Nikolai Gogol, Robert Howard, Theodore Dreiser: Reflections

Reading Nikolai Gogol's "Taras Bulba" I remember thinking "This feels like something Robert Howard would write," something of the wild, swashbuckling spirit and pulpy briskness of a Conan the Barbarian adventure to be found in this classic of nineteenth century Russian literature (one reason, I suppose, why our literary critics esteem this tale less than they do works like "The Nose").

However, after that occurred to me I quickly thought of all the ways in which "Taras Bulba" was very unlike a Howard tale. Gogol's saga of a Cossack colonel and his two sons riding off to battle the Poles over their insult to the Orthodox Church was a story of family, tribe, faith, all those traditional conservative touchstones that had little purchase on Howard's imagination to go by how little present they were in his own stories. Family? Where Conan, for example, is concerned we know nothing of parents, siblings, childhood--such that it always seemed to me a great unfaithfulness to Howard when those continuing his adventures or adapting them for the screen did present such elements (as L. Sprague de Camp did in his pastiches, John Milius did in his 1982 film, the 2011 remake of that 1982 film did to a still greater degree). Tribe means scarcely more, and faith less than nothing, with this the case notably even in Howard's tales of the Crusades, like the obvious proto-Conan that is Cormac Fitzgeoffrey (he, too, a tall, formidably muscled man with a square-cut mane of black hair who can throw a lance like a javelin). Men like Fitzgeoffrey may have come to the Orient with sword in hand, but they were by heritage and temperament only lately and superficially Christianized pagan barbarians after adventure, fortune and glory rather than the causes of Popes, Emperors and Kings.

Indeed, taken altogether Howard's heroes typically appeared before us as fully formed forces of nature, almost as if they had come into the world that way, and as lone, grown--exceedingly formidable--men seeking their destinies not as members of a nation or even as a band but individuals in a milieu far away from any origins they might have had. In the course of those lives many of them gain thrones, but even sitting them sit them alone (brooding with their chins on their fists, as it were), while if it seems clear that some of them had some issue (we are given to understand that Conan is a descendant of King Kull of Atlantis, and that the very libidinous Conan, after he had become King Conan of Aquilonia, ultimately made Zenobia his Queen at the close of Hour of the Dragon) any marital or family life they had is something about which Howard, for his part, is silent.

A certain sort of bourgeois nitwit of a critic sniffs at such extreme individualism in characterization, but it seems to me very understandable, and that not as some failing of an artistic imagination as such but as reflective of how young men such as Robert Howard was so often experience the world, perhaps especially in America, especially if they do not come from the kind of great privilege that so many of our "art lie"-peddling cultural gatekeepers do. Like most people they had a family of some sort growing up, yes, but having grown up they go out into the world to struggle in it alone, and usually fail or succeed alone, in surroundings that ever feel in important ways alien, while that aloneness does not change even if they become "family men" because in fighting to support that family they are still on their own. And indeed where the train of thought I discuss here began with Gogol it ended with Theodore Dreiser in An American Tragedy. Another underappreciated masterpiece which really does live up to its promise of relating a distinctly American tragedy, that book likewise saw its protagonist, Clyde Griffiths struggle on his own from the start of the narrative to its close. He had a family, we know all about it--the mother and father who raised him and siblings he grew up amongst, the more distant relations who had so prospered in Lycurgus, New York--but even when he was with them he was always alone in the ways that counted, down to the end of his adventure not as ruler of a kingdom but in an electric chair for the crime that in the end he actually flinched from committing, executed for what he was not in a tale where society can seem to be one of "that vast company of individuals who are born, pass through and die out of the world without ever quite getting any one thing straight" who people the land writ large.

The difference between how a Conan and a Clyde ended up seems to me to underline how both their writers, from their very different perspectives, in their very different ways, responded to, indeed indicted, the alienations of the early twentieth century America in which they both lived--in each case, superlatively. Howard's response was a romantic retreat into the past as it never was, through which he produced one of the greatest wish-fulfillment figures--the greatest Gary Stus--ever put on paper. By contrast Dreiser devoted a lifetime's study to that which alienated him, manifest in his creative as well as his nonfiction output, and in the process, as David Walsh had it, "presented more clearly" than any writer before or since "[t]he true pathos of the petty bourgeois, his manipulated dreams, his aspirations to prestige and good society, his willingness to sacrifice everything human in himself, his self-mutilation and self-abnegation in the name of 'advancement,' his terror and wonder at the workings of the ruling class," and altogether, "the grinding up of a human being by the brutal machinery of American capitalist society." And of course, for all that superlativeness neither stands very high with the literary Establishment, though again for different reasons--what a Howard does in their view to be taken even less seriously than what a Gogol did in "Taras Bulba," and Dreiser a "dead dog" in their view because they take what Dreiser did all too seriously, and see it as anathema, with on both scores a "Henry James . . . describ[ing] in minute and stylish detail the emotional relations of articulate middle-class people . . . more their cup of tea."