Interview With Rusty Burke The Ultimate Triumph Interviewer: Anya Martin July 1999

RB: I worked with Marcelo on the Solomon Kane book previously. I belong to the Robert E. Howard United Press Association, which is an amateur press group devoted to Howard. Marcelo had joined it. He started sending in some samples of Gary Gianni's artwork and was talking about the Solomon Kane book. I quickly volunteered to help him get the Robert E. Howard texts into good order because the sad fact is that Howard's stories have rarely been published without serious editorial emendations. There has been a movement afoot for several years to establish Howard's texts back to their original form as close as possible, so I volunteered to work with Marcelo on doing that.

RB: Since it seemed like a very natural mix between Frazetta and Howard, we tried to center the text around the theme of "barbarism." I submitted to him a list of stories and poems that I thought would fit the bill. I wouldn't say that I have done all the selecting because Marcelo has been pretty much involved in the process

RB: There are going to be a couple of stories that haven't been published much. One in particular, "Spears of Clontarf," has only seen very limited publication. It has been published twice but in very limited editions. This will be its first major publication.

RB: No, it was rejected. Later he actually added some other elements to it and turned it into a fantasy story, but in its original form, it was a historical story set at the battle of Clontarf. He submitted this one to a magazine that was supposedly devoted to historical stories, but it was rejected. He tried to rewrite it as a fantasy and that was rejected, but that version, "The Grey God Passes," has been published a little more often than the original.

RB: What we also hope to include is an essay and perhaps excerpts from Howard's letters, that with the stories will serve to illustrate Howard's views on barbarism, which many people over the years I think have misunderstood. This will be a chance to really get a comprehensive look at Howard as a writer who had interesting ideas.

RB: Howard at the end of the Conan story, "Beyond the Black River," which is in the book, states that barbarism is the natural state of mankind, civilization is a whim of circumstance, and barbarism will ultimately triumph. People over the years have taken that to mean that Howard thought that barbarians were superior to civilized people, and that always in a clash between barbarians and civilized people, barbarians would win. I think that's a misreading of Howard. Certainly, the excerpts from his letters will make it very clear that he did not consider barbarians superior to civilized people, but that he thought that all people are in part barbarians. He thought that when you are striving to keep your society together, when you stop building your civilization, it will begin a slow but inevitable decline into barbarism.

It will first start to degenerate and people will pay more attention to hedonistic [activities] and so forth. Then slowly but surely, a stronger younger culture will begin to insinuate itself and take over and build a new civilization over the old. He saw it as a long drawn-out process. The German barbarians storming the walls of Rome was really the primary example of what he was talking about. He didn't always see it as happening that dramatically. I personally think that when you look at headlines as to what's going on in the Balkans, it hard to doubt that people are barbarians at heart. As Yeats said, "the center cannot hold," that barbarism will start to take over.

So I think that this book will make a lot of these themes a little clearer. When you just look at it in the context of one story or that one quotation, I don't think it's clear exactly what he meant.

RB: No, in fact, in his letters to Lovecraft he made it very clear that he felt barbarism was a pretty squalid existence. He said that if he could choose any existence to be born into, to grow up knowing nothing else, that he would prefer to be a barbarian or, as he also often said, an American frontiersman. He probably would have preferred to have been born on the American frontier. Besides that, he also would have wanted to be a Germanic barbarian. But he stressed that was simply because it would suit his temperament more, and he did not believe it would be better for all people. Civilization was probably better for most people.

He had very sometimes conflictive views on the whole subject. But no, he never said barbarism was better than civilization. There's a Robert E. Howard Internet chat-list as you might imagine, and we've had some hearty discussions of this whole subject. I will say that a lot of knowledgeable Howard fans disagree with me on my interpretations, too, but we'll let Robert E. Howard talk for himself in this book.

RB: Right, his excerpts and his stories. And there will be an essay. Well, keeping my fingers crossed. A French Howard scholar, Patrice Louinet, is working on an essay. But, of course, Howard's own words will be there for anybody to read.

RB: In my view, Patrice is probably the leading Howard critic. I've known Patrice for some years, and he has been taking Howard's works apart and getting at some of the underlying themes. Unfortunately he writes very slowly, and he hasn't published a great deal. So this will be an opportunity at last for people to see what he has done. He did have one article in a book called The Fantastic Worlds of Robert E. Howard which came out a couple of years ago. His article in that was called "The Kings of the Night." It touches upon some of Howard's attitudes about barbarism.

