be Etruscan in terms of its usefulness when examining Howard’s work.
Far from being teacher’s pets, idealizations with ichor or ink in their veins instead of blood, the residents of the American pantheon fascinate as human beings, deeply flawed but even more deeply talented. Our inductee-in-waiting will fit right in; he is always going to be a controversial figure, one with not only his fair share of faults, but also an unfair share of alleged faults. Lovecraft somehow neglected to accuse him of complicity in the Lindbergh kidnapping, but sent so many other reproaches his way that Howard allowed himself a little fun in a July 1935 letter:
Recalling off-hand the charges you have made against me, I remember that at various times you have accused me of being: Exalter-of-the-Physical-Above-the-Mental; Enemy of Humanity; Foe of Mankind; Apostle of Prejudice; Distorter of Fact; Repudiater of Evolutionary Standards; Over-Emphasizer of Ethics; Sympathizer of Criminals (that one broke all altitude records); Egotist; Poseur; Emotionalist; Defender of Ignorance; Sentimentalist; Romanticist. If I were guilty of all the things of which you’ve accused me, I not only wouldn’t be fit to live; I wouldn’t have sense enough to live.
To which list of charges some pantheon-gatekeepers would hasten to add, Pulp Hack, Racist, Sexist, Suicide, Bully, Arrested Adolescent, and Creator of Conan. Yes, Conan, the Cimmerian, he of the gigantic melancholies and gigantic mirth, he who poses a gigantic problem in that his huge, but decidedly non-Schwarzeneggerian, shadow falls across the rest of Howard’s work. Stick up for Howard to her cousin Enid though she did, Novalyne Price herself seems to have regarded Conan as a deal-breakingly undesirable potential brother-in-law, a dependably bad influence on the writer she was dating. And down through the decades since then, the Cimmerian has gone the way of Tarzan and James Bond as a creation whose links to his creator have been repeatedly severed, so that in John Wayne’s America: The Politics of Celebrity we catch the otherwise staggeringly erudite Garry Wills referring to “Conan the Barbarian, created by John Milius.”
“Conan the Barbarian,” as dumbed-down as he is pumped-up, is merely a multimedia reduction of Conan the Cimmerian, the character displayed to optimum effect in this volume’s The Tower of the Elephant and Red Nails, and in The People of the Black Circle and Beyond the Black River of its predecessor. The title of the present afterword, which positions Howard as a barbarian at the pantheon-gates, is intended as more than a rote invocation of his uncivilized-and-proud-of-it characters. For much of America’s cultural history, any homegrown writer who presented himself at the gates guarded by Europeans – and those Americans who, in the words of Ernest Hemingway, “wrote like exiled English colonials from an England of which they were never a part to a newer England that they were making” – was ipso facto a barbarian, an outlander.
When we run a banner with the strange device “Barbarian” up the flagpole in an American context to see if anyone salutes, we get some historically and culturally freighted responses. Before Howard happened to “barbarism” and “barbarian,” European-Americans usually associated those words with the continent’s previous owners. Europeans for their part have reached for the adjective “barbaric” and the noun “barbarian” so often when considering Americans of any sort that it would be forgivable to conclude that the New World was named in honor of the navigator Barbario Vespucci. And Americans have been almost as quick to call each other barbarians; for New Yorker George Templeton Strong, that always-quotable diarist/onlooker of the antebellum and Civil War years, all Southerners bore the mark of Cain as soon as congressman Charles Sumner bore the marks of the hotheaded Preston Brooks’ cane, and were besides “a race of lazy, ignorant, coarse, sensual, swaggering, sordid beggarly barbarians.”
The childhood adage is only half right: sticks and stones may break our bones, but names can hurt hellaciously as well. However, names are also like sticks and stones in that they can be picked up and thrown back in the face of tormentors. In recent decades epithets meant to identify and isolate the members of certain groups have been worn by those members as badges of affirmation, and before that a few Americans comfortable in their own figurative buckskins taught themselves to take pride in, rather than umbrage at, “barbarian” and its variants. Walt Whitman’s I sound my barbaric yawp over the roofs of the world in Song of Myself is only the most famous instance.
