What-- more, different kinds of range exist; Howard certainly ranged across recorded history and the invitingly blank pages of unrecorded history. In The Star Rover Jack London imagines a--ider full-panoplied and astride of time,--and his Texan admirer, for whom that novel was something of a sacred text, clung convincingly to bucking temporal broncos in his historical fiction, especially a set of stories from the early Thirties that pit Crusaders against Eastern conquerors. Here the contending supernatural forces are not Jehovah and Allah but Hubris and Nemesis. The Shadow of the Vulture features--he Armageddon of races, Asia against Europe,--but equally stupendous and far more exotic is the death-grapple between Asia and Asia when Bayazid and Timour meet in Lord of Samarcand, as--he thunder of cymbals and kettle-drums--contends with the'swesome trumpeting--of war-elephants, and--lasts of arrows and sheets of fire--wither--en in their mail like burnt grain.-- To range we should also add reach, and a refusal to be intimidated by historical distances and distinctions. The English specialist in American literature Tony Tanner was struck by the brashness with which T. S. Eliot and Ezra Pound availed themselves of--ragments of the world-- past and disparate cultures to build their own private worlds. This sort of relatively unfettered eclecticism when dealing with the past is peculiarly American and an utterly different thing from the European writer-- sense of the past. If anything it negates the historical sense--he results and new juxtapositions can be brilliant, breathtakingly original and very un-European.--The Hyborian Age of the Conan stories also looms in Carl Van Doren't comparison of James Branch Cabell-- fantasies to The Faerie Queen:--eographical and chronological boundaries melt and flow, wherein fable encroaches upon history, and the creative mood of the poet re-cuts his shining fabrics as if they were whole cloth intended solely for his purposes.--And when Tanner says of Herman Melville-- prose that with--ts vast assimilations, its seemingly opportunistic eclecticism, its pragmatic and improvisatory nonchalance, its capacious grandiloquence and demotic humour, it is indeed a style for America--the style of America,--he also captures many of the stylistic attributes of an American named Robert E. Howard. Opportunistic eclecticism and improvisatory nonchalance can't help but improve a talented writer-- range.
Also pertinent to this issue is the fact that Howard spent much of his time at the typewriter trying to make editors and readers laugh. Sailor Steve Costigan, the'srdinary ham-an'tegger--who broke big for his creator in the pugilistically inclined pulp Fight Stories, is represented here by The Bull Dog Breed. Steve comes equipped with a concussion-proof skull and a repercussion-proof gullibility, and the stories about him focus on the ties that bind man and--ublin gentleman'tbulldog, and the inability of two-fistedness to keep up with two-facedness. A few years later Breckinridge Elkins, the first and most illustrious of Howard's mountain man man-mountains, arrived as discreetly and understatedly as a rockslide, and he was soon joined by Pike Bearfield. Pragmatically cloned for a new market, Bearfield acquires his own, epistolary-narrative-shaking identity in this volume-- Gents on the Lynch, and also The Riot at Bucksnort and A Gent from the Pecos.
The farther west the English language got, the greater its Americanization, as Paul Horgan recognizes:--ts inflations and exaggerations were brandished in reply to the vastness of the West, the bulk of mountains, where man was so little. If there was vulgarity in its expression, there was also pathos, for what showed plain was the violent dancing of a spirit that must assert or be lost.--Only a generation or two removed from all of this, Howard knew what he wanted to recapture for Pike Bearfield and Breck Elkins; to Lovecraft in 1931 he admitted,--estern folkways and traditions are so impregnated with savagery, suffering and strife, that even Western humor is largely grim, and, to non-Westerners, often grotesque.--The savagery, suffering, and strife of Vultures of Wahpeton'tsque elements like Mustang Stirling-- outlaws and a Vigilante Committee are reprised farcically in Gents, as Bearfield-- spirit dances violently in passages like--olks is always wanting to lynch me, and quite a few has tried, as numerous tombstones on the boundless prairies testifies.--Gents also features Howard, who seethed over attempts by Easterners to impose their frames of reference on the Southwest, gleefully imposing a Southwesterner-- frame of reference on the most hallowed events of East Coast history:--e said the Britishers was going to sneak out of a town named Boston which I jedge must have been a right sizable cowtown or mining-camp or something, and was going to fall on the people unawares and confiscate their stills and weppins and steers and things.-- The man responsible for a story called By This Axe I Rule! is likely to disdain check-swings of that axe; not for Howard the hedging of bets and eying of exits found in earlier American fantastic fiction. He did not so much write his stories down or type them out as commit them--nd commit to them. For Ann Douglas, Melville-- books--ove forward when he is in close connection with himself, in the grip of his daemon.--That is also true of Howard, to the point where he abandoned several fan-favorite characters because the close connection had been lost; his daemon had shifted his grip. But the grip is searingly, serratedly tight in, for example, Wings of the Night; Melville-- Ahab, a Quaker, describes himself as--adness maddened--during his pursuit of the white whale, and the akaanas of Wings airlift Kane, the Puritan, to a similarly far gone state. Howard dwells upon their--earful mirth to see men die wholesale,--their--trange and grisly sense of humor [that is] tickled by the suffering of a howling human.--We could be dealing with the'soys--of King Lear----s flies to wanton boys, are we to the gods; They kill us for their sport,--although in this instance it is not the flies but the boys who are winged. While the akaanas are not divine or even supernatural, Howard does liken them to--emons flying back to hell through the dawn,--and they call to mind Richard Slotkin't Regeneration Through Violence comment on the forests of Nathaniel Hawthorne:--he man who enters the wilderness hunting for something he regards as truth or power is always led to a place where devils dance in a ring, inviting him to a black Eucharist.-- Having agreed with Lovecraft--hat Puritanism provides a rich field for psychological study,--in an October 1930 letter, Howard exploits that rich field in Wings as nowhere else in his Solomon Kane series. America-- Puritan and African antecedents encounter each other in a--re-American'tsetting:--he Dark Continent, land of shadows and horror, of bewitchment and sorcery, into which all evil things had been banished before the growing light of the western world.--And yet the supposedly Dark Continent illuminates Solomon Kane as he seeks out the shadows, becomes most fully himself, acquires a context that his birthplace Devon, as is evidenced by the hail-and-farewell of Solomon Kane-- Homecoming, can never hope to provide. In his 2004 essay Heritage of Steeclass="underline" Howard and the Frontier Myth, Steven R. Trout memorably discusses the one-sided dialogue between Kane and the'shriveled, mummified head of Goru, whose eyes, strangely enough, did not change in the blaze of the sun or the haunt of the moon.--Goru is an eloquent if wordless accuser; the Englishman has failed in what might otherwise seem an objectionably paternalistic role--proved better at being a Kane than being a Solomon. He is a king whose kingdom is raptored away from him, and the akaanas, it should be noted, arrive from Europe to prey upon and despoil--in effect, colonize--Africans.