Sixty-five years ago, Robert E. Howard took his own life.

June 5, 2001 12:00 AM

Sixty-five years ago, Robert E. Howard took his own life. Now, I can't really argue that his stories weren't often sexist, racist, what have you, although I would point out the heroic women who appear in various of his stories and the fact that to Howard, it was what actions you took rather than your birth that made you a person. But no matter what stance you take on his views or politics, I think it's safe to say that the man wrote some of the most ripping yarns ever. In an effort to expose the world to his non-Conan work (which often exceeded in quality the tales of his more famous creation) here and here are some good links, and here is an excellent Kull site that has all sorts of information on Howard's less famous but more textured barbarian king, Kull of Atlantis. I've been a fan of Howard for years now, and while he certainly wasn't a subtle writer, his work has a kind of sledgehammer power I envy. It may not be for everyone, but I think it's certainly worth a look.
posted by Ezrael (20 comments total)

I have no idea what his stuff is like to read, but I worked at a book store thousands of days ago and saw a lot of these paperbacks and the guys (never girls) who bought them.

The book covers were usually something like this: a large-breasted and largely naked woman sprawls on the ground and clutches the naked thighs of some largely naked muscle man who holds his naked sword erect and looks defiant. And tanned. And naked. Largely.

And the guys who bought the books were almost always pasty, skinny, jumpy, pimply teenage boys. The only person I knew who read them (a friend's brother) was -- no surprise -- pasty, skinny, jumpy, pimply. And later, psychotic. But before that, he joined the army because he loved knives and guns and the idea of being a spy and learning how to kill with his bare hands. He's now on permanent disability for what I think his mother called mental strain. He still plays with guns and recently was arrested for a street shootout.

I'm sure you're not one of those guys and I'm not saying you ever were. I'm just trying to explain why I will never be able to read anything by Howard, even if the world's greatest literary critics join you in extolling his works. Such biases linger.
posted by pracowity at 1:42 AM on June 5, 2001

Well, I don't think escapism is that bad. (And to a certain degree, I was a pasty, skinny, jumpy, pimply teenage boy. I'd bet a lot of people were. We all start somewhere.) Bad cover art is endemic to the publishing industry...and one of the reasons I chose the non-Conan stuff is exactly because it often isn't the thud-and-blunder stuff. Especially not Kull (who may look like that, but nobody who goes through existential crisis after crisis and isn't even interested in sex) or Solomon Kane (a Puritan).

But ultimately, it's people like you who I'm after. You are exactly the person I want to try and convince to give Howard a shot. Because, quite honestly, I'm damn sick of the canonization of writers who are working with themes Howard provided them with. The guy wrote horror stories that Stephen King and Ramsey Campbell have called the best of the 20th Century, he created the idea of a story reaching back to the roots of mankind...there's a lot to like in Howard. Your biases, ultimately, are your own affair...I can't make you read anything, and I wouldn't want that power...but if I can convince you to give the Solomon Kane stories a shot, I'd be content. If not, well, Howard's not getting any deader.

And the guys who bought the books were almost always pasty, skinny, jumpy, pimply teenage boys. The only person I knew who read them (a friend's brother) was -- no surprise -- pasty, skinny, jumpy, pimply. And later, psychotic. But before that, he joined the army because he loved knives and guns and the idea of being a spy and learning how to kill with his bare hands. He's now on permanent disability for what I think his mother called mental strain. He still plays with guns and recently was arrested for a street shootout.

Well, Mark David Chapman read Catcher in the Rye and went out and shot John Lennon, but people still read it, and no one blames J.D. Salinger. Similarly, people laud Taxi Driver as a great work of art, and yet one of our President's father's friends' sons watched it, and decided to shoot Ronald Reagan. What we do with the art we take in is our own affair, I think.

I grew out of my pasty skinny jumpy pimply teenaged boy phase, that's true. That'll happen, given time. If it helps you, I didn't discover his work until college, but I don't know what else I can say. If you've already made up your mind, I don't think I can say anything.
posted by Ezrael at 2:09 AM on June 5, 2001

> Well, Mark David Chapman read Catcher in the Rye ...

Of course I'm not blaming Howard for anything. That wasn't my point. I drink tea; so did Attila the Hun.