American barbarians force their way in where they are least expected. Henry James was a writer so unlike Howard it is a wonder the English language was big enough for the two of them; and yet in his 1877 novel The American, protagonist Christopher Newman visits the Louvre, where he is perceived as “the great western barbarian stepping forth in his innocence and might, gazing a while at this poor effete old world, and then swooping down on it.” John Dos Passos’ explanation for his return to America after the Great War was that “for us barbarians, men from an unfinished ritual,” postwar Europe was once again overly “gentle.” And barbaric resolve of a sort that Howard might have found admirable is implicit in this Henry Miller exhortation in Tropic of Cancer: “It may be that we are doomed, that there is no hope for us, any of us; but if that is so let us set up a last, agonizing, blood-curdling howl, a screech of defiance, a war-whoop!” In his Seven Keys to Texas the historian T. R. Fehrenbach even frames the “eternal dilemma” of the Lone Star State writer in nigh-Howardian terms: “To go or not to go to Rome, and when in Rome, to try to become Roman, or make his living explaining his barbarian ways to Romans – who may find them greatly entertaining.”1
Howard was aware that his barbarians might be mistaken for Noble Savages. Writing to Lovecraft in late October 1932, he denied possessing an “idyllic view of barbarism,” and expressed impatience “with the depiction of the barbarian of any race as a stately, god-like child of Nature, endowed with strange wisdom and speaking in measured and sonorous phrases.” He freely admitted that the barbarian of history was subject to tabus like “sharp sword-edges, between which he walked shuddering,” and more often than not brutal, squalid, childish, treacherous, and unstable. And yet “The day and night were his book, wherein he read of all things that run or walk or crawl or fly. Trees and grass and moss-covered rocks and birds and beasts and clouds were alive to him, and partook of his kinship. The wind blew his hair and he looked with naked eyes into the sun. Often he starved, but when he feasted, it was with a mighty gusto.” The Howard barbarian might leave Eden, an Eden more unforgiving in different ways than the Genesis-garden, but he does so of his own accord, and when he ventures city-ward he functions as an x-factor, a reality principle, handwriting on the wall scrawled forebodingly before ever the wall was built.
We might transfer to Conan what Paul Horgan said of the mountain man in his Great River: The Rio Grande in North American History: “He was an American original, as hard as the hardest thing that could happen to him,” but after that – and this is crucial – much would still need to be said. From the criminality of the City of Thieves’ Maul, The Tower of the Elephant scales the sheer, silvery cliff-face of cruelty, of a highly civilized barbarity exposure to which will move Conan, the nominal barbarian, to shoulder the guilt of the entire human race. The not-from-around-here thief or assassin, the off-limits temple or tower, the monstrous or demonic hench-being of a blackly renowned necromancer awaiting the intruder – these are the basic building blocks of a fantasy subgenre with which presumed familiarity easily breeds contempt. Yet Howard, decades before sword-and-sorcery was even dubbed sword-and-sorcery, used the blocks to construct something startlingly non-formulai
c, so much so that when Tom Shippey, as perceptive an academic as has ever engaged with modern fantasy, picked Tower for his 1994 Oxford Book of Fantasy Stories, he remarked on the “unexpected” compassion of “Howard’s normally brutish hero.”2
And so we open the pages of one of the pivotal American heroic fantasy tales and find an outlander pitying a being who is infinitely more of an outsider, while the monster-killing imperative yields to the decision to assist the monster in its revenge-killing. We are told in The Tower of the Elephant that Conan recalls Yara to wakefulness “like a judge pronouncing doom,” and the barbarian as the feral Rhadamanthus by way of whom his creator pronounces the dooms of civilization’s sophistries and shibboleths, the certainty that those who live off the fat of the land will die from that same luxury in the blink of history’s eye – these concepts are epitomized and versified in that crucial Howard poem, A Song of the Naked Lands.
The Howardisms of this parable-as-paradigm – “Grim was the barter, red the trade,” or “the prison of satin and gold” known as “Culture and Art” – should not distract us from realizing that the Texan was not the first to shoe and saddle this particular hobbyhorse. The cheerless tune of Song is audible in Henry David Thoreau’s observation “It was because the children of the Empire were not suckled by the wolf, that they were conquered and displaced by the children of the northern forests who were,” and dates all the way back to Herodotus. The much-traveled Greek chose to end his Histories with a moral courtesy of Cyrus the Great. As translated by Aubrey de Sélincourt and A. R. Burns, the hero-king is urged to help himself to a “better” country. He does not burst into song, but he does anticipate A Song of the Naked Lands:
“Soft countries breed soft men. It is not the property of any one soil to produce fine fruits and good soldiers too.”