Grim Lands

by Robert E. Howard

  Still, when considering a story like this volume’s Pigeons from Hell it is worth remembering that African-Americans stimulated Howard’s imagination when he was a child – witness one tale he recalled to Lovecraft, invariably set in “the ruins of a once thriving plantation,” in which “always, as [vagrants] approach the high-columned verandah through the high weeds that surround the house, great numbers of pigeons rise from their roosting places on the railing and fly away” – and, in ways that will not appease all readers nowadays, troubled his conscience when he was an adult. “I don’t. I don’t! I don’t hate it! I don’t hate it!” insists Quentin Compson when he is accused of hating the South at the end of William Faulkner’s Absalom, Absalom! Howard, a Southwesterner rather than a Southerner, was never quite as much on the defensive as is Harvard student Quentin “in the iron New England dark.” And yet we should not lose sight of the fact that “South” comes before “west” in the word “Southwest,” so Southern pride goes before, or remains after, a fall, the possibility of which would never have occurred to the less history-burdened. Clark Edward Clifford acknowledges the complicated shadows in his In the Deep Heart’s Core: Reflections on Life, Letters, and Texas: “Even if we manage to kill Mexicans and Indians with John Wayne remorselessness, Southern-ness lurks in the shadows, ever ready to remind us that we too have done something wrong, have lost a war, have declined, have once been human.”

  Have once been human – or, in some instances, inhuman. “Her past and her traditions are close to my heart, though I would be a stranger within her gates,” Howard once wrote of the South, and Griswell, the (Lovecraft-esque?) New Englander of Pigeons From Hell, permits the Texan to return as a stranger to the strangest of American lands. If not quite a first person narrator, Griswell is first among equals as a third person actor in the story; he’s the viewpoint character, and his viewpoint is that of “frantic abhorrence of these black woods, the ancient plantation houses that hid forgotten secrets of slavery and bloody pride.” Howard was capable of confiding, “I have often wished strongly that I had lived on the ancestral plantations in the Deep South in the days before the Civil War,” or maintaining that the horrors of slavery were frequently exaggerated, but we have evidence that he was not so much a loyal son as a transplanted grandson who knew a bit too much to be quite as loyal as he would have liked.

  In Pigeons he does not insult our intelligence with blameless Blassen-villes, social workers who happen to own a plantation, apostles of outreach and uplift victimized by their motivelessly malevolent maid Joan. But neither can he bring himself to insult regional pride by attributing to a rootedly Southern, irreproachably bloodlined family atrocious mismanagement of their human property. So the Blassenvilles turn out to be of European origin and Caribbean extremism, in Sheriff Buckner’s words a “French-English family. Came here from the West Indies before the Louisiana Purchase. The Civil War ruined them, like it did so many.” Quicker to apply the whip and slower to leave off because they “got their ideas in the West Indies,” as Buckner puts it, the family is convenient for Howard’s conflicted purposes, and it is only logical that Celia, “the last one of the family to come to these parts,” hence even less of an adoptive Southerner than her relatives, is the cruelest of the cruel.

  While Celia is drawn to voodoo culture, Joan, her victim and subsequent victimizer, has “white blood in her,” and pride of her own. In a sense they are each other’s weird sisters, and instead of an American melting pot Pigeons posits a bubbling witches’ cauldron in which what should be the boundaries between Celia and Joan dissolve – the identities and fates of the two characters are not disentangled until the final paragraph. Howard’s dark American fantasy reflects multihued American reality in that the disentanglement of fates and identities is impossible.

  In the quasi-autobiographical Post Oaks & Sand Roughs, Howard’s false start at a novel in the late Twenties, his alter ego announces, “Now, I wish for a fair craft, three-masted, full-sailed, with a fair wind and a clear sea path – to where? The Isles of Yesterday, mayhap, or the coasts of Romance, or the beaches of Adventure, or the turquoise sea of Dawn.” But by the time he wrote to fellow pulp pro E. Hoffmann Price on February 15, 1936, he lamented having “gone so far along the path of romantic-exotic writing that it’s devilish difficult to find my way back to common-place realism, and yet every urge in me is to write realism.” Realism nevertheless accompanied him on that romantic-exotic path; Post Oaks & Sand Roughs provides the too-much-too-soon observation, “A boom town drugstore is an ideal place to study humanity,” and in 1931 Howard told Farnsworth Wright, “My boyhood was spent in the oil country – or rather oil came into the country when I was still a young boy, and remained.” Oil came, oil remained – where others saw a windfall, a resource to be exploited, Howard saw an invading force, an occupying army. In many of his letters he stole a march on the distinguished historian Bernard DeVoto, who in works like 1947’s Across the Wide Missouri described the American West as “a plundered province,” one that was being “systematically looted.”

