Hope everyone had a great Christmas and is set for a spectacular 2007. The Howard centennial leaves us Howard fans out of breath but with a sizable achievement to our everlasting credit. This year will be hard for future generations to top.

The attempt to get a Cimmerian out every month in 2006 failed — too many real-life responsibilities got in the way down the home stretch for me to make it happen. Nevertheless, I’m committed to getting out the remaining 2006 issues necessary to make Volume 3 a complete set. I’m going to attempt finishing the November, December, and Awards issues during the next few weeks, and will start work on the V3 Index soon. Volume 3 slipcases will also be coming sometime this spring.

If all goes as planned, Volume 4 will start with a February issue, and we’ll try for a bimonthly schedule going forward. Also keep a lookout for the 2007 Awards ballot, which will appear on this website soon. And as Rob points out in the last post, there is much in store for Howard fans in the coming year. The Complete Letters, the Del Rey Best of REH set, and much more. Just because the centennial is over doesn’t mean that we’re due for a Howard drought.

I’ll post here when the rest of the 2006 Cimmerians ship.

Dedicated readers of this blog will recall a post from Steve Tompkins, who last July took umbrage at the ravings of a guy on one of the REH e-mail lists, who had opined that Howard’s on-again, off-again girlfriend Novalyne Price was responsible for his suicide, and furthermore claimed that author Joe Lansdale had said much the same thing in his introduction to Wildside’s Weird Works of REH #3 (the intro in question is available for reading online here). At the time, Steve judged the claim preposterous — and guessed that Lansdale likely had said nothing of the sort in his intro.

Well, Joe himself happened onto The Cimmerian‘s blog archives recently and read the post in question. Needless to say, he agrees with Steve. Here are Joe’s own thoughts on the matter:

Read a piece on the site where it was suggested that I (“the western writer” which is probably no more accurate than horror writer or crime writer, and I’m better known for the latter two) said that Howard killed himself over Novalyne Price. No I didn’t. I did suggest that the loss of her — and his mother, among other things — were the final straw. But the straw was bent at birth, and to blame anyone for his choices is ridiculous.

I think Howard, had he lived in modern times, might have avoided an early death by the use of something along the lines of Zoloft. But it didn’t exist then and no one really understood that kind of depression. It took certain events to send him over the lip, but they could have been any events, and my guess is it worsened as he grew older. Suicide seems to have been a part of his thinking for a long time. But Novalyne sure didn’t have anything to do with it. She didn’t owe him her life to make his life a happy one, which, in the end, it couldn’t have.

Just wanted to get clear where I stood on this matter. You have to read the whole thing, not just take a line from it you like. I never bought that he killed himself over his mother, or for that matter Novalyne, just that all these factors back-to-back led him to do what he was wanting to do for sometime; it was more than he could handle, but he was the one who used the gun.

I never said what “simperingflophouse” said I said, at least it’s more as if he took the line, which I did say, out of context with my intent. That may have been my fault, but it wasn’t the thesis I was after. I’ve always disliked the idea Howard did it because of his mother or his girlfriend, but think that they were the final straws that broke his depressed back that day. It could have been most anything, really.

Thanks. Joe

S.T. Joshi’s article “Bran Mak Morn and History” in Two-Gun Bob: A Centennial Study of Robert E. Howard comes trailing a backstory that originated with the author’s 1996 magnum opus H. P. Lovecraft: A Life. That book more than deserved its Bram Stoker and British Fantasy Awards, but phrases from the pages (502-503) on which Robert E. Howard is introduced as an untutored provincial-turned-pen pal were destined (and designed?) to live in infamy among even the least touchy Howardists: “Fanatical cadre of supporters,” “subliterary hackwork that does not even begin to approach genuine literature,” “[Howard’s] views are not of any great substance and profundity,” “Howard’s style is crude, slipshod, and unwieldy.” The artful dismissal-intensifier “does not even begin to approach” is surpassed a page later when Joshi quotes Lovecraft’s “There’s a bird whose basic mentality seems to me just about the good respectable citizen’s. . .” evaluation of REH in a December 14, 1935 letter to Kenneth Sterling and then editorializes “If Howard’s later devotees would adhere to this view, they would make themselves a little less ridiculous in proclaiming vast profundity and originality for his work.” Only a little less ridiculous, mind you — that might qualify as the unkindest cut of all, were there not many cuts yet to come.

