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…”