Every Day, I Remind Myself

Every day, I remind myself that the world is full of honest, compassionate, thoughtful, and courageous people who are completely ignored and have no authority whatsoever.

Robert E. Howard, "Red Nails"

Click for a better jpeg.

Because writers have intentions of their own, a reader should respond to any story as it reveals itself on the page, and not as it could have developed in the reader's imagination.

With all of this in mind, I consider my response to Robert E. Howard's Conan story, "Red Nails," unfair. Still, the conviction of my response forces me to accept it with obvious reservations.

To the adventure modes of Harold Lamb, Talbot Mundy, and Edgar Rice Burroughs, Howard brought a distinctive touch of supernatural horror. This made his work stand out, but in various degrees of intensity. Stories like "The Shadow Kingdom" and "Worms of the Earth" emphasize their moods of dread and strangeness, while other stories focus more on physical action. For the most part, Howard's Conan stories fit the second pattern.

In that sense, I feel that "Red Nails" became a lost opportunity. The story develops into a tale of action and physical conflict like many other Conan stories, but it begins as a tale of potential horror.

The primary source of this mood comes from the setting, an apparently-deserted city that is in fact one vast building with cavernous hallways and balustrades in perpetual twilight, where dying factions who have never set foot outside ambush and torture each other in the darkness.

As a writer, Howard lacked the visual precision of Clark Ashton Smith, but like Smith, he understood the value of setting as a narrative engine. His vast building offers little in the way of any physical presence, but it does provide expressionistic hints of jade green, blood red, and cat's-eye gleams from supernatural gems. As Conan wanders through each dim hallway, he drags the reader along to find what he finds; this propels the story with a sense of immersion despite the absence of detail.

For me, this immersion works best early in "Red Nails," when Conan has no idea of where he is and of what exactly he is witnessing. He uncovers hints of a twilit war fought by crazed people, and the result is a mood of morbid strangeness that I wish Howard had maintained right to the end. Instead, Howard explains everything from top to bottom: who these people are, why they fight, how they ended up in this Gothic trap. To his credit, Howard's exposition never slows the narrative drive, but it does reduce an eerie sense of mystery into yet another typical Conan tale.

Many readers consider this a good Conan adventure, and as a tale of pulp swordplay and treachery, it does the job. Yet I wish that Howard had pursued his initial hints of that twilit building and its incomprehensible inhabitants. He had a setting of eerie potential that he turned into something ordinary, and I suspect that he felt the loss, because while the story goes on, he pulled more and more supernatural elements out of his hat in a patchwork effort to top himself. None of these escalations was necessary. What he had needed was right there, on the page, right from the start.

Writers have their own goals; as a reader, I should accept these, but every now and then, I feel as if other directions would have led to more striking outcomes. Like the feuding clans of "Red Nails," Howard the writer of horror clashed with Howard the writer of Conan, and in this battle, Conan won.

Robert E. Howard, "The Shadow Kingdom"

Click for a better jpeg.

From 1929, "The Shadow Kingdom" displays Robert E. Howard at his worst and best. The worst is clear on the page; the best remains harder to pin down.

As a writer for WEIRD TALES, Howard lacked the verbal precision and sensory immersion of Clark Ashton Smith, the grotesquely metaphysical imagination of C. L. Moore. What he did offer was a narrative drive that moved rapidly from one scene to the next, and the intensity of a specific emotional tone: the conviction of a world endlessly dangerous, yet one that could be fought. Howard wrote for an adolescent sensibility, which limited the range of his techniques and the scope of his feelings, but within these limitations, he was king.

As often happens with kings, Howard's charm tends to thrive in recollection, but it crumbles while the king scowls back at us. Once the pages have been closed, the stories become dreams recalled in a reader's mind, but the process of absorbing Howard's prose can drive attentive readers out of their minds.

Howard understood the demands of adventure, he understood the thrill of a rapid pace, but did he understand the needs of a human ear? Perhaps he never heard his prose above the clacking of the typewriter.

