Dark Valley Destiny

by Unknown

  There is one truly happy poem of childhood, quoted as a heading p Chapter VI. And in one poem—just one—the young poet sets forth If'1 less than lethal way to escape from the trials and confinement of a Pookkeeper's job. In Emancipation the miserable underling gloats over his newly gained freedom: i

  But I've told the boss he can go to Hell. ^ I left him singing his hymn of Hate—

  And I'm headed West on a Red Ball freight!49

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  " This life-loving alternative to suicide—riding the rails as a hobo— || also the solution selected by Steve Costigan, Howard's alter ego in |rOtt Oaks and Sand Roughs. But a realistic alternative for Robert himself

  twas not. A sheltered dreamer, brought up in an environment of othering protection and poor at interpersonal relations, could not have irvived the bufferings of weather, poverty, and sharp-eyed fellow hobos.

  Much more real to Robert Howard were the demons and goblins )m the depths of hell, the strange and evil creatures from other worlds, the hate-filled, unregenerate humanity—the larcenous oil men, the prostitutes, and the witches who passed as fellow mortals along the

  streets of Cross Plains. These "swinish" creatures, as he called them, started to gather more than ten years before that fateful dawn of Junr 11,1936. And stamping their cloven hooves and taloned feet, they began to beat out a measured funeral march from which the haunted man found no avenue of escape and sought none. He had already turned his back on life a decade or so earlier, when he penned Lines Written in the Realization That I Must Die:

  Let my name fade from the printed pages;

  Dreams and visions are growing pale,

  Twilight gathers and none can save me.

  Well and well, for I would not stay:50

  Some of Robert Howard's friends, including Lovecraft, have said that Howard was primarily a poet. We disagree. We consider him a great storyteller first and foremost, and one who made his prose soar at time* because he brought poetry to it. Uneven as are his poems and his prose, some of the great passages in his fiction possess the color, the imagery, the verve, the precision of language, and the rhythm that give them a dimension akin to poetry.

  At times his sentences have the simple but sustained rhythmic roll that we associate with the King James Bible, possibly because in childhood his parents often read to him from the Old Testament. Or possibly that marvelous, fluid rhythm descended to him through earlier generations of Ervins and Howards, who came from the Southeast bringing with them to Texas some of the lilting speech patterns of the seventeenth century Scotch-Irish settlers. Howard liked to say: "All Celts are poets," and although he was not so pure a Celt as he wished to believe, some of the fine old speech rhythms may have come down to him through hi* storytelling Howard grandmother.

  Whether the rich fabric of Howard's poetry had its origin in exotic phrases from many earlier pens, or whether he owed his intensity to the singing rhythms of Scottish and Irish speech, he was entirely original in his modes of perception. The world he saw was not the world we know or want to know, save as a momentary escape into the fantastic. Yet, we stand amazed at the sheer power of his imagery. The iron harp of Conan'h creator, which echoes the fiend-haunted depths of Howard's troubled spirit, can also reverberate to bear aloft the sparkling lines "that set the stars on fire."51

  X. SERPENTS, SWORDS, AND SUPERMEN

  The stars beat up from the shadowy sea, The caves of the coral and pearl, And the night is afire with a red desire For the loins of a golden girl.

  You have left your girdle upon the beach, And you wade from the pulsing land, And the hot tide darts to your secret parts That have known one lover's hand.1

  By spring of 1930, Robert Howard's stories were being accepted with encouraging frequency. He felt that he could now afford to buy something he had long desired: a horse. Since the death of Patches, he had regretted having no animal of his own.

