The Persians had to admit that this was true and Cyrus was wiser than they; so they left him, and chose rather to live in a rugged land and rule than to cultivate rich plains and be subject to others.3
The point to this quick look at the backstories of terms like “barbarian” or “naked lands” is that Howard dealt himself into debates that were old before 1492 and did not embarrass himself – one of the reasons why he would not embarrass the pantheon either.
But can that august-if-virtual institution be persuaded to take in a lowly pulpster? The Library of America allowed in Dashiell Hammett and Raymond Chandler, who made Black Mask a legend, years ago, but then allowances are easily made for the brass knucks and coshes of hardboiled detective fiction, thanks to that subgenre’s bruisingly unsparing reportorial function. Hammett and Chandler were also fortunate enough to have John Huston, Humphrey Bogart, and Howard Hawks adeptly adapting their work for another, even more popular medium. With Lovecraft’s tentacles now snaking across the Library’s threshold, perhaps the pulpily fantastic will win itself more space.
When he gave the title Pulp Fiction to one of the defining movies of the Nineties, Quentin Tarantino may or may not have intended to acknowledge the fact that the best pulps have aged well because they showcased work that turned out to be ageless, but Michael Chabon’s sincerity in his Pulitzer Prize – winning novel The Adventures of Kavalier and Clay, where he calls the pulps “argosies of blood and wonder,” is incontrovertible. A democracy’s pantheon should be hospitable to those who achieve excellence in intrinsically democratic venues. Stephen King, who came along too late for the pulps, started out by selling to even less prestigious markets like Dude, Cavalier, Adam, and Swank, and now seems poised for induction in the aftermath of his 2003 Medal for Distinguished Contribution to American Letters (an event that reduced Defender of the Canon Harold Bloom to weeping tears of blood).
Paul Seydor’s “reconsideration” of Sam Peckinpah’s Westerns is deservedly admired for seeing those movies as if for the first time and with the clearest of eyes. While trying to find a niche in the pantheon for his artist, Seydor singles out American literature’s “fascination – bordering, some might argue, on the pathological – with the exotic, the foreign, the criminal, and the wild. This fascination in turn results in a fiction that rarely moves far from escapist genres. The reasons our artists give for this almost always reduce to the same one when we cut through the rhetoric of individualism and freedom: the insufficiency of mainstream American life to vitalize the imagination.” Sure enough, Howard’s imagination was vitalized by the exotic, the foreign, the criminal, the wild. With transatlantic voyages not yet an option, the only New World available to Donald MacDeesa in Lord of Samarcand, who hails from the uttermost West of his day, is the East; he is limited to crossing seas of sand and oceans of grass. Yet how well Leslie Fiedler’s summation of classic American tales in general, and Poe’s Arthur Gordon Pym in particular – “And through it all the outcast wanderer, equally in love with death and distance, seeks some absolute elsewhere” – suits the wayward clansman as he looks back down “the bitter trail of his life” and hugs an isolation colder than the bones of the moon. If Seydor is correct, if the truest American writing is fringe writing, all edge and no center, then by working the genre fringe Robert E. Howard teleported himself smack-dab into the center, the dream-center, of our culture. When everything is margin, marginalization becomes moot.
The title of one of the poems in this volume, Which Will Scarcely Be Understood, would do as well for a summary of Howard’s critical reception, such as it was, until the late Seventies at the earliest. And yet much of the cryptography needed to decode his meaningfulness had already been done. “During my last year in college, I’d read several of D. H. Lawrence’s books,” Novalyne Price tells us in One Who Walked Alone. “I could see they were sexy. I didn’t know whether to tell Bob about reading them or not.” Had she dipped into Lawrence’s nonfiction as well as his fiction, specifically 1923’s Studies in Classic American Literature, she would have bristled with a whole arsenal of talking points when making the case for Howard’s pantheon-readiness to cousin Enid.
