Joe R. Lansdale is racking up the Howard credits. He is probably best known in Howard circles for his glowing introduction to Mark Finn’s biography of Howard, Blood & Thunder: The Life and Art of Robert E. Howard; Lansdale was also the author of a Conan pastiche, The Songs of the Dead, which was recently published as a mini-series by Dark Horse Comics to mixed reviews.
While perusing the posts over on the REH Comics Yahoo group, I came across a link (hat tip to Bill Thom) to a piece by Lansdale about Howard’s Sword and Planet novel Almuric. While there are a few phrases that made me wince, overall, Lansdale has some fine and insightful things to say about our favorite Texan:
Howard was very much aware of what he was doing. Even the name of his hero, Esau Cairn, brings up certain images. In the bible, Esau was the hairy one, not thought capable of carrying on the civilization he was, as the elder son, supposed to inherit and push forward. He was the outcast, the rough one, the savage. Howard saw this not as a loss, but as a positive, so it strikes me that the name is a purposeful connection.
And that’s just one example. Read the rest here.
LEO ADDS: The truth be told, it pains me to see this story held up as a valid benchmark by which Howard can be judged. Almuric is clearly a hasty, unfinished effort, one that REH never intended to be published. Patrice Louinet says in “Hyborian Genesis II” (in Del Rey’s The Bloody Crown of Conan) that Howard finished a first draft and only part of a second before abandoning the novel in favor of The Hour of the Dragon, which in stark contrast didn’t ape the Sword-and-Planet tales of Burroughs and Kline and indeed is now widely hailed as a fantasy classic. In addition, as the few people who read my old Almuric essay in REHupa know, it’s all but certain that someone else wrote the entire last chapter, and did so in such hackneyed, absurd fashion that it poisons all that came before. Specifically, as people who’ve read Morgan’s essay on the subject know, the author in question was likely Otto Binder, who penned a saccharine, happily-ever-after ending utterly at odds with the fatalistic musings on death and hate that dominate Howard’s best stories.
Knowing all of this puts Lansdale’s criticisms, both positive and negative, into a much different perspective. Of course “the prose was often rushed and purple” — that’s probably one of the major reasons he abandoned the tale unfinished. It’s not true that “Howard was just gaining his chops with this one” — Almuric was written in early 1934, late in his career, after much of Howard’s very best work had already seen print.
The stuff I find the most objectionable is the oft-repeated assertions of REH as a champion of “the little boy’s yearning for adventure,” the “wild boy free of all restraints and inhibitions,” featuring heroes “constantly capable, youthful, smart” that inevitably score “a hot little virgin” and frolic in a “false but seemingly perfect world, or at least perfect to that aforementioned eleven-year-old boy, or the eleven-year-old boy inside of most men.” Decades of professional authors and critics have breezed through such nostalgic critical surveys of Howard’s lesser work, and inevitably they conclude that Howard was above all a man with “a little boy’s heart,” that his work was potent yet literary only “with a small ‘l’.” Even granting all of Almuric‘s faults of haste and first draft roughness, I can’t help but wonder if we read the same book.
When I think of Almuric, I think above all of Esau Cairn as a towering figure of Hate, which is about as far from Huck Finn as you could imagine. Esau tells us that “I did feel a rush of panic, common to all wild things, at being confined and shackled, but I fought down this feeling and it was succeeded by one of red unreasoning rage.” Think about that for a moment: red, unreasoning rage. This is the guy that supposedly evokes Huck Finn? Howard’s best friend Tevis Clyde Smith wrote many years after REH’s death that, “At times [Howard] would meditate on some type of violent end other than self-destruction, feeling that it would be his ill luck to finish off somebody in a burst of temper who had done some trivial thing to unleash the collected resentment within him. The prospect made him shudder…” Esau Cairn derives not from Huck Finn but from characters like Darrell Standing in Jack London’s The Star Rover, whose murderous rages land him in jail and later on the end of a rope.
The Main Theme of Almuric, and indeed of all Howard’s work, isn’t that everything is a perfect boy’s fantasy, it’s that (as stated in Almuric): “I tell you, the natural life of mankind is a grim battle for existence against the forces of nature.” Esau stalks through the tale in a “red fury,” a “wild beast fury,” and wherever he goes his vision swims “in a red mist.” Again and again Howard rams this down our throats, with Esau spelling out how, “fury lurked close to the surface of my soul, ready to blaze into ferocious life at the slightest encroachment.”
Lansdale opines that, “One gets the impression that Howard wanted to be free of all responsibilities.” Well, no — Howard is careful to portray a character ever chained to the scarlet responsibilities of the Blood Feud:
Somewhere, somehow, I found in me power to throttle my red rage and blind fury. When my very brain reeled with the lust to break my chains and explode into a holocaust of slaughter, I held myself with iron grasp. And the fury ate inward into my soul, crystallizing my hate. So the days passed, until the night that Yasmeena again sent for me.
