In an earlier post I jokingly mentioned historian Martin Gilbert, who in addition to his titanic biography of a titan has written often about the Holocaust and the First and Second World Wars. In 2006 he published a book about the Somme, with Verdun one of the two 1916 Golgothas where, after the preliminaries of 1914 and 1915, Western civilization industriously and industrially set about killing itself.

By now even those who know or care to know little about J. R. R. Tolkien and The Lord of the Rings are probably aware that in creating the Dead Marshes through which Frodo, Sam, and Gollum pass he was sharing something of his experiences at the Somme: enduring fantasy crafted from nigh-unendurable reality. In an August 25 article, Gilbert recalls Tolkien sharing more of those experiences not in print but in person:

J.R.R. Tolkien and the Somme were inextricably linked. I learned this forty-four years ago, shortly after I was elected to my first university appointment, at Merton College, Oxford. I was twenty-six years old.
In those days there was a strict seating order at college dinners. The head of the college sat in the centre, the senior fellows on either side of him, and the junior fellows at the far ends of the table. Also at the ends were the Emeritus Fellows, long retired, venerable, sometimes garrulous guardians of the college name. Several of them had served in the First World War. When they discovered a historian, new to his craft, filled with the keenness of a youngster amid his elders, they were happy to talk about those distant days, already more than forty years in the past.
Some enjoyed singing the songs of the trenches, in versions far ruder than those sung today. Tolkien was more reticent, yet when he did open up, full of terrible tales. There was never any boasting. The war’s scars were too many, its reality too grim, to lead to self-glorification, or even to embellishment.
In 1916, the twenty-four-year-old Tolkien was a 2nd Lieutenant in the Lancashire Fusiliers. On the evening of July 14 — two weeks after the start of the Battle of the Somme — his battalion went into the line. He had never seen action before. What he later called the “animal horror” of the trenches was as yet unknown to him. But he already knew that one of his closest friends, Robert Gilson, had been killed on the first day.

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Fantasy master Charles Saunders has a new post on his blog about the African conception of elves in ancient legend. He even includes a short fable he wrote about them for a fan magazine in 1980. Interesting stuff, well worth a read.

And for those who for decades have always yearned to put a face to the creator of such iconic Sword-and-Sorcery characters as Imaro and Dossouye, the sage of Nova Scotia has added a picture to his Autobiography page.

With due deference to Scott Smith, David C. Smith is far and away the best Smith to happen to genre fiction since Clark Ashton. His heroic fantasy of the late Seventies and early Eighties was distinguished by a bleak clarity of vision about human beings and the openings our nature creates for pre-human or trans-human Evil. The resulting stories, novellas, and novels were operatic without Bayreuthian kitsch, informed by the Athenian tragedians, the Jacobean revengers, and Smith’s passion for the eternal severities of the most case-hardened pulp fiction.

With his friend sometime sword-and-sorcery writer Joe Bonadonna and Jake Jaquet, the former editor of Dragon magazine, David has symposed up a storm about the state of the subgenre we all spend so much time worrying about, and the resulting conversation, with the trio seated at a table stacked with pulps and paperbacks, is available in six parts at YouTube:

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Roderick T. Long, an Associate Professor of Philosophy at Auburn University and a self-described Aristotelean/Wittgensteinian, left-libertarian market anarchist, has penned a thoughtful essay on Howard’s Pictish tales. Long sees Howard’s racism and racialism as part of a complex cultural, historical, and artistic dynamic, one potent enough to transcend garden variety prejudice and attain a genuine artistry reminiscent of Kipling. A follow-up post, meanwhile, meditated on Howard and feminism.

There is much within these two posts for Howardists to debate, but agree or disagree they are fine examples of the sort of serious critical writing Howard deserves, writing originating from well outside the incestuous Howardian tribe. Professor Long does Howard’s shade the favor of taking him seriously, judging and criticizing his stories as literature and not mere pulp hackwork, and that is very nice to see.

Deep silence fell about the little camp, planted there so audaciously in the jaws of the wilderness. The lake gleamed like a sheet of black glass beneath the stars. The cold air pricked. In the draughts of night that poured their silent tide from the depths of the forest, with messages from distant ridges and from lakes just beginning to freeze, there lay already the faint, bleak odour of coming winter.

