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Robert E. Howard was a popular pulp author in the 1920s and ’30s. Mostly, he is remembered today for Conan the Barbarian, but he wrote a great deal of adventure and sword-and-sorcery stories, many of which appeared in the pages of Weird Tales.

As the subtitle suggests, this book aims to tell the story of Howard’s life through a close analysis of his literary output, using quotes from Howard and his contemporaries.

Literature is a business to me–a business at which I was making an ample living when the Depression knocked the guts out of the markets. My sole desire in writing is to make a reasonable living.

So Howard himself wrote, in the early 1930s. Smith argues that in fact, Howard did have literary ambitions, but that he cloaked them with this sort of practicality.

Howard was a hard-nosed, hard-boiled kind of guy. An amateur boxer and weightlifter, he’d seen more than a little nastiness growing up and, Smith argues, his dark and violent stories reflect his upbringing.

I confess, prior to reading this book, I’d only ever read one thing by Howard: a short story called Ye College Days. It’s a dark comedy, in the vein of Ambrose Bierce, that seems to be satirizing college sports rivalries. Funny, in a macabre sort of way.

Howard, Smith repeatedly tells us, was fixated on physicality and violence in his fiction. His stories tell of fighters and warriors, struggling in mortal combat, either against one another or sometimes against otherworldly demonic entities.

This is in contrast to Howard’s friend and fellow pulp author, H.P. Lovecraft. Howard and Lovecraft corresponded frequently, and Lovecraft’s brand of weird fiction influenced some of Howard’s works.

HPL and REH had their share of disagreements, too, including one over a fairly abstract philosophical point about whether it is better to live in the comfortable regulation of civilization, or the liberated wilds of barbarism.

My favorite parts of the book are the ones about Lovecraft and Howard’s relationship, as they debate and discuss ideas while critiquing each other’s fiction. Unlike Howard, Lovecraft was a quiet, scholarly, would-be aristocrat who had probably never even been in a fistfight, and his characters are much the same; as bookish as Howard’s were barbaric.

The entire Weird Tales community strikes me as a forerunner of internet fandoms and forums. Fans could and did write to Weird Tales, seemingly usually to complain about something. Today, we know Robert Bloch as the author of Psycho, but once upon a time he was a teenaged kid writing angry letters to Farnsworth Wright, the editor.

Speaking of Farnsworth Wright, here’s his take on the readership of his magazine:

While we have many quick-witted and intelligent readers, we also have many whose intelligence is rudimentary.

This is the problem with having a wide readership. Not that Weird Tales was necessarily a blockbuster success, since financial difficulties seem to have been a recurring theme.  On the other hand, at one point we are told that in 1928, Howard:

…earned $186 from his writing, sufficient for him to no longer require other means to support himself and to help with his family’s expenses.

I looked up estimates of the purchasing power of $186 in 1928. Seems it’s equivalent to about $3,000 in today’s dollars, so I’m guessing this was monthly income.

A dream come true, to most of us self-published authors! Imagine if we all made $3K a month. Howard was clearly making a decent living, at least before the depression.

But let’s try to zero in on the specifics of the pulp publishing business. Weird Tales pays Howard $186 a month for his stories. Why? Presumably because they think his stories sell magazines. Of course, since each issue contains stories by multiple authors, there’s no way to precisely know how many sales are due to the presence of a Howard story. But he did have a tendency to be favored with having his story illustrated on the cover. (A fact that annoyed Bloch.)

About those cover illustrations… most of Howard’s tales were illustrated for WT by a woman named Margaret Brundage.  A quick sample of her oeuvre on Wikipedia left me thinking, “More like Margaret Bondage, am I right?” Ms. Brundage’s covers frequently depicted naked women in various sorts of peril, which many Weird Tales contributors were keenly aware of when writing their stories.

Smith writes that Howard “wrote from experience and with a deep respect for history, and the best Conan stories are melancholy with the sharp memories of greater days gone before.” Perhaps, and yet I can’t help wondering if the reason his stories sold was because of the titillating covers that usually accompanied them.

This is a pretty bleak conclusion for anyone looking to draw writerly insights from Howard’s career. Whatever qualities his fiction may have had, was it popular because it provided a basis for many a teenager’s fantasy? If so, what hope is there for authors in a world that also contains DeviantArt?

However, I take a more optimistic view. We still read the Weird Tales authors today, and enjoy the worlds they were able to conjure. The quality of their writing does matter after all!

Imagine if you could tell Howard, or Lovecraft, or any of the others, that in the year 2023, we’d be using a global communications network to discuss their works. I would imagine they’d be delighted.