  “The money changers have fled from their high seats in the temple of our civilization,” Roosevelt declared in his First Inaugural in 1933. The temples of Howard’s civilizations were frequently the haunts of horrors, so he presumably approved of FDR’s words. If, like the Thirties-redolent hard-boileds in the pages of Black Mask, certain Conan stories flirt with vulgar Marxism, vulgar Marxism has aged better than any other kind. “Aye, I’ve seen men fall and die of hunger against the walls of shops and storehouses crammed with food,” the Cimmerian marvels in The Black Stranger, and when a former fence protests that he is now “respectable” in The Hour of the Dragon, Conan’s derisive reply is, “Meaning you’re rich as hell.” Another story dispenses with “the long, long ago when another world lifted its jeweled spires to the stars” while retaining the low expectations of high finance. At the start of Wild Water a bankrupt farmer’s unspeaking but unyielding neighbors, who ensure by their “hard-eyed” auction attendance that his property is not snapped up but instead sold right back to him for a pittance, are familiar to us from Depression iconography. This story outdoes Vultures of Wahpeton in depositing the Howard hero in a situation, in a civilization, where he can no longer be the Howard hero. “Times is changed, can’t you understand?” another character says to Jim Reynolds, “a throwback, the personification of atavism.” Hailing from “the high ridge of the Lost Knob country” (Did Howard intend a joke about post-frontier emasculation when he fictionalized Cross Plains as Lost Knob?) Reynolds is both “dark as an Indian” and the owner of a Ford roadster. Although still a bit larger than life, he is smaller than the system at the center of which sits Saul Hopkins, the financier who pulls strings “to which were tied loans and mortgages and the subtle tricks of finance.” (As Howard saw fit to bestow “the hooked nose of a vulture” upon him, it comes as a relief that the character’s last name is Hopkins.)

  “I am hemmed in by laws, laws, laws,” Kull roars in By This Axe I Rule!, but he ultimately shatters the most superannuated of those laws. Jim Reynolds, born into a different sort of Pre-Cataclysmic Age, is far more hemmed in. He can gun down the king of Locust Valley, but can never hope to declare himself “king, state, and law!” like Kull. State and Law are too much for him, or any man, as the heavens themselves blaze forth the death of the frontier in the more-than-meteorological storm of Wild Water. Like Harry Morgan, gutshot in Hemingway’s To Have and Have Not, Reynolds dies cursing, done in not by the lawmen with whom he is hell-bent on shooting it out, but by a friend. That friend, Bill Emmett, has taken up residence where those wronged by modernity often relocate, in the Book of Revelations, from which he is eager to visit an “awful mountain of black water” on the low-lying town of Bisley and witness the “Locust and Mesquital rollin’ down like the rivers of Judgment.” Although “on the devil’s business,” Emmett can quote scripture, but he is also capable of summoning the authentic voice of the twentieth century: “You’re small stuf
f; you killed one enemy. I aim to kill thousands!”

  Volume II of The Best of Robert E. Howard ends with one of his most memorable poems, which doubles as a prelude or overture to the Conan series. Cimmeria came to Howard just before the favorite son of that “land of Darkness and the Night” did, and the “I” who speaks throughout the poem, who effects the beautifully intuitive shift from “winds and clouds, and dreams that shun the sun” to “clouds and winds and ghosts that shun the sun” is not Conan but his creator. “I remember,” that “I” declares; one cannot remember the future, and the absolute power that not-always mournful but neverending remembrance exercised over Howard may help to explain both the brevity of his life and the longevity of his storytelling. Cimmeria may not be a state of the Union, but it is a state of mind, and as its creator stands before the pantheon-gates the fairminded should recognize the heritage that “wraps [him] in the grey apparel of ghosts.”

