Robert E. Howard Days is here again. The annual gathering to celebrate one of the twin towers of modern fantasy at his home in Cross Plains, TX. And I won't be going. I'm definitely feeling a few pangs of regret and a fair bit of FOMO.
I suppose I'll be there tangentially; David Hardy is bringing a Solomon Kane fanzine in which he asked me to contribute a short essay.
Two years ago I attended the mecca for Howard-heads, staying in a rented home with Deuce Richardson and Ken Lizzi. You can read the sordid tale of our exploits here. If you want more there's an oral history of it here on this episode of the Rogues in the House podcast, where I was joined by fellow guests Jason Waltz and Jason Ray Carney.
I came back loaded up with more loot than a Viking raid of the Irish coast circa 780 AD.
I do absolutely plan to get back one day, and hopefully soon. One Howard Days is not enough. I'd like to see Howard's home and Higginbothom's again and take in the panels, but also the fantastic human companionship. Shake Will Oliver's hand for example for his herculean task of researching and writing Robert E. Howard: The Life and Times of a Texas Author. Have a great trip Will! And the Shiner Bock is not drinking itself.
In 2023 I was asked to present a paper at an academic panel. I thought I'd share that here, since I only recited it orally and it has never seen print elsewhere.
Here is Far Countries of the Mind: The Frontier Fantasy of Robert E. Howard.
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| 2023 Glenn Lord Symposium panel... left to right Dierk Gunther, me, Will Oliver, Jason Ray Carney. |
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Far countries of the mind: The frontier fantasy of Robert E. Howard
When Jason asked me to present a paper at the Glenn Lord Symposium, I wanted to do something that would both be on point with the man of the hour, but also spoke to why we need to seek out new experiences and new landscapes.
This is my first trip to Cross Plains, a far country at least to this son of Massachusetts.
Any Jack London fans here?
Howard certainly was; he referred to London as “this Texan’s favorite writer,” and boasted that London “stands head and shoulders above all other American writers.”
London is today best known for his novels The Call of the Wild, White Fang, and The Sea-Wolf, and short stories like “To Build a Fire.”
London actually did write some notable fantasy, including a book which held Howard in a particular possession: The Star-Rover.
But compared to Howard, London’s literary corpus was principally set here, in a recognizable historical framework contemporary times. The Klondike, and the South China Sea.
Why?
Born in 1876, three decades before Howard, London was able to experience life in a way Howard could not.
London had a literal frontier to set his stories: The Klondike, Yukon territory up in northwest Canada. London experienced North America’s last frontier first-hand. In 1897, a 21-year-old London took part in the gold rush in search of fame and fortune. His adventures in this vast, unforgiving, awe-inspiring expanse of wilderness informed the remainder of his writing career. It was something akin to magic.
In the last chapter of The Call of the Wild, “The Sounding of the Call,” John Thornton, Buck and their companions embark on a long overland voyage in search of a lost mine, pushing the boundaries of the gold rush into uncharted lands. Here it’s as though the characters have left reality and entered the land of myth. A hunt for treasure in a dangerous, unknown, and fantastic world, not so far from the likes of Conan as you might think.
London’s language here is heightened, rarefied, almost otherworldly. Indulge me this reading:
“When Buck earned sixteen hundred dollars in five minutes for John Thornton, he made it possible for his master to pay off certain debts and to journey with his partners into the East after a fabled lost mine, the history of which was as old as the history of the country. Many men had sought it; few had found it; and more than a few there were who had never returned from the quest. This lost mine was steeped in tragedy and shrouded in mystery. No one knew of the first man. The oldest tradition stopped before it got back to him. From the beginning there had been an ancient and ramshackle cabin. Dying men had sworn to it, and to the mine the site of which it marked, clinching their testimony with nuggets that were unlike any known grade of gold in the Northland.
But no living man had looted this treasure house, and the dead were dead; wherefore John Thornton and Pete and Hans, with Buck and half a dozen other dogs, faced into the East on an unknown trail to achieve where men and dogs as good as themselves had failed. They sledded seventy miles up the Yukon, swung to the left into the Stewart River, passed the Mayo and the McQuestion, and held on until the Stewart itself became a streamlet, threading the upstanding peaks which marked the backbone of the continent.
… on this great journey into the East, straight meat was the bill of fare, ammunition and tools principally made up the load on the sled, and the time-card was drawn upon the limitless future.”
We’re in Holy Grail territory here, or perhaps the land of the Jewels of Gwahlur. Possibly.
Born 30 years after London, Howard lived in a world in which the frontier, at least in the continental U.S., had closed. In 1906, the west was only recently settled but was settled nonetheless. After Wounded Knee the days of Indian raids were largely over.
In Howard’s time the “gold rush” was not individuals seeking wealth, but oil companies setting up shop in Texas and pumping the land of black gold, leaving broken bodies and despoiled land in their wake.
Faced with this unsatisfying reality Howard turned his typewriter to stories set in the world of fantasy, where a frontier of the mind could still be found.
The Hyborian Age is Howard’s impossibly ancient re-creation of the western, when the entire world was still a frontier to be explored, great plains and vistas of wild lands to be traveled and settled, forgotten cities and their riches waiting to be discovered and plundered, and decadent cities and civilizations ripe for treading under the sandaled feet of barbaric races.
It was also a place where life had meaning, because it was put to the test.
Back to London, in his story “In a Far Country” two civilized slackers serving as part of an expedition in the Klondike opt to leave their party and hole up for the worst of the winter in a cabin. They succumb to their own sloth and the dark isolation of the terrible cold north. It’s dark and terrible (and wonderful).
