The Best of Robert E. Howard, Volume 1 (74 page)

There is a human tendency to invest events like holidays, graduations, and weddings with an atmosphere of pomp and grandeur. This involves the use of the creative imagination in a manner not so different from the way the storyteller weaves his tales. “There was pageantry and high illusion and vanity, and the beloved tinsel of glory without which life is not worth living,” wrote Howard concerning times gone by: “All empty show and the smoke of conceit and arrogance, but what a drab thing life would be without them.” For him, there is no meaning or beauty in life other than what we dream into it.

In this and other respects, Howard could be considered an early existential writer. The term “existentialism” derives from its central tenet that “existence precedes essence,” a terse definition that calls for clarification. Existentialism asserts that humans do not come into being for any special or specific purpose. Instead, one determines one’s own “essential nature” through one’s actions. It is basically an atheistic philosophy, although some philosophers have been able to reconcile it with faith. In either case, responsibility for creating goals, values, and meaning rests on human shoulders. Meaning in life is something that must be created, rather than discovered. Many commentators chose to dwell on the negative implications of existential philosophy, making much ado about “the meaninglessness of life” and “the absurdity of human existence.” There is no meaning to be found in the vast universe beyond ourselves.

Existentialism brought into sharper focus a number of themes, ideas, motifs, and subtexts that had been cropping up with increasing frequency in literature and art during the early decades of the twentieth century. These could be found in popular art as well as fine art, even if the former remained beneath the radar of most intellectuals until comparatively recently. The works of both Robert E. Howard and H. P. Lovecraft reflect some aspect of existential thought. Thomas R. Reid has duly noted that Howard and Lovecraft “write in archetypal terms, of man’s struggle against chaos and destruction. Howard’s primordial heroes most often win, Lovecraft’s are invariably crushed or emotionally maimed. In either case the statement of man’s position is the same. From a position of utter inferiority, man must deal with the degrading and degenerate manifestations of the world in which he lives.” In Conan we see the consummate self-determining man, alone in a hostile universe.

S
ERVING
T
IME IN
D
ISILLUSIONMENT

Conan’s world is one of both breathtaking wonder and blood-freezing horror. There are exotic kingdoms and gleaming citadels, but also foreboding hinterlands and mysterious ruins haunted by nightmarish specters. Fabulous wealth in the form of gold and precious gemstones lies in heaps for the taking, if one is bold enough to dare the terrors that lurk in the nearby shadows. Monstrous fifty-foot serpents rear up, fangs dripping venom. Giant slavering apes snarl and lurch forward with taloned hands extended. Yet even these terrors can be overcome by the craft, audacity, sinew, and fighting prowess of a fierce barbarian warrior. And gold is not his only reward. Alluring women await; some are slave girls, some are princesses, some are warriors in their own right, but all are almost agonizing in their physical perfection.

For daring to conjure such fever dreams, Howard has at times been labeled an “arrested adolescent” by his harsher critics. However, such critics tend to be familiar with only a small portion of Howard’s work. Howard lavished whatever exuberance and love of life he possessed upon his most famous creation, leaving precious little for himself or most of his other characters.

In
The Shadow Kingdom
, King Kull broods on his throne, grappling with philosophical abstractions.
Red Shadows
introduced the dour fanatic Solomon Kane. In
The Dark Man
, Black Turlogh O’Brien fatalistically smites his enemies in the grip of a berserker rage.
Worms of the Earth
tells the tragic tale of Bran Mak Morn, who consorts with dark forces in an effort to save his dying race. The crusaders of Howard’s historical stories are not knights in shining armor, but brutal men in dirty chain mail vying for power over small medieval fiefdoms.

Howard himself was buffeted by severe mood swings. He took his own life at the youthful age of thirty. While only in his early twenties, he was writing poetry redolent of world-weariness, loss, and ennui. In one such poem, “Always Comes Evening,” he laments, “…my road runs out in thistles and my dreams have turned to dust…” More than once, he speaks of the bone-crushing weight of age pressing upon him, even as he admits he is young in actual years: “I fling aside the cloak of Youth and limp / A withered man upon a broken staff.” Far from being an “arrested adolescent,” Robert E. Howard was, if anything, a premature middle-aged burnout.

