Reading Robert E Howard: Surprise Racism
One of the very first blog posts we wrote ever was Is Cthulhu Racist?, which defends the Mythos from accusations of racism. [Note that we wrote ‘Mythos’ and not Lovecraft; that Lovecraft was a racist isn’t in dispute - he was a racist and several of his stories feature racist language] We don’t expect writers who lived in the first half of the XX century to align with modern sensitivities, so we’re used to ignoring those moments in Lovecraft and other Weird Fiction writers’ stories. However, some of Robert E Howard’s non-Conan, the Barbarian tales still managed to surprise us.
[You can find the first Reading Robert E Howard post on The Snarky Cats of Ulthar blog over at WordPress.com]
There is racism in some Conan stories, but it was easy to see The Valley of Lost Women as an exception. So, when we started exploring, we were surprised not only at how unpleasant Howard could be, but also how people don’t seem to talk about it nearly as much as they do when it comes to Lovecraft. The first shock came with Black Canaan, which we reviewed for our Weird West series. Initially, we took the mention of the black village by the Tularoosa to mean it was secretive.
How could any Black River man fail to understand that warning? It could have but one meaning - old hates seething again in the jungle-deeps of the swamplands, dark shadows slipping through the cypress, and massacre stalking out of the black, mysterious village that broods on the moss-festooned shore of the sullen Tularoosa.
However, we soon felt this nagging suspicion that maybe it was better to google and see where this was going. If we hadn’t been reviewing Howard’s Weird West stories, we would’ve stopped reading after finding the plot synopsis online. Knowing what was going to happen didn’t make it less unpleasant, though. At first, we even wondered if it was really that bad because we found a review calling Pigeons From Hell racist and honestly we still don’t see it. But no, it was that bad.
After Black Canaan, we tried reading Black Hound of Death, but stopped when we got to this:
They were seeking him in the fastnesses near the scattered black settlements, knowing that a Negro seeks his own kind in his extremity. But I knew Tope Braxton better than they did; I knew he deviated from the general type of his race. He was unbelievable primitive, atavistic enough to plunge into inhabited wilderness and live like a blood-mad gorilla in solitude that would have terrified and daunted a more normal member of his race.
On one hand, it’s nice that Howard said this crazy black man was an exception, on the other hand, we decided we didn’t want to keep reading. Then, there was Skull Face. The lead character was boring, but we were curious about the villain, Kathulos of Egypt, and his plans. This was explained in Chapter 14: The Black Empire, and that name really should’ve been a red flag.
He plots, in a word, the overthrow of the white races!
His ultimate aim is a black empire, with himself as emperor of the world! And to that end he has banded together in one monstrous conspiracy the black, the brown and the yellow.
Wow, just wow. First, Howard had already used ‘Oriental’, which, while seriously dated, was at least acceptable when he wrote this, so there was no excuse for ‘yellow’. It wasn’t as if he was trying to show readers this particular character was a racist. Then there was the plan itself, which put race in the centre of the plot. We skipped to the end, and Kathulos makes it clear he sees everyone as inferior and wants to divide and conquer, but we didn’t feel like going through all the race talk that would likely take place until we got to that.
We decided to avoid more modern settings and picked The Gods of Bal-Sagoth. Since the lead is a Celt and he’s taken captive by vikings on the shore of Ireland, we thought there would be no problems. Really, when we started reading, we actually thought Thank God everyone is white! Then, the ship got lost in a storm and was taken south. But surely it couldn’t have gone that far south, right? Wrong. Turlough and Athelstane end up on an island inhabited by a dark-skinned people who walk around almost naked and had never seen white people until Brunhild, a viking woman, washed ashore after a previous shipwreck.
I found a strange terrible people dwelling here, a brown-skinned folk who knew many dark secrets of magic. They found me lying senseless on the beach and because I was the first white human they had ever seen, their priests divined that I was a goddess given them by the sea, whom they worship. So they put me in the temple with the rest of their curious gods and did reverence to me.
This was a frustrating read because there were some interesting things - the island was an old settlement from the lost civilization of Atlantis, the mysterious high priest, Gothan, and his experiments, his and Brunhilde struggle for power - but Howard’s choices messed it up. Yes, we get that the theme was how even the mightiest civilizations are doomed to fall, and that the islanders’ current state is proof of that, but did they have to look like such stereotypical savages, walking around nearly naked? The Roman Empire is no more, but its descendants didn’t forget about something as basic as clothes. Howard had Brunhild get together with one of the islanders and no one went on a racist diatribe about interracial relationships, though, which was pretty surprising. Still, if he had focused on the good stuff, we would’ve been able to overlook the rest. Unfortunately, Howard rushed through the Brunhild/Gothan conflict and delivered the killing blow to the island people by having their city attacked by more nonwhite savages:
This man was naked, powerfully muscled and of a copperish red rather than brown. The heavy animal-like jaw, the slanting low forehead showed none of the intelligence and refinement of the brown people, but only brute ferocity.
The city was swarming with naked, copper-skinned devils who burned and ravished and butchered in one red carnival of madness.
Oh, so now the brown people are intelligent and refined? Because it didn’t seem like it when they were being tricked and succumbing to superstition. Ugh! We probably wouldn’t have been so annoyed with Howard’s choices if we hadn’t read The Gods of Bal-Sagoth right after the other stories; but we did, and it became one more example of Howard letting racism get in the way of a good story.
Despite all this, we still decided to read Shadow of the Vulture because it introduced the character of Red Sonya of Rogatino, who served as inspiration for the famous Red Sonja. Here, we got Muslim Turks, and, comparing their portrayal to what Howard wrote in those other stories, it’s clear that he really should’ve stuck to the Middle East and North Africa. We’re not saying it was one hundred percent perfect, but the differences were obvious. By the way, we read Clark Ashton Smith’s The Black Abbot of Puthuum around the same time we were struggling with Howard, and we almost stopped when the titular abbot showed up. We were like, Et tu, Clark Ashton Smith?! However, while that description would probably not fly today, the story itself was thankfully nothing like Howard’s.
We didn’t write this to argue that Robert E Howard’s books should be banned; in fact, we still think he was a great writer and a master at world-building. However, considering how crazy people still go over Lovecraft - we just think it’s odd that Howard never seemed to generate the same anger. There is stuff online about the racism in his works, but we don’t know of any collective effort to denounce him the way it happened with Lovecraft. We’re guessing it’s because most people focus on Conan, the Barbarian, and don’t bother with the rest. We don’t like skipping to the end to see how the story developed, but that’s what we’ll be doing if we feel like reading more of Howard’s non Conan stories again, just to make sure we’re not wasting our time.