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.

He has written for or edited The Dark Barbarian: The Writings of Robert E. Howard (1984), the five-volume Selected Letters of Philip K. Dick (1991-1997), The Barbaric Triumph: A Critical Anthology on the Writings of Robert E. Howard (2004) and The Dashiell Hammett Tour: Thirtieth Anniversary Guidebook (2009).

On a more personal note: his 1976 essay “Conan vs Conantics” was a kind of revelation to me. Every Howard fan can — and, in this blogger’s opinion, should if it hasn’t already been done yet – read it thanks to the Web Archive link that I just provided. It opened my eyes in regards to Lyon Sprague de Camp’s editorial shenaningans when I first stumbled upon it a decade ago.

Damon C. Sasser, REHupan and head of TGR, has recently written a blog on Don Herron’s nomination. Here are some of his kind words:

Much like Hammett’s Continental Op, he is always one step of everyone else and on the cutting edge of literary discoveries and criticism.

The winner of the Munsey Award will be announced next month, during Pulpfest 2010.

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.

Blood & Thunder’s strength to me is its claim that Howard was very much a product of his environment. The creator of Conan of Cimmeria and Kull the Conqueror was born and raised in early 20th century Texas, one of the last vestiges of American frontier life. Howard’s father, a physician, moved Robert and his mother from small town to small town, following work that spilled over from the boom-and-bust cycles of oil speculation. These small towns were wild and violent places, Finn writes, and Howard the elder’s services were needed to stitch men back together. Into this potent mix of brawling, wealth-chasing men, towns that knew untapped wealth and crushing poverty in a span of days, and the wide open plains of sand and scrub of rural Texas, Howard’s career as a writer was born.

Finn’s insights in these chapters are unique and insightful, as its easy to write off that Howard’s “weird tales” were entirely products of his own imagination, and sprang, fully formed, from the recesses of his mind. Writes Finn, “To ignore the presence of the Lone Star State in Robert E. Howard’s life and writing invites, at the very least, a few wrongheaded conclusions, and at worst, abject character assassination.”

However, I don’t agree with all of Finn’s conclusions, including one of his boldest: that Howard had no choice but to commit suicide. Finn posits that Howard’s death by self-inflicted gunshot “was the one, the only, thing he could do, given his circumstances.” Finn paints a grim picture of those circumstances, which included constant brushes with poverty (due to the Great Depression and the whim of the pulp magazine editors, who often went months without cutting Howard a check), an overbearing and terminally ill mother, and a nomadic upbringing that left Howard unable to make lasting relationships. But to say that suicide was the only thing Howard could do in his situation absolves him completely from blame. There’s always a choice to soldier on, no matter how grim our circumstances. Surely better times were ahead for Howard, and now we can only sadly speculate on the great works that would have flowed from his pen in his middle years. But, as Finn does state, the only one who truly knows why Howard pulled the trigger was Howard himself.

But Blood & Thunder is much more than an analysis of the how and why of Howard’s death. There’s some well-researched biographical material here, including a review of some of the odd jobs Howard worked, a look at his friendships and his brief relationship with Novalyne Price, his fascination with boxing and physical conditioning, and an overview of his correspondence with famous horror writer H.P. Lovecraft. One of my favorite chapters is “Mythology,” the last, which provides a great overview of the post-Howard years, including his resurgence in the Lancer paperback series of the 1960’s and 70’s, the “Conan the Barbarian” boom sparked by the comic books and the movie of the same name, and the growth of critical studies dedicated to Howard’s works (unlike Finn I happen to think that Conan the Barbarian was a terrific swords-and-sorcery film, if nothing at all like Howard’s character).

I was particularly intrigued by “the trunk,” a huge collection of unpublished miscellaneous material that lay largely unopened from Howard’s death until 1950, as well as the early days of Howard publishing by the likes of Gnome Press. Much of this material was new to me.

Finn also spends some time in this chapter refuting the claims about Howard’s character circulated by the likes of de Camp and Hoffman Reynolds Hays, the latter a reviewer for the New York Times. De Camp’s assessment of Howard is a doozy: “The neurotic Howard suffered from Oedipean devotion to his mother and, though a big and powerful man like his heroes, from delusions of persecution. He took to carrying a pistol against his ‘enemies’ and, when his aged mother died, drove out into the desert and blew his brains out.” This is certainly unfair and, as Finn points out, in many places simply inaccurate.