I meant to contrast Howard's audience (or the part I saw of it) with the heroes on the covers to explain why, despite your plea to get people to try Howard, I doubt I'll be turning to "The Cat and the Skull" or "The Screaming Skull of Silence" or "The Curse of the Golden Skull" or "Skulls in the Stars" or even "The Moon of Skulls" any time soon. They seem to appeal to people who entertain (or are entertained by) fantasies I don't have.

But I'm truly glad you enjoy him so much. I'm glad people still read at all.
posted by pracowity at 3:06 AM on June 5, 2001

I must admit I haven't read any REH since I was an adolescent (pasty, jumpy and pimply but flabby as well, which is somehow worse). I wonder how it would read now. In some ways, perhaps he is more interesting than his creations – the idea that his books are a projection of his fantasies, the astonishing level of homo-eroticism in the writing. What immediately springs to mind is the constant fascination with physique and the mother-fixation (after all, wasn't it his mother's death that caused him to commit suicide?).

The "heroic women" thing is interesting, too, both in relation to his ailing mother (so his ideal woman would be the anti-mother), and the suppressed homosexuality that I'm heinously trying to pin on him (the women as an idealised male figure of desire placed in a more acceptable female body).

There's not much about it on the internet as far as I can tell (I just did a google on "Robert E Howard" homosexual).
posted by Grangousier at 3:21 AM on June 5, 2001

You know, I was just wondering that about Kull and Brule not too long ago. Maybe that's why they cut Brule out of the movie.
posted by Ezrael at 3:44 AM on June 5, 2001

Ezrael,

I have to admit that your recent writing was a catalyst in getting me to pop in my Conan (all of Howard I have, currently) DVD. At some point I will certainly pick up some of his books.

I do find the dichotomy of films from books interesting. This is coming from someone that was awarded a Blockbuster gold or platinum membership (?) when he rented 120 movies in 6 months.

Isn't the world an interesting place though? I really have ZERO sympathy with anyone claiming to bored, having nothing to do, unless they are illiterate.

"Houdini, the Nazi's, and his ass." I'm game. After all, Catcher in the Rye is the book that Mel Gibson was obsessed with in Conspiracy Theory and yet his character had only 2 names, Jerry Fletcher, while most assassins have three: Mark David Chapman, John Wilkes Booth, etc. What kind of web shall we weave? Not to mention, what I've been digging up on "webs." Did you know that spider silk is used for the crosshairs of microscopes? And...damnit, Ezrael you and your "Start on one end and work your way to the other" approach to reading at the library will be the death of me!
posted by john at 3:48 AM on June 5, 2001

Sorry. My bad. I'll just fold up my tesseract and go home. :)

Seriously, I've never seen that movie. Is it any good?

Come to think of it...Robert Ervin Howard, a gun nut living by himself in Texas with his mother in the 1930's...maybe the reason he shot himself is because whoever it was who used Guiseppe Zangara to try to kill Roosevelt was trying to make another go of it with a disaffilated, disaffected writer with anarchist leanings (Howard preferred Barbarism to Society and said so, not just in his fictions, either) and Howard pulled the trigger on himself rather than be their puppet. Perhaps it was someone at Weird Tales, selectively re-editing the works of the writers, knowing that they would read their own works and be so horrified at the changes that the subliminal text would imprint itself on their minds. However, no thought was given to the fragility of their egos...Howard kills himself, Lovecraft dies, Ashton Smith gives up fiction, and instead of killing Roosevelt, the mole only kills the magazine.

Tag. You're it.
posted by Ezrael at 4:13 AM on June 5, 2001

By the way...Howard Phillips Lovecraft and Clark Ashton Smith also had three names. Just if you need more grist for the mill.
posted by Ezrael at 4:14 AM on June 5, 2001

Found this online. It's a serious scholarly look at John Milus' Conan the Barbarian film. Even I think that's going a bit far.
posted by Ezrael at 4:34 AM on June 5, 2001

Giving it some more thought (though not wide reading - all my teenage REH books are in a dust-covered box somewhere in an attic measureless to man and unseen these twenty years by all but...

...ahem...

...sorry.)

Ultimately what I remember the books to be essentially about are the adolescent themes of Mastery and Conquest (hence the PSJPTP factor in the readership). In a world where to be a man is to be empowered [over others], and where one's own body is pretty much repellent to all concerned, projecting into a fantasy of Conquest and Kingship (with Thews of Steel to boot - what exactly is a thew, anyway?) is hugely attractive. And Howard was (whatever his sexual orientation) victim of a terminally prolonged adolescence (according to the reading I've done this morning, anyway).

