Remembering Wolfshead

[Originally published in The Dark Man: The Journal of Robert E. Howard Studies, Vol. 5, No. 1, March 2010. Copyright 2010 by The Dark Man.]

Robert E. Howard has been a huge part of my life. Amazing to think that I have been reading, enjoying, studying, reflecting on, and commenting on writings by and about Howard for a little over four decades. Today I am recalling a major milestone in my development as a Howard enthusiast --the 1968 Lancer Books paperback Wolfshead (ISBN: 0-447-73721-060).

Like many Howard readers of my generation, my first exposure to the author's work was with my discovery of the Lancer Conan series. Marc Cerasini introduced me to the Lancer series when I was twelve. To this day, every time I hear The Doors' "Light My Fire" I flash back to when I was lying on my couch in my old house reading Conan the Warrior while the song was playing on the radio. I am not kidding when I say this happens every time I hear that song. That's the sort of impact the Conan books had on me --it was a formative, transcendental, life-altering experience. At the time I was introduced to them, four Conan volumes had already appeared: Adventurer, Warrior, Conqueror, and Usurper. These were soon followed by King Kull and the volume simply entitled Conan. I vividly recall my first sight of these on the book racks of various drug stores and 5&10 stores of that vanished era.

I was no less excited when I first beheld the cover of Wolfshead displayed on the book rack. My eyes were drawn right to it, for here was another glorious, eye-popping cover painting by Frank Frazetta. The cover depicts a barbarian swordsman, this one a Nordic blond, grappling with a monstrous green serpent in some ancient temple. In the background lurks a mysterious robed figure. Now please remember that I was only thirteen at the time, and Howard was being marketed as the master of "sword and sorcery" fiction. But my initial reaction was like, wow, here's another cool barbarian character --some guy named Wolfshead!

The other feature of that cover that immediately caught my eye was something that doesn't embarrass me now. That was the author line: Robert E. Howard. It just said "Robert E. Howard" --no "and L. Sprague de Camp," no "and Lin Carter," no "edited by L. Sprague de Camp." I grabbed the book like a junkie seizing a package of unadulterated heroin.

When I got home I was able to examine the book more closely. I soon realized that I had embarked on a voyage of discovery. As I looked over the back-cover copy, it began to dawn on me that this was not a collection of stories about a single character like the previous Howard volumes. Opening the cover to the teaser page, I found the opening of the story "Wolfshead" quoted. Okay: "Wolfshead" was the name of a story and not a character. Silly me. But what hit me was that, unlike the previous Howard stories I had read, this one was written in the first person. And it was a horror story, not a heroic fantasy. In his Conan introductions, de Camp had made passing mention of the fact that Howard had written in a variety of genres. At that time, for some reason, I hadn't expected to read any of these other works. But now, I was getting my first indication that Howard was also a noteworthy author of horror stories.

On to the introduction: The back-cover copy had promised "a special introduction by the author." I was looking forward to reading it. Finally, an introduction that did not consist of some editor's or "posthumous collaborator's" evaluation of Howard's fiction --just Howard's own take on his writing. I read what Howard had to say with interest, but in the back of my mind, I wondered when and why he had written these words. Then I reached the end of the piece, where I was startled to learn that it was an excerpt from a letter to H.P. Lovecraft. I had not read Lovecraft at this point, but was aware of him. I could not fail to recall the peculiar name I knew by reputation as that of a great horror writer. So, here was another major discovery: the Lovecraft-Howard correspondence.

In the days that followed, I devoured the collected stories and was not disappointed. First up, "The Black Stone." This was the first Howard story that I read in a genre other than heroic fantasy, and the genre was horror. The first-person narrative was different from the third-person action tales I had read previously, but no less compelling. I savored this eerie story of mystery and menace, and it remains a favorite to this day.

The second story in the collection was "The Valley of the Worm." I was pleased to find that heroic fantasy was by no means absent from Wolfshead. What do I need to say about "The Valley of the Worm"? It's a top-of-his-game Howard story, and a top-ten favorite on everybody's list. And I first read it in Wolfshead.

After "Valley," we come to the story that gives the collection its title. Here was Howard's non-traditional take on a traditional icon of Gothic horror, the werewolf. "Wolfshead" is more interesting to me now in retrospect than it was upon first reading. The story, with its colorful cast gathered at a remote outpost and stalked by a demonic figure, can be seen as a precursor to a much later tale, "The Black Stranger." I'm still not quite sure why "Wolfshead" was chosen to serve as the title story for the collection when there were more impressive stories to choose from. My guess is that the title is both brief and very distinctive. And if some kid was fooled into thinking this was a collection about a new series character, that probably didn't hurt either.

The following story, "The Fire of Asshurbanipal," contained some more notable firsts. Since I read Wolfshead long before any of Howard's westerns, I was thrilling to his depiction of gunfights for the first time. Until now it had all been swords, battle axes, and the like. And it would be years before a specialty publisher issued the tales of El Borak. "The Fire of Asshurpanipal" provided my first encounter with one of Howard's Middle Eastern adventurers.

"The House of Arabu" was the second story in the collection to feature a blond barbarian, so the Frazetta cover wasn't totally misleading. Although the cover does not depict an actual scene from either "The Valley of the Worm" or "The House of Arabu," it captures the mood of the latter quite nicely.

"The Horror from the Mound" was the first story I read in which the author utilized a regional Southwestern setting based on his first-hand knowledge. (Little did I then know that this story was actually Howard's first attempt to use the Southwest in his fiction.) In any case, Howard was on to something. The descriptions of the protagonist's hardscrabble existence lingered with me long after the story's vampire menace had faded.

Rounding out the collection was "The Cairn on the Headland." This remains one of my favorite Howard horror stories. In this tale, the narrator glimpses the horrific metaphysical reality underlying the myths of old. Here also was the first reference to the battle of Clontarf that I encountered in a Howard story --or anywhere else for that matter.

Such are my memores of Wolfshead, all those years ago. Hopefully, they might shed a little light on Howard's literary reemergence after decades of obscurity. Certainly that old paperback, now crumbling with age, holds a pivotal place in my own development as a Howard reader. "The Black Stone," "The Valley of the Worm," "Wolfshead," "The Fire of Asshurbanipal," "The House of Arabu," "The Horror from the Mound," and "The Cairn on the Headland" --all these are Robert E. Howard stories I read before I read Bran Mak Morn and Solomon Kane. The Dell paperback Bran Mak Morn was issued in 1969, and three paperbacks collecting the Solomon Kane stories appeared soon afterwards. I consider it fortuitous that publishers did not wait until all the fantasy series characters were in paperback before issuing Howard stories from other genres. Had this been so, Howard would have been pigeon-holed as a "sword and sorcery guy" that much longer.

That is why I consider the publication of Wolfshead something of a milestone. In the beginning there was just Conan, King Kull, and "sword and sorcery." Wolfshead took me to the next level.

BLOOD LUST: Robert E. Howard's Spicy Adventures

[Recent blogs have consisted of excerpts from my original fiction, in the interests of self-promotion. This time I am offering another of my essays on Robert E. Howard. "Blood Lust" was originally published in The Cimmerian in 2005, and was very well received. It went on to win The Cimmerian's Hyrkanian Award. The version here is slightly longer than the one that appeared in print, so worth reading even if you're already familiar with the printed version. This version Copyright 2009 by Charles Hoffman.]

“The girl looked up at him, her face like a dim white rose in the dark…
“`Tell me.’ His voice was soft, soothing, as one speaks to a babe.
“`Le Loup,” she gasped, her voice swiftly growing weaker. ‘He and his men --descended upon our village-- a mile up the valley. They robbed --slew-- burned…I ran. He, the Wolf, pursued me --and-- caught me--’ The words died away in a shuddering silence.
“`I understand, child. Then--?’
“`Then --he --he --stabbed me--with his dagger--oh, blessed saints! --mercy--’
“Suddenly the slim form went limp. The man eased her to the earth, and touched her brow lightly.
“`Dead!’ he muttered.
“Slowly he rose, mechanically wiping his hands upon his cloak. A dark scowl had settled on his somber brow. Yet he made no wild, reckless vow, swore no oath by saints or devils.
“`Men shall die for this,’ he said coldly.”

--“Red Shadows” Weird Tales, August 1928


“…He laughed at her struggles as his arms savored each intimate charm. ‘I’m no tell-tale, nor blackmailer! I’m not threatenin’ you. I don’t have to!’
“His mouth crushing hers thirstily --the way his muscular arms defeated her frenzied struggles-- was enough to convince her. But, jerking her mouth free, she stormed defiantly: ‘Damn you, let me go! I’ll kill you…you can’t--’
“Her defiance broke in a despairing shriek as she realized the futility of her resistance.
“Presently, as he looked down at her where she lay weeping in rage, shame and humiliation, he started to speak; then he changed his mind, shrugged his shoulders and headed for the door.
“There was no mercy in the game she played, and she had no reason to expect any.”

--“Murderer’s Grog” Spicy-Adventure Stories, January 1937


What a difference eight years make!

The first quotation is from one of Robert E. Howard’s best-known stories, “Red Shadows.” It served to introduce readers to one of Howard’s most memorable heroes, the dour Puritan swordsman, Solomon Kane, a religious fanatic so morally upright that he takes it upon himself to protect all in peril and stamp out evil wherever he finds it. In “Red Shadows,” he seeks to avenge a girl ravaged by a vicious bandit called Le Loup, Kane’s opposite, an amoral thrill-seeker who lives to gratify his lustful appetites at the expense of those weaker than himself.

The second quotation is from the denouement of “Murderer’s Grog” by “Sam Walser.” This story features a very different sort of protagonist, one Wild Bill Clanton, described by the author as a “sailor, gun-runner, blackbirder, pearl-poacher, and fighting man deluxe.” One might also add “serial rapist” to Clanton’s resume-- “Murderer’s Grog” is not the only story in which Clanton forces himself on a woman.

The irony of the contrast between Solomon Kane and Wild Bill Clanton would have been lost on any who chanced to read both these stories upon their original publications in the pulp fiction magazines of the 1920s and `30s --such readers would have had no way of knowing that Robert E. Howard and Sam Walser were one and the same. Walser was a pseudonym --an ancestor’s name-- that Howard used for the Wild Bill Clanton series written in the final phase of his career. Debuting in Weird Tales back in 1928, Solomon Kane had been the first of Howard’s heroes to appear in print. Premiering in Spicy-Adventure Stories in April 1936, a mere two months before Howard’s death, Wild Bill Clanton was most likely the last of Howard’s heroes the author saw introduced. (He may or may not have lived to see his western hero Buckner J. Grimes debut in the June 1936 issue of Cowboy Stories.)

So how was it that the creator of Solomon Kane came at the last to write a series of tales in which, essentially, Le Loup is the hero? In the beginning, it was solely for the money. Weird Tales was never a financially secure publication; it teetered on the verge of bankruptcy throughout its thirty-year history. Payment to authors was often late, and this considerably worsened during the Depression. Early in 1935, Howard was burdened by medical expenses for his aging mother, including a serious operation. At the time of his greatest need, payment from Weird Tales continued to grow ever more unreliable. Weird Tales had been paying Howard in a series of monthly installments, but these were cut off just as his need was greatest. On May 6, 1935, Howard sent “an urgent plea for money” to editor Farnsworth Wright that concluded, “A monthly check from Weird Tales may well mean for me the difference between a life that is at least endurable --and God alone knows what.” Wright responded with part of the money, but Weird Tales owed Howard over a thousand dollars at the time of his death.

Desperate for more dependable sources of income, Howard looked about for fresh markets to tap. To that end he had previously engaged fellow pulp writer Otis Adelbert Kline as his literary agent. Now, in 1935, he followed the lead of his friend and colleague, E. Hoffmann Price. Price was a star contributor to the lucrative “spicy stories” market. The so-called “spicy” pulps were a line of magazines that featured fairly standard genre stories, but with the added ingredient of sex. Of course, for the most part the sex in the spicy magazines was tame, even quaint, by today’s standards. Erotic titillation was furnished mostly by the trappings of sex; the heroine’s scanty undergarments, her inviting boudoir, passionate attitude and so forth. Any actual sexual activity was left to the reader’s imagination. Sexual episodes were indicated by a sentence trailing off in ellipses… followed by a discreet line drop before the story resumed in the next paragraph. Both the cover paintings and the interior illustrations hinted that the magazine’s contents were hot stuff, but the actual stories always seemed to promise more than they delivered. Even so, they were condemned by prudish critics as an affront to decency.

The company that published the spicy line was, as a business tactic for avoiding official censure, known variously as the Trojan Publishing Company or Culture Publications. The first spicy title was Spicy Detective Stories, its premiere issue dated April 1934. It was joined in July by Spicy Mystery Stories and Spicy-Adventure Stories. The last of the primary spicy magazines was Spicy Western Stories, which did not appear until 1936. Companion magazines from the same publisher included Snappy Adventure Stories, Snappy Detective Stories, and Snappy Mystery Stories. The “Snappy” titles were not appreciably different from those bearing the “Spicy” imprint.

