As Brian Attebery emphasizes,--he American writer must find some way of reentering the ancient storytelling guild: he must validate his claim to the archetypes that are the tools of the trade.--Howard's modus operandi involved straightforward breaking and entering, after which he helped himself to whatever archetypes he needed. Thus the harpies of Wings, on loan from Jason and the Argonauts, and the advisory to readers at the start of The Valley of the Worm acknowledging that they--ave heard the tale before in many guises wherein the hero was named Tyr, or Perseus, or Siegfried, or Beowulf, or Saint George----and yet it is Niord/James Allison/Robert E. Howard who knows best, by dint of having known first. Such effrontery is a way for the American fantasist to plant his feet and his feats. Against the Conqueror Worm, Howard sets the worm-conqueror in not only The Valley of the Worm but also Red Nails.
In 1938 J. R. R. Tolkien, moonlighting as a draconologist not long after he had unleashed Smaug,--he Chiefest and Greatest of Calamities,--in The Hobbit, assured an audience of children in an Oxford lecture that a dragon is--ore terrible than any dinosaur--and--he final test of heroes,--so it is quite fitting that a dragon should test Conan the Cimmerian in his final adventure (final in the sense of last to be written). Howard's hero brings, of course, a forthrightly American attitude to the confrontation:--here-- no law against killing a dragon, is there?--is his libertarian question to Olmec in an early draft of Red Nails. In his indispensable Beowolf: The Monsters and the Critics, Tolkien makes the case that--here are in any case many heroes but very few good dragons,--and faults the Beowulf-dragon for--ot being dragon enough,--due to trace elements of symbolism and allegory that threaten to dilute the effectiveness of--ome vivid touches of the right kind.--His ideal is a--eal worm, with a bestial life and thought of his own.--Howard's dragon in Red Nails is nothing but vivid touches and bestial life, hungry, enraged, vengeful--woe betide any allegorical readings foolish enough to be caught downwind of him. He squats--atching [Conan and Valeria-- crag] with the frightful patience of the reptile folk. So might one of his brood have glared up at their troglodyte ancestors, treed on a high-flung rock, in the dim dawn ages.--Later he wallows on the ground--ike a dog with pepper in its eyes,--and--noisy gurgling and lapping--betrays his attempt to quench his poison-inflamed thirst.
Conan, who will soon be faced with the riotously unnatural Xuchotl, broad-jumps the abyss of ages and the great divide between mammal and reptile to accept the dragon as a fellow natural born killer:--e attributed to it characteristics similar to his own, and saw in its wrath a counterpart of his rages, in its roars and bellowings merely reptilian equivalents to the curses he had bestowed upon it.--Unlike Sigurd Fafnir---bane, he does not need to dine on dragon-heart to gain understanding, and that he feels--kinship with all wild things, even dragons--makes Conan wilder and the dragon more real. Seldom exhibiting an appetite for fantasy of any sort, the American pantheon has never been motivated to seek out a definitive New World dragonslaying, but were it to do so, Red Nails would be waiting.
Like many Americans, some of whom are now pantheon residents, Howard preferred to skirt, or slink away from, certain of the misshapen menhirs and dolmens that stand out so starkly in our psychic landscape. Comforting though it would be to report that he was ahead of his time in his views on people who did not look like him, he was simply, even simplistically, of his time in his over-reliance on--ace,--a construct both highly artificial and built with the shoddiest of materials, as an organizing principle. Howardists are fond of recalling one occasion on which Steven R. Trout, for whom the celebrating-in-the-endzone triumphalism of Wings in the Night about the'shite-skinned conqueror--just got to be too much, remarked,--don't remember ever seeing such a clear indication that ol--Bob would--e lost money had he bet the Louis/Schmeling fight.-- Still, when considering a story like this volume-- Pigeons from Hell it is worth remembering that African-Americans stimulated Howard's imagination when he was a child--witness one tale he recalled to Lovecraft, invariably set in--he ruins of a once thriving plantation,--in which--lways, as [vagrants] approach the high-columned verandah through the high weeds that surround the house, great numbers of pigeons rise from their roosting places on the railing and fly away----and, in ways that will not appease all readers nowadays, troubled his conscience when he was an adult.--don't. I don't! I don't hate it! I don't hate it!--insists Quentin Compson when he is accused of hating the South at the end of William Faulkner-- Absalom, Absalom! Howard, a Southwesterner rather than a Southerner, was never quite as much on the defensive as is Harvard student Quentin--n the iron New England dark.--And yet we should not lose sight of the fact that--outh--comes before--est--in the word--outhwest,--so Southern pride goes before, or remains after, a fall, the possibility of which would never have occurred to the less history-burdened. Clark Edward Clifford acknowledges the complicated shadows in his In the Deep Heart-- Core: Reflections on Life, Letters, and Texas:--ven if we manage to kill Mexicans and Indians with John Wayne remorselessness, Southern-ness lurks in the shadows, ever ready to remind us that we too have done something wrong, have lost a war, have declined, have once been human.-- Have once been human--or, in some instances, inhuman.--er past and her traditions are close to my heart, though I would be a stranger within her gates,--Howard once wrote of the South, and Griswell, the (Lovecraft-esque?) New Englander of Pigeons From Hell, permits the Texan to return as a stranger to the strangest of American lands. If not quite a first person narrator, Griswell is first among equals as a third person actor in the story; he's the viewpoint character, and his viewpoint is that of--rantic abhorrence of these black woods, the ancient plantation houses that hid forgotten secrets of slavery and bloody pride.--Howard was capable of confiding,--have often wished strongly that I had lived on the ancestral plantations in the Deep South in the days before the Civil War,--or maintaining that the horrors of slavery were frequently exaggerated, but we have evidence that he was not so much a loyal son as a transplanted grandson who knew a bit too much to be quite as loyal as he would have liked.
In Pigeons he does not insult our intelligence with blameless Blassenvilles, social workers who happen to own a plantation, apostles of outreach and uplift victimized by their motivelessly malevolent maid Joan. But neither can he bring himself to insult regional pride by attributing to a rootedly Southern, irreproachably bloodlined family atrocious mismanagement of their human property. So the Blassenvilles turn out to be of European origin and Caribbean extremism, in Sheriff Buckner-- words a--rench-English family. Came here from the West Indies before the Louisiana Purchase. The Civil War ruined them, like it did so many.--Quicker to apply the whip and slower to leave off because they--ot their ideas in the West Indies,--as Buckner puts it, the family is convenient for Howard's conflicted purposes, and it is only logical that Celia,--he last one of the family to come to these parts,--hence even less of an adoptive Southerner than her relatives, is the cruelest of the cruel.
While Celia is drawn to voodoo culture, Joan, her victim and subsequent victimizer, has--hite blood in her,--and pride of her own. In a sense they are each other-- weird sisters, and instead of an American melting pot Pigeons posits a bubbling witches--cauldron in which what should be the boundaries between Celia and Joan dissolve--the identities and fates of the two characters are not disentangled until the final paragraph. Howard's dark American fantasy reflects multihued American reality in that the disentanglement of fates and identities is impossible.