By Gary Romeo

Robert E. Howard's racism is brought up from time to time. When The Hour of the Dragon was reprinted for the second time as Conan the Conqueror alongside Leigh Brackett's The Sword of Rhiannon in 1953 as an Ace Double, there was a significant edit.  The first reprinting was in the Gnome Press hardcover in 1950 and, while also titled Conan the Conqueror, was not edited.

Donald Wollheim changed a word at the end of Chapter 4. In the original tale as printed in Weird Tales, December 1935, Conan had just killed a black man who had imprisoned him, while another black guardsman watches. The text reads:

But they attempted no reprisal, nor did they accept Conan’s urgent invitation to approach within reach of the bloody chain in his hand. Presently, grunting in their ape-like speech, they lifted the senseless black and bore him out like a sack of wheat.

Wollheim changed the offensive "ape-like speech" to "strange dialect." Frankly, I believe this was an improvement and a needed and progressive change for a mass-market paperback published in 1953. As a general principle, I think editors should change things they disagree with as long as the writer or the writer's estate agrees with the change.

When L. Sprague de Camp reprinted the story once more in Lancer Books, Conan the Conqueror (1967), it was changed to "guttural speech."

De Camp did not hide his reasoning; he publicly explained his thought process in an article, “Editing Conan,” originally published in the fanzine Amra and reprinted in Ace Books, The Blade of Conan (1979):

I have, therefore made a few small adjustments to take the edge off Howard’s most cutting ethnic remarks. These changes have been very slight, since it would be ridiculous to try to turn Howard posthumously into a civil-rights activist. [Ape-like] was not only abrasive but also absurd to anyone who knows about the complex, often musical African languages.

De Camp was factually and morally correct to make the change. 

By 1979 most REH books were edited for racism by either de Camp or Glenn Lord. It became a standard practice except for the Berkley Conan books published in the 1970s (why that happened is beyond the scope of this article). When the "pure text" movement gained ground CPI (the entity that now controlled REH publishing) was amenable to having a specialty press publish unedited tales. This process could have started with the Donald M. Grant hardcover books published in the 1980s. But Lord and Grant felt the edits were still needed.

When Del Rey published The Bloody Crown of Conan in December 2004, The Hour of the Dragon was reverted to the offensive "ape-like speech" narration.

Is this progress? De Camp was correct that "pure text" REH was best left to specialty publishers that appealed to hardcore fans. Edgar Rice Burroughs Inc. started the process of editing ERB’s racism decades ago. Recently they have been re-releasing pure text in specialty volumes. I believe this was the model that REH publishers should have followed. 

The Conan series really should be a popular mainstream series (as it once was), and should be geared to fans of all races and nationalities. The character, Conan, has become more than REH's literary creation. Conan is a popular culture, mass-appeal icon in fantasy. Those who like the character should be allowed to explore further but the initial contact should be non-abrasive. 

Blogger bio: Gary Romeo became a REH fan due to the Marvel Comics.  He quickly grabbed the Lancer Books and became a lifelong fan.  He has been a member of  REH United Press Association since 1999. He has  been published in The Cimmerian, REH: Two Gun Raconteur, and The Dark Man.

The Pavilion Blog is the companion blog of The Dark Man: Journal of Robert E. Howard and Pulp Studies. It features brief, conversational reflections related to Robert E. Howard at around 500-600 words. Interested in contributing? E-mail the editors at tdmjournalreh@gmail.com

Follow TDM on Twitter: @tdmjournalreh

An interview with the 2nd Editor of The Dark Man: Journal of Robert E. Howard and Pulp Studies: professor and poet, Frank Coffman. Coffman discusses the trials and successes of editing TDM issues 5, 6, 7, and 7 (revised issue).

Interviewer: Dr. Nicole Emmelhainz-Carney, Co-editor of TDM.
Also of interest: The Origins of TDM: Interview with the Founding Editor Rusty Burke​

The Pavilion Blog is the companion blog of The Dark Man: Journal of Robert E. Howard and Pulp Studies. It features brief, conversational reflections related to Robert E. Howard at around 500-600 words. Interested in contributing? E-mail the editors at jason.carney@cnu.edu
​​
Follow TDM on Twitter: @tdmjournalreh

An interview with the Founding Editor of The Dark Man: Journal of Robert E. Howard and Pulp Studies. Topics treated include the origins of TDM, Karl Edward Wagner and the Frost King's Icemaker, and the Future Vision of TDM. 

