Dark Valley Destiny
Page 39
When his historical adventure stories met with only partial success, Howard gave thought to writing serious Westerns, a type of fiction very popular in the 1930s. But now he found himself facing a dilemma. While Westerns—serious Westerns—drew him like a magnet, he began to realize that, during the years when the oil boom swept through his hometown, he had made no observations and taken no notes on the quality of life in the community. He wrote:
And now all those things are a chaotic jumble in my memory which I can't untangle. I've gone so far along the path of romantic-exotic writing that it's devilish difficult to find my way back to common-place realism.12
Too late he saw that carefully-tended memories of real events, even those that are painful and stultifying to the imagination, give a writer's works an authority that cannot be gained from such vicarious experiences as reading books or watching motion pictures.
Moreover, Howard never had, and made no attempt to get, a sound knowledge of the complexities, subtleties, and contradictions of human personality. Hence, save for a few, his characters are mainly stereotypes. In writing for the pulps, that was unobjectionable, but it was not good enough for a writer striving for larger rewards and the greater prestige of the quality magazines.
The truth of the matter is that Robert Howard was, by personality and experience, far removed from viewing the world realistically. So all-consuming were his fear and hatred of "enemies," and so great was the isolation of his daily life, that the lives of the people among whom he lived were less "real" to him than the devils and monsters of his nightmares. He had, without realizing it, found his proper niche as a writer in the realm of the fantastic and in the fanciful, humorous Westerns of his own creation.
While the West of Breckinridge Elkins was no more real than Conan's Hyborian Age, it was equally successful. Otis Kline sent thirteen of the tales about the Nevada bumpkin to the British firm of Herbert Jenkins. The editor replied that if Howard could give continuity to the stories, he would publish them as a novel.
Howard dutifully interpolated a love interest in the person of a Glory McGraw, with whom Breck was forever quarreling over idiotic misunderstandings. The revised work had not yet been sent to England at the time of Howard's death, but a contract came through by the end of 1936 with an advance of $150. The book, published as A Gent from Bear Creek, appeared in 1937 and sold well enough to justify a cheap reprint. Had the sale been made a year earlier, would it have made a difference to Robert Howard's plans? Frankly, we doubt it.
Into his imaginary West, Howard introduced another humorous character, Buckner J. Grimes. This gargantuan worthy became the hero of one of Howard's best burlesque Westerns, "A Man-Eating Jeopard," a tale published in the June 1936 issue of Cowboy Stories. A second Grimes story, "Knife-River Prodigal," was posthumously published in the same magazine.
At the urging of his new agent, Otis Kline, Howard branched out in an unexpected direction. He sold a story to Spicy Adventures, one of a group of pulps called "the hots," because they made a pretence of being pornography. Compared to what one can buy openly today, the stories were as mild as milquetoast. While they told of episodes of fornication, instead of explicit scenes, the author would indicate a lapse of time by a row of dots.
The first story, "The Girl on the Hell Ship," which the editor retitled "She Devil" and which was followed by four others, introduced another typical Howard hero, Wild Bill Clanton, a sailor whose chief delight is in the ready use of his fists. Like all Howard's heroes, he was a "broad-shouldered, clean-waisted, heavy-armed man with wetly plastered black hair, blue eyes that blazed with the joy of mayhem and lips that grinned savagely . . ."
Telling of his new venture, Howard wrote Lovecraft:
One market I tried was Spicy Adventures, a sex magazine to which Ed [Price] is the star contributor. I sold the first yarn I tried, but... it requires a deft, jaunty style foreign to my natural style. . . . Why don't you give it a whirl? . . . the sex element is a cinch; . . . Just write up one of your own sex adventures, altered to fit the plot. That's the way I did with the yarn I sold them.13
The advice must have astonished the puritanical Lovecraft. For a man who prided himself on being an old-fashioned New England gentleman, the idea of such exploitation would have been horrifying. As for Robert Howard himself, we are glad that he had such a vivid imagination to fall back on, plus the ancestral name of Sam Walser to borrow for a pseudonym.