Most pulp writers who submitted work to the spicy titles did so --like Howard-- under pseudonyms. E. Hoffmann Price was bold enough to allow his work for the spicy pulps to appear under his real name. In fact, the spicies were Price’s single biggest pulp market, with over a hundred and fifty stories published in them over the years. Price wrote for Spicy Western as well as for Spicy-Adventure. According to Glenn Lord, Price revealed that most of the stories published in the spicies were actually provided by a select inner circle of half a dozen writers utilizing a vast array of pseudonyms. Price asserted that for an outsider attempting to crack that inner circle, it was as difficult as for the proverbial rich man entering the gates of Heaven. Even so, Robert E. Howard did it handily.

Howard found in the spicy pulps just the sort of reliable revenue source that he so desperately needed. For one thing, the pay was good. Spicy-Adventure paid at the rate of one cent per word to its better authors, quite generous by the standards of the day. More important, however, was the promptness of payment. Authors were paid upon editorial acceptance of their material in contrast to Weird Tales’ editorial policy of payment upon publication. With Spicy-Adventure, Howard’s main complaint was that stories could be no longer than 5500 words. For the most part, however, he found the arrangement satisfactory enough to entertain plans to contribute to Spicy Mystery and Spicy Detective as well.

Altogether, Howard wrote eight spicy stories and a synopsis for an additional unwritten story. Of the eight completed stories, six feature the hot-blooded rogue, Wild Bill Clanton. Five of the Clanton stories appeared in Spicy-Adventure. The additional Clanton story, the two unrelated tales, and the synopsis remained unpublished for decades after Howard’s death, finally appearing in the `70s and `80s.

The first Clanton story, “The Girl on the Hell Ship” was received by the Otis Adelbert Kline literary agency on October 7, 1935, and duly forwarded to Frank Armer at the Trojan/Culture publishing group the next day. Otto Binder was at the time the Kline agency’s New York representative. Binder sold additional Clanton stories to Spicy-Adventure, including “The Purple Heart of Erlik” around December of 1935 and “The Dragon of Kao Tsu” in February 1936.

In a letter to Novalyne Price dated February 14, 1936 --Valentine’s Day-- Howard wrote at length about the spicy pulps, describing his work to date and detailing the editorial requirements:

“…A nice balance must be maintained --the stuff must be hot enough to make the readers bat their eyes, but not too hot to get the censors on them. They have some definite taboos. No degeneracy, for instance. No sadism or masochism. Though extremely fond of semi-nude ladies, they prefer her to retain some garment ordinarily --like a coyly revealing chemise. However this taboo isn’t iron-clad, for I’ve violated it in nearly every story I’ve sold to them. I’ve found a good formula is to strip the heroine gradually --she loses part of her clothes in one episode, some more in the next, and so on until the climax finds her in a state of tantalizing innocence. Certain words are taboo, also, although up to a certain point considerable frankness in discussing the female anatomy is allowed. The hero should be an American, and the action should take place in some exotic clime. I’ve laid my yarns in the South Seas, in Tebessa in Algeria, in Shanghai, and in Singapore…My character is Wild Bill Clanton, a pirate, gun-runner, smuggler, a pearl-thief and slaver, and carefully avoids all moral scruples in his dealings with the ladies.”

Novalyne had once chided Howard for making heroes of such disreputable figures as gunfighter John Wesley Hardin. In his unabashed description of Clanton as such a scoundrel, Howard may have been subtly needling Novalyne. Note that Howard bluntly calls Clanton a “slaver” rather than using the charming euphemism “blackbirder.” Moreover, this occupation appears at the end of Clanton’s resume, right before mention of his lack of moral scruples in regards to women.

The Wild Bill Clanton series began to appear in Spicy-Adventure Stories starting with the April 1936 issue. Howard was already dead by the time most of them saw print. Interestingly, the six Clanton stories can be divided into three pairs, grouped by location and plot devices. “The Girl on the Hell Ship” and “Ship in Mutiny” are set in the South Seas. Closely linked, these two episodes tell how Clanton seizes and retains command of the Saucy Wench, and feature the only recurring character apart from the hero, the beautiful and headstrong “Celtic-Latin” hellcat Raquel O’Shane, distinguished from paler Howard sex goddesses by a splash of Hispanic blood that presumably accounts for her stormy temper. The next two stories, “The Purple Heart of Erlik” and “The Dragon of Kao Tsu,” transpire in the Oriental port cities of Shanghai and Singapore, respectively. Each unfolds as a caper to acquire a priceless relic. The final pair of tales consists of “Desert Blood” and “Murderer’s Grog.” The former takes place in French Algeria, the latter in British India. Both involve gun-running and exotic femmes fatale.

“The Girl on the Hell Ship” was retitled “She Devil” by the editor of Spicy-Adventure Stories, and featured as the lead story in the April 1936 issue. The story was also chosen for the cover illustration. As was often the case in the pulps, the cover did not accurately reflect the contents of the story. In fact, the editor may have simply used a painting he had on hand, hence the need to change the story’s title. Instead of a ship in the South Pacific, the cover depicts a tavern in the Yukon or some such place. Gruff male patrons are clad in furs and other heavy clothing. A young brunette girl prances merrily through their midst, cheerfully raising a shot glass. Seemingly impervious to cold that make tough men huddle in furs, the cover girl is clad only in a red bra and microskirt, stockings and garters.

Readers familiar with Howard’s work will recognize plot elements in “She Devil” that the author employed previously in the Conan story, “The Pool of the Black One” (Weird Tales, October 1933). Like Clanton, Conan appears after swimming to a ship, having abandoned a leaky boat. Both protagonists were in that situation as the result of earlier predicaments. Aboard ship, Conan meets the pirate captain, Zaporavo, who has abandoned his usual trade to sail into unknown waters. Zaporavo, like the tyrannical Bully Harrigan encountered by Clanton, broods over maps and charts as he searches for some mysterious treasure kept secret from the crew. In both stories, the captain meets his fate after landfall on an island. Conan and Clanton assume command of their respective ships, which must take flight from the island’s dangers. Conan also appropriates Zaporavo’s sultry mistress, Sancha. Sancha is from Zingara, Howard’s Hyborian Age counterpart of seventeenth-century Spain. Like Raquel O’Shane, she is possessed of fiery Latin blood.

The other interesting aspect of “She Devil” is the manner in which Raquel O’Shane mentally compares Bill Clanton to Bully Harrigan; “He was a man at least, not a beast like Harrigan.” Harrigan is described as “a bellowing, red-eyed, hairy monstrosity,” broad as a door” with “a chest and arms muscled and hairy as an ape’s.” Not a pretty picture, but Clanton engages in the same shady enterprises as Harrigan, is just as ruthless, and more devious. But the author holds up Clanton as a superior type, reflected in his appearance. “Clean-waisted” is a term Howard sometimes uses to physically distinguish a brawny hero from a brawny villain. Raquel is immediately taken by Clanton’s rugged good looks. To be fair, however, she has also had to constantly avoid being pummeled and slapped around by Harrigan. “That’s no way to treat a lady!” Clanton asserts gallantly. He is not one to physically abuse women --yet. That aspect of his personality only emerges in the subsequent stories.

“Ship in Mutiny” is a direct sequel to “She Devil.” Notably, it’s the only Clanton story never to appear in the pages of Spicy-Adventure Stories. Commentators on this usually blame Raquel. Editorial policy dictated that the hero should remain footloose, savoring the charms of many women rather than staying more or less monogamous. In “Ship in Mutiny” Clanton does enjoy passionate sex with the island princess Lailu but, faithful in his fashion, returns to Raquel. The editorial mandate was clear; Raquel had to go. She does not reappear in any of the remaining episodes.

In considering the rejection of “Ship in Mutiny” by Spicy-Adventure, commentators tend to look no further. However, other factors may have contributed to its unsuitability. In a letter to H. P. Lovecraft dated December 5, 1935, Howard complained that writing for the spicy pulps “requires a deft, jaunty style foreign to my natural style.” The first story, “She Devil,” was written in this jaunty style, with touches of playfulness and humor. “Ship in Mutiny,” on the other hand, is more typical of Howard’s prose, grimmer and more intense.

The sexual element is more pronounced than in the previous story. In most pulp fiction, the hero inevitably gets the girl; there is little in the way of sexual tension. But Howard recognized the potential of sexual tension to enhance the overall suspense. Thus the villain Tanoa lusts mightily after Raquel, even as Clanton is aroused by Lailu. Passages speak of eager hands itching to cup velvety breasts. Raquel is in danger of being lured away from Raquel by Lailu’s ample charms.

Of course, the pulp fiction double standard is in effect. Clanton actually bedding a woman of another race is perfectly understandable; boys will be boys. But when a nonwhite man even lusts after a white woman, his desire alone is usually a death sentence. In due course, Clanton fights and kills the island chief Tanoa. Clanton had previously rescued Raquel from a Kanaka native in “She Devil,” but that bout was just a warm-up for Tanoa. Tanoa is a half-breed whose European education includes “boxing in Oxford.” In several stories, Howard introduces a barbaric character who has had the benefit of some sort of civilized education or training; such a character is always presented as an especially dangerous foe. Most notable is a virtually identical character, Santos, for the Sailor Steve Costigan story, “Fist and Fang” (Fight Stories, May 1930). Other such characters could be said to include John De Albor from “Moon of Zembabwei” (Weird Tales, February 1935, as “The Grisly Horror”), or for that matter, Conan himself.

Perhaps it is this mingling of civilized and barbaric traits that accounts for Tanoa’s extreme viciousness. In addition to making the story a little too hot, Howard may have violated the publisher’s stricture against sadomasochistic elements. When Clanton is Tanoa’s captive, the half-breed villain declares, “We’ll find the girl and make her watch while I skin him alive! I’ll make a garment of his hide and force her to wear it always about her loins to remind her how her lover died!” It is a sadistic fantasy worthy of the Marquis himself.

The other two spicy stories written by Howard and unpublished in his lifetime do not feature Wild Bill Clanton. They are “Guns of Khartum” and “Daughters of Feud.” Both merit some comment. “Guns of Khartum” is perhaps most notable for its background. It is set in the Sudan in 1885, during the fall of the besieged city of Khartum. The ten-month siege of Khartum was the culmination of an uprising of Islamic militants led by a religious figure called the Mahdi. The famed British military hero Chinese Gordon perished when Khartum fell. In Howard’s story, an American ivory hunter named Emmett Corcoran is one of the defenders of Khartum. Corcoran battles the Islamic hordes, a French renegade in league with them, and even the Mahdi himself. In a calm during the storm, he finds time for heated sex with both a virtuous white woman and a sinister woman of color.

The tale is anything but “jaunty.” An editor may well have deemed it excessive. The physical and emotional violence is unrelenting, and the sexual content is very intense. Just offstage, white city-dwellers are being slaughtered by non-white invaders. In the aftermath of the siege, the blonde heroine is enslaved in a harem for five months. At one point, the hero beds a woman he finds sexually alluring but otherwise despises. This last incident is certainly a commonplace situation, but perhaps a little too real for the spicy pulps.

In his Valentine’s Day letter to Novalyne Price, Howard mentions setting spicy stories in the South Seas, Algeria, Shanghai, and Singapore. He then mentions yet another story, this one taking place in Kentucky. This last setting is a bet of a jarring note, coming after a string of exotic locales. Kentucky seems an unlikely backdrop for glamour and intrigue. Passion crosses all boundaries, however, as Howard sought to demonstrate in a story titled “Daughters of Feud.”

The subject of feuds between rival clans fascinated Howard to some extent, and he sometimes incorporated it into his fiction. One of the Breckinridge Elkins humorous westerns is entitled “The Feud Buster.” “The Valley of the Lost” and “The Man on the Ground” are horror stories with western setting, and a feud is part of the background in each. Most notably, a feud between factions in a lost city is the subject of “Red Nails,” Howard’s final Conan tale. A feud could even serve as a catalyst for the events of a spicy story.

In “Daughters of Feud,” Braxton Brent is the new schoolteacher in the rural backwater of Whiskey Run (which is not identified as specifically being in Kentucky in the actual story.) He presides over a one-room schoolhouse in which all ages are taught --from tots to nubile nineteen-year-old girls. Two of the latter, daughters of rival feuding families, erupt into a catfight in the middle of class. Dark-haired Ann and fair-haired Joan tear at each other, ripping garments, exposing breathtaking expanses of quivering young flesh, etc. Brent breaks them up and, to maintain discipline among the other unruly students, must administer corporal punishment. After class, he takes each girl in turn to the woodshed, which embroils him in trouble with both feuding families. Things are further complicated when he is overcome with passion for the untamed rustic beauty of Joan.

Howard told Novalyne that the editors said his Kentucky story was “too hot for them to handle.” They might well have added “too rough” and “too kinky.” The lovemaking between Brent and Joan is a tad more explicit than was commonplace in 1936. However, the more objectionable elements would have been the rough stuff. The hero is threatened with castration and the heroine is threatened with gang rape. Brent’s whipping of nineteen-year-old Ann’s naked buttocks with a leather strap is described in loving detail. To protect Brent from charges of partiality, Joan displays her own marked buttocks, which she had actually lashed herself with a switch.

