For all his strengths and faults at least today you read more and more critics that say Conan and co are more than they thought. I have read mainstream critics that are surprised by the emotional depth,the quality of his writing.
The fact he still read and admired today and he is getting mainstream classic rep like few pulp writers is more than enough for me.
J.D
There are some negative pulp issues of his stories that i agree about. The colouring,repetition of ideas. Which must be the negative side to him writing to many magazines,re-writing stories until they sold.
Still he has a great average of quality.
Overall, I agree with you. I simply wanted to make clear that there are legitimate reasons for a critic to have reservations about Howard's work -- or even to feel it falls below the level of "Literature" with a capital L. However, as far as adventure tales and the lesser heights of the greats, I still think Howard has his place.
When Howard read Rats in the Wall he liked it so well he wrote a long letter about it to Wierd Tales which was forwarded to Lovecraft. From that the two of them ended up forming what got to be know as the Lovecraft Circle which has been losely compared to the Inklings. But this was a group of correspondents who communicated almost exclusively through the mail.
Well... close, but not quite. I'm going to be a bit pedantic here (when am I not?
). The first part of this statement is quite correct; we have the letter to Wright on "The Rats in the Walls", it is included in both Howard's Selected Letters: 1923-1930 published by Necronomicon Press some years back (pp. 48-49) and in The Collected Letters of Robert E. Howard, Volume Two: 1930-1932, published by the Robert E. Howard Foundation Press (pp. 42-43). We don't have Lovecraft's response to Howard, but we do have Howard's response to that letter, and many of the letters following, and there's a lot of fascinating reading there.
But the Lovecraft Circle was already in existence long before Howard came into contact with Lovecraft. The nucleus of that had begun as early as around 1916-1917, with various correspondents from his amateur journalism circle, such as Rheinhart Kleiner, Maurice Winter Moe, Ira A. Cole, and, later, Samuel Loveman, Alfred Galpin, Frank Belknap Long, Clark Ashton Smith (who began corresponding with HPL in 1922). And then there was the New York Lovecraft Circle, the "Kalem Club", so called because the (core) members' names all began with K, L, or M. (Incidentally, Wheeler Dryden, half-brother to Charlie Chaplin, was at least an intermittent member of this group, and such literary notables as Hart Crane occasionally also took part in discussions... at least in person.) So Howard was something of a late-comer to the Circle, rather than a founding member. He did, however, quickly become a very important member of the group, and corresponded with August Derleth, CAS, Long, E. Hoffman Price, and several others of the group until his death.
Howard is to me one of the sadest figures in American lit.
I have my own take on this but I can't help but ask: in what way?
By the way as for the Carter de Camp books, I enjoyed them. Just take them for what they are and they can be looked at aside from the actual "Conan Cannon".
As for the pastiches written by de Camp, Carter, Nyberg, et al.... some of them are not at all bad, some are mediocre... and some are simply gawdawful. But I agree; one must see them as pastiche, something "in the manner of" or in homage to, Howard, rather than a true continuation of Howard's own tales. If seen as actually being by these writers, in their own voices, but about Howard's characters, there are some which are really quite decent S&S, very entertaining. Few could stand up as art, but no, they aren't entirely bad. (Though don't get me started on Jordan and his ilk....)
The movies however may be a different story. The first wasn't too bad but the second.... not so great.
That's an extremely charitable way of putting it....
The thing is, I'm not sure you could, even now, have a character like Conan as Howard wrote him... at least, not from any major studio. He is neither a true anti-hero, a villain, nor a Galahad, but a rather more complex character than is often credited... and darn sinister at times. I think in particular of that passage in "Rogues in the House", where Howard describes him in these terms (he has gone looking for a girl who betrayed him to the police, and meets up with her new lover on the stairs outside her rooms):
A vague bulk crouched in the darkness before [the lover], a pair of eyes blazed like the eyes of a hunting beast. A beast-like snarl was the last thing he heard in life, as the monster lurched against him, and a keen blade ripped through his belly. He gave one gasping cry, and slumped down limply on the stairway.
The barbarian loomed above him for an instant, ghoul-like; his eyes burning in the gloom.
Now, not many people would describe their "hero" as "ghoul-like" or "beast-like" (though certainly Moorcock and Wagner have moments like this with both Elric and Kane), and I simply cannot imagine a major studio executive having the wherewithal to even understand such a character, let alone have the guts to put such on the screen....