  The horse, which he installed in the backyard barn, was a steeldust mare, a medium-sized mouse-colored animal of Mexican breed resembling the Western mustang. People remember Gypsy as a good-looking horse and Robert as a regular rider during the time he owned her. He rode her to visit people in and around Cross Plains and took long outings into the country. He later claimed that one of his enemies tried to kill him by slicing a stirrup leather almost through so that when he put his weight on the stirrup, the strap would break and cause him to fall.2

  Then, early in 1931, Gypsy vanished. Howard probably sold her. We do not know why, but we can guess. Owning a horse without a groom to handle the chores is time-consuming, and Howard's time was increasingly preempted by his writing. The animal must be fed, watered, brushed, and exercised, and the owner must muck out the stable. Moreover, the Howards either had or soon acquired a cow, a Guernsey named Delhi,3 and there may have been a problem about keeping two animals at once in a tiny bam that also served as the doctor's garage. Besides, as the year progressed, Howard began to travel more, leaving someone else to tend the animals.

  Anyway, Howard got rid of Gypsy, though not without a pang. Years later, when he drove past a lot in which a similar horse was grazing, he would tell his companion that his horse looked like that. Thereafter he satisfied his longing for animal friends by feeding stray cats, until a dozen felines had taken up residence in or around the Howard house and barn. Robert even trained some of them to sit up and receive a stream of milk squirted from Delhi's teats as he milked her.4

  At that time Robert, then aged twenty-four, tried to correct the fact that he had no girl. His friends were either dating or had already married. Tevis Clyde Smith had wed Echla Laxon in 1927, although that union proved ephemeral. For years Robert had excused his misogyny by assuring people that no one would want to look at a big hulk of a man like him. Besides, he preferred his freedom, he said, quoting Kipling:

  Down to Gehenna or up to the Throne,

  He travels the fastest who travels alone.5

  If, as seems probable, Robert had never touched a girl except for the one little necking party staged to best his friends, he nevertheless entertained lively fancies about the fair sex. Many of his poems, like that at the head of this chapter, prove the point.

  Robert Howard set his sights on Ruth Baum, the pretty blond daughter of a leading Cross Plains family who, like Hester Howard, were Methodists. Ruth attended Sunday school and belonged to the Epworth League, the young people's auxiliary of the Methodist Church. Robert joined both organizations, writing Booth Mooney that he did so in hopes of getting to know the girl better. Soon he was elected vice-president of the Sunday-school class.

  The members of The Junto were horrified. They deemed themselves sophisticated people who, while not atheists, did not take their elders' piety seriously. And here was Bob, their star litterateur, freethinker, and iconoclast, clasped to the bosom of a highly respectable Protestant denomination. They need not have worried. Robert's con-

  Ucts with Ruth Baum never got beyond passing the time of day. He never said anything personal to her and never worked up the courage to ask her for a date. As Ruth recalled: "He was very shy; but then so !/Was I at the time."6

  I Moreover, the discussions in the Epworth League and Sunday-pchool class failed to capture Robert's interest. With every week his fboredom grew more excruciating. He told Preece: "It's nothing but a lot |of infernal tripe, a lot of muck .. ."7 He began to skip meetings and soon Idropped out altogether, girl or no girl. And Ruth Baum never knew that 4 Robert Howard had eyed her with longing.

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  Despite Howard's failure to establish ordinary social contacts with a girl, he wrote of slim, passionate women whose "marble limbs caught fire from my passion. . . ."8 He brooded over his lack of female companionship and wondered if, after all, he was normal. The fear that he was not became so strong that in October 1930 Dr. Howard sent his son to the Scott and White Clinic at Temple, south of Waco, for a physical examination. Incidentally, the "personal history" that formed a part of the medical report showed
the continuation of two of the family's little pretenses: that Hester Howard was five years younger than her husband and that she did not have tuberculosis.

  Robert told the examining physician that, besides having gas pains, he had been slow in developing, not acquiring strong sexual desire until • he was nineteen; that he thought he had a varicocele (a varicose vein in his scrotum); and that—a common adolescent fear—his penis was of subnormal size.

  The doctor thumped, and poked, and tested, and measured. The record gives Robert's height as five feet eleven inches, his weight as 191 pounds. His heart action was normal, with a tendency to tachycardia (overspeeding under stress). The doctor sent Robert home and wrote to Dr. Howard:

  We do not think there is anything wrong with Robert. We can find no varicocele of any consequence, his organs are normally developed and he tests out good in every respect.