Interviewer: Dr. Nicole Emmelhainz-Carney, Co-editor of TDM.

The Pavilion Blog is the companion blog of The Dark Man: Journal of Robert E. Howard and Pulp Studies. It features brief, conversational reflections related to Robert E. Howard at around 500-600 words. Interested in contributing? E-mail the editors at jason.carney@cnu.edu
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Follow TDM on Twitter: @tdmjournalreh

By Jason Ray Carney

In a letter to H.P. Lovecraft on March 2nd, 1932, Robert E. Howard discussed the impending German Presidential Election. In accordance with the Weimar Constitution that governed Germany in 1932, true power was entrusted to the office: in addition to a seven-year-term, the President of the Weimar Republic appointed the Chancellor, the leader the Reichstag (the National Parliament), and he could dissolve and reconstitute the legislature.
 
1932 in Germany was a tense year. Economic and political tensions were simmering due to the rising Nazi and the Communist parties. Both parties, it was widely assumed, were frustrated by the constitution and sought power not to maintain the government but to replace it with a new one that harmonized with their non-democratic ideological visions.

In March of 1932, there were three candidates on the ballot. Paul von Hindenberg (1925-1934), the defender of the troubled Weimer constitution. A political and military mainstay, Hindenberg was running for a second term; 84-years-old at the time, he was a former general who led the German Imperial Army during the Great War. There was Ernst Thälmann, a member of Kommunistische Partei Deutschlands, a committed Stalinist. Finally, there was Adolf Hitler, the candidate of the Nazi party, who was only recently (February 25th, 1932) granted German citizenship. Germany, like most of the Western world during this interwar period, was in crisis, not just due to post-War reparations but also economic depression.
 
Howard viewed the election of either Hitler or Thälmann as a threat to world peace and so supported Hindenberg. He wrote this Lovecraft, who supported Hitler:
 
I hope Von Hindenburg carries the election. During war days I would cheerfully have lighted a torch to burn him at the stake, but now I think he is one of the strongest stabilizing factors in Europe, and that his re-election would be to the advantage of not only Germany, but the entire world. He was doubtless the ablest general of any nationality in the Great War, and now seems to be about the most level-headed statesman on the Continent.
 
It is curious to see Howard, naively viewed by many as partisan to anti-sociality (i.e. barbarism) and rebellion, on the side of social stability and cohesion. Considering the possibility of a fascist or soviet regime in Germany, Howard speculates about a dystopic future, one dominated by quasi-feudalistic autocrats:
 
It seems we must choose between a strong soviet government, and a strong dictatorship on the fascist style. Just as in the feudal days, men chose a strong baron or count to serve, for mutual protection. Personal liberty, it would seem, is to be a thing of the past. Individualistic independence must be sacrificed for national security.
 
Here Howard compares both soviet- and fascist-style governments to pre-modern feudalism and monarchy, to rule by a “strong baron or count.”

Howard was prescient: the interwar period became the era of dictators who curtailed civil liberties, murdered millions, and plunged the world into violent chaos. Howard’s political ideal, “individualistic independence,” seems to be projected onto the “level-headed statesman," the 84-year-old president of a troubled Weimar republic regime, a political insider.
 
Was Howard optimistic about Hindenberg’s prospects? Not quite. He expressed his pessimism in a sonnet published this same month in Weird Tales, titled “The Last Day.” It depicts a demon who allegorizes autocracy who grips a global orb in his “brutish fist.” What does the demon do with the world?
 
His skull-mouth gaped and icy shone his eye.
Down crashed the crystal globe—a fireshot mist.
Masked the dark lands, which sank below the sea--
A painted sun hung in a starless sky.
 
In Howard’s understanding, "level-headed statesmen" were opposed by brutish and diabolical forces. Tired Victorians like Paul von Hindenberg, Woodrow Wilson, and Neville Chamberlain sought to stabilize the West against demons who grasped at the globe with their brutish fists.