I do think Finn is quick to dismiss all of Dark Valley Destiny, even the interviews it contains from people who knew Howard. Finn says that De Camp’s interview questions were leading in nature and evoked the negative responses about Howard for which de Camp had come looking, and already believed to be true. This may be true, but I’d like to revisit Dark Valley Destiny and formulate my own opinion.

In the end, however, this is another strength of Finn’s book: It opens up the wider world of Howard’s books and other material about his life that may not be so widely known. After reading Blood & Thunder I feel inspired to go back and read more of the Howard I’ve overlooked, such as his boxing stories and his historic fiction. The now-defunct Amra, a small-press fanzine dedicated to Howard’s life and writings, sounds particularly intriguing.

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.

Do not worry, Indy. This is not a demagogic knock on the poor, lone, dissenting voice in REHupa (other than J.D. Charles). I’m not calling for a witch-hunt, though I can’t help but notice that Gary weighed in to defend DVD in the comments section under Mrs Van Ostrand’s blog. It is not my purpose and I will (try to) be fair. It must be noted that on Amazon, Romeo isn’t totally uncritical of the book and rates it  ’only’ three out of five stars. He is cited as the helpful “con” review by Amazon… Crom’s Devils!

It was much more infuriating to me to see four glowing reviews, Gary’s mixed comments and only one anonymous bad reviewer than to read Mrs. Van Ostrand’s piece. It means that on Amazon, someone genuinely interested in learning more about the life of Cross Plains’ bard is misdirected to outdated and debunked research. Here at TC, there are plans to write up a capsule bio that also rates other biographical sources for accuracy, but TC has less readers than Amazon.

We must do something there.

So if  our dauntless Guerilla Leader, Mark Finn, doesn’t mind, this humble shieldbearer would like to use this blog to suggest a few other legitimate targets for further operations: the commentary sections of Amazon and other internet booksellers. I think it is undeniable that the people who will see those comments will probably be far more numerous than the readers of “Fandomania.com”. Future nonsensical writings like Ms. Van Ostrand’s (I’m reluctant to call her supposedly humorous piece an “article”) could possibly be prevented.

Leo Grin noted last year another place where we could fight the good fight : Wikipedia. The “Master Race” entry is where we should strike first. This blogger’s ignorance should be blamed: I noticed this earlier and I don’t know yet how to make an edit on the Free Encyclopedia. There is no doubt that this page needs some urgent action.

Do you think that Maggie’s article was an outrage? Then read the names cited among the “Fictional representations” of this “concept in Nazi ideology.” Robert Ervin Howard comes second. Just after his pen-pal, Howard Philips Lovecraft.

Shields up, brothers and sisters!

  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.

I first discovered KEW’s work by way of Robert E. Howard. Having just read the Zebra edition of Worms of the Earth, I wanted more Bran Mak Morn. Learning of Wagner’s BMM pastiche, Legion From the Shadows, I tracked it down.

Legion From the Shadows has always gotten mixed reviews. Don Herron (like Wagner, a Tennessean) is on record as stating that KEW’s Bran was a bit too prone to concussions to be credible as a Howardian protagonist, likening Karl’s Pict to the glass-skulled heroes of Hugh B. Cave’s tales. Others have pointed out weaknesses in plot and motivation, specifically in regard to the enigmatic Liuba.

All these points may be valid, but I contend that Wagner maintained an atmosphere of grim, desperate horror and menace in Legion From the Shadows that makes the novel one of the few Howardian pastiches worth reading. It also had another thing going for it in my eyes: the dedication and afterword. The dedication was to David Drake and the afterword discussed the seminal horror author (hitherto unbeknownst to me, outside of the citation in “The Children of the Night“), Arthur Machen. Both dedication and afterword were emblematic of Wagner’s life-long practice of heralding new talent and also being a loremaster of weird tales past.

Within a few months I’d found a copy of the Lin Carter-edited, The Year’s Best Fantasy Stories: 3. Within was “Two Suns Setting,” featuring Wagner’s immortal hero-villain, Kane. As Steve Tompkins noted, that tale is a categorically American and Howardian one. It immediately won me over to KEW’s most famous creation. It probably didn’t hurt that the story showed Kane at his most likeable and sympathetic.

