He is rarely given to stately symmetry, and if some of his work (though not supremely accomplished tales like Worms of the Earth or Lord of Samarcand) can be jagged, jittery, and joltingly uneven, we need only remember that the most influential writing about the American classics often considers not whether the glass is half empty or half full, but why it tends to be half cracked. Richard Chase in his The American Novel and Its Tradition stresses the “radical disunities and contradictions” and attraction to “extreme ranges of experience” of the best American novels, while the eminent critic George Steiner once observed that “the uncertainties of taste in Poe, Hawthorne and Melville and the obscuring idiosyncrasies of their manner point directly to the dilemmas of individual talent producing in relative isolation.” We don’t think the idiosyncrasies of Howard’s manner are obscuring, except perhaps to certain bouncers on the pantheon payroll, but as a later but arguably even more isolated individual talent, he too was making much of it up as he went along, which brings us to his claim that he “was the first to light a torch of literature in this part of the country, however small, frail, and easily extinguished that flame may be. I am, in my way, a pioneer.”
In his essay Southwestern Literature?, Larry McMurtry comments, “The tendency to practice symbolic frontiersmanship might almost be said to characterize the twentieth century Texan,” and that tendency is almost impossible to avoid when discussing the twentieth-century Texan who concerns us here. Howard’s self-identification as a torch-lighting trailblazer is not only symbolic frontiersmanship but a striking example of a well-known Leslie Fiedler generalization: “[The American writer] is forever beginning, saying for the first time (without real tradition there can never be a second time) what it is like to stand alone before nature, or in a city as appallingly lonely as any virgin forest.”5 In Terrible Honesty Ann Douglas sketches the “culturally impoverished” Ernest Hemingway, “starting in some sense from scratch, less freighted with cultural baggage,” and therefore freed up to “fashion, with little resistance or waste, the new literary tools the modern experience demanded.” The culturally impoverished and isolated Howard labored long in a short life to fashion the new literary tools his startlingly modern varieties of heroic fantasy and historical adventure demanded.
Being a literary fire-bringer and torchbearer in West Texas was the only way in which progress still permitted Howard to be a pioneer. “He should have lived his life a generation before, when men threw a wide loop and rode long trails,” he writes of his doomed hero in Wild Water, one of the stories we’re most excited about including in this collection, and although Howard himself could continue throwing wide loops and riding long trails at his typewriter, that wasn’t enough for him. “What I want is impossible, as I’ve told you before,” he emphasized in a 1933 letter to Lovecraft, “I want, in a word, the frontier – which is compassed in the phrase, new land, open land, free land – land rich and unbroken and virgin, swarming with game and laden with fresh forests and sweet cold streams, where a man could live by the sweat of his hands unharried by taxes, crowds, noise, unemployment, bank-failures, gang-extortions, laws, and all the other wearisome things of civilization.” The Howard heroes Francis Xavier Gordon and Esau Cairn, both born “in the Southwest, of old frontier stock,” light out for improbable territories where they need not try to pry open Frederick Jackson Turner’s closed frontier. Gordon, represented in The Best of Robert E. Howard by Hawk of the Hills and Son of the White Wolf, hurls himself into “howling adventures among the Indians,” only now the wild warriors are those of Afghanistan and Arabia. Cairn is hurled through space by one Professor Hildebrand’s teleportation device to a paradoxical interstellar homecoming:
I had neither companionship, books, clothing, nor any of the things which go to make up civilization. According to the cultural viewpoint, I should have been most miserable. I was not. I revelled in my existence. My being grew and expanded. I tell you, the natural life of mankind is a grim battle for existence against the forces of nature, and any other form of life is artificial and without realistic meaning.
