Dark Valley Destiny

by Unknown

  In Howard's stories of Roman Britain, the Picts resemble those of "The Lost Race"; but later, in the Conan stories, they more nearly resemble the Iroquois as described in the novels of James Fenimore Cooper and Robert W. Chambers.

  Robert Howard brought his new historical perspective from the Canal Street Library in New Orleans to the pastures near Cross Plains. Here the war whoops of marauding Comanches and the shouts of cowpunchers at a roundup for the X— Ranch were transformed into the battle cries of Scottish Highland warriors pouring out of the hills in full attack on English armies below. Later Howard wrote:

  I had a distinct Scottish patriotism and liked nothing better than reading about the Scotch and English wars. I enacted these wars in my games and galloped full tilt through the mesquite on a bare-backed racing mare, hewing right and left with a Mexican machete and slicing off cactus pears which I pretended were the heads of English knights. But in reading of clashes between the Scotch and the Picts, I always felt my sympathies shift strangely.38

  In those early years in Cross Plains, more than Robert's historical perspective changed. His whole world was changing, and changing with dizzying speed. "How are you gonna keep 'em down on the farm after they've seen Paree?" asked the lyrics of a popular ragtime melody, and of course the answer is that you cannot. In 1920 the balance between urban and agrarian populations, heretofore weighted toward the rural communities, shifted. For the first time in the history of the United States, more people lived in cities than in small towns or on farms. 1 Callahan County—which had suffered the vicissitudes of Comanche: raids; cattle drives from 1867 on; the great slaughter of the buffalo inl the 1870s; horse thieves, gunplay, and casual homicide; vigilantism and lynching; plague, pestilence, and drouth—now underwent another major j cataclysm: a population explosion. j

  Amid the peanut fields, the pecan groves, and the grass lands, oil j derricks began to rise. Every day saw new wells "spudded in" and new people entering the area in search of black gold. Villages with only a few hundred inhabitants found themselves overrun with thousands of oil-j dazzled invaders rushing toward the land of derricks, where the hungry drill bites continually into the earth. Each wanted to arrive first. Each wanted his well to be the one whence rose the coveted dark-green pillar of oil.

  An inexorable movement westward toward the oil fields became a feverish rush. Vans, trucks, dray horses pulling covered wagons, teamsters hauling pipes, hacks piled high with jumbled belongings passed along the dust-filled roads night and day. Opaque-eyed, stolid, blind to each other, the fortune-seekers drove on in dust-enveloped lines. Lexie Dean Robertson, who became the poet laureate of Texas in 1939 and who knew Robert Howard and encouraged his poetry, well described the scene:

  The tents pop out like marbles from a conjurer's bag.

  One day the village lies somnolent beneath the blazing sun, the only sign of life one speckled hen with seven mongrel chickens.

  Next day the quiet groves are filled with dirty tents, while yellow shacks of raw unpainted pine are going up on every vacant lot.

  Already one industrious tent-wife's weekly wash is spread out to dry, coarse woolen shirts and dingy blankets smothering the tender young buds of the bush on which they lie.

  Opposite the village church a sign is being hung at the front of a hastily-constructed plank store:

  wild cat inn-fried oysters, chile, hamburgers-

  open all night.

  Men stand about in groups; they look foreign and prosperous; some of them wear high-laced boots and carry bundles of blue-prints which they read as they walk along. Everywhere the talk is oil and leases.

  Two hundred automobiles are parked about the little stores. The native villagers eye it all in astonished wonder.

  An energetic housewife catches the spirit and advertises her rooms for rent. Before dark every cottage window bears the same label.

  Under a great oak, where yesterday two children built a playhouse, a strident-voiced individual has located a gasoline stove and is selling doughnuts. A crowd gathers as he spears them deftly from the boiling grease.

  The oak tree's leaves are dusty now and shrivelled.... But the town grows.

