by Unknown
Late in the spring of 1923, Robert received his diploma, and Dr. Howard came to fetch home his wife and son. Then the question arose: Since Robert was determined not to follow a medical career, should he go to a liberal arts college? Brownwood had two, Howard Payne and the smaller Daniel Baker.
Even though Hester Jane Howard risked letting her son slip out of her grasp, she urged him to matriculate along with his friends Tyson and Vinson. But Robert Howard balked. He did not want to go to college, he said. He had had all he could take of sitting in classrooms, being droned at by teachers, and keeping to schedules. Moreover, in college lie would have to take a lot of required courses in subjects that did not interest him.67 He professed to despise writing courses in particular, although he had never taken one. He preferred to stay at home, perfecting his skill as a writer and earning his keep by such jobs as he could find.
Here Robert made an elementary mistake, one which other young people—especially would-be writers—often make. This is to think that, because some required college subject might bore them or seems to have no immediate application, they should not waste time on it. A writer never knows what odd body of knowledge may come in handy; in a lifetime of writing, practically everything a writer learns will prove useful. A decade later Howard seems to have had, too late, an inkling of this truism. He wrote:
A literary college education probably would have helped me immensely. That's neither here nor there; I didn't feel I could afford it, and that's all there was to it.
I might have liked college, but I hated grammar and high school with a vindictiveness that has not softened in later years.68
Howard's claim that poverty kept him from college can be dismissed as an ex post facto rationalization of his blunder. In reality he could have managed. Tuitions were low, and he could easily have found part-time work. Certainly Dr. Howard, ambitious for his son, would have helped. The real reason, we think, was that which Robert Howard gave for his dislike of his grade-school days:
I hated school as I hate the memory of school. It wasn't the work I minded; I had no trouble learning the tripe they dished out in the way of lessons —except arithmetic, and I might have learned that if I'd gone to the trouble of studying it. ... I generally did just enough work to keep from flunking the courses, and I don't regret the loafing I did. But what I hated was the confinement—the clock-like regularity of everything; the regulation of my speech and actions; most of all the idea that someone considered himself or herself in authority over me, with the right to question my actions and interfere with my thoughts.69
In other words it was not poverty but fierce independence of spirit and intolerance of any sort of supervision, except from his mother, carried by an imperfectly socialized human being to the point where it became counterproductive, that kept Robert Howard from going to college. Few of the ironies of Robert's life are more poignant than the fact that in this matter, for one of the very few times in his life, he flatly disobeyed his mother's behest; and that in this matter, for one of the very few times in her life, Mrs. Howard was right and her son was wrong. College might have given Robert Howard his final chance to escape the fate awaiting him.
VIII. APPRENTICE PULPSTER
Oh, brother coiling in the acrid grass, I lift not for me your sibilant refrain: l-rss deadly venom slavers from your fangs Than courses fiercely in my every vein.
A single victim satisfied your hate, Hut I would see walled cities crash and reel, (irey-bearded sages blown from cannon-mouths, And infants spitted on the reddened steel.
And I would see the stars come thundering down, The foaming oceans break their brimming bowl— Oh, universal ruin would not serve To glut the fury of my maddened soul!1
Five years after his graduation from Brownwood High School, Robert Howard made his single serious attempt to write realistic fiction. This was Post Oaks and Sand Roughs, an autobiographical novel about 54,000 words long. He submitted the work to Dodd, Mead & Co., who rejected It on September 13, 1928, whereupon he apparently shelved it for good and all.
The rejection is not surprising. The work has little audience appeal. Neither is it very skillfully executed. Yet the manuscript is invaluable to anyone interested in the thoughts and feelings of the youthful author. When Robert was working on it, he told his friends what he was doing and warned that they would all appear in easily recognizable guise.2 This in indeed the case. Both characters and places are, practically speaking, undisguised. Cross Plains appears as "Lost Plains"; Brownwood is "Redwood"; Howard Payne College is called "Gower-Penn"; Clyde Smith is "Clive Hilton"; Robert's story "The Shadow Kingdom" becomes "Thj Phantom Empire"; and so on.
