Dark Valley Destiny

by Unknown

  The nearest he came to an attack of puppy love occurred in the summer of 1921 when, aged fifteen, he meandered through the midway of the annual carnival. He wanted to see the boxing matches, since he had kept up his boxing and sometimes entertained notions of a pugilistic career.

  Shoving his way through the throngs of the curious, he was dazzled by the sight of a carnie girl, presumably with the heavy makeup and the free-and-easy manner of her kind. He glimpsed the girl for a few seconds only; then she disappeared into a tent. But Robert was smitten with the terrible aching, delicious yearning that descends on adolescents with their first love—a passion of which the love object is seldom aware. To Robert this girl represented freedom, color, adventure, excitement—all the things his life lacked. For years he cherished a mental picture of the carnie girl while ignoring the more mundane and available local lasses. She—or his idealized concept of her—unquestionably shaped some of his fictional women.49

  For three years, from the fall of 1919 to the end of the spring term of 1922, Robert attended the school in Cross Plains. Although, as he said later, he was seething with resentment during the entire time, he kept his feelings under control. A barbarian—or his idea of a barbarian—to the core of his being, Howard could never abide the enforced discipline of the schoolroom or work place and could never accept gracefully rules set by others or standards he had not imposed upon himself.

  Yet, when he made up his mind to follow some course of action, nothing could deter him from it, as the following example shows. Like many boys embarking on the stormy sea of adolescence, thirteen-year-old Robert experimented with tobacco; but about the time that the Howards moved to Cross Plains he gave up smoking for good and all. Years later he offered E. Hoffmann Price a whimsical explanation: "The most contemptible stinker I know of smokes, and so I refuse to." With considerable insight he added: "I'm afraid I'm not consistent. I breathe, and so does that son of a bitch!"50

  Robert's classmates remember him as a big, good-looking, slim, but well-built youth. In school he was very quiet and reclusive. Polite but reserved, he took no part in school activities, gave his teachers no trouble, and got better-than-average grades. His best subject was history, in which he led his class; his worst, mathematics, in which he just squeaked by. He studied Latin on the theory that it would help him with Spanish in college, but he never went to college and his Spanish remained rudimentary.

  Robert called himself lazy and asserted that he could have done much better if he had put his mind to it. Perhaps it was not so much laziness from which he suffered as an unconscious misdirection of his energies. People who labor under severe chronic emotional stress, whether on the conscious or subconscious level, devote so much of their energy to controlling unresolved hate or anger or fear that they have little residue for constructive activities.

  When not in school or doing after-class jobs for pocket money,

  Robert was reading voluminously. In later life he attributed the trouble with his eyes, which compelled him to wear glasses for reading, to having been punched in the eyes while boxing and to "sitting out on the woodpile and reading until after dark." He was supposed to wear his glasses all the time but feared to do so lest, as he said, some enemy hit him in the eye while he was wearing them.51

  Diligent inquiry has been made about these "enemies" of whom Robert continued to speak all of his adult life. The unanimous opinion of those who knew him is that these enemies were figments of his imagination. Since the boundary between the real and the imaginary was always fuzzy to him, Robert treated his imaginary enemies as an ever-present menace. When, in his late twenties, he asked E. Hoffmann Price about the latter's enemies and learned that Price had none, Robert was incredulous. How could a man exist without enemies? After all, every hero of adventure fiction had at least one or two. That an enemy is a liability and that constant concern about enemies is stressful and time-consuming, as well as emotionally depleting, never crossed the mind of Robert Howard.

  Doctor Howard still cherished the vain hope that his son would become a physician; but as each year passed, Robert's determination to live by writing grew. Aside from his mother, who boasted to neighbors of her son's literary promise, the only person who encouraged his youthful literary ambitions—so strange and suspect to friends and acquaintances—was his English teacher, Doris Pyle.