So ultimately the writing will be narcissistic and self-centred, in so far as it is purely concerned with the inner life of the writer and the projection of his own fantasies and wishes into the form of his characters with no interest in any other ideas than gratification. That is why he can't be more than a "Sub-" writer (Sub-Poe, Sub-Kipling, perhaps even Sub-Burroughs). Sadly.

Personally, I think that Fantasy and Science Fiction are at their best when they are in some way aware of the world outside the writer's head and satirical perhaps. Thus Asimov, Lem, Gibson, Dick and others I can't think of at this very moment.

When in my pimpled pomposity* I droned on about Almuric (interstingly not on Amazon, so no link) to a teacher at school, she countered with William Golding's Pincher Martin. It's an interesting comparison, I think, and I wish I'd read the Golding at the time (rather than just a few years ago). The point is that it's an infinitely better book, because it converns more than the immediate gratification of the reader. In a sense, whereas Golding (even at his most fantastical) is concerned with "The Marvellous in the Everyday"**, fantasy writers can only draw attention to the mundane in the fantastical


*I really hate alliteration.

**RealAudio needed. Sorry, I couldn't resist it.
posted by Grangousier at 5:10 AM on June 5, 2001

I hate that I keep jumping in, but I feel like I need to ask these questions:

Are you talking about Conan? Because there's damn little fantasy fulfillment in Solomon Kane, whose stories often end up with the character alone, unsure of himself and unaware of what awaits him. Likewise, what kind of wish fulfillment is there in Kull, a man who makes himself a King and then basically finds out that for the rest of his life he will be a target, that having is not so great as wanting?

A lot of the Conan stuff extant, as well, is not Howards. I'm not just talking about the crap written by new hands...even Howards published work was expurgated and changed by L. Sprague De Camp.

I'm not trying to be contentious. It's just that I see a lot of assumptions about Howard, but none of them seem to be based on the work. It bothers me. The cold fact is, Pigeons from Hell is one of the best short stories of horror ever written. Dozens of writers think so. Karl Edward Wagner and Michael Moorcock both list it an an influential work...it's hardly sub-poe. It's not sub-anything.

At his best, Howard was amazing. At his worst, he was a hack. He only had one skill as a writer, really, a vivid ability to create almost out of nothing. He never traveled, never saw the places he described, but his grasp of what he was writing about was first rate.

I admit to a taste for Philip K Dick, Umberto Eco, Tim Powers. But having a taste for cerebral fantasy doesn't mean I can't recognize the times that Howard got it right were very right. People of the Black Coast may be one of the most original stories I've ever read. I mean, David Drake, David Weber, Ramsey Campbell, Karl Edward Wagner...these aren't bad references to have.

"The mere accumulation of knowledge and the acquisition of wisdom does not make a god," answered the other rather impatiently. "Look!" A shadowy hand pointed toward the great blazing gems which were the stars.
Kull looked and saw that they were changing swiftly. A constant weaving, an incessant changing of design and pattern was taking place.
"The 'everlasting' stars change in their own time, as swiftly as the races of men rise and fade. Even as we watch, upon those that are planets, beings are rising from the slime of the primeval, are climbing up the long slow roads to culture and wisdom, and are being destroyed with their dying worlds. All life and a part of life. To them it seems billions of years; to us, but a moment. All life."
Robert E. Howard, The Striking Of The Gong

There's no wish fulfillment here. Kull is basically Lord Byron with an axe, a man who has what he thought he wanted only to find he can't stand it. There's no immediate gratification here. Not even close. Kull will die, alone, unloved, and while he lives he doesn't even know what's real and what isn't.

Is the writing narcissistic and self centered? Depends on the story. Almost nothing written by Howard and left along by De Camp has that problem, really. Howard's heroes don't win that often. They survive, and that's their victory.

Like I said before, there are problems in Howard. Sexism, racism...these are elements in his work. But narcissism isn't there, I don't think, except in the worst of the Conan stories and those were worked over pretty damn hard by editors and posthumous collaborators.

