Brian Attebery-- The Fantasy Tradition in American Literature--essential reading, provided one avoids falling into the book-- Howard-shaped hole--begins with an examination of how fantasy was endangered before the genre could even acquire a tradition in--he country where pragmatism became a philosophy and--ormalcy--a point of faith.--Nor should we forget the ur-faith of Puritanism, which ensures that even today places exist in the United States where a burning eagerness to read, say, the Harry Potter novels is met with an eagerness to burn the Harry Potter novels. The Enlightenment so thoroughly incorporated in the Founders--blueprints was hardly more encouraging; how, for example, is a model home like Monticello to be haunted? The fantastic survived, in Attebery-- words,--s a resistance movement, working to undermine the national faith in things-as-they-are,--one given to--iding out in the nursery and periodically venturing out disguised as romance or satire or science fiction.-- L. Frank Baum paved the yellow brick road for the fantasists that followed, but his Oz is arguably more of a proto-Disneyland than a fully functioning American fairyland, as disinviting to many adults, and adolescents aspiring to adulthood, as it is come-hitherish to children and those other adults who aspire to revisit childhood. Edgar Rice Burroughs afforded Howard his principal model of a dream-life gaudier and boasting the performances of more exotic megafauna than any three-ring circus, but told his most enduring stories on the far, the optimistic side of the First World War, before shell-shock and trench fever went to work on Victorian values. To us Barsoom and Amtor and Pellucidar seem to yield too quickly to empire-building and futures of cultural terraforming rather than terror swarming. Howard's dark fantasy is more informed by history, as is his history by dark fantasy--witness the Suleyman-who-is-no-longer-quite-so-Magnificent of The Shadow of the Vulture, for whom imminent defeat appears as--gray plain of the dead, where corpses dragged their lifeless bodies to an outworn task, animated only by the will of their master.-- But Howard's well-situated alcove in the fantasy pantheon isn't enough for us; by hook or by crook, or rather by battering ram or skeleton key, we--e looking to get him into another pantheon as well, the one implicit in the argument Novalyne Price had with her cousin Enid:--oe-- works are in the literature books and Bob-- aren't--et.--To highlight what makes Howard an American classic, we must agree on what makes a classic. Although science fiction writer Gordon R. Dickson, in his introduction to the 1980 Howard collection The Road of Azrael, defined a genuine classic as the'solden bell-sound--of a unique voice, that of an author--ho has something to give which did not exist in the world before he came into it, and which disappeared forever when he went out of it,--we need credentials to sway those who feign deafness to, or genuinely cannot hear, the golden bell-sound.
Howard's own words to his friend Tevis Clyde Smith after he received the first of many missives from fellow Weird Tales contributor H. P. Lovecraft could be construed as a warning:--e-- out of my class. I-- game to go the limit with a man my weight, but me scrapping with him is like a palooka climbing into a ring with a champion.--He was wrong as can be about that--geography forced his sparring-partnership with Lovecraft (unlike, say, the bond between Tolkien and C. S. Lewis) to play itself out on paper, and most semi-impartial judges have awarded a majority of the rounds to Howard'sbut a few too many ill-considered comparisons and we might as well present his literary standing with a one-way ticket to Palookaville. Are we shoving him into the ring against opponents to whom he would be lucky to lose? Do even his most unforgettable stories belong in the same weight class as those of Poe and Hawthorne, Twain and Bierce, Hemingway and Faulkner? Are we being delusional if we borrow what D. H. Lawrence said of Herman Melville----e was neither mad nor crazy. But he was over the border. He was half a water animal, like those terrible yellow-bearded Vikings who broke out of the waves in beaked ships. He was mad to look over our horizons. Anywhere, anywhere out of our world. To get away, out!----and apply it to Howard? Well, as Sailor Steve Costigan says of himself and Mike, his throat-seeking missile of a bulldog, in this volume-- The Bulldog Breed,--lways outclassed in everything except guts and grip!-- The American literary pantheon is not on any map (--rue places never are,--Melville reminds us in Moby Dick) but just as baseball boasts Cooperstown and rock-and-roll its Hall of Fame in Cleveland, The Library of America is an approximation, a simulacrum, the earthly tabernacle or reliquary for--merica-- best and most significant writing.--Like America itself, an American pantheon should be a work in progress, a movable--and expandable--feast. Room is being found for those who never asked to be Americans, or did indeed ask but were rejected, and if the Library of America-- seal of approval can be read as the functional equivalent of a pantheon induction, the hospitable welcomes recently extended to H. P. Lovecraft and Philip K. Dick should be cause for Howardist rejoicing. The Library-- blurbage for Lovecraft salutes his--lassic stories of the strange and fantastic from the visionary master of cosmic horror--and--ntensely personal vision.--The vision of his Texas correspondent was equally intense and personal; the word--mpersonal--might as well be Etruscan in terms of its usefulness when examining Howard's work.
Far from being teacher-- pets, idealizations with ichor or ink in their veins instead of blood, the residents of the American pantheon fascinate as human beings, deeply flawed but even more deeply talented. Our inductee-in-waiting will fit right in; he is always going to be a controversial figure, one with not only his fair share of faults, but also an unfair share of alleged faults. Lovecraft somehow neglected to accuse him of complicity in the Lindbergh kidnapping, but sent so many other reproaches his way that Howard allowed himself a little fun in a July 1935 letter:
Recalling off-hand the charges you have made against me, I remember that at various times you have accused me of being: Exalter-of-the-Physical-Above-the-Mental; Enemy of Humanity; Foe of Mankind; Apostle of Prejudice; Distorter of Fact; Repudiater of Evolutionary Standards; Over-Emphasizer of Ethics; Sympathizer of Criminals (that one broke all altitude records); Egotist; Poseur; Emotionalist; Defender of Ignorance; Sentimentalist; Romanticist. If I were guilty of all the things of which you--e accused me, I not only wouldn't be fit to live; I wouldn't have sense enough to live.
To which list of charges some pantheon-gatekeepers would hasten to add, Pulp Hack, Racist, Sexist, Suicide, Bully, Arrested Adolescent, and Creator of Conan. Yes, Conan, the Cimmerian, he of the gigantic melancholies and gigantic mirth, he who poses a gigantic problem in that his huge, but decidedly non-Schwarzeneggerian, shadow falls across the rest of Howard's work. Stick up for Howard to her cousin Enid though she did, Novalyne Price herself seems to have regarded Conan as a deal-breakingly undesirable potential brother-in-law, a dependably bad influence on the writer she was dating. And down through the decades since then, the Cimmerian has gone the way of Tarzan and James Bond as a creation whose links to his creator have been repeatedly severed, so that in John Wayne-- America: The Politics of Celebrity we catch the otherwise staggeringly erudite Garry Wills referring to--onan the Barbarian, created by John Milius.----onan the Barbarian,--as dumbed-down as he is pumped-up, is merely a multimedia reduction of Conan the Cimmerian, the character displayed to optimum effect in this volume-- The Tower of the Elephant and Red Nails, and in The People of the Black Circle and Beyond the Black River of its predecessor. The title of the present afterword, which positions Howard as a barbarian at the pantheon-gates, is intended as more than a rote invocation of his uncivilized-and-proud-of-it characters. For much of America-- cultural history, any homegrown writer who presented himself at the gates guarded by Europeans--and those Americans who, in the words of Ernest Hemingway,--rote like exiled English colonials from an England of which they were never a part to a newer England that they were making----was ipso facto a barbarian, an outlander.