For himself Howard chose the name "Steve Costigan." The name "Stephen" (or "Steve") and "Costigan" held a curious and inexplicabl fascination for Howard. At least five Costigans and eight Stephens a Steves appear in his stories. Two of his fictional heroes, in addition t his alter ego in Post Oaks, are Steve Costigans. j
A few incidents in the novel, especially toward the end, are patentl fictitious and clearly express the author's unfulfilled wishes. In on scene, for example, "Steve" beats up an employer who gives him wigging for tardiness.3 But for the most part the narrative closely follow Robert's life history from the autumn of 1924, when he went to Browt wood to attend Howard Payne, to the time of writing four years latei Wherever we have been able to compare the novel with the actui incidents in Robert Howard's life and with the real people he knew, th work follows the facts with almost literal exactness. Thus, used wit caution, Post Oaks will serve as a factual source of information aboi Howard's physical existence from eighteen to twenty-two and—eve more fascinating—as a study of his emotional life during this period Allowing for the self-consciousness, egocentricity, and extremism 4 youth, Howard presents a convincing picture of his inner being. It cann< be said that he flatters or whitewashes himself. If anything, he reveal more about his various emotional states than he probably realized.
Seventeen-year-old Robert had returned to Cross Plains in the earf summer of 1923, determined to start his writing career while workiri at odd jobs to earn his spending money. Since he lived at home and pa| neither room nor board, his expenses were small. He had no taste ft gambling with real cash. He did not smoke or drink or date girls. AsiJ from buying books and attending movies, his main amusements well walking in the woods and boxing with his friend Tyson. I
Lindsey Tyson, "Pink" to his friends, was gentle, good-nature< and unassuming, yet so physically powerful that he could tear a pack < cards in two. Although he had little interest in Howard's flights of fane and none in his literary aspirations, the two continued to find each oth« congenial. Besides admiring Tyson's strength, Bob undoubtedly felt thl this longtime pal did not criticize him, put him down, or make him fe< like a hick, as did his more sophisticated Brownwood friends from time to time. When Howard records resentment at what he considered the huperior attitudes of his "city-bred" or "sophisticated" acquaintances, or "young members of the intelligentsia," he is probably referring to Smith and Vinson.4
Howard spent little on clothes. Perhaps as a reaction against the white shirts imposed on him in boyhood by his mother, he made a fetish of dressing in rough work clothes. For all but the most formal occasions, u shirt and a pair of unpressed pants were attire enough, with a sweater udded in cold weather. As Steve, Bob's alter ego, explains in Post Oaks, he
.. . always felt out of place when nicely dressed. He despised coats, vests, ties and hair brushes. He preferred for his curly black hair to look wild and unkempt, and always had it cut very short so as to avoid combing it as much as possible.5
All through his adult life, Howard affected a deliberately scruffy appearance, foreshadowing the uniform of ragged blue jeans adopted by the rebellious young Americans of the 1960s. When complaining to his friends that girls ignored him at social gatherings, he confessed, "I suppose there is something forbidding about my appearance, which is usually unshaven and careless. . . ."6 When Steve Costigan broods over a
supposedly superior attitude taken toward him by his Redwood friends, he blames their condescension on his "ragged old clothes and slouchy ways and queer ideas." Although Howard imagined his Brownwood friends saying of him: "He'd be all right if it wasn't for the outlandish clothes he wears,"7 he refused to change his habits.
Robert's use of English followed a similar pattern of rebellion. Although he wrote English with a flair and sometimes with the pen of a poet and could speak standard English perfectly well, frequently (whether as a part of his tough-guy pose or to shock his acquaintances) he would fall into proletarian locutions such as: "I don't know nothin' " or "I ain't got no education." Steve Costigan nearly always speaks in this manner.
During the year and a half that Robert Howard remained at home, struggling to earn a living as a professional writer, he held several modest jobs, but the precise chronology of these forays into the business world are lacking. The town was still crowded with oil operators, oil-field workers, and the raffish characters attracted by booms of all kinds, and his contacts with these people continued to be distasteful.
