When we run a banner with the strange device--arbarian'tup the flagpole in an American context to see if anyone salutes, we get some historically and culturally freighted responses. Before Howard happened to--arbarism--and--arbarian,--European-Americans usually associated those words with the continent-- previous owners. Europeans for their part have reached for the adjective--arbaric--and the noun--arbarian'tso often when considering Americans of any sort that it would be forgivable to conclude that the New World was named in honor of the navigator Barbario Vespucci. And Americans have been almost as quick to call each other barbarians; for New Yorker George Templeton Strong, that always-quotable diarist/ onlooker of the antebellum and Civil War years, all Southerners bore the mark of Cain as soon as congressman Charles Sumner bore the marks of the hotheaded Preston Brooks--cane, and were besides--race of lazy, ignorant, coarse, sensual, swaggering, sordid beggarly barbarians.-- The childhood adage is only half right: sticks and stones may break our bones, but names can hurt hellaciously as well. However, names are also like sticks and stones in that they can be picked up and thrown back in the face of tormentors. In recent decades epithets meant to identify and isolate the members of certain groups have been worn by those members as badges of affirmation, and before that a few Americans comfortable in their own figurative buckskins taught themselves to take pride in, rather than umbrage at,--arbarian'tand its variants. Walt Whitman't I sound my barbaric yawp over the roofs of the world in Song of Myself is only the most famous instance.
American barbarians force their way in where they are least expected. Henry James was a writer so unlike Howard it is a wonder the English language was big enough for the two of them; and yet in his 1877 novel The American, protagonist Christopher Newman visits the Louvre, where he is perceived as--he great western barbarian stepping forth in his innocence and might, gazing a while at this poor effete old world, and then swooping down on it.--John Dos Passos--explanation for his return to America after the Great War was that--or us barbarians, men from an unfinished ritual,--postwar Europe was once again overly--entle.--And barbaric resolve of a sort that Howard might have found admirable is implicit in this Henry Miller exhortation in Tropic of Cancer:--t may be that we are doomed, that there is no hope for us, any of us; but if that is so let us set up a last, agonizing, blood-curdling howl, a screech of defiance, a war-whoop!--In his Seven Keys to Texas the historian T. R. Fehrenbach even frames the'sternal dilemma--of the Lone Star State writer in nigh-Howardian terms:--o go or not to go to Rome, and when in Rome, to try to become Roman, or make his living explaining his barbarian ways to Romans--who may find them greatly entertaining.--
Howard was aware that his barbarians might be mistaken for Noble Savages. Writing to Lovecraft in late October 1932, he denied possessing an--dyllic view of barbarism,--and expressed impatience--ith the depiction of the barbarian of any race as a stately, god-like child of Nature, endowed with strange wisdom and speaking in measured and sonorous phrases.--He freely admitted that the barbarian of history was subject to tabus like--harp sword-edges, between which he walked shuddering,--and more often than not brutal, squalid, childish, treacherous, and unstable. And yet--he day and night were his book, wherein he read of all things that run or walk or crawl or fly. Trees and grass and moss-covered rocks and birds and beasts and clouds were alive to him, and partook of his kinship. The wind blew his hair and he looked with naked eyes into the sun. Often he starved, but when he feasted, it was with a mighty gusto.--The Howard barbarian might leave Eden, an Eden more unforgiving in different ways than the Genesis-garden, but he does so of his own accord, and when he ventures city-ward he functions as an x-factor, a reality principle, handwriting on the wall scrawled forebodingly before ever the wall was built.
We might transfer to Conan what Paul Horgan said of the mountain man in his Great River: The Rio Grande in North American History:--e was an American original, as hard as the hardest thing that could happen to him,--but after that--and this is crucial--much would still need to be said. From the criminality of the City of Thieves--Maul, The Tower of the Elephant scales the sheer, silvery cliff-face of cruelty, of a highly civilized barbarity exposure to which will move Conan, the nominal barbarian, to shoulder the guilt of the entire human race. The not-from-around-here thief or assassin, the off-limits temple or tower, the monstrous or demonic hench-being of a blackly renowned necromancer awaiting the intruder--these are the basic building blocks of a fantasy subgenre with which presumed familiarity easily breeds contempt. Yet Howard, decades before sword-and-sorcery was even dubbed sword-and-sorcery, used the blocks to construct something startlingly non-formulaic, so much so that when Tom Shippey, as perceptive an academic as has ever engaged with modern fantasy, picked Tower for his 1994 Oxford Book of Fantasy Stories, he remarked on the'snexpected--compassion of--oward-- normally brutish hero.--
And so we open the pages of one of the pivotal American heroic fantasy tales and find an outlander pitying a being who is infinitely more of an outsider, while the monster-killing imperative yields to the decision to assist the monster in its revenge-killing. We are told in The Tower of the Elephant that Conan recalls Yara to wakefulness--ike a judge pronouncing doom,--and the barbarian as the feral Rhadamanthus by way of whom his creator pronounces the dooms of civilization't sophistries and shibboleths, the certainty that those who live off the fat of the land will die from that same luxury in the blink of history-- eye--these concepts are epitomized and versified in that crucial Howard poem, A Song of the Naked Lands.
The Howardisms of this parable-as-paradigm----rim was the barter, red the trade,--or--he prison of satin and gold--known as--ulture and Art----should not distract us from realizing that the Texan was not the first to shoe and saddle this particular hobbyhorse. The cheerless tune of Song is audible in Henry David Thoreau-- observation--t was because the children of the Empire were not suckled by the wolf, that they were conquered and displaced by the children of the northern forests who were,--and dates all the way back to Herodotus. The much-traveled Greek chose to end his Histories with a moral courtesy of Cyrus the Great. As translated by Aubrey de S--lincourt and A. R. Burns, the hero-king is urged to help himself to a--etter--country. He does not burst into song, but he does anticipate A Song of the Naked Lands:
--oft countries breed soft men. It is not the property of any one soil to produce fine fruits and good soldiers too.-- The Persians had to admit that this was true and Cyrus was wiser than they; so they left him, and chose rather to live in a rugged land and rule than to cultivate rich plains and be subject to others.3
The point to this quick look at the backstories of terms like--arbarian'tor--aked lands--is that Howard dealt himself into debates that were old before 1492 and did not embarrass himself--one of the reasons why he would not embarrass the pantheon either.
But can that august-if-virtual institution be persuaded to take in a lowly pulpster? The Library of America allowed in Dashiell Hammett and Raymond Chandler, who made Black Mask a legend, years ago, but then allowances are easily made for the brass knucks and coshes of hardboiled detective fiction, thanks to that subgenre-- bruisingly unsparing reportorial function. Hammett and Chandler were also fortunate enough to have John Huston, Humphrey Bogart, and Howard Hawks adeptly adapting their work for another, even more popular medium. With Lovecraft-- tentacles now snaking across the Library-- threshold, perhaps the pulpily fantastic will win itself more space.