By Nicole Emmelhainz-Carney
 
Background and Methodology 
 
Like many before me, I have found Howard’s letters to be an unbelievably useful source for primary data collection and analysis. For the brief analysis that follows, I used The Collected Letters of Robert E. Howard, 1923-1929, edited by Rob Roehm. I gave a presentation of this research at Howard Days 2019 for the Glenn Lord Symposium. Ben Friberg’s video of the presentation (as well as my co-presenter’s presentations) are on YouTube. 

I’m applying a methodological approach called “distant reading” for this research. Distant reading is a process developed through the Digital Humanities (a fairly newer interdisciplinary academic field that combines technological approaches to tradition Humanities research) that allows for large amounts of text to be analyzed through different lenses. As opposed to a “close reading,” where in the researcher would typically limit their primary data to just one text (or one part of a text), distant reading allows for researchers to observe patterns across many texts and much larger datasets. Distant reading provides the possibility, then, to generate better understandings of a writer’s work over time: where attention lies more in the text (determined by numbers and usage) and what that focus may mean for the whole of the writings.

There are many openly-accessible software platforms that allow anyone to conduct distant readings; I used Voyant (https://voyant-tools.org/) for this project. Voyant has a fairly low learning curve and allows its users to easily visual data through a variety of means, include general information about the text (such as total words), word clouds, and trends within the dataset. 
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Howard as a Young Writer: General Observations​

While I don’t have the space in this blog post to go into the many interesting observations made through a distant reading of Howard’s early letters, what I can say is that, generally, Howard’s letters demonstrate that he was incredibly thoughtful about his writing and his process for writing, and that Howard was also an astute observer of the markets and audiences he wrote for. He thought often about the type of writing he was producing and wanted to produce. This was evident from throughout his correspondences with Tevis Clyde Smith and Harold Preece in the first volume of his collected letters. He was also highly critical of himself as a writer. This passage, from letter #033 to Smith, demonstrates Howard’s struggles and his response to those struggles:
        
I’m a failure. Ha ha ha ha ha ha! Rich ain’t it? All day I’ve worked tried to write poetry. I’ve worked. I’ve worked. Changing, revising, aw hell! My stuff is so infernally barren, so damnably small. I read the poems of some great author and while they uplift me, they assure me of my failure. Hell, hell, hell. My soul’s a flame of divine fire, damn me damn me damn me, I can’t give it a human, worldly voice.

While this collection doesn’t include his correspondents’ letters, it’s clear from the tone and writing style that Howard employs that he saw these letters as an opportunity to enact the idea of “writing as a conversation.” Howard experienced problems with his writing, or had questions, and posed and explored these problems and questions in his letters to his friends. While I’m uncertain as to how Preece and Smith responded, I believe that the act of writing the letters allowed Howard to explore his concerns in a way where his imagined audience (what Preece and Smith may respond) was enough to let Howard process his troubles, learn from them, and grow as a writer. Analyzing the first volume of letters in Voyant, and limiting the text to exclude common words such as articles, prepositions, and pronouns, I generated the following word cloud:

Barring some overlap because of different variations of these words (for example, the capitalized version of “write” appears separately from the lowercase version of the word), in his early letters, Howard’s focus in his letters often gravitated towards issues of writing. With his first professional publication appearing in Weird Tales during this time, it’s not surprising that as he ‘conversed’ with his friends in these letters, he was still learning how to be a writer. 

In the interest of space and time, I’d like to wrap up this short analysis by saying that rather than a pulp “hack” writer, Howard was, from the beginning, a careful, reflective writer who sought out advice and help from trusted friends. Like we see happening in the coming years with the development of a discourse community within the Weird Tales writers he corresponded with, Howard in his early writing years was very much centered in a writing community of peers. Without these, he may not have developed into the writer he’s now known for being. 

Blogger bio: Nicole Emmelhainz-Carney is an Associate Professor of Rhetoric and Composition at Christopher Newport University, where she also serves as the Writing Program Administrator and Writing Center Director. A poet and scholar, her research interests include collaboration and writing practices among writers. She has published and presented on Robert E. Howard frequently, and serves as co-editor for The Dark Man: Journal of Robert E. Howard and Pulp Studies.