  The gambling hall came, and the dancing girls. Whores and bootleggers plied their trades openly and undisturbed—painted girls leaning against unpainted steps, watching blackfaced clowns selling "medicine" that was a sure cure for what ailed you. With a few telling strokes, Mrs. Robertson sketches a passing moment in Pioneer during the oil boom:

  A little ragged boy selling city papers; two stray dogs fighting; furtive-eyed men gazing greedily at bulging hip pockets; a gambling hall with wide open doors; smells of gasoline, garlic, crude oil, dust, crushed roadside flowers; and over it all sounds the clickety-clack clickety-clack of hammers building a rig in the graveyard.39

  A decade later Robert Howard still remembered the oil boom with disgust. He told Farnsworth Wright, the editor of Weird Tales:

  ... oil came into the county when I was still a young boy and remained. I'll say one thing about an oil boom: it will teach a kid that Life's a pretty rotten thing about as quick as anything I can think of.40

  To his pen pal Lovecraft, an adult Robert Howard deplored the seamy side of human nature to which a boy was exposed during an oil boom. Its "violence and bestial sinfulness" were enough to send a kid straight to the Devil. In graphic detail he revealed the long-remembered feelings of sexual excitement and abhorrence that had been aroused in him when, as a youngster, he held a job as pickup and delivery boy for a tailor. The local dance-hall girls (Howard called them harlots) would hand him their dresses for cleaning. Fine silk, delicate lace, exquisite workmanship— all were dreadfully stained. Such dresses, Bob Howard told Lovecraft, always symbolize boom days and nights to him—"shimmering, tantalizing, alluring things—bright as dreams, but stained with nameless filth."41

  In addition to the confusing community transformations going on around young Robert, the people who came in with the oil boom further confounded the thinking and perspective of an adolescent boy. No longer were "good people" and "bad people" clearly distinguishable. The Southern gentleman and his persecutors; the cowboys and the Indians; the cavalry and the border bandits; the Wells Fargo rider and the outlaw; the cattleman and the homesteader—all were studies in contrast. The newcomers were a mixed lot, neither of the Southern tradition nor of the Western. These people came from the industrial North and East, and they came to exploit the opportunity for big money made possible by an oil strike.

  Besides the usual dregs of the boom—the drifters who came to the Oil Belt out of curiosity and stayed, hoping for adventure—there were young men, unsettled by the war, who were looking for a good place to establish a business and grow up with the country. Many brought their wives and children with them and later, as colonists, joined the employees of the fast-growing oil companies. Other newcomers were company people, transferred by their employers to the region. These lived near a refinery on small "tank farms"—compounds of identical houses built by the oil companies to provide workers' housing in the midst of a housing shortage. These more or less permanent residents were true colonizers, and some of their descendants still live in the area.

  In contrast to the colonizers were the exploiters, the promoters who conned their way to riches. Trading and lying and cheating, they parlayed fraudulent leases into fortunes and in many cases preyed upon and bilked the country folk and townspeople of the profits of the boom. Although the new settlers tried to dissociate themselves from the promoters, they often found themselves forced into business associations with the very con artists for whom they felt only contempt.

  At the same time, these city-bred newcomers had little patience with the old-time residents, whom they rejected as ignorant and archaic. The Howards often found themselves with a foot in each camp. Young Robert must have felt particularly confused and disillusioned by these cultivated swindlers. If the very people toward whom he had every right to look for leadership, understanding, and litera
ry appreciation, themselves turned out to be crooks, who could be trusted? Bitterly he wrote:

  You have built a world of paper and wood, Culture and cult and lies;

  Has the cobra altered beneath his hood, Or the fire in the tiger's eyes?42

  While boom streets were dominated by day by the speculators from Wall Street and the lease brokers, by night the hell-raising roughnecks took over. Oil-field workers, tool dressers, mule skinners, roustabouts, well shooters, rig builders, and bootleggers strutted about with their booze and babes in noisy defiance of the Fundamentalist Southern Protestants who, drawing their shades primly against the sounds of revelry, refused to let even the moonlight in.

