On An Anniversary

On this day in 1936 Robert E. Howard took his own life.

I have been trying for a long time to capture my love for him and his writing. I've mentioned it before on this blog. Though there are plenty of writers who work I feel very strongly about (Michael Ende, Neil Gaiman, William Gibson, Oscar Wilde, among many others), it's Howard who keeps coming up in my mind as the one I want to express my deep devotion to. Perhaps it's because, as a pulp writer, he's generally not as well respected as what we would call literary writers (a distinction that in itself is a product of the last hundred years). Perhaps it's because his most famous creation, Conan, has been thoroughly misrepresented in media, to the point that I fear the average person has lost the sense of who Conan really is. Like with so many other icons, the average person isn't getting the real creation, but rather a blurb version with none of his complexity or fire. To them, Conan has lost his brooding and philosophy, and has become an ape in a loincloth.

Part of it is also that I regularly recommend some of my favorite stuff to people, and I've never met someone I recommended Conan to who reacted to it anywhere nearly like how I did all those years ago when I picked up my first Conan pastiche. I repeatedly recommended "The People of the Black Circle" to a fellow student who showed interest in fantasy and even showed him where he could find it, but I don't think he ever read it. When I worked at a bookstore and I talked someone into buying a book of Conan stories, he returned it within a week.

I'm not out to try to prove that Robert Howard was a fantastic writer or that Conan is a brilliant work of art. I believe both of those things, but I also know (after spending too much time dragging myself through the tiers of academia) that REH's fantastic work doesn't need a defender such as I to recommend it; it speaks for itself, and I can neither add to it nor take away. If one day we fans manage to convince the literati that Howard has a vital place in the canon, I will be jubilant, but that's probably beyond my meager power. Now, I just want to be able to express what about his writing I find so compelling.

But every time I try, I feel ridiculous. When I admitted my devotion to Howard to a wonderful poet, he gave me a disappointed look and changed the subject. When I mention my hope to write criticism about his work to colleagues, they suggest I should try popular culture instead of literature. And yet I can't give up.

If we look at writers such as Jack London, Ernest Hemingway, and Rudyard Kipling, who have been accepted into the canon (though I could argue that, unfortunately, their stars have waned over the years), they write about many of the same themes as Howard does: exploration, survival in harsh environments, the triumph of humans over their environment, civilization versus the wild. They might have done so without murderous resurrected mummies, but the exploration of themes in Howard is every bit as rich.

And Howard talked about other themes. Love, mortality, personal fulfillment, science, loyalty, theology, sexism, tradition, and many more.

The writing is strong on a sentence level, too. The descriptions are vivid but economical, the language eloquent, the pacing fantastic. Howard's writing is a model for how to craft an intricate and gripping plot. His characters reveal surprising, even sublime, complexities and contradictions.

Talking about barbarism, conquest, and the bloody truths of steel and sinew is considered outmoded these days, as though civilization has moved beyond this "boyish" interests. We sit back on  leather sofas and watch news stories on our giant flat-screen TVs about the brutality that grips other countries and shake our heads at how far "behind" they are at becoming more like us, little realizing that our way of life isn't some end point on a cosmic sliding scale of national improvement. I know, given enough time, all civilizations will collapse back into this "outdated" norm. Barbarism isn't a fantasy but an inevitability. I can picture Roman citizens on their couches laughing about the backwardness of those unwashed simpletons on the frontier.

Maybe that's something Howard has to offer us. Every day, I feel like we're slipping closer to his descriptions of decadent, hedonistic, lazy societies too wrapped up in our petty interests and wars to notice our own slide towards downfall. If we look honestly, we have to admit we're there already.