​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 Jason Ray Carney

Let's not prevaricate: Robert E. Howard was intrigued by violence. Boxing, gunplay, fencing, battle: these violent activities feature widely in Howard's works. But did he glorify violence?

Sometimes he did. Sometimes he didn't. It would be incorrect to claim that Howard articulated a sophisticated theory of violence. And yet, there is evidence that the young writer thought deeply about violence and did not always naively glorify it. Consider this passage from the James Allison story, "The Valley of the Worm." The narrator, James Allison, a disabled person who mystically recalls his several past lives, describes a pre-modern battle thus:

I cannot paint the madness, the reek of sweat and blood, the panting, muscle-straining effort, the splintering of bones under mighty blows, the rending and hewing of quivering sentient flesh; above all the merciless abysmal savagery of the whole affair, in which there was neither rule nor order, each man fighting as he would or could. If I might do so, you would recoil in horror; even the modern I, cognizant of my close kinship with those times, stand aghast as I review that butchery.

Howard is not James Allison, of course; but Howard, like Allison, was a modern; so, attributing Howard's sensibilities to Allison might be interesting. But did Howard, like Allison, "stand aghast" at bloody violence? This is a difficult claim to accept given the ubiquity of lovingly described violence in Howard's fiction.

​What did Howard think about violence in general?

Perhaps a more directly biographical reference will help. Consider a passage from Post Oaks and Sand Roughs, a quasi-autobiographical account of Howard's life in the late 1920s. The protagonist, Steve Costigan, reflects on the attractiveness of football games to moderns:

Steve Costigan sat in the grandstands to see men clash and bleed, and he was frank in his admission of the fact. […] And in this respect was consciously honest, while the rooters, men and women who roared for a touchdown, were as unconsciously dishonest as those ladies and senators who thronged the amphitheaters of ancient Rome to discuss the skill and beauty of the chariot races […] and secretly thrilled at the sight of the charioteers who died under the frantic hoofs.

Here Howard strikes on one of his perennial themes, the hypocrisy of civilization, the way rules of polite comportment sometimes obscure and hide an underlying savagery. It recalls the young Conan the Cimmerian's oft-quoted reflection in "The Tower of the Elephant": "Civilized men are more discourteous than savages because they know they can be impolite without having their skulls split, as a general thing."

Howard does not always glorify violence in a naive way. Instead, he often acknowledges how, perhaps tragically, violence is a permanent feature of being human. In this way, Howard finds a surprising ally in a great intellectual of the interwar period, Walter Benjamin (1892-1940), the famous Jewish mystic and Marxist philosopher. In Section V of Benjamin's Theses on the Philosophy of History (1942), he states, "Es ist niemals ein Dokument der Kultur, ohne zugleich ein solches der Barbarei zu sein. / There is no document of civilization which is not at the same time a document of barbarism." Here Benjamin translates Marx's 19th-century theory of class antagonism as the engine of history into a lyrical idiom. For Benjamin, even the most beautiful art--e.g. Stravinsky's haunting orchestral composition, The Firebird (1910)--is nevertheless the dark exuda of a society animated by a never-ending struggle between the haves and the have-nots. Could those warbling notes of 1910 prefigure the cacophony of trench warfare?

Howard would brave that strange comparison.

Howard was fascinated by violence. Often, in a puerile way, he glorifies it in the register of pulp entertainment; and yet, his understanding of violence seems mature, part of a sincere tragic vision shared by many others, such as William S. Burroughs, who in a 1991 interview famously quipped, "This is a war universe. War all the time. That is its nature. There may be other universes based on all sorts of other principles, but ours seems to be based on war and games."

War and games. Swordplay and boxing. Gunplay and football.

Let a passage from a December 1934 letter to H.P. Lovecraft conclude this reflection. Howard has this say about the ubiquity of bloodshed in Texas history:

Frequently range-wars and feuds and fights were the result, not of deliberate aggression on either side, but simply because of economic, climatic and even geographical conditions beyond the scope of human control. [...] You can hardly pick out a western feud and say definitely that one side was 'ride' and the other 'wrong.'