Lawrence’s survey is as eccentrically electric, or electrically eccentric, as any of the newly identified classics he was covering, and no better description of what he was up to exists than cultural historian Ann Douglas’ in her Terrible Honesty: Mongrel Manhattan in the 1920s, which despite its title is about much, much more than Manhattan or the 1920s:
The “essential American soul,” [Lawrence] proclaimed, is “hard, isolate, stoic,” and a “killer.” America is full of “vampires,” the “terrible … ghosts” of the black and red men the white settlers had exterminated, exploited, and, unbeknownst to themselves, envied and assimilated. For Lawrence, America was a King Kong figure – King Kong’s cinematic debut was only a decade away – careening amid the wasteland of the West, and he was King Kong’s prophet.4
Douglas goes on to stress that “Lawrence called the American literature he was writing about ‘classic’ – recognized and revered, in other words, by those acknowledged to be best able to judge the matter – but next to no one knew it. Using the term was, in fact, a publicity stunt, Lawrence’s bold bid to canonize a group of authors who were largely ignored, forgotten, or misread.” Cooper, Hawthorne, Poe, and Melville were for him avatars of a shadow-side America, the “inner nature of brutality [of which was] more extreme and more at odds with its public mask and voice than was the case anywhere else.” When the mask slipped, when Kong broke his chains, as per Douglas paraphrasing Lawrence, “America might be the only nation capable, if uncensored and unchecked, of flooding the civilized world with what William Carlos Williams called in his self-consciously Lawrentian study In the American Grain (1925), ‘rich regenerative violence.’ ”
And flood the civilized world it did, with red harvests and blood meridians, wild bunches and magnum forces. Imagery that conjures a civilized world flooded, by forces at last unchecked, with rich regenerative violence is of course also ground zero for Howard studies. Lawrence’s “bold bid to canonize” leads straight to Leslie Fiedler’s Love and Death in the American Novel, Richard Slotkin’s Regeneration Through Violence trilogy about the mythology of the American frontier, and to Howard’s most powerful work. Those of us who’ve worked on The Best of Robert E. Howard are driven by a “self-consciously Lawrentian agenda” of our own – we too are partisans of a writer “largely ignored, forgotten, or misread,” and we’re sure that because his finest stories are classic, “though next to no one [knows] it,” they should be promoted as such in a repeat of Lawrence’s 1923 “publicity stunt.”
The slightest suggestion of Howard’s induction-potential will have some of the unconverted demanding the installation of a metal detector in the pantheon’s entrance. Is the violence that convulses Howard’s stories rich and regenerative, or just rote? “This young man has the power to feel. He knows nothing of war, yet he is drenched with blood,” Ambrose Bierce conceded of Stephen Crane. Similarly drenched if similarly unbaptized by fire, Howard too possessed a power to feel that his readers never cease to feel. Jack London was the authorial father-figure who taught the Texan the most about luring romanticism into the dark alleys where realism was waiting. George Orwell thought London “essentially a short-story writer,” conspicuous for “his love of brutality and physical violence and, in general, what is known as ‘adventure.’ ” Alfred Kazin for his part noted in his 1942 overview of modern American literature On Native Ground, “Nothing is so important about London as the fact that he came on the scene at a time when the shocked consciousness of a new epoch demanded the kind of heady violence that he was always so quick to provide.” Howard, who came of age in an even newer epoch, trafficked in even more unsparing violence; early in Lord of Samarcand a battlefield’s “shrieks of dire agony still [rise] to the shivering stars which [peer] palely out, as if frightened by man’s slaughter of man.”
Yes, his work i
s full of swords, but they are often double-edged, and a preoccupation with the survival of the fittest is shadowed by the certainty that both fitness and survival are fleeting. At his best, Howard was a purveyor not of cheap thrills but of frissons costly for both the writer and his more alert readers. “One problem in writing bloody literature,” he mused to HPL in 1932, “is to present it in such a manner as to avoid a suggestion of cheap blood-and-thunder melodrama – which is what some people will always call action, regardless of how realistic and true it is.” In an April 1932 letter Howard vented, “I’ll swear, I’ve written of Christian armies being defeated by Moslems until my blood fairly seethes with rage. Some day I must write of the success of the earlier Crusades to gratify my racial vanity.” He never did (and perhaps would not have been able to had he tried), but in Lord of Samarcand Donald MacDeesa topples both Bayazid the Thunderer and Timour the Lame – the pistol shot with which he redresses his grievance with the latter is anachronistic, but also precociously American.
Dirge-dire, Lord is enough of a revenge tragedy to frighten a Jacobean. If Howard the poet likens the nations Timour tramples underfoot to “lost women crying in the mountains at night,” Howard the dramaturge takes over when MacDeesa assures Bayazid, “I would go through greater hells to bring you to the dust!” The Texan blithely challenges both Christopher Marlowe and Edgar Allan Poe; indeed, by helping himself to several chapter epigraphs, Howard induces Poe to attend his somber feast even as Bayazid is forced to be present at Timour’s. This volume’s Son of the White Wolf, wherein the titular predator is a rough beast whose hour comes round again in one of the Great War’s only “glamorous” sideshows, also aspires to be “bloody literature.” Bloody, and prescient – cultures force-marching themselves into imagined pasts in pursuit of illusory purity and predestination are a regrettably familiar phenomenon to us in the twenty-first century.