RB: Yes. He is given a great deal more legitimacy in France than he is in the United States. Of course, that's been true of many of our great fantasy authors, such as Lovecraft. Poe was recognized in France long before he became part of the canon here. In fact, many Americans are still embarrassed about Poe. Philip K. Dick has an enormous following in France and he is kind of ignored here.

RB: I think the French are not as inclined as Americans to compartmentalize literature. The French give a higher level of legitimacy to comics and graphic novels. Americans just want to think there's serious literature and then there's popular culture. They relegate Howard to popular culture. And I have to say that maybe some of the comic books haven't helped Howard. I'm not sure why it is that the French are much more open to fantasy, horror, or science fiction. They do a lot of really good work in keeping these writers alive and ultimately giving them critical recognition.

RB: I was delighted with all the reviews of The Whole Wide World because I can't recall a single one that dismissed Howard as a mere pulp hack. They all talked about, well, of course, he's a well-known American writer. They didn't feel the need to make back-handed slaps at him. So I do think that that film went a long way toward the ultimate goal of seeing Howard take his rightful place in American literature as Lovecraft has finally done.

RB: I think when you have an anthology that is put together by Joyce Carol Oates, you've well arrived.

RB: And a couple of the Lovecraft journals are now recognized by the Modern Language Association, which, of course, is a step toward getting academia to contribute articles and so forth on this writer because now he has standing. They can put in on their CVs.

RB: I was very disappointed in the whole marketing and promotion behind the film. I felt like it got all these wonderful reviews, but the distribution was so poor that it showed for one week in most cities. I know here in DC it showed in one tiny art-house theater downtown. It was a wonderful movie, and it should have been much more widely seen. At the same time, they should have had a paperback come out of the book in conjunction with the film. But, of course, that's all in retrospect. It's too late now. It would have been nice.

I would like to think that those things will promote a more sympathetic look at Howard. The other thing that we have had to slowly get past is that for so many years, the people who were supposedly Howard's biggest fans were disparaging his work as mere entertainment, that it didn't have any serious ideas in it. But the fact is that there are a lot of interesting ideas in Howard's work. There are themes that run throughout that make it stand out as more than entertainment. If it was just pure entertainment the way most of the pulp stories of its day were it would have been forgotten among with all the rest of them. But it still speaks to people, which is something which indicates there is a lot more there than meets the eye.

RB: Howard's work does several things. It works on a number of levels. It does certainly work as pure exhilarating entertainment. As I've always said, it grabs you in the first paragraph and dumps you a soggy, sweating, panting mess at the end. It's just straight-ahead fiction. It moves at a very fast clip. But along the way, he has condensed history into essential patterns of history. So there's a lot of that that we recognize. If we're familiar with history, we recognize these cycles that he's talking about of building and then decline or decay.

There's also a powerful theme in his work of the need for individual freedom to act, that we have to be ready to act and be confident in ourselves. Conan is the ultimate exemplar of the wheel rolling of itself, the person who is not swayed by fashion or the dictates of what others want. But I don't think the theme is just irresponsibility. It's not do whatever you want. It's act in ways that make the situation better, act in ways that solve the problem or that keep there from being a problem. The need is there for the individual to be confident enough to act without standing around and asking other people what do you think we ought to do. So there's this powerful theme of individual freedom and individual responsibility that really speaks to a lot of people.

And it's true that it particularly appeals to teenage boys. There's no question that at that age that's a thing they're starting to question and get into. The appeal of Howard's work for years and years has been very strong for adolescent males, but I think there's something there for everybody, too. It's not just that Conan does whatever he wants because there are a lot of times that if that's what he was going to do he would've just hightailed it out of the situation.

RB: Yes, there's a sense of honor. There's a sense that we are responsible. If we have the power to act in ways that help others, we should want to do that. So I think that's pretty compelling.

And as I said, there's this very profound sense of history in his works. He was somewhat of a student of history, although a friend of mine says he was a student of the history of violence. I guess it's hard to gainsay that since Howard didn't write a lot about court intrigues or anything like that. It was war and conflict. But he knew a great deal about the histories of when peoples and cultures came in conflict with one another and he saw recurring patterns. Again, I believe that's one of the things that will come out of this book on barbarians. People will see this recurring pattern of civilization's rise and then decline. He saw that over and over again.

RB: I didn't find out about Howard until I was already in college. I made a disparaging remark about comic books being kids' stuff to someone who then brought me a copy of Conan the Barbarian #4, which was the adaptation of "Tower of the Elephants," and said, here, read that. I thought that was pretty good.

