Dark Valley Destiny (2 page)

The land does not readily recover from such years of deprivation. Although the 1936 spring rains once more filled the lake, set the creek back on its course, and greened the prairie, the thirsty West Texas land and its people still bore marks of their ordeal. And again June was hot and dry.

It had been a long night. Robert Howard may have rubbed eyes weary from their constant vigil before he once more turned his gaze to the darkened room. There on her bed his mother lay comatose, her large frame wasted by tuberculosis, probably complicated by cancer, her fine mind dimmed by uremia. For the past few days, she had recognized no one.

Miss Merryman, the housekeeping nurse who had shared the watch with Robert, had already left for home. He turned to her replacement, Mrs. Green, and repeated the question that he had asked his father the night before: "Will she ever be conscious again?"

The answer was the same. The nurse whispered gently, "No, I'm afraid not."
⁴

Faced with the loss of the one person who gave stability to his existence, Robert Howard left his mother's room and went to his study, where his battered Underwood Number 5 stood on his generous writing table. Dropping into the chair before it, he inserted a sheet of paper and typed:

All fled—all done, so lift me on the pyre;

The feast is over and the lamps expire.
⁵

Then he strode down the narrow hall, without a word to the recently-hired cook, who was moving about the kitchen, preparing breakfast. He went out the back door, never glancing up at the unpretentious white clapboard house where his father, Dr. Isaac Mordecai Howard, and his guest, Dr. J. D. Dill, were lingering over their coffee. Watching Robert climb into his dusty 1931 Chevrolet sedan, parked beside the fence on the west side of the house, the cook was not alarmed. She assumed that he was about to drive uptown to get the morning mail as he had done hundreds of times before. She turned away as he rolled up the window.

Lifting from the glove compartment a borrowed Colt .380 automatic, Robert Howard thumbed the safety catch. He must have thought about what Dr. Dill had told him the day before. He had sought out Dr. Dill, a family friend who had come from nearby Rising Star to be with the Howards during their ordeal, and asked if anyone had ever been known to live after b«ing shot through the brain. The old doctor had reflected awhile and then replied that there were cases on record where people had survived a shot through the forebrain but none where the bullet had gone through both the front and back parts of the brain.

Sitting there in his car at about eight in the morning, Robert Ervin Howard took careful aim and shot himself through the head. Thus he was spared the pain of knowing about his mother's death, just as she, by her coma, was spared the pain of knowing about his. At four that afternoon, about the time the water wagon passed the house to sprinkle down the dusty road, he died without regaining consciousness.

Hester Howard lingered throughout the following day. She did not hear the local shower that afternoon as, pattering across the roof, it beat a brief tattoo to mourn young Robert's passing. At half past ten, in the cool, sweet-scented night, Mrs. Howard died.

Mother and son were buried on Sunday, June 14, 1936, at the Greenleaf Memorial Cemetery in Brownwood, forty miles away, after a double funeral service at the Baptist Tabernacle in Cross Plains.
⁶
Their raw graves were watered that afternoon by the only rain that fell on Brownwood during the entire month of June. In West Texas there is a saying that anything transplanted on a rainy day is bound to thrive.

Although this account of Robert E. Howard's death and rebirth may seem melodramatic, it merely reflects his own style. In a letter, Howard acknowledged a melodramatic tendency in himself that was shared by Texans of the old original stock. He considered the cases of certain notorious gunmen, such as Bob Ollinger, Bat Masterson, and Henry Plummer, men who were no less deadly because they were given to melodramatic gestures. Of Ben Thompson in particular he said that the man's whole life was a dramatic invention—pure melodrama until the day he was shot down in a theater in San Antonio.
⁷

Howard told his friend H. P. Lovecraft that he would be the last to deny this tendency in himself, but that it would be a mistake to suppose melodrama negates the seriousness of a man's intent. There is no certainty that a South westerner is bluffing just because he dramatizes himself. Many people have learned too late that a bully is not always a coward, and a braggart may indeed make good his boasts.

