Dark Valley Destiny

by Unknown

  After certification, if the young physician could afford it, further study in Europe was thought desirable. During the first two decades of the twentieth century, to have "studied in Vienna" was considered a guarantee of excellence. It had snob appeal, too; Robert Howard was not above casually mentioning in an autobiographical sketch that the father of a childhood playmate was studying in Vienna when the First World War overtook him.13

  As an alternative to study in Vienna, young American physicians might undertake work in one of the many medical schools then cropping up. Although some of these schools provided excellent training from the start and became great medical centers, others did not furnish instruction of such high standards. Many students paid their tuition, attended a lecture or two on medical history, and then to their surprise received diplomas. These diploma mills, along with legitimate institutions, throve in the late nineties and persisted well into this century.

  Isaac Howard seems to have fallen victim to one of these fly-by-night schools. Texas, in 1876, was the first state to establish a board of medical examiners, but the law requiring physicians to be licensed by examination was not passed until the Act of 1907. This act contained a provision, nicknamed the "grandfather clause," stating that all doctors currently in practice who could present reasonable credentials be licensed without examination, but that all subsequent physicians admitted to practice be required to pass a written examination before licensing.

  In anticipation of the state's new licensing requirements, in 1902 Dr. Howard enrolled in the Gate City Medical School in Texarkana, Arkansas. He was a student there when he married Hester Jane Ervin in 1904. It is possible that he took some sort of work-training program and checked back to the school from time to time. At any rate he continued to practice in the Dark Valley area during the ensuing year.

  In 1905 he graduated. Two years later, in 1907, he took the State Board examinations and received his license to practice medicine in Texas. Shortly thereafter the Gate City Medical College, which had graduated its first class in 1903, was "reported fraudulent or not in good standing." Within the next two decades it had disappeared.14

  Dr. Howard's training was probably as good as that of most frontier physicians; save for military surgeons on frontier outposts, most of these medical men were poorly prepared. But times were changing. The settling of the West had begun to attract doctors of a different kind— better-trained men who were more stable in their professions. These new physicians were becoming worried about the wide range of competence among their practicing colleagues, and they built up organizations to control the quality of medical training. Although it was to Dr. Howard's credit that he chose to be licensed by examination rather than by invoking the "grandfather clause," his credentials were not such as to recommend him to city or county organizations or to the staffs of first-rate hospitals.

  Despite these drawbacks, Isaac Howard made "a pretty fair country doctor," according to his patients and other citizens of Cross Plains, who late in his life gave him their Citizen of the Year award. He strove long and earnestly to make up for the limitations of his background. Acquaintances remember him as "always taking courses somewhere," trying to bring his medical knowledge into step with that of the metropolitan centers.15

  People who knew Isaac Howard also remember him as something of a crusty character, brusque and domineering. Sometimes his methods were rough-and-ready, more folk medicine than science. At other times his anxiety about his patients led to constant reading and refresher courses, which kept him abreast of his times.

  One patient consulted him about some blisters on her back, which she hysterically but erroneously suspected of being a symptom of syphilis. She was horrified when the doctor, by way of diagnosis, broke one of the blisters with thumb and forefinger, sniffed at it, and tasted the exudate. Yet, another patient feels that Dr. Howard's up-to-date diagnosis saved his son from an unnecessary operation for appendicitis.16

  The limitations of Dr. Howard's education drove him on a constant search for knowledge. Although he could accept his own insufficiencies, he maintained a naive—almost grandiose—belief in the power of knowledge. With knowledge man's capacities were boundless. He could successfully intervene in anything if he just knew how. Referring to Dr. Howard's self-confidence, one of his fellow townsmen said: "I bet he wouldn't have been afraid to try brain surgery or anything else."17

  This confidence included his belief in divine healing and in his own power to manipulate the supernatural for his or his patients' benefit. Dr. Howard studied oriental religious philosophy and yoga, practiced its breathing exercises, and investigated the medical value of hypnosis. He was known to have treated more than one female patient making "magnetic passes," that is, drawing his hand through the air a few inches above the front of her body from neck to knees, in the manner developed by Franz Anton Mesmer (1733-1815) and imitated by the "magnetic healers" that abounded in the United States in the mid-nineteenth century. The families of several patients claim that these treatments were enormously helpful to the sufferers.18

  In later years Dr. Howard made occasional trips to Fort Worth to attend religious revival meetings conducted by one of the evangelical sects, in the course of which he sought relief for an arthritic knee. He regularly returned declaring: "They cured me! I can just walk and do all right." But in a few days he would be limping as badly as ever.19 As an old man he had a strange, rolling walk, probably developed to favor his damaged knee joint.

  Dr. Howard's was a dynamic personality. E. Hoffmann Price, one of Robert's writing friends, who visited the Howards in 1934, was deeply impressed. Arriving exhausted, Price longed for nothing so much as bed; but the doctor kept him up late while grilling him on writing and writers. Glassy-eyed, Price "sat there, listening and answering, to a late hour, kept awake by sheer force of the man's personality."20

  Some of this energy grew out of rage at a world that was always getting out of hand and going off half-cocked. He tried to channel his feelings. An acquaintance remarked:

  It was difficult to understand his feelings. I recall one time early in the morning Dr. Howard was walking up the street whistling as loud as he could. When I said, "Dr. Howard, you must be feeling very happy this morning," his reply was: "When you hear me whistling like that, you will know that I am one mad s.o.b."