The instances of whipping and self-flagellation in this story are no mere matter of happenstance. Howard’s personal library included such volumes as Experiences of Flagellation, A History of the Rod, and Curiosa of Flagellants and History of Flagellation. He also wrote poetry like “Limericks to Spank By” and “Good Mistress Brown,” the latter concerning the spanking of an adult woman. This does seem to indicate that Howard’s sexual interests extended beyond a simple taste for vanilla. These particular interests, however, are by no means rare. The spanking of a grown woman is often part of a “taming of the shrew” scenario in books and movies. Those who share the interest ate titillated, with the rest of the audience none the wiser. In the movie McLintock! John Wayne spanks Maureen O’Hara --clad in soaking wet undergarments-- in front of the whole town. The film is considered wholesome family entertainment.

Returning to the saga of Wild Bill Clanton, we come to the second pair of stories, “The Purple Heart of Erlik” and “The Dragon of Kao Tsu.” These twin tales unfold in exotic Far Eastern ports teeming with danger and intrigue. Rare artifacts of great value are sought by an assortment of colorful characters. Sinister, inscrutable Oriental villains add a dash of mystery and menace. Such is the very essence of pulp fiction. It is also the sort of thing a master like Howard could write in his sleep.

“The Purple Heart of Erlik” (Spicy-Adventure Stories, November 1936) takes place in Shanghai. Wild Bill Clanton has become a darker character since we saw him last. He does not actually rape the story’s heroine, Arline Ellis, but not for want of trying. When Clanton meets Arline in Shanghai, he tells her, “I’ve made a point to run into you in a dozen ports, and you always act like I had the plague…I came to Shanghai just because I heard you were here…” In contemporary parlance, he has been stalking her. Now comes the moment of truth, “If I didn’t think you were so good-looking, I’d smack your ears back!…Now are you going to be nice or do I have to get rough?…Nobody interferes with anything that goes on in alleys behind dumps like the
Bordeaux…Any woman caught here’s fair prey.”

Arline escapes thanks to the handy pitcher she breaks over Clanton’s head. For some reason, this scene was chosen for an illustration in the pages of Spicy-Adventure. The quote from the story that accompanies the picture reads, “Not even Wild Bill Clanton could stand up under a clout like that.” Clanton has an unfortunate tendency to get hit over the head in these stories. He is stunned by a pitcher and a gun barrel, both wielded by women. On other occasions, he is knocked cold by a belaying pin and a rifle butt that hits him hard enough to break the stock. Clanton will be lucky indeed not to suffer from some form of brain damage later in life.

One can only speculate as to why Howard portrayed Clanton as such a bastard. At the time he was writing the Clanton series, Howard was also writing the humorous western adventures of the powerful but good-natured Breckinridge Elkins. Nearly a score of these stories appeared in Action Stories during the final phases of Howard’s career. After writing so many stories about a character who is constantly being lied to and taken advantage of, the author may have indulged the urge to create a character who was nobody’s fool. Invisible behind the Sam Walser pseudonym, Howard was free to give reign to his darker impulses.

“The Dragon of Kao Tsu” (Spicy-Adventure Stories, September 1936) finds Wild Bill in Singapore. Not surprisingly, he lusts after the wealthy heiress Marianne Allison throughout the story. This time, however, his lust is further fueled by class resentment: “Probably it had never occurred to Old Man Allison’s pampered daughter Marianne that a man on Clanton’s social plane would even think of making a pass at her, but he had to clench his hands to keep them off her.” Remarkably, Clanton is on his best behavior: “[T]here was a limit to even his audacity, and he didn’t dare try any rough stuff on the daughter of Old Man Allison, millionaire and wooly wolf of finance that the old devil was.” Marianne enjoys being in charge: “Feeling perfectly safe from him, she took a feminine delight in tantalizing him. She was aware of her effect on him, and she enjoyed seeing the veins in his forehead swell with frustrated emotion.”

Eventually though, Clanton gains the upper hand. Marianne becomes indebted to him, and has a scandal to avoid. Clanton suggests that, instead of money, she pay her debt with her body. Marianne feigns agreement, then reneges --by striking Clanton on the head with a gun barrel. Though momentarily stunned, Clanton is able to prevent Marianne from fleeing. Swearing that she’ll keep at least one bargain, he then takes her by force. “`You don’t dare!’ she gasped, as he drew her roughly to him. ‘You don’t dare--’ …Bill Clanton didn’t even bother to reply to her ridiculous assertion.” Afterwards, he teases her about associating with men like himself. “Her reply was unprintable, but the look in her eyes contradicted her words as she took his arm and together they went out to the street.” The End.

So it’s really all okay. Or is it? Nowadays, of course, glib rationalizations like the one Howard uses ---her lips said, “No,” but her eyes said, “Yes” -- are deemed unacceptable. No means no. Another such rationalization is “he knew her better than she knew herself.” This one is applicable to James Bond in the movie Goldfinger, in which Bond forces himself on Pussy Galore and saves the American economy by doing so. This scene occurs in one of the most popular movies ever made, a film produced decades after Howard’s death. It was not condemned when the movie was released nor, as far as I know, since. Also, the romance of the popular characters Luke and Laura on the soap opera General Hospital began with a rape, and other sympathetic rapists have been featured on daytime dramas aimed at a primarily female audience. Lest we judge Howard too harshly, we must take this into consideration.

This is not to suggest that Howard just sort of unknowingly blundered into the rape scenes that occur in the Clanton series. He knew exactly what he was doing. In the synopsis for his unwritten spicy story, the hero is held up by a girl and Howard bluntly states “he knocked the pistol out of her hand and raped her.” Interestingly, the girl falls in love with the hero. As in “The Dragon of Kao Tsu,” all’s well that ends well.

In his Valentine’s Day letter, Howard informs Novalyne Price that in the spicies, a favorite formula is for the hero to accomplish what only the villain attempts in conventional yarns. This indicates that not only were rapes by the protagonist tolerated by the editors, but also that such scenes may have been fairly commonplace. Considerable scrutiny is required to adequately account for shifts in attitudes from one era to another. At one time topless women were taboo in motion pictures; now they are a familiar fixture. Conversely, nude baby photos, once so sweet and innocent, are now regarded with suspicion. The sexual attitudes of times gone by can seem odd, ironic or mystifying to people of later eras. As an example, consider these editorial guidelines from Frank Armer, publisher of the Trojan/Culture line of Spicy magazines (reproduced in the Cryptic Publications chapbook Risqué Stories #5):

1. In describing breasts of a female character, avoid anatomical descriptions.
2. If it is necessary for the story to have a girl give herself to a man, or be taken by him, do not go too carefully into details.
3. Whenever possible, avoid complete nudity of the female characters. You can have a girl strip down to her underwear, or transparent negligee or nightgown, or the thin, torn shreds of her garments. But while the girl is alive and in contact with a man, we do not want complete nudity.
4. A nude female corpse is allowable, of course.

It is therefore difficult to gauge Howard’s personal attitudes concerning rape based on the fiction he wrote for the spicy pulps. He may have been following a common magazine format for commercial reasons, or he may have simply been in a bad mood. To be fair, one should look at how he handles the subject in his other fiction. We have previously noted that a rape/murder became the catalyst of Solomon Kane’s quest for vengeance in “Red Shadows.” The matter of rape is also touched on in a pair of stories featuring Howard’s best-known creation. Between Solomon Kane and Wild Bill Clanton, there was Conan. Howard began writing the Conan series in 1932, roughly four years after the appearance of Kane in print and four years before the appearance of Clanton. The two stories of interest at present are “The Frost-Giant’s Daughter” and “The Vale of Lost Women.” Neither saw print during Howard’s lifetime. Perhaps they were a bit too hot for the pages of Weird Tales.

“The Frost-Giant’s Daughter” is set in the far North, where Conan encounters Atlai, the daughter of the god Ymir. The siren-like Atali lures men to their doom. Conan escapes Atali’s trap, but Atali barely escapes subsequent rape by Conan. In this story, Howard suggests that Conan was under a spell, and the author allows no actual rape to take place. In “The Vale of Lost Women,” Conan agrees to aid the virgin Livia, who offers her body as an inducement. He ultimately releases her from her agreement, stating that he has never taken a woman against her will and that holding Livia to such a bargain would be no different that forcing her. For the most part, rape or abuse of women, even by villains, is not a prominent fixture in the fiction of Robert E. Howard.

The third and final pair of Wild Bill Clanton adventures is comprised of “Desert Blood” and “Murderer’s Grog.” In both, Clanton is a “fish out of water” in the sense that these exploits find him, not at sea or in port, but further inland. Both plots involve gun-running. In both we meet exotic femme fatales who seem to spend much of their time lolling about on couches, cushions and divans while wearing revealing costumes.

“Murderer’s Grog” is much darker than “Desert Blood,” however. It appears to have been written a good deal later, when time was running out for Howard. In the Valentine’s Day letter, Howard remarks, “I’ve laid my yarns in the South Seas, in Tebessa in Algeria, in Shanghai and in Singapore.” If the order Howard mentions these locales reflects the order that their respective stories were composed (and in the case of the other episodes, it does), then “Desert Blood” was the third Clanton story to be written, after “She Devil” and “Ship in Mutiny” but before “The Purple Heart of Erlik” and “The Dragon of Kao Tsu.” The fact that Clanton displays better character in “Desert Blood” than in either “Erlik” or “Kao Tsu” also suggests earlier composition. Moreover, the Valentine’s Day letter does not mention the setting for “Murderer’s Grog.” That story only arrived at the Kline literary agency two and a half months later, on April 27, 1936. Otto Binder subsequently sold it to Spicy-Adventure in May. Therefore it does seem likely that it was written after a hiatus of weeks or months following the composition of the rest of the Clanton series. This makes “Murderer’s Grog” one of the last stories Robert E. Howard ever wrote.

The earlier story, “Desert Blood,” was actually the second Clanton story to be published. It appeared in Spicy-Adventure Stories for June 1936. Howard may or may not have lived to see it in print.

Set in Algeria, “Desert Blood” opens in the chambers of the local temptress Zouza. There Zouza successfully rebuffs the advances of Clanton, her feminine wiles enabling her to manipulate him. Preying on his vanity, she is able to convince him that only by killing a lion can he prove his manhood and win her. One would think that Wild Bill Clanton, famed as a brawler and womanizer, would possess greater self-esteem, but he submits to her terms. Leaving Zouza’s chambers, Clanton immediately runs into a woman he has met in his travels. She is Augusta Evans, an American schoolteacher (like Novalyne Price) vacationing abroad. Attractive but prim and aloof, she too rebuffs Clanton. Having gotten the cold shoulder twice in less than an hour, Clanton heads for a seedy dive to drink away his frustrations.

After a bout of hard drinking, Clanton comes to his senses on the back of a mule taking him into the desert to meet his guide for the lion-hunting safari. He does not recall setting out. The safari turns out to be a ruse to get rid of Clanton, who ends up captured by the desert sheik Ahmed. Ahmed, Zouza, and another seductress, Zulaykha, are part of a plot to appropriate Clanton’s cargo of guns. Clanton is rescued by the Bedouin beauty Aicha, disguised in western garb. In the epilog, Clanton learns that Aicha appropriated her garments from Augusta Evans, last seen riding naked on a runaway donkey back towards town.

It is admittedly possible that Howard had a certain schoolteacher ex-girlfriend in mind when he created Augusta Evans. Augusta’s embarrassing predicament at the end of the story could even be viewed as a sadistic humiliation fantasy. On the other hand, taking a pompous character down a peg has long been a staple of slapstick comedy. I tend to favor the latter notion.

“Desert Blood” is fairly upbeat in tone, even “jaunty.” For once, Clanton is given an unselfish motive for his undertakings. Regarding his current gun-running, we are told “there was more than money involved. He had a genuine sympathy for these mountain tribesmen, fighting for their lives against a ruthless European power.” Sympathy for the underdog is a redeeming trait shared by a number of Howard’s more roguish protagonists. Moreover, in both his El Borak adventures and in his correspondence with Lovecraft, REH expresses anti-imperialist sentiments. In “Desert Blood,” the rakish Clanton also displays uncharacteristic warmth towards Aicha.

Similarly, Clanton is atypically circumspect in dealing with the local temptress of the tale, Zouza. When Zouza rejects him, we are told that “it was easy to seen that she was not prompted by a coquettish whim, rising from a desire to be deliciously mastered after a mock resistance.” This indicates that Clanton is somehow able to discern the difference, and is possibly intended to mitigate the sort of behavior he exhibits towards the likes of Arline Ellis and Marianne Allison. Clanton makes no move to coerce Zouza. On the contrary, he caves in to her silly demands.