Algernon Blackwood, “The Wendigo”

The small screen can deliver big scares; Eric Kripke has been proving that more often than not for two full seasons and a strike-shortened third with Supernatural. That show, in which two brothers drive the unluckiest backroads of the American night while being driven by a family mission that asks too much of them, crashes through The CW’s sugar-and-spice-and-spite like a classic rock power chord. And at least half the episodes of Mick Garris’ Masters of Horror were good unclean fun; sixty minutes without commercials can amount to the functional equivalent of a novelette, if not a novella. When Showtime wasn’t interested in a third season, the MOH auteurist anthology approach lived to affright another day as Fear Itself, eight episodes of which aired this summer before NBC switched to scaring us with flexi-dwarf gymnasts instead. As soon as the opening credits of “Skin and Bones,” the episode shown on the night of Thursday, July 31, revealed that the director du semaine was Larry Fessenden, I began hoping for a particular monster with which Fessenden has worked almost as often as did Scorsese with De Niro. . .the rottenest tooth in a knowing primordial grin, the blackness at the core of the rampaging blizzard.

At the start of “Skin and Bones” (written by Drew McWeeny and Scott Swan. who also scripted one of my favorite Masters of Horror episodes, the John Carpenter-directed “Cigarette Burns”), the ranch-owning but city-dwelling Grady Edlund has been missing for 10 wintry days. He returns as the only surviving member of a party that unwisely elected to ride the high country in the teeth of a storm, and even while indoors, bed-ridden and being cared for by his wife, sons, and brother, reeks of . . .externality, of having come back wrong. If Famine rather redundantly put itself on a starvation diet, the result might look like Grady, who is played by Doug Jones, an actor-turned-human-canvas worthy of the best efforts of a Bernie Wrightson or Gahan Wilson, perhaps even a Goya or Bosch; as Larry Fessenden proudly notes of his “Skin and Bones” work “He is the special effect.”

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I’m flattered that my fatwa to Arnie Fenner should provoke a thoughtful reply from not only Gary Romeo but also Fenner himself. That Fenner should come back to the Killing Floor that he quit some thirty years ago is significant. After all, he knows Frazetta!

Rather than compose two entries to address them both, let me instead write one long reply, since there is a great deal of overlap in their remarks and likewise my reactions; suffice to say, both Arnie and Gary more or less ignored my main points and gave me reasons and answers that didn’t go with the questions I rhetorically asked.

The Captain of the Lancers
Gary, you are looking at the specifics of what Arnie wrote (calling into question Howard’s various claims) rather than seeing the generalities of the intro he wrote. It’s more of the “damning with faint praise” structure that de Camp used in all of his intros. Bring up the personal demons, if there are any, and then throw a couple of knocks at Howard’s technical proficiency, and then finish up with “…but he sure could tell a hell of a story.” That’s the de Camp influence, and it’s so pervasive because, as you like to point out, the Lancers were simply so successful.

As for “Most critics of REH” — three is not most. It’s three. You’ve correctly cited three guys (who aren’t well thought of as genre critics in the first place) and they indeed rebuke and refute de Camp’s charge that Sword-and-Sorcery is good clean harmless fun. But note that Lundwall, Rottensteiner, and Stephen King are all taking exception to de Camp’s assessment of Sword-and-Sorcery. And sure, not liking Sword-and-Sorcery in the first place will inevitably lead them to read Conan stories in the worst possible frame of mind. Only King ventures past his disdain for the genre to offer up his opinion of Howard’s other work (back then, that meant Conan and the horror stories, if that). This blurb about Howard, first published in Danse Macabre, an intentionally iconoclastic treatise on What Steven King Thinks of Stuff, is no better than de Camp’s backhanded compliments, either.

The other two chuckleheads don’t weigh in on Howard the man, nor any of his other writings save for Conan, so again, we’re not seeing the whole picture. Gary has sharpened the knife to make his kosher hot dogs with, but he started carving at the ass. And really, who CARES if they don’t agree with de Camp on his assessment of heroic fantasy? I’m much more concerned about what folks like John Clute, Darrell Schweitzer, Ron Goulart, Lee Server, Diana Waggoner, and all of the hack newspaper reporters and columnists from the late seventies and eighties and nineties have all said about Howard, each of them writing the same paragraphs, slightly reworked, over and over again, in the same fashion, and with those great pregnant pauses inserted so you imagine the very worst. That is the danger. That’s the problem. And I lay it at de Camp’s cold, dead feet.

