by Unknown
Robert did not particularly mind the loss of his job. He was much more interested in the fact that Farnsworth Wright finally sent him eight dollars for "In the Forest of Villefere." An oil man offered to let him use a room in his office and set himself up as a public stenographer. There he typed letters for other oil men, some of whom went away without paying his modest fees.
In this small office, amid the bustle and clatter of the town-site boom, when business was slow, Robert wrote. He wrote of mist-shrouded lands and hate, lust, and death among strange men who walked like giants on the earth. At first he was timorous, fearing that he had lost whatever talent he had; but as his confidence grew, he began a work longer than a short story, a serial-length fantasy called "The Isle of the Eons." This is a tale of two men cast ashore on a Pacific island when their ship goes down in a storm.
Robert was well into "The Isle of the Eons" when he abruptly stopped work on it and wrote instead his first novelette: "Wolfshead." This 7,500-word tale is a sequel to "In the Forest of Villefere" and a more impressive work. The style is the same, and the time remains vaguely Renaissance or early Baroque. But Howard has a stronger, denser plot and a larger cast of characters, whom he makes more effort to characterize.
While de Montour, the narrator of "Villefere," appears in the story, this time the tale is told by another Frenchman, called simply Pierre. Pierre tells how, years before, he visited a Portuguese slave trader on the west coast of Africa, who had invited a host of European friends to a party in his lonely castle. After a series of shocking murders interrupt the party, Pierre learns that de Montour, one of the guests, is animated by the demon who once inhabited the body of the werewolf and has become a killer in spite of himself.
While the tale is lively and readable, it is not completely free of inconsistencies. We never learn, for example, how the wealthy trader fetched his highborn guests from Europe—a feat which in those days would have taken months and cost a fortune. Moreover, the rules for killing a werewolf without being haunted by its demon are somewhat clumsily contrived.
It is interesting to note that the story reflects the occult dabbling of Robert and his father. When de Montour tells of the curse upon him, he explains that, when the earth was young, grotesque, fiend-ridden beasts wandered over the wild land, and the forces of good warred with those of evil:
A strange beast, known as man, wandered among the other beasts, and since good or bad must have concrete form ere either accomplishes its desire, the spirits of good entered man. The fiends entered other beasts, reptiles and birds; and long and fiercely waged the age-old battle.46
Anyone with ears attuned to the occult world of the 1920s can hear echoes of the works of the queen of the occultists, Helena Petrovna Blavatsky, the founder of Theosophy. Madame Blavatsky, a fat Russian adventuress, launched her cult in the 1870s. She published her famous chef d'oeuvre, The Secret Doctrine, in 1888. This six-volume work, riddled with plagiarism and fakery, is based on a mishmash of contemporary scientific, pseudoscientific, mythological, and occult works, all cribbed without credit and used in a way that showed only skin-deep acquaintance with the subjects discussed. One quotation from The Book of Dzyan, an imaginary work from ancient Atlantis, reads in part:
The Wheel whirled for thirty crores more. . . . The great Chohans called the Lords of the Moon, of the Airy Bodies: "Bring forth Men, Men of your nature. . . Animals with bones, dragons of the deep, flying Sarpas were added to the creeping things. . . . The Lhas of the High, the Lhamayin of Below, came. They slew the Forms which were two- and four-faced. They fought the Goat-Men, the Dog-Headed Men, and the Men with fishes' bodies. . . .47
An echo of these pronouncements reverberates through the quoted passage from "Wolfshead," although the resemblance is not so close that we can be sure Howard actually read The Secret Doctrine. He may have read one of the books put out by Madame Blavatsky's followers. Or perhaps he borrowed the ideas of his occultist acquaintance from Cottonwood, S. T. Russell.
While Howard was intrigued by the occult, he never became a True Believer. Like H. P. Lovecraft and William Butler Yeats, he used occult doctrines as a springboard from which to develop imaginative fiction. In "Wolfshead," the tale that established him with the readers of Weird Tales clearly shows his growing command of the elements of plot and style. He built his theme around the doctrine that the human body evolved here on Earth, but the human mind or spirit immigrated hither from some other planet.
