Formerly published as ‘In the Dreaming West’

“Know, oh prince, that between the years when the oceans drank Atlantis and the gleaming cities, and the years of the rise of the Sons of Arуas, there was an Age undreamed of, when shining kingdoms lay spread across the world like blue mantles beneath the stars—Nemedia, Ophir, Brythunia, Hyberborea, Zamora with its dark-haired women and towers of spider-haunted mystery, Zingara with its chivalry, Koth that bordered on the pastoral lands of Shem, Stygia with its shadow-guarded tombs, Hyrkania whose riders wore steel and silk and gold. But the proudest kingdom of the world was Aquilonia, reigning supreme in the dreaming west.”

-Overture to the Conan Stories, from The Phoenix on the Sword

Was Robert E. Howard a hater of blacks?

Was Robert E Howard a hater of women?

Did Robert E. Howard, through his brief but furious life’s work, promote the idea that white men were morally superior to women and men of the “colored” races?

Howard does, in the overture to his most famous series and throughout his fictional adventures of such intense tribal individualists as Kull, Amra, Esau Cairn, Conan, Bran Mak Morn, Solomon Kane, Black Terrence Vulmea, Kirby Buckner, and a mob of brutal Gaelic adventures, place the spark of transcendent freedom as burning most brightly among the Indo-European races. However, virtually all of the above characters, most notably Xavier Gordon in his 18th Century desert adventures and the puritan avenger Solomon Kane, devote the majority of their vast energies to toppling the villains afflicting other races with evil. The single most common theme in the Howard canon is of the racial interloper, the alienated outsider who arrives on his own heroic terms. If there is a prejudice of the racial kind to be found in his body of work, it is that certain Caucasian peoples—most notably Romans, Muslim Arabs and English—are excessively savage in the treatment of others, with the English being doubly evil in that they treat their own with extreme cruelty also. This last sentiment obviously arises from his reading of his Scottish and Irish history, but also seems to be informed by his reading of the histories of the English Sea-Dogs, particularly Francis Drake's betrayal of fellow captains. The cruel, ethnic duplicity of Englishmen [in Howard's mythos seemingly inherited from the Romans] is something which the Solomon Kane [English] and Black Vulmea [Irish] characters are obsessed with throughout their hero cycles.

As for women, Howard wrote four over-the-top heroines: Dark Agnes, an extreme psychopath who he devoted much energy to, Valeria, the prototype of the postmodern, improbably-hot, killer babe in such vogue as I write this, Red Sonja a combination of the two heroines above, and his combination of Bonnie Parker and Queen Elizabeth: Belit, the subject of the following review. Rarely was a Howard heroine arm candy, but rather a woman inspired by the Scotch-Irish frontier women of his lineage, or the exotic seductress or pretty girl in bad circumstances inspired by the other aspect of his family roots, the mixed-race women produced by the Mississippi and Arkansas plantation society, of which he knew at least four survivors from his family and their associates, including two mixed-race women who survived slavery to tell of it to the young, dreaming Howard.

Before we continue let us take a look at an old review of the most popular Conan story, a story that brings these two strands together in the mind of Howard. The following is excerpted from A Thousand Years in His Soul: Book One—The Poets

Queen of the Black Coast by Robert E. Howard

This review of Queen of the Black Coast is broken into five parts, mining the contents of each of the five chapters in this novelette for the substrata, in particular the nature of the Conan character and the importance of Belit to the mythic barbarian and Howard’s awful view of life.

The story of Conan and the pirate queen begins with a look at “civilized” life from the perspective of an honorable savage. Conan forces his way onboard an outgoing merchant galley one step ahead of the corrupt law. He befriends the captain and tries to defend the small ship against the “Tigress” a predatory war galley commanded by Belit. Belit is a pirate queen that is ethnically supposed to be of a pre-Berber tribe, who commands black pirates who worship her "like a goddess."