By his death, Robert Howard proclaimed himself to be a man of his word, a man to be taken seriously. Everyone in town would see that he was not a harmless freak who shadowboxed in the street, who told whopping tales, and who wrote outrageous stories for weird magazines.

By his death, moreover, Howard found the acceptance that he had sorely missed among the townspeople of Cross Plains. Death rejects no one, good or bad, superior or ordinary, young or old, rich or poor. Until he gave himself to Death, no one, except perhaps his mother and his dog, had ever thought he amounted to much or had seemed to care whether he did or not.

By his death, Howard became his own protector. No longer restrained by his regard for his mother or supported by her awareness of his needs, he faced the violence in his own nature. Just as his mother had protected him from the violence of schoolyard bullies, so now he must protect himself from the bullying of his own terrors and impulses. He must confront his fury in the dark valley in which he walked, for she would not be there to protect him as she had during his infancy in that real Dark Valley of Palo Pinto County. If he found the task too much to encompass, he had better do the gentlemanly thing and die. According to his lights, he died like a gentleman; for he turned on himself and on no other the fury and the violence that are so clearly reflected in his behavior, his poetry, and his stories.

Howard once poignantly described a painting entitled
The Stoic,
in which an Indian is seen going about his tasks, scourged by his own hand in response to his grief at the death of his son.
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This harsh model of the indomitable Indian seemed to be Howard's ideal. He admired a man's ability to keep slugging through, sustained only by stubbornness and pride, when his very world seemed turned against him. A man had dignity, at least, if he stayed on his feet and held his head up. Unable to live up to this superhuman standard, Robert Howard was bound to have a poor self-image and to face an impossible choice.

Dr. Howard later said that Robert was unbalanced by his grief; yet the doctor was well aware that his son's death was a premeditated act. He knew that Robert had been thinking about suicide and death for a long time. When Robert put his affairs in order and informed his father of his wishes for the disposition of his small property, Dr. Howard tried to dissuade him from the act.

Still, the troubled father appeared to be almost resigned to his son's decision. When, on the day before he died, Robert went to Brownwood and made funeral arrangements and then, returning to his room, spent the evening sorting out his papers, Dr. Howard seemed curiously detached. Perhaps he found his son's agitation difficult to grasp, or perhaps he was weary of futile persuasion.

Dr. Howard seemed to know that Robert had "lost himself." Perhaps he sensed his son's compulsion—as if there were some kind of destiny laid upon him from which he had no recourse. Dr. Howard believed that his son's fatal attachment to his mother crystallized in his mind when he was a small child because Robert's mother had been the boy's only companion and because he, the doctor, busy with his practice, had had little time to "cultivate and shape" his son's course through the years. All this the distracted father wrote to Robert's friends Frank Torbett and H. P. Lovecraft during the June weeks that followed the tragic day of Robert's death.
⁹

Robert E. Howard—"Robert" to his family and neighbors and "Bob" to his few close friends—was an enigma not only to his father but also to the young men who knew him best. Tevis Clyde Smith, his first publisher and a staunch friend to the end of Howard's life, often felt distress at Bob's bitterness, his frequent expressions of suicidal intent, and his fear of nonexistent enemies. He reported that Bob's expectation of personal assault was such that he ordered his pants cuffed two inches higher than the current style because he wanted his feet, always encased in high-topped shoes like a prizefighter's, to be free from entangling trouser legs should he have to defend himself.
¹⁰

Truett Vinson, another close friend—who, along with Smith, was one of the Brownwood writing group—found incomprehensible qualities in Howard, with whom he briefly became a rival for the attentions of a local schoolteacher. Vinson considered Howard odd, although he could never quite define the nature of this oddness. A restrained and literate man himself, Vinson had little patience with Howard's excesses. He considered his friend's stories "trash" and said so. Consequently the two men rarely discussed their writings.
¹¹

Yet, Vinson continued his friendship with Howard, even though he did not understand him. But then, claimed Vinson, no one else understood him either. Each accepted the other as he was; and on this brusque honesty the friendship rested.