  His trouble, in our judgment, is due to his thinking there is something

  wrong. After he has dispelled this thought from his mind he will be in fine shape.9

  His stomach gas can probably be accounted for by his enormous consumption of pancakes; for the rest, the only thing Robert Howard had to fear was fear itself. Thus, Robert was confronted with the fact that his failure to get a girl was due not to any physical abnormality but to his emotional attachment to his family, his basic disinterest in the usual pursuits of the average small-town girl, and his preoccupation with literary matters. In short, he was unlikely to find any of the local lasses interesting beyond first acquaintance.

  Conversely, girls were not likely to be fascinated by Robert. His repute as the town eccentric, his unconventional views, and his spells of misanthropy and moroseness made him unattractive to the local girls. While some of the behavior that Howard indulged in would not have seemed so odd in an urban or academic setting, other of his ways, such as his obsession with hatred and "enemies," would have seemed strange anywhere.

  Even his friends found Bob an enigma. One said, "He just didn't give a damn for a lot of things that other people do. . . . Bob had a funny habit. He'd be walking along the street, and you'd see him suddenly start to shadowbox. He'd box for a few seconds and then go back to walking again." When a young woman was visiting at the Bond house across the street, she took fright at the sight of Robert walking down the middle of the road in the moonlight, shadowboxing as he walked and singing at the top of his lungs.10

  Another person remembers that, when walking, Howard would now and then stop, turn back, and take a few steps in order to upend a stick or stone and peer beneath it. In the street he often passed people he knew without a sign of recognition, being completely wrapped up in his own world of imagination. This inattention to his surroundings, like his shadowboxing, may have indicated that he was plotting a story. As Derleth said: "He lived in a world that was at least quasi-make-believe."11

  Unpredictably Robert would blow up over trifling annoyances but meet major misfortunes with outward calm. His temper flared easily and burned hot. Once The Cross Plains Review ran a story that did not give his mother the credit he thought she deserved. Robert stormed into the

  newspaper office, threw a copy on Jack Scott's desk, and told him not to send the damned paper to his house any more. The next day Dr. Howard came in to reinstate the subscription.

  Howard was certain that enemies lurked behind every bush, waiting to destroy him. He kept up with his boxing and fencing in part to protect himself should the need arise. Yet, he never, apparently, got into a brawl with anyone. Probably people took care not to cross a man with Howard's physique and volatile temper.

  Still, Robert's virtues were not unappreciated. His friends speak of his kindliness and sympathy, his uprightness, and his sparkling humor when he was in a good mood. He was the star of The Junto; and the members' fascination with his erudition and soaring imagination held the group together. The only girl he ever dated said that, as she came to know him, she was surprised at how charming Robert could be.

  Forty-odd years later, these friends still mention Bob with love and respect. When reminded of his strange ways, they warmly defend him, shrugging off his eccentricities by saying: "Oh, well, in some ways Bob never grew up." It infuriates them to hear him described as "crazy," a term some of his fellow townsmen applied to him during his lifetime.

  Yet his friend E. Hoffmann Price wrote: "R.E.H. was a strange character: gracious, likeable, congenial—and nutty as an almond bar. Since you knew he was harmless, it was easy to like him very much, admire him for his many admirable qualities, and ignore his pure strain crazy facets."12 Another close friend said: "He was very strange and plain 'weird.' "13

  Withal Bob Howard's friends remained faithful. He kept up with Lindsey Tyson and with another youth in Cross Plains, David C. Lee; with Clyde Smith and Truett Vinson in Brownwood; with Earl Baker, with whom he had learned to ride in Cross Cut; and with F. Thurston Torbett in Marlin, Texas. Several years older than Bob, Torbett was the son and nephew of a pair of physicians. His uncle, J. W. Torbett, owned a sanitarium specializing in the treatment of rheumatism, while his father, Frank Torbett, worked in the institution.

