Dark Valley Destiny

by Unknown

  Subsequently Dr. Howard said he thought that Robert had determined to kill him, but that Robert had not been able to bring himself to do so while his mother still lived. Some of the doctor's friends thought so, too. Since inviting friends to a death vigil was not a common Texan custom, albeit not unknown, they suspected that Isaac Howard had urged them to spend the night with him so that somebody could keep an eye on Robert, lest he kill either the doctor or himself. Later on, Dr. Howard retracted his statement, averring that he did not think Robert had really meant him any harm; but this somewhat lame amendment might well have been a typical Howard face-saving gesture.40

  We can only guess what thoughts were running through Robert Howard's mind that night. Whether he thought killing his father would be an act of mercy because the old man would be miserable if left alone, whether he hoped that the whole family might enter their next lives together, or whether such a death would fit his obsession of universal destruction, we shall never know. In any case he felt sure that his father would soon be dead, as his remarks at the cemetery amply prove.

  At any rate, he put such thoughts aside as the evening wore on and went into his study. There he tried to tidy up the mass of papers that he kept in his small trunk. Manuscripts, carbon copies, rough drafts, notes, and letters lay jumbled in a heap. Some were not even clipped together, their pages lying scattered throughout the pile. Robert began sorting out the papers, but after a while he gave up the job and tossed the whole mass into the air, so that the floor lay buried under a snowfall of typed sheets. Then he returned to his mother's room to sit out the rest of the night.

  A little after seven on the morning of June 11th, with a red sun hanging low in a hot and cloudless sky, a flurry of activity stirred the little house. Clarence and Birdie Martin bade the doctor good-bye. The recently-hired cook came in and began bustling about the kitchen, preparing breakfast for Dr. Howard and his remaining guests. Kate Merryman set out for home when the day nurse, Mrs. Green, took up her duties in the sickroom.

  Robert, who had kept an all-night vigil beside his mother's bed, turned to Mrs. Green and asked her, as he had previously asked his father, whether there was the remotest chance that his mother might recover consciousness. The nurse's answer was a gentle "No."

  Stimulated by caffeine, bone-weary from the sleepless night just passed, and overwhelmed by a sense of his impending loss, Robert E. Howard paused to take a last long look at the still body of his mother. Then he strode from the airless bedroom to his own tiny, manuscript-cluttered study and tapped out his final message of despair. Like a man in a dream, he marched out to his car, fingered the safety catch on his gun, and sought the rosy dawn of a new world and a better day.

  We can only hope that he found it. For a man so reared, so motivated, so victimized by circumstances beyond his control, so rent by gigantic angers and frustrations, there was no other way to find rest from hate and the fear of loneliness. We who have studied the man and his Works shall never entirely know the source of the "jets of agony" and the "crimson pain" of which he complained in his poetry. What was the "battle," the "dreary noise and prattle," whereof he was weary? But we know the pain was there. Perhaps the gods who hammered out his personality were careless in their handiwork, for they neglected the hardening process that endows a man with a love of life despite all its trials and disappointments.

  By protecting Robert from the rack of this uncaring world, his parents denied him the opportunity to achieve maturity. By encouraging his childish idea of dying when she died—if not openly, then by tacit signs of pleasure—his mother paralyzed whatever will to independence he might have had. And to these life-denying forces should be added his father's lingering belief in reincarnation, a belief often discussed with his son.

  Although Howard was a self-proclaimed agnostic, he half believed that death was not the end of everything. It was, instead, some sort of liberation, a transition to his next incarnation—a thought he eloquently expressed in the closing lines of his poem The Tempter. Yet he was not fully convinced. He spoke as well of the "silence and the long black rest." But even if death was the end of everything, an eternal, dreamless sleep, he preferred it to the life he knew.

  Withal, Howard's attitude toward death remained that of a small child who lacks an adult understanding of the full implications of death. To him, as to so many of the youthful suicides of today, death seemed an easy, natural way to shoo away whatever vultures were tearing at his vitals. His failure to attain a realistic view of death is reflected in the casualness with which his heroes annihilate others—although to some degree this bloodthirstiness also mirrors the pulp-magazine conventions of the day. On the other hand, such real impending deaths as those of Patches and his mother filled him with revulsion. He could not accept death as an inevitable rounding out of a given span of life.