In Howard’s worlds, there is no more powerful restraint than the need to abstain from glutting one’s hatred until the tree of vengeance is ripe with blood-red fruit. When that time comes for Esau, Huck Finn is a million miles away, and all the little boys in the audience are hiding under their mothers’ petticoats:
And crouching on him, I glutted my mad hate for his cursed race. I strangled him slowly, gloatingly, avidly watching his features contort and his eyes glaze. He must have been dead for some minutes before I loosed my hold.
The mightiest men clustered about a tall figure that was their chief — old Bragi, Khossuth had told me. I had heard of him, a hard, cruel man, moody and fanatical in his hatreds.
A million ages of traditional war and feud rose up to confound me.
I laughed as a wolf barks, from the depths of my bitter rage and agony.
“No man can twist me with mad words to forget old hates.”
“Lead us to Yagg, or lead us to Hell! We will stain the waters of Yogh with blood, and the Yagas will speak of us in shudders for ten thousand times a thousand years!”
Brutal hardship, crimson murder, black vengeance, darkest futility — these are the elements of Howard’s worlds that thrum within his prose like a war-drum echoing across a haunted jungle. But after all of this, a veritable Also sprach Zarathustra trumpeting his deepest-held themes, the reader is subjected to a final chapter that does its best to turn Almuric into an Oprah Book Of The Month Club candidate:
As for me, I have Altha — and she has me…Our love will last forever, for it has been annealed in the white-hot fires of a mutual experience…Now, for the first time, there is peace between the cities of Khor and Koth, which have sworn eternal friendship to each other…we hope to instill some of the culture of my native planet into this erstwhile savage people before we die and become as the dust of my adopted planet, Almuric.
Are you effing kidding me? Howard throwing away all of the hate and bloodlust, letting the “gentler instincts of the Earthwoman” civilize his savage planet? REH didn’t write that crap, no way no how, and it’s immeasurably sad to see a respected author like Lansdale latching onto these selfsame passages and extrapolating from them all kinds of theories about Howard “not carrying the male reader too far from mama.” Listen again to Joe’s idea:
There is something in the ending of Almuric that makes one consider that soon, Esau Cairn may not be quite so wild, since now there is peace between warring cities, and shortly he could be carrying out the trash, walking the Almuric equivalent of old Rover, wondering why he can’t just put his feet up.
Is it any wonder that critic after critic has read the very worst elements in the Howardian canon, stuff REH would have been horrified to know has seen print, and come away thinking that for all his “noble savage” fantasies Howard was not a literary writer? Don Herron said it best in his essay “The Dark Barbarian”: ultimately, a writer is judged more on his or her good work than on the poor. If you take the time to do that with REH, I humbly submit that what is revealed is an oeuvre of astonishing thematic depth, with stories that work on purely literary levels as much as they entertain on visceral ones.
Take Lansdale’s summation of the women in Howard’s stories. He came away from Almuric with cotton-candy dreams of:
a land where I was forever vigilant, forever in top physical shape and something for the ladies, who I might add, were also primitives, always good looking and secretly lustful minus the pesky problems of real primitives, ticks, fleas and body odor; beautiful maidens who have saved themselves for me to ravish…
It is true that this vibe is prevalent in a large number of Howard’s stories, but almost invariably they appear in his worst works, not only in abandoned efforts such as Almuric but most famously in the group of middling-to-awful Conan tales penned between Howard’s first great period of Cimmerian creativity (“The Phoenix on the Sword,” “The Frost-Giant’s Daughter,” “The Tower of the Elephant,” “Queen of the Black Coast”) and his stellar western-inspired revival at the end of the series (“Beyond the Black River,” “The Black Stranger,” and “Red Nails”). These medial tales seem to have been written at white heat during a time of great emotional and financial strain for Howard, when the Depression had knocked out many of his markets, the banks had failed and wiped out his savings, and his Mother was growing increasingly ill. He almost certainly wrote this interchangeable bevy of insipid female characters with one thought in mind: convince Weird Tales editor Farnsworth Wright to buy each story and use it for the cover, getting Margaret Brundage to do one of her patented nude chalk illustrations. The litany of names — Olivia, Natala, Sancha, Octavia (I exempt Livia, the heroine of “The Vale of Lost Women,” in deference to a story I judge to be horribly underrated, one far superior to tripe such as “Jewels of Gwahlur,” and “The Devil in Iron”) — forms a formidable quality hurdle that many people (most famously Robert Bloch) found impossible to leap.