In 2001 Howard occasioned what has to be the worst passage in one of Joshi’s very best books, Ramsey Campbell and Modern Horror Fiction. Here is as good a place as any to mention that when Joshi is writing about those like Campbell or Shirley Jackson or Thomas Ligotti who broadcast on his preferred frequencies and speak to his sensibilities, few genre critics repay reading as much as he does. Otherwise, however, he can be so condemnatory as to suggest a reflexively merciless, possibly infanticidal tribal deity casting the aesthetically or morally misshapen forth into the Outer Darkness. Let’s steel ourselves to gaze upon his expanded inventory of Howardian infractions (page 148 in the Campbell book):

Howard’s prodigious imagination in conceiving the life and actions of primitive peoples is certainly remarkable. It was probably derived from his own fascination with what he perceived to be the freedoms of barbarian life and his implacable hostility to civilization — attitudes fostered by his being the descendant of one of the original settlers of Texas and his lifelong residence in the remote village of Cross Plains. These provocative conceptions are, however, frequently offset by a lamentable crudity of expression and a yielding to the most hackneyed conceptions of pulp fiction: characters who are broad caricatures rather than living beings; lurid bloodletting and melodrama; implausibility of action, especially with regard to supernatural phenomena; and a general slovenliness in diction and plot development. Howard and his work have attracted a small but vocal band of cheerleaders who are determined to give him high rank as a writer and thinker, but it is unlikely that he will ever have as high a standing as, say, his friend H. P. Lovecraft in general literature.

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Check out this morning’s Wall Street Journal for a nice article on Howard by respected political/culture writer John J. Miller. The Cimmerian gets name-checked, and John pits three words of my conservative optimism against a burst of Rusty Burke’s liberal pessimism. Fun for the whole family.

John is National Political Reporter for the National Review, and does a lot of freelance writing for the WSJ and other publications. Last year he wrote a good article about Lovecraft in the same paper, which you can read here, while in 2002 the WSJ published his piece on Christian values in Tolkien’s Middle Earth.

As for the National Review, it always has solid pop-culture material — read John’s take on Dungeons & Dragons, his column on C. S. Lewis’ Screwtape Letters, some thoughts on the ghost stories of Russell Kirk, or browse through his excellent coverage about last year’s Narnia craze:

Back to Narnia

Narnian Order

The Lion King

X-Mas in Narnia

Getting Howard some good press in one of the nation’s most prestigious newspapers serves as a nice bookend to January’s coverage of him in The Washington Post by Pulitzer Prize winning critic Michael Dirda, and is a fine way to wrap up the REH centennial. Thanks, John.

UPDATE: John also blurbed his article and this website at National Review‘s The Corner, one of the cooler conservative blogs out there. Check it out.

UPDATE #2: Another National Review veteran, S. T. Karnick, offers his own brief exegesis of Howard’s relevance at his personal blog.

The following article recapping the World Fantasy Convention’s Cross Plains bus trip appeared in the Cross Plains Review for Thursday, November 9, 2006:

Mystery Tour Bus — The Rest of the Story

Many folks noticed the huge chartered tour bus in town last week-parked in the restaurant district, downtown and out by the Robert E. Howard Museum. At each stop, a collection of travelers stepped out with digital cameras to record everything and everybody. After all, how often does a group from around the world get to visit Cross Plains and see life in the slow lane up close and personal?

Some folks might have recognized Leo from Los Angeles, Rusty from D.C. and Mark from Vernon, Texas. These fellows are part of the faithful group who attend the annual Robert E. Howard Days. Patrice has visited our area before, but admitted it had been several years since he has traveled from France to Texas. Others were first time visitors from England, Canada and seven states, besides a range of cities in Texas.

The group was given a special tour of the Museum by Project Pride members. The trip had been arranged as part of the pre-convention activities of the World Fantasy Convention being held in Austin. The Fandom Association of Central Texas played host to over 700 writers, scholars, artists and aficionados of the entire genre of fantasy, science fiction and speculative fiction works from around the world.