Someone living that vicariously through Cairn’s frontier-fresh start is unlikely to be either urbane or urban, although The Tower of the Elephant begins at the bottom, in a (mean)-street-level beggars’ banquet where only “watchmen, well paid with stained coins,” represent law and order. The setting of Vultures of Wahpeton is a cluster of mining camps with pretensions to townhood, not a city, but in its gold rush throes, Wahpeton effectively caricatures the unrestrained capitalism Franklin Delano Roosevelt was saving from itself while Howard worked on his novella: a welter of getting and spending, gouging and fleecing, wheeling and dealing in smoke-filled rooms and gunsmoke-filled dives. More typically dreamlike are Samarcand – when Donald MacDeesa looks upon that Central Asian capital for the first time, it “[shimmers] to his gaze, mingling with the blue of the distance,” like “a city of illusion and enchantment” – and the fireworks-bedecked Constantinople of The Shadow of the Vulture, a “realm of shimmering magic, with the minarets of its mosques like towers of fire in an ocean of golden foam.” The most mysterious of all cities for Howard is obviously domesticity, and although drawn to the Middle Ages, he had difficulty imagining middle age for himself or his characters. Still, if Conan in a standoff with Valeria and Gottfried von Kalmbach flummoxed by Red Sonya are mere skirmishes in the battle of the sexes, they are skirmishes fought zestfully by both combatants. And the “pastoral quietude” of a chance meeting between a disenchanted king and a distraught slave girl in By This Axe I Rule! should serve as a warning against underestimating this writer’s range.
What’s more, different kinds of range exist; Howard certainly ranged across recorded history and the invitingly blank pages of unrecorded history. In The Star Rover Jack London imagines a “rider full-panoplied and astride of time,” and his Texan admirer, for whom that novel was something of a sacred text, clung convincingly to bucking temporal broncos in his historical fiction, especially a set of stories from the early Thirties that pit Crusaders against Eastern conquerors. Here the contending supernatural forces are not Jehovah and Allah but Hubris and Nemesis. The Shadow of the Vulture features “the Armageddon of races, Asia against Europe,” but equally stupendous and far more exotic is the death-grapple between Asia and Asia when Bayazid and Timour meet in Lord of Samarcand, as “the thunder of cymbals and kettle-drums” contends with the “awesome trumpeting” of war-elephants, and “blasts of arrows and sheets of fire” wither “men in their mail like burnt grain.”
To range we should also add reach, and a refusal to be intimidated by historical distances and distinctions. The English specialist in American literature Tony Tanner was struck by the brashness with which T. S. Eliot and Ezra Pound availed themselves of “fragments of the world’s past and disparate cultures to build their own private worlds. This sort of relatively unfettered eclecticism when dealing with the past is peculiarly American and an utterly different thing from the European writer’s sense of the past. If anything it negates the historical sense … The results and new juxtapositions can be brilliant, breathtakingly original and very un-European.” The Hyborian Age of the Conan stories also looms in Carl Van Doren’s comparison of James Branch Cabell’s fantasies to The Faerie Queen: “Geographical and chronological boundaries melt and flow, wherein fable encroaches upon history, and the creative mood of the poet re-cuts his shining fabrics as if they were whole cloth intended solely for his purposes.” And when Tanner says of Herman Melville’s prose that with “its vast assimilations, its seemingly opportunistic eclecticism, its pragmatic and improvisatory nonchalance, its capacious grandiloquence and demotic humour, it is indeed a style for America – the style of America,” he also captures many of the stylistic attributes of an American named Robert E. Howard. Opportunistic eclecticism and improvisatory nonchalance can’t help but improve a talented writer’s range.
Also pertinent to this issue is the fact that Howard spent much of his time at the typewr
iter trying to make editors and readers laugh. Sailor Steve Costigan, the “ordinary ham-an’-egger” who broke big for his creator in the pugilistically inclined pulp Fight Stories, is represented here by The Bull Dog Breed. Steve comes equipped with a concussion-proof skull and a repercussion-proof gullibility, and the stories about him focus on the ties that bind man and “Dublin gentleman” bulldog, and the inability of two-fistedness to keep up with two-facedness. A few years later Breckinridge Elkins, the first and most illustrious of Howard’s mountain man man-mountains, arrived as discreetly and understatedly as a rockslide, and he was soon joined by Pike Bearfield. Pragmatically cloned for a new market, Bearfield acquires his own, epistolary-narrative-shaking identity in this volume’s Gents on the Lynch, and also The Riot at Bucksnort and A Gent from the Pecos.