The interesting thing here as that, when the Arab-Islamic invaders swept across North Africa, the staunchest resistance they encountered came from Berber tribes who were ruled by a warrior queen. I would bet that Belit is a composite of that Berber queen, a Chinese pirate queen of the 19th Century, and Bonnie the psychopathic gangster of Howard’s own time. Howard’s treatment of race is often overlooked, and he is assumed to have harbored a typically negative view of blacks for a man of his time, race and locality. He is also widely assumed to have been misogynistic as well. A nice example that refutes both prejudices comes in the following line, “…she knew she had found her lover, and his race meant naught…”

It is significant that Belit is the only love of Conan’s 25 story career, and that Howard was a bachelor who is thought to have only loved one woman. Conan has no qualms about helping Belit with her anarchist crusade against the entrenched powers of the age. In case you were impressed or horrified by the 1970s film Excalibur, when Euther committed the sexist crime of armored intercourse, Chapter One closes with Conan doing the same, but with considerably more encouragement from the lady beneath him.

For the time period of its composition Queen of the Black Coast is absolutely scandalous: a naked, mixed-race woman leading a crew of black pirates, and, more troubling, directing a white man! Howard states that “hers was the mind that directed” and “his the arm” that carried out the directions. This had to be written as fantasy—could have never been released as a historical or oriental adventure.

As Belit rashly looks for a city to sack up a poisonous river of death, she engages Conan in a discussion as to his religious beliefs and superstitions, revealing herself to be something of a crazed witch. Much of Conan’s cultural back-story is fleshed out in this conversation. At this point Howard is at his horrific best where the setting is concerned, and Belit is beginning to let her powerful relationship with Conan go to her head. She is clearly intoxicated by how their strengths complement one another and decides to take on the darkest corner of Howard’s lurid world, even as Conan professes his fatalism. This is Bonnie and Clyde in a world of horrific shadow. [Ironically this was written and published concurrent with the exploits of these depression era gangsters, who played out their doom in Howard's quarter of the country.]

Howard’s generation of writers were obsessed with ancient horrors and undiscovered mysteries. Rather than have some learned character reading ancient symbols to narrate the nature and fate of the civilization that had built the city that Conan and his savage bride were plundering, Howard uses toxic plants to drug Conan into a nightmare that reveals for the reader what horrors Belit has led them into. As often happens with Conan, he is befuddled by sorcery and must find some simplistic direct means to combat its effects. This recurrent theme was a favorite of Howard’s, reflecting, I think, a fitting sentiment for a rural writer to hold concerning a world that has just been duped and plundered by a coven of bankers.

Chapter 4 is a classic berserk scene as Conan battles the “oldest race on earth” and extinguishes it only through the inspiration of his mate. This was just about the only scene in the original Conan movie, by John Milus, that actually came from a Howard story. It also shows how personal Howard’s stories were. The Conan franchise has been squandered in film largely because the movie makers refuse to present the character in the stories he was crafted in. Howard did not write “save the world stories.” Howard wrote about individuals in an unjust and uncaring world striving against the odds. In that sense his work was far less “fantastical” than most of what is written and filmed under the banner of science-fiction. The public will never be able to enjoy Conan in his natural setting except in print. Hollywood cannot abide an action hero that does not save the world.

The most iconic aspect of Conan as a character is that he either begins a story alone or ends it alone. In Queen of the Black Coast Conan only finds companionship—rare for him in his life—when the world seems to be burning and his lady is lighting the torch. He begins the story on the run and ends it wandering and alone. In Howard’s mind this was about as much as a real man of action could hope for, to not sell out and remain the man that the one woman who loved him had fallen for. In most fiction the writer metaphorically castrates the male hero by having him buckle under the weight of society, facilitating a “happily-ever-after” ending. [Ernst Junger, a writer of science-fiction and westerns who had survived the worst trench warfare of WWI, was particularly galled by this modern convention.] Howard’s Conan is more like a serial killer with a code that turns his back on the world after every angry spasm of interaction.