A little bit later, another friend acquired the Robert E. Howard Conan paperbacks for me. I was just hooked on the writer. But it wasn't until almost 10 years later when I joined REHPA (Robert E. Howard Press Association) that I started seriously trying to explore Howard's own life. Many of the introductions to Howard's books made me wonder how in the world could this guy that they're describing have written these stories which are so powerful. This guy sounded like a wimp frankly. So I began seriously trying to explore Howard's life. I realized that his life and his work had been disparaged by people with ulterior motives for doing so. I took him on as kind of an underdog cause. I was championing the underdog, and I've continued for 20 years now.

In fact I have a short biography of Howard coming out this month from Cross Plains Comics. It's more of an abbreviated biography. I'm working toward a fuller book-length biography. And I've continued to work with people on the restoration of Howard's texts, to remove some of the later editorializing and rewriting and so forth. To see Robert E. Howard take his rightful place, there are many corrections that have to be made not only to his texts but to his biography. There are an awful lot of things that people think they know about him that are wrong.

RB: Oh, the sketches influenced me certainly. But it was in a general sort of sense. I have been, of course, a big fan of Frazetta's work for many years, so when Marcelo showed me some of the sketches that possibly might go into the book, I was familiar with the themes. The types of illustrations certainly influenced the types of stories that I was looking for. The idea of the general theme of barbarism rose out of that. There were other stories that we probably could have put in, but in the final analysis, we decided that this would be an excellent way to present some of Howard's best work along with one of his best illustrators ever and to really illustrate this particular theme of barbarism.

RB: No, but Howard did write some humorous stories, and oh, to be able to go back into the 1950s and get Frank to do illustrations for the Breckinridge Elkins (CK) stories. I think he could have done that rustic humor about as well as anybody besides Al Capp.

RB: I personally think Frank Frazetta has never gotten enough credit for the popularizing of Robert E. Howard at that time. As I've always said, I think Howard's work would have continued to be read. I don't know that it would have become as big. Just about everybody who says, "oh, I discovered Robert E. Howard as a teenager" was attracted by those covers. You look at the Frazetta covers against any other cover of any other Howard book, and there's this raw, primitive power to them that grabs people's attention.

At the time, they were revolutionary in the paperback world. Compared to other paperbacks that came out in those years, these books just jumped off the rack at you. I don't think Frank's ever got nearly the credit that he should have for bringing Howard to people's attention and making people want to buy those books.

RB: Yeah, so many people did. Other people have been happy to take credit for having popularized Robert E. Howard, but when it comes right down to it, very few people were buying the books for Robert E. Howard. The Conan tales were familiar to a core group of aficionados of the pulp era and of heroic fantasy literature, but very few people were buying them because L. Sprague deCamp's name was on the covers, because he was known mainly as a science fiction writer. But people would buy it for that cover. Many people that I've talked to were Edgar Rice Burroughs' Tarzan fans. They saw those covers and they saw this blurb "mightier than Tarzan," and they went, "whoa." So they thought they'd give this guy a try, and it went from there. It snowballed.

I personally think that Frazetta should get the lion's share of the credit for the popularity of the Conan books in the '60s.

RB: I would certainly hope so. Howard and Frazetta are a writer-and-illustrator match made for each other. Frazetta's artwork has many of the same qualities as Howard's prose. Howard's work stands out because there's a lot of his own emotion and passion in it. It's not just a dry narrative. You actually feel the fiction. I think Frazetta's artwork has that quality, too. You feel the emotions or the passions that he must have been feeling when he was painting or drawing. It's because Howard and Frazetta share some of these characteristics and they share some ideas about men and history. They're just a perfect match. It's a darn shame that nothing like this was done 20 years ago when Frank could've perhaps actually illustrated the stories themselves.

RB: No, no.

AM: The reason I wanted to ask you about this is because many people with access to Frazetta's sketches would have just published the sketches with maybe an essay on Frazetta.

RB: Well, that's Marcelo for you. It's been just a real pleasure working with Marcelo. Rejoining Frazetta with Howard was just brilliant. And of course, bringing in Gary Gianni to do the Solomon Kane book was brilliant. One of the things that I've enjoyed about Gary's work is that it wasn't referencing what had been done before with the character. He was looking at it fresh, and his influences come from outside the realm of fantasy and comics and so forth. One of the problems I've had with comic book adaptations and even movies these days is that they are so self-referential, they stay with ideas that have been done to death in their fields. They don't bring in influences from outside the genres.