38 replies to this topic

[timeless]

Any ideas?

Not as a soldier, at age 35. Not as a correspondent, either, lacking journalism experience (except for some oil industry news.)

Would he have stayed in Texas and wrote Westerns?

Interesting speculation...

[Mikey_C]

Ripe ground for speculation here...

Perhaps he would have run off with Hemingway and kicked fascist butt in the Spanish Civil War?

Gone underground in Paris with the French Resistance?

Moved to Walmington-on-Sea and joined the Home Guard with Captain Mainwaring? (Don't panic!!!)

The possibilities are endless...

[deuce]

Any ideas?

Not as a soldier, at age 35. Not as a correspondent, either, lacking journalism experience (except for some oil industry news.)

Would he have stayed in Texas and wrote Westerns?

Interesting speculation...

As I recall(?), the Defense Department pretty much took anybody who could pass the physical. Edgar Rice Burroughs (70+ yrs old and no journalism experience) was an Army correspondent in the Pacific theater.

[Mikey_C]

There, perhaps, is our answer...

[timeless]

Interesting, Deuce.

What do you think Bob Howard's response to witnessing the brutality of actual war would've been? Not boxing, not history, not fiction. Real violence.

How would that exposure have affected later writings?

[deuce]

Ripe ground for speculation here...

Perhaps he would have run off with Hemingway and kicked fascist butt in the Spanish Civil War?

Hey Mikey! I thought Ol' Papa spent the war in the Florida Keys fishing and hunting U-boats? Mundy was down that way, too, but died of diabetes early on.

As to how REH would've dealt with war... It's hard to see him in a combat unit. Beyond taking orders, etc...(hey, Conan seems to have done it), how would he have dealt with loss? Everything I've read, guys in the front-lines got pretty tight ("Band of Brothers" and all that). Could he have emotionally survived seeing his buddies killed in horrible ways? Burroughs, who was from a military family and served briefly in the cavalry, found his earlier views (at least of "modern" war) profoundly changed. War seems to change everyone who experiences it, for better or worse.

[timeless]

Imagine Bob Howard, perhaps flush with cash from a sale of a second Conan novel (not serialized by a publication that paid him few and far between) and freed by his mother's death, wandering Europe, expat style, in those electric years leading up to WW2...

[godzilladude]

Interesting, Deuce.

What do you think Bob Howard's response to witnessing the brutality of actual war would've been? Not boxing, not history, not fiction. Real violence.

How would that exposure have affected later writings?

You have to remember, Bob was exposed to lots of violence and bloodshed, being the son of a country doctor working in oil boom towns. Lots of folks getting maimed by heavy equipment, shootings, beatings. And they'd get dumped on the front porch or in the house while Dad tried to put them back together (no hospitals), with little Bob there to watch. I think that is where all the violence showed up from in his works, and comes across so convincingly, actually seeing the result first-hand.

I personally think he would have greatly feared serving in the war, he didn't make a habit of wandering into dangerous situations for fun. He wrote a fair amount about WWI, generally snapping at the way the government tried to control the populace, and noting the evils of trench warfare and how it chewed men up. He also discussed in his letters the war that in the early 1930s he was sure was coming, both in Europe and with Japan. He wrote the poem "Little Brown Man of Nippon" as a sort of war-challenge to the Japanese. So he would hardly have been surprised by any of it, save perhaps the A-bomb, which was a very closely held secret at the time. How REH would have used the concept of Mutual Assured Destruction in his stories, would have been interesting to see. Those would have been dark stories, indeed. Well, actually, there are a couple REH very short stories where a person has to power to end the world, and in all three stories he pulls the trigger with a barking laugh. One, out of personal spite ("The Supreme Moment"), and the other as his country is completely overrun by the enemy, and he's the last one standing ("The Last White Man" and "The Last Laugh" (he annihilates the Greys in this one!)). So I think I know how he'd play it.