For some reason, I was given to wonder about the possible inspiration for this sequence. Much has been made of Howard’s advice to H. P. Lovecraft concerning writing for the spicies; “Just write up one of your own sex adventures altered to fit the plot.” This comment has been viewed as bluster, or a playful attempt to tweak the puritanical Lovecraft, but most often dismissed with a baffled shrug. One can only offer conjecture as to what Howard actually meant by this remark.

Conceivably, he was simply describing, in admittedly grandiose terms, a process by which he took a mundane incident and inflated it to heroic proportions for fictional purposes. Perhaps the Zouza episode, for example, was inspired by some instance in which Howard went out of his way to appease a female, to the point of doing something he would normally never consider. In the more colorful world of Wild Bill Clanton, the same sort of appeasement might entail killing a lion to impress an exotic mystery woman.

Whatever the case, “Desert Blood” is one of the spicier Clanton adventures. Wild Bill encounters no less than four alluring females, and those are just among the principle characters. In the background there are also “half a dozen dancing girls who had just enough Sudanese blood in them to impart an untamed voluptuousness found only in mixed breeds.” This talk of blood imparting untamed voluptuousness is part of a motif that runs through the story and indeed the entire series. The title “Desert Blood” has less to do with actual blood spilt in the fight scenes than with blood as a metaphor for the libido. Clanton’s first sight of Aicha sets “his already hot blood a-riot.” When Zulaykha offers herself, “not even the realization that only a miracle could keep his severed head from rolling in the sand within the next hour could cool the customary ardor of his reckless blood.” Just as in the South Seas, when the “magnificent figure” of Lailu “drove a pulse of passion through his blood in spite of his plight.” In Singapore, the mere sight of Marianne Allison crossing her legs “made the blood boil to his head.” There was no place in the pages of Spicy-Adventure Stories for either crude talk of “blue balls” or timid, clinical references to “raging hormones.” “Blood” was by far a more apt metaphor for passion. “Blood” alone could denote either sex or violence. It was a strong word Robert E. Howard made frequent, skillful use of.

“Murderer’s Grog” did not appear in Spicy-Adventure until the January 1937 issue. By that time, Howard had been moldering in his grave for half a year, the feast over, the lamps expired. “Murderer’s Grog” lingered like a bad aftertaste. Befitting its title, the last of Wild Bill Clanton’s exploits is a bitter hangover of a story. The bare bones of the plot are stark: Clanton attempts to rape a woman and is thwarted, but after a night at the bottle he resolves to try again and is successful. Fleshed out, the story is like a dark shadow of “Desert Blood.” The plot and location are similar, but the tone is redolent of bitterness and pain.

“Murderer’s Grog” takes place in British India, recalling the French Algeria setting of “Desert Blood.” Clanton is on another gun-running mission. Once again the story opens with Clanton’s visit to a local femme fatale. Sonya Ormanoff is a mysterious adventuress involved in secret dealings. Like Zouza, she enjoys lounging around in a revealing costume. Also like Zouza, Sonya attempts to brush Clanton off though she had previously displayed an interest in him. This time, however, Clanton is not to be distracted by a snipe-hunting trip. He carries her roughly to the couch and begins to undo her clothes, but gets no further. Sonya has burly male henchmen at her beck and call. Though Clanton fights ferociously, he is overwhelmed by their numbers. He is thrown out of Sonya’s apartment and down a flight of stairs. Sonya’s maid follows him into the courtyard “to indulge in the age-old feminine sport of taunting the fallen.”

As in the previous story, Clanton seeks to drown his troubles at this point. Once again, he heads for a vice den to brood, ogle dancing girls, and drink. Wild Bill’s hard drinking has been duly noted throughout the series. In “She Devil,” we are told that “liquor was to him what moonlight and perfume are to some men.” Indeed, the very sight of bottles of booze make Clanton’s eyes glisten. In “The Dragon of Kao Tsu,” Clanton is drinking in a bar when first seen. Eyeing Marianne Allison’s figure as she walks away from him causes Clanton to "moan with despair and grab the whiskey bottle.” In “Desert Blood,” Clanton retires to a hideaway where he “sat and drank and drank and drank…” As a result of that particular binge, he experiences a lapse of memory symptomatic of a problem drinker. Now Clanton’s career as a drinking man reaches a culmination in a story whose very title speaks of strong drink.

Swaggering into a local dive, Clanton demands “'something liquid with a kick.'” When he repeats his demand for “'liquid dynamite,'” he is offered brandy and even opium. Unknown to Clanton, he has enemies nearby, rival gun dealers. They bribe the bartender to serve him a concoction called bhang. Bhang is known as the drink of murder, capable of inducing homicidal madness. Clanton’s foes hope it will cause him to attack a British official he had a run-in with earlier. His subsequent arrest would get him out of the way.

Clanton drinks the bhang and calls for more. Soon he flies into a rage, abusing a dancer and challenging any man in the house to a fight. When no one takes up the challenge, he storms out. But instead of seeking out the British official, he heads back to Sonya Ormanoff. He fights his way through the henchmen. At the end of the tale, Clanton rapes Sonya and leaves her in tears before heading off to complete his gun deal. Here ends the saga of Wild Bill Clanton.

This time there is no question of the woman’s eyes belying her protests, or of Clanton intuitively discerning here repressed desire. Instead, Clanton simply dismisses her sobbing and abject humiliation with a shrug of his shoulders. No excuse is offered for his behavior, other than the revelation that Sonya was a Communist and plotted his downfall. But Clanton knew neither of these things the first time he attempted to take her. Neither was the bhang, the rage-inducing “murderer’s grog,” a factor by the end. Howard goes out of his way to mention that the fight with Sonya’s henchmen cleared Clanton’s head, and that he is in full command of his faculties when he rapes Sonya. The one truly extenuating circumstance, the malign influence of the murderer’s grog, is discarded by the author like an empty beer can.

Sonya Ormanoff is a character who deserved better treatment, by Howard as well as Clanton. We are told that she is a white woman who lives among the natives. “She was blond, with a glorious wealth of light gold hair, and her flesh was a purely white as unstained Northern snow.” Using terms like “purely white” and “unstained” serve to make Clanton’s defilement of Sonya seem all the more heinous. Sonya is comfortable in a foreign milieu and at ease wearing Eastern garb. Sonya had the potential to be the most interesting of all the Clanton women, a female counterpart to Howard adventurers like El Borak and Kirby O’Donnell. Instead, she is treated like a cheap throwaway.

After raping Sonya, Clanton muses, “There was no mercy in the game she played, and she had no reason to expect any.” And in the real world, that is the plain truth of the matter. A man who traffics with dangerous individuals runs the risk of being beaten up and/or killed. A woman who does so runs the risk of rape in addition to being beaten up and/or killed. But in the “jaunty” pages of Spicy-Adventure Stories, it is an extremely harsh lesson for a female character to learn at the hands of the story’s hero.

The bold adventuress Sonya Ormanoff is humbled in “Murderer’s Grog,” but Clanton himself seems little better off. As introduced in “She Devil,” Wild Bill Clanton is a self-assured winner. He starts out with nothing but a pair of pants and within twenty-four hours acquires an alluring lover and his own ship. In “Murderer’s Grog,” he is beleaguered and at bay. “Smoldering rage at the world in general, smarting vanity, and thwarted desire combined to make Bill Clanton a raging demon.” He give in to brooding and bitterly cursing his fate. “‘The British!’ raged Clanton, clenching his huge fists. ‘Always the damned British--’” This from a man who, in “Ship in Mutiny,” had nary a worry at all about escaping a British warship that was hunting him down.

Emblematic of Clanton’s desperation is his isolation from his natural element --the sea. The first pair of Clanton tales takes place in the South Seas, the second pair in Oriental port cities. “Desert Blood” takes place further inland, but only a hundred miles or so. “Murderer’s Grog,” on the other hand, is set far from any ocean. We are told that Clanton came to India from Russia, bringing his guns by camel train all the way through landlocked Afghanistan. “Desert Blood” contains a number of references to his identity as a seafarer. Clanton is “a man of the sea” whose face is “browned by the sun of the Seven Seas.” In “Murderer’s Grog,” however, there is but a lone fleeting mention of him walking with “the lurching roll of a seaman” as he heads off in search of liquor to drown his misery.

Clanton begins the series as a rogue and ends as a scoundrel. His later behavior is certain to be regarded as reprehensible by many modern readers, especially if they’re women. Naturally enough, he receives no comeuppance in stories written for the spicy pulps of yesteryear. Still, in “Murderer’s Grog,” he seems a man without a future. Given his drinking binges and repeated head injuries, he may well end up the toughest mug in the nursing home.

Howard began writing spicy stories as Sam Walser late in his career for purely commercial reasons. At the same time, he was busy with other projects as well. His humorous western tales of Breckinridge Elkins were popular with readers of Action Stories, and he created similar westerns for other magazines. Shortly before his death he sold the first installments in a new western series that had been commissioned by the editor of the prestigious and high-paying Argosy. Ultimately he was successful in recouping his finances. June 1936 saw Howard stories published in no less than five different magazines --Action Stories, Cowboy Stories, Spicy-Adventure Stories, Thrilling Mystery, and Weird Tales. In “Lone Star Fictioneer,” an essay recounting Howard’s writing career published in The Last Celt, Glenn Lord notes, “By the spring of 1936, he was enjoying an all-time high in sales.” David Drake echoes this fact in his introduction to the Howard paperback collection Cthulhu: The Mythos and Kindred Horrors, observing, “By 1936, Howard was selling regularly to Argosy, one of the top three pulp markets of the day. Robert E. Howard was thirty years old, and his career was about to take off.”

By most accounts, then, Howard’s career was back on track. But how did Howard himself feel about it? In another letter to Novalyne Price, written in late February 1936, he speaks of “my mother’s life ebbing away before my eyes, with my father breaking up and aging before me with the worry and strain we both labor under, and I myself faced with the wreckage of all my life’s plans and labors, and the utter ruin of my career.” (emphasis added) The fact that he went on to take his life a few months later indicates that Howard’s mood did not improve along with his finances. Perhaps money was not everything. Tales of heroic fantasy Howard written a year or more before were still appearing in Weird Tales. Now, these only served to remind him of his glory days.

The fiction of Robert E. Howard is for the most part lacking in misogynistic elements. Not so the fiction of Sam Walser. In the vast range of fiction Howard wrote under his own name, whenever a woman suffers, we are most often meant to feel empathy. This holds true whether in the case of the sadistic abuse of Joan in the horror story “Pigeons from Hell,” or in regards to the terror experienced by Yasmina at the hands of the Master of Yimsha in the Conan adventure, “The People of the Black Circle.” But in one of Howard’s final stories, “Murderer’s Grog,” we find the author in a bitter mood indeed. In the spring of 1936, Robert E. Howard saw the world becoming a very dark place. On June 11, he turned out the last light as he left it.

Escape From Eden: Genesis Subverted in "The Garden of Fear"

[This essay was originally published in The Dark Man: The Journal of Robert E. Howard Studies, Issue 5, Winter 2001. Copyright 2001 by Mind's Eye HyperPublishing / Iron Harp Publications. I have revised it slightly for this appearance.]

One of Robert E. Howard's most celebrated tales is "The Valley of the Worm." Since its original publication in 1934, it has been reprinted and anthologized many times. Its reknown is especially noteworthy since it features none of Howard's well-known series characters. "The Valley of the Worm" does, however, contain a number of common themes and motifs that Howard deals with individually in other stories: a barbarian hero, an imaginary prehistoric era, mysterious ruins, racial migration, reincarnation, the Picts, revenge, giant serpents, and an unearthly subterranean horror. For this reason, "The Valley of the Worm" has been cited as the quintessential Howard story. (See "The Valley of the Worm: A Gathering of Howard's Essential Creative Themes" by Rick McCollum in The Fantastic Worlds of Robert E. Howard.)

"The Valley of the Worm" is narrated by James Allison, a dying invalid who is able to recall all of his past incarnations. The tale begins with Allison's assertion that the narrative he is about to relate is the archetypal story of the dragon-slayer, the actual basis of all the world's myths of this type from Siegfried to St. George. In a past so remote that the continents have been reshaped a score of times since, Allison was the mighty warrior, Niord of the AEsir. In a mysterious lost valley, Niord does battle with a gigantic slug-like abomination he calls "the Worm." He perishes in the battle, but manages to slay the monster. Niord is reborn both as James Allison's incarnations and as every heroic myth-figure of Western civilization.

Niord is not a series character like Kull or Conan, but "The Valley of the Worm" is part of a loosely connected cycle linked by the common narrator James Allison. Howard wrote a handful of other tales narrated by Allison, mostly drafts and fragments unpublished in his lifetime. "Marchers of Valhalla," published posthumously, comes down to us as a complete draft, but the presentation of the reincarnation theme and James Allison himself differ markedly from that in "The Valley of the Worm." In "Marchers of Valhalla," Allison actually has something of an active role in the story's prologue and epilogue, and an explanation is offered for his visions of past lives. In "The Valley of the Worm," on the other hand, Allison remains offstage, narrating the incredible story of Niord from the shadows. This more ambiguous portrayal of Allison and his racial memory enhances the sense of wonder and awe that is so vital to the atmosphere of "The Valley of the Worm."