Blogger bio: Jason Ray Carney teaches popular literature and creative writing at Christopher Newport University. He is the co-editor of The Dark Man, the area chair of the "Pulp Studies" section of the Popular Culture Association, and the editor of Whetstone: Amateur Magazine of Sword and Sorcery.

The Pavilion Blog is the companion blog of The Dark Man: Journal of Robert E. Howard and Pulp Studies. It features brief, conversational reflections related to Robert E. Howard at around 500-600 words. Interested in contributing? E-mail the editors at jason.carney@cnu.edu

​​Follow TDM on Twitter: @tdmjournalreh

By Chase A. Folmar
​
While reading any of the Weird Tales Three, there’s a certain quote by Clark Ashton Smith that always springs to mind: "My own conscious ideal has been to delude the reader into accepting an impossibility, or series of impossibilities, by means of a sort of verbal black magic, in the achievement of which I make use of prose-rhythm, metaphor, simile, tone-color, counter-point, and other stylistic resources, like a sort of incantation."

In this description we can see not only the principle of Smith's own writing, but that of Howard, Lovecraft, many other pulp writers of the time, and later authors who were influenced by such stories. How often are we as readers inundated in these tales with expansive lists of strange, almost unpronounceable names like Zothique, Dylath-Leen, and Tsotha? How often do we come across archaic or uncommon words we need to consult the dictionary about in order to fully understand, words like cyclopean, sibilant, and comber? How often are we presented with these stories told not in the personal, more introspective style of traditional narratives, but in the detached, wider-lens format one might find in Herodotus’s Histories, or if Dante had written his Divine Comedy in prose instead of verse?

In each of these facets we can see the incantation Smith writes about coming together. With the fantastical, sometimes even absurd onslaught of names, we are thrown headfirst into completely alien and unknowable settings, immediately creating an otherworldly aura for the story to exist within. The antiquated vernacular is then added to maintain the overall weirdness of the narrative, but because these words have real-world application and history, the effect is an almost unnoticed sense of credibility lent to the described events. Culminating all of this is the quasi-historical, matter-of-fact rhetoric many of these stories are crafted with, as if they are tales stemming from by-gone ages of human history lost to all recollection more than they are imaginative romps through totally fabricated secondary worlds of pure fantasy.

Thus, the black magic is cast, and we as readers are free to fall under its spell.

This technique, so masterfully expressed by Smith, is part of the reason I believe authors like him, Howard, and Lovecraft have endured for as long as they have, and why there are still audiences hungry not only for their works, but for stories that share the same 'verbal black magic' approach. Think of Frank Herbert’s Dune, which couches events taking place in the interstellar far-future with medieval nomenclature and trappings, or Gene Wolfe’s Book of the New Sun, wherein a major part of the conceit is that the story takes place so far in Earth’s future that the 'translator' has to use both antiquated diction and prehistoric animal names as the closest substitutes for things which have no modern, recognizable equivalents.

It’s such an interesting way to not only think about writing, but also about what kind of effect you want to elicit within your audience, and speaks to the literary genius of authors like Smith, Howard, and Lovecraft. 

Blogger bio: Chase A. Folmar is a writer of speculative fiction and weird fantasy, with an avid interest in the craft of storytelling. His works and other collected thoughts can be found on his website, chaseafolmar.com.

​The Pavilion Blog is the companion blog of The Dark Man: Journal of Robert E. Howard and Pulp Studies. It features brief, conversational reflections related to Robert E. Howard at around 500-600 words. Interested in contributing? E-mail the editors at jason.carney@cnu.edu

​​Follow TDM on Twitter: @tdmjournalreh
 

By Rusty Burke

Today is the 145th birthday of Edgar Rice Burroughs, one of the most influential adventure writers of all time. His creation, "Tarzan of the Apes," is one of the best known fictional characters in the world. His "Barsoom" series, taking place on a fictional Mars, inspired generations of science fiction writers (though it must be admitted there was precious little science in his novels). The prolific ERB also wrote stories set on Venus, in the center of the Earth ("Pellucidar"), in "The Land That Time Forgot" ("Caspak"), on the moon, and much more.