If you’ve just seen the movies try this.

Howard failed to sell a story, The Vale of Lost Women, in which the Conan character acts in a brutal sexist fashion, slaughtering am entire black community so he could have sex with a white woman—who herself has been brutalized by a black king, and tormented by a black woman, yet remains sympathetic to the plight of the villagers as Conan and his black warriors exterminate them—though he does eventually redeem himself. By the end of The Vale of Lost Women the character has been restored to his brutal place of rough honor after chastising himself. In this tale Howard has the audacity to place a hero as racist, rapist villain and fails to get a sale.

In Rogues in the House, Howard has his hero, Conan, remind his companions that Thak, the ape man—who he barely slew, and who, considering the time period he was writing, could have been a stand in for a black man, an allegory of Jack Johnson as some black activists have claimed King Kong was—that Thak was a man. [Orator, Jonathan Bowden does an excellent job of addressing this story in a lecture on Howard available on YouTube.]

Howard’s fictional creations have real hates, fears and joys—which must rankle the liberal soul, that fictional characters surpass them in humanity—and live their brief, passionate lives in a far more complex and nuanced society than the artificial cultural mono-crop from which sprouted those who would judge their creator. Even from the dim recesses of Howard’s brutal fiction there is a constant drumbeat that a man is a man despite his race, his tribe and his sins.

Robert E. Howard’s worldview was largely a vehicle for his fantasy about how two outlaws—usually a man and woman of Arуan descent—as “pariahs wandering the earth” or “barbarians together,” might strive against the corrupt, soul-eating world and strike a blow for the unshackled spirit.

That is the reason for Howard’s being reviled by liberals and academics, because he is an advocate of the soul, the human spirit, not a proponent of social orthodoxy, but a mystic with an infatuation for beguiling beauties that reminded him of the mixed-race women who told him stories as a boy, tinged with a morbid sense, that one day, there would be a last “Aryan,” the last of Howard’s extended bloodline, watching Time pass into Eternity.

In the final act of his life, Howard permitted himself the death that some of his characters had yearned for—mostly female characters considering suicide as an option for the saving of their soul from the terrible realm in which it was trapped—that had befallen a number of gods in his stories, permitted himself the rest that he did not permit his characters. Overall Howard’s view of women is starkly sympathetic and his view of barbarian ethics and civilized vice are often viewed through a female prism, with Conan [his most famous creation] most strikingly seen through the eyes of a female companion.

Robert E. Howard was a dreamer, a shaman who made of himself a sacrifice to a flitting notion, that, suffused in a world of waxing and waning races, nations, tribes and gods, a man or a woman could remain whole on a human scale and not be reduced to a mere cipher of the greater social elements.

The world we now live in denies ever more stridently that a man or a woman have a place outside the collective, placing our current world ethos in direct opposition to the heroic Arуan fantasies spun by Howard, fantasies which recovered the ancient tradition that first sparked into written life with Gilgamesh and Enkidu, burned most brightly with the fury of Achilles and the wiles of Odysseus and finally flickered out with the supreme, direct actionist, Beowulf, whose time was eclipsed even as he took the stage.

These vibrant tales, particularly as revived by Howard, radiated one unifying ethic, that the hero’s sacred place is stark and lonely, a crucible of the soul aloof from the petty yearnings of the “ox-eyed” multitude, above which he rises to battle the furtive and often unguessed villains and monsters that exist, in the heroic context, in veiled realms—as Tolkien would have it, "in shadow," but as Howard most often envisioned in a “somberly” lit twilight. The Howardian hero rises above or apart from society to battle the cloaked figures which menace, manipulate, bedevil and undermine Mankind, by warping Man’s collective potential through the destruction of its most vital individual elements, those dreaming souls, who seem to rise most often and flash more brightly, in The Dreaming West—those dreaming souls who so unmindfully need a “melancholy” hero, a hero who may not share, but is necessary for the preservation of, their “shining” dreams.