Howard worked on other stories with indifferent success. He sold a Francis X. Gordon tale for publication in Top-Notch for June 1935. The next story of the series, "Blood of the Gods," places Gordon in Arabia, seeking a mystical nobleman who, with a treasure in jewels, marches off into the desert. Another jewel-encrusted yarn, "The Trail of the Bloodstained God," is set in Afghanistan and involves a man-sized, gem-studded, golden idol and rival treasure hunters.
Otis Kline had little hope for this story. He told his client: "The theme of jewels or treasure secreted in an idol has been done over and over so much editors are beginning to tire of it."14 As predicted, the story failed to sell and did not see print until it was rewritten as a Conan story twenty years later.
Recollecting tales he had heard or read about pre-Civil War life in the Deep South, Howard wrote a science fiction story, which was published in Weird Tales for February 1935, under the title of "The Grisly Horror." The story involves a colossal carnivorous ape from Africa and a villainous African cultist.
A tale with even stronger racist overtones was "Black Canaan," published in Weird Tales for June 1936. Here in jungle swamplands, a Negro uprising, organized by another cultist, is put down by gallant whites. The brutal racism of the white men in this story may infuriate some modern readers. Still, it is a realistic portrayal of the attitudes of some landowners in the Deep South a century ago. And at about the same time that "Black Canaan" was written, Howard also composed "The Dead Remember." In this fantasy the writer's sympathy is with a Negro couple murdered by the vicious cowboy narrator, who suffers supernatural retribution.
These and other lesser tales occupied Howard's busy typewriter during the last year or so of his life. He left more than eighty unsold stories when he died, and fragments of many others. We do not know when most of these were written and can only guess at their publishing history. Some have been rescued from oblivion and turned into Conan stories. Others have been completed by various writers and published in the wake of the recent wave of interest in Robert Howard and his great barbarian hero Conan.
As we have indicated, the work is uneven in quality. Certain plot elements appear and reappear too often; sometimes his people are mere stock characters or unintentionally funny; frequently Howard's very ideas dry up. Had not Conan stood at Howard's shoulder and dictated stories for his scribe to set down, Robert Howard would be forgotten today. Fortunately Howard's cadenced prose, his wide canvases splashed with bright and unforgettable word pictures, his headlong action, and his way of entering into every story and dragging us in with him confer an element of greatness on him.
Despite numerous trips to hospitals, anxious bedside watches, and feverish pounding of the typewriter, Robert Howard managed to have some social contacts with people of his own age. Still, they were not always heartwarming contacts; and we suspect that some of his difficulties, at least, should be attributed to the impossible position in which he found himself. He was dutifully caring for his mother and frustrated by the restrictions the nursing service imposed on him. He was eager to break into new writing fields, and all he got from the new editors were rejection slips. He craved freedom, but life's demands hemmed him in.
One of Bob's cooling friendships involved Novalyne Price. When Novalyne got back to Cross Plains after her stay in the Brownwood Community Hospital, she gave thought to her social future. She began to see Bob again, but on a less intimate basis than before. He was obviously out of the running as a long-term best friend, let alone as a husband; so it behooved her to widen her circle of acquaintances. She had heard a lot a
bout Bob's tall, handsome Brownwood buddy Truett Vinson; and she told Bob that, when she went back to Brownwood for her summer vacation, she would try to arrange a meeting with Vinson.
Robert scoffed: "He'd never take you out! No guy would fall for you; you're just saying that to make me jealous."15
That was all Novalyne needed to cement her determination to have a date with Truett Vinson. And after the date she told Howard about it. At first Robert refused to believe her, even when she showed him a book Vinson had given her with his initials in it. When at last he could no longer deny the fact, Robert became furious and stopped seeing Novalyne.
After a lapse of several weeks, Novalyne sent Bob a note suggesting that he come around to renew their acquaintance. With the Howard talent for forgetting or ignoring unwelcome facts, Robert replied in a letter bristling with injured dignity, wounded feelings, and anger:
Cross Plains, Texas July 8, 1935
Dear Novalyne:
Thank you for the invitation to call; but you honestly can't expect me to enjoy ridicule and contempt so much that I come back for another dose.