In addition to touring the Museum, the Cross Plains Public Library and the general downtown area, the group enjoyed a local lunch before returning to Austin and the remainder of the convention.

[redacted] was especially impressed with the new Meet the Author display in the library as he is the next author on that agenda. He will be here in February to discuss Howard as a Texas writer, influenced by Texas history, economy and geographic environs. One of Howard’s more famous characters, Breckinridge Elkins, is pure larger than life Texan, and will be a key feature of Finn’s presentation.

Several members of the traveling group were delighted to find some of their writings on the shelves of the Museum book shop and quickly autographed the copies. Project Pride was equally delighted to meet more of the authors of the publications that are for sale locally.

Looks like I figured correctly when I earlier predicted that the vast majority of those overpriced eBay Howard items would remain unsold. Almost every one of the auctions ended without a single bid, even while lots of other people listed items at low starting prices and had them bidded up into the correct ballpark.

Out of the dozens of auction winners in the past few days, the only one that qualifies as a sucker bought two of Van Hise’s chapbooks for at least double what he would have paid anywhere else. I guess if you’re real lazy, real dumb, or real loaded you don’t care what you pay, but it’s embarrassing nonetheless.

Okay, the success of Happy Feet (which edged out the most Flemingesque Bond film since On Her Majesty’s Secret Service to be the #1 movie last weekend) following the 2005 March of the Penguins phenomenon moves me to protest this current status as the feel-good flightless fowl of the 21st century. Enough with the cutesification; where are the weird fiction penguins? Where are the mutant penguins, the albino penguins, the birds who can intimidate leopard seals and feral Shoggoths or freeze Miskatonic expeditions in their tracks with a single well-timed “Tekeli-li!”

Give us penguins Who Know Too Much (consult Chaosium’s 1996 The Antarktos Cycle for details), red-eyed and raucous-voiced witnesses to the cosmic tragedies and iniquities that have unfolded on the austral icecap for the last few million years. Children of all ages need nightmares and today’s animators just aren’t getting the job done.

In a previous posting, eBay madness, I noted some of the Howard items being hawked for ridiculous prices at that site. Apparently I spoke too soon. Has there ever been a time when there was such a magnificent variety of Howard items on eBay, and at such absurdly bloated prices?

Grant Conans for $200 a pop when they are easily available elsewhere at $20? Bob Price booklets for up to $100, not as a hotly contested bid but as a minimum starting price? A freaking REH Days postcard that is widely available for fifty cents each June being offered by James Van Hise for a “Buy It Now” price of $20? This is outrageous.

And the weirdest thing is that all of this stuff has hit within the last week or so, and from a wide variety of different sellers. If one dealer had tried to game the market in this way, that’s one thing. But with so many items listed from multiple sellers, it makes you wonder what is happening. Did the World Fantasy Convention somehow convince dealers that there is a large Howard market out there, a market they were previously unaware of? Is there just a centennial swell at play? Whatever it is, it’s damn strange.

Browsing through the list one can see the Grant Conans, the Gnome Conans, assorted pulps, the Bob Price booklets, assorted REHupas, Howard Collectors, the Baen paperbacks, Jonathan Bacon’s old Fantasy Crossroads, all the early Dark Man issues, all three issues of Cromlech, foreign fanzines signed by Glenn Lord, Amras, Lone Star Fictioneers, an Always Comes Evening for a flat $1500, a 1937 Weird Tales for $275. It’s also amazing how many items are listed at set prices, with the dealers refusing to let them be auctioned so that the market could naturally determine the highest bid.

I guess it’s just possible that collectible prices for REH are actually going through the roof, but I think it’s much more likely that these dealers are fishing for suckers, and most of these items will never sell at such ludicrous prices. That’s the reason the dealers have them locked down with high “Buy It Now” prices rather than auction them, because they are fairly sure they would never get these amounts in an open market. I’m not a collector (thank God), but if I was I would forget about this forum and do my searching at abebooks or addall, where prices are reasonable and fairly competitive. Looking at all of this sitting out there blows me away. I’m really interested to see how much of it sells. Wow.