The Allison story that most closely resembles "The Valley of the Worm" is "The Garden of Fear." This is the only other James Allison narrative published during Howard's lifetime. In it, the role of Allison is once again that of the shadowy off-stage narrator. His past incarnation this time is another powerful blond warrior of the AEsir, Hunwulf. To rescue his mate, Hunwulf must somehow traverse a garden of deadly, bloodsucking plants and confront a strange winged man-like being. As in "The Valley of the Worm," the narrative transpires in an almost-unthinkably remote era of the distant past, during which tribes of the northern AEsir wander the globe in centuries-long drifts. Once again, a barbaric hero from the dawn of time confronts a chilling and mysterious supernatural menace. The narrative structure of "The Garden of Fear" closely matches that of "The Valley of the Worm." Each title refers to a geographic setting fraught with terrible danger --a garden of fear, and a valley of the worm, which is a common metaphor for death.

Given these similarities, "The Garden of Fear would seem a fitting companion piece to "The Valley of the Worm." It has not heretofore been regarded as such, however. No less than the more obscure Allison narratives, it has long been overshadowed by "The Valley of the Worm." This is not so surprising considering that the latter is regarded by many as Howard's best story. "The Garden of Fear," on the other hand, is usually viewed as a good, but not great, Howard story. One reason may be that "The Garden of Fear" ends on a quiet note that lacks the punch of the denoument of "The Valley of the Worm." "The Valley of the Worm" also opens on a high note:

You have heard the tale before in many guises wherein the hero was named Tyr, or Perseus, or Siegfried, or Beowulf, or Saint George. But it was Niord who met the loathy demonic thing that crawled hideously up from hell...[1]

Resonating with the power of the ageless myths it invokes, this opening passage is an irresistable hook that draws the reader in. But what of mythical allusions in "The Garden of Fear"?

The links between Niord's saga and those of Tyr, Perseus, et al, are made explicit by Howard in "The Valley of the Worm." There are ties to one of the great tales of antiquity in "The Garden of Fear" as well, only here the links are not so explicit. But even though he does little in the way of direct allusion, Howard nonetheless invokes an ancient story that lies at the very heart of Western culture. By looking just a little more closely at "The Garden of Fear," we can discern a wildly distorted version of nothing less than the Biblical account of creation from the Book of Genesis. And if that were not enough, Howard does more than simply rework elements of Genesis; he turns the Biblical creation myth completely upside down!

In comparing the story of Hunwulf with the story of Adam, we find instance after instance in which Howard stands Genesis on its head. We can start with the location evoked in the story's title; "the Garden of Fear" as opposed to "the Garden of Eden." In either case the garden is designated by a four-letter word, one beginning with "E" and one beginning with "F." However, Eden was a place where Man could dwell in a state of untroubled bliss, oblivious to worry or care. Fear, on the other hand, is the emotional state most fraught with turmoil and distress.

The story itself opens as James Allison recounts his ability to recall his past incarnations:

...I see with a clear, sure sight the grand panorama of lives that trail out behind me. I see the men who have been me, and I see the beasts who have been me.

For my memory does not end at the coming of Man. How could it, when the Beast so shades into Man that there is no clearly divided line to mark the boundaries of bestiality?...I see a vast shaggy, shambling bulk that lumbers clumsily yet swiftly, sometimes upright, sometimes on all fours. He delves under rotten logs for grubs and insects, and his small ears twitch continually. He lifts his head and bears yellow fangs. He is primordial, bestial, anthropoid; yet I recognize his kinship with the entity now called James Allison...[2]

It is worth noting that Howard makes no mention of Allison's bestial incarnations in "The Valley of the Worm." Their inclusion here stands as another contradiction to the Book of Genesis --evolution, not creation.

As in "The Valley of the Worm," the dying invalid James Allison derives satisfaction from describing the brawny warrior he was in a bygone age. He speaks of Hunwulf's yellow, lion-like mane, mighty shoulders, and "thews...like woven steel cords" [3] with evident pride. In two brief paragraphs, the bedridden Allison wistfully recalls growing to "manhood," "full manhood," and "fierce, sinewy, untamed manhood." [4] The source of all this manly pride is "the love of Gudrun" [5]:

What shall I say of Gudrun? How describe color to the blind? I can say that her skin was whiter than milk, that her hair was living gold with the flame of the sun caught in it, that the supple beauty of her body would shame the dream that shaped the Grecian goddesses. But I cannot make you realize the fire and the wonder that was Gudrun. You have no basis for comparison; you know womanhood only by the women of your epoch, who, beside her are like candles beside the glow of the full moon. Not for a millenium of milleniums have women like Gudrun walked the earth. Cleopatra, Thais, Helen of Troy, they were but pallid shadows of her beauty, frail mimicries of the blossom that blooms to full glory only in the primordial. [6]

This introduction is all the more remarkable considering that Gudrun appears in one of Howard's lesser-known tales, and is given no dialogue and little action. However, solely on the basis of this description, Gudrun emerges full-blown as the ultimate Howardian uber-babe. Not even such notable temptresses as Belit, the queen of the Black Coast, and Atali, the frost giant's daughter, are praised in terms quite this lavish. Yet when we consider the parallels between "The Garden of Fear" and the story of Eden, we realize why Howard has placed her at the apex of human womanhood. Gudrun is the counterpart of Eve, the first woman. Note that, except for collective references to women of the tribe, females are absent from "The Valley of the Worm." The relationship examined in that story is the male bonding between Niord and his Pictish comrade Grom. In the present story, however, Hunwulf must have his Gudrun because Adam had his Eve. And, in keeping with Howard's reversals of Genesis, the two mate-women could not be more dissimilar. Genesis unambiguously recounts how God creates Eve from Adam's rib. In "The Garden of Fear," Gudrun's origins are mysterious; she is an orphan of some lost tribe of the AEsir. Eve is created full-grown. Gudrun is discovered as "a waif...a child wandering in a dark forest." [7] Eve is Adam's demure companion and helper; before tasting of the forbidden fruit, she is without sexuality. Gudrun, on the other hand, is a sex goddess without peer.

Adam obtains Eve without any effort on his part, even sleeping through her arrival. Hunwulf can obtain Gudrun only by vigorously inflicting deadly physical violence. Eve is generously given to Adam as a gift from God. Gudrun is also given as a gift, only not to Hunwulf. Once Gudrun grows into "the full ripeness of her glorious young womanhood," [8] the tribal elders decree that she be presented to the tribe's mightiest hunter, Heimdul the Strong, as a reward. Since "the dream of Gudrun was a madness in my soul, a flame that burned eternally," [9] Hunwulf bashes in Heimdul's skull with a stone axe. Here the mention of a cave man's weapon suggests the prehistoric world as known to anthropologists; it therefore stands in further juxtaposition to the Biblical creation account. Even so, Hunwulf's slaughter of Heimdul during a fit of jealous rage recalls Cain's murder of Abel. Abel is favored by God over Cain; Heimdul the Strong is favored by the tribe over Hunwulf. The story of Cain and Abel occurs subsequent to that of Adam and Eve. The killing of Heimdul occurs prior to Hunwulf and Gudrun's adventure in the Garden of Fear.

Up to this point, the story of Hunwulf and Gudrun has been told as exposition, a briefly recounted backstory. Their actual narrative begins with them in flight. Hunwulf has murdered the tribe's favorite son, and must now flee the tribe's vengeance. He recalls how he "went into the wilderness, an exile and an outcast, with blood on my hands," [10] suggesting the mark of Cain. Since Gudrun reciprocates Hunwulf's passion, she accompanies him willingly. The story of Adam and Eve ends with their expulsion from Eden. Conversely, the story of Hunwulf and Gudrun begins with their flight into exile. And, in Howard's most ironic subversion of Genesis, Adam and Eve of Jewish lore are recast as characters with very Germanic-sounding names.

Hunwulf and Gudrun flee together with their angry tribesmen in hot pursuit. They escape by swimming the rapids of "a rising river," [11] a torrent so dangerous that even the bold AEsir break off their chase. The fugitive couple reaches the farther bank of the river "beaten and torn by the frenzy of the flood." [12] Given our Biblical analogy, Howard's choice of the word "flood" here does suggest the story of Noah from later chapters of Genesis. On the far side of the river, the couple enters unknown territory. They traverse forests and mountains where they are stalked by tigers, leopards, and giant condors. In the Garden of Eden, Adam and Eve were given dominion over the animals. As Hunwulf and Gudrun approach the Garden of Fear, animals are a constant threat.

The weary pair finds refuge in a village inhabited by a peaceful brown-skinned people. Arriving at dusk, they are treated with hospitality. At a feast held in their honor, Hunwulf indicates that he intends to press on towards the grasslands he glimpsed to the south while descending from the mountains. The villagers cry out and gesture frantically. Though Hunwulf cannot understand their language, it is clear that they are attempting to warn him away from some terrible danger that inhabits that region.

Even as the villagers yammer their panicked warnings, Hunwulf finds himself under sudden attack. A large, dark winged shape swoops down out of the night sky, knocking him to the ground. He hears Gudrun scream as "she was torn from my side." [13] The wording here recalls how Eve was taken from Adam's side, only in the more literal sense of being molded from one of his ribs. In that episode, Adam and Eve were brought together. In Howard's version, Hunwulf and Gudrun are cruelly seperated. Looking skyward, Hunwulf watches in helpless fury as his mate is borne away into the night.

Horrified and enraged, Hunwulf charges into the darkness, weapon in hand. He quickly realizes that his blind chase is hopeless. The friendly villagers calm him and show him a crude painting of the winged creature that abducted Gudrun; it is not one of the giant condors that inhabit the region, but something far more deadly. They try to dissaude him from pursuing this being, but Hunwulf is firm in his resolve. The villagers furnish him with a map and some provisions, and the blond warrior sets off immediately in search of his mate.

As he travels by night, Hunwulf is aware of the proximity of cave bears and saber-toothed tigers. Again these are images we associate with cave men, rather than Adam and Eve. Hunwulf presses on fearlessly. At daybreak he enters a large valley that narrows at the convergence of two lines of cliffs. Nearing his destination, Hunwulf passes wandering herds of mammoths. Once more we are reminded of the Stone Age, not Eden.

Emerging from a wooded area, Hunwulf enters a clearing. At its center he spies a green tower of jade-like stone standing in the midst of a field of unusual red flowers. The tower is about seventy feet high and crowned with a smaller structure surrounded by a gallery and parapet. Doors and barred windows are visible in the top portion alone; this appears to be the only point of entry.

A tower also appear in Genesis, specifically the Tower of Babel in Chapter 11. The Tower of Babel is a human achievement so impressive that God himself feels jealousy. The tower in "The Garden of Fear," on the other hand, is of inhuman origin. Humans at this point in the dim distant past are not yet capable of erecting such a structure. Hunwulf himself does not even have the words to describe it; he has never seen man-made dwellings other than tents and huts. Only the modern James Allison, narrating the story, is able to identify the tower as such.

Hunwulf feels sure that Gudrun is held captive in the tower, yet is wary in approaching it. Surrounding the tower on all sides for hundreds of yards is a field of tall, sinister looking flowers. Growing closely together, the strange plants consist of thick, four-foot stalks adorned with "poisonously green leaves...drooping on long snaky stems." [14] Each is topped with a large blossom of "livid crimson" whose "fleshy" petals are "the hue of an open wound." [15] In Genesis, the plants in the Garden of Eden are described as being good to eat and pleasing to look upon. Concerning the plants in the Garden of Fear, we are told that, "Their whole aspect was repellent..." [16]

His "wild-born instincts" [17] warning him of danger, Hunwulf observes the garden from a place of concealment. Those instincts are confirmed by the "charnel-house reek of death and decay and corruption that rose from the blossoms." [18] In one of Howard's more obvious allusions to Genesis, Hunwulf wonders if "some great serpent" [19] is concealed in the garden. A satanic figure does indeed appear, but not in the form of a serpent.

Noticing movement in the tower, Hunwulf watches as a strange figure emerges onto the parapet, "a man, but such a man as I had never dreamed of, even in nightmares." This man is described as tall and powerful, black as ebony, with batlike wings folded on his shoulders. He leans upon the parapet and looks out over the garden. Howard explicitly ascribes a satanic aspect to this being: "When I, as James Allison, dream again the dreams of Hunwulf, that image is etched in my mind, that gargoyle figure with elbows propped on the parapet, like a medieval devil brooding on the battlements of hell." [21]

In a major revision of Genesis, the serpent of Eden is replaced with a satanic figure from a much later era. A very ancient symbol also associated with Jason and Hercules, the serpent was not even originally identified with Satan in Genesis. That link was established in later books of the Bible. Genesis was written circa 1,000 BCE, with roots in an oral tradition going back undoubtedly much further. In "The Garden of Fear," however, the winged man is explicitly likened to "a medieval devil," with the term "gargoyle" further suggesting the cathedrals of the Middle Ages --an era thousands of years after the time Genesis was set in writing. Howard is also explicit in describing the winged man as black, but with "no suggestion of the negroid." [22] This recalls the Black Man that appears in the writings of Nathaniel Hawthorne and elsewhere. In any case, Howard substitutes a comparatively modern satanic image in place of the serpent of ancient myth.