As I see it, the ironic thing about the pulp community of the 1930s was that they were not thinking big enough. If they had known the future, would they have been grousing over whose story got the cover illustration? No! These trivial concerns melt away when you consider the influence their ideas would one day have in popular culture.

Part of the reason that the words of these authors live on is the community they created. I’ve written before about how Lovecraft’s correspondence with Bloch helped shape one of his best stories. One wonders what they might have done if they’d had the internet at their disposal.

Comes the cynic’s reply: probably waste it by arguing over petty nonsense. A forum is only as good as its members. While I obviously have a great deal of respect for some of their work, there’s no denying most of the major figures at Weird Tales were, well, weird. (Especially Lovecraft. His eccentricities, both the harmlessly amusing ones and the kind of appalling ones, come through clearly in this book.)

As for Howard himself, his own story ended in a rather sad way, the details of which I won’t discuss because they have little bearing on his literary work. All I’ll say is that it would have been interesting to see what he might have produced had he lived to write for a full natural lifetime. Stephen King called much of Howard’s work “puerile.” Smith contests this accusation vigorously, and rightly so, but he never brings up what I consider the most obvious objection: Howard died at the age of 30, and so never could produce more mature works.

After reading this book, I decided to give another of Howard’s stories a try. I read Wolfshead, because Smith seemed to think it’s one of his best early stories.

It’s not bad, I have to say. Of course, for multiple reasons, it is shocking to the sensibilities of modern readers. But it’s got a good atmosphere; a creepy castle in some remote jungle, a cast of interesting characters, and a memorable narrative voice.

Looking through Howard’s works on Wikisource led me to The Battle That Ended The Century, which is a humorous in-joke story, allegedly by Lovecraft, packed with references to various members of the Weird Tales crowd, including Howard, or as he is called in the story, “Two-Gun Bob.”. My favorite line:

[T]he eminent magazine-cover anatomist Mrs. M. Blunderage portrayed the battlers as a pair of spirited nudes behind a thin veil of conveniently curling tobacco-smoke.

Can’t you just picture the sort of scene that’s being described? I bet when you started reading this review, you had no idea who Margaret Brundage was, and now you are able to appreciate inside jokes about her art style that were originally intended for a specific group of writers in the 1930s.

Such is the power of a writing community! Here we are, nearly a century later, and still reading their words. Would anyone in 1936 have dared imagine that the contributors of this strange little pulp would still be remembered? And what will people in 2110 remember about 2023, I wonder? An interesting question to ponder, indeed. But for today, I have gone on too long already.

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From Fenimore Cooper’s Literary Offences (1895):

There are nineteen rules governing literary art in domain of romantic fiction — some say twenty-two. In “Deerslayer,” Cooper violated eighteen of them. These eighteen require:

1. That a tale shall accomplish something and arrive somewhere. But the “Deerslayer” tale accomplishes nothing and arrives in air.
2. They require that the episodes in a tale shall be necessary parts of the tale, and shall help to develop it. But as the “Deerslayer” tale is not a tale, and accomplishes nothing and arrives nowhere, the episodes have no rightful place in the work, since there was nothing for them to develop.
3. They require that the personages in a tale shall be alive, except in the case of corpses, and that always the reader shall be able to tell the corpses from the others. But this detail has often been overlooked in the “Deerslayer” tale.
4. They require that the personages in a tale, both dead and alive, shall exhibit a sufficient excuse for being there. But this detail also has been overlooked in the “Deerslayer” tale.
5. They require that when the personages of a tale deal in conversation, the talk shall sound like human talk, and be talk such as human beings would be likely to talk in the given circumstances, and have a discoverable meaning, also a discoverable purpose, and a show of relevancy, and remain in the neighborhood of the subject at hand, and be interesting to the reader, and help out the tale, and stop when the people cannot think of anything more to say. But this requirement has been ignored from the beginning of the “Deerslayer” tale to the end of it.
6. They require that when the author describes the character of a personage in the tale, the conduct and conversation of that personage shall justify said description. But this law gets little or no attention in the “Deerslayer” tale, as Natty Bumppo’s case will amply prove.
[I omit rule 7 from this list, as it contains language which may shock modern readers–B.G.]
8. They require that crass stupidities shall not be played upon the reader as “the craft of the woodsman, the delicate art of the forest,” by either the author or the people in the tale. But this rule is persistently violated in the “Deerslayer” tale.
9. They require that the personages of a tale shall confine themselves to possibilities and let miracles alone; or, if they venture a miracle, the author must so plausibly set it forth as to make it look possible and reasonable. But these rules are not respected in the “Deerslayer” tale.
10. They require that the author shall make the reader feel a deep interest in the personages of his tale and in their fate; and that he shall make the reader love the good people in the tale and hate the bad ones. But the reader of the “Deerslayer” tale dislikes the good people in it, is indifferent to the others, and wishes they would all get drowned together.
11. They require that the characters in a tale shall be so clearly defined that the reader can tell beforehand what each will do in a given emergency. But in the “Deerslayer” tale, this rule is vacated.