Thanksgiving! Baked turkey, with dressing made of biscuit and cornbread crumbs, sage, onions, eggs, celery salt and what not; hot biscuits and fresh butter yellow as gold; rich gravy; fruit cakes containing citron, candied pineapple and cherries, currents, raisins, dates, spices, pecans, almonds, walnuts; pea salad; pumpkin pie, apple pie, mince pie with pecans; rich creamy milk, chocolate, or tea — my Southern ancestors were quite correct in adopting the old New England holiday.

I hope you had as enjoyable a Thanksgiving this year as I did. I don’t know when I enjoyed a holiday more.

That’s Robert E. Howard, writing to H. P. Lovecraft in December of 1932. In some ways, he didn’t have much to be thankful for. The Depression had hit hard, several of his reliable markets had stopped publishing, and his life’s savings was lost when the Cross Plains banks failed. But he still had his friends, and the joys of football games and boxing matches, and the serene and comforting cornucopia of riches and memories that is a Thanksgiving dinner with loved ones.

For that 1932 holiday he told HPL that he spent the morning doing chores, then went with Lindsey Tyson to a football game in Brownwood between Howard Payne College and Southwestern University, fierce rivals who on that day were battling for the “championship of the Texas Conference.” Before the game he ate dinner at “the home of a friend” — Tevis Clyde Smith, perhaps? — and then

we helped him unload a bunch of steers, in order to facilitate an early arrival at the game. They were the finest, fattest, big Hereford critters I’ve seen in a longest time; and one of them was the meanest and wildest I ever saw. The three of us fought him all over the hill, and after we got him in the corral, we couldn’t get the ropes off. We had two ropes on him, or he’d have killed some of us. When he’d plunge at one of us, the other would haul him back, and so on. As it was both of us had some narrow shaves. We finally got one lasso off his horns, but to save our necks, we couldn’t get the other off. We had him hauled against the corral fence, and every time we slacked the rope, he took every inch of it, and tried to murder us. At last I threw a doubled lariat around his huge neck and snubbed his head down against the fence, and held him there while the rope was cast off his horns. Then it was every man for himself!

After that adventure, Howard “picked up another friend and repairing to the stadium, witnessed one of the fiercest, closest and hardest-fought games I have ever seen.” He describes the game to Lovecraft in detailed and poetic terms that still roil the blood seventy years later. “Primitive ferocity…heaving among the helmets…charging at blinding speed…driving with all the power of his iron legs…struck the line like a thunderbolt…devastating stiff-arm…terrific punishment…sheer power…desperate plunges…” As the game neared its end, Howard’s keen eye caught a scene of the sort that his stories reek of, the kind of scene that summed up Life itself to the Texan in all of its tragic majesty and red ruin:

Always the big fullback was in the midst of the battle, fighting with every ounce of his iron frame and ferocious spirit. Then toward the last of the game, something happened. I don’t know what it was. I was watching the ball, when a yell went up, and we saw the big Indian down. His leg was hurt. They carried him off the field and laid him on the sidelines, where they began working over his injury. A big German lad was sent in in his place. He was good, but he was not Hoot Masur. Southwestern began an implacable drive. They marched irresistibly down the field, fighting for every inch. At last, on the sidelines, the injured player rose, with the aid of his companions. He began to limp up and down the lines, leaning heavily on a team-mate. Doggedly he plodded, half-dragging his injured member, his heavy jaw set stoically. Out on the field his team-mates, crippled by his loss, were being pushed slowly back toward their own goal. The fullback let go of his supporter, and walked alone, limping deeply, moving slowly. From time to time he worked at the injured leg, stooping, flexing, trying to bend his knee. Then he would resume his endless plodding. I forgot to watch the game in the fascination of watching that grim pathetic figure toiling along the sidelines — up and down — up and down. The sun was sinking, and the long shadow of the grandstands fell across the field. In that shadow the fullback plodded. Once, somewhere, I saw an old German print or woodcutting, depicting a woodcutter in a peaked hood carrying a bundle of sticks through the Black Forest. I was irresistibly reminded of this print. The peaked hood was there, even, the peaked hood of a grey sweater-like garment worn by football players when not in the game. There were the same massive shoulders, made abnormally broad by the bulge of the shoulder-pads beneath the sweater; the same slouching, forward bending pace. The shadows of the forest were to an extent repeated in the shadows of the grandstand. Only the bundle of sticks was missing, but the figure etched in the shadow stooped and toiled as if it bore the weight of a world on its shoulders. There was tragedy in the sight; he was eating his heart out because he was not back in the game, stopping those merciless onsets, giving freely of his thews and heart and blood, eating up punishment that would have snapped the bones of a lesser man. There was nothing of the story-book sob-stuff about the business. But to me, at least, there was a savage pathos in the sight of that grim, mighty figure plodding up and down the lines, striving vainly to work his bitterly injured leg back into shape, so he could re-enter the game. At last, when his captainless team was making its last stand, with its back to the wall, he sank down on the naked ground and covered his eyes with his hands. He would not watch the defeat of his mates. But that defeat did not come. Fighting like madmen, they broke up the attack just half a foot from the goal-line. The final score: Howard Payne 6, Southwestern 0. The fullback’s touchdown in the first quarter was the only score. As the grandstands emptied and people rushed down onto the field to congratulate the winners, I saw him limping slowly through the throng, toward his teammates.

