Dark Valley Destiny

by Unknown

  A deep savagery seethed within Robert Howard. For example, hi rejoiced in the pain of an injured oil-field worker who had earlier arouse* his enmity. Sometimes, when he boxed with a friend, a "ruthless barba rism" took over and made him as dangerous as a wild animal.72 j He nearly always, however, kept his violent urges under control Only once that we know of did he use direct action against an offendei He and his parents, probably during one of their family trips by automat bile, went to dinner at some restaurant or boardinghouse. Their place ai table was back in a corner, and a man already eating had his chair il such a position that the Howards could not squeeze past. Robert politely asked the man to move his chair a little. Ignoring him, the man continuei to eat. Robert repeated his request with the same result. Then Robej picked up the chair, diner and all, dumped the man out on the floor, an waved his parents through. j

  Nevertheless, Robert harbored much kindness, too. He was gene] ous in his praise of the literary work of other struggling writers, eve; when he secretly thought little of their efforts. He often expressed coj cern for the financial strain imposed on his aging parents by a son wh had little to contribute to the family income. He admired his polish® Brownwood friends, sometimes with an extravagance that was unmet ited.

  Like most shy people, Robert was painfully aware of his socil shortcomings. While he early learned to cultivate the pose of not givin a damn for the approval of classmates, friends, or townsfolk, he wt extremely sensitive to their reactions to him. Everyone in town, he wrot<

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  "knew he was a jest, an eccentric." And he accused his Brownwood friends of laughing at him behind his back because of the way he dressed. But instead of protecting his ego by conforming in dress and manners, Howard flaunted his eccentricities like an unfurled flag in the foremost battle line. Except for the most formal occasions, his clothes were baggy and shabby, partly because he had little money to spend and partly because he refused his parents' offers to buy him new garments.

  Robert's adoption of working-class English was another affectation lliat further estranged him from the townspeople of Cross Plains. His frequent use of such sentences as "I don't reckon him and me will ever he the friends . . . you and me are" contrasts vividly with the genteel speech of his parents and his own excellent written English.

  While pent-up fury is the most constant and compelling feature of Howard's character, scarcely less remarkable is his acting ability. With hit* clear self-knowledge, he wrote in Post Oaks about himself in the guise nf Steve:

  But the basic honesty of Sebastian's nature prompted Steve to be as much like his real self as it was possible for a natural actor to be. After all, what was his real self, he who had acted so many parts in his life?73

  An example of his acting skill—that protective coloration for an exposed mid aching spirit—may be seen in the way that Robert, who had never kiHsed a girl before, copied the ubiquitous clinch-before—fade-out seen in nearly every movie of the time. Observant moviegoer that he was, he followed the actors' techniques so closely that the astonished recipient of the kisses asked: "What sort of bunch do you run with . . . anyhow? Are they all as wild as you?"74

  Despite this bit of clever acting to foil a cruel joke, Robert had a rather skewed and low opinion of women. This is not surprising, since he never dated a girl until he was over twenty-eight and, except for his mother, had had no contacts with the opposite sex. In Post Oaks he several times expresses a curious sort of gallantry mixed with condescension, an attitude with which he—and later his barbarian heroes—regarded the fair sex.

  He believed that women are weak: ". . . the co-eds were kowtowing us women will ever kowtow to the victor, right or wrong." "Women are the spoils of the victor, and they know it and are afraid." Women—and men, too—were unconsciously dishonest as they watched a football game, said Robert. Although they claimed to come to see a touchdown! like the ancient Romans in the amphitheaters who talked of the skill andf beauty of the chariot races, they really came to see bloodshed and deaths in battle. (

  Women, he said, use their charms to lure men for their own endl, Beneath the gray eyes of the girl he kissed, "lurked the hard calculation of all women's eyes when they rest on a man—any man." Robert said that he knew little of women and "did not know how to entertain them without making love to them—and who does?" Women are anxious and] nosy about things that are none of their business. Of a librarian he wrote that she "came running, anxious, womanlike, to poke her nose intdf something which did not concern her." '*

