When he gave the title Pulp Fiction to one of the defining movies of the Nineties, Quentin Tarantino may or may not have intended to acknowledge the fact that the best pulps have aged well because they showcased work that turned out to be ageless, but Michael Chabon't sincerity in his Pulitzer Prize--inning novel The Adventures of Kavalier and Clay, where he calls the pulps--rgosies of blood and wonder,--is incontrovertible. A democracy-- pantheon should be hospitable to those who achieve excellence in intrinsically democratic venues. Stephen King, who came along too late for the pulps, started out by selling to even less prestigious markets like Dude, Cavalier, Adam, and Swank, and now seems poised for induction in the aftermath of his 2003 Medal for Distinguished Contribution to American Letters (an event that reduced Defender of the Canon Harold Bloom to weeping tears of blood).
Paul Seydor----econsideration'tof Sam Peckinpah-- Westerns is deservedly admired for seeing those movies as if for the first time and with the clearest of eyes. While trying to find a niche in the pantheon for his artist, Seydor singles out American literature----ascination--bordering, some might argue, on the pathological--with the exotic, the foreign, the criminal, and the wild. This fascination in turn results in a fiction that rarely moves far from escapist genres. The reasons our artists give for this almost always reduce to the same one when we cut through the rhetoric of individualism and freedom: the insufficiency of mainstream American life to vitalize the imagination.--Sure enough, Howard's imagination was vitalized by the exotic, the foreign, the criminal, the wild. With transatlantic voyages not yet an option, the only New World available to Donald MacDeesa in Lord of Samarcand, who hails from the uttermost West of his day, is the East; he is limited to crossing seas of sand and oceans of grass. Yet how well Leslie Fiedler-- summation of classic American tales in general, and Poe-- Arthur Gordon Pym in particular----nd through it all the outcast wanderer, equally in love with death and distance, seeks some absolute elsewhere----suits the wayward clansman as he looks back down--he bitter trail of his life--and hugs an isolation colder than the bones of the moon. If Seydor is correct, if the truest American writing is fringe writing, all edge and no center, then by working the genre fringe Robert E. Howard teleported himself smack-dab into the center, the dream-center, of our culture. When everything is margin, marginalization becomes moot.
The title of one of the poems in this volume, Which Will Scarcely Be Understood, would do as well for a summary of Howard's critical reception, such as it was, until the late Seventies at the earliest. And yet much of the cryptography needed to decode his meaningfulness had already been done.--uring my last year in college, I-- read several of D. H. Lawrence-- books,--Novalyne Price tells us in One Who Walked Alone.--could see they were sexy. I didn't know whether to tell Bob about reading them or not.--Had she dipped into Lawrence-- nonfiction as well as his fiction, specifically 1923-- Studies in Classic American Literature, she would have bristled with a whole arsenal of talking points when making the case for Howard's pantheon-readiness to cousin Enid.
Lawrence-- survey is as eccentrically electric, or electrically eccentric, as any of the newly identified classics he was covering, and no better description of what he was up to exists than cultural historian Ann Douglas--in her Terrible Honesty: Mongrel Manhattan in the 1920s, which despite its title is about much, much more than Manhattan or the 1920s:
The'sssential American soul,--[Lawrence] proclaimed, is--ard, isolate, stoic,--and a--iller.--America is full of--ampires,--the'serrible--hosts--of the black and red men the white settlers had exterminated, exploited, and, unbeknownst to themselves, envied and assimilated. For Lawrence, America was a King Kong figure--King Kong-- cinematic debut was only a decade away--careening amid the wasteland of the West, and he was King Kong-- prophet.4
Douglas goes on to stress that--awrence called the American literature he was writing about--lassic----recognized and revered, in other words, by those acknowledged to be best able to judge the matter--but next to no one knew it. Using the term was, in fact, a publicity stunt, Lawrence-- bold bid to canonize a group of authors who were largely ignored, forgotten, or misread.--Cooper, Hawthorne, Poe, and Melville were for him avatars of a shadow-side America, the'snner nature of brutality [of which was] more extreme and more at odds with its public mask and voice than was the case anywhere else.--When the mask slipped, when Kong broke his chains, as per Douglas paraphrasing Lawrence,--merica might be the only nation capable, if uncensored and unchecked, of flooding the civilized world with what William Carlos Williams called in his self-consciously Lawrentian study In the American Grain (1925),--ich regenerative violence.--
And flood the civilized world it did, with red harvests and blood meridians, wild bunches and magnum forces. Imagery that conjures a civilized world flooded, by forces at last unchecked, with rich regenerative violence is of course also ground zero for Howard studies. Lawrence----old bid to canonize--leads straight to Leslie Fiedler-- Love and Death in the American Novel, Richard Slotkin't Regeneration Through Violence trilogy about the mythology of the American frontier, and to Howard's most powerful work. Those of us who--e worked on The Best of Robert E. Howard are driven by a--elf-consciously Lawrentian agenda--of our own--we too are partisans of a writer--argely ignored, forgotten, or misread,--and we--e sure that because his finest stories are classic,--hough next to no one [knows] it,--they should be promoted as such in a repeat of Lawrence-- 1923--ublicity stunt.-- The slightest suggestion of Howard's induction-potential will have some of the unconverted demanding the installation of a metal detector in the pantheon't entrance. Is the violence that convulses Howard's stories rich and regenerative, or just rote?--his young man has the power to feel. He knows nothing of war, yet he is drenched with blood,--Ambrose Bierce conceded of Stephen Crane. Similarly drenched if similarly unbaptized by fire, Howard too possessed a power to feel that his readers never cease to feel. Jack London was the authorial father-figure who taught the Texan the most about luring romanticism into the dark alleys where realism was waiting. George Orwell thought London--ssentially a short-story writer,--conspicuous for--is love of brutality and physical violence and, in general, what is known as--dventure.-- Alfred Kazin for his part noted in his 1942 overview of modern American literature On Native Ground,--othing is so important about London as the fact that he came on the scene at a time when the shocked consciousness of a new epoch demanded the kind of heady violence that he was always so quick to provide.--Howard, who came of age in an even newer epoch, trafficked in even more unsparing violence; early in Lord of Samarcand a battlefield----hrieks of dire agony still [rise] to the shivering stars which [peer] palely out, as if frightened by man't slaughter of man.-- Yes, his work is full of swords, but they are often double-edged, and a preoccupation with the survival of the fittest is shadowed by the certainty that both fitness and survival are fleeting. At his best, Howard was a purveyor not of cheap thrills but of frissons costly for both the writer and his more alert readers.--ne problem in writing bloody literature,--he mused to HPL in 1932,--s to present it in such a manner as to avoid a suggestion of cheap blood-and-thunder melodrama--which is what some people will always call action, regardless of how realistic and true it is.--In an April 1932 letter Howard vented,----l swear, I--e written of Christian armies being defeated by Moslems until my blood fairly seethes with rage. Some day I must write of the success of the earlier Crusades to gratify my racial vanity.--He never did (and perhaps would not have been able to had he tried), but in Lord of Samarcand Donald MacDeesa topples both Bayazid the Thunderer and Timour the Lame--the pistol shot with which he redresses his grievance with the latter is anachronistic, but also precociously American.