Last year, Bill Thom won the first Munsey Award, given “to a deserving person who has given of himself or herself for the betterment of the pulp community, be it through disseminating knowledge about the pulps or through publishing or other efforts to preserve and to foster interest in the pulp magazines we all love and enjoy” for his hard work on Coming Attractions, an indispensable resource on Pulp-related news that I peruse each week and where I found dozens of news items to announce on The Cimmerian these last six months. This year, essayist (and Cimmerian journal-contributor) Don Herron is nominated.  Don Herron authored several seminal pieces on Robert E. Howard –you can read Brian Murphy’s appreciation of Don’s “milestones in Howard studies” here on the Cimmerian blog.

Besides his literary criticism about the Bard of Cross Plains, Don Herron is also an authority on Dashiell Hammett, Charles Willeford, Philip K. Dick and the Emperor of Dreams, Clark Ashton Smith. He created the Dashiell Hammet Tour in 1977 and has lead Hammett aficionados through San Francisco every year since then.

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The echoes of Robert E. Howard’s life can be found in the places where he best lived it–in his copious amount of fiction and verse. And while that is a good place to start forming a complete picture of Howard, eventually the Lone Star State will rear its ungainly head and bellow, “Well, what about me?” You can always take the man out of Texas, but it’s impossible to take Texas out of the man.
 
–Mark Finn, Blood and Thunder: The Life & Art of Robert E. Howard

It’s hard for me to compare Mark Finn’s Blood & Thunder: The Life & Art of Robert E. Howard, with any other biography of Howard, for the simple fact that it was the first full-length treatment of Howard’s life that I’ve read. But over the years I had picked up a lot of detritus on the life of the man who brought us larger than life, pulp heroes like Conan of Cimmeria and Solomon Kane, gathering enough scattered bits of information to form what I thought was a pretty accurate picture of one of my favorite writers: Immensely talented, yet socially malajusted, overly dependent on his mother, with paranoid and schizophrenic tendencies.

Fortunately, Finn has set the record straight on Howard’s character and personality with Blood & Thunder, presenting an alternative view that brings Howard into focus as a colorful and misunderstood young man who took his own life largely due to circumstances beyond his control. Finn admittedly wrote his book as a counterpoint to the only other full-length biography of Howard, L. Sprague de Camp’s Dark Valley Destiny, which according to Finn is responsible for many of the inaccurate myths surrounding Howard’s life. “I tried to think of everything that I didn’t like about de Camp’s effort, and then I tried very hard not to do that,” writes Finn. This is both admirable and, in a few places, limiting.

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After the Fenner debacle and in the wake of the Maggie situation, I would like to use this blog as an opportunity to propose something to Robert E. Howard’s fans.

The latter problem seems to have been promptly resolved, since Ms. Van Ostrand’s blog was deleted from Texas Escapes and Jason Dorough has added a nice Editor’s Note on Fandomania.com, which warns its readers that the blog is highly controversial.

Ms. Van Ostrand’s primary source was Dark Valley Destiny. Beside her apparent taste for sensationalism, I wondered how she could believe that Sprague’s biography was definitive.

And the conclusion is quite simple: it came from her sheer ignorance. She ran wildly with what she’d read in DVD. Then I looked at the customers’ comments  on Amazon about Old Spraguey’s biography.

You know what, Howard fans? There’s only one single name known in REH fandom there. Guess who that person is?

Gary Romeo.

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  Karl Edward Wagner (1945 -1994) died fifteen years ago today. I never knew Karl. Nevertheless, his work as an author, essayist, editor and REH scholar has affected my views regarding the entire field of weird literature since I was barely a teenager. I believe that he should be remembered and due attention paid.

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Even the Gods so glorious must march at the last, down the dim dusty road to death the destroyer.

– L. Sprague de Camp, The Tritonian Ring

I hesitate to mention the name L. Sprague de Camp ’round these parts, given the resentment held against him for his character-sullying, inaccurate portrayals of Robert E. Howard in his REH biography Dark Valley Destiny and elsewhere. But if you can look beyond his REH sins (and that’s a big if), de Camp the fiction author has a few gems to offer fans of sword-and-sorcery.

One of de Camp’s more highly-regarded S&S stories is the short novel The Tritonian Ring. Though an imperfect work and not in the same class as Howard’s best, upon recent re-read I found that The Tritonian Ring remains a cracking good read and worth picking up, if you can still find it these days. It’s pure story and possessed of a reckless momentum that lovers of S&S will appreciate.

Though de Camp greatly admired Howard’s writings and Conan in particular, latching on to Howard’s tales and reissuing edited stories and pastiches of the Cimmerian with fellow writer and S&S aficionado Lin Carter, The Tritonian Ring is a deliberate attempt by de Camp’s to break from The Hyborian Age and its larger-than-life heroes. According to this Wikipedia article, de Camp intended Poseidonis to be “The Hyborian Age done right” (i.e., a pre-cataclysmic age of earth that may have logically occurred, based on de Camp’s conception of the science of geology). It’s also an overbold claim sure to irk Howard fans.