Howard gave considerable credence to the doctrine of reincarnation, and this undoubtedly contributed to his view of himself as an “old soul.” Possible former incarnations notwithstanding, however, he did not live out even a single normal life span. Even so, he experienced his share of strife and conflict. This was not in the form of physical combat, but instead resulted from his struggle with his surroundings. Howard confided to Lovecraft:

It seems to me that many writers, by virtue of environments of culture, art and education, slip into writing because of their environments. I became a writer in spite of my environments. Understand I am not criticizing these environments. They were good, solid, and worthy. The fact that they were not inducive to literature and art is nothing in their disfavor. Nevertheless, it is no light thing to enter into a profession absolutely foreign and alien to the people among which one’s lot is cast.

As a youngster, Howard was introverted and sensitive with a tendency to brood over real or imagined slights by others. He undertook a rigorous bodybuilding program that gained him a powerful physique as an adult. He informed his father that, “I entered in to build my body until when a scoundrel crosses me up, I can with my bare hands tear him to pieces, double him up, and break his back with my hands alone.” Growing up, he became increasingly resentful of authority: “I hated school as I hate the memory of school. It wasn’t the work I minded…what I hated was the confinement–the clock-like regularity of everything; the regulation of my speech and actions; most of all the idea that someone considered himself or herself in authority over me, with the right to question my actions and interfere with my thoughts.” Howard took up writing as a profession in large part because it enabled him to be his own boss: “I worked in a gas office, but lost the job because I wouldn’t kow-tow to my employer and ‘yes’ him from morning to night. That’s one reason I was never very successful working for people. So many men think an employee is a kind of servant.”

All these things contributed to Howard’s premature burnout. Possessed of a dominant personality, he was given to butting heads with people and situations with which he felt himself at odds. Essentially, he was fighting the whole damn world, and over time this took its toll. Hence his feelings of world-weariness and futility.

In a larger sense, however, Howard’s disillusionment differs from that of the average person only in degree. Everyone experiences some form of unrequited longing or thwarted ambition. Disappointment is a fact of life, an inevitability known to all. For the more sensitive, disappointment is shadowed by disillusionment. There is a vague sense of resentment that life has somehow played one false. Often this is dismissed with the commonplace observation that things aren’t always what they’re cracked up to be. But in Howard’s prose, as well as his poetry, disillusionment has a way of becoming magnified.

From time to time, Howard writes of some glorious dream that only serves to conceal a hideous underlying reality. In such passages, he feels moved to portray disillusionment on a grand, even cosmic, scale. For Howard’s heroes it is often the result of a single, sudden horrifying revelation, rather than merely stemming from the accumulation of numerous minor disappointments. Portrayed thusly, it is another example of Howard’s penchant for depicting ordinary human struggle on a mythical level. All pervasive, disillusionment enfolds humanity like some form of original sin. Not even Conan can escape it.

In classic mythology, the hero’s journey often entails a descent to the underworld and communion with the dead. In
The Hour of the Dragon
, Conan delves deep beneath the shadow-guarded tombs of Stygia. There he meets the Princess Akivasha, who lived ten thousand years earlier and is celebrated in myth the world over. According to her legend, she trafficked with dark forces to remain young and beautiful forever. When she attempts to seduce him, Conan learns that Akivasha is a vampire, an unclean parasitic monster. As he escapes her lair, he is nearly overwhelmed with despair:

The legend of Akivasha was so old, and among the evil tales told of her ran a thread of beauty and idealism, of everlasting youth. To so many dreamers and poets and lovers she was not alone the evil princess of Stygian legend, but the symbol of eternal youth and beauty, shining for ever in some far realm of the gods. And this was the hideous reality. This foul perversion was the truth of that everlasting life. Through his physical revulsion ran the sense of a shattered dream of man’s idolatry, its gleaming gold proved slime and cosmic filth. A wave of futility swept over him, a dim fear of the falseness of all men’s dreams and idolatries.

