In
Robert E. Howard’s Black Canaan
(1936), discussed a few weeks ago, southern whites were barely able to put down
a Voodoo-enabled uprising among poor African Americans in the Louisiana swamps,
circa the late nineteenth century. Unabashedly
racist in tone, the novella was suffused with white anxiety about retribution
for slavery, which had ended only a century before. (See also An
Insurrection, Emboldened by Voodoo).
However,
a few years earlier, Howard published The
Footfalls Within (1931), a short story which expressed almost the opposite
point of view. Insofar as authors—and people
in general—change their perspectives with greater maturity and life experience,
one would expect that Black Canaan was
the earlier story, and that The Footfalls Within came later, showing
greater sympathy and concern for social justice. That it did not suggests that Howard was either ambivalent or undecided about
matters of racial justice. Or that there
was an event or a psychological change that led him to take the more regressive
view expressed in Black Canaan.
H.P.
Lovecraft modified his appalling views on race and ethnicity little, if at all
during his career. Regarding
psychological changes affecting the perception of racial differences, it is
interesting to read a letter Lovecraft wrote to his Aunt Lillian in 1926,
during his short, unhappy stay in New York City. It is an extremist rant against nearly every immigrant
community in the city, and ends with him recommending segregation or
suicide—“a bullet through the brain…”—as the only remedies.
Lovecraft’s
family and friends were afraid he might select the second option, and urged him
to return to Providence for a time.
His friend Samuel Loveman believed that during this difficult emotional
time Lovecraft was carrying a bottle of poison for just this purpose. (This episode is described in L. Sprague de
Camp’s 1975 book Lovecraft, A Biography.)
Robert
E. Howard also struggled with mental illness and emotional instability,
culminating in a suicide at age 30—the same year and month that Black Canaan was published. Not to oversimplify, but it does seem that
extreme feelings and assumptions about racial difference reflect internal psychological issues, that
racist ideology is an external expression of inner torments that may or may not
be directly connected to race.
In this
regard, The Footfalls Within is a
very interesting story. It features
Howard’s popular character of Solomon Kane, the brooding Puritan strongman who
wanders the world to administer violent and righteous justice. He is a lot like Conan, but wears more clothes,
is better armed, and is biblically literate.
The Footfalls Within is
strongly influenced by biblical and also Lovecraftian imagery—an unusual mix.
On the trail of some cruel slavers somewhere in Africa, Kane ponders some evidence of their carnage:
“Destruction
goeth before them and death followeth after.
Wo unto ye, sons of iniquity, for the wrath of God is upon ye. The cords be loosed on the iron necks of the hounds
of hate and the bow of vengeance is strung.
Ye are proud-stomached and strong, and the people cry out beneath your
feet, but retribution cometh in the blackness of midnight and the redness of
dawn.”
Similar
language can be found in the books of nearly every Old Testament prophet, where the
concern is often for justice and deliverance from oppression, by violence if
necessary. Should the Good Lord be a bit
too slow at turning the wheels of justice, (in human understanding), Solomon
Kane is there to expedite things. Howard
lovingly describes his weapons: two heavy pistols, a dagger, a long two-edged
sword, and most importantly, a “cat-headed stave hardened into iron.”
Fans of
the Solomon Kane stories will remember that this is no ordinary staff. Kane obtained it from his comrade in arms and
blood-brother, “a black magician of the Slave Coast, named N’Longa.” The story provides a lot of detail about the staff,
though its origin and even composition remain unknown. Before N’Longa gave it to Kane, it had been
used by the Pharaohs, Moses, and King Solomon, among others. Mohammed “himself hath spoken of it by
allegory and parable”. Only in a Howard
story would a weapon rise nearly to the level of one of the characters in the
plot. It seems a useful item to have,
and is later critical in a climactic struggle with a very Lovecraftian monster.
In The Footfalls Within, Solomon Kane is
somewhere in Africa, where he observes the cruel treatment of recently captured
natives by their Arabic masters. Enraged,
he attacks the slavers, but is captured after chopping, slicing and impaling
about a dozen of them. The author
clearly sympathizes with the Africans, and has his character endeavor to free
them, even risking his life. However, he
describes the Arabs and their evil leader in this way:
Hassim,
Kane ruminated, was the very symbol of militant Islam—bold, reckless,
materialistic, sparing nothing, fearing nothing, as sure of his own destiny and
as contemptuous of the rights of others as the most powerful Western king.
Were such
travesties as I.S.I.S. not in the news these days, it would be easier to dismiss this passage as
caricature and stereotype. At least his
comparison of the Arab to western despots circa the early 17th
Century indicates some balance in Howard’s view.
Kane
and his captors travel on, where they eventually encounter the ancient ruins of
what appears to be a mausoleum. Obscure
Hebraic letters are carved into a massive door which is sealed with an enormous
lock. Furthermore, the ruin sits in
…a
strange clearing among giant trees—strange because nothing grew there. The trees ringed it in a disquieting
symmetrical manner and no lichen or moss grew on the earth, which seemed to
have been blasted and blighted in a strange fashion.
Similar
settings may be found where “…a traveler in north central Massachusetts takes
the wrong fork at the junction of the Aylesbury pike just beyond Dean’s Corners”
or more likely, “west of Arkham” where “there are valleys with deep woods that
no axe has ever cut”. Kane thinks he
hears massive and ominous “footfalls within” the mausoleum. Something large and powerful is pacing about
in the darkness, trapped, waiting to come out. But his captors are oblivious of this and
commence breaking the lock on the door. Readers
will suspect at once that this is a bad idea.
The fictional
image of a structure—house, room, castle, temple, even mausoleum—is often a
representation of a mind or personality. Its entrances, walls and compartments
are metaphors for memories recalled or repressed, or storage places for
unresolved torments and traumas. (Think of
Poe’s “The Fall of the House of Usher”, or stories about haunted houses in
general.) The release of the amorphous monster
from the mausoleum in The Footfalls
Within brought the liberation of Solomon Kane and the enslaved Africans. But what was pacing about inside Howard’s
mind at this time, awaiting release?
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