  This seems to have been a characteristic state of Isaac Howard's mind. One neighbor describes him as a "cheerful man, whistling all the time." (She did not know the doctor's own explanation of his whistling.) Mrs. Leroy Butler, in girlhood a neighbor of the Howards, tells of hearing the voices next door raised in anger. "Then after a while Dr. Howard would come out and get in his car, whistling away just like nothing had ever happened." She innocently added: "I do declare that I think he was about the whistlingest man I ever knew."21

  Here is another of those living lies so confusing to a growing child: his father's inappropriate response to anger with a cheerful whistle. This and other falsehoods in the Howard household—his mother's putting up a good front, smiling and laughing despite depression, fatigue, and pain; the secret of his mother's age and her physical condition; the anxiety about the doctor's qualifications and the family's overstatement of his abilities—all added up to a constant confusion if not an outright burden for a growing child. As a result, the boundaries between the real and the unreal remained dim for Robert Howard.

  If Dr. Howard at middle age was memorably dynamic, how much more so he must have been at thirty as, dressed all in black—the costume de rigueur for a physician of the time—he swung himself astride his horse above saddlebags bulging with laudanum, ether, ipecac, aspirin, and all the other medicines to purge, sweat, or chill a fever! To the infant Robert, this man of six-foot-two must have been a formidable figure, well-suited to his role as the evil lord of Dark Valley. Riding off in a cloud of dust or returning home to take his Hessie in his arms for a lusty kiss, he must have stirred anxiety and resentment in the heart of his baby son.

  The sheer
masculinity of the father, absorbing, as it does, the full attention of the being who provides his food and care, prompts in every young child anger, distrust, and uncertainty. When to this is added the mother's inability to meet the child's needs—whether because of her ill health or the child's illnesses—the baby, doubly deprived, feels himself the victim of malevolent forces beyond his control.

  Thus, for Robert, in the first year of his life, two Dark Valleys came into being: the "good" valley of happiness and satisfaction, and the "bad" valley peopled with the demons of fear and disillusionment. Since he was never able to exorcise his fear, rage, and destructive wishes, Robert Howard was doomed to remain engulfed in unmanageable chaos and to be haunted by demons as long as he lived. The spirit within him suffered the dark chill of desolation.

  The pale sunshine and all-embracing shadows of those early days in Dark Valley wrought their black magic well. Robert Howard's longing for the warmth of a lost intimacy was ever tinged with terror and a fear of madness. He believed that these feelings were the result of racial memories and superstitions derived from the collective lore of the Nordic ancestors, with whom he identified himself through his great-greatgrandfather, Sam Walser.

  There, on the fringes of the world, he said, between icy shore and snowy forest, overshadowed by foreboding hills, these barbaric Northmen harbored dark dreams and paranoid impulses. Cloud-dimmed skies, shrouding ancient hills and veiling somber trees, stirred memories whence sprang feelings as sharp and penetrating as persecutions. Herein lay the seeds of madness, he said, which burst out among these Northmen's descendants in Salem during the witch panic of 1692, when these folk dwelt in a similarly gloomy clime. Howard speculated that, when racial memories and primal fears break through the sleep of centuries, they take on monstrous shapes—an apt description of the breakthrough of the unconscious.

  When he cited the pagan Scandinavians, Howard was really writing about himself. His ideas of racial memories and his fears mask thfl| vicissitudes of development, wherein the warm meadows of the earth*;

  born child became the Gates of Hell, with a Dark Lord watching over. Years later Howard wrote: "Barbaric life was hell; but so is modern life."22

  Later on, when Robert Howard failed to resolve the feelings that made modern life hell for him, Dark Valley underwent another transformation. It became his fictional Cimmeria. Like the gray, overcast skies of so many of his dreams, Dark Valley came to be a shadowy place even by day. At night it was black—as black as the forests of "Cimmeria, Land of Darkness and the Night." Now dim-remembered Dark Valley Creek slipped into the Brazos as noiselessly as the "dusky streams that flowed without a sound."

  "Somber," "lonely," "brooding," and "silent" are the words that Howard used to describe both the real and the fictitious lands. The faintly remembered high ridges and dark woods, and the isolation of Dark Valley, where night winds murmur through the leaves, were transmuted into the "sullen trees" that darkened the marching hills of Cimmeria, and the "lone winds" that "whisper down the passes."

  Lost in this ghost-haunted land of his inner being, Robert Howard raised his voice in an unforgettable lament, a lament that is cadenced to a liquid flow of melancholy:

  I remember

  The dark woods, masking slopes of sombre hills; The grey clouds' leaden everlasting arch; The dusky streams that flowed without a sound, And the lone winds that whispered down the passes.

