Conan

I never read many of the Conan stories, but have started again today just for short diversions from hard work. Some people swear by Robert E. Howard’s writing, while Joshi calls it “subliterary hack work.”

My immediate sense (which may be wrong, just as I think I was initially too unappreciative of Blackwood’s brilliant “The Willows” due to physical fatigue) is that Howard creates a refreshing alternative universe, but displays little purely literary skill.

The shots people sometimes take at the style of Lovecraft or even Poe are, I am quite sure, superficial and simply wrong. Lovecraft is often attacked for using too many adjectives. But the fact is, he makes it work. Literary rules are guidelines, any one of which can be broken effectively by someone with sufficient talent to pull it off. And Lovecraft does get away with phrases such as “which now towered before him in unnameable, ghastly, unspeakable, eldritch hues” (I just made that one up). And Joshi even seems to be right about why– such phrases reflect something about the mental state of the narrator.

However, I’m also pretty sure that Howard can’t write anywhere near as well as Poe or Lovecraft, both of them masters of English style in my opinion.

For instance, here is a fairly typical sample paragraph from the Conan story “The Phoenix on the Sword”:

“Steel glittered in the Stygian’s hand and with a heave of his great dusky shoulders he drove the dagger into the baron’s fat body. Dion’s high thin squeal broke in a strangled gurgle and his whole flabby frame collapsed like melted butter. A fool to the end, he died in mad terror, not knowing why. Flinging aside the crumpled corpse, already forgetful of it, Thoth grasped the ring in both hands, his dark eyes blazing with a fearful avidness.”

Now, this is just awful writing. And it is a simple misjudgment to call this “pulp” and also to call Lovecraft “pulp.”

Here is some outstanding writing, by Lovecraft himself:

“When a traveller in north central Massachusetts takes the wrong fork at the junction of the Aylesbury pike just beyond Dean’s Corners he comes upon a lonely and curious country. The ground gets higher, and the brier-bordered stone walls press closer and closer against the ruts of the dusty, curving road. The trees of the frequent forest belts seem too large, and the wild weeds, brambles, and grasses attain a luxuriance not often found in settled regions. At the same time the planted fields appear singularly few and barren; while the sparsely scattered houses wear a surprisingly uniform aspect of age, squalor, and dilapidation. Without knowing why, one hesitates to ask directions from the gnarled, solitary figures spied now and then on crumbling doorsteps or on the sloping, rock-strewn meadows. Those figures are so silent and furtive that one feels somehow confronted by forbidden things, with which it would be better to have nothing to do. When a rise in the road brings the mountains in view above the deep woods, the feeling of strange uneasiness is increased. The summits are too rounded and too symmetrical to give a sense of comfort and naturalness, and sometimes the sky silhouettes with especial clearness the queer circles of tall stone pillars with which most of them are crowned.”

That’s the opening paragraph of “The Dunwich Horror.” I can easily imagine a critic putting this in the “pulp” basket for a series of reasons that I would consider to be shallow and quite revealing of an absence of all literary judgment. In fact, I think the whole first two pages of this story are among the best English prose ever written, and an explanation of why is on my very short list of writing projects that are just around the corner.

Style is not just an interesting philosophical question– it is in some respect the only philosophical question, if you adopt my basic standpoint. If the usual view is that truth is best reflected in explicit propositional content, with style serving as a sort of graceful ornament thereto, I hold that this usual view is vacuous and inane. Style is best defined as the manner in which someone or something alludes to something without stating it explicitly. For many this amounts to mere “vagueness,” but if you hold as I do that allusion is the only tool we have for getting at the things themselves, then style becomes the central topic of philosophical conversation, and a lack of style is a far greater certificate of worthlessness than any number of surface blunders.