Beyond the Elder Peaks

While looking to see if, like so many other of the Kane stories, “The Right Hand of Doom” had made it into the public domain, I found a review titled, “The Racist Hand of Doom” which seemed to align well with my wife’s aforementioned misgivings about Kane, and Robert E. Howard in general.

All of the Big Three of the pulp fantasy market of the 1920s and 1930s – Howard, Clark Ashton Smith, and HP Lovecraft – were a little racist, in their own way, and I’ve always found Howard’s racism, when it manifests, to be the most distasteful. ... It is in Howard’s fiction that I occasionally see real hatred; there’s a couple of Conan stories which degenerate into Conan slicing up dark people, or conquering a tribe (because a white outsider is clearly always going to be superior to a black person who’s lived in the tribe all their life). But it’s a curiously inconsistent bigotry, which sometimes isn’t even manifested.[1]

I have to take issue with this, firstly in the suggestion that Robert E. Howard’s racism would seem even more egregious than H.P. Lovecraft’s. Try reading Lovecraft’s poem, “On the Creation of Niggers,” and you’ll get more racism in a few lines than Howard wrote in his whole life. His Ukrainian wife, of Jewish descent, mind you, recounted that she often had to remind him of his company to restrain his constant flow of anti-Semitic remarks, and said he would become “livid with rage” at the sight of mixed-race groups in New York City.

S.T. Joshi, one of the foremost Lovecraft scholars, notes that “There is no denying the reality of Lovecraft’s racism, nor can it merely be passed off as “typical of his time,” for it appears that Lovecraft expressed his views more pronouncedly (although usually not for publication) than many others of his era. It is also foolish to deny that racism enters into his fiction.” In his book “H. P. Lovecraft: Against The World, Against Life,” Michel Houellebecq argues that “racial hatred” provided the emotional force and inspiration for much of Lovecraft’s greatest works.[2]

By comparison, Robert E. Howard’s racism rarely rises above the level of stock imagery. Yes, he has the paeans to Conan’s Aryan virtues, and his descriptions of the Africans Solomon encounters certainly rely on stereotypes we’d have a hard time accepting today. “The Moon of Skulls” includes an ugly screed about miscegenation, but it also comes from a villain, a cruel, Atlantean sorcerer, bitter over the loss of their tyrannical empire.

We often forget, in a “the victors write the history books” kind of way, just how racist America acted in the 1920s. Yes, the civil war had freed the slaves decades before, but this era saw the rise of the Ku Klux Klan, not as the clandestine menace we think of it today, but as a genuine political force, fielding popular marches through Washington, D.C. and putting up political candidates with real chances. These days saw the passage of the first immigration laws, the first drug laws, the Jim Crow laws, poll taxes, and other laws, all conceived of by their creators as a set package of legislation that would preserve the “purity of the White race.” America’s most popular radio show right before World War II took the form of a weekly, hour-long screed against the blacks and the Jews. That the Holocaust happened in Germany and not any other Western country, including the United States, in some ways seems like just a roll of the dice; “there, but for the grace of God,” if you will.

Robert E. Howard lived and wrote in the very middle of all that, in the deep south of Texas. Yet his stories form one of the main incarnations of the “noble savage.” N’Longa, first introduced in “Red Shadows” as a savage witch doctor barely able to speak (even the review quoted above admits, “he talked funny in his earlier encounters with Kane because he was speaking pidgin English (a patois which, to be fair, is pretty much designed to make the speaker sound retarded)”), becomes the wise old man or mentor of Solomon Kane’s own journey, and in all of his African stories, though Howard relies on stock imagery pulled from a flagrantly racist culture, he speaks of an intangible, undeniable power that Kane finds there.

Few would accuse Robert E. Howard of masterful writing. As a storyteller, yes, he told some of the best ripping yarns of the twentieth century, but as a writer–a person who puts words together to express emotions, themes, actions and depth–his writing lacks nuance, sophistication or subtlety. Howard’s stories rock out, hard, but no one will mistake them for a classical symphony. As such, he pulls on stock images, cliches, and stereotypes, and coming from the time he did, those stereotypes inevitably evince a deep-seated racism. But what themes his stories do return to, the things that Howard really wrote about, rather than the things that simply showed up because of his context and the kind of writing he did, always cut the other way. Solomon Kane has a great deal to learn from N’Longa.

In most adventures of the period, it is always just a matter of time before the Blacks are somehow shown the error of their ways by their white colonial masters. In white Solomon Kane, we see a superhero whose self-belief isn’t up to his physical prowess. Then, his Jewish name is destined to confuse.[3]

Indeed, he needs the guide and aid of an Africa “ju-ju man.” We forget that at the time, the controversies Howard raised came from the exact opposite camp: the suggestion that “primitives” might have something to offer, or that civilization might seem inferior to them. One of my favorite parts of Pinnacle’s Savage World of Solomon Kane comes in the first few pages, when it describes Kane’s world and Howard’s vision as essentially primitivist, and Kane himself as some manner of proto-anarchist.

Or, consider the ambiguous power hinted at in the last paragraphs of the very first Solomon Kane story ever published, first with the title “Solomon Kane,” and later, Red Shadows>

Afar the drums muttered: “The wisdom of our land is ancient; the wisdom of our land is dark; whom we serve, we destroy. Flee if you would live, but you will never forget our chant. Never, never,” sang the drums.

I agree with one online commenter who said:

[I]t’s interesting to see how forward-thinking these stories are for their time in a lot of ways. You gotta love N’Longa; his influence rocks Solomon’s world, makes him re-think so much of what he’d taken for granted, about people, about spirituality, about himself. I can’t help but sense that, as a Southern-born boy living in a time and place where racism was mundane and common as breathing, Howard was giving these issues some extra thought himself.[4]

Of course, we should hardly feel content. One of the things that really makes me love this game comes from the opportunities it presents to really go face-to-face with some of those elements that remain with us: the “Noble Savage”, the assumptions about civilization and the value of cultures, and so many of the assumptions and attitudes that seem as innocent to us today as the stereotypes Howard employed seemed to him in his day. Howard used his stories to explore his own feelings about civilization and barbarism and black and white. This game gives us a great opportunity to do the same.