  After Robert had "proved himself a man" by kissing and then cuddling the young woman, one of the perpetrators of the trick asked whether he had become sexually excited during the contact. "She didn't get me hot at all," he answered truthfully. Then going on to say that th« girl was too young and frail, he added: "I pity her. . . . Weakness is tht most pitiful thing in the world, even the natural weakness of woman."7® In a final barbed thrust at womankind, he reflected that the "only reason a woman could give for [a man's] lack of interest in her was— another woman." Later, when he discovered that what had started as I joke nearly ended a friendship, he "detested the sight of women," particularly bold women "cutting their cow-like eyes" at men.

  In Post Oaks, Howard frankly reveals his strict code of morality, He "did not gamble, drink, and ogle ten-cent whores"; and like many a young man before him, he wondered if those who did so considered him a weakling because of his abstinence. Writing of himself at the agf of twenty-two, he said that his "innate virility was submerged by hit ambition and his love of his work. The cold white fire of his intellect . . . had burned his body free of desires and almost bare of flesh and muscle."

  Although he broke his nonalcoholic promise to his mother, madt some beer, and from time to time got drunk—"uproariously" accordin| to him, "mildly" according to his friends—Robert "despised a drunkefl man, and saw neither cleverness nor humor in his maunderings." If hi had no sympathy for a drunkard, "he despised and even hated a liber« tine, whom [sic] he was convinced was the lowest mortal living."76 While "his inferiority complex rode him with burning spurs," HoMf« ard was endowed with a modicum of self-assurance as far as his writing was concerned. As untaught and inexperienced as he knew himself to be at eighteen or twenty, he could write: "I'm not a great writer now, but I will be some day." A friend with writing ambitions once told Bob that he lacked fire, and in that same friend Bob sensed "there was power there, struggling and halting, groping for life and expression, chained down by ignorance . . ." It was this very poetic fire, this power to turn cold words into hot action, that Robert Howard, himself chained down by ignorance, managed all unaided to develop in the ensuing years. So fertile was his imagination that it was easier to start another story than to rewrite and revise tales that had met with no success. When he got going, "he was most prolific, hammering out, sometimes, several short stories and many rhymes in one day."

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  dark valley destiny

  Finally, in the closing section of Post Oaks and Sand Roughs, a section where the autobiographical narrative gives way to a labored and tapering ending, we find a stunning summation of Howard's life experience, as wistful as it is replete with self-knowledge. "Bewildered and baffled by life, full of a savagery he could not control and knew not where to direct, hurling his ferocity at random against what seemed to him to be obstacles, battered and beaten, never winning, never admitting defeat, doomed to go down that rough road forever. Was that to be [his] fate?"

  And like a counterpoint, he answers with a prisoner's bar-rattling cry: "I want to live awhile." But could he break free? Could this man, who was "a dreamer and a dweller in citadels of illusion," survive in a world that was "vibrant with reality?"77

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  IX. SINGER IN THE SHADOWS

  A silver scroll against a marble sky,

  A brooding idol hewn of crimson stone, A dying queen upon an ebon throne, An iron bird that rends the clouds on high, A golden lute whose echoes n
ever die—

  A thousand dreams that men have never known Spread mighty wings and fold me when alone Upon my couch in haunted sleep I lie.

  Then rending mists, the spurring whisper comes

  "Wake, dreamer, wake, your tryst with Life to keep!" Yet, waking, still a throb of phantom drums Comes hauntingly across the mystic deep; Their echo still my thrilling soul chord thrums— Which is the waking, then, and which the sleep?1

  Robert Howard proved to be a noisy neighbor. He continued to write in spasms, often sitting up all night or even for two nights in a row. In the warmer weather, when the windows were open, the all-night clatter, disturbed the Butlers' sleep. Mrs. Butler complained to Mrs. Howard, but the doctor's wife would brook no criticism of her son. She cut the Butlers from her list of friends, and the next time young LeeRoy Butler innocently dropped in for a chat with Robert, Hester Howard made him feel unwelcome.