At one point the idea of a musical career obsessed him. In the spring of 1924, he writes, he
. . . started taking violin lessons from a wandering old fiddler who'd gone on the rocks because of drink. But he took up with a wandering minstrel show and skipped the country, so I started taking lessons from an old Scotchman who led the local band. I took one lesson and then the Scotchman came to a sudden and violent end. I then made arrangements to continue my lessons with a German but before I could begin, he jumped town just ahead of the law, leaving a trail of deft swindles behind him.8
Thus abruptly ended an abortive musical career.
While Howard was presumably working at his writing, little literary evidence for the period exists. He may have made numerous false starts and thrown the fragments away. One short piece of 1,500 words—a synopsis rather than a fully developed story—survives among his unsold manuscripts and may well belong to this time of apprenticeship. Called "The Last White Man," it is a racial fantasy, which present-day taste would find repugnant but which was quite in keeping with the climate of literary opinion in the 1920s.
The tale begins with a sullen-faced, sandy-haired giant awaiting an attack by a band of Negro warriors. Rifle and scimitar in hand, he ruminates on the downfall of the Caucasoid race. He knew that there had been a time when his race had ruled the world. "Then the decadence set in. . . . The ruling race forgot the art of war, forgot all except the search, for new pleasures, and in so doing, they descended to the depths of degeneracy. . . . And a new, strong race had risen."
The tale goes on to explain that the high birthrate of the Negroes I enabled them to overwhelm all the rest of mankind. Organized by an Arab chieftain, they had allied themselves with the Asians to exterminate the whites; then, turning on the Asians, they slaughtered them in turn.; The protagonist, the last non-Negro left on earth, reflects with grim satisfaction that: "the black race was doomed. They were destroyers, not' builders. When they slew the white men, progress ceased. The blacks reverted to savagery."9
At length the Negroes charge. The white man expends his last < cartridge and then rushes among them with his scimitar, until a flight of spears brings him down. A rising sun shines on an earth that bears a single race of man.
This undeveloped tale from Howard's early fumbling sets forth several themes that run through his fiction. For one thing, his protagonist is almost always a physical giant. For another, the author favors tales of universal, bloody destruction. Fascinated by swords, he seizes upon every chance to bring swords into play, even in modern settings where real conflicts would be settled by firearms.
Howard also emphasizes the idea that civilization breeds "decadence" or "degeneracy." In his time it was commonly held that the Roman Empire fell because the Romans had become "decadent." Modern historians interpret the facts differently. If "decadent" has any meaning, it refers to behavior of which the user disapproves. By this standard, when the Romans were at their most "decadent," they conquered the Mediterranean world; when they reformed their manners and morals, adopted Christianity, and abolished gladiatorial games, they were overcome by northern barbarians.
"The Last White Man" illustrates Howard's parochial attitude toward other races. Most of his ideas of non-Caucasoid peoples came from his acquaintances and from the popular fiction of the time—fiction, which we should call racist. The writers used ethnic stereotypes as their stock in trade, assuming that all Scots were thrifty, Irishmen funny, Germans arrogant, Jews avaricious, Negroes childish, Latins lecherous, and Orientals sinister. Howard's Negroes, for example, are all "ebony giants," even though—save for some groups like the Nilotic subrace of the Sudan—Negroes vary in stature much as any other race.