For a Fat Girl, You Sure Don’t Sweat Very Much
Arnie, my problem with the introduction wasn’t that you had some opinions (no matter how out of date they may have been), but that you chose to include your snarky and negative opinions in a book intended to celebrate the collaboration between author and painter. It’s supposed to be a laudatory introduction, and instead, it comes off as more of the same old, same old.

For the record, I don’t blame you per se; you’re just doing what everyone else has done, ad nauseum, since Howard died, and there’s no reason to expect you to have done it any different. But this fight about de Camp’s legacy has been going on for almost three months in several different online arenas, and you were just the straw that broke my dromedary back, so to speak. The first round is on me.

On the other hand, I wonder if the Hemingway scholars get all hepped up with the gospel because scholars, fans, and appreciators always write things like, “For a guy with a short-person’s chip on his shoulder who spent his entire adult life trying to prove what a man he was, that Ernest Hemingway sure could write a pretty good story.” Does any modern (tragedy optional) author get treated in such a way? Virginia Woolf? Hunter S. Thompson? How about James Tiptree, Jr, a.k.a. Alice Sheldon’s scandalous murder/suicide? Funny how that stuff is never mentioned in the introductions to their books, and certainly not in so cavalier a manner. Even Lovecraft at his most maligned (by, coincidentally, L. Sprague de Camp, and others) was able to shake the barnacles off and take on a sheen of respect, if not respectability, from the literati.

Only Howard gets kicked like that. Why? Because he’s dead? Because there’s a little sensationalism around his death? Those of us who have been involved in Howard studies in the last ten-to-fifteen years know that there now exists several compelling portraits of the man that do not glamorize nor sensationalize his suicide, and moreover provide an explanation for it that doesn’t involve hysterics over a dying mother to whom he was “excessively devoted.” When we see what you’ve written, it just looks like you couldn’t be bothered to read up on your subject. But, laying all of that aside, what on Earth possessed you to say that Howard wasn’t a good writer? No, I get it, you called him a good storyteller, but is splitting hairs like that the tone you really wanted to take in a book that features eight of his most famous and widely-read works? This has been going on for so long, I’m not surprised that you didn’t see what you were doing nor perceive it as a backhanded compliment. It’s ingrained. Second nature. De Camp was very fond of “…and yet despite all of these flaws, there’s something compelling about these tales of rousing adventure.” For a maladjusted momma’s boy, that Howard kid sure could spin a yarn, couldn’t he? Jesus H. Christ.

In Conclusion
In many ways, it’s as if the last eight years haven’t happened at all. When Arnie offered up his opinions of REH’s work in the book Icon, back in 1998, I seethed with rage, even as I realized that (1) this was a book about Frazetta, not REH, and (2) he was just the latest in a long line of folks who liked to kick REH in print, and there wasn’t anything I could do about it. I just sighed and shook my head and thought, “Yet another guy who doesn’t get it. Oh well; at least Frazetta liked him.” And I wondered back this why so many people, even people who claimed to like Howard, kept writing and repeating the same negative and judgmental things about him, over and over.

When Leo Grin took on John Clute for some of the things he said in his review of the Gollanz Conans in 2002, I realized we had a chance to fix things. Out of that online and very public exchange, several things became clear to me: Leo, in REHupa, had information and access to same that only 29 other people shared, and it wasn’t Clute’s fault that he wasn’t a member. Also, Clute acknowledged that in his review, he simply cribbed stuff from the intros to the books. Now, if someone like John Clute, a canny critic and well-respected figure in SF studies, could play fast-and-loose with such information and distort it further, is there any reason to think that the hack reporter for AP, the struggling writer for fill-in-the-blank magazine trying to fill seven column inches before his deadline, or the art critic with vague ties to the de Camp era Conan, wouldn’t do the same?

It wasn’t until the after the turn of the century that the REHupans started to come out of the shadows to change the perception of Howard, his work and the fans. Rusty and Patrice stayed on the “authoritative text” project when the publishing reins passed on to Del Rey, and they roped in other Howard scholars like our own Steve Tompkins to help them with introductions. Likewise, Paul Herman started publishing the public domain REH at Wildside Press, again enlisting noted fans and scholars to provide contextual introductions.

