Books which inspired Robert E Howard | Locklin on science

“My tastes and habits are simple; I am neither erudite nor sophisticated. I prefer jazz to classical music, musical burlesques to Greek tragedy, A. Conan Doyle to Balzac, Bob Service’s verse to Santayana’s writing, a prize fight to a lecture on art.”

Robert E. Howard books; Conan and Bran Mak Morn are a sort of peak pulp storytelling of a certain kind, just as his friend HPL’s stories are peak pulp horror. The main problem with his books are there aren’t enough of them. The man killed himself at age 30, so he wasn’t drawing on a particularly deep reading life. You have to figure there was a lot of Conan taken directly from the stuff he read, and Conan fans might get a kick out of his literary interests.

Howard of course had a basic background in classic literature, as most high school graduates did in his day: Shakespeare, The Bible, Beowulf, The Norse Sagas, Arabian Knights, the Greeks and Romans. For a small example, Conan was a Cimmerian; Cimmerians were the Scythians of ancient history, written about by Herodotus. Howard was also interested, as were many in his day, in Theosophy and their weird ideas about Atlantis and Lemuria. He was  a fan of Kipling, Sax Rohmer, Jack London, Rider Haggard (who is amazing and largely forgotten) and Edgar Rice Burroughs and the myriad of Authors in Adventure magazine. I could talk about these guys in detail, but I figure it is more useful to outline some more obscure pieces I’ve read fairly recently.

Harold Lamb was a big influence on Howard. One of the writers for Adventure magazine, he churned out what can only be described as pulpy …. but extremely accurate historical fiction. I felt like I got more out of reading his “Theodora and the Emperor”  than I did out of reading Procopius. It’s not high literature, but it portrays the protagonists as complete characters in a way that historians are unable to, which is a considerable work of imagination. I’d put this book below something like the I, Claudius books, but maybe close in quality to Robert Graves Count Belisarius (same characters, completely different interpretation of them). Graves treated Belisarius as a sort of good guy tragic Mary Sue, and the Emperor and Empress as sort of malign ciphers. Lamb wrote his work a couple of decades later, and concentrated on the psychological furniture of Justinian and Theodora, who were, to say the least, obviously very complicated and interesting people. Justinian was an educated peasant who was adopted by maternal uncle, an illiterate but extremely capable soldier who eventually became Emperor. Justinian himself had no military experience, but was a political genius who oversaw a reconquest of large swathes of the Roman empire, revised roman law, rebuilt the city and oversaw many momentous events. Theodora was a former circus worker;  a sort of circus porn star and prostitute. From these humble beginnings she became a powerful and beloved leader, and one could say an early advocate for women’s rights from a woman who suffered greatly in her past life. As such they’re a lot more interesting as characters than Belisarius, who, frankly does kind of come across as a sort of tragic Mary Sue in the chronicles. Howard never read this specific book as it came in the 1950s, but it and Lamb himself is quite a find for historical fiction fans, and gives views of the type of author which inspired Howard. I have only thumbed through his other books on  Crusaders and Gengis Khan, but they look real promising also. We know REH had read Tamerlane and The Crusades and I stuck ’em on my Kobo for a rainy day.

Howard also read Flaubert’s undeservedly forgotten Salammbo. My pal Marty Halpern suggested this as a good book to read while on vacation in Lisbon, for the Carthaginian feels. In fact it was pretty appropriate appropriate, especially for the month long Santos Populares festival, which mostly takes place in former Carthaginian neighborhoods of Alfama. The book tells a bizarre story about some mercenaries hired by the Carthaginians and the Eponymous princess to fight for Carthage, and what happens when Carthage can’t pay up. It’s … brobdingnagian, energetic, sensuous and basically a fully formed sword and sorcery story written with the highest French literary qualities by Gustave freaking Flaubert (of Madame Bovary fame) and published in 1862. This makes absolutely no sense. It makes even less sense he lifted it all from an actual historical event in Polybius’ Histories. Nobody reads it any more because it was a “minor novel from a major novelist,” but I think this assessment is a mistake. It’s great fun, and as it literally invented an enormous genre of fiction, it is at least as important as the invention of modern literary narrative in Madame Bovary. I figure the type of weedy literary schnerd who pretends to ajudicate the importance of old novels is more comfortable with the neuraesthenic middle class people portrayed in Madame Bovary than they are with human-sacrificing witch-queens and barbarian mercenaries, even if the latter were actual people who really lived and did precisely the things described in the book. Flaubert himself wrote the book to be the diametric opposite of Bovary, to avoid becoming typecast as that guy who writes claustrophobic psychological novels about neuraesthenic middle class schmedleys in France. Anyway, don’t listen to the literary schnerds; read Salammbo if you like Conan books, or history or any other kind of books involving sword and sandal.

The Book of Invasions. Howard like many Americans had a romantic identification with his Irish ancestry. Conan’s god Crom was actually an Irish god, Crom Cruach. Conan himself has an Irish name. The Book of Invasions; a weird book compiled in the 11th century, telling the possibly true tales of multiple tribes invading the island of Ireland. It’s considered mythological these days, because you know, modern people are real good at not believing in false and stupid horse shit, but back in Howard’s day it was considered to be at least partially conventional history. It’s a completely bonkers piece of literature; there are pre-celtic tribes, huge plagues, several supernatural races of demigods, and eventually the Irish show up. It’s more bizarre a document than any sword and sorcery background mythos I’ve ever read; positively Lovecraftian in places, with supernatural races and epic battles galore.

Insanely awesome online scholarship on the books REH read:

The Robert E. Howard Bookshelf

25 comments