He let assonance bloat beyond control:

"The color and the gayety of the day had given away to the eery stillness of night."

- - - - -

"And so in a brooding mood Kull came to the palace, where his bodyguard, men of the Red Slayers, came to take the rein of the great stallion and escort Kull to his rest."

- - - - -

"'Strike at the skull if at all,' said Brule. 'Eighteen wait without the door and perhaps a score more in the corridors."

He cluttered his prose with end rhymes:

"They eyed each other silently, their mutual tribal enmity seething beneath their cloak of formality."

- - - - -

"'Tush. Be seated. Look about you. The gardens are deserted, the seats empty, save for ourselves. You fear not me?'

"Kull sank back, gazing about him warily."

- - - - -

"The windows opened upon the great inner gardens of the royal palace, and the breezes of the night, bearing the scents of spice trees, blew the filmy curtains about. The king looked out."

- - - - -

"'Did not Ka-nu bid you follow me in all things?' asked the Pict irritably, his eyes flashing momentarily."

- - - - -

"'Aye. Night and day you are watched, king, by many eyes.'"

- - - - -

"'Aye!' came Brule's scarcely audible reply; there was a strange expression in the Pict's scintillant eyes."

Bloated assonance and end-rhymes are the sickness of an early draft; most writers hear these flaws in revision and cut them out. Howard, I suspect, either failed to hear or failed to revise.

These are the limitations of Howard, but many people clench their noses, turn off their hearing, pretend to be blind, and read on. What keeps them reading?

The rapid pace is an obvious clue, but Howard's most reliable secret is a knack for making scenes vivid not to eyes, nor to ears, but to a specific emotional receptor that tingles at the touch of uneasiness and defiance:

"Valusia -- land of dreams and nightmares -- a kingdom of the shadows, ruled by phantoms who glided back and forth behind the painted curtains, mocking the futile king who sat upon the throne -- himself a shadow. [...]

"He was king of Valusia -- a fading, degenerate Valusia, a Valusia living mostly in dreams of bygone glory, but still a mighty land and the greatest of the Seven Empires. Valusia -- Land of Dreams, the tribesmen named it, and sometimes it seemed to Kull that he moved in a dream. Strange to him were the intrigues of court and palace, army and people. All was like a masquerade, where men and women hid their real thoughts with a smooth mask [...] And now a strange feeling of dim unrest, of unreality, stole over him as of late it had been doing. Who was he, a straightforward man of the seas and the mountain, to rule a race strangely and terribly wise with the mysticisms of antiquity? An ancient race --

"'I am Kull!' said he, flinging back his head as a lion flings back his mane. 'I am Kull!'

"His falcon gaze swept the ancient hall. His self-confidence flowed back…. And in a dim nook of the hall a tapestry moved -- slightly."

Even as the combination of anxiety and defiance can limit the emotional range of a narrative, it can supercharge with pulp intensity the tone that remains:

"'The night can hear,' answered Ka-nu obliquely. 'There are worlds within worlds. But you may trust me and you may trust Brule, the Spear-slayer. Look!' He drew from his robes a bracelet of gold representing a winged dragon coiled thrice, with three horns of ruby on the head.

"'Examine it closely. Brule will wear it on his arm when he comes to you tomorrow night so that you may know him. Trust Brule as you trust yourself, and do what he tells you to. And in proof of trust, look ye!'

"And with the speed of a striking hawk, the ancient snatched something from his robes, something that flung a weird green light over them, and which he replaced in an instant.

"'The stolen gem!' exclaimed Kull recoiling. 'The green jewel from the Temple of the Serpent! Valka! You! And why do you show it to me?'

"'To save your life. To prove my trust. If I betray your trust, deal with me likewise. You hold my life in your hand. Now I could not be false to you if I would, for a word from you would be my doom.'"

A story like "The Shadow Kingdom" represents an acquired taste, and like many such things, must work a spell on young readers or never take hold at all. I was caught before my 'teen years; I can understand the power of a narrow scope, I can even respect it, but as an adult reader, I clutch my ears at the scraping of this gawdawful prose.