Moreover, Howard accepted the then common white American's belief that Negroes were persons of arrested mental development, incapable of creativity. At the same time, his view of the black race contained a subtle paradox. Influenced by the romantic primitivism of Kipling, Burroughs, and London, and holding a jaundiced view of civilization, he could not altogether condemn barbarians for being barbarians. In many ways he found barbarism admirable. In discussing French authors, he wrote, "Dumas has a virility lacking in other French writers—I attribute it to his negroid strain."10
Hence he often adhered to an indulgent if condescending view of
Africans and other barbarians. Toward American Indians he was some-! what more friendly. His mother's hatred of Indians and his Texan traditions based on the depredations of the Comanches were counter-; balanced by his readings of Indian lore and by his association with his^ part-Indian uncle. He thought the Indians had had a "raw deal" from; the whites and that they might have developed their own civilization if; left to themselves.11 Although he agreed with Lovecraft's rhapsodies on the nonexistent "Aryan race" and for a while accepted Lovecraft's disapproval of non-Nordic immigrants, Howard never displayed the frenzied hatred that Lovecraft at times developed for non-Anglo-Saxons, foreigners, and ethnics. I
Howard's view of the institution of slavery reflects his family background. As a descendant of slaveowners, he is complacent about the enslavement of blacks by whites, assuring a correspondent that "the slaves on my ancestors' plantations were never so misused." Yet he could' work up a fine head of steam over the enslavement of whites by blacks or Orientals: "I hate to think of white people being wiped out and enslaved by niggers."
Still, he does not exactly defend the institution of slavery. He says merely that "mistreatment of slaves is, and has been somewhat exaggerated." Yet, again, citing old Aunt Mary Bohannon, an ex-slave, he speaks of "tales of torture and unmistakable sadism that sicken me____"12
If a racist, Robert Howard was, by the standards of his time and place, a comparatively mild one. He noted the superior qualities of the industrious Bohemian immigrants who settled in Texas. He praised, individuals of various backgrounds whom he admired: certain Jewish prizefighters merited a kind word, as did the Negro cowboy who invented bulldogging. He thought ridiculous the county custom of forbidding] Negroes to spend the night within its borders.
While Howard's late story "Black Canaan" has gallant white men dashing about the Deep South to forestall "nigger" uprisings, elsewhere; he shows sympathy for the downtrodden blacks. In "The Dead Remem-' ber," his sympathies are with a Negro couple abused and murdered by a drunken, vicious cowboy. He even wrote a few stories with black heroes.
Over the years Howard, like Lovecraft, came to take a more impar-; tial view of the races of man. Although he never became a racial egalitarian, Howard was less ethnocentric than many of his contemporar-ips. If he did not mature further in such matters, the main reason was I hat, living in a county with a negligible nonwhite population, he had little contact with any nonwhites save for casual traffic with proletarian Negroes and Mexicans in his travels about the state.
In the summer of 1924, Robert Howard sent one of his early stories to a new magazine call
ed Weird Tales, a monthly periodical of fantasy and ncience fiction. This magazine, which replaced the earlier, defunct Thrill Hook, was the brainchild of Jacob C. Henneberger, publisher of the nuccessful College Humor. Weird Tales, which based its title on a line from I'oe, began with the issue of March 1923; but after a year it fell on such hard times that Henneberger lost control of it. The editorship passed from Kdwin F. Baird to a gaunt Shakespearean scholar named Farnsworth Wright, who suffered from Parkinson's disease. After a hiatus from April to November 1924, the magazine resumed publication and staggered along in shaky financial condition for over thirty years. It proved to be the chief outlet for the works of the fantasist from Cross Plains.
Howard's story "Spear and Fang" is scarcely more than a juvenilium—a caveman tale of the kind favored by many young writers of imaginative fiction. Such stories lie on the border between science (iction and historical fiction. Even the great H. G. Wells wrote at least two.13 A common theme of such stories is the supposed conflict between men of the Neanderthal race and those of the tall, aristocratic Cro-Magnon race, which overran Europe in the Pleistocene period, at the end of the fourth glaciation.
This, too, is the theme of "Spear and Fang." The story tells how the artistically gifted Cro-Magnard, Ga-nor, rescues his girl, A-aea, from the clutches of a Neanderthaler who has carried her off. The apish Neanderthaler "plunged forward on short, gnarled legs. He was covered with hair and his features were more hideous than an ape's because of the grotesque quality of man in them. Flat, flaring nostrils, retreating chin, fangs, no forehead whatever, great immensely long arms dangling from sloping, incredible shoulders. . . ,"14
In Howard's day, Neanderthal man was described in print as having m hunched, apelike posture and a shambling gait. This assumption derived from the first nearly complete Neanderthal skeleton found, that of an arthritic old man whose deformed bones lay in the cave of La