  He was an American classic as early as The Shadow Kingdom and its follow-up The Mirrors of Tuzun Thune, which asks, “What worlds within what worlds [await] the bold explorer?” and cranes from the Siege Perilous of the Valusian throne to glimpse “some far country of [Kull’s] consciousness.” Assessing his body of work, such as it then was, to his friend Tevis Clyde Smith in February 1929, Howard poor-mouthed Mirrors as “vague and badly written; this is the deepest story I ever tried to write and I got out of my depth.” A good many classic American writers got to be classics by venturing out of their depth and diving instead of drowning, and in this story Howard discovered just how deep his depth truly was. The Hall of a Thousand Mirrors offers reflections that some who do not dream enough would never dream of encountering in a sword-and-sorcery story; Tuzun Thune’s glassy surfaces reflect W. H. Auden’s insight that most American stories “are parables; their settings, even when they pretend to be realistic, symbolic settings for a timeless and unlocated (because internal) psychomachia.”6

  The wizard’s mirrors also reflect Ann Douglas’ contention that an American trademark is the “[displacement of] mimesis … to what the critic Richard Poirier, speaking of American narrative and borrowing a term from Shakespeare’s Coriolanus, has called ‘a world elsewhere.’ Forced into exile, Coriolanus turns the tables on those who exile him by telling them, ‘I’ll banish you. There is a world elsewhere.’ ” Douglas sees the “willful conversion of exile from the known and familiar world into an enhanced power of exploration and vision in another unknown but compelling world, this exchange of the recognizably real for a place or mode defined as more insistently real, a place where provincials are recognized as sovereigns” as the “central strategy of classic American literature.” Kull, already exiled from his native Atlantis and a provincial grudgingly recognized as a sovereign, in Mirrors reaches the point of susceptibility to exchanging the recognizably real for the at-first-phantasmal-but-then-more-insistently real: “Day by day had he seemed to lose touch with the world; all things had seemed each succeeding day more ghostly and unreal.” Pantheon, please note: neither wars nor women nor wealth are won in Mirrors or The Tower of the Elephant – these are not stories of wish fulfillment but rather perspective-enhancement, imagination-enlargement.

  Howard might have lit his pioneering torch in an unpromising hinterland, but he kindled imaginations around the world. That he lived and died with no inkling of the passion that his passionate storytelling would eventually ignite, or the power with which artists would respond to his power, is intolerable. He has created many, many readers and not a few writers as well, the more conscientious of whom have been determined, not to write like Howard but rather to write, like Howard. Brian Attebery accords L. Frank Baum, imperfections and all, the status of “our Grimm and our Andersen, the man who introduced Americans to their own dreams.” Despite being an imperfect man and writer, Howard told perfectly wonderful stories that reintroduced twentieth-century Americans (and much of the world) to their own nightmares – but also to the chance of triumph, however hard-won and soon-lost, over those nightmares.

  By now our confidence that Robert E. Howard could not help thinking or writing five classically American things before breakfast each morning must be apparent. “A writer who wishes to produce something both American and fantastic” is for Attebery compelled to “move against the currents, restoring what has been lost over the years or finding eddies of tradition that have resisted the general erosion of the marvelous.” It’s time to acknowledge that Howard, whose sense of loss was at least as keen as his other five senses, was eminently qualified to undertake such tasks. So here’s to a viable, meritocratic, and open-audition-offering pantheon, one into which this author will not have to fight his way once his ability to write his way in is better known. His induction will leave the pantheon more sensitive to the call of the wild and the pall of the mild; more tragic but also more comic; more fantastic but also more realistic; brawnier, but more poetic; more physical, but more haunted. No other country in the world could have produced a Robert E. Howard, and, regrettably, few other countries would have been as slow to realize his stature and significance. But as the afterlives of earlier classic writers’ work have taught us, late is still much, much better than never.