  With Miss Pyle's encouragement, Robert wrote a story and sent it to Adventure Magazine. It was promptly returned with a rejection slip. Although this is the usual fate of an early literary effort, Howard seems to have taken the rejection as a personal affront. Twelve years later he complained: "I never have been able to sell to Adventure; guess my first attempt cooked me with them for ever!"52

  To sell a piece to Adventure was Howard's lifelong ambition. While he submitted many stories, he never sold one there; although they did publish, gratis, two minor contributions by him. The magazine had a department, "Old Songs That Men Have Sung," and in 1926-27 they ran the words of two traditional songs that Howard submitted: Young Johnny and Sanford Burns.

  Robert's failure to sell to Adventure had nothing to do with his 1921 effort, which the editors had long since forgotten. The fact was that

  Robert was competing with such able and finished writers as Harold Lamb and Talbot Mundy. Howard's stories, then and later, were not up to the literary standards set by these talented men. Had he lived to mature further, both as a writer and as a human being, while Adventure writers of the older generation passed from the scene, he might well have achieved his goal.

  When he was sixteen, Robert conceived one of his major heroes: Solomon Kane, an English Puritan who adventures around the world in the late sixteenth century, during the closing years of the reign of Elizabeth I. Solomon Kane differs from most of Howard's heroes. Instead of a hell-raising roughneck, a lawless plunderer, or a rapacious opportunist, Kane is a sternly moral man who devotes his life to righting wrongs. Somber of dress, dour of manner, and rigid of principles, he is troubled by doubts about his soul, his worthiness, and his faith. Kane is more complex and—within the limits of adventure-fantasy fiction— a more credible character than some of Howard's later, more popular heroes.

  In creating his protagonist, a fictioneer often takes certain aspects of his own character and personality—including some of his secret urges, fears, and hopes—exaggerates them, and builds his hero around them. Of Solomon Kane, Howard wrote:

  Solomon Kane ... I created when I was in high school, at the age of about sixteen, but, like the others I have mentioned, several years passed before I put him on paper. He was probably the result of an admiration for a certain type of cold, steely-nerved duellist that existed in the sixteenth century.53

  Solomon's dueling expertise aside, Howard's actual personality came closer to Kane than to Conan. Like Kane, he was basically a Puritan. So far from being lawless was he that he would not even cut across other people's lots, as everyone else did in walking about Cross Plains. Instead he punctiliously strode around the corners of his neighbor's lawns. The only exception that he made was the lot of his friend Lindsey Tyson, across which he would cut. When he found a wallet containing fifty dollars—equal to several hundreds of dollars today—he hunted down the owner despite difficulties and returned it to him. The owner gave him ten dollars. Later, with wry irony, he remarked to Tyson: "I make ten dollars by being honest; at the same time I lose forty dollars by being honest." Another time his friend Tevis Clyde Smith shrewdly observed that Robert "was Solomon Kane, off paper, even more than he was Conan."54

  In Texas in the 1920s, eleven years of precollege schooling was required for college entrance. Since the Cross Plains school system in those days offered only the first ten grades, pupils with collegiate ambitions went to Brownwood, some twenty-three miles away, for their final year. Even pupils from towns that offered eleven grades were often sent to Brown-wood High to complete that final year, for the Brownwood school was larger, had better facilities, and offered a wider variety of courses. />
  In the autumn of 1922, after a family trip for a seaside visit to the Chamberses in Galveston County, Robert Howard entered the eleventh or senior grade at the high school in Brownwood. The school was badly overcrowded, with three pupils jammed into a seat designed for two, a condition eased the following year with the completion of the junior high school.

  Mrs. Howard decided to go to Brownwood to keep house for her son throughout the school year. Dr. Howard opposed the plan. He complained to the Bakers that Hester and Robert were isolating him from his own family.55 But he gave in and rented a house for them at 316 Wilson Street, a few blocks south of the center of town, at the corner of Hawkins. Isaac Howard remained in Cross Plains to tend his practice, but he went to Brownwood every weekend or two for a visit.

  Perhaps Isaac realized, however dimly, that something ought to be done to break, or at least stretch, the cord that bound Robert to his mother, or perhaps he simply hated living alone. We shall never know what arguments raged and what compromises were struck.