Over the next few years, despite diligent searching, I only managed to acquire Bloodstone and Dark Crusade. All of this in spite of the fact that the early 1980s were probably the heyday of Wagner’s books being in print/available. It is a perennial gripe amongst Wagner fans (and potential ones) that Karl’s works are hard to find. Apparently, much like REH’s works (though, perhaps, to a lesser extent), KEW’s books tend to remain in the possession of their readers and not be recycled back to bookstores and ebay.

The years from 1987 to 1991 were when I acquired the majority of the books in my Karl Edward Wagner collection. I had greater access to bookstores and more funds at my disposal, of which I took full advantage. I remember one visit to a bookstore accompanied by a friend who was also a KEW fan. Somehow, he chanced to find a pristine copy of Night Winds before I did. He chortled at my dismay. Later that evening, before we headed to the bars, he handed the book to me and told me to keep it. A few years later, I handed him an edition of The Book of Kane, published by Donald M. Grant, for Christmas.

During that same period, I branched out from reading Karl’s contributions to the realm of fantasy and began searching for his work in the horror field, both as an author and an editor. Reading Wagner’s “Sticks” (reviewed more fully here on TC by Al Harron) ignited that search. My finding copies of In a Lonely Place and Why Not You and I? were personal triumphs. Wagner was editor for DAW’s popular “The Year’s Best Horror Stories” for fifteen years, so finding volumes from that series was not particularly hard. Always (or near enough), Wagner’s selections and introductions were worth reading. Horror lit has ever taken a bit of a backseat for me in comparison to fantasy, so I can safely say that without KEW’s editorial work, my knowledge of the field (past and present) would be markedly lessened. I still firmly believe that Peter Straub should have included a Wagner story in the second volume of American Fantastic Tales.

Also during that period, Karl got TOR Books to green-light the “Echoes of Valor” series, which featured heroic fantasy fiction from the glory days of pulp. Getting those tales back in print was a service to fantasy literature, and one that should not be forgotten. Wagner’s knowledgeable introductions will definitely fuel/inspire some future blogs from yours truly.

Somehow, I never picked up the first volume of the series until after I bought The Fantastic Worlds of Robert E. Howard. Reading that collection of essays from the sequestered mailings of REHupa, I discovered the fact that Wagner had printed “The Black Stranger” within the pages of Echoes of Valor (the initial volume in the series) for the first time. The first time ever. I was quickly apprised of the fact that “The Black Stranger” was a far different beast than the double-reverse-engineered monstrosity L. Sprague de Camp had entitled “The Treasure of Tranicos.” Not only that, but KEW had blown the whistle on Howardian post-mortem ”Conantics“  before anyone else in his forewords and afterwords composed for the Berkley Conan series. Learning this, I quickly purchased all three Berkleys; all that LSdC allowed to see print before he stifled the rest in their cradle.

Not too long after I learned all that, the most significant event in the twenty-first century history of Wagner’s published works occurred: Night Shade Books released Midnight Sun and Gods in Darkness. Those two high-quality, hardbound volumes collected all of KEW’s Kane stories and novels between four covers. They quickly sold out, and copies now appear on ebay for triple-digit figures. One has to wonder why no new editions of Karl’s work have seen print since; a question only the Wagner estate can answer.

 Around the same time that the Night Shade volumes were published, I acquired The New Lovecraft Circle edited by Robert M. Price. Within its pages lay “I’ve Come to Talk With You Again.” That story, by general concensus, was the last that Karl ever wrote. It is suffused with a quiet nihilism that is explicity linked to Chambers’ The King in Yellow. The protagonist, Kent Allard, seems to have been to Wagner what Randolph Carter was to Lovecraft. After reading it, I experienced a feeling much like that when I read Howard’s “Nekht Semerkeht.” This was a story written by one who knew he was not long for this world.

Fifteen years after his untimely demise, Karl Edward Wagner is not a dark prophet wholly without honor in his hometown of Knoxville, Tennessee. Spearheaded by his family and friends, a memorial and celebratory festival devoted to KEW’s legacy will be held in Knoxville on October 17th.

Steve Tompkins was a tireless proselytizer of Wagner’s works. Rereading one of his posts devoted to KEW was what prompted me to write this memorial essay.

