Today, right in the midst of a domicilic transition, The Collected Poetry of Robert E. Howard landed on my doorstep. Knowing the consequences of giving in to temptation, I steeled my will and carried on carryin’ on the washer and the fridge and the bookcases…
Night has fallen and I now give myself a most just reward, drinking deep from the cup of Howard’s poetic genius.
“Saint Padraic’s Day usually leaves me with a distaste for the whole Celtic Irish race.” Robert E. Howard, from a letter to Harold Preece, ca. early April, 1930.
Howard’s Hibernophilia is hard to contest, but reading the above quote might cause one to wonder. In context, the meaning becomes much clearer. 
REH (whose photo to the left could easily be that of a “Black Irish” workman of the early twentieth century) noted the “questioning glances” of fellow Texans “who wear purely Gaelic surnames.” His response to such affronts was that, “I’ll wear the green if I have to fight every damned Celt in the world.” A suitably pugnacious Howardian (and Celtic) attitude, in my opinion.
Howard was always ambivalent in his regard for the Irish. In another letter to Preece, REH wrote, “Damn the Irish and damn the black Milesian blood in my veins that makes me like drift-wood fighting the waves and gives me no peace or rest waking or sleeping or riding or dreaming or traveling or wooing, drunk or sober, with hunger or slumber on me”. Again and again REH railed against the waywardness and instability that he saw in the Celtic psyche. “What has my Celtic blood ever done to me but give me a restless and unstable mind that gives me no rest in anything I do”? Obviously, despite Robert E. Howard’s heart-felt pride in his Irishness (the true extent of that Irishness is something Patrice Louinet is researching even now), he didn’t view Erin nor her children through green-tinted glasses, at least not in every instance. (Continue reading this post)
“Know, oh prince, that between the years when the oceans drank Atlantis and the gleaming cities, and the years of the rise of the sons of Aryas, there was an Age undreamed of… (…) Hither came Conan the Cimmerian… “
– The Nemedian Chronicles
In December, 1932, the words above first introduced Conan the Cimmerian and his Hyborian Age to twentieth century America. Readers from every generation since have been intrigued by that heading from Chapter I of “The Phoenix on the Sword.” In a previous post, I discussed just what Robert E. Howard might have meant by “the sons of Aryas.” Why would a ‘Nemedian chronicler’ from Hyborian Age Nemedia speak of the Hyborian Age as “an Age undreamed of”?
David Foster Wallace hung himself on September 15, 2008. On that day, the author of novels like The Broom of the System, Infinite Jest and (the unfinished) The Pale King resolved to shuffle off this mortal coil at the business end of a home-made gibbet (see “Word of the Week“). Having been hailed for years as a “genius” by a vast array of pundits and critics, his beautiful wife gone for the day, Wallace quite apparently felt that life was no longer worth living.
To all fans of Robert E. Howard, Wallace’s fate should evoke a certain amount of resonance. Wallace was in his forties (as opposed to REH’s 30.5 years of age) when he did himself in. Still, I’m sure DFW’s fans have been asking themselves that eternal question: “Why”? Wallace seems to have suffered from long-term depression. He even tried electro-convulsive therapy to alleviate his anguish, all to no avail. Anti-depressants were a mainstay of his existence, but Wallace felt that the drugs were creating a wall betwixt himself and the world he wanted to write about. According to D.T. Max of The New Yorker, in his article about DFW, “The Unfinished,” Wallace wanted, “to author things that both restructure worlds and make living people feel stuff,” (DFW’s quote to an editor). Is such a sentiment that far from what REH aspired to? In regards to his poetry and prose, Howard often expressed the view that he wasn’t measuring up to the standards he set for himself. In Wallace, we see a man who, despite all modern pharmacology and the welcoming embrace of post-modern criticism, just couldn’t carry on. Yet, there are those who feel that Robert E. Howard simply did not have sufficient reason to end his life. Fair enough. However, are those same post–mortem/post-modern critics (and their ilk) going to hold DWF to the same stringent standards of authorial behavior as they do REH, or does Wallace get a free pass because he wrote about the “real world” (as if Howard didn’t )?
Tom Shippey once stated that the three landmark works of the twentieth century (1984, The Lord of the Flies and The Lord of the Rings) were all works of “fantasy.” Personally, I’d also nominate several works of Robert E. Howard into that category (damn good company, in my opinion). Just as in the works cited by Shippey, the narrative is heightened to illuminate universal questions and truths. Wallace, also, did not shy away from going beyond the fields we know, at least in a temporal sense. His Infinite Jest is set in a post-post-modern future. When all’s said and done, how different is Wallace’s tale from that of Robert W. Chambers’ “The Repairer of Reputations,” wherein Castaigne is an uncrowned “King of the United States of America” and there is always a “Government Lethal Chamber” within easy walking distance? Wallace seems to have shared the depressed, nihilistic world-view engendered by RWC’s fictional play, The King in Yellow.