In addition to these large rules, there are some little ones. These require that the author shall:

12. Say what he is proposing to say, not merely come near it.
13. Use the right word, not its second cousin.
14. Eschew surplusage.
15. Not omit necessary details.
16. Avoid slovenliness of form.
17. Use good grammar.
18. Employ a simple and straightforward style.

Even these seven are coldly and persistently violated in the “Deerslayer” tale.

Obviously, ol’ Samuel Clemens is not acting in good faith. He has devised these rules specifically in order to ensure that Deerslayer will be in violation of them. I suspect nearly all other purported rules for writers are created through a similar process. Probably not with the same degree of venom as motivated Twain, but in the sense of being designed to fit pre-existing books, and not as independent criteria.

Still, Twain’s essay is hilarious. I’d be honored if someone hated my books this much!

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The other day I was reading about Booth Tarkington. If you haven’t heard of him–as I hadn’t until just recently–he was a novelist in the early 20th-century. Apparently, he was quite famous in his day, but has since been largely forgotten. Wikipedia informs us:

By the later twentieth century, however, he was ignored in academia: no congresses, no society, no journal of Tarkington Studies. In 1985 he was cited as an example of the great discrepancy possible between an author’s fame when alive and oblivion later. According to this view, if an author succeeds at pleasing his or her contemporaries — and Tarkington’s works have not a whiff of social criticism — he or she is not going to please later readers of inevitably different values and concerns.

Think about that second sentence a while. Chew on it. Do you think this is true? (By the way, although Wikipedia doesn’t say so directly, I’m assuming this is a close paraphrase of the cited text.)

I have recently been part of a discussion, started by Mark Paxson, about whether writing needs to have a point. The overwhelming consensus I’ve heard is, “No, it doesn’t. It just needs to tell a good story.” Anyone who subscribes to the theory Wikipedia describes above is implicitly saying that it does need to have a point.

Who would say this? I’ll tell you who: a critic. Critics are always looking for the point in any work of fiction. I should know, being one myself and constantly trying to tease out the hidden deeper meaning in things.

Critics, according to this theory, are who keep books relevant. The thinking goes, in order to preserve an author’s works as significant, there must be something in it for the critics to evaluate and discuss. Naturally, critics are big proponents of this idea. (I like to imagine all the important literary critics gathering to celebrate their control of authors’ legacies, ideally singing a song similar to this Simpsons classic.)

But the problem is that this theory is blatantly wrong. From what little I’ve read of Tarkington, his writing reminds me of Wodehouse. Wodehouse, whose works contain barely any social criticism and unabashedly take place in some sort of eternal “Edwardian never-never land,” is widely regarded as one of the greatest writers of the English language, exactly because his books transport readers to another world.

I suppose one could write a critical academic analysis of Wodehouse, but I think it would just come across as ridiculous. Such was Wodehouse’s mastery of comedy that you cannot even begin to consider his works in a normal, “serious” fashion. Something in their comic spirit defies it.

If you try hard enough, I suppose you can impose intertextual and social commentary on anything. Again, if I haven’t demonstrated this repeatedly on this blog, I don’t know what more I can do. But is that necessary to ensuring an author’s works live on? Somehow I don’t think it is.

Still, there must be some reason I never heard of the guy until now, despite living in the American Midwest, with which his work is (or was) as closely identified as Twain’s is with the Mississippi or Steinbeck’s with California. I wonder what the reason is.

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Let me start by making something very clear: I have nothing but respect and admiration for Paul Graham. I’ve read most of his essays multiple times. A few of them have completely changed the way I look at the world. He is, in my opinion, nothing short of a modern Renaissance man. So please don’t think I’m attacking him or trying to tear him down. Not that I could even if I wanted to, but I would never want to. Nevertheless, he has made a claim I disagree with, and I want to examine it.

Graham recently posted an essay entitled “Write Simply.” It’s a subject he’s written about before, especially in “Write Like You Talk.” You should read these essays before reading this post.

