January 22, 2007
Conan the American Posted by Fredric Smoler at 10:05 PM EST I just learned, from an e-mail from a mailing list, that today is the birthday of Robert E. Howard. In case the name is unknown to readers of this blog (and it probably should be), Howard, one of the premier pulp writers, created Conan the Barbarian, along with a horde of less well-remembered heroes—characters with names like Wulfhere the Skull-Splitter. He is also one of the very few people to actually invent a genre of popular writing, in his case the one subsequently dubbed “sword and sorcery.” That niche is normally distinguished from the rather more prestigious genre of epic fantasy, which is traced to J. R. R. Tolkien. Cambridge dons and Harvard profs will reminisce without shame of their childhood love of Tolkien, but Tolkien, of course, was himself an Oxford don. I have never heard anyone make an un-ironic reference to a childhood acquaintance with Robert E. Howard. Much of what Howard wrote is somewhat embarrassing to recall but apparently remains deeply pleasurable to a fair number of early adolescent boys—a lot of it is still in print. When I was a kid, in the 1960s, Howard’s pulp novels were marketed with extremely lurid covers drawn by artists like Frank Frazetta; looking over the reproductions of the current cover art on Amazon, the art is now a bit more decorous. Howard was born in 1906 in Peaster, Texas, never graduated from college, and died 30 years later, a suicide. He sold his first fiction in 1927, and was prodigiously productive, writing over 300 stories and 700 poems. He published in venues like Weird Tales and Action Stories, and eventually invented a durable world and time, his Hyperborean Age, after bumping into a book on the ancient Picts. Given the mildly racy and very violent fantasies he mass-produced, I was surprised to learn that Howard was physically a pretty formidable character; I too easily assumed that characters like Conan and King Kull would be dreamt up only be wheezy nerds enmeshed in escapist fantasies. Howard, however, grew up on what had very recently been a frontier, hearing reminiscences of gunfights, Indian raids and lynchings, and built himself up, TR-like, into a pretty fair boxer; he turns out to have had a notable reputation for toughness in a very tough milieu. I hadn’t thought about him for decades, but today, reminded of his existence by that e-mail, he seems to me to be an oddly resonant American figure. Before making a pretty good living as a writer he’d been a soda jerk, picked cotton, and branded horses. He remade himself into what he desperately wanted to be—a writer, a boxer—and he made something new in the world. The thing he made is probably more or less scorned by anyone but some early teenage boys and historians of popular culture, but when you catch a few moments of a cheesy sword-and-sorcery movie on cable, it is interesting to remember that someone actually invented this sort of tale. Americans cannot claim to have invented mass culture, but we invented a fair piece of it. The piece of it Howard invented melded and mutated into other things, most of it a lot better than he was, but still distantly indebted to him. Another e-mail I received today linked to a Variety story saying that one of the best current fantasy writers, George R. R. Martin, is going to have a cycle of his fiction filmed by HBO, with each novel in a series expected to number seven scheduled for a season. Martin’s books are a fusion of epic fantasy and many other things—some Tolkien, some Shakespeare, some medieval history, and, as it happens, while at a great remove, a very, very little bit of Robert E. Howard.
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