With the slow build to Solomon Kane’s release gaining steam for a winter release, as well as the recent publication of Heroes in the Wind (I swear, I’ll never get over that hideous title), mainstream media is starting to take notice. The most recent of these, at least in Britain, is The Times, whose David Hayles writes an article on Howard. As with many such attempts of mainstream journalists to chronicle Howard’s life, the results are problematic.

First off, the title is “The strange life and death of Robert E. Howard, creator of Conan the Barbarian.” Not a good start. Nikola Tesla had a strange life & death. Che Guevara had a strange life and death. Michael Jackson had a strange life and death. Robert E. Howard’s life was full of moments both wondrous and terrible, but I would hardly consider it so dramatically removed from the average Texans’, to the point of considering it “strange.” This might be a bit extreme on my part, but generally in order for a person’s life and death to be considered “strange” I’d say it would have to be pretty darn unusual. Perhaps the title was editorial mandate, or some attempt to pull in readers, promising unusual stories: perhaps relating how Howard boarded up his windows and doors at night to defend against the onslaughts of imaginary enemies, or detailing his late-night hallucinations of Conan holding Howard hostage as he writes the Cimmerian’s memoirs, or the bizarre accusations of crypto-homosexuality in himself or his characters.

Fortunately none of those ridiculous myths are present. Unfortunately, it isn’t free of misrepresentation.

When Robert E. Howard killed himself at the age of 30 in 1936 he left behind a formidable legacy–he had all but created the sword and sorcery genre, which has spawned books, comics, video games and films.

Rather typical for hackwork involving Howard, the article starts on Howard’s death. After his most famed creations Conan and the Sword-and-Sorcery genre, Howard is most famous for his tragic death. This is as unfair and disproportionate a memorial to his life as it would be remembering Ernest Hemingway as “that journalist who wrote The Old Man and the Sea and offed himself” or Vincent Van Gogh as “the painter who went a bit mad and cut off his own ear.” Thus, like Cimmerian alumnus Mark Finn, I have a bit of an issue with so many articles on Howard beginning with the end, so to speak.

It gets a bit better, and then a bit worse.

Howard, who wrote fantasy and horror stories for the pulp magazines, is gathering a literary reputation–long overdue, say his legions of fans. Penguin Books has released a volume of his best stories as a Modern Classic.

Howard’s literary reputation has been a battle fought for the better part of thirty years, but with Penguin and the Library of America finally relenting to the barbarian breaking down the gates, that acceptance is practically attained.

Born in 1906, the son of a doctor, Howard spent most of his adult life in Cross Plains, Texas. He shunned society, preferring the company of books and his housebound mother, who was gravely ill with tuberculosis.

I’m sorry, shunned society? The same Howard who had a fairly modest circle of friends and acquaintances with whom he nonetheless spent much time in company, to the point of going on week-long road trips to New Mexico on occasion? The same Howard who expressed a desire to hunt down old-timers across the state in order to listen to their unique experiences? The same Howard whose collected epistolary correspondence with people on opposite sides of the country would make a tome in themselves?

“The pulp magazines encouraged prolific writers,” says Michael Moorcock, the British fantasy writer who is a fan of Howard. “The rates were always pretty low and the only way to make a living was by turning out a lot of copy. Howard was lonely and isolated and the pulps offered escape.”

Oh, hello again, Mr Moorcock.

Howard was not averse to writing to order but, while he wrote genre fiction, he bent the form. He wrote boxing yarns but cross-pollinated them with ghost stories. He wrote crime capers, and added a dash of horror: Graveyard Rats, full of Indian curses and severed limbs, is a devilish cross between his fellow Texan wordsmith Jim Thompson and Edgar Allan Poe. Finally, Howard crossed adventure with fantasy to create sword and sorcery, and his most famous character, Conan the Barbarian.

While I’m appreciative of Hayles’ inclusion of Howard’s ghostly boxing tales–though namedropping The Spirit of Tom Molyneaux in the same way he mentions Graveyard Rats wouldn’t have gone amiss–and his crime-horrors, defining Howard’s Sword-and-Sorcery as the mere combination of adventure with fantasy is a bit strange. Surely fantasy as a genre had already defined itself as chock full of adventure? Again, this might be my own personal perniciousness refusing to leave a good thing alone.

Inspired in part by the Scottish Picts, Conan was a muscular vagabond thief, fearless in his hunt for plunder and adventure.

Crom–I can’t imagine I’m the only one picturing the spirit of Conan doing cartwheels in his grave in being compared to the hated Picts!

“R. E. H. combined the adventure stories of H. Bedford Jones and Lord Dunsany, and the supernatural tales which [the fantasy writer] H. P. Lovecraft produced,” Moorcock says. “His landscapes were borrowed mostly from other pulpsmiths like Edgar Rice Burroughs or Max Brand, and the rest was taken from westerns.”

I notice a rather condescending tone in Moorcock’s comments, true to form. The implication is that Howard did nothing original on his own, but merely combined the creations of other, more talented authors to create the illusion of something new. Saying Howard’s landscapes were “borrowed” from Burroughs or Brand does a disservice to Howard’s own imagination, as formed from his own experiences of Texas and his own readings of history as they were from other authors, probably more so. In any case, I would at least expect Moorcock to cite the likes of Lamb, Mundy, London, Rohmer or Kipling, historical authors Howard is known to have read, rather than H. Bedford Jones, who I’m unaware Howard had any particular admiration for (though I’m sure one of the more seasoned Howard scholars will correct me on that issue if this was the case).