For Howard, violence isn't only an issue of moral significance; it is also natural, like a storm, a plague, or an erupting volcano. Violence is not only ugly. Violence is sublime, terrifying, beyond our control.

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

Organization: The Pavilion posts should be brief (no fewer than 400 words; no more than 650). A sub-goal of posts will be to remind readers of the archive of nonfiction resources available that treat Howard (specifically resources that may have been forgotten or are currently neglected).

Style: The style of the posts can range from academic to conversational.

Editorial policy, proofs, and changes: The blog editor(s) will cut longer blog post submissions to meet the approximate 500 word requirement. Additionally, blog submissions may be edited before publishing (proofreading, sentence-level clarity, etc.). Although writers will not be given pre-publication proofs of posts, they should not hesitate to contact the editor(s) if changes need to be made after posting.

Rights and CC License: Writers retain all copyrights. In lieu of copyright, writers will be asked to license their posts to The Pavilion under the  following Creative Commons license: "Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike CC BY-NC-SA." Under this CC license, writers authorize The Pavilion editors to share their work with readers of the blog as well as make cosmetic editorial changes such as proofreading; however, The Pavilion  cannot use this work commercially. (Archive note: posts will be archived but can be removed if the author requests their removal).

Author bio: In addition to the post, writers should include a brief bio (no fewer than 50 words; these words do not count toward word limit). Include references to projects you are working on or would like to promote.

Art policy: Except in cases where art is being analyzed or the writer can provide original, high-quality art, this will be a text-only blog. If art is included, permissions must be obtained.

Topic Ideas:
Post Oaks and Sand Roughs
One Who Walked Alone
Howard’s Young Reading
Jack London and Robert E. Howard
Robert E. Howard and Texas Mythology
The Economics of Howard’s Stories 
The Horror of Robert E. Howard
Robert E. Howard and Rendering Sorcery
Robert E. Howard and Oil
The Prose Style of Robert E. Howard’s Action Scenes
Robert E. Howard and Boxing
Robert E. Howard and Reading History
The Young Friends of Robert E. Howard
The Life Philosophy of Conan the Cimmerian
The Poetry of Robert E. Howard
Robert E. Howard and the Jazz Age
Robert E. Howard and Blades
Robert E. Howard and Genres

Overview: The Pavilion Blog will function as the companion blog of The Dark Man: Journal of Robert E. Howard and Pulp Studies. The Pavilion will feature brief scholarly notes, interviews, memoir essays, reviews, and other REH and pulp-related miscellany. These posts will be brief essays/pensée for helping readers identify and explore  interesting elements about Robert E. Howard, his work, and his literary historical context.

SUBMISSIONS

Organization: The Pavilion posts should be brief (no fewer than 400 words; no more than 650). A sub-goal of posts will be to remind readers of the archive of nonfiction resources available that treat Howard (specifically resources that may have been forgotten or are currently neglected).

Style: The style of the posts can range from academic to conversational.

Editorial policy, proofs, and changes: The blog editor(s) will cut longer blog post submissions to meet the approximate 500 word requirement. Additionally, blog submissions may be edited before publishing (proofreading, sentence-level clarity, etc.). Although writers will not be given pre-publication proofs of posts, they should not hesitate to contact the editor(s) if changes need to be made after posting.

Rights and CC License: Writers retain all copyrights. In lieu of copyright, writers will be asked to license their posts to The Pavilion under the  following Creative Commons license: "Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike CC BY-NC-SA." Under this CC license, writers authorize The Pavilion editors to share their work with readers of the blog as well as make cosmetic editorial changes such as proofreading; however, The Pavilion  cannot use this work commercially. (Archive note: posts will be archived but can be removed if the author requests their removal).

Author bio: In addition to the post, writers should include a brief bio (no fewer than 50 words; these words do not count toward word limit). Include references to projects you are working on or would like to promote.

Art policy: Except in cases where art is being analyzed or the writer can provide original, high-quality art, this will be a text-only blog. If art is included, permissions must be obtained. 

Queries and submissions:  jason.carney [at] cnu [dot] edu