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.”

The Tritonian Ring is set in Poseidonis, a prehistoric land consisting of the conjoined masses of Europe, Asia, and Africa, which had not yet experienced continental drift. This is the fabled time of Atlantis, whose spires had not yet sunk beneath the sea. All the weapons, gear, architecture, and technology in the novel are bronze-age, which lends the book a further air of realism.

But The Tritonian Ring is far from historic fiction. Rather, de Camp uses its familiar backdrop of chariots and bronze-plated cuirasses to introduce gorgons and wizards — a healthy dose of monsters and magic — and the Gods as well. Loosely based on the ancient Greek pantheon (each representing a different facet of mankind), the Gods of Poseidonis are ultra-powerful but not infallible, exerting their influence on the earth through visions and suggestion.

At the beginning of The Tritonian Ring the age of the Gods is drawing to a close. “Events will take a deadly turn for us in the next century, unless we change this pattern,” says Drax, Tritonian God of war, in a council of the Gods. The threat emanates from the northern kingdom of Lorsk, and from the actions of a single man, Vakar, a young prince and heir to the throne. The Gods send messages to the warlike race of Gorgons, urging them to launch a surprise attack and destroy the Loskan Empire before the threat can materialize.

But the King of Lorsk learns of the Gorgons’ threatening movements. He calls on the advice of the witch Gra, who advises the king to send his son Vakar on a quest to “seek the thing the Gods most fear.” Vakar embarks on a quest to recover this item, the fabled Tritonian Ring, against which the Gods’ power is useless. Yet the Tritonian Ring is no all-powerful artifact, but a mere circlet of iron forged from a fallen star.

Though de Camp does not fully explain why, the Gods power is useless against this new metal. They can’t enter into the dreams of humans that use or bear iron, and magic and supernatural creatures can inflict no harm upon men who wield it. Should Vakar recover the star, the secrets of iron smelting will be laid bare and the reign of the Gods and the age of magic ended. Poul Anderson’s fine novel The Broken Sword (1954) draws on the same sources of folklore which depicted iron as anathema to supernatural beings, and Anderson may have been inspired by de Camp, as The Tritonian Ring debuted in 1951.

It is fitting that Vakar is chosen (fated?) to undertake the quest. He is a modern man in every sense, a pragmatist whose interests lie in books, philosophy, and history. He has no use for cultures (even that of Lorsk) that adhere to ancient, senseless customs. All men on Poseidonis dream of the Gods, save Vakar (though he is keenly aware of this deficiency, this trait also renders Vakar immune to telepathy and attempts to read his mind, which comes in handy later in the book). Thus, Vakar is among the first wave of new men, those drifting away from ancient gods to worship the new gods of science and progress.

Though not cut of the same stature of Conan, and a reluctant hero who relies as much on his luck as his skill with a blade, in the end Vakar comes to embrace a philosophy that Howard fans can appreciate: “Wait to be sure of anything and you will find yourself looking out through the sides of a funerary urn, your quest unaccomplished.”

De Camp is known for his use of sly wit and he does not disappoint here, liberally sprinkling The Tritonian Ring with humor (in one scene Vakar hails a man in a group of dock workers as “You — with the nose!”. As a writer de Camp is also possessed of an ambitious (some would say ostentatious) vocabulary. Thus, words like “acephalus,” “loricated,” “drugget,” and “taboret” are tossed casually into the book, forcing us mortal readers to reach for a thesaurus.

The Tritonian Ring is also pretty raunchy. De Camp obviously appreciated the female form and he loads the book with one titillating scene after another. I lost count of how many women with which Vakar has sex, but his conquests include an Amazon queen, a female satyr, the nubile queen Porfia of Sederado . . . and a half-dozen other women I’m sure I’m forgetting. In some respects he makes Conan seem downright chaste in comparison.

Finally, it must be noted that de Camp embraces a philosophy very much in opposition to Howard’s: The Tritonian Ring stakes the claim that progress — not barbarism — is mankind’s inevitable path. We can see De Camp’s sensibilities writ large in a passage in which Vakar watches a mob of commoners rise up against their murderous and oppressive noble rulers in an orgy of revenge killing. Whereas Howard would have described the scene as a bloody cleansing, Vakar laments for that which will be lost in the destruction:

“The only sad thing is that they will in their stupid fury have destroyed all the amenities of civilized life in Belem, so that there will remain nothing but wretched savages, unable to rise from their own filth. . .”

