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 [email protected]

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 [email protected]

By Bobby Derie

Conan the Barbarian #1 was launched by Marvel Comics in 1970...and before that, Conan appeared in an adaptation of “Gods of the North” in Star-Studded Comics #14 (Texas Trio, 1968)...and before that, down in Mexico, several series of La Reina de la Costa Negra ran through the 50s and 60s, starring a blond Conan alongside his pirate-queen Bêlit. They had first appeared together in the anthology Cuentos de Abuelito (1952). Before that...Gardner Fox had created a pastiche, Crom the Barbarian, who first appeared in Out of this World #1 (1950).

Comic writers and artists would go on to publish the adventures of Conan and Kull, Bran Mak Morn and Solomon Kane, and Cormac Fitzgeoffrey, James Allison and Breckinridge Elkins, and others, albeit rarely. But these are all heroes. 

So, too, would they adapt and publish some of Howard's standalone horror stories. “Dig Me No Grave” was adapted in the revived Journey Into Mystery #1 (Marvel, 1972), “The Monster from the Mound” and “The Thing on the Roof” in Chamber of Chills #2 and #3 (Marvel1973)—but what about before that? What was the first Howard horror story adapted to comics?

In the days before the Comics Code Authority was created in 1954, horror comics proliferated on the stands, each one trying to outdo the other in grue and ghastliness. The comics shared many writers, artists, and editors with pulp magazines, and “borrowing” plots from the pulps was common, without credit to the original authors, and they often ended up strongly altered along the way. H. P. Lovecraft’s “Cool Air” was discreetly adapted by EC as "Baby...It's Cold Inside!" in Vault of Horror #17 (1951), and his “Pickman’s Model” became “Portrait of Death” in Weird Terror #1 (1952).

They borrowed from Robert E. Howard too.

“Skulls of Doom!” in Voodoo #12 (1953) is very obviously, albeit loosely, based on the story “Old Garfield’s Heart” which had first been published in Weird Tales (Dec 1933). The parallels are uncanny: a doctor is called to the beside of a dying old man, in whom an alien organ belonging to an old god resides—and must be returned. However, the adapters took Howard’s simple and powerful story and give it a few twists. Instead of the heart, the organ is the brain—an undying brain from the Egyptian priest Vishnu, who was made a god after his death. In a typical pre-Code horror morality play, the unscrupulous doctor steals Vishnu’s brain—and puts it in his own skull. Which works out great, until Vishnu returns to reclaim his brain.

There may be some earlier adaptation tucked away in the moldering pages of some other pre-Code horror comic, and few of the writers and artists of that era could come close to capturing the magic of Howard’s prose, even if they borrowed his ideas. But for those who want to read “Skulls of Doom!”, the comic has passed into the public domain, and may be read for free.

​Blogger bio: Bobby Derie is a scholar of pulp studies and weird fiction; the author of Weird Talers: Essays on Robert E. Howard and Others and Sex and the Cthulhu Mythos.

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 [email protected]

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. 
​
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 [email protected]

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 [email protected]

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