  Howard's life story is the tragic drama of a man unable to cope with reality. Within the make-believe world of Conan and King Kull, Howard was fearless, inscrutable, and desired by all women—a man who could slaughter enemies by the dozen. Single-handed he toppled rulers from their thrones and created empires of Oriental splendor. He even vanquished the menaces of the supernatural by the magic that he alone controlled. But in the everyday world, with its real disappointments and inevitable disasters, Howard had no inner resources. Faced with the loss of maternal protection, he took the way of self-destruction.41

  E. Hoffmann Price understood Robert Howard's inmost needs and motivation with a clarity that time has in no way dimmed. To another Howard fan, he wrote this shrewd appraisal:

  ... REH at the age of 30 had the same dismay and despair that one might expect of a child who has lost his mother. When I was a kid, very young, I remember my feelings when my mother was seriously ill and survival doubtful. . . . More than mere bereavement, there was plenty of self-centered fear of unpleasant possibilities, grim certainties—a terrifying world in which I'd have not an ally.

  Now it seems to me that REH, big and grown up and rugged and bluff as he was, had carried with him from early childhood a lot of the state of mind I have tried to describe; and with his growing up, he had also acquired a lot of grown-up grimness, a lack of which would have made his act impossible.

  While a 5-year-old would be terrified of a world devoid of a mother's emotional and spiritual sustenance, to say nothing of her maternal support and attention, he'd finally adjust himself; he simply would not have the means of escape, or, if he had, he'd lack the brute courage to use the means on himself. But REH had, in a way of speaking, the 5-year-old's need to escape, and the grown man's stern resolution.42

  A moment after the shot was fired, the cook screamed. Drs. Howard and Dill rushed out and carried Robert back to the house. They laid him down on one of the beds on the sleeping porch and saw that the bullet had entered his head above the right ear and had come out on the left side. Being old Texas medical hands, they knew that it was useless to try to get Robert to a hospital.

  Leah Bowden ran after Kate Merryman to fetch her back. As word of the shooting spread, the other physicians in town came over to see if they could be of any help. The justice of the peace arrived and telephoned young Jack Scott at his newspaper office. Scott jumped in his car and sped to the Howard house. He recalls:

  The JP was waiting for me on the porch. I started asking him some questions because I had to do a story and he said, "Come on in here with me, back where Robert worked."

  I followed him into Robert's room and there was a piece of paper in the old Underwood typewriter he used. I pulled it out and read it: All fled, all done, so lift me on the pyre; The feast is over and the lamps expire. "What does it mean?" the JP asked.43

  About four o'clock that afternoon, Robert died without regaining consciousness. Lamenting his loss, Isaac Howard wept loudly. So distraught did he become that Dill and the other physicians present feared that their colleague might suffer a heart attack. They urged him to go to a hospital. Isaac agreed, and they began to collect his clothes. Th
en Isaac changed his mind and refused to go. Kate Merryman remembers: "He was very emotional about anything. It seemed to me he could turn his tears on and off at will, and that was the way he was for several days after the deaths."44

  After the undertaker had removed Robert's body, several neighbors and medical acquaintances, aware of Isaac's distraught condition, decided to sit out the dark hours with him. Thus, for a second night there was no quiet in the Howard home.

  Hester Howard lay oblivious to the pounding feet of strangers and the lamentations of her husband during the day of her son's death. In the hushed silence of the following evening, at 10:30 o'clock on June 12th, she slipped away without regaining consciousness.