The forty dollars offered by Wright for "Wolfshead" made Howard feel, like a millionaire; but since the money was payable only on publication, and since typing letters for oil men was a nebulous source of income, in the early fall of 1925 Howard took a job in the Cross Plains Post Office. The job was short-lived. In Post Oaks his alter ego Steve claimed that the postmaster, whom Robert described in the most unflattering terms, played a scurvy trick on him. The man, he said, offered him a regular job at eighty dollars a month if he would work for one month without pay. After dutifully putting in his free month as an apprentice, he was told that the postmaster could afford to pay only forty dollars a month. At this Robert quit in indignation and added the skinflint to his enemies list.48
Next Robert took a job in the office of a natural gas company, but [ he soon ran afoul of this employer, too. He considered the man an "ignorant and arrogant swine" who demanded "bootlapping" from his subordinates. Howard apparently went to the opposite extreme. Considering that he was bound to be fired anyway, he adopted "a swaggering and insolent attitude which was intolerable." When summoned to his boss's desk by the sound of a bell, he remarked to his co-workers in a tone his employer could not fail to hear: "I wonder what that Goddamned son of a bitch wants now?" As he anticipated, he was soon dismissed. Although the reason given was a slump in business, this employer also joined the lengthening list of lifelong enemies.49
As autumn changed her russet dress for wintry brown, Robert was back at home typing away. He could have found work as a laborer in the oil fields, but his mother discouraged it. She "objected to the company in which he would be thrown" and dreaded having her slender nineteen-year-old son undertake such heavy labor. Robert, by now aware I hat he would have little chance for success in any but his chosen field of writing, used her objections as an excuse for staying home, although he was still convinced that he had a weak heart.50
Back at his own desk, Robert found it hard to concentrate. Some stories sent to Weird Tales came back pink-ticketed. Others, started in the hot fire of enthusiasm, resisted his efforts to hammer them into completion. From this period dates much of Howard's poetry, but even ill is did not come easily. Poems and stories, long and short, were relumed "with soul-killing regularity."51
Sometimes he would write steadily for days with scarcely any time out for food or sleep; at other times he called himself "lazy" and could not bring himself to face the typewriter. Only another writer can guess I he heights of hope and the depths of despair he must have felt in the months that he clung precariously to the lowest rung of the slippery ladder of success.
That winter of 1925-26 Howard made another try at finishing his serial, "The Isle of the Eons." Contrary to his usual practice of sending nu editor the first—and only—draft of the manuscript, he wrote three drafts before he gave the project up. The fragmentary story was finally published in 1979 in a paperback collection, The Gods of Bal-Sagoth.
It is easy to see why he could not finish the tale, though the part lie did write is lively enough. There are far too many menaces and complications for a single story to carry. The story begins with two shipwrecked men who discover a cave at the border of a beach. Therein I* an octopus squilching about outside its watery element, a giant statue of an ape-man, which comes to life at night, and a scroll of parchment covered with cryptic runes of an ancient time. As if these elements were not enough, the men suffer hallucinations, feel an urge to kill each other, light with hairy beings in the forest above the cave, try to elude the walking statue, and hear an evil and mysterious
piping.
This plethora of plot elements show the danger of starting a story without a clear idea of whither it is going. In addition they shed light on Robert Howard's reading. One of the protagonists in the story discovers that the parchment is a memoir of a priest-sorcerer of Mu, telling of the downfall and submergence of that mythical continent. Since James Churchward was the first to apply the name "Mu" to an imaginary Pacific dark valley destiny i
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continent, in his 1926 book The Lost Continent of Mu, we can be sure that Howard read this book while he was working on "The Isle of th< Eons."52
It seems likely that Howard also read Lewis Spence's Atlantis ii America, published in 1925. During the two previous decades, Spencei a Scottish mythologist, published books on the mythologies of varioui peoples. He also wrote several Atlantist books—full of errors in the lighi of modern knowledge but relatively sane and sober when compared wit} most speculations about a sunken continent. In Atlantis in America^ Spence claimed that the Cro-Magnard people of postglacial Europe wen Atlanteans driven from their island home by the great subsidence. On< of Howard's characters mentions this hypothesis.