Black Vulmea’s Vengeance demonstrates that Howard was potentially a pirate novelist capable of boarding the flagships of Stevenson and Sabatini, but also transcends “cheap blood-and-thunder melodrama” in its exploration of mercy as a form of revenge more devastating to its undeserving recipient than even the most massively retaliatory payback would be. Living with one’s own crimes can be more painful and more protracted than dying because of them. Elsewhere we find a vignette swollen into a metaphor in The Man on the Ground, as a feud-driven Texan’s hatred, “an almost tangible abstraction – a hate too strong for even death to destroy; a hate powerful enough to embody itself in itself, without the aid or necessity of material substance,” outlives him among dry-gulching-facilitating rocks “hotter than the hearthstones of hell.” D. H. Lawrence speaks in his chapter on The Scarlet Letter of “a black and complementary hatred, akin to love,” and Howard was no stranger to that perverse intimacy situated in the far regions of antipathy. Witness not only The Man on the Ground but also the final story in this volume, Red Nails, as remarkable an American treatment of the feudist cul-de-sac as there’s been since Huck Finn, caught up in the quarrel between the Shepherdson and Grangerford clans, was told “by-and-by everybody’s killed off, and there ain’t no more feud. But it’s kind of slow, and takes a long time.”
The story’s inspiration has little to do with the Hyborian Age and much to do with the Lincoln County War in which Billy the Kid shot to fame as a shootist. As Patrice Louinet explains in Hyborian Genesis Part III (see The Conquering Sword of Conan), a vacation that took Howard to the hyperbolically haunted site of Lincoln, New Mexico, left him speculating as to whether “the nature of the Bonito Valley determined the nature of the feud – narrow, concentrated, horrible.” What was for him local, or at least regional, color also appears in the story’s “cactus-dotted plain” and reference to “cliff-dwellings of the mysterious brown people” – we are not far from Brian Attebery’s description of Burroughs’ Barsoom, “a dream or fantasy vision of the American Southwest.” As Rusty Burke comments in his in-depth study Journey Inside: The Quest of the Hero in Red Nails, much of the story’s nomenclature – Olmec, Chicmec, Tezcoti, Xuchotl – “rings with the history of the Pre-Columbian peoples of Mexico and Central America, from whom Howard drew for the story’s proper names.” Pre-Columbian shadings may also have contributed to what the Texan teased to Clark Ashton Smith as being “the grimmest, bloodiest, and most merciless story of the series so far,” the elements of the Mesoamerican worldview that T. R. Fehrenbach, in his Fire and Blood: A History of Mexico, summarized as “magic and mystery, blood and horror,” all perceived through “a filter of darkest night, or in a violent blast of sun blaze.”
Another New World underpinning is disclosed when we learn that the “sinister crimson” city was founded on the enslavement and slaughter of black people. (Xuchotl does not seem to be haunted by these original victims, but maybe, just maybe, everything that befalls all subsequent citizens, whether Kosalan or Tlazitlan, can be traced to the founding atrocity.) Conan and Valeria, the two adventurers who tip the balance of the feud, are once and future Aquilonians respectively, and therefore, given the special significance of Aquilonia (which in the Conan series “reigns supreme in the dreaming West”), Americans of a sort. The Cimmerian grins “hardily” when he accepts an offer from the Tecuhltli – “We’re both penniless vagabonds. I’d as soon kill Xotalancas as anybody” – thereby expressing an unmistakably American attitude: the history behind other people’s feuds is of little importance, and space, the essential New World resource, heals the wounds that time turns gangrenous.
But a December 1934 letter to Lovecraft in which Howard professes himself indifferent to European “squabbles and massacres,” describing the continent as “nothing but a rat-den where teeming, crowded rodents, jammed together in an unendurable mass, squeal and gnash and murder each other,” cautions us against too quickly single-sourcing the story. Europe had been a Xuchotl in 1916 – note that the city has its own no-man’s-land, the Halls of Silence which lie between the feuding factions – and by 1935 looked to be one again, as the postwar years in which Howard grew up gave way to prewar years during which he and others grew aware that dictatorships were calling the tune to which democracies desperately danced. Neither entirely an Old World story nor entirely a New World story, Red Nails becomes an underworld story, a visit to a realm sealed off and trapped by the cave-in of Tlazitlan sanity. Murmurous with the ghosts of old murders, Xuchotl rises architecturally above several ossuaries’ worth of skeletons at its foundation but morally descends into “the black corridors and realms of the subterranean world.” D. H. Lawrence called Poe “an adventurer into vaults and cellars and horrible underground passages of the human soul,” and from those same passages in Red Nails the Crawler, the Burning Skull, and the pipes of madness emerge, while Tolkemec, Howard’s diabolus ex machina, returns from the vaults of the dead as memorably as anyone has since Madeline Usher. Xuchotl surpasses even the Blassenville Manor of Pigeons from Hell as a contender to be Howard’s equivalent of Shirley Jackson’s Hill House, Stephen King’s Overlook Hotel, or Poe’s palace of Prince Prospero – “And one by one dropped the revelers in the blood-bedewed halls of their revel” covers the people of Xuchotl as well as the masquers of the Red Death.