  The cleavage between morals and moonshine was symbolized by the political struggle between the Prohibitionists and the anti-Prohibitionists —the "wets" and the "drys"—and later, with the abuses of the Prohibition era, between the law-and-order people and the bootleggers, a lawless element no one really liked. Even with the repeal of Prohibition, Callahan County, under strong Southern Baptist influence, continued to be dry and so remained until recently when Abilene, in adjacent Taylor County, voted to go wet. The vote coincided with a minor earthquake, about 2.5 on the Richter Scale, a rare occurrence in these parts. One of our informants alerted us in good Texas fashion: "Forget the Richter Scale; that was ten thousand Baptists turning over in their graves."

  In the interstices between hell-raising and horse-trading, life for the citizens of Cross Plains ran its daily course. Children were being born, growing up, and going to school. Their parents, both old settlers and newcomers, found common cause in establishing schools, churches, clubs, libraries, and the other institutions necessary for the promulgation of civilization. For the new people this meant introducing their neighbors to the beliefs and mores of the big Northeastern cities. For the old settlers it meant struggling to maintain the customs and traditions of their agrarian past. This mix of new ways and old added another element of conflict to Texas life in the 1920s, which must have had an unsettling effect on the mind and emotions of adolescent Robert.

  Still, the influence of old-time religion remained strong in Cross Plains, and it so remains to this day. People do not hesitate to make their convictions known. A Northerner, brought up in the belief that a man's religion is nobody's business but his own, may be startled when a Texan whom he has just met asks as a conversation opener: "Are you church people?" or "What church do you go to?" or even "Are you saved?"

  Churches of four denominations still graced the town of Cross Plains after time swept away the rowdy oil boom. Dr. Howard, always restless, sampled the services at all four churches and years later asked the ministers of each to preach at the funeral of his wife and son. Although he and Mrs. Howard appeared to have attended church irregularly, fourteen-year-old Robert faithfully went to Sunday school. He attended the Baptist Church until his friend Lindsey Tyson urged Robert to go with him to the Methodist Church, opposite the newspaper office.

  Later, as an adult, Howard abandoned churchgoing. He called himself an agnostic but developed a lively interest, along with his father, in the Hindu idea of reincarnation. His lifelong love affair with suicide was reenforced by his adoption of this philosophy. Strict adherents to Christian doctrine count self-destruction a sin for which the penalty is eternal damnation. Hindu philosophy, which embraced reincarnation, and the rash of cults based upon its tenets, on the other hand, fitted neatly with the potential suicide's belief that death is not a descent into the night of oblivion but instead an ascent into the clear bright light of a better day. Howard's poem The Tempter is a magnificent expression of this tragic supposition. After describing his disillusionment with life and the release offered by death, the poem mentions reaching for a gun and ends with the lines: "As my soul went gliding, gliding, / From the shadows into day."43

  Despite his frequent moves and endless schemes to discover the pot of gold at the rainbow's end, Isaac Howard never accumulated much in the way of worldly goods beyond what he needed to pay his bills and to maintain his family in moderate comfort. Money, as ever, remained Hcarce in the Howard household. Some patients "forgot" or delayed payments to their undemanding doctor; others settled their bills in produce from their gardens or in steaks from a slaughtered steer.

  This scarcity of money continued to be a bone of contention between Isaac and Hester, who, seemingly unaware of the postwar recession, scolded her husband for bartering his services. Although the family lived about as well as the majority of the townsfolk in Cross Plains in the years after the First World War, the lack of ready cash for such luxuries as ice cream and magazines made Robert feel poor indeed. He said so later in a letter to Lovecraft: "I have been poor all my life, and so have all my friends."44

  Robert had to earn all his own pocket money, since his parents gave him no allowance. He mentions with a good deal of contumely various small jobs held and errands run. At various times during his adolescence, Robert hauled garbage, clerked in a grocery store, picked cotton, "smashed baggage," and "dug ditches." During one vacation he worked in M. Polishuk's Model Store:

  I used to work in a Jewish dry-goods store. Before each sale—and Jewish sales go on forever—I would "mark down" the goods according to instructions. For instance, the regular retail price of a pair of trousers would be $5.00. I would mark in big numbers on the tag—$9.50, and then draw a line through that and mark below, $5.50.4S

  In 1921, fifteen-year-old Robert became a regular reader of Adventure Magazine, the aristocrat of the pulps, which was published three times a month. One day, having exhausted all the local reading matter and being desperate for some new material, he suddenly realized that magazines could be bought at the drugstore. Tramping into town, he pawed avidly through the bright covers on the rack, made his selection, then discovered that he lacked the twenty-five cents to pay for his prize. Undaunted, he charged the magazine and paid for it ten days later when the next issue appeared, to be charged and enjoyed in its turn.