There’s always been something about “Write Like You Talk” that bothers me, and I got the same feeling from “Write Simply.” But it was hard for me to figure out what it was, because generally it seems like sound advice. There was nothing in them I could point at and say, “That’s wrong.”

But I think I’ve finally figured out what nags at me: it’s that most famous writers through history clearly didn’t write this way.

Let’s look at some examples. Here is the opening of Oscar Wilde’s 1891 essay “The Soul of Man Under Socialism”:

The chief advantage that would result from the establishment of Socialism is, undoubtedly, the fact that Socialism would relieve us from that sordid necessity of living for others which, in the present condition of things, presses so hardly upon almost everybody. In fact, scarcely any one at all escapes.

Now and then, in the course of the century, a great man of science, like Darwin; a great poet, like Keats; a fine critical spirit, like M. Renan; a supreme artist, like Flaubert, has been able to isolate himself, to keep himself out of reach of the clamorous claims of others, to stand “under the shelter of the wall,” as Plato puts it, and so to realise the perfection of what was in him, to his own incomparable gain, and to the incomparable and lasting gain of the whole world. These, however, are exceptions.

Is this simple? I don’t think so. Here is a rewritten version that contains basically the same ideas.

The best thing about Socialism is that it would allow everyone to have more independence. There have been a few gifted people who have had this independence in the past, and who have done great things that benefited society, but not many.

Does this mean I’m a better writer than Wilde? Seems unlikely. Nor is Wilde’s style unusual for his time. Read anything written in English during the Victorian period. I’ll bet that the language is more complex, the sentences more intricate, than an equivalent piece of writing today. Whether you compare Oscar Wilde to Paul Graham or Varney the Vampire to Twilight, you will see this pattern.

What explains this difference? I can think of a few possible explanations:

  • Writers today are smarter than those fussy Victorians, and use simplified language to make our point clear.
  • The Victorians were smarter than writers today, and could handle more complex language.
  • Victorian writers and modern writers are, in the aggregate, equally smart, but fashions have changed.

There are probably good arguments to be made for each, though I tend to favor the last one. In particular, Victorian writers were writing because they knew they had to justify publishing their writing in some physical form, which meant a higher word count. With some exceptions, writers today face no such requirement. Maybe that is sufficient to explain it.

But let’s look at another famous writer, from a more recent period:

I have before me a bibliography of P. G. Wodehouse’s works. It names round about fifty books, but is certainly incomplete. It is as well to be honest, and I ought to start by admitting that there are many books by Wodehouse – perhaps a quarter or a third of the total – which I have not read. It is not, indeed, easy to read the whole output of a popular writer who is normally published in cheap editions. But I have followed his work fairly closely since 1911, when I was eight years old, and am well acquainted with its peculiar mental atmosphere – an atmosphere which has not, of course, remained completely unchanged, but shows little alteration since about 1925. 

This is from George Orwell’s 1945 essay “In Defence of P.G. Wodehouse.” I can make a lot of cuts to this:

I have not read all of Wodehouse’s books, but am familiar enough with them to say that his style has changed little since 1925.

Doesn’t this communicate the same point? And might not Orwell himself approve, since he also once wrote in another essay, “If it is possible to cut a word out, always cut it out.” I think Graham and Orwell would agree on this rule.

On the other hand, Orwell also wrote the novel Nineteen Eighty-Four, in which a totalitarian government systematically eliminates words from the language in order to make certain thoughts unthinkable. In the appendix to the novel, there is an example of how this works:

Pre-revolutionary literature could only be subjected to ideological translation — that is, alteration in sense as well as language. Take for example the well-known passage from the Declaration of Independence:

We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their creator with certain inalienable rights, that among these are life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. That to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among men, deriving their powers from the consent of the governed. That whenever any form of Government becomes destructive of those ends, it is the right of the People to alter or abolish it, and to institute new Government. . .

It would have been quite impossible to render this into Newspeak while keeping to the sense of the original. The nearest one could come to doing so would be to swallow the whole passage up in the single word crimethink.

And this is what I find scary about writing simply: there is a fine line between writing so simply that you get your ideas across, as Graham advises, and writing so simply that your ideas become too simplified.

Einstein is famously quoted as saying, “Everything should be made as simple as possible, but no simpler.” In fact, he didn’t say this. What he said was, “It can scarcely be denied that the supreme goal of all theory is to make the irreducible basic elements as simple and as few as possible without having to surrender the adequate representation of a single datum of experience.” But, amusingly, someone decided it was better if it was made simpler. And they were right, in this case–but it’s still worth knowing the real quote.

