Category Archives: Robert E. Howard

Robert E. Howard, Southern Fiction

Conan the Middlebrow

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I was intrigued by a recent article in Psyche on middlebrow works of art. Philosophers Aaron Meskin and Jonathan Weinberg make a strong case that while the term middlebrow is generally considered a put-down, it should instead be viewed as a worthy objective for all artists:

“Unlike the avant-garde, which may appeal only to a rarefied audience, middlebrow works pursue a broad audience, requiring only a minimal acquaintance with the medium or genre. And unlike most straightforwardly pop works, which can reach a mass audience by being weightlessly undemanding, middlebrow works aspire to at least some forms of artistic achievement typical of high art, such as thematic depth, formal ambition, intricate narrative structure, philosophical richness, linguistic inventiveness, and so on.”

That sounds like Robert E. Howard to me. Forced by economic necessity to write fiction with mass appeal, he frequently infused his stories with poetic beauty and thoughtful opinions.

As David Smith observes in his magnificent Robert E. Howard: A Literary Biography:

“His work is shot through with a relentless awareness of time, hurtfully so. This tragic appreciation is exhibited as powerfully in his writing as his acute awareness of the body — the weight of time, its passage and its cost to us. He grew up, of course, listening to recollections of the immediate past, frontier tales in which “the past is never past,” in Faulkner’s famous phrase.” p. 191.

Like the highbrow William Faulkner, Robert E. Howard the middlebrow wrote out of a distinctive Southern experience, inspired by Texan tall tales and family narratives of wars, blood feuds, and duels waged to defend honor. Like Flannery O’Connor, also a highbrow, Howard critiqued modern society from a Southern mindset. In “Tower of the Elephant,” Howard not only mesmerizes us with young Conan’s attempt to steal a fabled treasure, but also interjects a sharp rebuke on the modern decline of good manners:

“Civilized men are more discourteous than savages because they know they can be impolite without having their skulls split, as a general thing.”

That sounds like something O’Connor might’ve penned if she’d been a man.

Howard also exceeded the boundaries of pulp fiction in “Red Nails,” a rousing adventure tale that skewers societies that have succumbed to corruption and self-destruction. The degeneration triggered by wealth was a running theme in his stories, no doubt inspired by the misery caused by the sudden wealth of the Texas oil boom, which he witnessed first hand. Stories such as “Red Nails” echoed the Agrarian critique of industrialized society from I’ll Take My Stand.

It was Robert E. Howard’s ability to combine mass appeal and shrewd insight that makes his works so enduring. As his friend H.P. Lovecraft put it:

“Scarcely anybody else in the pulp field had quite the driving zest and spontaneity of R. E. H. He put himself into everything he wrote—even when he made outward concessions to pulp standards…”

Robert E. Howard

Robert E. Howard

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Robert E. Howard

It’s been 90 years today since the death of Robert E. Howard, one of the greatest fantasy authors who ever lived. Long ignored by scholars, his fiction is esteemed more than ever now that we’re finally appreciating its depth and artistry. Howard had much to say about the rise and fall of civilization, as well as the underlying nature of humanity that persists despite the circumstances and fashions of the hour.

His fans admire Howard’s vision of the lone hero who fights honorably in a world that often disdains honor, nobility, or courage. It takes courage to open one’s eyes to the world as it is and dare to live well. He affirms that stance in one of Conan the Barbarian’s most famous speeches:

“I seek not beyond death. It may be the blackness averred by the Nemedian skeptics, or Crom’s realm of ice and cloud, or the snowy plains and vaulted halls of the Nordheimer’s Valhalla. I know not, nor do I care. Let me live deep while I live; let me know the rich juices of red meat and stinging wine on my palate, the hot embrace of white arms, the mad exultation of battle when the blue blades flame and crimson, and I am content. “

Let’s raise a tankard of cheap wine to his memory.

Robert E. Howard, Science, Weapons

The Barbarian and the Playwright

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Fans of Robert E. Howard know the timeless appeal of his greatest creation, Conan the Barbarian. As David Smith puts it, Conan is “the natural man, ourselves begun again, reborn in a world as we secretly know our own world to be beneath its layers of hypocrisy and pretense.”

In my latest guest post at the DMR Books blog, I examine the parallels between recurring themes in the Conan stories and the works of dramatist and science writer Robert Ardrey.

In African Genesis and subsequent books, Ardrey examines the anthropological evidence for what “the natural man” actually is, as opposed to the myths we are told, or worse, tell ourselves. Ardrey’s works provide a deeper understanding of Howard’s tales celebrating the heroic, enduring qualities that make us human.

