I’ve been on an escape kick lately. I wrote about it here at The Cimmerian, and in the latest issue of The Dark Man I have a published opinion piece about its presence in the works of Robert E. Howard.

In short, while some critics consider escape a dirty word, I think it’s one of fantasy’s strengths, and a quality of the genre to be embraced, not shunned. I also think that readers who deny fantasy’s escapist element are deluding themselves; we love sword fights, and alien landscapes, and dragons. If we didn’t, wouldn’t we all be reading non-fiction or John Steinbeck novels instead?

As a followup on my recent post extolling the values of escapism, here’s some more of my thoughts on how this quality relates to Howard’s Conan stories.

For readers not afraid to embrace its delicious rewards, Howard’s stories offer a rewarding escape destination, “An age undreamed of when shining Kingdoms lay spread across the world, like blue mantles beneath the stars.” Like a long vacation after many months of thankless work, an escape to the Hyborian Age illuminates new possibilities for the reader.

Here are a few choice offerings.

Escape from boundaries. The Hyborian Age is not a fanciful Neverland or Narnia or Middle-Earth: It abides by the laws of gravity and is also clearly inspired by the cultures, places, and peoples of our own history.

But Howard’s world is also a place full of color and epic sweep. Even its crime-laden cities — the wicked streets of Shadizar, where murder and prostitution, and thievery and corruption run rampant in the Maul — offers a welcome retreat from the familiar problems of poverty, broken families, and pollution endemic to our own modern metropolis’.

Howard made the lands of the Hyborian Age his own personal retreat. While he may have been a product of Texas, Howard dreamed of landscapes far different than the post oaks and sand roughs of Cross Plains, and incorporated these into his fiction. In a letter to H.P. Lovecraft in 1931, Howard wrote:

I have lived in the Southwest all my life, yet most of my dreams are laid in cold, giant lands of icy wastes and gloomy skies, and of wild, windswept fens and wilderness over which sweep great sea-winds, and which are inhabited by shock-headed savages with light fierce eyes.

Howard also included plenty of unexplored frontier country in his world. Looming on its western coast is the dangerous, ever-untamed Pictland, and to the east are vast stretches of open nomadic lands, including tundras, deserts, and steppes. It’s a land rife with possibility, movement, and exploration, very much opposed to the real world of Howard’s day, in which the last vestiges of North American wilderness were being settled and civilized.

Escape from perfumed civility. We live in age of platitudes, where the truth told in plain language can get you in trouble. Grievances are settled not in hot blood, sword-to-sword and man-to-man, but in Byzantine, drawn-out courtroom affairs. Even in the rough and tumble day-to-day life of Cross Plains in the early 1920s, the codes of the old West — vigilante justice, settled man-to-man and gun-to-gun — were a thing of the past, much to Howard’s dismay.

The barbarian view of justice offered in Howard’s stories offers a refreshing, black-and-white alternative to modern legal systems and veiled courtesies. Conan has his own rough code; for instance, he treats women with a grudging respect and never threatens them with violence. He’s also a man who follows through on his promises, as evidenced in this line from “The God in the Bowl”: “I am no dog,” the barbarian muttered. “I keep my word.”

Yet Conan has no patience for couched words and double-talk: “Civilized men are more discourteous than savages because they know they can be impolite without having their skulls split, as a general thing,” he says.

In the Hyborian Age, we are offered the chance of escape into clear, hard, cold, stark decisions that have meaning. In Howard’s world, the treaties and compromises with which we’ve become familiar in 21^st century life are offered by those who speak with forked tongues, and are not to be trusted. Cold steel and are strong hand are always the cure, even when the opponents are monsters and wizards.

Escape from mortality. At first, this claim may seem contradictory. Isn’t death lurking in every corner of the Hyborian Age? Men in Howard’s stories die from thieves’ dagger-thrusts in the Maul of Shadizar, are crushed and rent in the fearsome grip of hulking ape-men, or are brained by the hatchets of screaming Picts pouring over the palisade walls of wilderness outposts.

And yet, viewed from a pagan’s perspective, these are honorable deaths. It is not the lot of the protagonists in Howard’s stories to die of crippling old age without dignity, suffering for example as did Howard’s mother from a lifelong, losing battle against tuberculosis.

While it’s not clear whether some otherworldly Valhalla opens its great doors to receive the souls of the slain, Howard’s main supporting character’s deaths are clean and final. Agonizing, drawn-out suffering is notably absent — see Belit’s death in “Queen of the Black Coast,” or Balthus in “Beyond the Black River.”

Additionally, for all his hair-raising brushes with danger, from encounters with savage monsters and lurkers in the dark to impossible combats against overwhelming odds, Conan never dies. The reader walking vicariously in Conan’s skin may experience trauma and pain, but he or she is ultimately safe. While his companions may die, Conan will always live on, and there will always be more adventure around the next corner.

Escape from menial activity. Conan never has nor will ever be a common laborer. Farming or masonry or construction is not his lot. And certainly no one in Conan’s tales works the 8-5 shift or serves the computer gods of the modern office (in Howard’s day, the typewriter or the mimeograph).

Howard himself worked a series of menial, meaningless jobs before embracing the personal freedom of the writer’s life. Wrote Howard: “There is more freedom in writing than there is in slaving in an iron foundry, or working — as I have worked — from twelve to fourteen hours, seven days out of the week, behind a soda fountain. I have worked as much as eighteen hours a day at my typewriter, but it was work of my own choosing, and I could quit anytime I wanted to without getting fired from the job.”

While Howard’s letters highlight his aversion to mindless physical labor and obligation to a corporation, his stories bathe this antipathy in the red fires of burning cities. In the Hyborian Age the sky is the limit for strong-armed heroes. A lowly barbarian born on a battlefield can take what he needs at the point of a sword, or carve out a kingdom in Aquilonia. All that’s required is might and conviction.

Unlike the 20^th century worker who works out of obligation and is subservient to a hierarchical corporate structure, Conan is a doer who carves out his own destiny, rising from barbarian to thief to warrior to king. It’s noteworthy that when he does reach the top, and finds himself in a position of responsibility, Conan yearns for more carefree days: “These matters of statecraft weary me as all the fighting I have done never did,” says Conan in “The Phoenix on the Sword.” “In the old free days all I wanted was a sharp sword and a straight path to my enemies. Now no paths are straight and my sword is useless.”

Escape into barbarism. Howard believed that civilization was a whim of circumstance, and that barbarism must always ultimately triumph. This is the ultimate rejection of reality, a rejection of the march of history in favor of a primordial, indefinite time which Howard never knew but instinctively felt and loved.

Howard lived in Texas, a state whose borders had become rigidly defined only decades before Howard’s birth. He could still hear tales of wild, lawless times from aging but still colorful characters around town, and felt in his soul that this pre-civilized era of rugged frontier life and rough justice meted out by gunslingers was America’s best. Howard’s best stories, his fantastic tales of Conan and Kull, reached into a past that he never knew and never existed but represented a way of life in which man could reach his fullest potential and live the life he was meant to live. While he may have drawn inspiration for his characters from some local personalities, Howard ultimately rejected progress and his 20^th century surroundings. Here’s Howard’s words to Novalyne Price-Ellis, as quoted from One Who Walked Alone:

I don’t think you’re going to like ol’ Conan. His struggle is big, uncomplicated with civilized standards. The people who read my stuff want to get away from this modern, complicated world with its hypocrisy, its cruelty, its dog-eat-dog life. They want to go back to the origin of the human race. The civilization we live in is a hell of a lot more sinister than the time I write about. In those days, girl, men were men and women were women. They struggled to stay alive, but the struggle was worth it.