In the quasi-autobiographical Post Oaks & Sand Roughs, Howard's false start at a novel in the late Twenties, his alter ego announces,--ow, I wish for a fair craft, three-masted, full-sailed, with a fair wind and a clear sea path--to where? The Isles of Yesterday, mayhap, or the coasts of Romance, or the beaches of Adventure, or the turquoise sea of Dawn.--But by the time he wrote to fellow pulp pro E. Hoffmann Price on February 15, 1936, he lamented having--one so far along the path of romantic-exotic writing that it's devilish difficult to find my way back to common-place realism, and yet every urge in me is to write realism.--Realism nevertheless accompanied him on that romantic-exotic path; Post Oaks & Sand Roughs provides the too-much-too-soon observation,--boom town drugstore is an ideal place to study humanity,--and in 1931 Howard told Farnsworth Wright,--y boyhood was spent in the oil country--or rather oil came into the country when I was still a young boy, and remained.--Oil came, oil remained--where others saw a windfall, a resource to be exploited, Howard saw an invading force, an occupying army. In many of his letters he stole a march on the distinguished historian Bernard DeVoto, who in works like 1947-- Across the Wide Missouri described the American West as--plundered province,--one that was being--ystematically looted.----he money changers have fled from their high seats in the temple of our civilization,--Roosevelt declared in his First Inaugural in 1933. The temples of Howard's civilizations were frequently the haunts of horrors, so he presumably approved of FDR-- words. If, like the Thirties-redolent hard-boileds in the pages of Black Mask, certain Conan stories flirt with vulgar Marxism, vulgar Marxism has aged better than any other kind.--ye, I--e seen men fall and die of hunger against the walls of shops and storehouses crammed with food,--the Cimmerian marvels in The Black Stranger, and when a former fence protests that he is now--espectable--in The Hour of the Dragon, Conan't derisive reply is,--eaning you--e rich as hell.--Another story dispenses with--he long, long ago when another world lifted its jeweled spires to the stars--while retaining the low expectations of high finance. At the start of Wild Water a bankrupt farmer-- unspeaking but unyielding neighbors, who ensure by their--ard-eyed--auction attendance that his property is not snapped up but instead sold right back to him for a pittance, are familiar to us from Depression iconography. This story outdoes Vultures of Wahpeton in depositing the Howard hero in a situation, in a civilization, where he can no longer be the Howard hero.--imes is changed, can't you understand?--another character says to Jim Reynolds,--throwback, the personification of atavism.--Hailing from--he high ridge of the Lost Knob country--(Did Howard intend a joke about post-frontier emasculation when he fictionalized Cross Plains as Lost Knob?) Reynolds is both--ark as an Indian'tand the owner of a Ford roadster. Although still a bit larger than life, he is smaller than the system at the center of which sits Saul Hopkins, the financier who pulls strings--o which were tied loans and mortgages and the subtle tricks of finance.--(As Howard saw fit to bestow--he hooked nose of a vulture--upon him, it comes as a relief that the character-- last name is Hopkins.)
-- am hemmed in by laws, laws, laws,--Kull roars in By This Axe I Rule!, but he ultimately shatters the most superannuated of those laws. Jim Reynolds, born into a different sort of Pre-Cataclysmic Age, is far more hemmed in. He can gun down the king of Locust Valley, but can never hope to declare himself--ing, state, and law!--like Kull. State and Law are too much for him, or any man, as the heavens themselves blaze forth the death of the frontier in the more-than-meteorological storm of Wild Water. Like Harry Morgan, gutshot in Hemingway-- To Have and Have Not, Reynolds dies cursing, done in not by the lawmen with whom he is hell-bent on shooting it out, but by a friend. That friend, Bill Emmett, has taken up residence where those wronged by modernity often relocate, in the Book of Revelations, from which he is eager to visit an--wful mountain of black water--on the low-lying town of Bisley and witness the'socust and Mesquital rollin'tdown like the rivers of Judgment.--Although--n the devil-- business,--Emmett can quote scripture, but he is also capable of summoning the authentic voice of the twentieth century:--ou--e small stuff; you killed one enemy. I aim to kill thousands!-- Volume II of The Best of Robert E. Howard ends with one of his most memorable poems, which doubles as a prelude or overture to the Conan series. Cimmeria came to Howard just before the favorite son of that--and of Darkness and the Night--did, and the's--who speaks throughout the poem, who effects the beautifully intuitive shift from--inds and clouds, and dreams that shun the sun'tto--louds and winds and ghosts that shun the sun'tis not Conan but his creator.--remember,--that----declares; one cannot remember the future, and the absolute power that not-always mournful but neverending remembrance exercised over Howard may help to explain both the brevity of his life and the longevity of his storytelling. Cimmeria may not be a state of the Union, but it is a state of mind, and as its creator stands before the pantheon-gates the fairminded should recognize the heritage that--raps [him] in the grey apparel of ghosts.-- He was an American classic as early as The Shadow Kingdom and its follow-up The Mirrors of Tuzun Thune, which asks,--hat worlds within what worlds [await] the bold explorer?--and cranes from the Siege Perilous of the Valusian throne to glimpse--ome far country of [Kull--] consciousness.--Assessing his body of work, such as it then was, to his friend Tevis Clyde Smith in February 1929, Howard poor-mouthed Mirrors as--ague and badly written; this is the deepest story I ever tried to write and I got out of my depth.--A good many classic American writers got to be classics by venturing out of their depth and diving instead of drowning, and in this story Howard discovered just how deep his depth truly was. The Hall of a Thousand Mirrors offers reflections that some who do not dream enough would never dream of encountering in a sword-and-sorcery story; Tuzun Thune-- glassy surfaces reflect W. H. Auden't insight that most American stories--re parables; their settings, even when they pretend to be realistic, symbolic settings for a timeless and unlocated (because internal) psychomachia.--
The wizard-- mirrors also reflect Ann Douglas--contention that an American trademark is the'sdisplacement of] mimesis--o what the critic Richard Poirier, speaking of American narrative and borrowing a term from Shakespeare-- Coriolanus, has called--world elsewhere.--Forced into exile, Coriolanus turns the tables on those who exile him by telling them,----l banish you. There is a world elsewhere.-- Douglas sees the'sillful conversion of exile from the known and familiar world into an enhanced power of exploration and vision in another unknown but compelling world, this exchange of the recognizably real for a place or mode defined as more insistently real, a place where provincials are recognized as sovereigns--as the'sentral strategy of classic American literature.--Kull, already exiled from his native Atlantis and a provincial grudgingly recognized as a sovereign, in Mirrors reaches the point of susceptibility to exchanging the recognizably real for the at-first-phantasmal-but-then-more-insistently reaclass="underline" --ay by day had he seemed to lose touch with the world; all things had seemed each succeeding day more ghostly and unreal.--Pantheon, please note: neither wars nor women nor wealth are won in Mirrors or The Tower of the Elephant--these are not stories of wish fulfillment but rather perspective-enhancement, imagination-enlargement.