Much of Burroughs' work originally appeared in All-Story magazine (aka All-Story Weekly and All-Story Cavalier Weekly before merging with The Argosy to become Argosy All-Story Weekly in 1920), which is probably where a young aspiring writer in Texas named Robert E. Howard first read it. He apparently liked it: there were twelve ERB books in his library which his father donated to Howard Payne College after Howard’s death, including six Tarzan and four Barsoom titles (the others were The Mucker and the first Pellucidar novel, At the Earth’s Core).

Oddly, though Burroughs is the best-represented author in Howard’s library, REH did not mention him in listing his "favorite authors" in a December 1932 letter to H.P. Lovecraft. He named A. Conan Doyle (9 of whose books were in his library), Jack London (6 books), Mark Twain (4), Sax Rohmer (7), Jeffery Farnol (5), Talbot Mundy (7), Harold Lamb (2), Robert W. Chambers (5), H. Rider Haggard (3), Rudyard Kipling (5), Stanley Lane-Poole (2), Ambrose Bierce (1), and Sir Walter Scott, Jim Tully, Arthur Machen, and Edgar Allan Poe, none of whom were represented by a volume in his library, but did not list Burroughs. He mentions Burroughs only once in his writings, in a futuristic race-war tale called "The Last Man": "It was, I reflected, just such a scene as had been described by Edgar Rice Burroughs, a highly imaginative writer of fiction, who flourished in the early part of the twentieth century."

No one can doubt that Burroughs must have had some influence on Howard. In particular, the Tarzan stories seem likely to have played some role in the conception of the barbarian, and the jungle setting probably influenced any of Howard’s tales set in Darkest Africa (though of course Haggard and others might have contributed as well). Deuce Richardson has recently made a strong case that Tarzan the Untamed very likely influenced Howard’s Conan stories "A Witch Shall Be Born" and "Xuthal of the Dusk." While Untamed was not among the books donated to the Howard Payne library, it was the seventh book in the series, and Howard owned the first five as well as the eighth, so it strikes me as likely he’d have also had six and seven, and Deuce’s examples certainly suggest that, at the very least, REH had read it.

We can only wonder why Burroughs was left off the list in 1932. Possibly he thought such a "popular" writer would not impress Lovecraft. Or maybe he just overlooked him inadvertently. Whatever the case, I think it is safe to say that Burroughs was an important influence on Robert E. Howard.

Blogger bio: Rusty Burke is the Chairman/President of The Robert E. Howard Foundation; he was the founding editor of The Dark Man, and compiler of The Robert E Howard Bookshelf, among other things. 

​The Pavilion Blog is the companion blog of The Dark Man: Journal of Robert E. Howard and Pulp Studies. It features brief, conversational reflections related to Robert E. Howard at around 500-600 words. Interested in contributing? E-mail the editors at jason.carney@cnu.edu 

By Danny Anderson

John Milius helped define the 1980’s when he cast Arnold Schwarzenegger in Conan the Barbarian. The 1982 film jump-started the career of one of cinema’s most iconic action stars, and the epic brought to the screen a violent swagger that made it an instant cult classic. The film was merciless, cruel, and ever so chauvinistic. If ever a film flaunts the conventions of political correctness, this is that film.

Given all that, one might think that movie has aged badly and become reduced to a mere nostalgic curiosity, or, worse yet, only a cinematic pilgrimage for Proud Boys and devoted acolytes of Richard B. Spencer.

I say to you today that this is not the case.

Conan the Barbarian has become, to our collective cultural shame, more relevant than ever.
​
Make no mistake: this is still a very fun movie and its classic soundtrack works with its visuals and campy, committed performances to create a shockingly thrilling experience. But what I want to focus on here is how the film’s politics map so neatly upon our own in 2020.

First, there’s the civilization itself. Conan is born into a world in which the old orders have disintegrated. What has emerged in that vacuum is a combination of warlords and mysticism. In the figure of James Earl Jones’s Thulsa Doom, the mystic becomes warlord, and his snake-cult of personality spreads across former empires attracting young neophytes in hoards, undermining the very foundations of the old kingdoms.

