In Terrible Honesty Ann Douglas sketches the'sulturally impoverished--Ernest Hemingway,--tarting in some sense from scratch, less freighted with cultural baggage,--and therefore freed up to--ashion, with little resistance or waste, the new literary tools the modern experience demanded.--The culturally impoverished and isolated Howard labored long in a short life to fashion the new literary tools his startlingly modern varieties of heroic fantasy and historical adventure demanded.
Being a literary fire-bringer and torchbearer in West Texas was the only way in which progress still permitted Howard to be a pioneer.--e should have lived his life a generation before, when men threw a wide loop and rode long trails,--he writes of his doomed hero in Wild Water, one of the stories we--e most excited about including in this collection, and although Howard himself could continue throwing wide loops and riding long trails at his typewriter, that wasn't enough for him.--hat I want is impossible, as I--e told you before,--he emphasized in a 1933 letter to Lovecraft,--want, in a word, the frontier--which is compassed in the phrase, new land, open land, free land--land rich and unbroken and virgin, swarming with game and laden with fresh forests and sweet cold streams, where a man could live by the sweat of his hands unharried by taxes, crowds, noise, unemployment, bank-failures, gang-extortions, laws, and all the other wearisome things of civilization.--The Howard heroes Francis Xavier Gordon and Esau Cairn, both born--n the Southwest, of old frontier stock,--light out for improbable territories where they need not try to pry open Frederick Jackson Turner-- closed frontier. Gordon, represented in The Best of Robert E. Howard by Hawk of the Hills and Son of the White Wolf, hurls himself into--owling adventures among the Indians,--only now the wild warriors are those of Afghanistan and Arabia. Cairn is hurled through space by one Professor Hildebrand-- teleportation device to a paradoxical interstellar homecoming:
I had neither companionship, books, clothing, nor any of the things which go to make up civilization. According to the cultural viewpoint, I should have been most miserable. I was not. I revelled 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 realistic meaning.
Someone living that vicariously through Cairn't frontier-fresh start is unlikely to be either urbane or urban, although The Tower of the Elephant begins at the bottom, in a (mean)-street-level beggars--banquet where only--atchmen, well paid with stained coins,--represent law and order. The setting of Vultures of Wahpeton is a cluster of mining camps with pretensions to townhood, not a city, but in its gold rush throes, Wahpeton effectively caricatures the unrestrained capitalism Franklin Delano Roosevelt was saving from itself while Howard worked on his novella: a welter of getting and spending, gouging and fleecing, wheeling and dealing in smoke-filled rooms and gunsmoke-filled dives. More typically dreamlike are Samarcand--when Donald MacDeesa looks upon that Central Asian capital for the first time, it--shimmers] to his gaze, mingling with the blue of the distance,--like--city of illusion and enchantment----and the fireworks-bedecked Constantinople of The Shadow of the Vulture, a--ealm of shimmering magic, with the minarets of its mosques like towers of fire in an ocean of golden foam.--The most mysterious of all cities for Howard is obviously domesticity, and although drawn to the Middle Ages, he had difficulty imagining middle age for himself or his characters. Still, if Conan in a standoff with Valeria and Gottfried von Kalmbach flummoxed by Red Sonya are mere skirmishes in the battle of the sexes, they are skirmishes fought zestfully by both combatants. And the'sastoral quietude--of a chance meeting between a disenchanted king and a distraught slave girl in By This Axe I Rule! should serve as a warning against underestimating this writer-- range.