Dirge-dire, Lord is enough of a revenge tragedy to frighten a Jacobean. If Howard the poet likens the nations Timour tramples underfoot to--ost women crying in the mountains at night,--Howard the dramaturge takes over when MacDeesa assures Bayazid,--would go through greater hells to bring you to the dust!--The Texan blithely challenges both Christopher Marlowe and Edgar Allan Poe; indeed, by helping himself to several chapter epigraphs, Howard induces Poe to attend his somber feast even as Bayazid is forced to be present at Timour--. This volume-- Son of the White Wolf, wherein the titular predator is a rough beast whose hour comes round again in one of the Great War-- only--lamorous--sideshows, also aspires to be--loody literature.--Bloody, and prescient--cultures force-marching themselves into imagined pasts in pursuit of illusory purity and predestination are a regrettably familiar phenomenon to us in the twenty-first century.
Black Vulmea's Vengeance demonstrates that Howard was potentially a pirate novelist capable of boarding the flagships of Stevenson and Sabatini, but also transcends--heap blood-and-thunder melodrama--in its exploration of mercy as a form of revenge more devastating to its undeserving recipient than even the most massively retaliatory payback would be. Living with one-- own crimes can be more painful and more protracted than dying because of them. Elsewhere we find a vignette swollen into a metaphor in The Man on the Ground, as a feud-driven Texan't hatred,--n almost tangible abstraction--a hate too strong for even death to destroy; a hate powerful enough to embody itself in itself, without the aid or necessity of material substance,--outlives him among dry-gulching-facilitating rocks--otter than the hearthstones of hell.--D. H. Lawrence speaks in his chapter on The Scarlet Letter of--black and complementary hatred, akin to love,--and Howard was no stranger to that perverse intimacy situated in the far regions of antipathy. Witness not only The Man on the Ground but also the final story in this volume, Red Nails, as remarkable an American treatment of the feudist cul-de-sac as there-- been since Huck Finn, caught up in the quarrel between the Shepherdson and Grangerford clans, was told--y-and-by everybody-- killed off, and there ain't no more feud. But it's kind of slow, and takes a long time.-- The story-- inspiration has little to do with the Hyborian Age and much to do with the Lincoln County War in which Billy the Kid shot to fame as a shootist. As Patrice Louinet explains in Hyborian Genesis Part III (see The Conquering Sword of Conan), a vacation that took Howard to the hyperbolically haunted site of Lincoln, New Mexico, left him speculating as to whether--he nature of the Bonito Valley determined the nature of the feud--narrow, concentrated, horrible.--What was for him local, or at least regional, color also appears in the story----actus-dotted plain'tand reference to--liff-dwellings of the mysterious brown people----we are not far from Brian Attebery-- description of Burroughs--Barsoom,--dream or fantasy vision of the American Southwest.--As Rusty Burke comments in his in-depth study Journey Inside: The Quest of the Hero in Red Nails, much of the story-- nomenclature--Olmec, Chicmec, Tezcoti, Xuchotl----ings with the history of the Pre-Columbian peoples of Mexico and Central America, from whom Howard drew for the story-- proper names.--Pre-Columbian shadings may also have contributed to what the Texan teased to Clark Ashton Smith as being--he grimmest, bloodiest, and most merciless story of the series so far,--the elements of the Mesoamerican worldview that T. R. Fehrenbach, in his Fire and Blood: A History of Mexico, summarized as--agic and mystery, blood and horror,--all perceived through--filter of darkest night, or in a violent blast of sun blaze.-- Another New World underpinning is disclosed when we learn that the'sinister crimson'tcity was founded on the enslavement and slaughter of black people. (Xuchotl does not seem to be haunted by these original victims, but maybe, just maybe, everything that befalls all subsequent citizens, whether Kosalan or Tlazitlan, can be traced to the founding atrocity.) Conan and Valeria, the two adventurers who tip the balance of the feud, are once and future Aquilonians respectively, and therefore, given the special significance of Aquilonia (which in the Conan series--eigns supreme in the dreaming West--, Americans of a sort. The Cimmerian grins--ardily--when he accepts an offer from the Tecuhltli----e--e both penniless vagabonds. I-- as soon kill Xotalancas as anybody----thereby expressing an unmistakably American attitude: the history behind other people-- feuds is of little importance, and space, the essential New World resource, heals the wounds that time turns gangrenous.
But a December 1934 letter to Lovecraft in which Howard professes himself indifferent to European--quabbles and massacres,--describing the continent as--othing but a rat-den where teeming, crowded rodents, jammed together in an unendurable mass, squeal and gnash and murder each other,--cautions us against too quickly single-sourcing the story. Europe had been a Xuchotl in 1916--note that the city has its own no-man't-land, the Halls of Silence which lie between the feuding factions--and by 1935 looked to be one again, as the postwar years in which Howard grew up gave way to prewar years during which he and others grew aware that dictatorships were calling the tune to which democracies desperately danced. Neither entirely an Old World story nor entirely a New World story, Red Nails becomes an underworld story, a visit to a realm sealed off and trapped by the cave-in of Tlazitlan sanity. Murmurous with the ghosts of old murders, Xuchotl rises architecturally above several ossuaries--worth of skeletons at its foundation but morally descends into--he black corridors and realms of the subterranean world.--D. H. Lawrence called Poe--n adventurer into vaults and cellars and horrible underground passages of the human soul,--and from those same passages in Red Nails the Crawler, the Burning Skull, and the pipes of madness emerge, while Tolkemec, Howard's diabolus ex machina, returns from the vaults of the dead as memorably as anyone has since Madeline Usher. Xuchotl surpasses even the Blassenville Manor of Pigeons from Hell as a contender to be Howard's equivalent of Shirley Jackson't Hill House, Stephen King-- Overlook Hotel, or Poe-- palace of Prince Prospero----nd one by one dropped the revelers in the blood-bedewed halls of their revel--covers the people of Xuchotl as well as the masquers of the Red Death.