It’s unfortunate de Camp again steps in it (and on Howard) with his attempted Howard one-upmanship, as the setting of The Tritonian Ring is among its charms, and differs in a few significant ways from The Hyborian Age — but “done right” is another matter altogether. Despite de Camp’s best efforts and ambitions, the world of The Tritonian Ring is in no ways a superior imaginative work than The Hyborian Age, and as a work of art, it pales next to tales like “Beyond the Black River” and “Red Nails.”

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Were someone to press a Kampfpistole against my head and demand to know which de Camp and Carter Conan novel I deemed the least feloniously FUBAR, I’d have to go with Conan of the Isles, mostly because of two paragraphs on the second-to-last page:

Even farther west, at the very rim of the world, the old thief had confided, lay a vast new continent, Mayapan, the Atlanteans and their Antillian descendants had called it. They raided its coasts for gold, emeralds, and virgin copper, for red-skinned slaves and curious birds with gorgeous plumage; for tiger-like cats whose pelts were marked with black rosettes on tawny gold. Here, too, were barbarian states founded by renegades from Atlantis and Antillia, where the cults of the Great Serpent and of the Saber-toothed Tiger carried on their ferocious rivalry in a welter of human sacrifice and abominable worship.

A new world, he thought; a world of trackless jungles and spacious plains, of towering mountains and hidden lakes, where immense rivers writhed like serpents of molten silver through depths of emerald jungle, where unknown peoples worshiped strange and fearsome gods…

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I hate snakes; they are possessed of a cold, utterly merciless cynicism and sophistication, and sense of super-ego that puts them outside the pale of warm-blooded creatures.

– Robert E. Howard to H. P. Lovecraft, ca. February 1931

“The visionary explorer, Col. P. H. Fawcett, claimed to have seen a 48-foot anaconda, but I don’t believe it.”

– L.Sprague de Camp, REHupa #57

Novalyne: Well, I haven’t seen any giant snakes, or big-busted naked women frolicking through the West Texas hills lately.

Robert: Oh, but I have.

– The Whole Wide World

From recent science news:

It was the mother of all snakes, a nightmarish behemoth as long as a school bus and as heavy as a Volkswagen Beetle that ruled the ancient Amazonian rain forest for 2 million years before slithering into nonexistence. Now this monster, which weighed in at 2,500 pounds, has resurfaced in fossils taken from an open-pit coal mine in Colombia, a startling example of growth gone wild.

“This is amazing. It challenges everything we know about how big a snake can be.”"This thing weighs more than a bison and is longer than a city bus,” enthused snake expert Jack Conrad of the American Museum of Natural History in New York, who was familiar with the find.

“It could easily eat something the size of a cow. A human would just be toast immediately.”"If it tried to enter my office to eat me, it would have a hard time squeezing through the door,” reckoned paleontologist Jason Head of the University of Toronto Missisauga.

To give de Camp due credit, he was aware of the Gigantophis, a prehistoric python that was the previous record holder at 30-33 feet. And while boas get very large, they do not have the optimal climate for growth that Titanoboa apparently did — really hot, steaming jungles such as Howard assured us was Satha’s natural habitat.

The three inevitables: Death, taxes, and grappling with the shade of L. Sprague de Camp. I never cease to be concussed by the adamantine certainty of de Camp’s Final Guard that he and only he could ever have been Conan’s salvager and salvation, the Last Best Hope of Howardkind. That REH’s stories, the dark and bloody American frontier of modern heroic fantasy, could never have cut it on their own. That unless bulked-up and buttressed by hardcases like Conan the Buccaneer, the authentic tales would have been shunned by the scads of anthologist claim-stakers and repackaging-prospectors who flocked to the Klondike that pulp fiction became in the late Sixties and early Seventies.

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Haterade drinkers insofar as “The Black Stranger” is concerned often target the character of Tina for special opprobrium, condemning in particular the punishment Valenso frantically administers to her as a distasteful piece of Brundage-bait, Howard blatantly angling for another Weird Tales cover or at least catering to a one-handed segment of his readership. Paying attention to the way the scene is constructed and described should be enough to disprove such allegations, but turning to “The Black Stranger: Synopsis A” in The Conquering Sword of Conan is also useful in that the synopsis is of course Howard selling Howard on his latest idea, telling the story to himself, engaging in the equivalent of a filmmaker’s “pre-viz” (previsualization). Here he refers to Tina as “a flaxen-haired Ophirean waif,” “the little Ophirean girl,” and “the child,” and Valenso loses the self-control that should be a Zingaran grandee’s watchword as follows:

The nobleman instantly seemed seized with madness, and had the girl cruelly whipped, until he saw she was telling the truth.

Nary a hint of a prurient agenda. I sometimes wonder whether Esteban Maroto contributed to the muddying of the waters here; his illustrations for the 1980 Ace standalone The Treasure of Tranicos leer at Tina through a vaseline-smeared lens as a pillowy, pouty houri on the brink of several Sapphic interludes with Belesa:

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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?