It should be fairly obvious that I’m drawing a parallel between Thulsa Doom’s warlord mysticism and the rise of populism and neo-fascism. For example, Donald Trump has subverted the old political institutions on the backs of not one, but two religious cults: the Christian nationalism of Evangelicalism and the secular messianic faith of QAnon. Trump, like Putin, is no less a snake-king than Thulsa Doom.

And on the subject of snakes: in the last decade, the colonial era “Don’t Tread on Me” flag has become increasingly ubiquitous among certain groups. Whatever the origins of the flag are, people who fly it now signal an allegiance to an American micro-culture: militias, anti-masking, gun rights, and so on. This is merely a tip of the Balkanized iceberg that our society has become.

We see it every day with variations on the American flag. Blue lines, red lines, colorless, colonial, fringed. And that Confederate flag, of course. It seems each group has its own tribalistic version of America to pledge allegiance to. Like Thulsa Doom’s symbol of two snakes facing one another, these flags are symbols of our modern gods, and everyone must choose their own object of worship, their own proverbial Crom, Mitra, or Set.  

The many gods of Conan’s Hyborian landscape are but one point of connection to our contemporary Balkanization. Conan’s debate with Subotai about whether Crom or The Four Winds are greater gods can be seen as a metaphor for our own many variations on the Black Lives Matter/All Lives Matter confrontation. Trump, for all his faults, is not the cause of this fracture, but another function of it, in spite of fantasies of a “return to normalcy.” Like Thulsa Doom, he has merely figured out how to rally his many tribes.

Our civil discourse has collapsed. Hear the lamentation of the women. 

Blogger bio: Danny Anderson teaches English at Mount Aloysius College in PA. He tries to help his students experience the world through art. In his own attempts to do this, he likes to write about movies and culture, and he produces and hosts the Sectarian Review Podcast so he can talk to more folks about such things. You can find him on Twitter at: @DannyPAnderson.

​The Pavilion Blog is the companion blog of The Dark Man: Journal of Robert E. Howard and Pulp Studies. It features brief, conversational reflections related to Robert E. Howard at around 500-600 words. Interested in contributing? E-mail the editors at jason.carney@cnu.edu

By Luke E. Dodd

(Editors' Note: This is a preview of a larger study Dodd is conducting. The full study will be made available on our web page in December. Figures appended. JRC and NE)
 
Publication of The Dark Man: Journal of Robert E. Howard and Pulp Studies (hereafter, TDM) dates to August of 1990. Over more than 30 years, this journal has provided over 1,800 pages of content both for and from the Robert E. Howard fandom. To date, TDM has spanned 24 issues.
 
Given the long tenure of this publication, lead editorial efforts have shifted over the history of TDM. Across all editorial eras, the publication rate of TDM has been 0.9 ± 0.2 (mean ± SE) issues per year. However, TDM has maintained a rate of 1.3 ± 0.4 issues per year since the landmark 25th anniversary issue, and since 2019 the journal has maintained a twice-annual publication schedule. Along a similar trajectory, the page count of any given TDM issue has increased dramatically over the years (see Figure 1 above). While the length of TDM has averaged 75 ± 6 pages across all issues, the journal currently hews consistently to a length of 100 pages per issue. These metrics indicate substantial growth of the journal across multiple decades.

​Across the full tenure of the journal, the majority of all entries in TDM have been either scholarly articles (47%) or reviews of published works (22%). Authorship of these pieces of criticism has varied widely over the decades, and serves as a testament to an inquisitive, vocal fandom that includes both established members of the field as well as newcomers to works of Robert E. Howard. Indeed, 63 individuals have contributed scholarly articles, notes, and reviews to TDM. Considering these, the most published contributors to TDM include Charles Hoffman (10 entries), followed by Rusty Burke (9 entries) and Dr. Charles Gramlich (8 entries). Editorial materials in TDM (21%) have spanned a variety of topics, and include not only prefatory remarks, but occasionally interviews, opinion pieces, or special features.
 
Considering general trends across editorial eras, scholarly articles and notes tend to provide about half of the total contributions to TDM, while total editorial and review entries have been more variable over the years (see Figure 2 below). Importantly, memorials penned for deceased members of the field (3%) have also been featured in TDM across editorial eras, as well rarer materials from Robert E. Howard himself (6%). These contributions underscore the important inclusion of irregular miscellany in TDM over the years.
 