The Barbaric Triumph debuted in 2004 and contained several influential essays that have positively and permanently impacted Howard studies. Hot on those heels came The Cimmerian in print and online, and Leo’s contributions to the field may well be among the biggest contributions to our cause yet. Other fanzines have sprung up or returned, notably Damon Sasser’s Two-Gun Raconteur, and they further widened the space for thoughtful criticism.

When the Conan comics rebooted from Dark Horse, Kurt Busiek contacted me about providing text pieces in the back of the issues a la the old Savage Sword model. This ended up being a regular text piece in the back of the trade paperback collections with ruminations and reflections on the Howard stories contained therein. These essays have led fans back to Howard in Del Rey form, where they were bolstered by additional information in the various thought-provoking introductions.

Online, we have an embarrassment of riches: two active blogs, several yahoo groups, and two message boards from Dark Horse.com and Conan.com, respectively — and Howard scholars and knowledgeable fans are present in every forum to offer advice, dispense info, and in general be goodwill ambassadors for Howard and his works. The REHeapa archive holds some of the more interesting and important pieces of new information to date. What’s more, anyone can access it, unlike REHupa, where the membership is fixed and closed.

It was Howard scholars and activists who first reached out to F.A.C.T. (the Fandom Association of Central Texas) about bringing the World Fantasy Convention to Texas for 2006 as part of the Robert E. Howard centennial. Those same Howard activists sat in on board meetings, made plans to do a separate convention when it looked like the con was going to Australia instead, and helped F.A.C.T. with programming and guidance when the deal finally went through.

My biography of Howard, specifically written to update the twenty-five-year gap between Dark Valley Destiny and the current state of Howard studies, premiered at the WFC and was subsequently nominated for a World Fantasy Award.

All of this has been hard, thankless work from a number of people, many of whom have burned out, damaged relationships, put personal plans on hold, restructured honeymoons and vacations so that they coincided with conventions and business trips, spent thousands upon thousands of our own dollars that we’ll never get back for various publishing efforts — and all of it in an effort to improve Howard’s literary standing, change the way in which he’s discussed, and to help Howard ascend into the same echelon as Lovecraft, Hammett, Chandler, and other writers who transcended the pulp ghetto to become classic fixtures and staples of popular culture.

So, when something like the introduction to And Their Memory Was a Bitter Tree comes out and it’s got the same old sentiments, structured the same old way, it makes all of us who have spent so much of the last eight years working just slump down in our chairs and reach for a bottle of liquid courage.

Realistically, I can’t make Arnie read my book, or read The Barbaric Triumph, or any of the online websites, and I certainly can’t reason him out of a position that he himself didn’t reason himself into. No one can be expected to know what the inner circle of Howard studies knows. But what the fans CAN do is start providing feedback for the kinds of projects that they want to see, and also weighing in on what they don’t want to see in the future. The Howard fans online have already spoken, sent messages, canceled pre-orders, and other things to show their displeasure. Personally, I’m a big fan of voting with your dollars, as it seems to be the shortest route to a publisher’s heart.

And, Gary, one final thought: no one ever said that they wanted the same introductions in every book. That’s intellectually retarded. I guarantee you that we could all write an introduction to a Conan collection and come up with at least six different angles and they would all be interesting, lively, and valid. All I would ask is that you leave the personal baggage at the door — yours and Howard’s. Just once, can we let his work stand for itself without propping it up on the outlines of Howard’s mythical and fictitious biography?

Came across a couple of wickedly funny satires on YouTube, which both use The Lord of the Rings to skewer their targets, filmmakers Michael Moore and George Lucas respectively (and oh so effectively). I give you:

Fellowship 9/11: The beloved, saintly, indefatigable, scrupulously honest redresser of America’s wrongs visits Middle-earth and quickly discovers a sinister plot by corrupt elven, dwarven, and human bureaucrats, zealots, and pampered elites to demonize the poor, peaceful, third-world peoples of Mordor and steal their oil. This film not only inoculates the viewer from ever taking the Man from Flint seriously again, it also (perhaps unintentionally) tars and feathers the many film and book critics who used the appearance of Jackson’s (awful) trilogy to portray Tolkien as a closet cultural supremacist hiding behind a thinly veiled allegory of metrosexual good guys and dreadlocked, Ebonics-braying monsters.

Lord of the Rings by George Lucas: What if the sage of Skywalker Ranch had been the one who tackled the Rings trilogy on the big screen? Using hilariously on-point parodies of actual Star Wars prequel DVD supplement footage, along with animation that eerily captures the real life quirks and ticks of the people involved, the makers of this little gem demonstrate how vacuous and absurd Lucas’ insufferably pompous latter-day pronouncements have been in the face of his abysmal products.

