Dark Valley Destiny

by Unknown

  Finally, Standing's confession of the uncontrollable temper that has brought him to his present pass must have struck an iron bell in Robert Howard's inmost being. Standing says: . . ."the snarl of my anger was blended with the snarls of beasts more ancient than the mountains, and the vocal madness of my child hysteria, with all the red of its wrath, was chorded with the insensate cries of beasts. . . ." Robert Howard was aware that he, too, had a murderous temper, so much so that he actively feared that he might some day kill somebody in a fit of rage. In describing a drugstore job Steve held in 1926, Robert writes of his alter ego:

  He had been keyed up for murder, swift and without warning, had been frozen to such a point that the reaction was slow in setting in. And when it did come, it left him with the firm conviction that if he worked very much longer at this hellish job, he would, in a moment of semi-insanity, either kill or be killed.35

  But this was later.

  Lindsey Tyson dropped out of college after the Thanksgiving holidays, and Robert found himself with a new roommate, a young man with whom he was merely on terms of mutual tolerance. The new roommate staged poker and crap games in the room while Robert was trying to sleep and snored like a sawmill when at last he did retire.

  After Lindsey's departure from Brownwood, Robert had no sparring partner with whom to practice boxing. Although Tyson's enthusiasm still inspired Robert to continue to lift weights and to take long walks, he found it harder to keep up his exercises. As his lean, spare body grew harder, his unquiet spirit yearned for someone to box with, because battering another human being was a mode of expression with him. We see his boxing as an acceptable way of working off some of the accumulated fury that seethed within him and that, from time to time, erupted like a volcano, spilling its hot hate over bosses and innocent bystanders.

  To add to his deprivations, Robert was hungry all the time. Having the voracious appetite of an adolescent, he could never seem to get enough to eat. He had practically no money, since his parents gave him no allowance, and he was too shy to ask his landlady for extras between meals. One day he found a dime in the pocket of an old pair of pants and feasted on two apricot tarts from the local pastry shop. Years later he remembered those tarts.36

  Robert Howard, however, could always find consolation at the keys of his typewriter. When he was not practicing typing, he wrote stories. That autumn of 1924, he turned out several boxing and Western tales, confident that, since he was now an "established writer," whatever he wrote would sell. When all returned with small pink slips, he could not imagine what was wrong.

  He hesitated to try Weird Tales again so soon after his first acceptance; but as other markets proved obdurate, he undertook a second tale of primitive life, laid in Bronze Age Britain. In "The Lost Race," the Briton Cororuc, a blond giant of a man, is returning from a visit to a Cornish tribe when he spies a wolf being mauled by a panther. After he saves the wolf, the creature vanishes. Later he is captured by a band of dwarfish Picts, whose five-hundred-year-old shaman plans to have Cororuc burned at the stake in retaliation for ancient wrongs. Another Pict, wrapped in a wolf's skin, arrives just in time to save the blond giant who had earlier rescued him and sends him on his way laden with gifts.

  Even as published in its revised form, "The Lost Race" is amateurish. It assumes that a clear-eyed man in daylight could mistake a man in a wolfskin for a genuine wolf. Cororuc bears a shield of buffalo hide, although no animal of that species had existed in Britain for thousands of years. And the fauna includes a panther.

  Howard loved panthers and introduced them into many of his stories. It is unclear what sort of animal he had in mind, for the term may be applied to several of the larger cats—the leopard, the cheetah, and the American puma or cougar. Howard's probable source for this ubiquitous beast is the "black panther" of Kipling's Jungle Books, for Howard was a great admirer of the works of Kipling. Be that as it may, Britain has harbored no such feline since the Pleistocene. Had the eighteen-year-old writer spent a little time in research, his tale would have had a louder ring of truth. But this he had yet to learn.

  Howard's next tale was "The Hyena," a short first-person fiction set in the East Africa that Robert recreated from his reading. The hero, one of Howard's many "Steves," is a young American visiting at a Boer ranch. As the story develops, we detect many of the plot elements that later became identified with Robert Howard's works. We see, too, some of the author's feelings and beliefs, which—as with all writers—are woven into the fabric of the tale.