  The senior Howards often visited the sanitarium and took their prescribed baths in hot-spring water. Robert went on long walks with Thurston, who was a student of the occult. They talked out their philosophies of life and discussed a writer's problems. While sometimes active and cheerful, at other times Robert would be "blue and depressed" and talk of suicide.14

  Torbett collaborated with Howard on a successful story, "A Thunder of Trumpets," which was published a year after Howard's death. It involves a girl living in India and a withered, toothless yogi who can will himself to appear to others as a handsome young man.

  In the early 1930s, a new interest came into Robert Howard's life and added a welcome new dimension to it. He began a correspondence with H. P. Lovecraft and later with other professional writers in the fantasy field. His letters to Lovecraft, by far the most numerous, offer a rich lode of information to anyone who mines them, and much credit is due Glenn Lord for collecting and preserving them.

  Howard Phillips Lovecraft (1890-1937) was a gaunt, lantern-jawed, erudite, unworldly man who lived with a pair of aged aunts in Providence, Rhode Island. Although he wrote sixty-five outstanding horror stories, often compared to Poe's, and sold most of them to Weird Tales, he had to supplement his small income by rewriting the works of assorted would-be authors and by drawing on the principal of a small legacy from his mother.

  As individualistic as Howard, Lovecraft seldom stirred from his house during the day but loved to prowl the streets of Providence by night. He idealized eighteenth-century England and thought that civilization had been declining ever since. Ultraconservative in dress, manners, and political convictions, he hated immigrants and foreigners, especially Jews, Negroes, and Latins, who, he felt, had robbed him of his old Anglo-Saxon birthright.

  Despite these feelings, he was kind and polite always. To younger writers, like Howard, he was ever generous both with praise and urgings to make use of elements from his most famous tales, the Cthulhu mythos. He was a voluminous letter-writer and one who enjoyed a good debate. Therefore he and Robert Howard argued and sometimes battled over a wide range of ideas.

  Such was the man of whom Robert Howard wrote in glowing terms to the editor of Weird Tales in June 1930: and thus began the longest and most intimate correspondence of Howard's life. In it the young writer confided to Lovecraft things he would not dream of discussing with the townsfolk of Cross Plains.

  Although the two men differed widely in background, Howard found in Lovecraft a man who shared his passion for historical, prehistoric, and mythological lore. In the early stages of this friendship by correspondence, Howard assumed that Lovecraft was a professor, or at least the holder of advanced degrees. Consequently he treated the older man with deference and tended to accept all of his ideas, even the more untenable ones, as if they were gospel. Howard even prophesied— correctly, as it turned o
ut—that Lovecraft would have a lasting influence on American fantasy writing. Later, when he learned more about Lovecraft's limitations, Howard became more critical. Although he finally realized that Lovecraft pretended to profound knowledge on matters he knew little about, such as the Southwest, the friendship lasted until Howard's death, and the voluminous correspondence brought new perspectives to the young Texan's writing.

  Together they ranted against immigrants, foreigners, and the equality of the races of man. Lovecraft pointed out that "Two-Gun Bob's" "sense of placement" with ancient barbarians (like Lovecraft's own involvement with ancient Rome and Georgian England) was merely a reflection of things they had read or heard about in childhood. He also debunked Howard's mystical ideas of ancestral memories and reincarnation, but these concepts fell on deaf ears.

  The pen pals discussed current events and international affairs. Lovecraft admired Mussolini and, until shortly before his death, took an indulgent view of Hitler. Howard, an antiauthoritarian, libertarian democrat, had no use for either; and he denounced Mussolini as a racketeer and Hitler as a madman. At one time Robert, like Vinson and some of the other Junto members, had vaguely considered himself a "socialist." But he soon found repellent the degree of organization and regimentation inherent in even the most democratic socialism. Later he drifted toward a kind of Nietzschean anarchism as his ideal, thinking this condition obtained in barbarian and frontier societies. He admitted, however, that such a regime was an impractical form of government for twentieth-century America.