Many such attempts at satire quickly lose steam and degenerate into bad Saturday Night Live sketches, but these two manage to maintain their momentum and become classics.

In the article I recently posted surveying Sword-and-Sorcery since the Eighties, it was a particular pleasure to push the ornery-in-the-best-sense, refusing-to-consent-to-consensual-reality work of Matthew Stover as hard as I could. Stover’s latest novel will be throwing elbows on bookstore shelves this fall, and over at his blog he’s been musing about how, while the women who enjoy the adventures of Hari Kaine (an assassin as lethally talented at kingdom-decapitating as Gemmell’s Waylander) really, really enjoy them, a certain post-graduate studies quality makes demands that will at least partially exclude some readers:

The real problem with gathering feminine readership for the Acts of Caine, it seems to me, is that [Heroes Die, Stover's first Caine novel] depends on an SFF-savvy reader — for it to have full effect, the reader should already be well-versed to the point of exhaustion with the various tropes that the story is twisting into less-familiar shapes. Which seems to be more of a guy thing, overall.

Make sure the woman you lend the book to has already read Conan and Bran Mak Morn, Elric and Hawkmoon and Fafhrd & Gray Mouser and the like, and I’m pretty sure she’ll like Caine.

This is a problem with male readership as well. As one editor at Del Rey told me:

“What stops Caine from being more successful is that he’s only accessible to people who are already hardcore fans. Write something ‘entry-level’ — not necessarily Harry Potter, but even more grown-up entry-level like most of Jonathan Carroll or Neil Gaiman, something where someone who knows nothing about SF and fantasy can enjoy it — and you’re golden.”

Unfortunately for me and my career, I’ve never been able to pull something like that together, outside of Star Wars.

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Speaking of Ernest Hemingway, whom Steve mentions in his last post, friend of The Cimmerian John J. Miller has a brand new piece on the Master and his fishing habits in The Wall-Street Journal. Miller’s interest is more than professional — he grew up in Michigan and recently vacationed “Up North” in Seney, where the Hemingway stories discussed take place.

Mark is tied up with ArmadilloCon in Austin, Texas at the moment, and so won’t be able to answer Gary until early next week. Until then, Arnie Fenner, the man whose introduction started this latest flurry of posts, writes in to clairfy a few things. Here’s Arnie:

Yee-haw, boys! Get a rope! We’ll teach that Fenner fella a…Godfrey Daniels! You guys are talking about me!

Just to be clear, I don’t think I did a hatchet job on REH, definitely didn’t deify Frazetta, and certainly didn’t give de Camp a pass, either, (shoot, Mark’s posting is longer than the intro) so I’m guessing that questioning some of the suppositions about Howard that have appeared in the last decade or so is what has raised everyone’s Irish. We all read the same stuff and can come to different conclusions, particularly when evidence is anecdotal or offered 70 years after the fact. In other words, its a big world and the last time I looked there was room in it for more than one opinion.

No, I don’t think Howard was a “great” writer, but (as I stated) certainly believe he was an exceptional storyteller. That’s not a dismissal or criticism or damning with faint praise at all — at least, it wasn’t intended as such. That he was able to overcome his circumstances and limitations and create work that people are still passionate about decades after his death…says loads. The difficulties a writer — or artist — surmount in order to create a lasting work makes their accomplishment all the more remarkable. But I also pointed out that Howard benefited from — became better at his craft with the guidance of — Farnsworth Wright’s editing. A matter of opinion, I’m sure.

Steve asked: who do I think are great writers? Joseph Conrad, Kurt Vonnegut, Joseph Heller, Harper Lee, John Steinbeck, to name a few. Stephen King, J. K. Rowling, George MacDonald Fraser, and Robert E. Howard (among others) are great storytellers. There’s more than enough room on my bookshelf for both.

I do agree that Rusty Burke would have written a better intro.

If Mark wants to talk about our differences of opinion sometime over beers, I’d be glad to. He’ll have to buy, of course: after all, I know Frazetta.

As I said awhile back, Leo, I greatly enjoy The Cimmerian. If you’d like a copy of the Conan book, I’ll ask Tim Underwood to send you one. Despite the introduction, it’s actually pretty nice.