Summer 2007 (4 page)

Oh, and that secret about
where you can get all your ideas. I’ve changed my mind. I’m not telling.

Column:
Lansdale Unchained #2: ROBERT E. HOWARD AND THE WORLD OF
ALMURIC By Joe R. Lansdale

When I was a kid I read Edgar Rice Burroughs for the
first time, and his stories blew the top of my head off and sent it into orbit.
I’m pretty sure that shrapnel from that explosion is still circling the planet,
if it didn’t knock it all the way to the moon, or beyond. Perhaps it’s way out
there some place spinning in the black between the stars.

Before I read Burroughs, I already knew I wanted to be a
writer, but after his assault of pulp sense of wonder, flashing swords and bold
heroics, the die was cast. I had to be a writer. It had chosen me instead of me
choosing it. I was wrestled to the floor, pinned, the demon whispering sweet
nothings in my ear.

As the pulps might have put it, the shiny and wonderful
doom was mine.

This reading, one of the Martian novels, led to a
passion for all things Burroughs, and next, all things similar to Burroughs. I
read as many stories in this vein as I could. Somewhere around 1970 or so I
came across
Almuric
by Robert E. Howard.

Man. What a killer. There was a taste of Burroughs here,
and a big ole dollop of Jack London, and some other influences as well, but
there was a whole lot of a guy named Robert E. Howard. Already the things that
made him unique were slipping through. Sure, the prose was often rushed and
purple, some of these faults having to do with the style of the time, and some
because Howard wrote for magazines that paid by the word and times were tough
and he needed money.

His work was raw and savage and original and he was a
lover of the primitive, or at least the primitive as he viewed it. But Howard
was not a primitive talent. He was well read. This is proved by his
correspondence with others, and by the discussions Ms. Novalyne Price, perhaps
his one true love, reported in her book about Howard,
One Who Walks Alone.

Howard was not just hammering at it. Sure, the
storytelling was natural, but there was intent behind his work, even if it
wasn’t of a great literary ambition, and his main concern was that of
entertaining the reader. No easy thing to do, I might add.

Take for instance this section from
Almuric
, as
his hero Esau Cairn considers the life he has fallen into on his new world.

“I was living the life of the most
primitive savage; I had neither companionship, books, clothing, or any of the
things that go to make up civilization. According to the cultured viewpoint, I
should have been most miserable. I was not. I reveled in my existence. My being
grew and expanded. I tell you, the natural life of mankind is a grim battle for
existence against the forces of nature, and any other form of life is
artificial and without meaning.

“My life was not empty; it was
crowded with adventures calling on every ounce of intelligence and physical
power.”

There is something of the little boy’s yearning for
adventure in all of this. The view that the primitive life is a good one, the
whole noble savage bit. Spend a week in the woods in your skivvies trying to
survive on ants and grubs, drinking creek water and hunting your food with a
pointed stick, crapping behind trees with leaves as your toilet paper, and the
primitive experience would most likely cause the bulk of us to long for our
bathrooms and hot showers and bedrooms and soft beds, our books and our TV
remote. But the idea of being free, of being eternally youthful and capable, is
just the sort of thing to grab boys and young men by the throat and engage them
on some level that has little to do with truth or literary criticism. Howard,
like Burroughs, is reaching into that part of us that is forever Huck Finn; the
wild boy free of all restraints and inhibitions, out for a ride on the world,
spurs dug in, riding the bucks and the jumps like a rodeo rider.

And Howard is studied enough, purposeful enough, to do
just that, give us that bucking, wild ride. In these kinds of fantasies, when
well done, and
Almuric
is well done, you can project yourself into the
main character, and fill him up, give him bits of yourself that are not in the
narrative, become Esau Cairn, constantly capable, youthful, smart, and in the
end, guess what?

Yep. You get the girl.

And we’re not talking the local poke or the library
spinster.