Shoot, could do an entire article on this. Some day.

Edited by godzilladude, 03 May 2007 - 03:01 PM.

[timeless]

I'd love to hear more of your opinion on this, GD.

Howard's post-war writings would certainly be much different, I think. I'm not sure if he'd write about the war though, or modern times. I think he would've devoted himself to Texas history, with very limited weird elements if any at all. I think he would've went more 'Zane Grey.'

[Mikey_C]

He might have done an Ambrose Bierce - wandered off to Europe in the heat of the action and vanished without trace...

[John Maddox Roberts]

I can see Howard as a war correspondent, even without journalist credentials. All sorts of publications sent out correspondents, not just newspapers, and he had connections in the magazine world. Hell, even the Harvard Yachting News kept a permanent correspondent on Guadalcanal because so many Harvard grad yachtsmen were in the small craft service there. Remember JFK and his PT 109? He could have gotten a Texas paper or magazine to send him overseas just to report on Texas servicemen. I see the big difficulty as his well known reluctance to leave Cross Plains. As for his postwar career, he'd have had to change something, because the pulps crashed in the late 40s.

[timeless]

Interesting point about the pulps. From what I understand he was about through with weird fiction anyway.

[deuce]

Howard's post-war writings would certainly be much different, I think. I'm not sure if he'd write about the war though, or modern times. I think he would've devoted himself to Texas history, with very limited weird elements if any at all. I think he would've went more 'Zane Grey.'

Hey Timeless! I always saw him as giving Louis L'Amour a run for his money. Similar interests, writing styles and background. John Jakes would've been lookin' over his shoulder, too.

[timeless]

Jakes was influenced greatly by Howard.

[Pontifex]

Interesting, Deuce.

What do you think Bob Howard's response to witnessing the brutality of actual war would've been? Not boxing, not history, not fiction. Real violence.

How would that exposure have affected later writings?

Well what were his thoughts on WWI? I can't imagine them being that much different.

[deuce]

Jakes was influenced greatly by Howard.

A major fan. Besides his "Brak" stuff, I, Barbarian is excellent, hard-hitting, barbaric fiction.

[godzilladude]

I'd love to hear more of your opinion on this, GD.

Howard's post-war writings would certainly be much different, I think. I'm not sure if he'd write about the war though, or modern times. I think he would've devoted himself to Texas history, with very limited weird elements if any at all. I think he would've went more 'Zane Grey.'

I dunno. REH tended to flow from one thing to the next with regard to his intense writings, and pretty quickly. So he might have written westerns for a few years, then as the pulp market dried up, and his father died in 1944, he might have started wandering around a bit more, and wrote about what he saw. With the advent of the A-bomb, he might have started writing about frontier wars, a simpler time when heroism and bravery and simple weapons were more important than who had the latest scientific advance.

I think the biggest change would have been how he uses racial strife in his stories. He recognized racial tension (or conflicting societies, more broadly) as a basis for violence, and saw it as a historical fact of life, flowing through all sorts of races and cultures through the millenia. After the Holocaust, I think like most others he would have started avoiding the subject, and stuck to other reasons to fight. Maybe he would have taken another shot at the detective stories, maybe become a protest writer ala Woody Guthrie, who knows. I think his works would have still revolved around short intense works, and the occasional longer work, as he got more comfortable with that format. Some folks think he would have gone on to Hollywood to be a screen writer, but I don't know if he could work on a team adequately to do that. He never was much interested in being a team player. The reclusive do-your-own-thing, anti-society writer was more his style.

[Kortoso]

I personally think he would have greatly feared serving in the war, he didn't make a habit of wandering into dangerous situations for fun.

That's probably true of most of the folk who wound up becoming war corespondents.

[timeless]

Except Ernie Pyle.

And see where that got him.

[Sermon Bath]

a little off the subject but I think Howard would have like Letters From Iwo Jima.....what a great movie that is