  Robert continued to pound his log by day and type by night. When resting from these labors, he sat in the porch swing, bellowing out a song in a voice that wafted across most of Cross Plains. The song was usually Bye, Bye, Blackbird, to the tune of which he would improvise verses by the hour. When stimulated—whether by joy, or anger, or potent brew—«

  he would sometimes rush out of the house to run, jump, and yell.2

  Robert also did a lot of walking. He could be seen each weekday triding down the dusty road to the post office in the center of town, and many a time he carried home bags of groceries from the little market run by Annie Newton Davis and her husband. While this exercise built him up into a mass of muscle, it also increased the appetite he had developed in earlier years. He drank much milk, loved cheese, and had a special weakness for pancakes. Kate Merryman, who kept house for the Howards during Hester Howard's last illness, said: "I bet I've cooked a million hotcakes for him. He loved them for dinner, supper, or breakfast."3 But he showed an un-Texan preference for tea over coffee.

  As a result of this gargantuan appetite, Robert's weight rose to 200 pounds and sometimes topped that figure. His broad face grew round and a little jowly. In the fall of 1928 he boasted to Preece that, by Spartan Helf-denial, he had brought his weight down to 184 pounds for a boxing match.4 This struggle between his appetite and his hatred of obesity continued all his life.

  As opportunity and finances permitted, Robert began to collect weapons, some of which decorated the bathroom wall itself, while others were stashed with his guns in the long closet built into the west wall of the room. The collection eventually included a pair of foils, a cavalry naber of Civil War vintage, a Latin American machete, a boomerang, and several knives and daggers, one of which was a World War I trench knife with a triangular blade and a scalloped knuckle guard. He even obtained a long French double-curved bayonet of a type copied from the Turkish yataghan.5

  Robert and Lindsey took a pair of empty brass cartridge cases, taped them over the ends of the foils, and tried to fence without the fencer's usual mask, jacket, and gloves. Luckily no eyes were injured. Robert also fenced a little with Earl Baker. As far as we can tell, Robert Howard never knew an experienced fencer nor read a book on the art. Presumably he got his ideas about handling the foils from the movies in which Douglas Fairbanks, Sr., tried to put on a good show without neriously endangering the other actors.

  Viewed objectively Howard's life, during the years that followed his graduation from Howard Payne, may seem dull and uneventful. As the oil boom petered out, the town settled down to its former quiet, Godfearing ways. Changes in the weather, local births and deaths, the coming of paving on Main Street—these were the concerns of the townspeople of Cross Plains.

  But for Robert Howard the realities of the world around him were never so enthralling as his own dreams and illusions. Thus, for him the years spent in his tiny room, hunched over his typewriter, were rich and wonderful years of adventure and action. The bustle and clutter of the! oil-boom days, with huge derricks in backyards, brawling roustabouts on' the streets, oil magnates vying to snatch an oil lease from some less luckyj fellow, and painted girls in handsome dresses brazenly selling their! charms held no interest for him.

  Yet, where he could vest with drama some strange idea or event that! caught his fancy, his imagination seized upon it and made it scintillate! like fireworks across a velvet sky. To give an example: Two days before! Christmas 1927, in the town of Cisco, four robbers entered the First National Bank, the leader in a Santa Claus costume. A gun battle erupted during the holdup, and when the robbers escaped with hostages, they left the chief of police dead and seven citizens wounded. One bandit died; but after a three-day manhunt, the rest were captured, tried, and sentenced. One man was sentenced to life; one who tried to escape was lynched by aroused citizens; the leader was electrocuted. The president of the bank, in his memoir of the incident, says that while Helms, the leader, struggled as he was taken from his cell, he finally walked to the chair and submitted to execution in silence. Howard in his dramatized report wrote: "Helms .. . went to the chair, roaring and cursing blasphemies, fighting against his doom so terribly that the onlookers were appalled."6

  In the year that his father allotted him to establish himself as a writer, Robert Howard not only worked on Post Oaks and Sand Roughs, his unsuccessful autobiographical novel, but also saw both "The Dream Snake" and "Red Shadows" published in Weird Tales. "The Dream Snake" is one of Howard's least distinguished works, a simple formula piece of average acceptability. In it a man tells his friends about a recurrent dream of being pursued by a giant serpent in Africa. Each night the creature undulates through the long grass, coming ever closer. After his friends retire—as any Weird Tales reader could guess—the friends hear a shriek and rush in to find the doomed man crushed as though by a huge constrictor. And as every Howard enthusiast knows, giant snakes regularly slither into his stories and coil their hideous bodies around the sore-tried hero.