Frequently, Conan encounters beings whose capacity for evil or depravity exceeds that of mere mortals. It’s all part of a heroic saga of ordeals and triumphs surpassing those to be found in the course of ordinary, everyday life. And if there is no escaping disillusionment, Conan must experience disillusionment on an epic scale.

Thomas R. Reid has pointed out that, “One does not have to search long among extant epic works to find others which parallel underlying themes in both Lovecraft and Howard. In Norse mythology, one is confronted with a cosmology in which defeat is inevitable. Man’s and the gods’ transitory victories are tempered by the foreknowledge of total defeat.” Reid concludes that Howard’s fiction expresses “the ancient and yet increasingly modern belief that man exists in a hostile world…”

“We of North Europe had gods and demons before which the pallid mythologies of the South fade to childishness,” proclaims the Irish-American narrator of one of Howard’s horror stories, who goes on to add, “In the southern lands the sun shines and flowers bloom; under the soft skies men laugh at demons. But in the North, who can say what elemental spirits of evil dwell in the fierce storms and the darkness?”

Howard’s view of the Northern myths was shared by Edith Hamilton, who duly noted:

The world of Norse mythology is a strange world. Asgard, the home of the gods, is unlike any other heaven men have dreamed of. No radiancy of joy is in it, no assurance of bliss. It is a grave and solemn place, over which hangs the threat of an inevitable doom. The gods know that a day will come when they will be destroyed. Sometime they will meet their enemies and go down beneath them to defeat and death. Asgard will fall in ruins…Nevertheless, the gods will fight for it to the end…

This is the conception of life which underlies the Norse religion, as somber a conception as the mind of man has given birth to. The only sustaining support possible, the one pure unsullied good men can hope to attain, is heroism…

Bleakness, futility, and the inevitable passing of all things are part of the world-view of Robert E. Howard.
The Gray God Passes
was inspired by an actual historical event, the Battle of Clontarf, which Howard transformed into his personal vision of Twilight of the Gods. In it, the Celtic warrior Black Turlogh laments, “The days of the twilight come on amain, and a strange feeling is upon me as of a waning age. What are we all, too, but ghosts waning into the night?” Such somber notes give Howard’s tales a resonance lacking in the works of his imitators. It could be said that many readers
come to
Robert E. Howard for the action, adventure, thrills and horror to be found in his stories, but they
stay for
the dark, turbulent undercurrent that runs just beneath their surface.

Meaning is only possible through heroic struggle. David Weber offered these cogent observations:

…Bran Mak Morn fights for his people’s last chance for greatness and their vengeance upon their supplanters. Kull struggles to impose his own clear, barbarian’s sense of
justice
in place of the decadent, bureaucratic legalisms of Valusia. Black Turlogh O’Brien, outlawed and cast out by his own clan, sets out on a suicide mission to rescue a kidnapped maiden whose family would spit upon him, if they didn’t try to kill him outright. These are very human characters, with senses of honor which may be flawed but remain unbreakable, and while the irresistible force of darkness may bear down upon them, they snatch their occasional personal victories from its jaws.

In Robert E. Howard’s heroic tales, the fatalism of the old Nordic sagas is tempered by modern existential thought. Purpose is not to be found
without
, in the cold hostile universe that surrounds us, but
within
. Howard himself found meaning not in “the hard, barren semi-waste lands of Western Texas” in which he walked alone, but in the dreams and visions that stirred within him. One imposes meaning on the world through one’s actions, and even when one’s actions are lost to time, they are never insignificant. In
The Valley of the Worm
, Niord’s name and actual deeds are long since forgotten, but the significance of his triumph is celebrated in song and story the world over. Howard’s own heroic deed was to take up the profession of the writer, so little understood in his time and place, and bring his visions to the world.

To understand, and perhaps realize, one’s own heroic potential, one must look beyond the everyday. In times past, men sought shelter from the cold and darkness without to warm themselves at fires. In times to come, new generations of readers will warm and reinvigorate themselves with the modern myths of Robert E. Howard.