You usually end up with a hot little virgin who can’t
live without you. And even Howard backs off a bit, gives Altha the “gentler
instincts of an Earthwoman”. He couldn’t quite go the whole hog. Womanhood in
most of his stories was still that of the 1930’s Texas woman who could cook
your dinner, tend you in bed, and cut your throat with a razor if you done her
wrong. There is something in the ending of
Almuric
that makes one
consider that soon, Esau Cairn may not be quite so wild, since now there is
peace between warring cities, and shortly he could be carrying out the trash,
walking the Almuric equivalent of old Rover, wondering why he can’t just put
his feet up.

But thank goodness Howard doesn’t go that far. He leaves
us in our bubble, in this false but seemingly perfect world, or at least
perfect to that aforementioned eleven-year-old boy, or the eleven-year-old boy
inside of most men.

###

Again, Howard was very much aware of what he was doing.
Even the name of his hero, Esau Cairn, brings up certain images. In the bible,
Esau was the hairy one, not thought capable of carrying on the civilization he
was, as the elder son, supposed to inherit and push forward. He was the
outcast, the rough one, the savage. Howard saw this not as a loss, but as a
positive, so it strikes me that the name is a purposeful connection. And Esau
Cairn is not only savage, he is dangerous. Doesn’t the name Cairn strike close
to Cain, the man who killed his brother, Abel? When God asked him where his
brother was, Cain replied: “Am I my brother’s keeper?”

One gets the impression that Howard wanted to be free of
all responsibilities, even the keeping of one’s brother, or in his case, his
ailing mother. It was all a double-edged sword for Howard. Sure, he loved his
mother and was attached to her, but on some level he just wanted to be free.
And in 1936, shortly after he knew she would never regain consciousness, had
fallen into a death watch coma, he, not so much out of depression, but out of
sense of no more responsibility, a lust for dark freedom, lit a blue steel
candle that threw him out of this world and unchained him. Perhaps that snap of
gunfire tossed him across the black void of space to one of his created worlds
like Almuric.

My guess is he hoped so, or wished to be reincarnated in
some other time, more savage, more in need of a man of brawn and quick wit.

And if you throw out this idea of his character’s name
being a connection to the biblical Cain, the name of the ultimate outcast, just
leave the last name as it is, Cairn, and you still have an interesting and dark
connection. A cairn is a pile of stones erected by someone to mark something of
significance, often to mark a burial site or to stand as a memorial to the
dead. Death was never far from Howard’s mind, and it is interesting that his
hero’s name bears both the mark of the outcast, Esau, and a tribute to the
dead, and if you want to carry the idea of Cain into it, which I admit might be
stretching it a bit, but I believe it, you also have yet another reference to
the outsider, an outcast, someone who has shirked the responsibilities and the
actions of polite society and is living from moment to moment.

I bring this up, and perhaps belabor the point, to show
that Howard was fully aware of what he was doing, had literary technique, even
if it is with a small “l”, and that he was tapping into our knowledge of words
and images and archetypes. He was not a primitive creator of tales, a savage
genius, but was a clever man of letters with a little boy’s heart.

###

Burroughs was perhaps more able to suspend my belief
quickly, but only slightly, for Howard was just gaining his chops with this
one. A few pages in, and I was as hooked as a bass on a handmade fly, right
through the gills. Soon I was with Esau Cairn, and in an even shorter time, I
was him; a civilized man that didn’t fit in and who all his life had held back
his energies and physical powers for fear of hurting someone; I was him, loose
now on a world that was designed for me, a world where mortal combat was the
order of the day, a world where strange monsters slipped, slid, walked, and
flew over the landscape; a land where I was forever vigilant, forever in top
physical shape and something for the ladies, who I might add, were also
primitives, always good looking and secretly lustful minus the pesky problems
of real primitives, ticks, fleas and body odor; beautiful maidens who have
saved themselves for me to ravish, with, of course, the aforementioned “gentler
instincts of the Earthwoman”, therefore not carrying the male reader too far
from mama.