The author extends a hearty thanks to the Robert E. Howard Foundation, and specifically www.howardworks.com for their tireless efforts to catalog the publication history of Robert E. Howard; nearly all data summarized here was procured from that resource. Data visualizations in this publication were generated in R (version 3.6.0; R Core Team 2019; https://www.r-project.org//). Many thanks also go to Josh Adkins for conversations and suggestions related to data visualization. Finally, the author extends a deep gratitude to the many editors of TDM for their many decades of service to pulp fandom.
 
Luke E. Dodd is a professor, scientist, devourer of music, and collector of hobbies. He is one of the three hosts of The Cromcast, a podcast dedicated to the works of Robert E. Howard and other weird fiction (www.thecromcast.blogspot.com). He lives in Kentucky with his wife and son.

AUDIO ESSAY

By Jason Ray Carney
 
Recently scholar Bobby Derie brought to my attention an interesting passage from a letter from H.P. Lovecraft to J. Vernon Shea. In this passage, Lovecraft admits to admiring Ernest Hemingway:
 
"Hemingway is the sort of guy I intensely admire without any great impulse to imitate him. His prosaic objectivity is a very high form of art--which I wish I could parallel--but I can't get used to the rhythm of his short, harsh sentences."
 
- H. P. Lovecraft to J. Vernon Shea, 18 Sep 1931, LJS 56
 
Initially, one cannot think of two more diametrically opposed writers. Hemingway the Literary Modernist hews closely, even quasi-journalistically, to a harsh reality principle. In novels such as The Sun Also Rises (1926) and short stories like "A Clean, Well-Lighted Place" (1933), Hemingway uses a narrative rhetoric shorn of all superfluidities to bring into stark focus the disenchanted, dehumanizing reality of interwar modernity. With spartan prose, Hemingway creates flawed and pitiful characters such as Jake Barnes, Francis Macomber, Santiago the Fishermen, men who are portrayed as defeated, emasculated, and undermined by the harsh conditions of their unromantic lives.
 
Compare this oeuvre to Lovecraft the Pulp Sensationalist, whose work bridges every variation of the unreal genres of science fiction, fantasy, and supernatural horror. Lovecraft's dream stories are overripe with Dunsanian lyricism and baroque language. Lovecraft's Gothic pastiches adopt antiquarian affectations and have truck with a rhetoric of pulp spectacle, replete with ghouls, yawning graves, and lots of exclamation points. Finally, consider Lovecraft's science fiction masterpieces, such as At the Mountains of Madness (1936), loquacious tales that gush with pseudo-ethnographic thick description.
 
In execution and style, these two writers could not be more different.
 
But Lovecraft's admiration of Hemingway reminds us to consider these two writers' thematic similarities, their perverse preoccupation with the extent to which modernity disenchants the world, disinvests humanity of a sense of belonging in the cosmos; how modernity transforms the cosmos into a vacuum of meaninglessness. Consider the reflections of the protagonist from Hemingway's, "A Clean, Well-Lighted Place," a man who contemplates what he believes to be the bedrock foundation of the human condition: an undeniable fear of nothingness that can only be temporarily arrested by light.
 
What did he fear? It was not fear or dread. It was a nothing that he knew too well. It was all a nothing and a man was nothing too […] but he knew it all was nada y pues nada y nada y pues nada. Our nada who art in nada, nada be thy name thy kingdom nada thy will be nada in nada as it is in nada. Give us this nada our daily nada […]. Hail nothing full of nothing, nothing is with thee.
 
We hear the echoes of this philosophy of the ubiquity of fear in many of Lovecraft's famous, aphoristic asides in fiction, as well as in his criticism, not least from his opening to his literary historical survey of weird fiction,  "Supernatural Horror in Fiction":
 
The oldest and strongest emotion of mankind is fear, and the oldest and strongest kind of fear is fear of the unknown. These facts few psychologists will dispute, and their admitted truth must establish for all time the genuineness and dignity of the weirdly horrible tale as a literary form. Against it are discharged all the shafts of a materialistic sophistication which clings to frequently felt emotions and external events, and of a naively insipid idealism which deprecates the aesthetic motive […].
 