  Relatives from both sides of the family came to Cross Plains to support the bereaved doctor. Mrs. David Howard, wife of the doctor's brother, came from Mart, Texas; Mrs. W. P. Searcy, one of Mrs. Howard's sisters, arrived from Exter, Missouri; and several nieces and nephews from Arkansas, Oklahoma, and Missouri drove in for the funeral and interment services.45

  The small living room of the clapboard house in Cross Plains held two open coffins that Saturday; and family, friends, and neighbors came by to pay their respects. Near midnight Dr. Howard, exhausted as well as distraught, went to the bathroom. He remained there so long that his friends, who knew of the arsenal of weapons in the bathroom closet, became fearful lest the bereaved man turn a gun on himself. When he returned to the sitting room, several of the men undertook to remove the guns by passing them out through the bathroom window.46

  Disturbed as the old man was, his friends need not have worried. Isaac Howard was a strong man and courageous. E. Hoffmann Price, whom the doctor listed as one of his son's best friends, wrote this tribute to him eight years later:

  . . . whenever I think of Dr. Howard, well into his seventy-fourth year, and with failing eyesight, having for these past eight years faced alone and single handed a home and a world from which both wife and son were taken in one day, I cannot help but say, "I wish Robert had had more of his father's courage."

  Dr. Howard . . . has maintained a courage so high that I must pay him this tribute: my wife and I have never felt sorry for him.... He carries on, without complaint, and without any self-pity: and to regard him in the way one would regard others who have had bereavements less shocking would be to belittle the man.47

  On Sunday, June 14, 1936, the town's first double funeral was held at the Baptist Tabernacle. It was an exceptional funeral in several ways. No fewer than four preachers took part in the service. Officiating was the Reverend B. G. Richbourg, a traveling lecturer, former Cross Plains pastor, and longtime friend of Dr. Hot ard. He was assisted by J. C. Mann, the local Methodist minister; S. P. Collins, the Presbyterian minister; and V. W. Tatum, the Baptist minister.48

  The Reverend Richbourg preached a hellfire-and-damnation sermon based on the text of I Samuel 31:4: "Therefore Saul took a sword, and fell upon it." The sermon, emphasizing as it did the Christian tabu against suicide, greatly displeased the old doctor. For the next week or two, he was heard grumbling about the fellow "preaching my boy to hell!"

  Such a huge crowd turned out that many had to stand outside the church. Almost everybody in town attended; for despite their peculiarities, the Howards were held in high esteem. As a family, they lent the town distinction: the doctor for his salty language and devotion to his patients, Mrs. Howard for her refinement and elegance of attire, and Robert for his lonely role as the town's lone intellectual.

  The outpouring of sympathy seemed faintly tinged with guilt. Even

  faithful in his fashion

  today we feel that some townsfolk wonder about the strange young man who walked among them as a stranger, receiving little sympathy or understanding. In the reluctance of some to talk about Robert Howard, we sense the unasked question: Would something that was left undone have made a difference? And had we been asked, our answer would have been "No." It was the world within him, not the external world or the people among whom he lived, that determined Robert Howard's fate, and this inner world took shape long years before he and his family settled in Cross Plains.

  After the funeral, for some curious reason yet unknown, Dr. Howard insisted that the hearse leave Cross Plains by the back streets. Thirty-odd miles away, in the Greenwood Cemetery, the two pine coffins were lowered into the graves that Robert had selected a few days earlier.

  The day after the funeral, Isaac Howard pulled himself together. He and Kate Merryman went into Robert's study to try to make order out of Robert's scattered papers. While attempting to assemble one of the manuscripts, Miss Merryman came upon a single page from a letter that Robert had addressed to Novalyne. In it he chided her for ragging him about his black sombrero, adding that, considering the ordeal he was facing, it seemed small-minded to make a fuss about a hat.49

  On June 16th, when Isaac Howard filed an application for appointment as administrator of the estate of his son, he did "solomnly swear that Robert E. Howard, deceased, died without leaving any lawful will, so far as I know or believe."

  In time Robert's estate was appraised. This list of his assets, which overlooked the $1,000 still owing from Weird Tales, included $702 in cash, a postal savings account of $1,850, and a car with an assigned value of $350—making a total estate of $2,902. No value was placed on Howard's writings.50

  Later a large gray granite stone was set to mark the grave site of mother and son. Across the upper edge ran the name Howard. A narrow strip along the lower section of the stone bore the text chosen by Dr. Howard from II Samuel 1:23: "They were lovely and pleasant in their lives and in their death they were not divided." The center of the marker contained three polished panels. The left one was inscribed with Robert's name. The center panel at last exposed to view Hester Howard's true year of birth. The third panel, at first left blank, was in due time inscribed with the name of Isaac Howard, and thus the panels read today:

  robert e. hester ervin isaac m.

  author and poet wife and mother physician

  1906-1936 1870-1936 1871-1944

  Robert and his mother each had a footstone as well, but when Isaac died, there was nobody left to provide one for him.