Is Howard a leading light in fantasy? No. But while some of that is because of his style and subject matter, a lot more of it is due to his death. Remember, he was only thirty when he died. There was a lot more writing he could have done, and to read his later work is to see him improve. That's really why I posted this topic...to commemorate what was lost.
posted by Ezrael at 6:02 AM on June 5, 2001

> They seem to appeal to people who entertain (or are
> entertained by) fantasies I don't have.

One of the functions of strongly imagined writing is to give us access to fantasies and points of view we cannot (or at least have not) arrived at by ourselves. For those who naturally inhabit the same territory as Marius the Epicurean, Howard or Edgar Rice Burroughs might be a useful anodyne. (Not thinking about you personally, here, prac; I imagine you're a Joseph Conrad kind of guy.)
posted by jfuller at 6:19 AM on June 5, 2001

I grew up loving the Conan stuff (not pasty, somewhat pimply, somewhat flabby) and some Kull, but never read the Solomon Kane stuff until college. It's good, and I agree that REH is underrated as a writer. But, there are plenty of good writers whose lifestory or "lesser" works get all the attention.

If you're intrigued by the REH story, I would recommend the 1996 film Whole Wide World. It's a biopic based on the memoir written by REH's girlfriend/fiancee(?) Novalyne Price Ellis called "One Who Walked Alone: Robert E. Howard, the Later Years" (out of print). Renee Zellweger plays Price (and quite well, I think) and it's told from her perspective. Vincent D'onofrio is near brilliant as Howard. The film (which reviewers at IMDB call a "romance" --- which is NUTS) does a good job of telling how those around Howard saw him without pulling any punches or sugarcoating anything. Howard was a sonofabitch, that much is for sure. He was also a gifted writer and haunted by his imagination and a bizarre relationship with his mother. It's definitely worth a watch.
posted by sjarvis at 7:48 AM on June 5, 2001

The Conan movies were comic book pastiches of the Howard stories, and much lighter in tone, but Conan movie #1 is still one of my favorites. Adventure-comedy though it was, I'm still haunted by the final (still) image of the enthroned and very much older Conan, muscles still bulging but hair and beard going gray and looking as if he's seen more than he wanted to see of whatever it was that life showed him.

Question: if Conan the King were a much darker story than C. the Barbarian, more in the Blade Runner/Aliens mode, is Schwartznegger old enough to do it yet? Is there anyone around who might produce an above-average screenplay? Who could be trusted to direct? (I want Bergman, heh -- darker than Fanny and Alexander, but with more sword-swinging than there was in Cries and Whispers."
posted by jfuller at 8:25 AM on June 5, 2001

That is such a bizarre idea—alas, Bergman's not making films anymore. If only that were true of Arnold.
posted by rodii at 8:39 AM on June 5, 2001

> That is such a bizarre idea

Not all that much of a stretch, considering that one of Bergman's main studs (Max von Sydow) appeared in Conan #1.

All I really want is a lot more of what would be mass-market popular art if the world were full of people like me.


> Bergman's not making films anymore.

Kurosawa would do just as well. If either of these guys wants to do Conan the King from Beyond The Grave I promise I'd camp out to get tix.
posted by jfuller at 10:54 AM on June 5, 2001

Bergman's still alive, just not directing films. (My vote for Conan director in your world would be Jacques Tati.)
posted by rodii at 11:51 AM on June 5, 2001 [1 favorite]

Of course!

Conan/Hulot with signature raincoat, pipe, hat and twohanded broadsword sneaking through the sorcerers palace, trying to be as quiet as possible. A bauble attracts his attention and he picks it up to have a closer look, and then very, very carefuly replaces it from where it came from, while te broadsword over his shoulder knocks over a rack of axes...
posted by Grangousier at 12:07 PM on June 5, 2001 [1 favorite]

Conan film news
posted by gimli at 1:47 PM on June 5, 2001

Hey, thanks gimli! Didn't know that.

> While Milius has made clear that he prefers Arnold return
> to one of his best known roles, Schwarzenegger himself
> has remained somewhat aloof on the subject, going so
> far as telling the press during interviews for The 6th Day
> that he didn't think he would be able to fit the project
> into his schedule.

Darn. Well, if it can't be Arnie I'll take The Rock. He goes Arrrgh as well as anyone in the cinema today.
posted by jfuller at 2:51 PM on June 5, 2001