They are gathering in Cross Plains, Texas, this weekend, for the annual Howard Days celebration of the great Texas pulp writer — a man whose short, incandescent arc across the literary firmament has inspired countless people to seek adventure on the page.
I have never attended Howard Days, despite urging from Deuce Richardson, and I don’t know that I ever will be able to swing it. My next raid into Texas will likely be in pursuit of a sniper challenge… but that is a tale for another time.
I doubt not that I would enjoy the company of others who have found decades of keen enjoyment in the works of Robert E. Howard. This year, Willard M. Oliver will be on hand with his masterful biography, Robert E. Howard: The Life and Times of a Texas Author.
It took a little while for my indie book store to get this scholarly tome into my hands, and I didn’t intend to delve in immediately, as my attention has been elsewhere. But perusing it proved a dangerous dalliance — I was soon swept into the current and ended up reading the whole thing. All 473 pages of it (plus notes). Like I said, it’s a scholarly biography. But, obviously, it is a helluva read, too. Oliver writes with such deep understanding and empathy for his subject, that it renders the ultimately tragic story of a creative but tormented man accessible even to those who are not as deeply invested in Howardiana as so many of us are.
By Crom! the man crushed it. Reviews by people I respect delve throughly into the many strengths of this book, and I will not tread on their ground. Read Brian Murphy here, and John Bullard here.
I will confine myself to saluting Oliver for emphasizing the element of Howard’s life and work that has kept him alive and relevant for me when much of the work that captured me in my early teen years has faded into a hazy background. Howard was a Texan, and a writer of the frontier. Not just in his Westerns, of which there were many, but in all of his work — and particularly in the work that made him immortal: his tales of Conan of Cimmeria.
Conan of Cimmerian, by Justin Sweet.
Oliver emphasizes and re-emphasizes the centrality of a frontier ethos in Howard’s psychology and his work. This is made powerfully explicit in Howard’s correspondence with H.P. Lovecraft:
“What I want is impossible. I want, in a word, the frontier — which is compassed in the phrase new land, open land, free land — land rich and unbroken and virgin, swarming with game and laden with fresh forests and sweet, cold streams where a man could live by the sweat of his hands unmarred by taxes, crowds, noise, unemployment, bank failures, gang-extortion laws, and all the wearisome things of civilization.”
And, Oliver notes:
Although he could not have this in his own world, Howard could create it for Conan, and he called it the Hyborian Age.
The fire that lent Howard’s work its pulsing, lambent glow was a lust for, a demand for freedom.
“In the last analysis,” he explained to Lovecraft, “I reckon I have but a single conviction or ideal, or whatever it might be called: individual liberty.It’s the only thing that matters a damn. I’d rather be a naked savage, shivering, starving, freezing, hunted by wild beasts and enemies, but free to go and come, with the range of the earth to roam, than the fattest, richest, most bedecked slave in a golden palace.” Freedom was Howard’s center of gravity. It was what drove him. It underpinned his thoughts, it was the source of his love of the frontier, and it is found in each of his character creations.
“By God, I demand freedom for myself,” he succinctly declared to Lovecraft, “and if I can’t have it, I’d rather be dead.”
Howard would die by his own hand at the age of 30. Perhaps he had come to believe that the frontier he so yearned for could not be reached, and so ventured into the far country of death to seek it.
*
Robert E. Howard: The Life and Times of a Texas Author is one damned fine piece of work. If you are at all interested in the life and works of REH, pick it up. And raise a horn to Will Oliver, who has given us a chronicle that will stand until the mountains crumble and the oceans once again drink our civilization.
*
This is a fine recitation of Howard’s poem, Cimmeria:
Matthew says
I tend to identify with Howard. We are both writers from Texas. (Though Howard published a tremendous amount of work before he was thirty. I’ve only published a handful of things after that.)
I do wonder if Howard was “neural-divergent” which might be something else we have in common. That said there’s no way to know. You would need a trained diagnostician to interview Howard.
Greg Austin Walker says
I read Howard’s work as a very young man and was enthralled by it. How sad to learn he took his own life – age does not discriminate when it comes to suicide.
So many world-class writers and authors have done so. Hemingway, Thompson, Howard, Anne Sexton…
Mark Seinfelt has written a book on such tragic deaths titled “Final Drafts – Suicides of World Famous Authors” – “Seinfelt reveals that many authors contemplated ending their lives in their work; were obsessed with destroying themselves; were unable-in the case of the Holocaust-to live with the fact that their contemporaries had been killed; believed death to be a freedom from the horrors that forced them to create; and, sometimes, were simply unable to withstand rejection or criticism of their work.”
“Other noted authors discussed in this volume include John Berryman, Ambrose Bierce, Harry Crosby, John Davidson, William Inge, Randall Jarrell, Arthur Koestler, T.E. Lawrence, Primo Levi, Jack London, Jay Anthony Lukas, Tom McHale, Yukio Mishima, Henry de Montherlant, Seth Morgan, George Sterling, Sara Teasdale, Ernst Toller, John Kennedy Toole, Sergey Yesenin, and many others”
It’s a hell of a graveyard.
JimC says
It is, indeed, a helluva graveyard. The Ambrose Bierce case is particularly interesting from a Frontier Partisans perspective, because it seems likely that Bierce probably committed suicide by Revolutionary firing squad at the hands of Pancho Villa’s men.
deuce says
Along with Bullard’s and Murphy’s, this is another excellent review of Oliver’s book. Thanks, Jim!
Will says
Thanks, Jim! Raising a horn in honor of my Howard biography is high praise indeed.