  Dr. Howard paid $250 for the plot and, in the early weeks of his bereavement, often visited the graves. After each rain he noted puddles on the lawn and worried about the decay of the coffins. By autumn his concern had developed into such obsessive horror that he ordered the coffins dug up and reburied in steel vaults. The job was done by five cemetery workers using a truck on which a winch was mounted. Each worker got $25, a more than respectable day's wage in Depression times. One of the workers, Gomer Thomas, still remembers it as one of the most unpleasant jobs he ever had, because both the pine coffins and their contents were badly decomposed.51

  Isaac Howard also fretted over the landscaping of the plot. Since his old friend Dr. S. R. Chambers had moved back to Brown County and the doctor's son, Norris Chambers, was just reaching manhood, Isaac commandeered the youth as his relief driver and set out on several tours of greenhouses and nurseries. They drove Robert's Chevrolet, which had been cleaned up and patched by a garageman who still recalls the indescribable stench of the blood and human remains after the car had stood untended for days in the hot June sun. Isaac Howard talked endlessly about the landscaping, studied ornamental plants, and inquired all about growth patterns and prices; but in the end he planted practically nothing.52

  XIV DARK VALLEY DESTINY

  I have not seen the face of Pan, nor mocked the dryad's haste, But I have trailed a dark-eyed Man across a windy waste. I have not died as men may die, nor sinned as men have sinned, But I have reached a misty sky upon a granite wind.1

  Anxious, restless, and alone, Isaac Howard abandoned his medical practice. If an old friend or a kinsman sought him out, he would diagnose And prescribe; but he accepted no new patients and gave up most of those he had.

  The doctor offered Robert's collection of swords and knives to his son's childhood
pal, Earl Baker, who kept them until they were stolen several years later, but to Robert's other close friends he gave nothing.

  He bought a new trunk to replace the battered trunk used by Robert as a filing cabinet and in it stowed all of his son's magazines and miscellaneous papers. This he gave, along with Robert's books, to the library of Howard Payne College as a memorial. But the library, deeming the acquisition of little worth, neglected it. Shocked by the lurid Weird '' Tales covers and considering the magazines un-Christian, the librarian ' consigned the trunk—manuscript fragments, letters, and all—to the ^jOellar among the water pipes, where mold began to destroy them. When Howard heard of this, he descended on the college like an avenging flngel and reclaimed his son's materials.2

  1 He sent the trunk to E. Hoffmann Price in California, whence, in /ia roundabout way, its contents finally came into the possession of the longtime Howard admirer Glenn Lord. The contents of the trunk have been carefully preserved by Glenn Lord, now the agent for the Howard lieirs, and it is through his courtesy that these materials have been made Available to Howard's biographers.

  The three hundred books that constituted Robert's slim library, however, were left at Howard Payne, where they remained on the dusty shelves of little-used stacks until the authors of this work spent a day collecting them and urged the present librarian to maintain the collection in memory of their famous former student. This, we are told, has been done.

  Under the severe stress of a man suddenly deprived of his long-term props, Isaac Howard, in the early months of his bereavement, displayed some extraordinary behavior. For many years he had been "one angry son of a bitch," as he put it—his anger stimulated by and directed at Hester Howard. Scorned by his wife and spiritually barred from the inner circle of mother and son, he had coped with his resentment by spending long hours at the homes of friends and patients, with whom he ate copious meals and talked nonstop about how his Heck had kicked him out again. Now, with Mrs. Howard in her grave, his deep-seated resentment could no longer be vented in this way. Instead it expressed itself in obsessive anxiety about his deceased family, the community's spiritual welfare, and his own future.