  The young hero early acquires a violent hatred of a local fetish man, Senecoza. Such hates, for trivial causes or none, came easily to Robert Howard, and he readily attributed such passions to his characters. Years later E. Hoffmann Price found Howard to be "A man of strange, whimsical, bitter and utterly illogical resentments and hatreds and enmities and grudges." Howard took a perverse pride in his rancorousness, writing of himself (in the guise of Steve Costigan) as "a black Celt, and there is no race which cherishes a hate longer."37

  The Steve of "The Hyena" explains his hatred for the abhorred native thus:

  Because I came from Virginia, race instinct and prejudice were strong in me, and doubtless the feeling of inferiority which Senecoza inspired in me had a great deal to do with my antipathy for him.38

  Though a scoundrel, Senecoza is tall, magnificently built, dignified, and courteous. Here we see Howard's mixed racial feelings clearly expressed: on one hand, a white Southerner's traditional hostility toward the lesser breeds whenever they step out of their servile roles; on the other, a grudging acknowledgment of the barbarian's physical and personal superiority. Admiration for the barbarian—or Howard's idea of the barbarian —is a theme that runs through nearly every story and through his every waking thought.

  The hero also expresses Robert's deep feeling for wildlife. When riding through the veldt, the American visitor refrains from shooting because "it seemed to me a shame to shoot so many things. A bush antelope would bound up in front of me and race away, and I would sit watching him . . . my rifle lying idle across my saddle-horn."39

  Finally, Robert introduces one of those magical elements that so enliven his later stories. As if violence in the tale were not enough, the fetish man turns out to be a were-hyena. This, added to chases, shootings, and a knife duel between the main protagonists, keeps the action moving in the manner for which Howard is justly praised.

  Christmas vacation arrived. All the boarders left for home except Howard, who gallantly practiced his typing and shorthand against the final examinations. His roommate having gone with the rest, Howard occupied the upstairs room alone in a nearly empty house, and

  ... all his old horror of upstairs rooms returned in full force. Closets opened in the rooms, each letting into the attic, and it froze [his] blood to lie there in the darkness and silence and reflect that a man, or anything, could make an ingress and prowl all over the house without coming into the open. Time and again he bounded from his bed, to stand shivering in the cold dark, his heart in his mouth and his muscles clenched in knots of iron, as he awaited the attack of some ghostly marauder.40

  For several days a blizzard delayed the older Howards' coming to pick up their son. When he finally reached home, he was delighted to find a letter from Wright, accepting "The Hyena" and promising twenty-five dollars for it on publication. The letter also urged changes in "The Lost Race" before Weird Tales would take it.

  Like many writers, Howard disliked the idea of revising his work. When he finished a story, he felt he was through with it and was eager to start another.41 But at length he undertook the revision, sent the altered story off, and added two others. The latter Wright rejected, but he accepted "The Lost Race," promising thirty dollars on publication. Robert's hopes rose like a hot-air balloon.

  He confided to his mother that he could scarcely believe he was actually selling his stories. When she cautioned him that he had a long row to hoe before he was truly established, he brushed the warning aside. "With the
start I got, I'd be a dub if I didn't succeed in a few years. . . . But the first story is the hardest, and after that it's comparatively easy.. . . All the great ones amounted to something by the time they was |sic] twenty."42

  Fired by the sale of three stories, Robert sought no job but remained at home, writing furiously. He tried stories on several markets other than Weird Tales; when they were rejected, he sent five others to Wright, with no better success. In some of his letters of rejection, Farnsworth Wright took the trouble to point out flaws in style or plot, and this the young, untutored author accepted with negligible grace, believing the faults to be minor.