Such passages, enjoyable on their own as differing viewpoints from Howard’s, only strengthen the claims that de Camp was fumbling about in the Lancers, making changes to and rewriting story fragments of an author which he never fully understood — or, perhaps, which he did understand, but felt no kinship.

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…

Black rosettes on tawny gold, serpents of molten silver — the blaze kindled here would leap from Lin Carter’s prose (this passage reads much more like Carter than his senior partner) to the imaginations of many of his youthful readers. Would the promise of Robert E. Howard’s revelation, in the 1936 letter to P. Schuyler Miller we’ve been parsing for so many decades, that Conan visited a “nameless western continent” be fulfilled in Mayapan? We never got any closer than the Isles fadeout. Later, during the Great Glut of the Tor years, in Conan and the Amazon John Maddox Roberts’ Cimmerian actually expressed a desire to cross the Western Ocean someday, teasing us with with the possibility that the writer responsible for that adrenaline-spike alternate history King of the Wood (the Mongols and their samurai shock-troops besiege Tenochtitlan!) might explore Mayapan. No such luck; perhaps those with veto-power at Tor nixed an Oldy Oldson Conan.

But that which sword-and-sorcery has withheld from us, archaeology seems willing to deliver, vindicating Percy Harrison Fawcett in the process. In today’s Boston Globe article “Finding the Lost City” David Grann excerpts his new book The Lost City of Z:

Using aerial photography and satellite imaging, scientists have also begun to find enormous man-made earth mounds and causeways across the Amazon — in particular in the Bolivian flood plains where Fawcett first found his shards of pottery. Clark Erickson, an anthropologist from the University of Pennsylvania who has studied these earthworks in Bolivia, says that the mounds allowed the Indians to continue farming during seasonal floods. To create them, he said, required extraordinary labor and engineering: tons of soil had to be transported, the course of rivers altered, canals excavated, and interconnecting roadways and settlements built. In many ways, he said, the mounds “rival the Egyptian pyramids.”
Some scientists now believe the rain forest may have sustained millions of people. And for the first time scholars are reevaluating the El Dorado chronicles that Fawcett used to piece together his theory of Z. Though no one has found evidence of the fantastical gold that the conquistadores had dreamed of, the anthropologist Neil Whitehead said, “With some caveats, El Dorado really did exist.”
These scholars say they are just beginning the process of understanding this ancient world — and, like the theory of who first populated the Americas, all the traditional paradigms must be reevaluated. “Anthropologists,” Heckenberger said, “made the mistake of coming into the Amazon in the 20th century and seeing only small tribes and saying, ‘Well, that’s all there is.’ The problem is that, by then, many Indian populations had already been wiped out by what was essentially a holocaust from European contact. That’s why the first Europeans in the Amazon described such massive settlements that, later, no one could ever find.”
Fawcett often complained about his many detractors, about the “men of science” who had “in their day pooh-poohed the existence of the Americas — and, later, the idea of Herculaneum, Pompeii, and Troy.” He spoke of his vision of a majestic culture rising in the Amazon and radiating outward, before being finally overwhelmed and swallowed by the lianas and creepers and palms. And in his final letter, which was carried out of the jungle by an Indian runner before he vanished, Fawcett assured his wife: “You need have no fear of any failure.”

It’s too perfect that Fawcett crossed paths with H. Rider Haggard. The Pacific hasn’t yielded up Skull Island, R’lyeh, and the Isle of the Eons yet, but the oceanic vegetation of Amazonia might be more forthcoming. Thanks to Clark Ashton Smith’s “The Seed from the Sepulchre,” we have a pretty good idea of how this civilization became “lost,” but what wars were waged, what demons were appeased, what god-kings dreamed obsidian-and-ophidian dreams?

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.

Here’s a recent catechism recitation to that effect, from a thoughtful thinker of thoughts who made a name for himself by calling Novalyne Price a “bitch” and a “gold-digger” several years back:

And if there would have been no Lancers, there would have been no Marvel Conan. No Marvel Conan would have meant no Conan movie. So what we would have had is something akin to what Brak the Barbarian or Thongor is now; a few books and a memory.