Hemingway, Robert E. Howard

The Boxer

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Ernest Hemingway and Robert E. Howard had a lot in common. Both were passionate outdoorsmen who relished food and drink and brawling. Though identified with different genres, both infused their fiction with athletic, vivid prose that still stirs the imaginations of appreciative readers. They have inspired countless writers, and decades after their deaths, their works are still in print.  

Both of them boxed, and wrote spirited, brawny stories about boxers. And each also wrote inspirational tales about heroes who refused to surrender despite overwhelming odds.

And yet, both committed suicide.

I’ve read excellent accounts of the lives and careers of both authors, and still puzzle over their final acts.

No doubt both men were tormented, and found some release – or at least, temporary escape – from their suffering in their writing. In a letter to F. Scott, Fitzgerald, Hemingway confided:

“Forget your personal tragedy. We are all bitched from the start and you especially have to hurt like hell before you can write seriously. But when you get the damned hurt use it—don’t cheat with it. Be as faithful to it as a scientist—but don’t think anything is of any importance because it happens to you or anyone belonging to you.”

In his poem “Musings,” Howard identifies writing as a weapon against the horrors and torments of a hostile world:

The mighty poets write in blood and tears
And agony that, flame-like, bites and sears.
They reach their mad blind hands into the night,
To plumb abysses dead to human sight;
To drag from gulfs where lunacy lies curled,
Mad, monstrous nightmare shapes to blast the world.

The intrepid protagonists that both writers brought to life still inspire. Garcia, the washed-up matador in Hemingway’s “The Undefeated,” must battle not just a formidable bull, but a predatory promoter and a fickle, unforgiving crowd. Like Santiago in “The Old Man and the Sea,” Garcia may be beaten at the end, but refuses to give up. Howard’s Conan tales still thrill readers with dazzling, evocative scenes of courage and muscle battling intrigue and sorcery.

How could artists who penned such timeless accounts of heroic tenacity raise their guns to their own heads?

One possible explanation is suggested by H.P. Lovecraft’s tribute to Howard shortly after Howard’s suicide:

“Scarcely anybody else in the pulp field had quite the driving zest and spontaneity of R. E. H. He put himself into everything he wrote—even when he made outward concessions to pulp standards…”

The same could be said of Hemingway. Both infused their stories with their own life-force. Like the determined heroes they conceived, they held on to their agency, though in a final, hard choice. Both found themselves with no other option. Hemingway could no longer write, and he was racked by concussions and a broken body. Howard was convinced both his relationship with Novalyne Price and his writing career were over, and was physically and emotionally wrecked by the demands of attending to his mother.

We can easily imagine Hemingway and Howard as the boxer Paul Simon wrote about:

In the clearing stands a boxer
And a fighter by his trade
And he carries the reminders
Of every glove that laid him down
Or cut him till he cried out
In his anger and his shame
“I am leaving, I am leaving”
But the fighter still remains

Pummeled and in devastating pain, the boxer chooses to leave. But the fighter still remains. As Hemingway once put it, “A man can be destroyed but not defeated.”

Fantasy Fiction, Robert E. Howard, Science fiction

My DMR Books blog interview

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I was pleasantly surprised and honored when D.M. Ritzlin of DMR Books asked if he could interview me as part of his series of author profiles. We covered my writing background, the literary and philosophical influences on my fiction, and works in progress.

It’s now online at Independent Author Spotlight: M.C. Tuggle.

Robert E. Howard

Conan the philosopher

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Robert E. Howard

Stoicism has inspired many writers, including Matthew Arnold, Walker Percy, and Ambrose Bierce. I strongly suspect it also influenced Robert E. Howard, whose character Conan of Cimmeria exemplified Stoicism.

In fact, I’d say Conan was the very model of a Stoic. He could shrug off bad luck, pain, and looming disaster like no other fictional character, whatever the genre. Conan fumed at cowardice, punished betrayal, and battled opponents savagely, but he never complained, never felt sorry for himself. He accepted fate with a shrug.

What is Stoicism? Here’s a short, useful definition from WhatIsStoicism.com:

“Stoicism, or Stoic philosophy, is a philosophy of personal ethics and a methodology for seeking practical wisdom in life. A key principle of the ancient Stoics was the belief that we don’t react to events; we react to our judgments about them, and the judgments are up to us. They also advised that we should not worry about things beyond our control as everything in life can be divided into two categories – things that are up to us and things that are not.”

Sounds like Conan to me.

I believe Robert E. Howard’s most famous character reflected his author’s courageous and clear-headed embrace of the human condition, from its brief, tenuous life span to its deep-seated connections to a rich, sprawling past. I like the way David Smith puts it in his magnificent Robert E. Howard: A Literary Biography:

“His work is shot through with a relentless awareness of time, hurtfully so. This tragic appreciation is exhibited as powerfully in his writing as his acute awareness of the body — the weight of time, its passage and its cost to us. He grew up, of course, listening to recollections of the immediate past, frontier tales in which “the past is never past,” in Faulkner’s famous phrase.” p. 191.