It is also worth noting that the winged man operates in a manner totally at odds with that of the serpent of Eden. The serpent seduces Eve, subtly enticing her with guile. The winged man, on the other hand, abducts Gudrun in the most direct way possible, using blatant physical force to seize and carry her away.

James Allison, recalling what he witnessed as Hunwulf, is given to wonder whether the winged man was an isolated freak of nature or the last survivor of an extinct species. He favors the latter theory: "Winged men are not uncommon in mythology...As far back as man may go in myth, chronicle, and legend, he finds tales of harpies and winged gods, angels and demons." [23] (emphasis added) Allison reminds us that; "Legends are distorted shadows of pre-existent realities." [24] He concludes that "once a race of winged black men ruled a pre-Adamite world..." [25]

Here we have an actual direct reference to the book of Genesis. It is unlikely that, in writing "The Garden of Fear," Howard consciously recognized the numerous reversals of Genesis he embodied in the tale. The mythical allusions he deliberately included concern the harpies and related legends. However, the use of the term "pre-Adamite" does seem to indicate some awareness on Howard's part of the Biblical elements that were percolating in his subconscious.

The reflections concerning the nature of the winged man are those of the modern James Allison. The primitive Hunwulf superstitiously takes the existence of devils and monsters for granted. The bold AEsir warrior believes in demons, but does not fear them. Even so, he does not charge into the field of crimson flowers to recklessly assault the tower. The "wariness of the wild" [26] compels him to be cautious.

Hunwulf's instincts are confirmed when the winged man re-enters the tower and emerges once more with a stuggling captive. It is not Gudrun, but one of the brown villagers. The winged man flies out over the field of crimson flowers bearing his captive, and drops him into their midst. The nearest plants latch onto the pitiful victim and drain way his blood, killing him.

It is during this episode that we notice that serpentine imagery is by no means absent from "The Garden of Fear." As the plants await their victim, they hiss and sway like snakes. Their leaves vibrate and whir "like the singing of a rattlesnake." [27] The fleshy petals of the blossoms open "like the necks of serpents." [28] The thick stalks of the plants arch "like the necks of serpents" [29] as the blossoms latch onto their victim. Howard's personal aversion to snakes is well documented, and not atypically the inclusion of serpentine imagry enhances the horror of this sequence. The Garden of Eden was paradise on Earth, but the Garden of Fear is presumably the worst place in the world.

After feeding the villager to the flowers, the winged man withdraws to within the tower. Hunwulf emerges cautiously from his hiding place and approaches one of the plants on the fringe of the garden. Its petals spread "like the hood of a roused cobra." [30] When it lunges at him, Hunwulf uses his axe to sever the stalk. Now able to examine the plant more closely, Hunwulf takes note of the clinging barbs on the leaves and the tiny sucking mouths on the petals. With the sole exception of the one he eats of to gain knowledge, Adam is permitted to eat of all the plants in the Garden of Eden. With the sole exception of the one he cuts down to gain knowledge, all of the plants in the Garden of Fear are capable of eating of Hunwulf.

As he completes his examination of the blood-sucking plant, Hunwulf becomes aware of the winged man's return. He looks up as the winged man emerges once more from the tower, bringing the captive Gudrun. Although Gudrun possesses the "supple strength" of a "she-panther," [31] she is helpless in the winged man's powerful grasp. The evil of the winged man is evident as he indulges in deliberate cruelty, laughing at Hunwulf and mocking him in an unknown tongue. In the Tower of Babel episode of Genesis, God causes mankind to speak numerous languages instead of a single one in order to divide humanity. In "The Garden of Fear," several mentions are made of language barriers.

Toying with Hunwulf, the winged man lifts Gudrun as though intending to cast her into the crimson flowers. However, he fails to goad Hunwulf into running into the field of deadly plants. Though distressed, Hunwulf is clear-headed enough to realize that perishing in such a futile act would only deprive Gudrun of any hope of rescue.

Turning away, Hunwulf formulates a plan. He returns to where he saw the herds of mammoths grazing earlier. Setting a number of well-placed brush fires, he causes the mammoths to stampede in the direction of the tower. Hunwulf's use of fire her recalls another creation myth, that of Prometheus. The mammoths flee from the brush fires, "bulls trumpeting like the blast of Judgement Day." [32] Here is yet another direct Biblical allusion. The Day of Judgement is not mentioned in Genesis, however, but in the New Testament. It is described at length in Revelations, the last book of the Bible.

The panicked mammoths stampede right over the Garden of Fear. The deadly plants might be capable of downing a single mammoth, but not a whole thundering herd. The crimson flowers are mashed to pulp. When the mammoths depart, Hunwulf is able to approach the tower in safety. Using a rawhide rope, he is able to scale the tower where Gudrun is pent. Hunwulf is just a few feet below the parapet when the winged man reappears. The winged man draws a knife and is about to cut the rope, sending Hunwulf plummeting to his death.

It is then that Gudrun goes into action. Though not quite Valeria of the Red Brotherhood, she is still capable of breaking down a door and grappling with a monster long enough for Hunwulf to leap onto the parapet. With his trusty axe, Hunwulf caves in the head of the winged man. The winged man's skull proves no tougher than that of Heimdul the Strong. Hunwulf regains his mate in exactly the same manner he won her originally.

The axe Hunwulf uses throughout the story is made of stone, specifically flint. In "The Valley of the Worm," the AEsir are equipped with weapons of bronze. This indicates that "The Garden of Fear" takes place in an even earlier era. We are told that the events of "The Valley of the Worm" transpired so long ago that "the surface of the earth has changed, not once but a score of times...and the very stars and constellations have altered and shifted. [33] "The Garden of Fear," therefore, occurs at the very dawn of humanity...fittingly, considering its parallels with Genesis.

After their devilish adversary falls dead, Hunwulf and Gudrun embrace over the grisly corpse. It is then that Hunwulf catches a glimpse into the room Gudrun had escaped from. Within the tower, he sees strange furnishings and "shelves heaped with rolls of parchment." [34] The modern James Allison expresses regret that his former incarnation did not explore the tower and examine the scrolls. To the primitive Hunwulf, however, the tower and its contents represent nothing more than a fiendish trap; he and his mate waste no time in taking their leave of the place. Adam and Eve were punished for their pursuit of forbidden knowledge. Hunwulf and Gudrun discover arcane knowledge that is theirs for the taking, but want no part of it. They flee the tower and continue on their way into the wilderness. Their story ends with Hunwulf and Gudrun, like Adam and Eve, alone in a newborn world.

"The Garden of Fear" was originally published in the July-August, 1934, issue of Marvel Tales. "The Valley of the Worm" had beaten it into print, but only by a few months, debuting in the February, 1934, issue of Weird Tales. Weird Tales, where the bulk of Robert E. Howard's fantasy first appeare, is well remembered today. Marvel Tales, on the other hand, was an obscure publication, and "The Garden of Fear" marked Howard's only appearance in its pages. Arriving like a kind of stillborn twin, "The Garden of Fear" never achieved the recognition of "The Valley of the Worm."

It is not hard to understand why "The Garden of Fear" has been so over-shadowed. At the heart of "The Valley of the Worm" lies one of the Western world's great mythic tales, that of the dragon-slayer. Howard was fully conscious of this theme, and embodied it in the story with a sure hand. In writing "The Garden of Fear," however, Howard was most likely not consciously aware of the parallels with Genesis. But even if he had been, he could never have been explicit in citing them in the body of the tale. Such a thing would be controversial even today. Even if most Christians don't take the story of Adam and Eve as literal history, it is still an esteemed part of a text widely held as sacred. Therefore Howard could hardly have included a pronouncement like, "Here, then, is the ghastly truth that lies, garbled and distorted, behind that quaint Sunday School fable." The only legend he could explicitly point to was the less-compelling one of the harpies.

However, with recognition of its parallels with Genesis, "The Garden of Fear" does take on additional dimensions. We now see that the past incarnations of a single man, James Allison, include both the prototype of the dragon slayer and the prototype of the Biblical Adam. This raises the intriguing question of whether Allison might simply be insane. As an embittered cripple driven to madness by his affliction, Allison savors delusions of ultimate grandeur that place him at the very center of the collective consciousness of Western civilization.

That's one interpretation, but not one that the author himself would have embraced. Among Howard's most consistent themes is the preeminent importance of the individual and individual effort. In Robert E. Howard's vision, the deeds of one man can become the archetypal basis for myths and legends the world over. Not coincidentally, Howard is very vocal in celebrating the individual in the opening paragraph of "The Garden of Fear."

...I tell you the individual is never lost, neither in the black pit from which we once crawled, blind, squalling and noisome, or in that eventual Nirvana in which we shall one day sink --which I have glimpsed afar off, shining as a blue twilight lake among the mountains of the stars...[35]

This passage is interesting in several different respects. First there is the womb imagry of the black pit, in which humanity's origins are likened to the physical birth of an individual. Then Howard mentions Nirvana, a concept from a religious tradition altogether different form that which concerns him in the bulk of the story. Finally, there is the image of the blue lake and the mountains. He repeats this image in the last line of the story, after Hunwulf and Gudrun make their escape:

...we went hand and hand along the path made by the mammoths, now seen vanishing in the distance, toward the blue lake at the southern end of the valley and the notch in cliffs beyond it. [36]

A blue lake, seen from afar, was used earlier as an explicit metaphor for Nirvana. Now the protagonists are linked to the blue lake by a path made by mammoths seen "vanishing in the distance." In this context, the path of the vanishing mammoths suggests itself as a metaphor for extinction. Again, there is a juxtaposition of religion and paleontology. Nirvana and extinction are intertwined in the author's imagination.

Another of Robert E. Howard's most prevalent themes is the inevitable passing of all things. Empires rise and fall. Races fade away. Seas change their beds and rivers their courses. Glaciers wax and wane. Birth itself is but the beginning os a journey that ends in death. And so it is that Hunwulf and Gudrun, Howard's own Adam and Eve, join hands and start their journey down the path of the mammoths, towards the Nirvana in which humanity shall one day sink.

NOTES

[1] Robert E. Howard, "The Valley of the Worm," Weird Tales Vol. 23, No. 2 (February 1934), p. 193.

[2] Robert E. Howard, "The Garden of Fear," Marvel Tales Vol. 1, No. 2 (July-August 1934), pp. 11-12.

[3] Ibid., p. 13.

[4] Ibid.

[5] Ibid.

[6] Ibid., pp. 13-14.

[7] Ibid., p. 14.

[8] Ibid.

[9] Ibid.

[10] Ibid.

[11] Ibid.

[12] Ibid.

[13] Ibid., p. 16.

[14] Ibid., p. 20

[15] Ibid.

[16] Ibid.

[17] Ibid.

[18] Ibid.

[19] Ibid.

[20] Ibid., p. 21.

[21] Ibid., pp. 25-26.

[22] Ibid., p. 27.

[23] Ibid., p. 21.

[24] Ibid.

[25] Ibid.

[26] Ibid., p. 22.

[27] Ibid., p. 23.

[28] Ibid.

[29] Ibid.

[30] Ibid., pp. 23-24.

[31] Ibid., p. 24.

[32] Ibid., p. 26.

[33] "The Valley of the Worm," Op cit. p. 195.

[34] "The Garden of Fear," Op cit. p. 29.

[35] Ibid., p. 12.

[36] Ibid., p. 29.

Special thanks to David Gentzel for furnishing me with the original publication of "The Garden of Fear."

Robert E. Howard vs. the Desert of the Real

[Last year I was asked to provide an afterword for The Best of Robert E. Howard, Volume I from Del Rey Books (available at Borders, Barnes & Noble, and all better bookstores; no home should be without one.) My humble contribution is entitled "Robert E. Howard: Twentieth Century Mythmaker." I knew that more people would be reading this essay than all my other Robert E. Howard stuff put together, so I wanted to repeat the most important points I made elsewhere. I drew on a variety of my other writings, but the main template is the essay that follows. The opening section is very similar to "Mythmaker," but it later goes off in different directions. This appeared in Spectrum Super Special #2. Copyright 2004 by Charles Hoffman.]