For me personally there’s much to be said for an alternate timestream in which Conan does not become synonymous with loincloths and manscaping. But leaving aside the Uchronian issue of whether a scrupulously-edited set of the Howard, the whole Howard, and nothing but the Howard paperbacks would not have sufficed to invite heavy breathing on the part of comic book and movie adaptors by 1975 or so, let’s zoom in on the astonishing semi-dismissiveness of “a few books and a memory.” A few brilliant, genre-galvanizing books and multitudinous memories is more like it — rather like, oh, The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings in that respect. The implication that, absent de Camp’s marketing savantry, stories like “The Tower of the Elephant,” “The Scarlet Citadel,” “The People of the Black Circle” and “Red Nails” would have been essentially interchangeable with the efforts of Lin Carter and John Jakes is beyond gobsmacking.

The most unforgettable crucifixion scene outside the four Gospels, the rubies “like clots of frozen blood” that suspend a pirate queen from her own yardarm, a novel in which a master-mage is on the verge of making three thousand years of history vanish to resurrect the nightmare empire he calls home, all doomed to languish in Brakdom or Thongoritude! ‘Cause let’s face it, there’s no discernible difference between the puissance of Howard’s imagination and the work of John Jakes, the creator of Doomdog and Fangfish.

At the risk of being unkind, sometimes I wonder if a few of the Lancer loyalists have ever really read the Howard stories more or less available in their precioussss paperbacks. If they did, how to explain their from-my-cold-dead-hands insistence that potboilers belong with pot-melters?

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:

Even in the drawing depicting what REH intended to register as child abuse she looks ready to be photographed by Suze Randall. One wonders what Mr. de Camp thought (other than Ka-ching! — it would of course take another seven years for Howard’s “The Black Stranger” to dethrone its usurper).

Aside from the objections to the scene where the whip comes down, we’ve been treated to arguments that a child has no business being in a Conan story. For starters, doesn’t it seem as if heroic fantasy that features the, or a, human race should make room as needed for the younger members of that race? Also, I regard Tina as a logical follow-on to the inclusion of Zelata in The Hour of the Dragon; they’re both “tetched in the haid” clairvoyants who represent expansions of Howard’s character demographics. And the Ophirean waif’s significance just cannot be understood without being familiar with the role of Pearl in The Scarlet Letter. If that contention comes across as snobby or pretentious, c’est la guerre culturelle. Even if we discount Tina’s insight-all-her-own into both the story’s “black man” and Conan himself, the seeing of the hero and the monstrous forces he or she opposes through eyes other than those of an omniscient narrator is an essential sword-and-sorcery technique. Although not herself a POV character, Tina is a character who memorably shares her POV, to the enrichment of “The Black Stranger.” Like Bergil in The Return of the King or Klesst in “Raven’s Eyrie,” Howard’s child earns her place in the story (and my guess is the precedent of Tina was the permission slip KEW needed to create Klesst).

Over at this site’s dog-brother Morgan Holmes commissioned an analysis of L. Sprague de Camp’s 1980 Conan and the Spider God from one-time REHupan Richard Toogood. We can but pray that the latter was in a position to supply his own HazMat suit, as the Tartarean godawfulness of Spider God inspires the suspicion that Lin Carter was carrying de Camp all those years.

Seriously, the mere fact that its author was willing to publish this nithing-novel under his own name should have been enough to cause each and every copy of Literary Swordsmen & Sorcerers anywhere in the world to burst into eldritch green flames or leak ichor. Spider God is so disgraceful a performance that Sigurd of Vanaheim would have been enraged into behaving like a real Vanirman had he been forced to read it.

Although lacking the artistry and eschewing the quotage-with-malice-aforethought of Twain’s “Fenimore Cooper’s Literary Offenses,” Toogood’s indictment is at least as methodical; one of de Camp’s Still Starry-Eyed After All These Years faithful could only manage the rubber-bladed non-riposte “Let’s see Morgan write a Conan novel.” For my part while admiring Toogood’s unflagging capacity for outrage, I’m inclined to quarrel with one of his assertions:

At the risk of appearing chauvinist, I would also suggest that the use of a spider as a central feature indicates the governing hand of a woman in the creation of the book. Spiders are far more of a female fear than a male one as a thousand cartoons and sit-com clichés will testify to.