If there’s one point in all of Graham’s essays where I just don’t see things his way at all, it’s this from “Write Like You Talk”:

But just imagine calling Picasso “the mercurial Spaniard” when talking to a friend. Even one sentence of this would raise eyebrows in conversation. 

I love the phrase “mercurial Spaniard.” It’s been stuck in my mind ever since reading that essay. (I haven’t read the book Graham references.) It just has a nice feel to it. I admit I’m unusual in this regard–both my mother and her father loved unusual turns of phrases like this, and that’s probably where I picked it up. Would I say that in conversation with just anyone? No. Would I say it in conversation with a friend who loved it as much as I do? Absolutely.

Graham asserts that, “The gap between most writing and pure ideas is not filled with poetry.” I think that it used to be. Or, if not poetry, then clever and original prose. Of course, this doesn’t mean the ideas were good. But if they were bad, at least you still had some poetry. What do we have now?

Graham’s method is to convey his ideas as cleanly and precisely as possible. The old method was to communicate ideas with some ornament, some extravagance, in order to make them not only interesting, but aesthetically pleasing.

It’s true that bad ideas can be disguised with clever language. It’s one of the oldest tricks in the history of communication. But my fear is that good ideas can also be eroded through oversimplified language. The great writers of past eras were distinguished by their love for language, and their ability to use it in its most complex and most basic forms.

Graham says, “Write simply.” If I’m going to dispute this, I’d better offer some kind of counter-advice. Here’s my suggestion: write memorably. But understand that nine times out of ten, writing memorably is writing simply. Complexity is usually ugly, except when it’s necessary. But when it is necessary, be sure you can do it.

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Writers Supporting Writers is a new blog run by Mark Paxson, Audrey Driscoll, Susan Nicholls, Trent Lewin, and yours truly. You can find posts and video chats about all sorts of indie writing matters there. Go check it out, and please feel free to comment. 

One of the greatest things about the indie writing community is how indie authors continually support one another. We occasionally say it feels like the only people who read our books are other authors–but by my lights, that’s a good thing. It’s better to get feedback from people who actually have a handle on how tough writing is. 

My hope is that this site will be a place where indie authors can gather to discuss our experiences. I’ve already met one indie author thanks to this site–C. Litka. I’ll be reviewing one of his books later this week.

So visit Writers Supporting Writers; read some posts, make some comments, and maybe discover some new indie authors!

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Lydia Schoch has a fantastic post on why she blogs about multiple topics, contrary to the conventional wisdom. This, combined with Audrey Driscoll’s recent blog anniversary post, set me thinking about blogging in general, and why I like blogs.

I am in complete agreement with Lydia’s point: a blog should include the blogger’s observations on multiple topics, not a narrow focus on one thing.

Here’s why I think this: my introduction to the world of blogging was reading Andrew Sullivan’s Daily Dish. While it’s true that the main focus of his blog was political news and commentary, Sullivan would post about other subjects, like his beagles and the show South Park and the band Pet Shop Boys.

The other thing that made Sullivan’s blog great was the community. He would regularly post stuff readers would send in, including the long-running “View from Your Window” series.

Most of the people who discovered The Daily Dish probably did so because they liked politics, but the thing that made it great were its non-political aspects. You didn’t feel like you were going there to get the latest talking points of the day. You felt like Andrew Sullivan had invited you to come in and chat with him and some of his other acquaintances about what was on their minds. It felt sincere.

The best blogs feel like a spontaneously compiled record of what the author thought was interesting at the time. What that is varies from person to person, which is what makes each blog unique. Trying to refine a blog down to just one topic is no more realistic than defining a person by just one characteristic. In fact, in both cases, it seems vaguely sinister.

Now, of course, a good blog will have recurring themes, just as a novel or a piece of music has a leitmotif. But these should come about organically–the results of patterns in how the blogger’s mind interprets the world.

I read once that novels are supposed to capture the totality of life. I’m not sure I believe this. I thought novels were supposed to tell a story. But capturing the “totality of life” is a great description of what the best blogs do.

According to my stats page, over the entirety of its existence, I’ve written 628,932 words on this blog. As any writer knows, that’s a lot of words. As someone who struggles to write stories that surpass a word count of 15,000, I’m pretty confident I could not have written that many if I just focused on one topic.

Blogging is an art, and it’s an art that calls for freedom to improvise. As Andrew Sullivan himself once observed, it’s like jazz in that respect. There is a feeling of spontaneity, and even though the artist may revisit the same material, they never treat it exactly the same way twice. That’s what makes it interesting.