  Young Robert and his cronies sometimes went "hunting." Such expeditions were what we should call nature walks. As Tom Wilson explained: "He'd go hunting, but he wouldn't kill anything."

  Robert's purpose, he liked to say, was to "get back to nature." Once, in 1923, after his graduation from Brownwood High School, Robert went hunting with Baker, Tyson, and Wilson, purportedly to hunt raccoon and opossum. They caught a 'possum; the creature played dead. Robert picked it up and examined it. When he set it down, it suddenly came to life and fastened its teeth into its captor's calf, biting hard enough to draw blood. Robert hopped about, frantically trying to kick the 'possum loose. Eventually he freed himself from the needlelike teeth. "Even then he wouldn't let us kill it," said Wilson.46

  Robert's love of nature and wildlife fits the pattern of his personality. A psychiatrist, Harold F. Searles, argues that a child first experiences complete dependence upon and attachment to its parents. Then some of the childish interest shifts to material objects, such as a favorite teddy bear or security blanket. Dr. Searles calls these "transitional objects." In the normal person, love of things gradually matures into love of persons, and this change is triggered by the growth of sexuality in adolescence. Thus, most children move from complete dependence on their parents to a self-reliant relationship with their peers—classmates, sweethearts, friends, neighbors, and fellow workers. Searles goes on:

  Those persons who . . . fail to make this final achievement of normal adolescence continue throughout their lives to identify themselves more with Nature than with mankind. Toward Nature they experience a passionately close relationship, toward mankind they have a misanthropic attitude; their fellow men seem alien to them.47

  Dr. Howard, at least to some extent, shared this feeling for nature. Jack Scott, the distinguished editor of The Cross Plains Review, recalls an autumn afternoon when the doctor stopped his car in front of the newspaper office and repeatedly honked. Extricating himself from a confusion of customers ordering ads, posters, and other handb
ills, and the ringing of the telephone with reports of news items—all concerns of the town's only printer and newspaper publisher—Scott went out.

  "Hell, Doc," he said. "We don't give curb service here! What do you want?"

  "Get inside," commanded Dr. Howard, indicating the seat beside him. "I want to tell you something."

  His natural courtesy overriding his impatience, Scott climbed in and sat, ignoring the customers who stared at him through the plate-glass window.

  "I just came from Cottonwood," the doctor began. "You know how driving down that road is? The trees grow so close together on either side of the road that they overlap above. The leaves kept falling down on me or floating across the road. I just stopped my car and thought about these people, the ones I brought into the world, and the ones I had seen during their last illness. People are like the leaves on the way over to Cottonwood. They live, and then they just float down to earth and die. They're dead and forgotten."

  The doctor sat in a moment of quiet reverie. Then he said, "That's all there is to it. Get out! Just wanted to tell you that!"

  In his brusque way, Dr. Howard was expressing the same notion that Robert put to his friend Harold Preece. To the Celt, said Robert, the fall of a leaf can have more significance than the fall of an empire.48

  During adolescence Robert Howard increasingly showed two traits that fit Searles's picture of the misanthropic nature-lover. One was his estrangement from the human world; the other was his tardy, hesitant approach to sex. While adolescence is usually a time for delighted discovery of the opposite sex, Robert made a fetish of trusting few men and no women, save his mother. He ignored the fair sex in the classroom and avoided school dances and class outings. On the rare occasions when he found himself in a mixed company of his peers, he acted shy and ill at ease, escaping as quickly as he could.