In the stories just mentioned our pantheon prospect asked rather than evaded questions about the vengeance-imperative that powers so much genre fiction; and although he could be as pulpy as the occasion warranted----ow long can you avoid the fangs of the Poison People?--an especially odious high priest taunts a cobra-beset dancer in one of the Conan stories--the truth is that we--e dealing with an overachiever, a better writer than he needed to be to succeed in the markets available to him. Lovecraft beat everyone else to this realization while grieving for his friend in print:--e was greater than any profit-making policy he could adopt--for even when he outwardly made concessions to Mammon-guided editors and commercial critics, he had an internal force and sincerity which broke the surface and put the imprint of his personality on everything he wrote.--The imagery here,--nternal force and sincerity--breaking the surface and imprinting themselves, is precisely what D. H. Lawrence sought and found in his chosen American classics. And to Lovecraft-- tribute we can append the follow-up assertion that Howard was also greater than the profit-making policies adopted by too many of those who presumed to package his work in the decades after his death.
A natural, he possessed the unnatural degree of dedication and perseverance that getting the most out of being a natural entails. In her memoir How It Was, Mary Hemingway quoted her husband Ernest as having said,--he secret is that it is poetry written into prose and it is the hardest of all things to do--in some ways it was a little easier for Howard, much more of a born poet if much less of a prose revolutionary than Hemingway, with a bardic knack for investing subjectivity and selectivity through the sheer rightness of word-choices with much of the irrefutability of objectivity. His style is rather like the second of the two gifts the Nemedian girl Zenobia gives the dungeon-immured Conan in The Hour of the Dragon (the first being his freedom):--t was no slender stiletto, selected because of a jeweled hilt or gold guard, fitted only for dainty murder in milady-- boudoir; it was a forthright poniard, a warrior-- weapon, broad-bladed, fifteen inches in length, tapering to a diamond-sharp point.--The forthright and undainty pointedness of Howard's best prose is equally diamond-sharp. A character resents--he slow fading of the light as a miser begrudges the waning of his gold.----ll the sanity--goes out of another-- face--ike a flame blown out by the wind.--The lightning-bolts of an epic storm are--eiled in the falling flood like fire shining through frosted glass, turning the world to frosty silver.-- The active voice usurps the passive like one of Howard's pushful swordsmen ousting an enfeebled dynasty, and the pathetic fallacy could not work harder for him were it his indentured servant, as in one of this volume-- nerve-shredding crescendos, Wings in the Night:--shuddering white-faced dawn crept back over the black hills to shiver above the red shambles that had been the village of Bogonda.--To describe the vitality that crackles through his paragraphs we can enlist the aid of the reborn, regenerated-through-violence Esau Cairn in Almuric, Howard's unfinished roughing-up of the Burroughsian planetary romance:--tingled and burned and stung with life to the finger tips and the ends of my toes. Every sinew, vein, and springy bone was vibrant with the dynamic flood of singing, pulsing, humming life.--Looking again to Ann Douglas--Terrible Honesty, we read that--itality, not verisimilitude, is the criterion of classic American literature; it offers a portrait of energy itself, of the adrenaline of the psyche, a portrait in which the external landscape is never separate from the landscape within.--Howard specializes in portraits of energy itself and constantly injects his work with the adrenaline of his psyche'smany of his opening paragraphs are not so much invitations to continue reading as forcible abductions. American exceptionalism is perhaps better suited to literature than geopolitics, and Howard's immediacy and intensification combine for an exceptionalism like a Texas-accented emanation of Archibald MacLeish----ontinent where the heat was hotter and the cold was colder and the sun was brighter and the nights were blacker and the distances were farther and the faces were nearer and the rain was more like rain and the mornings were more like mornings than anywhere else on earth--sooner or sweeter and lovelier over unused hills.-- He is rarely given to stately symmetry, and if some of his work (though not supremely accomplished tales like Worms of the Earth or Lord of Samarcand ) can be jagged, jittery, and joltingly uneven, we need only remember that the most influential writing about the American classics often considers not whether the glass is half empty or half full, but why it tends to be half cracked. Richard Chase in his The American Novel and Its Tradition stresses the'sadical disunities and contradictions--and attraction to--xtreme ranges of experience--of the best American novels, while the eminent critic George Steiner once observed that--he uncertainties of taste in Poe, Hawthorne and Melville and the obscuring idiosyncrasies of their manner point directly to the dilemmas of individual talent producing in relative isolation.--We don't think the idiosyncrasies of Howard's manner are obscuring, except perhaps to certain bouncers on the pantheon payroll, but as a later but arguably even more isolated individual talent, he too was making much of it up as he went along, which brings us to his claim that he'sas the first to light a torch of literature in this part of the country, however small, frail, and easily extinguished that flame may be. I am, in my way, a pioneer.-- In his essay Southwestern Literature?, Larry McMurtry comments,--he tendency to practice symbolic frontiersmanship might almost be said to characterize the twentieth century Texan,--and that tendency is almost impossible to avoid when discussing the twentieth-century Texan who concerns us here. Howard's self-identification as a torch-lighting trailblazer is not only symbolic frontiersmanship but a striking example of a well-known Leslie Fiedler generalization:--The American writer] is forever beginning, saying for the first time (without real tradition there can never be a second time) what it is like to stand alone before nature, or in a city as appallingly lonely as any virgin forest.--