Essay Review
1977; University of Nebraska Press; Volume: 11; Issue: 4 Linguagem: Inglês
10.1353/wal.1977.0033
ISSN1948-7142
Autores Tópico(s)Literature, Film, and Journalism Analysis
ResumoEssay Review PULP KING OF THE POST OAKS The Last Celt: A Bio-Bibliography of Robert Erwin Howard. ByGlenn Lord. (West Kingston, R.I.: Donald M. Grant, Publishers, 416 pages, illus., $20.) Glenn Lord’s 15 years of work in the Texas outback, putting together all the facts about the bizarre life and work of Robert E. Howard, has had at least two remarkable results. First there is this opus, newly and splendidly published by Donald Grant, who is to Howard what the late August Derleth was to H. P. Lovecraft. Secondly, while the book is light on the “bio” and heavy (250 of the 416 pages) on the “biblio,” Lord and his contributors have provided us with at least skeletal proof that when Howard’s biography is written in full, it is destined to read like fiction— and bad fiction at that. Howard’s brief life (1906-1936) was as dull, stunted and ugly as the post oak country he called home. Born in Peaster, Texas, an only child of Dr. Isaac Mordecai Howard and Hester Jane Erwin, young Robert was shuttled around such boom-and-bust towns as Seminole, Bagwell, Burkett, Brownwood, and Cross Plains. “I have spent most of my time in the hard, barren semi-waste lands of Western Texas,” he wrote, “and since infancy my memory holds a continuous grinding round of crop failures— sand storms — drouths — floods— hot winds that withered the corn — hailstorms that ripped the grain to pieces — late blizzards that froze the fruit in the bud — plagues of grasshoppers and boll weevils that stripped the cotton.” When he was old enough to work he picked cotton, hauled garbage, branded yearlings, and clerked. He got a high school education, took a few courses, mainly in typing and shorthand, at a nearby college, and he read, like Jack London’s Martin Eden, everything he could get his hands on. Howard’s reading, about which he writes at length in an essay included in Lord’s book, was a grotesque stew of meat and gruel: Conan Doyle, Jack London, Mark Twain, Sax Rohmer, Jeffrey Farnol, Talbot Mundy, Harold Lamb, Rider Haggard, Kipling, Walter Scott, Arthur Machen, Poe, Bierce, Lovecraft, Balzac, De Maupassant, Dickens; in poetry, Robert W. Service, John Masefield, Sidney Lanier, Poe again, the Benets (“Stephen Vincent better than William Rose”), Walter de la Mare, Rupert Brooke, Siegfried Sassoon, Omar Khayyam, Bret Harte, Oscar Wilde, Tennyson, Swinburne, Alfred Noyes, Verlaine, Baudelaire, and Sappho. He said he never read Shaw or Conrad and would like to have touched a match to all of Mencken; he 350 Western American Literature “despised” Dreiser, Sinclair Lewis, Sherwood Anderson and Scott Fitzgerald. “I’d rather read Zane Grey the rest of my life,” he stated, not indicating if he felt this a fate worse than having to read Dreiser and company, or if he felt Zane Grey better than the others. Probably he meant the latter. Out of his reading and out of his understandable desire to escape the horrors of life in small town Northwest Texas (Cross Plains, in Callahan County, where Howard lived longest and where he died, has a population today of barely 1,200), Howard created his own fantasy worlds and, inevita bly, he began to write. “I have lived in the Southwest all my life,” he would say, “yet most of my dreams are laid in cold, giant lands of icy wastes and gloomy skies, and of wild, wind-swept fens and wilderness over which sweep great sea-winds, and which are inhabited by shockheaded savages with light fierce eyes. . . . Always I am the barbarian.” Howard wrote his first story at the age of nine. At 15, he wrote later, “having never seen a writer, a poet, a publisher, or a magazine editor, and having only the vaguest idea of procedure, I began working at the profession I had chosen.” And by the time he was 18 he had sold his first piece of fiction, beginning a non-stop 12-year career as contributor to the pulps, principally to Weird Tales, the long-lived horror-fantasy magazine which could boast among its contributors such budding writers as Tennessee Williams, Mark Schorer, Ray Bradbury...
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