  A short werewolf tale set in medieval France was Howard's next

  story. The plot of "In the Forest of Villefere" is simple: the narrator, walking through the woods, meets a stranger who, when the moon rides high, turns into a wolf and attacks him. The tale has its shortcomings^ The nature of the sinister stranger is glaringly obvious from the start; in fact, he even bears the name "Lee Loup." In addition the authoi experimented, not too successfully, with slightly archaized English^ Nonetheless, Wright called the story a "gem" and promised eight dollars upon publication.

  For several weeks, Howard took a respite from his typewriter. He visited R. Fowler Gafford, a slightly older playmate from his Cross Cut days. Gafford had been a farm boy who was crippled by a hip disease and now made a living as a real estate agent. He, too, had literary ambitions and had once sold a story to a confessions magazine; but, although his work had strength and power, it was rendered unsalable by impossibly poor grammar, spelling, and diction. Still, he was somebody to talk shop with, and so Robert renewed his acquaintance, despite Mrs. Howard's disapproval. ;

  Howard now had four acceptances from Weird Tales but had received no money whatsoever. To earn a little ready cash, he took a part-time job as a stringer on several papers in Texas and Oklahoma, | agreeing to furnish oil-field news on a regular basis. He pestered oil-j company officials and accosted oil workers on the street to glean materiajj for his weekly columns. He made around twenty-five dollars a month.J

  f

  At last, in June of 1925, "Spear and Fang" appeared in the July issue] of Weird Tales. In the once-in-a-lifetime euphoria of seeing his first; by-line in a professional magazine, Howard bought several copies and gave them to his friends. This policy, he soon found, was a mistake, for people came to expect him to provide them with copies of every issued containing one of his stories, a practice bound to wipe out his meager profits. After the August issue, in which "In the Forest of Villefere"; appeared, no more Howard stories were published in 1925. His total earnings from his literary work for the year were, therefore, twenty-four dollars.

  About the time that "Spear and Fang" hit the stands, his discouraging shortage of cash drove Robert to take another salaried job. This time , he became an assistant to an oil geologist at three dollars a day, hauling

  a stadia rod to areas indicated and holding it upright while his employer sighted on it with a transit. Howard later said that he was no good at this job, being as likely as not to take the rod up the wrong hill; but this evaluation smacks of an excess of modesty. He liked the outdoor nature of the work; the heavy boots he bought to fend off rattlesnakes, however, proved to be too large. As a result, during the whole two months of surveying, he was plagued by bleeding blisters.

  The geologist, "a slow, good-natured Easterner who feared rattlesnakes and occasionally told a joke," was patient with his assistant's mistakes. This, Robert said, was a good thing, because his "quick, passionate nature made him restless of any restraint, and the lonely surroundings in which they usually worked made him more untamed, more leaning to violence, than ever."43

  Robert wrote that he asked his boss about many of his techniques but that he could never remember the oral explanations. This inability to profit from oral instruction contrasts markedly with the extreme eye-mindedness that permitted him to memorize a whole printed page in a matter of seconds. This is not a unique mental organization. Parents of children who never seem to follow oral commands may do well to offer their young written directions instead of punishments.

  Although Robert disliked this job less than any other he held, one scorching day he collapsed from heat exhaustion. This episode led him to believe that he had a heart defect, an erroneous conclusion in the light of his medical records; but he was glad when early in August the geologist completed his survey and departed.

  A short time later, he took a job as a stenographer in a law office specializing in oil leases. Although the pay—thirty dollars the first month—was a fraction of what he had made lugging the stadia rod, he was lured by promises of monthly increases as his work improved. But, ns he reports, he was an inefficient stenographer, absentminded and untidy. He approached this job, as he did every new job, afraid that he could not measure up; then, as he became familiar with it, he viewed it with loathing and did not hesitate to let his employer know just how he Celt.

  He spent long evenings writing his oil-news columns, another task with which he was disenchanted, and found he had no time at all for creative writing. To make matters worse, his old typewriter broke down completely, and he had to spend all the money he had saved to buy a new one. He was lonely. Lindsey Tyson now moved in another crowd; and a rare visit from his Brownwood friends, Truett Vinson and Clyde Smith—the latter full of reminiscences of his recent tour of the Old South—left him depressed.