  Robert signed up for the science course, a surprising choice for one who had never shown any interest in science. Dr. Howard probably pushed his son into this elective—an obvious preparation for a premedi-cal college course—hoping that Robert would discover a true medical bent. This hope well illustrates a total lack of realism on the part of a parent who failed to perceive that his son's dislike of people and revulsion at the sight of gore and suffering precluded his selection of this particular career.

  The result of this course of study was unexpected. Although Robert considered his biology teacher a poor misfit, unable to control the hel- i lions in the class, he got excellent marks in science. He made 100 on the final examination, compared to 85 for economics and 80 for English. Yet he remained totally indifferent both to economics and science.56 ■ Both subjects represented the drab, prosaic, confining, unromantic aspects of the universe to a young man whose imagination beckoned in another direction. ,

  A decade later Robert was inveighing against the vain and ephemeral god of science and the tyranny of his materialistic reign. He excused himself by saying that he meant nothing against "true science," merely against the pretensions of some scientists and engineers whose self-confidence outran their knowledge. He also claimed that he had never tried writing science fiction because he had forgotten all the science he had learned at Brownwood High and was too ignorant of the subject to write convincingly about it.57 j

  Robert said he had the ability to be a good biologist; in fact his teacher had urged that career upon him. He might, he said, have made a better biologist than a pulp writer, but he had not the slightest desire to become the first and a burning desire to become the second. '

  Actually, Howard had a lively interest in such social sciences as ( anthropology and archaeology. He wished he could have spent his life digging up the ruins of ancient cities, but without college he never had ! a chance to study those subjects in a systematic way. What he learned about them he acquired by wide and indiscriminate reading of books— books that often set forth already obsolete views. In one story Robert mentions the anthropologist "Boaz," but it is unlikely that he ever read anything by Franz Boas (1858-1942), an early debunker of Aryanism.58 i Howard uttered similar strictures on economics, saying that he j found it a repellent subject of which he knew nothing. This did not stop } him from expressing strong opinions on governmental economic policies or showing, during his last years, considerable shrewdness in slanting and selling his stories.59 Still, his disdain for economics did affect his writing. Solomon Kane would be a more plausible character if he had ' a regular means of support, instead of conveniently stumbling upon : caches of treasure whenever he needed money to finance his wanderings. ( Robert would probably have flunked his mathematics course had, not the examination been given in two installments. When he appeared

  Cor the second part, he was the only pupil to show up. The teacher remarked that he had barely passed the first half and expressed the hope that he would improve on the second. No, said Robert; he had already worked the only problem in the book that he could solve. Learning that Robert's other marks were good to excellent, the teacher saved himself trouble by letting his student's grade of 60 on the first installment stand for the year.60

  The high-school teacher who influenced Robert most was young Osee Maedgen, who taught early American literature and acted as censor of the school paper, The Tattler. Miss Maedgen took Robert's prose in hand, taught him to polish it, and explained such mysteries as similes and metaphors.61

  His Brownwood High School period saw Robert's first appearance in print. The Tattler, which began publication the year before Howard's arrival at the school, magnanimously offered prizes for the best short Htory. Robert swept the field with two tales, both of which appeared in the issue of December 22, 1922. For "Golden Hope Christmas" he received a ten-dollar gold piece; for "West Is West," a five-dollar coin. While neither story is immortal, both are literate and well above the standard of the usual high school theme.