But remember, we judge an artist on his best work. There are no “beautiful maidens” perfuming the air of “Phoenix on the Sword,” “The Tower of the Elephant,” or “Beyond the Black River,” while the other great Conan tales feature women who make a mockery of simplistic categorizations and snickering dismissals. Atali the Snow Goddess, luring mazed warriors to their doom with the cry, “Brothers! I have brought you a man to slay! Take his heart that we may lay it smoking on our father’s board!” Bêlit, a woman who beneath her lust and fey laughter wears a sense of ever-present gloom like a royal cloak — as ill-fated as Virgil’s Dido, to my mind she ranks as one of literature’s great tragic evocations of London’s “I’d rather be ashes than dust.” “The Black Stranger,” with its pair of damsels that owe more to Hawthorne’s The Scarlet Letter than to any hackneyed pulp characterization.
Leave the Conan series and creep around the rest of Howard’s canon, and you are confronted with women more startling than stereotyped, more memorable than moth-eaten. Who can forget the Pictish sibyl Eevin from “Spears of Clontarf,” laden with “the ancient sorrow of womankind” and forced to endure foreseeing a “day the ravens drink blood” wherein all that she holds dearest will die:
Brian gazed fixedly at her for an instant. “I read my own doom in those words, little witch-girl of the woods; have you cast my fate?”
Eevin spread her hands helplessly. “My lord, Gormlaith the pagan believes me to be a sorceress, breathing spells and black dooms. You are wise and know otherwise, yet even you look on me as a person uncanny. I cannot rend the Veil at will; I know neither spells nor sorcery; not in smoke nor blood have I read it, but a weird has come upon me and I see — vaguely — through flame and the dim clash of battle –”
“And I shall fall?”
She bowed her face in her hands. “It is written.”
“Well, let it fall as God wills,” said King Brian tranquilly. “I have lived long and deeply. Weep not, little girl of the forest; through the darkest mists of gloom and night, dawn yet rises on the world. My clan shall reverence you in the long days to come. And go now, for the night wanes toward morn and I would make my peace with God.”
And Eevin of Craglea went like a shadow from the tent of the king.
When we next see Howard’s dark, nymph-like creation, she is walking among the dead, with a few “pesky problems” far more primitive than “ticks, fleas, and body odor”:
They were bringing Murrough’s body to the king’s tent; slowly they walked, weary, bloody men with bowed heads. Behind the litter that bore the prince’s corpse came others — the body of Turlogh, Murrough’s son — of Donald, Steward of Mar — of O’Kelly and O’Hyne, the western chiefs — of prince Meathla O’Faelan — of Dunlang O’Hartigan. Beside that litter walked Eevin of Craglea, her dark head sunk on her breast. She did not cry out, she did not weep. She walked as one in a trance. The bloody litters were set down and the warriors gathered silently and wearily about the corpse of their great king. They gazed unspeaking, their brains still so weary and dull and frozen from the agony of strife that they hardly knew what they saw or did. Eevin of Craglea lay motionless beside the body of her lover, as if she herself were dead; no cry or moan escaped her pallid lips.
I know, I know: what a waste of an opportunity to ravish an “always good looking and secretly lustful” woman! Too bad all the “little boys” are lying dead in pools of their own blood. Well, almost all — at the end of the tale, Howard takes a pair of survivors and has them ignore Lansdale’s stereotype long enough for one to intone, “The days of twilight come on amain and a strange feeling is upon me as of a waning age. The king has fallen and all his heroes and though we have freed the land of the foreign chains, we too are but ghosts waning in the night.”
What of Glory Bland, the luckless whore who falls for a man “crammed to the brains with murder,” and who dies in his arms, “like a child, a child just fallen asleep”? Unlike Conan, this gunslinger believes that “a woman’s life and body were inviolate” and that a sack of gold is not pirate booty to be snatched with a Conanesque lust but treasure “black with blood; the blood of innocent men; the blood of a woman.” He leaves the gold and a host of bodies smoking with gunpowder, and with nary a thought to perfect worlds and perfect heroes this “somber, brooding figure that might have been carved from the iron night of the Fates” rides off into a “night full of haunting shadows” while “within him grew a strange pain, like a revelation; perhaps it was his soul, at last awakening.”
For the “pesky problems of real primitives, ticks, fleas and body odor,” we need only turn to “Worms of the Earth” for one of the most ghastly sex objects in literature, the witch-slut Atla, described as “not old, yet the evil wisdom of ages was in her eyes; her garments were ragged and scanty, her black locks tangled and unkempt, lending her an aspect of wildness well in keeping with her grim surroundings. Her red lips laughed but there was no mirth in her laughter, only a hint of mockery, and under the lips her teeth showed sharp and pointed like fangs.” The only woman we ever see Bran get jiggy with is described as having “disquietingly long hands,” “mottles” on her skin and a “taint” in her veins, veins filled with a “heritage of ancient hate.” With her “lips smiling but her face inscrutable” she laughs scornfully at a sword pressed to her throat and hisses, “Strike and be damned, my northern wolf! Do you think that such life as mine is so sweet that I would cling to it as a babe to the breast?” No whimpering strumpet, she instead demands raw sex from Bran in a speech that is transcendent, one of the most impassioned, human pleas in all of fantasy:
“What of my blasted and bitter life, I, whom mortal men loathe and fear? I have not known the love of men, the clasp of a strong arm, the sting of human kisses, I, Atla, the were-woman of the moors! What have I known but the lone winds of the fens, the dreary fire of cold sunsets, the whispering of the marsh grasses? — the faces that blink up at me in the waters of the meres, the foot-pad of night-things in the gloom, the glimmer of red eyes, the grisly murmur of nameless beings in the night!