  One day several oil promoters with offices in the building where Robert worked invited him in for a glass of beer. He had once promised his mother never to drink alcoholic beverages; but on this occasion she; was out of town, and Robert found it easier to go along with the friendly offers than to keep his childhood promise. Sipping the brew hesitantly, he found it pleasant and refreshing. Soon he was drinking occasional bottles of beer and even buying some of the fine whiskey imported into the town by ever-busy bootleggers.

  As the weeks went by and his mother continued her visit away from home, Robert learned the formula for making beer and brewed a quantity in his family kitchen. His father did not approve, but neither did he forbid the unaccustomed activity. And the twinges of conscience that had assailed Robert faded as he assured himself that his mother had been unreasonable to extract the promise from him.

  Later Robert did get "uproariously drunk" on several occasions; then, swinging to the opposite extreme as was his wont in so many situations, he gave up drinking altogether for a time. Finally, he reports that, while he detested the taste of all drinks except beer, he spent from three to four dollars a month on a regular basis for "wine elixir, alcoholic tonics, beer, and, occasionally, bootleg whiskey. . . . When he drank, hei got terrifically drunk, but between these debauches he seldom touched liquor of any kind."44

  The midsummer heat made dust devils dance on the unpaved roads of Cross Plains. Business was slow. Robert decided to take a few days ofl and go to Brownwood to see Clyde Smith and Truett Vinson, who ha( a summer job as a bookkeeper. Bob, whose sensitivity enabled him tc read the intentions and reactions of people he knew from a shadow o: a smile or a flip of a wrist, sensed that his friend Clyde planned to play a trick on him to humiliate him in some way. He was, therefore, preparec when his friend drove him to the home of a young girl and invited hei to go on a short drive with them. As all three of them sat in the fronl seat, the girl suddenly asked: "Why are you afraid of women?" She snuggled close to him, her eyes inviting.

  Bob caught a glimpse of Clyde's half-smile, perceived the trick, and with a sardonic grin kissed the girl. Though appalled at his own temerity —it was the first time he had ever kissed a girl—he was determined not to let his friend embarrass him. Since the girl seemed not to mind and Clyde seemed amused, Bob kept his arm around her throughout the ride and showered her with kisses.

  Later Smith and Vinson confessed that they had planned to have the girl bestow endearments on Bob to discomfit him. But he had turned the tables on them. In fact, Clyde's girl found Bob a romantic
figure, and she made this all too plain.

  After Robert returned to Cross Plains, letters from Brownwood revealed that his friends thought Bob had taken too many liberties with another fellow's girl. The exchange grew alternately angry and apologetic. While they finally agreed to forget the whole thing, Bob's next visit to Brownwood stirred up more controversy. Bob went with Clyde to the public library to display his extraordinary skill at leafing rapidly through a book and accurately photographing each page on his mind. But then he saw a young woman across the room who resembled the recipient of his first kiss. Brimming with embarrassment and unwilling to meet her, Bob clambered out of a window and dropped to the lawn. Clyde's hilarious laughter brought the librarian on the run, and her disapproving remarks compounded Bob's discomfiture.

  Nursing his wounded pride, Robert returned to Cross Plains, got drunk, and discovered the next morning that another oil boom had swept into town. Oil workers and magnates strutted along Main Street. The wells lay under the very buildings; one derrick operated in the front yard of the First Baptist Church. Movable spudders towered up in many backyards.

  Although acquaintances told him here was great material for a story, Robert despised the promoters and swaggering roughnecks and "hated them all too much to write about them."45 The town was jammed; and with his mother still away Robert ate in restaurants and developed indigestion.

  He had already given up reporting on oil-field matters, saying quite correctly that he would never make a good reporter, who had to be thick-skinned enough to ask questions of hostile strangers and not react to their indifference with flaming anger. Now he lost his stenographic job. The work load grew heavy as oil leases multiplied, and his employers found a girl who could do the work better and more cheaply—and, we may guess, present less of a personality problem.