Shippey noted that “realism” in fiction often doesn’t seem capable of expressing the truths that many of us suspect lie beneath the facade of modern life. A cosmic, Lovecraftian view, in some respects. David Foster Wallace, in his non-fiction work, Everything and More, looked at the cosmic and infinite as well. Did the cosmic vistas that Wallace glimpsed affect his viewpoint? Did the “black seas of infinity” and “mad immensities of Night” darken his outlook? None can say now. All that can be said is that Robert E. Howard, enduring a hard-scrabble existence in central Texas during the Great Depression, had just as much, or just as little reason to live as Wallace did in twenty-first century California.
At a memorial service for Wallace, Jonathan Franzen had this to say: “People who believe that David’s death is the story of a biochemical imbalance don’t need the kinds of stories that David told.”
Replace “David” with “Robert E. Howard” and I think y’all might see why I wrote this blog.
“Know, oh prince, that between the years when the oceans drank Atlantis and the gleaming cities, and the years of the rise of the sons of Aryas, there was an age undreamed of…”
That lead-in sentence from “The Phoenix on the Sword” is very easily one of the most memorable in the whole Conan canon. The entire paragraph that it initiates wouldn’t even exist without Farnsworth Wright’s editorial interference. Wright asked Robert E. Howard to take out much of the geo-political information contained in Chapter II of the “submitted draft” that was sent to Weird Tales. REH encapsulated that data (along with additional facts) in the “Nemedian Chronicles” epigraph for the first chapter of “The Phoenix on the Sword.” Robert E. Howard seems to have put more into that first sentence than might be apparent upon first glance…
In his first letter to H. P. Lovecraft, Robert E. Howard informed HPL that he considered the Man From Providence to be superior to Machen or Poe. In other words, the finest horror writer of them all. In another letter (ca. June 1931), Howard wrote to Lovecraft that “the three foremost weird masterpieces” were Poe’s “The Fall of the House of Usher,” Machen’s “The Novel of the Black Seal” and last, but not least, “The Call of Cthulhu.” Thus, it is not surprising that some trace of REH’s enthusiasm for HPL’s landmark tale might be found in Howard’s own yarns.
“Skull-Face” would seem to echo with whispers out of R’lyeh. That is not to say “The Call of Cthulhu” was Howard’s only source of inspiration for his tale of Kathulos of Atlantis. Far from it. Over at the Official Robert E. Howard Forum, I went into some depth regarding the influence of Sax Rohmer’s writings upon “Skull-Face.” As I’ll demonstrate below, it appears that a Rohmer novel might have exerted some influence upon “The Call of Cthulhu” as well.
I’m Deuce Richardson and I’ll be your blogger for this evening. I’m a native south-east Kansan and grew up working on my parents’ farm/ranch, the fourth generation of Richardsons to do so. At the age of nine I discovered Robert E. Howard and haven’t been right in the head since. Subsequent to graduating high school, I attended Kansas State and then Pittsburg State University. After that, it was time to get to work. In early 2005, I leapt into the twenty-first century by purchasing my own computer. That eventually led me to becoming a member on the Official Robert E. Howard Forum. Membership there landed me in various places like Cross Plains, Texas and then, surprisingly, here. Enough about me. On with the show.
Ever since a certain “Mr. O’Neail” wrote in to Weird Tales wondering, there has always been a question hovering, bat-winged, over Robert E. Howard’s novella, “Skull-Face”: Was REH’s “Kathulos” (and the tale thereof) influenced, somehow, by Lovecraft’s “The Call of Cthulhu”?
Howard had this to say in a letter to HPL (ca. August 1930):
A writer in the Eyrie, a Mr. O’Neail, I believe, wondered if I did not use some myth regarding this Cthulhu in “Skull Face”. The name Kathulos might suggest that, but in reality, I merely manufactured the name at random, not being aware at the time of any legendary character named Cthulhu — if indeed there is.
That’s that, I guess, but… all indicators point to Robert E. Howard reading “Call of Cthulhu” before he ever started composing “Skull-Face.” In a letter to Weird Tales, Howard demonstrates he’d already savored the darksome pleasures of “CoC” (published in the February 1928 issue of Weird Tales): “Mr. Lovecraft’s story, ‘The Call of Cthulhu’ is indeed a masterpiece, which I am sure will live as one of the highest achievements of literature.” (ca. April 1928)