During that winter of lonely struggle to write amid the endless, disheart ening rejection slips, there were some bright moments for the younj author. He was pleased to receive a letter from the editor of Adventuri giving advice along with the notice of rejection. Among these helpfu comments was: "You have piled up so many exciting incidents that clos< to the end my mind was completely jumbled."53
He also visited Fowler Gafford on occasion and asked him to critij cize his manuscripts. It was rather like the lame leading the blind, bij for a young writer without any professional training, even this advici from a man who had sold a single story was better than none.
Robert had, moreover, made his peace with his two Brownwoot friends. After Christmas 1925, he made plans to visit Clyde Smith an< Truett Vinson in order to introduce them to his new pen pal, a youn| man of literary tastes: Herbert Klatt, the son of an oil driller. Howari hitchhiked to Brownwood to meet his friends; then the three drove th forty miles to pick up Klatt, who was to come from his home town bj train. The boys were somewhat disappointed to find Klatt, not the sc phisticated man of the world they expected, but a rustic youth with German accent, who had brought a huge homemade sausage along ai a treat.
The four drove to the unoccupied ranch house of Smith's unci* There the three friends got gloriously drunk, ruining a borrowed phon< graph and terrifying the nondrinking Klatt. The next day, with splittin headaches, they drove back to Brownwood in a snowstorm. Ever aftei
Robert remembered this party as the greatest orgy of his life. Years later he was still describing it with relish.54
The year 1926 got off to a good start. Robert received a letter saying that "Wolfshead" would be featured in the cover painting for the April issue of Weird Tales. Once more his heart leaped like a salmon; now surely he had made it and the road would be smooth henceforth. But shortly there followed another letter from Wright, reporting that the manuscript had disappeared and asking Howard to send the carbon copy forthwith.
Robert was thunderstruck. He had no carbon copy. Quick-witted in an emergency, he dispatched a telegram stating that his carbon copy was incomplete and that he would complete it at once and mail it promptly. Working all night, he rewrote the tale and sent it off. At this juncture he received another letter saying that the missing copy had turned up, all but the first page, and this Wright would take from the second manuscript. To repay the author for the extra throat-drying work, he would receive fifty dollars instead of the agreed-upon forty dollars. Robert felt the gods were being kind.
As spring brought a carpet of fresh field flowers to the land, Robert received the galley proofs of "Wolfshead." Reading the printed text, he was appalled by the story's errors and infelicities. Despondent again, he accepted an offer of a job from the manager of the Cross Plains Drug Store, a store owned by Dr. Randolph Robertson and run by one of his sons. The work was very hard. Howard was on duty every day of the week, with no time off, no vacations, from about nine-thirty each morning until one or two in the small, dark hours of night. He rushed to serve ice cream all day; and when the shop was at its busiest at night, the manager, fearful of the raucous crowd, ducked out, leaving Howard to fill orders, mix syrups, tend the cash register, sell patent medicines, and cope with surly customers who were spoiling for a fight.55
Robert's disposition was soured further by the Robertsons' nagging refrain that he was too generous with the ice cream, the roughnecks' demand for larger portions, and the realization that he was held in contempt by the giants who clambered about on eighty-foot rigs all day and at night demanded his attention. As ever, hate bubbled up inside him like lava in the crater of a volcano, ready to flow out as molten fury.
The long hours and stress hammered at Howard's health. His weight dropped from 165 to 151 pounds; he went to bed exhausted and woke up fatigued. There was no time to write—yet, for him creative writing was the internal gyroscope that kept his body and spirit on an even keel. He caught the flu, stayed in bed a week, and dragged himself back "in a state bordering on homocidal insanity." He himself reports that he was "as dangerous as a cornered wolf."56
That was the night when an oil worker-cim -pugilist tucked a magazine into his shirt, daring the lone soda jerk to stop the theft. He came to the counter and demanded a glass of water. Robert's self-control snapped; the volcano of his wrath erupted. Snatching up a five-pronged ice pick, he prepared to do murder. He addressed the man in a dangerously quiet voice: "Are you pregnant?" and pointed to the bulge in his shirt. Taken by surprise, the man guffawed, and the tension was released. But Robert knew how near he had come to killing or being killed.