Drama? You will see it on the football field, raw and real and naked, unaided by footlights, stage settings, or orchestras.

After the game it was time to repair to a local restaurant for a second gargantuan meal, a repast of “roast turkey and oyster dressing and ice cream” gorged while watching “the shirt-tail parade and the other antics of the celebrating collegians.” In 1932 Howard was but twenty-six, still only a few years removed from his time at Howard Payne and from his wayward youth. He was young, and he was with friends, and he had both watched and participated in a day chock full of hard work and brutal masculine struggle against nature and implacable foes. He had fought and he had feasted, in much the same way his new hero Conan was about to begin doing in the pages of Weird Tales for the very first time a scant few weeks later.

Howard finished the most enjoyable holiday in his memory by driving home with Lindsey “through the forty miles of hill country, through one of those still, clear, crisp star-filled nights that you enjoy only during good football weather. Simple and unsophisticated enjoyment, yet somehow I got more kick out of the whole affair than I’ve gotten out of more expensive and less innocent pleasures. We didn’t even take a drink of liquor.” After all, what use is liquor on a day punch-drunk with the mead of Life? On that Thanksgiving Howard had received a stirring confirmation of the way he viewed the world, a 50-yard-line view of the best and worst that existence had to offer. In his description of that day we see the writer’s mind at work, simmering with the dreams and thoughts that fueled his fiction.

Later in that same letter to Lovecraft Howard proclaims: “By God, I demand freedom for myself. And if I can’t have it, I’d rather be dead.” Over the next four years he would make good on this promise as his certainties about Life began to unravel and spiral into the abyss. But on Thanksgiving of 1932 the spirit of Robert E. Howard was free, and shone with a brilliance that melted away both the shadows of the Great Depression and the dark mantle of the depression that was all his own.

In the end, Life isn’t about freedom from struggle or tragedy or despair, it’s about what you do in the face of it. Whether it’s a dwindling group of battered pilgrims giving thanks to God, or a battered Indian fullback holding his head in his hands as his team wins, or a battered writer seeing in everything around him the seeds of his life’s work, drunk with the sheer humanity of it all. We all undergo great hardships in this world, but occasionally a day or a moment appears like an oasis, reminding us of all that is good and free. More than any other day, Thanksgiving conjures such feelings within us. We can read Howard’s thoughts seventy-four years later and share in his exultation, in the process reminding ourselves of the good in our own lives. Family, friends, passions, luck. Different draughts for each of us, but all drawn from the same sweet well.

Happy Thanksgiving.

At the end of film critic Kenneth Turan’s new book Now In Theaters Everywhere: A Celebration of a Certain Kind of Blockbuster, he includes his 1979 essay “Behind the Scenes: Conan the Barbarian” which might be of interest to fans of Howard and of that film. A recent Los Angeles Times book review by Tara Ison calls that particular essay “a wonderful look at the origins and development of a then-high-risk film project” but adds that “the story ends, disappointingly, in pre-production” rather than also describing the shooting of the film. Still, if you are a fan of that movie, you may want to hunt it down.