The farther west the English language got, the greater its Americanization, as Paul Horgan recognizes: “Its inflations and exaggerations were brandished in reply to the vastness of the West, the bulk of mountains, where man was so little. If there was vulgarity in its expression, there was also pathos, for what showed plain was the violent dancing of a spirit that must assert or be lost.” Only a generation or two removed from all of this, Howard knew what he wanted to recapture for Pike Bearfield and Breck Elkins; to Lovecraft in 1931 he admitted, “Western folkways and traditions are so impregnated with savagery, suffering and strife, that even Western humor is largely grim, and, to non-Westerners, often grotesque.” The savagery, suffering, and strife of Vultures of Wahpeton–esque elements like Mustang Stirling’s outlaws and a Vigilante Committee are reprised farcically in Gents, as Bearfield’s spirit dances violently in passages like “Folks is always wanting to lynch me, and quite a few has tried, as numerous tombstones on the boundless prairies testifies.” Gents also features Howard, who seethed over attempts by Easterners to impose their frames of reference on the Southwest, gleefully imposing a Southwesterner’s frame of reference on the most hallowed events of East Coast history: “He said the Britishers was going to sneak out of a town named Boston which I jedge must have been a right sizable cowtown or mining-camp or something, and was going to fall on the people unawares and confiscate their stills and weppins and steers and things.”
The man responsible for a story called By This Axe I Rule! is likely to disdain check-swings of that axe; not for Howard the hedging of bets and eying of exits found in earlier American fantastic fiction. He did not so much write his stories down or type them out as commit them – and commit to them. For Ann Douglas, Melville’s books “move forward when he is in close connection with himself, in the grip of his daemon.” That is also true of Howard, to the point where he abandoned several fan-favorite characters because the close connection had been lost; his daemon had shifted his grip. But the grip is searingly, serratedly tight in, for example, Wings of the Night; Melville’s Ahab, a Quaker, describes himself as “madness maddened” during his pursuit of the white whale, and the akaanas of Wings airlift Kane, the Puritan, to a similarly far gone state. Howard dwells upon their “fearful mirth to see men die wholesale,” their “strange and grisly sense of humor [that is] tickled by the suffering of a howling human.” We could be dealing with the “boys” of King Lear’s “As flies to wanton boys, are we to the gods; They kill us for their sport,” although in this instance it is not the flies but the boys who are winged. While the akaanas are not divine or even supernatural, Howard does liken them to “demons flying back to hell through the dawn,” and they call to mind Richard Slotkin’s Regeneration Through Violence comment on the forests of Nathaniel Hawthorne: “The man who enters the wilderness hunting for something he regards as truth or power is always led to a place where devils dance in a ring, inviting him to a black Eucharist.”
Having agreed with Lovecraft “that Puritanism provides a rich field for psychological study,” in an October 1930 letter, Howard exploits that rich field in Wings as nowhere else in his Solomon Kane series. America’s Puritan and African antecedents encounter each other in a “pre-American” setting: “the Dark Continent, land of shadows and horror, of bewitchment and sorcery, into which all evil things had been banished before the growing light of the western world.” And yet the supposedly Dark Continent illuminates Solomon Kane as he seeks out the shadows, becomes most fully himself, acquires a context that his birthplace Devon, as is evidenced by the hail-and-farewell of Solomon Kane’s Homecoming, can never hope to provide. In his 2004 essay Heritage of Steel: Howard and the Frontier Myth, Steven R. Trout memorably discusses the one-sided dialogue between Kane and the “shriveled, mummified head of Goru, whose eyes, strangely enough, did not change in the blaze of the sun or the haunt of the moon.” Goru is an eloquent if wordless accuser; the Englishman has failed in what might otherwise seem an objectionably paternalistic role – proved better at being a Kane than being a Solomon. He is a king whose kingdom is raptored away from him, and the akaanas, it should be noted, arrive from Europe to prey upon and despoil – in effect, colonize – Africans.