Laymes does not question the Great and Powerful Moorcock’s testimony:

It was evident that Howard was writing the stuff he wanted to read — a classic case of arrested development.

Wonderful, more armchair psychoanalysis based on hearsay and harebrained theory! And here I thought it died with Blood and Thunder and the tireless efforts of modern scholarship. Heck, one would think he would at least have perused Rusty Burke’s fantastic Short Bio of REH, readily available on the internet as it is.

Here was a grown man, living at home, hunkered down in his room, reading aloud tales of feats of the imagination — his own. For a stay-at-home, Howard’s interior world knew no bounds. “He had the average Texan’s wariness of cities, and most of his settings were rural,” Moorcock says. “Though he could produce an exotic city when he wanted.”

For an “average Texan’s wariness,” Howard appeared to have gained a liking for San Antonio–one of the largest cities in Texas, then and today–and for their inhabitants, as related in this letter to August Derleth:

San Antonio is full of old timers – old law officers, trail drivers, cattlemen, buffalo hunters and pioneers. No better place for a man to go who wants to get first hand information about the frontier. The lady who owned the rooms I rented, for instance, was an old pioneer woman who had lived on a ranch in the very thick of the “wire-cutting war” of Brown County; and on the street back of her house lived an old gentleman who went up the Chisholm in the ‘80’s, trapped in the Rockies, helped hunt down Sitting Bull, and was a sheriff in the wild days of western Kansas. I wish I had time and money to spend about a year looking up all these old timers in the state and getting their stories.

My, how poor little developmentally-challenged Bob seemed out of his element in the big bad city and how he wished to shun society–so out of his element he wanted to spend a year going around the state to find such “old timers” to hear their stories!

If anything, Howard has had as much impact on the film world as on literature (where fans include Stephen King, whose The Dark Tower series features the very Solomon Kane-like Gunslinger character).

I’m sure unaware readers surprised at King’s alleged fandom of Howard will be rather nonplussed by his thoughts in “On Writing.” Then again, Del Rey are as guilty as Hayles is for “The King Gambit.”

The two Arnold Schwarzenegger Conan films in the 1980s laid down the template for the sword and sorcery movie genre that became so very lucrative in its own right and led to dozens of (mainly Italian) inferior knock-offs: Ator the Invincible, anyone?

If anyone could name a Sword-and-Sorcery movie (apart from The Lord of the Rings trilogy) which was as successful financially and especially critically since Conan the Barbarian was released, I’d like to hear it. Even with my complicated appraisal of those films, I consider them on a whole other echelon above the likes of Deathstalker, Red Sonja and Yor, The Hunter from the Future, and even rough contemporaries Hawk the Slayer and The Beastmaster.

Yet Howard ultimately abandoned the genre that would prove so influential. John Clute, a fantasy story expert who edited the Penguin collection, thinks that Howard was edging towards a more serious subject, something “very dark indeed”. He had plans for “the greatest novel ever written about the frontier” but it wasn’t to be.

I would take issue with the suggestion that Howard’s work wasn’t “serious” before his great unfinished frontier work, but ultimately I can see that Hayles’ heart is in the right place, led astray by decades-out-of-date information, not least by the Eternal Champion himself:

On being told that his mother would not last another night, he went outside, sat in his car and shot himself in the head. Howard had struggled with depression, and Moorcock thinks that he was all written out. “He was horribly tired when he shot himself, and the kind of isolation you got in Texas, especially in those days, gives you very little to hang on to. Reading and writing pulp stories sometimes just doesn’t do it for you.”

Quite different from Moorcock’s belief that Howard was “written out” (and he would know, after all, he’s the British face of Howard scholarship), there are dozens of unfinished stories leading up to Howard’s death, and every indication that had Hester not slipped into that terminal coma, life would’ve continued on much as it had for him–probably better, as Steve Tompkins illustrated as only he could in “Newer Barbarians.” I seriously doubt “writing himself out” was a contribution to Howard’s suicide.

Overall, while it isn’t quite the disgrace it could have degenerated into, Hayles’ article ends on a high note. For all his insistence on Howard’s life being strange, and choosing to go to Moorcock as opposed to an actual Robert E. Howard scholar (were Glen, Rusty, Mark, Don and Patrice all out when he phoned?) led to the perpetuations of misconceptions that should’ve being buried in the last century, these final paragraphs are rather poignant, and manage to capture more truth regarding Howard than any of the half-baked mumblings that preceded it:

Maybe, at the end of it all, Howard felt that he had done what he needed to do. The prolific writer, whose 160-plus published stories were full of men facing death on their own terms, wanted to do the same.

In a letter to the fantasy writer August Derleth he stated: “I don’t want to live to be old. I want to die when my time comes, quickly and suddenly, in the full tide of my strength and health.” Youthful bravado perhaps, but he was true to his word. He wrote about men who didn’t age — his heroes were immortal. In bowing out in his prime, so was Robert E. Howard.

It’s heartening to know that, even when surrounded by the cloying miasma of myths, confusion and groundless hypotheses, a glimmer of pure, white light can pierce through.