From "In a Far Country":
“When a man journeys into a far country, he must be prepared to forget many of the things he has learned, and to acquire such customs as are inherent with existence in the new land; he must abandon the old ideals and the old gods, and oftentimes he must reverse the very codes by which his conduct has hitherto been shaped. To those who have the protean faculty of adaptability, the novelty of such change may even be a source of pleasure; but to those who happen to be hardened to the ruts in which they were created, the pressure of the altered environment is unbearable, and they chafe in body and in spirit under the new restrictions which they do not understand. This chafing is bound to act and react, producing divers evils and leading to various misfortunes. It were better for the man who cannot fit himself to the new groove to return to his own country; if he delay too long, he will surely die.”
This was Howard’s model; these lands were hard, and broke many, but they were a testing ground, where life was vivid and real, and you could emerge from it transformed if it did not destroy you.
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| Artist credit: Alex Kerr. |
Being of Texas Howard has always been a western writer, even if not always recognized as such. According to Glenn Lord (and you knew I had to reference him here), Howard wrote 41 westerns over his career, all but four prior to 1933. These include Weird Westerns like “The Hoofed Thing,” “The Black Hound of Death,” his humorous Breckenridge Elkins stories, and even pulpy historical fiction like “The Vultures of Whapeton.” His “Marchers of Valhalla” takes place in a prehistoric Texas.
Karl Edward Wagner in Echoes of Valor described Howard’s work a “fusion of Old World Myth and Old West Legend.” Mark Finn has made mighty inroads with Blood and Thunder.
But mostly he’s known as the Conan guy.
Another Howard scholar who sought to rectify this narrow view was the late great Steve Tompkins. In “How the West Was Wondered” in the April 2005 The Cimmerian journal, Tompkins quipped, “Robert E. Howard’s sense of humor could be plenty dark, and we can but hope that he would have been amused by his status as a perennial absentee, a Nowhere Man of Texas Literature. He has become a figure of world-historical significance in modern fantasy without ever figuring in the literary annals of his home state.”
Tompkins essay includes a William Carlos Williams citation. Williams described America as being the perhaps the only nation capable of flooding the civilized world with “rich regenerative violence” because of its frontier legacy.
And when we see the Picts flooding over the walls of Valenso’s stockade at the end of “The Black Stranger,” we understand.
Howard had no contemporary frontier in which to tell his stories, like London had. But Howard’s violent fantasy frontiers regenerated reader’s minds that were no longer offered the possibility of somewhere else.
The Hyborian Age became Howard’s Far Country, a place where he could hurl off the shackles of modern courtesies, conformity, and expectation, through larger-than-life figures like Kull and Conan.
We need a frontier. I sometimes wonder if our lack of unclaimed land is at the root of our current national and international unrest. At least here in the U.S. we don’t do well with restrictions and imposed scarcity.
We feel the need for frontiers without, and we feel them within. Howard needed them, something beyond the close walls of his Cross Plains bedroom, crying out for individual liberty, the only thing worth a damn.
The Hyborian Age is Howard’s impossibly ancient re-creation of the western, when the entire world was still a frontier to be explored, great plains and vistas of wild lands to be traveled and settled, forgotten cities and their riches waiting to be discovered and plundered, and decadent cities and civilizations ripe for treading under the sandaled feet of the barbaric races. In “Beyond the Black River” a small group of settlers struggle to make a living on the edge of a vast, dark Pictish wilderness, and is essentially a western masquerading as a weird tale. Consciously or unconsciously the west crept into his fantasy, which lent them much of their unique character.
As has been well documented, Howard began to turn away from fantasy, and toward stories of the old west, specifically the history of Texas. Howard often waxed poetically of these bygone times. In a December 1934 letter to Lovecraft he relayed a road trip he and good friend Truett Vinson took to the wild and isolated frontier village of Lincoln, home to the infamous and bloody Lincoln County War. Howard described his arrival as stepping into an elder age where old ghosts stalked its dusty, haunted streets, and of catching a glimpse of the once limitless frontier in the open desert plains west of the Pecos River.
In this old town of ghosts he saw the frontier.
Had he lived longer he would have written these stories; while this assertion involves some degree of speculation his own words layer that assertion with more than a veneer of Truth. I offer this passage from one of his letters:
Well they have gone into the night, a vast and silent caravan, with their buckskins and their boots, their spurs and their long rifles, their wagons and their mustangs, their wars and their loves, their brutalities and their chivalries, they have gone to join their old rivals, the wolf, the panther and the Indian, and only a crumbling ‘dobe wall, a fading trail, the breath of an old song, remain to mark the roads they travelled. But sometimes when the night wind whispers forgotten tales through the mesquite and the chaparral, it is easy to imagine that once again the tall grass bends to the tread of a ghostly caravan, that the breeze bears the jingle of stirrup and bridle-chain, and that spectral camp-fires are winking far out on the plains.
We would have had some amazing western literature from Howard’s typewriter, blending poetic flourishes with realism. Possibly tales about Billy the Kid or John Wesley Hardin, of whose tales he regaled Lovecraft at length. Maybe something as poignant as Larry McMurtry’s Lonesome Dove (McMurtry was a Howard fan, by the way), blending virtue and violence and an unflinching look at what a cattle drive might actually look like, when aid was far away and Indians and cattle-rustlers stood in for Picts and Zamorian thieves.
Howard’s mind was in a far country; maybe he tarried there too long.
Sadly we don’t have his great tale of Texas. But what we do have are his stories of impossibly distant frontier life, in a far country, Beyond the Black River.