In the stories just mentioned our pantheon prospect asked rather than evaded questions about the vengeance-imperative that powers so much genre fiction; and although he could be as pulpy as the occasion warranted – “How long can you avoid the fangs of the Poison People?” an especially odious high priest taunts a cobra-beset dancer in one of the Conan stories – the truth is that we’re dealing with an overachiever, a better writer than he needed to be to succeed in the markets available to him. Lovecraft beat everyone else to this realization while grieving for his friend in print: “He was greater than any profit-making policy he could adopt – for even when he outwardly made concessions to Mammon-guided editors and commercial critics, he had an internal force and sincerity which broke the surface and put the imprint of his personality on everything he wrote.�
� The imagery here, “internal force and sincerity” breaking the surface and imprinting themselves, is precisely what D. H. Lawrence sought and found in his chosen American classics. And to Lovecraft’s tribute we can append the follow-up assertion that Howard was also greater than the profit-making policies adopted by too many of those who presumed to package his work in the decades after his death.
A natural, he possessed the unnatural degree of dedication and perseverance that getting the most out of being a natural entails. In her memoir How It Was, Mary Hemingway quoted her husband Ernest as having said, “The secret is that it is poetry written into prose and it is the hardest of all things to do”; in some ways it was a little easier for Howard, much more of a born poet if much less of a prose revolutionary than Hemingway, with a bardic knack for investing subjectivity and selectivity through the sheer rightness of word-choices with much of the irrefutability of objectivity. His style is rather like the second of the two gifts the Nemedian girl Zenobia gives the dungeon-immured Conan in The Hour of the Dragon (the first being his freedom): “It was no slender stiletto, selected because of a jeweled hilt or gold guard, fitted only for dainty murder in milady’s boudoir; it was a forthright poniard, a warrior’s weapon, broad-bladed, fifteen inches in length, tapering to a diamond-sharp point.” The forthright and undainty pointedness of Howard’s best prose is equally diamond-sharp. A character resents “the slow fading of the light as a miser begrudges the waning of his gold.”
“All the sanity” goes out of another’s face “like a flame blown out by the wind.” The lightning-bolts of an epic storm are “veiled in the falling flood like fire shining through frosted glass, turning the world to frosty silver.”
The active voice usurps the passive like one of Howard’s pushful swordsmen ousting an enfeebled dynasty, and the pathetic fallacy could not work harder for him were it his indentured servant, as in one of this volume’s nerve-shredding crescendos, Wings in the Night: “A shuddering white-faced dawn crept back over the black hills to shiver above the red shambles that had been the village of Bogonda.” To describe the vitality that crackles through his paragraphs we can enlist the aid of the reborn, regenerated-through-violence Esau Cairn in Almuric, Howard’s unfinished roughing-up of the Burroughsian planetary romance: “I tingled and burned and stung with life to the finger tips and the ends of my toes. Every sinew, vein, and springy bone was vibrant with the dynamic flood of singing, pulsing, humming life.” Looking again to Ann Douglas’ Terrible Honesty, we read that “Vitality, not verisimilitude, is the criterion of classic American literature; it offers a portrait of energy itself, of the adrenaline of the psyche, a portrait in which the external landscape is never separate from the landscape within.” Howard specializes in portraits of energy itself and constantly injects his work with the adrenaline of his psyche – many of his opening paragraphs are not so much invitations to continue reading as forcible abductions. American exceptionalism is perhaps better suited to literature than geopolitics, and Howard’s immediacy and intensification combine for an exceptionalism like a Texas-accented emanation of Archibald MacLeish’s “continent where the heat was hotter and the cold was colder and the sun was brighter and the nights were blacker and the distances were farther and the faces were nearer and the rain was more like rain and the mornings were more like mornings than anywhere else on earth – sooner or sweeter and lovelier over unused hills.”
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