You understand me, I think, but I'll make myself clear so there won't be any chance of misunderstanding. It's simply that you and Truett haven't played fair with me, in concealing the fact that you were going together —and you know you haven't. There wasn't any need for such secrecy and the only motive for it was to make a fool out of me. It's none of my business who you go with, or who Truett goes with; but if either of you had had any consideration whatever for me, you'd have at least casually mentioned the fact that you were going together. If you'd merely told me, I wouldn't have thought anything about it. If you'd even neglected to tell me through carelessness I'd have overlooked it. But both of you had plenty of opportunity to mention it to me, and instead you concealed the fact, made a secret of it—and no doubt laughed at me because of it.
I understand now why you laughed at me so much the last time I was with you, though I still fail to see the joke. Why you thought it was such a hilarious joke on me for me to be kept ignorant of the fact that you were going with Truett, is something I can not fathom. Nor shall I try to fathom it; the knowledge that the slight was intentional is quite enough for me.
Taking advantage of a friend's trust, respect and consideration to try to make a fool out of him seems a poor triumph.
Very truly yours, Robert E. Howard16
No woman to accept such unwonted reproof, Novalyne sent back a spirited reply:
July 12, 1935
Dear Bob,
Although you leave nothing for me to say, being a woman, I'll say something anyway. You said that you didn't care whom I went with. I know that, Bob. During the time that I went with you, I realized perfectly how you felt about women. You always wanted to be free and independent. Women chain a man. Such an idea was obnoxious to you. Self-preservation was the first law which you recognize. Strange as it may seem, I, too, demand my freedom; self-preservation is also a law of my life. I'll do anything which gives me pleasure and consider myself under no obligation to tell my friends my personal business.
I did tell you that I wanted to go with Truett when I came home. Once when you were over, and I mentioned that I had seen Truett you said, "you're trying to make me believe that you've had a date with him, but I don't believe it." I said, "I am certainly going with him this summer." You chose to think that I expected to go with him in the future. You said, "You may do it, but you haven't yet." So I dropped the subject. Later (the last time you were over) you picked up a book that he had given me, and on the first page are his initials and mine. I saw you look at the page, and when you ignored the matter I mentally applauded you. "Well," I said to myself, "he intends to put one over on me by not mentioning the fact. He wants to further impress upon me that he is not in love with me nor the least bit jealous of me. He's pretty clever." I thought that you were laughing at me because you thought that I thought I was putting something by and I wasn't. You remember that you were always careful to let me know that I was just a friend, and I was careful to let you know that I knew that that was all there was between us.
Clyde and I went together four years. Two weeks before he married I had a date with him and he didn't tell me that he was fixing to marry. When he did, I was utterly dumbfounded. All my friends in Brownwood offered me sympathy. Was that easy to take? I considered that his affair and I didn't say a word to him nor about him for not telling me. And today
I like Clyde as well as I ever did. I still think of him as a real friend, and I don't think that he did not play fair with me.
I have always considered you head and shoulders above the average man. I didn't believe that you'd resort to middle-class melodrama and I can't believe that you really in your heart think that Truett and I have not played fair. You know both of us well enough to know that we haven't been untrue to your friendship. I can't help but think that you were tired of wasting your time with me and this is an opportunity of getting rid of me for next year. I could not help but know that I sometimes interfered with your work and the well-ordered routine of your life. You might have told me in a nice way that you could not spare me anymore of your time.
In my last letter I took it for granted that we were still friends and I invited you to call assuming that our friendship would continue as it had been in the past. I apologize for having made that mistake.
Please know that you will always have my sincere wishes for your continued success and happiness.
Novalyne17
As the weeks passed, the storm blew over. Robert and Novalyne began seeing each other again, although on a more impersonal basis than before. Both knew that there was no one else in Cross Plains who spoke their language. With whom else could they talk about things other than local gossip and the price of wheat, cotton, and petroleum?