Robert kept the drugstore job all through the summer in spite of his fatigue and repressed anger. While he had no time for visiting his literary friends, he did get to know one or two of the more genial roustabouts who frequented the drugstore. One turned out to be a boxer, and on a scorching summer night after the store closed, he wandered down to the ice house where some of the workers gathered at a makeshift clubhouse. There, in a windowless room, with a few loungers to cheer them on, Robert and the migrant worker staged a fight. Sweaty, bruised, and bloody, with the room reeling crazily around him in his vertigo, Robert felt not the blows but a heady uplifting of the spirit that he never forgot. Later he wrote that he "was a dreamer and a dweller in citadels of illusion, but tonight he had tasted Life, red, material, ferocious. And the tang was good."
As summer drifted lazily into autumn, Robert lent a receptive if reluctant ear to his parents' proposal that he return to Brownwood and take the entire bookkeeping course in the Commercial School of Howard Payne. It was not that bookkeeping attracted him, but he had to prepare himself to do something other than jerk sodas for the rest of his life.
Robert and his father made a pact: Robert would take the bookkeeping course, get his diploma, and then make one last effort to support himself by writing. If he should not succeed in a twelvemonth, he would give up writing for good and seek a job as a bookkeeper. To some of
Howard's admirers, it may seem tragically insensitive of the senior Howards to force their son to train for a career in which he had no nptitude or interest instead of providing him with college courses to enhance his writing skill and knowledge of publishing.
Robert, however, had already rejected college and had not yet changed his mind on the subject. Two years later he was still declaring: "I'm prejudiced against all colleges—to Hell with them." Up to that point, his literary career had shown no evidence that he could support himself by writing. Sometime between 1928 and 1933 he began to alter his views about college, but this occurred too late to affect the course of his life.57
At any rate, since Lindsey Tyson was also going back to Howard I'ayne, the two young men made arrangements to room together again, this time at the home of a family named Powell, and to take their meals til a boardinghouse a
cross the street. It was during this school term that Robert, while walking in his sleep, plunged out of a ground-floor window. Thereafter, he regularly tied his big toe to the bedpost to jerk himself «wake should he start to wander unawares.
Robert signed up for courses in bookkeeping, commercial law, business English, and business arithmetic. He discovered to his relief that the bookkeeping course was being given by the same kindly old man who had taught him shorthand.
Following Tyson's example, Robert resumed his routine of bodybuilding and weight-lifting exercises, and these he continued for the rest of his life. Occasionally he boxed. He became as eager a prizefight fan ah he was a football enthusiast. He particularly admired a promising young middleweight named Arthur "Kid" Dula and predicted that Dula would become world middleweight champion. But in this he was too sanguine; Dula achieved no more than a local reputation.
An epidemic of measles swept through Brownwood in the fall of 1926. The Powells' baby girl caught the virus and eventually died. When the elder Howards heard of the visitation, they rushed down to Brownwood lo rescue Robert, who had never had the disease. But Robert did not want to go home. In a rare, flaming rebellion against his parents' wishes, lie went to the bathroom used by the sick child, drank out of her glass, mid buried his face in her towel, hoping no doubt to be quarantined. But
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his parents took him home anyway; and presently he came down wit a severe case of measles, which confined him for two months. Thus wa his attempt to break away from parental domination thwarted, and thu did he become even more dependent on his parents' ministrations.
In this whole episode and in the events that followed it, we see tha Howard, while able to appraise himself coolly, was not able to tak appropriate action based on that appraisal. j
Later Robert tried to persuade the bursar's office at Howard Payn either to refund his fall tuition or to credit it against a second term. Th college refused. He had to start the course over at midyear, payin another tuition fee. He entered upon the spring term in a leisurelj fashion, neglecting his studies, spending most of his time at the movie or in playing seven-up with his fellow boarders, and writing poetry. Lat« he reported that one of his reasons for returning to college was thi college was easier than work.58 j