To which I would retort: Lord Dunsany. H. G. Wells. Robert E. Howard. Clark Ashton Smith. J. R. R. Tolkien. Stephen King. China Miéville.

A few weeks back I was reproached for omitting up-and-comer Joe Abercrombie from my survey of sword-and-sorcery since the Eighties. The shameful truth is, I’d never heard of Abercrombie or his three novels when I drafted the article, but I’m now scrambling to make up for lost time. In the interim, here’s a passage of interest from his appreciation of George R. R. Martin’s epochal/epic A Game of Thrones:

Way back in the ’30s Robert E. Howard’s Conan had been dark, dense, and muscular with a sprinkling of kinky. In the ’50s Fritz Leiber’s Fafhrd and the Grey Mouser had been dark, dashing and greasy with a faint aroma of gutter trash. In the ’70s, Michael Moorcock’s Elric and Corum had done away with light and dark altogether and replaced it with something much weirder and more thought-provoking. With A Game of Thrones, Martin dialled the dark up higher than ever before, but the thing that he really brought to the party — and it may seem a strange thing for a fantasy book — was realism.

“Sprinkling of kinky” — there’s the flagellation again. And I think the clearly-intended-as-compliments “greasy” and “aroma of gutter trash” in connection with Leiber are evidence of a perceptive, keen-nostrilled reader.

Lastly, and the segue can’t help but be graceless, David Foster Wallace’s writing was mostly outside our bailiwick here, but the news that he hanged himself at the age of 46 this past weekend, like the suicide of Thomas M. Disch on July 4 of this year, was enough to get the oldest and least curable of Howardist-wounds weeping a little. Much of Wallace’s work was on the to-do list for me but I revered Disch’s, from his early classics The Genocides (1965), Camp Concentration (1968), and 334 (1974) through his laser-seared book reviews for T. E. D. Klein’s Twilight Zone Magazine and his genre-dipped-in-liquid-nitrogen sequence The Business Man: A Tale of Terror (1984), The M. D.: A Horror Story (1991), The Priest: A Gothic Romance (1994), and The Sub: A Study in Witchcraft (1999). And it’s always been a source of delight that he wrote not only a Prisoner novel but also served a shield-wall stint by novelizing (as “Victor Hastings”) the 1969 film Alfred the Great:

Back in 2000 I did devour Wallace’s “McCain’s Promise: Aboard the Straight Talk Express With John McCain and a Whole Bunch of Actual Reporters, Thinking About Hope,” republished this year for obvious if (for some of us) melancholia-tinged reasons. He certainly had a knack for memorable titles — Brief Interviews with Hideous Men, A Supposedly Fun Thing I’ll Never Do Again — and the critic Sven Birkerts singled out his “Pynchonian celebration of the renegade spirit in a world gone flat as a circuit board.” As Pynchon’s Gravity’s Rainbow is one of the novels that most aided me in making sense of the 20th century’s non-sense, I knew I had an eventual date with destiny in the eidolon-esque form of Wallace’s 1,079-pager Infinite Jest, but now that reading experience will be…different.

I’m skeptical about suicide explanations that lean overmuch on chemistry or casuistry, and ever since an introductory German course have preferred that language’s word Selbstmord (“self-murder”) as being more brutally direct in capturing the enormity of the concept.. It was dispiriting to notice that within hours of the first news item in the Los Angeles Times someone predictably posted “What a selfish, cowardly idiot. Just another self-centered fool who thought of no one but himself” in the comments space. Me, I tend to look upon suicide not as sin or statement but as a Black Colossus of a decision; it’s one thing to determine that the accommodations are not to one’s liking but another altogether to insist so emphatically that only one exit from those accommodations is available. Recalling the words of Eastwood’s William Munny in Unforgiven –”It’s a hell of a thing, killing a man. You take away all he’s got and all he’s ever gonna have” — they apply just as much when the trigger is pulled with the gun pointed inward. The suicides of gifted writers like Disch and Wallace (and Howard before them) are not intrinsically more tragic than those of anyone else, but I don’t think it’s insensitive or unfair to posit a particular pang or subcategory of loss when creators who have it within them to usher us to worlds we would otherwise never visit instead usher themselves out of the world we share.

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?