Robert and Novalyne continued a desultory friendship through the fall of 1935. Although during the winter months Howard's time was largely consumed with the care of his mother, in February 1936 they had another date. Womanlike, Novalyne had not given up all hope of guiding Bob along the path he should follow, so she urged him to stand on his own two feet and unknot his mother's apron strings. While we do not know the details of the conversation, we surmise that Bob dug in his heels and retorted that nobody was going to tell him how to live his life. At any rate, the evening erupted into a blazing quarrel and ended with a grim parting.
It was their last date. Howard wrote Lovecraft that he had "renewed an old love affair and broken it off again."18 At the end of the school term that spring, Novalyne departed for Louisiana State University, where she began her studies for a master's degree.
Howard enjoyed an occasional respite from his nursing duties. On June 19,1935, he set out with Truett Vinson on a five-day trip to New Mexico. Howard drove through Carlsbad and Roswell to Lincoln, a tiny village near the Mescalero Apache Reservation—a village which, in the late 1870s, had been the center of the bloody Lincoln County War, in which Billy the Kid had served as a warrior. Howard and Vinson had their picture taken in front of the old wooden courthouse and jail, whence Billy the Kid had escaped, killing two men in the process. Aware that many men died in Lincoln, Howard wrote later:
I have never felt anywhere the exact sensations Lincoln aroused in me— a sort of horror predominating. If there is a haunted spot on this hemisphere, then Lincoln is haunted. I felt that if I slept the night there, the ghosts of the slain would stalk through my dreams.19
As they drove on through Albuquerque to Santa Fe, Howard became irritated at the crowds of tourists, especially those dressed in "British style sun-helmets, short-sleeved knit shirts, and knee-length pants." At the time the short-sleeved sport shirt, derived from the polo shirt, was just coming into use; while walking shorts were not fully Americanized for another twenty years. He also noted the large Hispanic population of New Mexico:
Or as they call them out here, Spanish-Americans. You or I would be Anglo-Americans according to their way of puttin
g it. Spanish-American, hell. A Mexican is a Mexican to me, wherever I find him.20
While he found the Mexican population of New Mexico better educated and more prosperous than the Mexicans in Oklahoma and Texas, he added: "I'll admit it seemed strange to me to see Mexicans treated on the same footing as white people. . . ."21 Despite this expression of Caucasoid chauvinism, he later agreed with Lovecraft that the population of New Mexico would eventually become homogenized.
With Vinson, Robert visited the art museum and the old governor's palace in Santa Fe. In the museum, he saw the painting of "The Stoic," which he found so vastly moving, and looked, with only desultory interest, at an archaeological exhibit of the artifacts of the Pueblo Indians. Later he wrote Lovecraft:
We stayed only one night in Santa Fe. It had been my intention to stay longer. . .. But Vinson got in a swivet to get home, for some reason which he never made entirely clear, but which seemed so important to him that 1 didn't press the matter.22
Vinson was eager to go home because he found Bob "a terrible driver, and | worse bedmate."23 The tourist cabins of that time contained only one double bed and often no bathroom. Sleeping in such cramped quarters, Vinson found himself constantly disturbed by Howard's thrashings and fnutterings. So Howard and Vinson drove home via El Paso, where they RAW movies, including "The Informer," and spent the night. The next day Howard drove to Brownwood, dropped Vinson, and came home, having Spent sixteen hours behind the wheel. He had in one day driven 570 miles.
In January 1936 Howard had another opportunity for a little fun. He went to Brownwood and picked up his friends Smith and Vinson for A few drinks. As before, the storyteller in him transformed a small drinking party into an orgy. He wrote his correspondent August Derleth about this alcoholic get-together:
One of them—a 220 pound giant—went on a real tear—high, wide and handsome. He revived the old Western custom of shooting up the joint, and mixing whiskey with gun-smoke and flying lead is not a combination for a peaceable man. ... I do remember coming to hand-grips with him, and one of my knees is still a bit lame from the knock it got as we hit the floor together.24