E. Hoffmann Price reported to Lovecraft that some people considered Howard "freakish, uncouth . . . provincial in some respects." Despite this judgment, Price felt great affection for Howard and added that Bob was "a courtly, gracious, kindly, and hospitable person."
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Still, Price recognized the complexity of Howard's personality, which he described as all light and shadow, deeply ambivalent, paranoid on occasion, full of dreamings and broodings. This very complexity was a challenge to Price, who was still trying to sort it out eighteen years later.
¹³
Price believed that Howard's attachment to home and family had deprived him of the social interaction essential to any child for the development of a clear-cut sense of self and others—an insight widely supported in the psychological literature of today.

Even Harold Preece, who was introduced to Howard in 1927 by Truett Vinson and who defended Howard's soundness of mind as proved by his creativity, spoke of Howard as "a strange man." "Reading Howard's collected verse made me realize he was always a stranger even if I called him a friend," wrote Preece. He regretted that this "Tristan," as Howard's cousin Maxine Ervin called him, had not found an "Isolde" to separate him from his fixation on his mother.
¹⁴

These reported impressions suggest that the determinants of Howard's behavior were deeper and older than his grief over his mother's impending death and that her passing became the occasion for, not the cause of, his suicide.

Howard had some self-knowledge. When he was in an expansive mood, he tended to identify with his grandfathers, of whom he was understandably proud. He saw himself as a pioneer in his profession, just as his grandfathers had been pioneers of the West. "I was the first," he said, "to light the torch of literature in this part of the country, however small, frail, and easily extinguished that flame may be."
¹⁵

His was a lonely task. Howard became a writer in spite of his environment, and he paid the price in isolation. Howard wrote: . . it is no light thing to enter into a profession absolutely foreign to the people among which one's lot is cast."
¹⁶
So alien, indeed, was his profession that few people in Cross Plains ever tried to understand the lone young man who lived among them. They chose, rather, to ignore him or to dismiss him as merely eccentric.

And who can blame the good people of Cross Plains for their lack of understanding? Howard himself did not fully realize the extent of his innovations. He was not only the first person in West Texas to earn his living as a writer; he was also the first American writer to develop a new genre of literature—a genre that has come to be closely associated with his name: heroic fantasy. Only now, after fifty years of relative obscurity, are the best of his works receiving worldwide attention. The heroic sweep of his narratives, the vividness of his imagery, and his ability to convey mood, magic, and mystery mark his writing as exceptional.

Most noteworthy of all of Howard's many stories are those about the barbarian hero Conan of Cimmeria, who lived in an age of Howard's imagining. Howard tells us:

. . that between the years when the oceans drank Atlantis and the gleaming cities, and the years of the rise of the sons of Aryas, there was an age undreamed of, when shining kingdoms lay spread across the world like blue mantles beneath the stars—Nemedia, Ophir, Brythunia, Hyper-borea, Zamora with its dark-haired women and towers of spider-haunted mystery, Zingara with its chivalry, Koth that bordered on the pastoral lands of Shem, Stygia with its shadow-guarded tombs, Hyrkania whose riders wore steel and silk and gold. But the proudest kingdom in the world was Aquilonia, reigning supreme in the dreaming west. Hither came Conan the Cimmerian, black-haired, sullen-eyed, sword in hand, a thief, a reaver, a slayer, with gigantic melancholies and gigantic mirth, to tread the jeweled thrones of the Earth under his sandaled feet.
¹⁷

Thus did Robert Howard conjure up under the big sky of Texas a continent that never was but might have been twelve thousand years ago. On it he strewed with lavish hand mountains and seas, brooding forests, meadows bright with flowers, and lurking forces of evil older than Time itself. And in this world he set a man, ill-clad and lone but armed with a strong sword and pride and courage, and to him gave the task of overcoming odds beyond the ken of ordinary mortals.

Yet the time was not ripe for the coming of Conan. For an entire generation, the great barbarian and his Hyborian world lay forgotten and ignored, only to emerge in triumph a few years ago from the crumbling pages of early magazines. Today the pseudo-historical tales about the giant Cimmerian, which captivate untold numbers of readers, have been dubbed "heroic fantasy" and are regarded by many as an escape literature second to none, save only Tolkien's trilogy
The Lord of the Rings.