It has been alleged
(allegedly by L. Sprague de Camp, and certainly by others who mean
it dismissively) that all of Robert Howard's characters were the
same. Utter this comment too loudly, in the wrong company and you
could find yourself in a heated debate involving bits of broken
furniture. Granted, the subject is a touchy one. Fans concentrate
on the minutiae that differentiates one character from another.
Detractors lump them all into one broad category. Who's right?
Well, the marginally unpopular answer is they both are. The
treasonous one favors the detractors' point of view, but only as
stated above. (I may be willing to go out on a limb, but not when
I have no control of where I land.)
Howard sketched his
characters in broad types-effective and appropriate types for the
fiction he created. They dress in different clothes, but they're
all cut from the same cloth. If you stood his cast of characters
in a police line-up before a fuzzy-eyed blue-hair, I guarantee
she'd have a hard time telling you "who done it." Having
said that, let's look at why. For this we must establish a certain
set of criteria to evaluate characters as "real" or
"human" and to distinguish them, one from the other. In
order to conserve space, I'm not going to grocery list these
traits, but the reader should be aware of the kinds of questions I
am considering while writing. Disagreement and rebuttal highly
encouraged, and no doubt inevitable.
What sort of person are we dealing with? i.e. what is their
background, personally and socially?
What do they do that commands our attention and draws us to
them? Are they heroic? Why do we care about them?
What do we learn about them personally through the course of
their adventures? An instance where a character might say
"I once lived in [insert nation, city, or street,
here]" does not inherently count as learning
something about them.
Kull is
prototype-Conan. In reading these stories, you can almost feel
Howard grasping in the darkness of his mind, trying to coax out
his Cimmerian hero. With Kull, as with Bran Mak Morn and Cormac
Mac Art, Howard seems to be testing the success of his work (and
by extension, the character longevity) against the acceptance of
his audience. Though these characters sold, they did not strike
the responsive chord that Conan was to attain.
It is unfortunate
that Howard never pursued Kull more thoroughly, because he isn't
Conan, nor are the stories particularly Conan-esque in subject and
tone. In some ways, Kull would rather think than fight (despite
his author's assertion otherwise) and this introspection alone
sets him apart from most Howard heroes, although others are
occasionally allowed their own contemplative moments. And Kull is
certainly no match for Conan in battle. He is quite often wounded
in ways that border on permanently debilitating, and he spends one
entire story unconscious.
The Kull stories
reveal a facet of Howard never explored in the Conan tales: weird
menace fantasy. Here he indulges in hybrid horrors like a half-man
half-octopus creature and ancient sentient beings like Saremes the
cat. The Skull of Silence in which Kull battles the absence
of Sound is perhaps the most conceptually striking thing that
Howard ever penned. And yet he abandoned these elements almost
entirely when he created Conan. Perhaps they didn't interest him
enough to pursue, but he kept the one constant that we remember
him for: the unstoppable warrior. Kull was never really
unstoppable, though. No matter how often his creator described him
thus, Kull is more barbarian in mind than in heart. He craves
knowledge and takes up the mantle of statehood, though unhappily,
holding himself apart from those he rules with the convenient
dismissal, "you don't understand me, I'm not from here."
Kull reverts to barbaric rage only as a last desperate measure,
where Conan's primary mode of operation is primal. It may have
been for this reason alone that Howard abandoned him-as a strict
action-hero, he may have never "clicked" right in his
mind.
The follow up was
unquestionably his most popular character. Conan is probably the
most widely known fantasy fiction character ever created. To his
legions of fans, he is the ultimate barbarian, a warrior without
peer in fact or fiction, though a psychologist would consider him
irredeemably sociopathic. He drinks and kills, and kills and
drinks, and sometimes does both at the same time. He flagrantly
steals religious artifacts to support his habitual debaucherizing.
He is rather phobic when it comes to certain wizards, overgrown
snakes, and assorted killer apes, and was noted for practicing his
own highly refined method of conflict resolution. You gotta love
him. 'Nuff said.
Sailor Steve
Costigan is another matter. Despite the vast number of stories
that Howard churned out concerning this mighty fighter, there's
only so much mileage you can wring from boxing stories. I will
freely admit that I haven't read them all (due simply to the fact
that I've never had access to them all). But in the ones I have
read, there is very little to distinguish them as stories from
each other, or as a character from any of Howard's more
"faceless" creations. What they are notable for is
conveying Howard's passion for pugilism with remarkable vigor. It
was this great passion and touching immediacy that made his
historical work so compelling. And when he applied it to character
instead of situation he had his finest hour.
Breckinridge
Elkins-the name alone practically takes up a whole sentence. If
this misguided behemoth of love has a parallel in modern
literature, he appears to be a modern relative of Sergio Aragones'
own barbarian, Groo the Wanderer. The collected adventures
concerning his wooing of Glory McGraw provide Howard with a
perfect vehicle to charm any audience. Rollicking adventures,
hilarious characters in absurd situations, and an unwavering
certainty that men and women will never, ever, even remotely
understand each other.
Preposterous as it
may seem, the Elkins stories are among the most human of all
Howard's writings. The characters are motivated and influenced by
the little things that drive us all: jealousy, desire, confusion,
pride, pettiness. We know these people; we've certainly seen
others like them, maybe even been a little like them ourselves.
Howard's trademark action serves here to enhance the comedy,
driving his cast deeper into frustration and taking the stories to
new heights of lunacy. When the Elkins stories lose their human
focus, they lose their charm, degenerating into comedic mayhem for
its own sake-something that grows quickly tedious.
Part of what makes
successful adaptation of Howard legends into celluloid heroes is
the basic fact that as living, breathing human figures, they're
fairly thin. As icons that resonate in the mind of a reader, they
are tremendously powerful. But the linchpin of the whole great
scheme, is Howard himself. His writing is what captivates and
compels us to come back again and again. When Lovecraft praised
the vigor and success of Howard's writing because he put himself
into every one of them, he was in no way exaggerating. Robert
Howard himself captures our imagination and our attention in ways
that his characters alone are utterly incapable of doing.
What would we get by
inviting Conan, Kull, or Breckinridge Elkins over for dinner? Not
much beyond an empty larder and the high probability of broken
furniture. Conversation? Doubtful. These are men of action, who
live-really and truly live-for the wind in their hair and the bit
between their teeth. They don't trouble themselves with the
trivialities of life: did I leave the stove on, how's this new
book I'm reading gonna end, what's the weather going to be like
tomorrow? Who cares? We may-but they never will.
On the other hand,
what would you get from having dinner with the man who gave birth
to these figures? A polite, charming, humorous, well-read, lively,
opinionated conversationalist. A man not too inclined to whap you
with a table leg if you ran out of wine. Probably.
REHupa Home Page