As Brian Attebery emphasizes, “The American writer must find some way of reentering the ancient storytelling guild: he must validate his claim to the archetypes that are the tools of the trade.” Howard’s modus operandi involved straightforward breaking and entering, after which he helped himself to whatever archetypes he needed. Thus the harpies of Wings, on loan from Jason and the Argonauts, and the advisory to readers at the start of The Valley of the Worm acknowledging that they “have heard the tale before in many guises wherein the hero was named Tyr, or Perseus, or Siegfried, or Beowulf, or Saint George” – and yet it is Niord/James Allison/Robert E. Howard who knows best, by dint of having known first. Such effrontery is a way for the American fantasist to plant his feet and his feats. Against the Conqueror Worm, Howard sets the worm-conqueror in not only The Valley of the Worm but also Red Nails.
In 1938 J. R. R. Tolkien, moonlighting as a draconologist not long after he had unleashed Smaug, “the Chiefest and Greatest of Calamities,” in The Hobbit, assured an audience of children in an Oxford lecture that a dragon is “more terrible than any dinosaur” and “the final test of heroes,” so it is quite fitting that a dragon should test Conan the Cimmerian in his final adventure (final in the sense of last to be written). Howard’s hero brings, of course, a forthrightly American attitude to the confrontation: “There’s no law against killing a dragon, is there?” is his libertarian question to Olmec in an early draft of Red Nails. In his indispensable Beowolf: The Monsters and the Critics, Tolkien makes the case that “there are in any case many heroes but very few good dragons,” and faults the Beowulf-dragon for “not being dragon enough,” due to trace elements of symbolism and allegory that threaten to dilute the effectiveness of “some vivid touches of the right kind.” His ideal is a “real worm, with a bestial life and thought of his own.” Howard’s dragon in Red Nails is nothing but vivid touches and bestial life, hungry, enraged, vengeful – woe betide any allegorical readings foolish enough to be caught downwind of him. He squats “watching [Conan and Valeria’s crag] with the frightful patience of the reptile folk. So might one of his brood have glared up at their troglodyte ancestors, treed on a high-flung rock, in the dim dawn ages.” Later he wallows on the ground “like a dog with pepper in its eyes,” and “a noisy gurgling and lapping” betrays his attempt to quench his poison-inflamed thirst.
Conan, who will soon be faced with the riotously unnatural Xuchotl, broad-jumps the abyss of ages and the great divide between mammal and reptile to accept the dragon as a fellow natural born killer: “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.” Unlike Sigurd Fafnir’s-bane, he does not need to dine on dragon-heart to gain understanding, and that he feels “a kinship with all wild things, even dragons” makes Conan wilder and the dragon more real. Seldom exhibiting an appetite for fantasy of any sort, the American pantheon has never been motivated
to seek out a definitive New World dragonslaying, but were it to do so, Red Nails would be waiting.
Like many Americans, some of whom are now pantheon residents, Howard preferred to skirt, or slink away from, certain of the misshapen menhirs and dolmens that stand out so starkly in our psychic landscape. Comforting though it would be to report that he was ahead of his time in his views on people who did not look like him, he was simply, even simplistically, of his time in his over-reliance on “race,” a construct both highly artificial and built with the shoddiest of materials, as an organizing principle. Howardists are fond of recalling one occasion on which Steven R. Trout, for whom the celebrating-in-the-endzone triumphalism of Wings in the Night about the “white-skinned conqueror” just got to be too much, remarked, “I don’t remember ever seeing such a clear indication that ol’ Bob would’ve lost money had he bet the Louis/Schmeling fight.”