theGrayMan

I've never read De Camp's . . . But I have read Mrs. Price's One Who Walked Alone. It's really good, and I read through it sometimes for the hell of it. You really get a good sense of who Howard was. He's pretty much your class clown (at least I thought so), because he's really witty and humorous. I just received Blood and Thunder, but because of all the reading I have to do for school I don't have the time to read through it. I  definitely will, however, when semester is over.

  


Well, no class clown. Different times, and more like a country of people who weren't raised to be an audience, yet.  Broadcast Radio was ten years old or so, movies with sound were about five (silents are related to Howard's "draw on your own resources to fill it out" writing style, except the written version is minus pictures instead of sound. About 30 years old and dead in its own 20's at the time Howard died). No TV except sci fi dreams of it, and some experimental demonstrations. Damn small population compared to now.

Very easy to mistake people of the thirties for us, but they weren't. They had a wholly different class of opinion, generally personal and robust, sometimes eccentric, sometimes bizarre (world isn't nailed down yet, then), and they fetched that opinion up out of personal experience, and out of a surprising amount of slow reading, in circumstances more free (and routinely expected to be more free) than police cruisers and survellience cameras now allow. Really truthful things, according to current performer's wisdom, generally do sound like humor. But they weren't performers, either: they just pretty much had the job of amusing themselves, knew the general principles, and were up to it. Mainly, they didn't restrict themselves much in speech or thinking on matters that weren't personal, or go over the top on them either. Balance. Time and balance.

Pretty clear that Ms. Ellis heard the man instead of devising him for her book, as the quotes she attributes to him sound to me like the closest things not his to his writing style that exist in print. You do have to remember that the book is about her, written down by her mostly in a professional practice journal at the time, usually meaning the very day, of the events described, and then edited by her much later, fairly near the end of a long life that ended wound around profession, church, and marriage. You also have both a man's and a woman's authentic viewpoint from the time to deal with, the one observed and reflected by the other.

To repeat about the general situation, the 20's and 30's just sound something like us because the base language is still English. Except for emotion, though, not.