  "Golden Hope Christmas," a sentimental trifle, tells of a Western badman who sells a worthless gold-mining claim to a tenderfoot and is outraged when the tenderfoot strikes it rich. He lies in wait for the lucky miner but gives up his plan to shoot him because it is Christmas morn. "West Is West" is a mere three-page anecdote about a tenderfoot who rides a bucking horse. It is informed with arch, juvenile humor:

  "Get me," I told the foreman of the ranch where I was spending my vacation, "a tame and peaceful bronc for I would fain fare forth among the hills to pursue the elusive bovine and, as thou knowest I have naught of riding skill, therefore I wish a quiet steed and if it be aged I care not.62

  Although he never joined the staff of The Tattler, Robert remained a regular contributor. In fact, he sent in so many stories that the paper was ntill publishing them a year and a half after he had graduated. In the issue of March 15, 1923, appears a laudatory editorial, which foreshadows by some fifty years the opinions of his modern admirers:

  DARK VALL1Y DBIT1WY_

  ROBERT HOWARD, SHORT STORY WRITER

  Have you been reading Robert Howard's short stories in The Tattler for several issues back? If you haven't you are missing a treat. His Christmas story received commendation from the editor of The Brownwood Bulletin and his later stories are just as good.

  We are fortunate in having such a good writer here in our school and we hope he will keep up his contributions. The stories are mostly written in the style of O'Henry [sic], Bret Harte, and Mark Twain, and are just as interesting as their stories. His stories have plenty of action and are spicy with near-cuss words and slang. If for nothing else The Tattler is worth a dime and over if it has a story written by Robert Howard. Read "The Sheik" in this issue!63

  Another of these youthful tales that has survived is "Aha! Or the Mystery of the Queen's Necklace." This is a Sherlock Holmes burlesque, but one which would have given Sherlock's creator little cause for alarm.

  During his first year at Brownwood High, Robert had made friends with a classmate, a youthful resident of the town, named Truett Vinson. One spring day in 1923 a fellow student asked Vinson if he knew Robert E. Howard. This other student—a very tall, lean boy with a commanding voice, named Tevis Clyde Smith—still remembers:

  We were on the school grounds at Brownwood High, and Truett said, "Yes, there he is now." I told Truett that I'd like to meet Bob, and he called Bob over, introducing us to one another. We shook hands, if it could be called that, for Bob extended a limp hand and executed what is known as a "dishrag shake."64

  Clyde Smith, as his friends called him, although two years younger than ; Howard, also had literary ambitions. With Vinson's help, he had been publishing a small amateur journal on a hand press. Not long after this] meeting, he and Robert began collaborating on a story, "Under the Great? Tiger," which they meant to run serially in Smith's magazine. While they soon abandoned the project, the three young men remained good friends until Robert's death thirteen y
ears later.

  To the other students at Brownwood High, Howard presented the same facade as at the Cross Plains school. He was always courteous but remained isolated, taking no part in collective activities. The school had a society, the Heels Club, for outstanding male students. (The girls had an equivalent sorority.) On the strength of his grades, Robert was en-

  Robert E. Howard at seventeen years of age, Brownwood, Texas, 1923

  rolled in the Heels Club and is so listed in the yearbook, along with Truett Vinson and Austin Newton, his earlier friend from Cross Cut. The activities of the Heels Club seem to have consisted in the main of "outings"—picnics in the woods—with, perhaps, some surreptitious tippling. Yet, despite Robert's love of the outdoors, survivors of the Heels Club do not remember him as taking part in these excursions. He did not even sign the imprint of the sole of a shoe, which bore the signatures of all the other Heels and which was reproduced in the yearbook.

  One unhappy event cast a long shadow over Robert. As Clyde Smith tells it:

  At the period of which I write, Bob was a Senior and I was a Sophomore. One of his classmates killed himself a few weeks before graduation. Bob was 17 at the time, and I was 15. The suicide had an impact on him, and, as the years went by, he became more constant in defending the right of self destruction, dropping hints of the value of such an ending.65

  We have not been able to learn much about this tragedy beyond what Smith reports. After Howard's death his father is said to have stated that, at Brownwood, Robert had joined a suicide club, members of which were pledged to kill themselves when their mothers died. It was also said that two other members of the club killed themselves before Robert did, but this sounds like village gossip of the sort that credited Robert with leaving an estate of ten thousand dollars or of having rigged a contraption in his car so that his pistol would automatically fire the fatal shot when he got in. Such tales are not to be taken seriously.66