“I am half-human, at least! Have I not known sorrow and yearning and crying wistfulness, and the drear ache of loneliness? Give to me, king — give me your fierce kisses and your hurtful barbarian’s embrace. Then in the long drear years to come I shall not utterly eat out my heart in vain envy of the white-bosomed women of men; for I shall have a memory few of them can boast — the kisses of a king! One night of love, oh king, and I will guide you to the gates of Hell!”
Leave it to Howard to instill in such a pathetic, loathsome creature a sense of soul-killing loss and forlorn intimacy seldom seen in the annals of the field.
There is Moira, the heroine of “The Dark Man,” bleeding out her ill-fated life in the skalli of her enemies, with Black Turlogh holding the dripping head of her erstwhile captor in front of her fading eyes, his mighty thews filled with “only a dark sadness, a deep sense of futility and weariness.” There is Brunhild, the mad queen from “The Gods of Bal-Sagoth,” who ruthlessly ascends to the throne of “a kingdom of the dead — an empire of ghosts and smoke,” only to end her brief reign as a crimson stain oozing from under ruins that fell upon her imperial ambitions with “a thunder like the bursting of the world.” There is Ettaire, the girl with the face that launches a thousand scimitars in “The Road of Azrael,” prompting the hero to muse, “Verily, the star of Azrael hovers over the birth of a beautiful woman, the King of the Dead laughs aloud and ravens whet their black beaks.” There is…but by now your eyes might be glazing over with sensory overload, scarcely able to keep all of these stories and characters straight.
And yet that’s the point, isn’t it? Howard’s well is deep, and a selection of his best stories — there’s enough to fill many volumes — provides all the proof one could ask for that he was by no means primarily a writer of juvenile wish-fulfillment fantasies with heroes and heroines that always conquered Life with panache and aplomb. The hot babes and immortal carefree hedonists of his lesser work aside, some of us are attracted to his best tales in spite of often dreary, depressing, fatalistic (one might say suicidally so) content, the same way that Tolkien infused his work with an overwhelming sense of loss and defeat and death and fading. We are drawn to such things because at base they are the essence of realism, the way the world really works, the fantasies of “little boys” notwithstanding.
God bless Joe Lansdale for writing about Howard with passion and respect — it’s great to see authors of note step up and acknowledge Howard’s influence on them. But I would beg readers to consider that such pieces might say more about the writer than about REH. Steve Tompkins has a favorite saying that I’ve taken to heart over the years: the more you bring to a work of art, the more you take away from it. It’s not valid to approach Howard with the thought that he was a potent blend of pleasant juvenile superficiality tinged with just enough Deep Thoughts to keep things interesting. If there is one thing I’ve learned over eight years of intense study of the work of Robert Ervin Howard, it’s that it never fails to expand to fit the expectations of the critics engaging it. If you come to REH’s best work — not his unfinished, rejected slush, but his considerable body of best work — with high expectations, you inevitably walk away with a sense of artistry that adumbrates the best that literature has to offer.
Howard wrote for the lowly pulps, and never enjoyed the luxury of being feted at cons, or of speaking about his artistry and themes on a panel for adoring fans, or of defending his work and reputation against the misunderstandings and simplifications of critics, whether they ultimately are dismissive or sympathetic. But unlike so many of the lauded authors of Howard’s time and our own, his best work is ultimately not shamed by comparisons to Homer or Hawthorne, Shakespeare or Steinbeck — or, for that matter, Leiber or Lansdale. Only by putting work like Almuric into context, and by taking stock of REH using his greatest stories and poems as our guide, can we gather the full measure of his artistry and literary achievement. Relying for insight on a failed Burroughs pastiche and nostalgic memories of youthful reading only serves to lock the lugubrious Texan into a gilded prison of indissoluble heroes and harlots and happy endings. The stories were at base written for the pulps, and they can certainly be enjoyed solely on that level, true enough. But in doing so, we ignore at our peril the vast amount of Howard’s work that speaks to something much greater and deeper and more terrible in the literate soul, things some of us find inexpressibly poignant and moving and fiercely nuanced, a kind of savage grace that speaks to us like little else in the literary world.