  "Red Shadows," originally called "Solomon Kane," is of more pith and moment. It introduces Solomon Kane, the upright hero of one of Howard's most popular series. Conceived while Howard was in high school, the fighting Puritan had lain fallow in his creator's brain for five years before he burst into print and bestowed fame on the twenty-two-year-old author.7

  Set in West Africa, like several of Howard's early tales, the story involves a murderer, witchcraft, a giant black who moves with catlike ease, and a gorilla. Here we see the beginnings of the distinctive prose style that makes much of Howard's later work hum with vitality. There are many elements of his verse in his prose: rhythm; alliteration; a kaleidoscope of color words richly sprinkled with names of gems; leaping, plunging verbs; memorable metaphors; and a generous use of personification—treating inanimate objects and impersonal forces as if they were living beings. When Kane first arrives in Africa, we hear the beat of the drums in the very words that describe the sound and message:

  Thrum, thrum, thrum came the ceaseless monotone of the drums: war and death (they said); blood and lust; human sacrifice and human feast! The soul of Africa (said the drums); the spirit of the jungle; the chant of the gods of outer darkness, the gods that roar and gibber, the gods men knew when dawns were young, beast-eyed, gaping-mouthed, huge-bellied, bloody-handed, the Black Gods (sang the drums).8

  Note that this pounding prose is reminiscent of the poetry of Edgar Allan Poe or Howard's contempoary Vachel Lindsay—a lush, dramatic style of writing, which a decade later fell into disfavor to be replaced by the Hemingwayesque style of short sentences, bald fact, and laconic terseness. But, fortunately, the Hemingway revolution was still in the future. For the kind of fantasies that Howard wrote, his robust, imaginative style is decidedly more suitable. The picture of black Africa, so eloquently evoked, is, we scarcely need to say, one which Howard gained from reading pulp fiction. It bears but slight resemblance to a modern anthropologist's view of native life.

  Between 1928 and 1931, Howard wrote nine Solomon Kane stories and three poems about him. Howard also started but apparently did not
finish four other stories. The tales became longer as he got used to the novelette length, which runs between ten and twenty thousand words, an advantageous length for stories of fantasy-adventure.

  One completed tale, "Blades of the Brotherhood," lacks the supernatural element of the other Kane stories. It is all swordplay. Although he hoped to sell it to one of the better-paying pulps, both Adventure and Argosy rejected it. The story appeared only in recent years, when it was published both in its original form and as rewritten by John Pocsik, who furnished a touch of the supernatural.

  Another Kane story, "The Right Hand of Doom," also failed to sell in Howard's lifetime. The plot revolves around the concept of a dead man's hand crawling spiderlike to take vengeance on the slayer of the deceased. The idea was a strong one when it was first introduced into fiction; but by the time Howard made use of it, it had become too familiar to stir up either horror or excitement.

  One of the best Kane novelettes, "The Hills of the Dead," appeared in Weird Tales for August 1930. In it Howard takes an unexpectedly benign attitude toward African Negroes. N'Longa, the fetish man whom Kane had met in "Red Shadows," joins forces with Kane to vanquish a tribe of immortal vampire-men who prey on nearby villagers. To accomplish this, N'Longa's soul leaves his body in a distant coastal village and takes possession of the body of Kran, a young lover of a native girl whom Kane had saved from a vampire. After the vampires have been destroyed, N'Longa returns Kran's body to him, remarking that Kane knows little of the ways of magic and adding: