Untrodden Fields: Robert E. Howard’s Sex Library; Part 2 by Bobby Derie

Intro From Part One:

[Some considerable work has been done by Howard scholars Dr. Charlotte Laughlin, Glenn Lord, L. Sprague de Camp, Steve Eng, and Rusty Burke to identify the books that comprised Robert E. Howard’s personal library, based primarily on the holograph list of books that Dr. I. M. Howard donated to form the Robert E. Howard Memorial Collection after his son’s death, as well as Robert E. Howard’s surviving letters and papers. Among these books are a number of works of erotica or curiosa which, while not pornographic to contemporary tastes, were nevertheless concerned with some aspect of sexuality (usually from a scholarly or pseudo-scholarly perspective) and were often treated as such. It is interesting to see, based on these books, what light if any they can shed on Howard’s life and work.]

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Otto A. Wall

Sex and Sex Worship (Phallic Worship) (1919) by Otto A. Wall is demonstrative of the difficulty in assigning a specific source to certain of Howard’s beliefs; a substantial tome of over 600 pages and more than 300 black-and-white illustrations, nominally “A Scientific Treatise on Sex, its Nature and Function, and its Influence on Art, Science, Architecture, and Religion—with Special Reference to Sex Worship and Symbolism” it would perhaps more honestly be described as a pseudo-Victorian, quasi-academic hodgepodge of all matters related to sex and religion that the author could dig up, with as many pictures of nude woman in ancient art, medical textbook drawings, or anthropological photographs as Wall could squeeze in, covering everything from ancient mythology to Ernst Haeckel. Much of the material, if Howard ever read the whole thing, he never mentioned in his fiction or surviving letters (it would be interesting to see what he made of  the anecdote of “Conon and his daughter” on page 520), and nothing that he did mention is specific enough to trace back to this source. For example, in letter to H. P. Lovecraft from October 1930, Howard wrote:

For my part, I am too little versed in antiquities to even offer an opinion, but I am inclined to think that these figures represent a pre-Christian age and have some phallic significance. I am especially inclined to this view by the consistent use of triangles in the stone figure. Phallic worship was very common in Ireland, as you know—the legend of Saint Patrick and the snakes being symbolical of the driving out of the cult—and in almost every locality where phallic worship thrived, small images representing the cult have been found, in such widely scattered places as Africa, India and Mexico. Though of course the workmanship of the images differs with the locality and I have never seen or heard of, figures just like these of yours. At any rate, they are fascinating and open up enormous fields of dramatic conjecture. I am sure you could build some magnificent tales out of them. (CL2.95)

Sex and Sex Worship contains sections on both phallic worship and serpent worship, but it is hard to say if this is Howard’s source—or at least his sole source—for his particular datum, since by 1930 the concept of phallic worship had become relatively widespread since being introduced by Hodder Westropp in his 1870 paper “Phallic Worship”; the best that can be said is this is the most likely source, given that the work was available before Howard made this statement and it was in his library at his death. At the same time, however, it feels insufficient to try to account for some of Howard’s statements in his letters to the sex books known to be in his library. For example, Howard writes in a letter to Harold Preece dated 5 September 1928:

Today at town I saw the hang-over of some old and lascivious custom—a girl had a birthday and her girl and boy friends pounced upon her and indulged in a spanking debauch. I have never been able to find just how that custom originated, but have an idea its roots lie in the old superstition that spanking a woman or whipping her with a switch makes her bear children oftener and easier. (CL1.225)

The basic anecdote of a tradition of whipping or spanking a woman on some particular day to ensure fertility and ease childbirth is found in Sex and Sex Worship, A History of the Rod, and History of Flagellation, often but not exclusively when discussing the Roman festival of Lupercalia. The concept of a “hang-over of some old and lascivious custom,” however, speaks more of the influence of Sir James George Frazer’s The Golden Bough (1890). (Burke)