Robert E. Howard's most famould creation, the indomitable barbarian warrior Conan, was introduced in the December 1932 issue of the pulp magazine Weird Tales. For the first story in the series, Howard provided a brief preface that served to set the stage for Conan's debut:

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, when shining kingdoms lay spread across the world like blue mantles beneath the stars -- Nemedia, Ophir, Brythunia, Hyperborea, Zamora with its dark-haired women and towers of spider-haunted mystery, Zingara with its chivalry, Koth that bordered on the pastoral lands of Shem, Stygia with its shadow-guarded tombs, Hyrkania whose riders wore steel and silk and gold. But the proudest kingdom of the world was Aquilonia, reigning supreme in the dreaming west. Hither came Conan, the Cimmerian, black-haired, sullen-eyed, sword in hand, a thief, a reaver, a slayer, with gigantic melancholies and gigantic mirth, to tread the jeweled thrones of the Earth under his sandalled feet. [1]

Earlier, the editor of Weird Tales had requested some biographical information about the young author himself. Howard's response painted a very different picture:

Like the average man, the tale of my life would merely be a dull narration of drab monotony and toil, a grinding struggle against poverty. I have spent most of my time in the hard, barren semi-waste lands of Western Texas, and since infancy my memory holds a continuous grinding round of crop failures -- sandstorms -- drouths -- floods -- hot winds that withered the corn -- hailstorms that ripped the grain to pieces -- late blizzards that froze the fruit in the bud -- plagues of grasshoppers and boll weevils...

I've picked cotton, helped brand a few yearlings, hauled a little garbage, worked in a grocery store, ditto a dry-goods store, worked in a law office, jerked soda, worked up in a gas office, tried to be a public stenographer, packed a surveyor's rod, worked up oil field news for some Texas and Oklahoma papers, etc., etc., and also etc...[2]

Finally, Howard was moved to conclude, "And there I believe is about all the information I can give about a very humdrum and commonplace life." [3]

As Morpheus said to Neo in The Matrix, "Welcome to the desert of the real."

Many years later Mark Schultz, illustrator of a collection of the Conan tales, recalled:

I discovered Robert E. Howard's Conan in 1969. when I was 13 years old. I read the stories then for their incomparable high adventure and mind-blasting horror. It wasn't unitl much later that I realized they hit so hard and stayed so timeless because Howard's feverish, passionate writing was a crystal clear reflection of a young mind in turmoil, fighting to be free of the limitations of his physical surroundings. [4]

Howard often discussed his writing with a young school-teacher named Novalyne Price, who had literary ambitions of her own. Late in life, Price wrote a memoir of Howard entitled One Who Walked Alone. Her book was subsequently adapted into a touching motion picture, The Whole Wide World starring Vincent D'Onofrio and Renee Zellweger. In One Who Walked Alone, Price recalls mentioning to Howard that she wanted to write about "real people with real problems." [5] Howard's reaction is revealing:

"Not me. I don't want to write about men struggling along on a sandy farm, getting drunk, coming in the house at night and beating up a small, frail woman who can't fight back." [6]

In his view, Novalyne was a "dreamer" who had lived a "sheltered life" [7] and who assumed that her own background represented a kind of universal norm:

"You come from a good home. You don't know these people out here. I do. You think they're nice and sweet and loving. That's not true... Trying to dig out a living on the farm in spite of the hail, and the dust is hard...That fills men with hate." [8]

Defending his own fiction, Howard asserted:

"The people who read my stuff want to get away from this modern, complicated world world with it hypocrisy, it cruelty, its dog-eat-dog life...The civilization we live in is a lot more sinister than the time I write about. In those days, girl, men were men and women were women. They struggled to stay alive, but the struggle was worth it." [9]

H. P. Lovecraft, with whom Howard corresponded regularly, once noted a curious paradox. Lovecraft observed that a great deal of fiction that purports to be about real everyday life is actually quite often rife with sentimental distortions. Howard himself expressed a similar view: "Nobody really writes realistic realism, and if they did, nobody would read it. The writers who thing they write it just give their own ideas about things they think they see. The sort of man who could write realism is the fellow who never reads or writes anything." [10]

By way of contrast, Lovecraft defined fantasy as "an art based on the imaginary life of the human mind, frankly recognized as such; & in its way as natural & scientific --as truly related to natural (even if uncommon & delicate) psychological processes as the starkest of photographic realism." [11] In other words, fantasy fiction makes no pretense of representing the physical world as it actually is. However, in the right hands it can vividly the most intensely felt yearnings of the human heart and soul, from the deepest longings and most dreadful anxieties to the loftiest aspirations. Therefore, it could be said that fantasy need have little to do with reality, yet have a great deal to do with truth, since these are not precisely the same thing.

This is, of course, not to say that realistic fiction cannot portray weighty abstractions such as spiritual damnation and redemption, just that fantasy can often do so more excitingly and entertainingly. The Star Wars saga of Anakin Skywalker / Darth Vader is a perfect example. For better or worse, more people have seen the Star Wars movies than have read Crime and Punishment. Also, interestingly enough, most people are more familiar with the story of Faust than of Crime and Punishment. Fantasy is an uncannily suitable vehicle for conveying powerful themes to a mass audience.

Novalyne Price Ellis recalled a subsequent conversation with Howard: "Bob began to talk about good and evil in life. He said that life was always a struggle between good and evil, and people like to read about that struggle...He wrote for readers who wanted evil to be something big, horrible, but still something a barbarian like Conan could overcome." [12]

Howard's remarks to Novalyne strongly suggest that he felt that his readers benefited in some way from seeing their struggles reflected on a higher level. To that end, Robert E. Howard took the oldest type of story --the tale of heroes, gods, and monsters-- and reinvented it as jolting pulp fiction. His prose, not unlike that of Raymond Chandler, was direct and hard-edged, yet lyrical. Howard's modern brand of fantasy has often been characterized as "sword and sorcery," but Lovecraft may have been more insightful when he deemed it "artificial legendry."

Howard wrote for the American working class of the early twentieth century. His readers were widely seperated by time, distance, and upheaval from the myths and legends that had enthralled their ancestors in the Old World. They lived in an era rocked by cataclysm, no less than the fictional Hyborian Age of Conan had been. In 1906, the year Howard was born, the world was ruled by kings, dukes, emperors, sultans, kaisers, and czars. Twenty years later, they were all gone. The slaughter of the First World War and the lawlessness of the Roaring Twenties were followed by the malaise of the Great Depression. The Depression was a humiliating ordeal for many Americans, and Howard's rousing tales of Conan helped to empower readers with flagging spirits. In a larger sense, however, Howard sought to resurrect the heroic saga where it had long been lost.

When America declared its independence from the Mother Country, it was also bidding farewell to Saint George and King Arthur. No comparable myths grew up to take their places. The new folk legends that appeared in the wake of the Industrial Revolution celebrated laborers and producers of goods. Today everyone has heard of Paul Bunyan, John Henry, and Casey Jones, and yet no one really cares about them. One needn't marvel at the fact that no nineteenth century publisher ever attempted to use such characters to sell dime novels. Instead, stories of gunfighters and bank robbers were dime novel mainstays. "Tall tales" of how hard some guy worked were presumably less inspiring. After all, how popular would Horatio Alger's novels have been, had his protagonists simply worked but remained poor?

The dime novel was followed in the early twentieth century by the pulp magazines. At this time, radio and motion pictures were in their infancies, television yet unborn. As astonishing as it may seem today, print was the primary entertainment medium for the masses. Publishing empires were built on pulp fiction magazines that usually sold for ten cents. By the late twenties, scores of different titles were on sale at any given time. The pulp jungle proved fertile ground for a new crop of homegrown heroes: cowboys, sailors, detectives, aviators, and soldiers of fortune. Interestingly, however, such pre-eminent pulp heroes as The Shadow and Doc Savage were essentially supercops, maintainers of the status quo.

Robert E. Howard had something different in mind when he conceived of Conan. His giant barbarian is an outlaw, a sword-for-hire, basically out for himself, yet still retaining a certain knack for doing the right thing. Conan is not a preserver of order; he is a mover and shaker, the whirlwind at the center of momentous events. And though his author endowed him with a very modern hardboiled edge, Conan remains that most immemorial of heroes, the warrior. Writing before Carl Jung was well-known in America, before Joseph Campbell's work had appeared, Howard possessed an instinctive grasp of mythic, archetypal figures-- king, warrior, magician, femme fatale. He knew that the ancient figure of the warrior would resonate with readers on a deeper subconscious level than, for example, the detective, a hero figure in some ways emblematic of the Age of Reason.

Howard's vivid "artificial legendry" has often sadly been dismissed as "escapism." Yet if the lot of the average man is truly one of "drab monotony and toil," as Howard believed, it falls to the skald and the storyteller to furnish needed refreshment for tired minds. And in truth, the average working adult does endure his or her fair share of drudgery. The majority of people earn a living by means of tedious jobs, not rewarding careers.

Herein lies a clue to Howard's well-known resentment of "civilization," for which the author has taken so much flak. Youngsters are told they can become anything they want if they try hard enough; they are never told how many waiters the world needs for every archeologist it can support. The former notion is wishful thinking, the latter a dismal truth Howard knew only too well. Viewed this way, civilized society is like a big lottery in which most people have to lose. As one example, consider the monkey-suited doorman standing in front of a luxury hotel. To Howard, such an individual would be better off, spiritually if not materially, wearing a loincloth and carrying a spear, battling openly against man and nature.

Decades after Howard's death, the lot of the working class changed, but in an important sense it was not for the better. Previously, the laborer could at least derive some satisfaction from accomplishing enormous tasks and producing tangible goods. In the last quarter of the twentieth century, however, the workplace underwent a transformation. Countless American manufacturing jobs were sold overseas to the lowest bidder. America became a "service economy," a glib euphemism for a nation of flunkies.

The plight of the American working man at the turn of the twenty-first century is explored in Chuck Palahniuk's 1996 novel Fight Club. The novel and its subsequent film adaptation look at a generation of men who are increasingly marginalized. Most are relegated to menial jobs and inane tasks. Alienated from society, they begin to form underground "fight clubs" in the basements of bars and similar places. Here they engage in greuling fistfights, finding a renewed sense of meaning in raw physical strife. At one point a character remarks, "I see the strongest and the smartest men who have ever lived...and these men are pumping gas and waiting tables." [14] It is a statement with which Robert E. Howard would have nodded in somber agreement.

In 1928, before his professional writing career took off, Howard wrote a novel entitled Post Oaks and Sand Roughs. It is actually a thinly-veiled autobiography of Howard (herein called "Steve Costigan") between the ages of eighteen and twenty-two. While crossing the threshold of adulthood, Howard at one point toiled at a tedious job in his town's drug store. At this time, Cross Plains, Texas, was in the midst of an oil boom. Oil workers swelled the town's population, and Howard had to work long hours for weeks on end. However, he was able to vent some of his frustration by taking part in amateur boxing matches held in an empty building at a local ice plant. One such episode is recounted in Chapter 9 of the novel. It is Fight Club seven decades early.

The chapter begins with Howard, or "Steve," humbled by his serf-like position:

A man who works all day or all night swinging heavy sledges, clambering about on an eighty foot rig, and in general doing work suitable for a giant, has scant respect for one who makes his living by doling out soft drinks.

Steve hated his job worse than he had ever hated any task, and the contempt and apprehension which he felt toward the mass of oil field workers grew to a fear and venomous hatred of dangerous and abnormal size. It grew to be an obsession with him to hate the blustering, powerful roughnecks who swaggered up to the fountain and domineeringly demanded attention. He served them in silence and with an immobile face, but all hell seethed in his brain. [15]

Reliving the experience as Steve, Howard recalls the physical toll the job took:

He did not read or write, scarcely had time to answer his correspondence. He had absolutely no time for recreation or even rest. All during the day he would dash back and forth behind the fountain which he had grown to hate, serving drinks and waiting on customers, doing many things he was not paid to do. At night he staggered home to fall into his bed and sleep the sodden sleep of utter exhaustion. He went to bed fatigued and he awoke fatigued. [16]

Emotionally drained by a job that's sucking the life out of him, Howard/Steve reaches the brink of despair:

Steve sighed as he walked beneath the cold silver moonlight and the gems of the stars. God, how clean and clear and high -- how far from all this sordid muck of living. Was there, anywhere in the world, such purity, such beauty? No --life was shoving Coca Colas and ice creams across the fountain top to unshaven roughnecks who swore at you --life was sordid and muck. Better that a man would never look at the stars, for they made him realize the terrible hopelessness and filth of his own existence. [17]

Redemption is found in a 1920s version of fight club. In Howard's recollections, the days and nights of toil at the drug store blend and blur together. However, when he recounts his alter ego's first battle, every detail stands out in remarkable clarity:

Steve reeled, the blood gushing from his mouth to mingle with the sweat on his chest. And in the fleeting instant before the fighting commenced again, Steve knew Life, fierce, red, and vibrant. God, but this was his element! To fight, to kill or be killed, here in this hell-hot, smoke-laden atmosphere, with a gang of roughnecks screaming oaths and shouting for his slaughter...

Steve plunged in without waiting for Bill's attack, expecting to be knocked cold, revelling in the fact that he was carrying the fight to his antagonist...They were fighting rough-house style now, with no attempt at science. Blow followed blow as fast as four frantic arms could drive them in, and the gloves, heavy with sweat and blood, flashed past each other in a never ending stream...