The Stoic philosopher Seneca observed that an extensive and intimate relationship to the past broadens and deepens a person:

“Of all people only those are at leisure who make time for philosophy, only they truly live. Not satisfied to merely keep good watch over their own days, they annex every age to their own. All the harvest of the past is added to their store. ”

Howard, a life-long and passionate student of history, appreciated the wealth of wisdom and adventure the past holds. That passion –and his unique worldview — supercharged his fiction.

Heinlein, Modern life, Robert E. Howard

Writers On Good Manners

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Robert Heinlein
Robert Heinlein

I’ve been pondering the deterioration of public discourse. The occasion of Robert Heinlein’s birthday brings to mind this quote:

“An armed society is a polite society. Manners are good when one may have to back up his acts with his life.”

― Robert A. Heinlein

Which reminds me of this:

“Civilized men are more discourteous than savages because they know they can be impolite without having their skulls split, as a general thing.”

― Robert E. Howard

Book review, Lovecraft, Robert E. Howard

Weird Tales of Modernity: A Review

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A secret that fans of Robert E. Howard and H. P. Lovecraft have known for years is that the works of these authors were much more than mere ghost and adventure stories. In the past couple of decades, a number of serious studies have confirmed that insightful and profound world views animated these tales, making them not only entertaining, but thought-provoking.

Jason Ray Carney is the latest scholar to analyze their enduring appeal. Carney, who teaches Literary Theory and Creative Writing at Christopher Newport University in Newport News, Virginia, also writes speculative fiction, and is the chair of the Pulp Studies section of the Popular Culture Association.

Weird Tales of Modernity examines Howard and Lovecraft, as well as the lesser-known Clark Ashton Smith, and considers their stories as critical reactions to modern art and the transience of life. While this study rewards the reader with a number of well-argued insights into the mindset and artistry of the three authors, it is not aimed at the general reading public. It is instead a highly technical analysis aimed at academics. While it lacks the conversational tone of Mark Finn’s Blood and Thunder, or the rollicking wit of Michel Houellebecq’s H. P. Lovecraft, it marches along with forceful logic and a careful mobilization of facts, backed by citations of numerous works from sixty-four notable authors and critics, including Jose Ortega y Gasset, W. B. Yeats, and T. S. Eliot.

Carney argues that Howard, Lovecraft, and Smith were united not only by their frequent appearance in the speculative fiction magazine Weird Tales, but also shared a common vision of art and life. A common theme in their stories was their rejection of modernism, and specifically, modern art, with its abandonment of traditional forms and the classical view of man. All three authors contemplated with disgust the creeping conformity that erased both individual and regional personalities. Robert E. Howard, for example, feared that “in a few generations all the United States will present one uniform pattern, modeled on the mechanized fabric of New York.” Such conformity, they warned, would not lead to global democracy, but to a dehumanized, soulless world.

Pulp fiction offered the “Weird Tales Three” a vehicle for expressing, and perhaps reclaiming, basic human experiences that modern life had taken from them. Howard, Lovecraft, and Smith crafted fiction that was, in Carney’s words, “sensational, often ineloquent or excessively ornate in style, and concerned with inciting raw emotions in readers – such as wonder, joy, excitement, and cosmic dread.”

Differing somewhat in style and theme, all three sought to rediscover those fundamental, ancient, and human emotions. Howard evoked them in his energetic tales of action and danger; Lovecraft showed us protagonists whose pursuit of esoteric knowledge forced them to confront inescapable cosmic horror; and Clark Aston Smith described characters desperately seeking lost joy, innocence, or love. All three conjured the frightening and the fantastic to focus the reader’s imagination on the ephemeral beauty and wonder that live in the ordinary.

Carney’s evaluation of Howard, Lovecraft, and Smith as a distinct subgroup provides an eye-opening and challenging appraisal that will help their readers to further appreciate their unique vision and artistry.

Ambrose Bierce, Robert E. Howard

Happy birthday, Ambrose Bierce!

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Today is the birthday of Ambrose Gwinett Bierce, one of the great short story writers and satirists of the late nineteenth century. Bierce, a former Union officer in the War Between the States, gave the world the most vivid and brutally honest picture of war ever captured in prose. The war than nearly killed him taught him many grim lessons, chief of which was that noble ideals are the cheapest of lies, used to convince the naive to prop up insane projects that lead only to suffering and death for the many — and profit for the few.

My Master’s Thesis explored Bierce’s war stories, tales exposing the animal senselessness of war.

Fans of both Ambrose Bierce and Robert E. Howard will want to read John Bullard’s excellent post on the significant influence Bierce exerted over a young Robert E. Howard. It includes additional resources on each author, with a link to Bierce’s works.