  1. “Civilized” and “barbaric” have continued to glower at each other in post-Howardian popular culture. The 1971 film The Omega Man is unsatisfactory as an adaptation of Richard Matheson’s classic pandemic-of-vampirism novel I Am Legend, but Anthony Zerbe’s Matthias could be channeling Howard when he says to Charlton Heston’s Neville, “Barbarians? You call us barbarians? Well, it is an honorable name. We mean to cancel the world you civilized people made.”

  2. While abnormally dangerous, Conan is not “normally brutish”; a brutish hero would have been no hero at all to Howard. In his first-ever sale to Weird Tales, the Cro-Magnon versus Neanderthal grudge-match Spear and Fang, the protagonist Ga-nor is an artist, a “past master” of cave painting. Had Shippey had the chance to read the Conan stories in order of composition, as can now be done by way of The Coming of Conan the Cimmerian, The Bloody Crown of Conan, and The Conquering Sword of Conan, before seeing the Cimmerian in action he would have seen him in inaction, refusing to hang the seditious Rinaldo because “a great poet is greater than any king.”

  3. Howard seemingly takes direct aim at Cyrus in his only Conan novel, The Hour of the Dragon. Squiring his readers through the “palm trees and orange groves” of the sun-and-soil-blessed province of Poitain, he writes, “It is not only the hard lands that breed hard men.”

  4. We can be sure that Howard would have scrambled to see King Kong, but he did not share his reaction to the film in any letter that has survived. What is known is that he “got a big whang out of [Eugene] O’Neill’s The Hairy Ape,” and in one of the poems included in this volume, “Never Beyond the Beast,” he warns of the inescapability of “the blind black brutish passion – the lust of the primal Ape.” Another poem cautions that “a strange shape comes to your faery mead/With a fixed black simian frown.”

  5. Katherine Anne Porter (1890–1980), who was born in Indian Creek, Texas, and grew up in Kyle, is best known for stories such as Pale Horse, Pale Rider, Noon Wine, and her late-in-life novel Ship of Fools. Porter’s first short story was published in 1922, so she beat Howard into print by three years. She also beat him out of Texas by a lifetime, and her relocations to Mexico, Greenwich Village, and Europe led McMurtry in Southwestern Literature? to draw a line in the dirt, like Travis at the Alamo, and pointedly exclude her: “Let those who are free of Texas enjoy their freedom.” Just how free of the state Porter ever was can be debated; in 1975 she insisted, “I happen to be the first native of Texas in its whole history to be a professional writer.” This claim to fame goes all the way back to Virgil’s primus ego in patriam mecum deducam musas (“for I shall be the first to bring the Muse into my country”), but it is disappointing that no one chronicling the history of Texas letters has ever juxtaposed Porter’s statement and Howard’s.

  Lik
e his, her imagination was jump-started by a yarn-spinning grandmother, and like him, she compensated for the lack of a formal higher education by ferociously concentrated autodidacticism: both writers illustrate the celebrated “Root, hog, or die” ideology in action. Arrestingly for students of the Howard-Lovecraft correspondence, Porter devoted fifty years to a biography of Cotton Mather, even living in Salem during 1927 and 1928 to absorb some witch-hunting atmosphere, but never finished the book.

  6. Psychomachia: soul-strife, the mind warring on itself.

  NOTES ON THE ORIGINAL HOWARD TEXTS

  The texts for this edition of The Best of Robert E. Howard, Volume Two, were prepared by Rusty Burke, with the assistance of David Gentzel, Paul Herman, Glenn Lord, Patrice Louinet, and Rob Roehm. The stories have been checked either against Howard’s original manuscripts and typescripts, copies of which were provided by Lord, or the first published appearance if a manuscript or typescript was unavailable. Every effort has been made to present the work of Robert E. Howard as faithfully as possible.

  Deviations from the original sources are detailed in these textual notes. In the following notes, page, line, and word numbers are given as follows: 11.20.2, indicating this page, twentieth line, second word. Story titles, chapter numbers and titles, and breaks before and after chapter headings, titles, and illustrations are not counted; in poems, only text lines are counted. The page/line number will be followed by the reading in the original source, or a statement indicating the type of change made. Punctuation changes are indicated by giving the immediately preceding word followed by the original punctuation.