  Vista on vista marching, hills on hills,

  Slope beyond slope, each dark with sullen trees,

  Our gaunt land lay. So when a man climbed up

  A rugged peak and gazed, his shaded eye

  Saw but the endless vista—hill on hill,

  Slope beyond slope, each hooded like its brothers.

  It was a gloomy land that seemed to hold All winds and clouds and dreams that shun the sun, With bare boughs rattling in the lonesome winds, And the dark woodlands brooding over all,

  Not even lightened by the rare dim sun

  Which made squat shadows out of men; they called it

  Cimmeria, land of Darkness and deep Night.

  It was so long ago and far away I have forgot the very name men called me. The axe and flint-tipped spear are like a dream, And hunts and wars are shadows. I recall Only the stillness of that sombre land; The clouds that piled forever on the hills, The dimness of the everlasting woods, Cimmeria, land of Darkness and the Night.

  Oh, soul of mine, born out of shadowed hills, To clouds and winds and ghosts that shun the sun, How many deaths shall serve to break at last This heritage which wraps me in the grey Apparel of ghosts? I search my heart and find Cimmeria, land of Darkness and the Night.23

  IV. BOY NOMAD

  The sin and the jest of the times am I Since destiny's dance began, When the weary gods from the dews and sods Made me and named me man.1

  Texans are by nature nomadic, Robert Howard wrote his friend Lovecraft in 1931.2 To confirm his statement, he listed the various parts of Texas in which he had lived during the first nine years of his life: a land-boom town near the New Mexico border on the Llano Estacado; San Antonio; a home in the West Texas sheep country; a cattle town near the Oklahoma Line; Bagwell in the pines of East Texas; the Oil Belt of West Central Texas. So many moves for a young child would clearly create problems of adaptation, and it is reasonable to assume that these frequent migrations influenced young Robert's psychological and social development.

  When the environment becomes unstable, a young child tends to substitute permanence of person for permanence of place. He clings to his mother instead of exploring a larger world with the natural curiosity of the young. Since no one left alive remembers Robert as a preschool child, this chapter must be based on what scanty records we have, plus Howard's own dim memories and our general information about the development of the average child.

  Robert's Dark Valley days were abruptly ended when the family moved to Seminole, Texas, on the "staked plain"—the Llano Estacado —near the New Mexico border. Seminole was in the midst of a land boom, became a bust when the railroad failed. Robert later described the starkness and dryness of the place and the erosion of the spirit that came about in that atmosphere of failure, dust, bawling cattle, grueling work, and endless vigilance against rattlesnake, gila monster, scorpion, and whatever other calamity fortune or the weather dealt out.3

  Considering Robert's tender age at the time, it is likely that his descriptions of Seminole derive from colorful hearsay rather than from actual memory. He was probably quoting his father, who, like many Texans of the time, was noted as a cracker-barrel raconteur who never let the truth stand between him and a good story. The tall tale has aptly been called the native Texan art form.4

  By January 1908, when the Howards arrived in Seminole, Robert, barely two, had learned to walk. Unused to strangers, the small boy would have been frightened by the bawling cattle and the shouts of the cattlemen on the roadway outside his door. He would have fled to the safety of his kitchen and the nearness of his mother.

  At the same time, like all children between two and three, Robert would have been enraged by parental restrictions and directions. Hearing the word "no" so often, toddlers seek to control their own destiny through negation. Striving toward autonomy and self-regulation at this age centers around a child's alimentary functions, particularly elimination: and many a battle royal ensues between mother and child when a toddler feels coerced to perform. This conflict was probably heightened for Robert by the fact that children of that post-Victorian era were expected to be dry and have their bowels under control before their nervous systems were mature enough to send such complicated messages and organize appropriate responses.

  While the developmental task of the three-to-four-year-old child is to gain control over his own body, Robert, even more than other youngsters of the time, would have had difficulty in getting to know his body well. Post-Victorian children were not allowed to touch their bodies. Parental concern about masturbation amounted to a mania during the last quar
ter of the nineteenth century; and Robert's parents, being rather old when their son was born, were more rigid than many reared at a later time. Masturbation, it was generally believed in the early decades of this century, made a person oversexed, unable to control himself, and might lead to masturbatory insanity. A classic pediatric book, L. E. Holt's The Diseases of Infancy and Child, which went through eleven editions between 1897 and 1940, urged severe medical treatment, including circumcision, for young masturbators.5

  Dr. Howard must have been familiar with some such text; and it would have simply reinforced his belief that masturbation, like sex in general, was a sin, the punishment of which was disease or, indeed, damnation in Hell. Dr. Howard believed in an actual Hell of endless burning and torment. In later years he frequently discussed this belief with his friend Dr. Solomon Roe Chambers in Cross Cut. Of these conversations, Norris Chambers, the son of Dr. Chambers and one of Robert's later acquaintances, writes:

  Dr. Howard was apparently raised to believe implicitly in a burning hell, and he had trouble all his life discounting it. He even worried a lot because he thought the preacher who preached Robert's funeral "preached him to hell."6

  What effect his father's stern beliefs must have had on Robert's normal childhood feelings can easily be imagined.