Bill was beginning to weaken. Forced into a corner, he gathered his waning strength and leaped forward with the ferocity of an attacking tiger. And Steve met him with a left-handed smash which struck Bill squarely in the mouth; something cracked like a twig. Bill went down. [18]

Howard/Steve comes away from the bout having experienced a kind of epiphany:

Steve felt jubilant in a strange manner. His mind was clear now, and the blood raced through his veins...He sighed deeply and with relish and glanced up at the stars which somehow seemed less cold and more friendly. [19]

Howard initially asserts that "life was shoving Coca Colas and ice creams across the fountain top to unshaven roughnecks who swore at you," but changes his tune once the fight is underway: "Steve knew Life, fierce, red, and vibrant." To put that capital "L" on "Life," one must seek out extreme experiences seldom encountered in the normal course of everyday living. Restless within the folds of a safe, comfortable civilization, adventurous spirits search for ways to test and challenge themselves. Examples can be found at every level of society, from the mountaineer scaling a peak "because it is there" to the teenage street racer.

Howard once told Lovecraft, "Despite the tinsel and show, the artificial adjuncts, and the sometimes disgusting advertisements, ballyhoo and exploitation attendant upon such sports as boxing and football, there is, in the actual contexts, something vital and real and deep-rooted in the very life-springs of the race...Football, for instance, is nothing less than war in miniature, and provides an excellent way of working off pugnacious and combative instincts, without bloodshed." [20] One can experience a fleeting taste of glory through some form of athletic striving, either first-hand or vicariously as a spectator. One can also experience a heightened sense of meaning, purpose, and fulfillment vicariously through art.

Whatever the case, a transcendental experience is sought. There is a yearning to transcend the coarseness and banality of everyday life. Championship football and soccer games are often followed by racous partying and even rioting, owing to the fact that most of the spectators lead exceedingly humdrum lives. Howard deemed his autobiographical a failure because it was "too vague, too disconnected, too full of unexplained and trivial incidents -- too much like life in a word." [21]

Ordinary everyday life consists of slogging through a morass of stifling worries and squabbles. A week's worth of listings for a courtroom television program like Judge Judy reads like a series of postcards from the desert of the real: "A dispute involving a VCR, a TV, and clothing. / A woman sues her beautician after her hair extensions fall out. / A woman sues her ex over unpaid bills. / A case involving a damaged TV set; an alleged break-in. / A dispute over an unpaid loan. / A dispute over a TV. Also: a fight is sparked by damaged bicycles." [22] The sheer pettiness of it all seems almost suffocating. Even so, there are people who watch such programs religiously, presumably for the dubious satisfaction of seeing others chided and punished. It is a peculiar form of spiritual tunnel vision.

Howard endeavored to offer his readers a wider vista. He knew that working at the counter of a drug store, or pumping gas, or selling shoes, or digging holes, was not enough to fill a man's heart. That is one reason he so excelled at depicting struggles that were epic, against evils that were truly horrific. Such is the essence of adventure, and Howard has been widely lauded as a great adventure writer. The path of the adventurer leads either to glory or doom, but it skirts commonplace tedium and transcends the gradual grinding down of the human spirit by the weight of the world. In its way, the adventure story is a subversive art form in the sense that it carries within it the implicit suggestion that everyday life is inadequate. No author has been more militant in conveying this message than Robert E. Howard.

There is little of adventure or glory to be found in the desert of the real, save in the form of a mirage. To invest common events like holidays, weddings, and graduations with an atmosphere of pomp and grandeur involves the use of the creative imagination in a manner not unlike the way the storyteller weaves his tales. "[T]here was pagentry and high illusion and vanity, and the beloved tinsel of glory without which life is not worth living," wrote Howard to a correspondent concerning times gone by, "All empty show and the smoke of conceit and arrogance, but what a drab thing life would be without them." [23] For him, there is no meaning or beauty in life other than what we dream into it. In this respect, and in other respects, Howard could be considered as early existential writer.


2. Serving Time in Disillusionment

Conan's world is one of exotic kingdoms, gleaming citadels, desolate wastelands, and mysterious ruins haunted by nightmarish spectres. 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 horrors can be overcome by the craft, 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 labelled 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 exhuberance and love of life he possessed upon his most famous creation, leaving precious little for himself and his other characters. Thus Solomon Kane is driven by fanaticism, and Bran Mak Morn by wrath. King Kull broods on his throne, grappling with philosophical abstactions. The crusaders of Howard's historical tales are not knights in shining armor, but brutal men in dirty chain male vying for power over small medieval fiefdoms. Howard himself was buffeted by severe manic-depressive 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. Far from being an "arrested adolescent," Robert E. Howard was, if anything, a premature middle-aged burnout.

For I rode the moon-mare's horses in the glory of my youth,
Wrestled with the hills at sunset --till I met brass-tinctured Truth.
Till I saw the temples topple, till I saw the idols reel,
Till my brain had turned to iron, and my heart had turned to steel. [24]

So wrote Howard in "Always Comes Evening," in which he concludes:

...my road runs out in thistles and my dreams have turned to dust,
And my pinions fade and falter to the raven-wings of rust. [25]

Verse in a similar vein includes "Shadows on the Road," "Lines Written in the Realization That I Must Die," "The Years Are as a Knife," "Futility," and "Illusion." Howard wrote not one, but two poems called "Surrender." In the less somber of the two, the poet speaks of dropping out of society and drinking himself to death. The other lacks any sort of narrative and consists solely of a "let me die" wail:

My heart is hollow with endless pain, my temples are growing white,
Open the window against the rain and let me go into the night. [26]

More than once Howard 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." [27] In "Always Comes Evening" he exhorts the devil to "Feed with hearts of rose-white women ashes of my dead desire." [28] Surely a lament for one's "dead desire" is more appropriate for a man in late middle life than for a young poet of, perhaps, twenty-two years.

Howard gave considerable credence to the doctrine of reincarnation, and this undoubtedly contributed to his view of himself as an "old soul":

I cannot well recall what shapes I bore,
What spears have pierced me, or what axes have gashed,
Yet through my dreams there runs the endless roar
Of nameless battles where lost armies crashed.

Shape upon shape returning, land on land,
Loosed by the ripping axe, the arrow's tooth,
Through endless incarnations, till I stand,
A scarred old man, masked in the guise of youth. [29]

Possible former incarnations notwithstanding, however, Howard 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 rather resulting from his struggle with his surroundings.

"It seems to me that many writers, by virtue of environments of culture, art, and education, slip into writing because of their environments," he told Lovecraft:

I became a writer in spite of my environments. Understand I am not criticizing those 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. [30]

As a child, Howard was introverted and the prey of bullies. This led him to undertake 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." [31] 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." [32] Howard took up writing as a profession in large part because it enabled him to be his own boss: "I worked a while 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." [33]

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 that life has somehow played one false. Often this is simply 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. All pervasive, it enfolds humanity like some form of original sin. Not even Conan can escape it. For Howard's heroes, disillusionment is a dragon no less formidable than a literal monster with fangs and claws. Typically it is the result of a sudden horrifying revelation, rather than the accumulation of minor disappointments. Portrayed in this manner, it is another example of Howard's penchant for depicting ordinary human struggle on a mythical level.

By way of illustration, we might consider a tawdry form of disillusionment common enough in the desert of the real, contrasted with a soul-searing encounter undergone by Conan. In a pair of poems, Howard recounts a youth's depressing visits to a seamy brothel:

My heart was the heart of a broken louse,
The jackal fired my eyes,
When I sought for peace in the bawdyhouse,
And the rest in a harlot's thighs. [34]

Youthful lust and frustration mingle with guilt and shame, and the poet is moved to conclude:

The girl I dreamed she might have been
Fades before she that is--
But I'll forget as do all men
In passion's barren bliss.

For she runs with Life a parallel --
The dream and its rotten core --
For Life's a harlot out of hell
With a red light over her door. [35]

A simple visit to a common prostitute proves so distasteful to Howard that all of life seems somehow tainted. In the saga of Conan, this experience is echoed in an episode in which the mighty Cimmerian confronts an immortal femme fatale. Chapter 18 of The Hour of the Dragon finds Conan deep within the underground 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 communed with dark forces to remain young and beautiful forever. When she attempts to seduce him, Conan learns that Akivasha is a vampire, an unclean thing. 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 forever 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, it glittering 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. [36]

Howard may or may not have known a loose woman or two, but he leaves it to Conan to confront the true harlot out of hell. 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.

The fantasy of Robert E. Howard encompasses both high adventure and blood-chilling horror. In both prose and poetry, Howard sends the reader soaring to exhilerating summits or plummeting to the very depths of his despair. But in either case, he endeavors to avoid the tedium of what T. S. Eliot described as a life measured out in coffee spoons. This aspect of the storyteller's art is of no small importance.

Critics like Robert McKee have theorized that it is the structure of "the story" that enables us to see our own lives as something other than a chaotic jumble of trivial incidents. We learn to focus on what is important and edit out the mundane. Our lives center on our goals and loved ones, rather than being measured out in coffee spoons, or frozen dinners, or toothbrushes, or flea powder, or parking meters, or crossword puzzles. Bruce Lee once quoted a Zen aphorism about a finger pointing to the moon: concentrate on the finger, and you miss all that heavenly glory. We define our reality by determining what is important to us.

The true "desert of the real" is perhaps nothing more than the desert of the trivial. Narrowness and pettiness are withering wastelands to which we must not succumb. Consider Conan as depicted in the opening of "Xuthal of the Dusk." These are the passages that provided the basis for Frank Frazetta's iconic portrait of the barbarian:

The desert shimmered in the heat waves. Conan the Cimmerian stared out over the aching desolation and involuntarily drew the back of his powerful hand over his blackened lips. He stood like a bronze statue in the sand, apparently impervious to the murderous sun, though his only garment was a silk loin-cloth, girdled by a wide gold buckled belt from which hung a saber and a broad-bladed poniard. On his clean-cut limbs were evidences of scarcely healed wounds.

At his feet rested a girl, one white arm clasping his knee, against which her blond head drooped. Her white skin contrasted with his hard bronzed limbs; her short silken tunic, low-necked and sleeveless, girdled at the waist, emphasized rather than concealed her lithe figure...

The Cimmerian growled wordlessly, glaring truculently at the surrounding waste, with outthrust jaw, and blue eyes smoldering savagely from under his black tousled mane, as if the desert were a tangible enemy. [37]

NOTES

[1] Robert E. Howard (hereafter REH), "The Phoenix on the Sword," The Coming of Conan the Cimmerian (New York: Ballantine Books, 2003), p. 7.

[2] REH to Farnsworth Wright in Glenn Lord, ed., The Last Celt (West Warwick, RI: Donald M. Grant, 1976), pp. 37-38.

[3] Ibid., p. 39

[4] Mark Schultz, Robert E. Howard's Conan of Cimmeria: A Sketchbook (Wandering Star, 2001), p. 2.

[5] Novalyne Price Ellis, One Who Walked Alone (West Kingston, RI: Donald M. Grant, 1986), p. 62.

[6] Ibid., p. 63.

[7] Ibid.

[8] Ibid.

[9] Ibid.

[10] REH, Post Oaks and Sand Roughs (Hampton Falls, NH: Donald M. Grant, 1990), p. 157.

[11] H. P. Lovecraft to Clark Ashton Smith, November 16, 1926, in Selected Letters II (Sauk City, WI: Arkham House, 1968), p. 90.

[12] Ellis, p. 151.

[13] H. P. Lovecraft to Donald A. Wollheim, 1936.

[14] Chuck Palahniuk, Fight Club (New York: Owl Books, 1997), p. 149.

[15] REH, Post Oaks and Sand Roughs, p. 141.

[16] Ibid., p. 95.

[17] Ibid., pp. 101-102.

[18] Ibid., pp. 104-105.

[19] Ibid., p. 106.

[20] REH to Lovecraft, January 1932.

[21] REH, Post Oaks and Sand Roughs, p. 141.

[22] All from TV Guide for the week of December 8, 2001: Vol. 49, No. 49, Issue #2541.

[23] REH to Harold Preece, received October 20, 1978.

[24] REH, "Always Comes Evening," Always Comes Evening (San Francisco: Underwood-Miller, 1977), p. 73.

[25] Ibid.

[26] REH, "Surrender," Shadows of Dreams (Hampton Falls, NH: Donald M. Grant, 1989), p. 92.

[27] REH, "The Sands of Time," Echoes From an Iron Harp (West Kingston, RI: Donald M. Grant, 1972), p. 65.

[28] REH, "Always Comes Evening," p. 73.

[29] REH, "The Guise of Youth," The Second Book of Robert E. Howard (New York: Berkley Books, 1980), pp. 211-212.

[30] REH to Lovecraft, circa May/June 1933.

[31] Dr. I. M. Howard to E. Hoffman Price, June 21, 1944.

[32] REH to Lovecraft, March 6, 1933.

[33] REH to Wilfred B. Talman, September 1931.

[34] REH, "Song From an Ebony Heart," Shadows of Dreams, p. 85.

[35] REH, "Love's Young Dream," Shadows of Dreams, p. 88.

[36] REH, The Hour of the Dragon (New York: G. P. Putnam's Sons, 1977), pp. 220-221.

[37] REH, "Xuthal of the Dusk," The Coming of Conan the Cimmerian, p. 219.