For both Hemingway and Lovecraft, fear of an all-consuming emptiness taints all of our human endeavors. Both writers are bards of the absurd, giving aesthetic form to humanity's alienation in the Western world between the wars.

​Blogger bio: Jason Ray Carney teaches popular literature and creative writing at Christopher Newport University. He is the co-editor of The Dark Man, the area chair of the "Pulp Studies" section of the Popular Culture Association, and the editor of Whetstone: Amateur Magazine of Sword and Sorcery.

The Pavilion Blog is the companion blog of The Dark Man: Journal of Robert E. Howard and Pulp Studies. It features brief, conversational reflections related to Robert E. Howard at around 500-600 words. Interested in contributing? E-mail the editors at jason.carney@cnu.edu

By Willard M. Oliver

In the third issue of The Dark Man, Rusty Burke published an article titled, “The Active Voice: Robert E. Howard’s Personae,” in which he demonstrated a clear pattern in Howard’s writing in that in order for him to write his stories, he first had to create a character and develop a persona around that character. “It wasn’t enough for him to relate stories about a character,” Burke wrote in the introduction to Post Oaks and Sand Roughs & Other Autobiographical Writings, “he had to relate them from within the character” (REH Foundation Press, 2019). As Howard himself told Lovecraft in a September/October 1933 letter, “I like to have my background and setting as accurate and realistic as I can, with my limited knowledge.”

In The Dark Man article, Burke noted the three main personae for Howard were the Boxer, the Celt, and the Texan, while in the introduction to Post Oaks he adds one more persona, the one he developed to write his semi-autobiographical novel, the “Realist” or “Realism” persona. To this list, I wish to propose one more persona that, like the Realism persona, did not fully develop, but still found its way into many of his yarns and rimes; I am speaking of the Ancient Mesopotamian Persona.

The early roots of this persona most likely came from reading the Bible, something his mother no doubt impressed upon him. In Howard’s letters to Lovecraft, he mentions Ancient Mesopotamia in five separate letters, such as a February 1931 letter in which he explained, “I somehow feel more a sense of placement and personal contact with Babylon, Nineveh, Askalon, Gaza, Gath, and the like, than I do with Athens or Rome.” In a follow-on letter in June, he even went so far as to write, “I have wondered at times if I number some Babylonian or Chaldean among my ancient ancestors, so strong at times [...] for it is only with the Mesopotamian countries that I feel any sense of placement.” It is possible that Howard was purposefully writing about Ancient Mesopotamia in these letters because he was endeavoring to create a new persona.

Howard’s yarns that have a strong connection to Ancient Mesopotamia include the unfinished Solomon Kane story “The Children of Asshur,” as well as “The Fire of Asshurbanipal,” “The House of Arabu,” and “The Voice of El-Lil.”  He also mentions Mesopotamia in such varied stories as “The Blood of Belshazzar,” “The Road of the Eagles,” “The Lion of Tiberias,” “Skull-Face,” “The Moon of Skulls,” and “The Gods of Bal-Sagoth.”

In looking to Howard’s rimes, the evidence is clear that he had a fascination for Ancient Mesopotamia: “The Gate of Nineveh,” “Babel,” “Babylon,” “Babylon has Fallen,” “O Babylon, Lost Babylon,” “The Road to Babel,” “The Riders of Babylon,” etc.

Although the topic of Ancient Mesopotamia sadly did not develop into a specific character, it clearly wove its way through some of Howard’s writing. Further research may clarify if this was merely a subject of fascination or an undeveloped persona.

Blogger bio: Willard M. Oliver is a professor at Sam Houston State University in Huntsville, Texas. He is a member of REHupa, has recently published in The Dark Man, and is currently working on a biography of REH for the University of North Texas Press. 

The Pavilion Blog is the companion blog of The Dark Man: Journal of Robert E. Howard and Pulp Studies. It features brief, conversational reflections related to Robert E. Howard at around 500-600 words. Interested in contributing? E-mail the editors at jason.carney@cnu.edu