###

Howard, like Burroughs, had that ability to make you
believe anything, even when the writing went off a little. I think
Almuric
has some of Howard’s most convincing and natural writing, but there are moments
when he strays, when the night oil has burned too long and the fingers have
flexed too much on the typewriter keys; little moments any commercial writer
will have, but they were blips, nothing more, and sometimes they were
interesting blips. But the true measure of Howard was when he strayed we could
forgive, because his internal storytelling compass constantly pointed true
north.

This also has to do with the method he used to tell this
specific tale. It was not a method Howard used as much as Burroughs, but I must
admit up front that for me the first person method of telling a story is the
best, the truest and the purest, and in the end the most convincing. It is in
one way the easiest way to tell a story, and the hardest to do well.

Like Burroughs with his tales of John Carter of Mars, as
well as others, Howard uses a foreword to set up the story, and by the time
Esau Cairn starts talking, the narrative becomes smooth and swift, and because
of the first person narration, believable, at least for the time it takes you
to read the book. That’s an achievement, friends.

But, it’s not all about storytelling, or first person
narrative, it’s also about the prose, and Howard could turn a phrase, or
several of them. He could engage you, excite you, and still stay on target with
his theme–shallow perhaps, but constant.

Take this example:

“On his rude throne above us, old
Khossuth lifted a spear and cast it earthward. Our eyes followed its flight,
and as it sheathed its shining blade in the turf outside the ring, we hurled
ourselves at each other, iron masses of bone and thew, vibrant with life and
the lust to destroy.”

This scene is the theme of the novel, and Howard never loses
this thematic intent in his adventure. It is front and foremost, the idea that
being close to nature and our basic impulses is the way men and women are meant
to live, though there’s no doubt that Howard’s world is mostly a masculine one,
a manly wet dream where one can constantly prove himself through combat.

When I was a kid, I ate that up. It allowed me, the
youthful reader, to feel powerful. More powerful than I really felt, and that
is the secret to this kind of fiction’s success. Again, I belabor, but I am
caught up in the spirit, so back off brothers and sisters, stand down and
listen to me testify.

Howard gave me happiness.

He gave me adventure that went beyond my own part time
Huck Finn experiences.

He gave me lust; what could be better than those savage
dolls he portrayed in his fiction. Women who could be feminine one moment, and
run with the wolves the next.

Yes, brothers and sisters, I say it once again unto you:
Howard speaks to youth, speaks to the youth inside all of us, the frisky part of
us that is tired of electric bills and water bills and phones that ring and
children that need braces.

It takes a storyteller to truly take us away, to lose us
inside the pages of his tale, and what makes a great storyteller is the ability
to tell you a bald faced lie and make you believe it, make you part of it, make
you the character.

Sure, his characters weren’t Ahab or Nick Adams or Augie
March, but they were in some ways better, for they were archetypes, and Howard
could make us become them. When you get right down to it, some of our finest
writers fail to do that. What Howard had was something that is often
overlooked. He had the ability to make the narrative the character; it was the
totality of the book that was the character, all else was there to serve the
story, and to finally create this wonderful, bumpy faced novel with blood in
its teeth.

Ray Bradbury, a more literary writer for sure, is still
a writer of this ilk. His characters are not to me true characters, no more
than his dialogue is real dialogue. What he does is sculpt out a story where a
little of this, a little of that, bits of business we don’t understand in
pieces, but only as a whole, come together to create the story as character.

Burroughs did that. And Howard did that.

This, as well as the ability to convince, is more of an
inborn talent than a skill, and it serves a writer well if he or she has it,
not to mention it’s helpful to politicians as well. Because it is not only
necessary to lie convincingly to make your stories work, but on some deeper
level, the good storyteller, or politician, must somehow believe his or her own
lies to the extent that they become, well, characters of a sort, a thing you
can embrace that somehow goes beyond mere words.