Dark Valley Destiny (23 page)

In New Orleans the Howards rented rooms in the house of a family of shabby-genteel Louisianians named Durrell, who had been compelled by economic necessity to take in boarders. The Durrells spoke French among themselves, and although they were natives of the city, their English was strongly accented. They despised the Italians who had come into the area and within a few years raised themselves financially by hard work and thrift.
²⁹

Fourteen-year-old Robert was amazed at the sight of one Joe Rizza and his wife standing in their shop, shucking oysters as if their lives depended on it when, as everyone knew, the man was rich and owned a chain of Italian restaurants. While Robert did not share the Durrell ladies' dreams of lost aristocracy, he thought it ridiculous to chain oneself to a dull occupation when one could afford not to do so.

Years later Robert recalled the Old French Market. He felt it should be preserved. For all its noise and bustle and its mixture of smells, it had an old-world charm that the boy Robert found hard to define. Here he savored genuine Creole gumbo cooked in the French manner and called it "food for the gods." Here he learned to enjoy seafood, although the sight of Italian women haggling at the top of their voices revolted him. Like H. P. Lovecraft, with whom he shared his New Orleans memories, he was repelled by the noisier, more extroverted Mediterranean culture in action, having—like his pen pal—grown up in a more taciturn, inhibited tradition. What offended him most was that the haggling sprang less from need than from greed, "hard shameless avarice!"
³⁰

Howard stretched his youthful memories to encompass a delectable drink of good whiskey mixed by an old French-German on Canal Street —an unlikely recollection. Since Robert was only fourteen at the time, and an immature fourteen at that, he was not apt to be buying alcoholic beverages in the French Market in New Orleans. The banana fritters or "plantains" that delighted him at the old market were more appropriate fare for adolescents.

While in New Orleans, the Howards wandered about on little sightseeing tours. They visited Ponchartrain, saw the duelling oaks, inspected the ruins of the old Spanish fort, and took a boat a few miles up the Mississippi to look at the stately old plantation houses along its banks. Howard said that he was grateful to have seen the old city before modernization obliterated all traces of Creole New Orleans. He felt Lovecraft was also fortunate to have seen the famous duelling oaks before some local vandal chopped them down to make room for a hot-dog stand.
³¹

Young Robert enjoyed the museums of New Orleans, especially those displaying relics of the Civil War. He was always interested in history, particularly that which related to Texas.

Whereas Howard's accounts of historical events are bathed in blood and in his stories he fills the air with severed heads, legs, and arms, this was sheer bravado. In real life he was squeamish about violence and bloodshed. When, as a young man, he fell into conversation with an East Indian whom he met in San Antonio, and the Hindu told in a matter-of-fact way about witnessing mass beheadings of Communists in China, Robert found himself actually nauseated.
³²

While he was in New Orleans, according to Robert's account, he had an experience he could not forget. He was present during a street fight in which one man killed another with a knife, nearly cutting off the victim's head. For years the memory of this incident evoked horror by day and nightmares by night. Howard told several of his friends about this event. If his tale was one of his whoppers, it was at least more probable than most of his tall tales; for New Orleans at that time led the nation in crimes of violence. Unnerved by the experience, he may have wanted to talk about it in an attempt to liquidate his anxiety.

One of Robert's first enterprises after his arrival in New Orleans was to hunt up the nearest public library. He found it on Canal Street, and there he spent happy hours racing through book after book. A history of Britain from early times to the Norman Conquest particularly impressed him. Written for children, this book dramatized the life and limes of the Picts, the pre-Roman aborigines of northern Britain; and a fascination with these obscure folk remained with him for the rest of his life.

Robert felt a strong affinity for these people, who seemed to him to be the perennial victims of early conflicts. With his typical sympathy for the underdog, Robert's imagination reshaped their history, their character, and their life-style. Howard's aborigines were the opposite of those presented in the history text—indeed, they were the opposite of young Howard himself. Whereas the book depicted a sly, furtive, and timid band of hunters and food gatherers, Howard's Picts were a strong, warlike race. Where they were shown as inferior, Howard's were superior. Where theirs was a loosely-knit tribal organization, regulated only by ritual and tabu, Howard gave them a central government under the leadership of a great king, Bran Mak Morn. Their network of desultory legend and superstition was chronicled by Howard as a coherent history of past glories.

Unlike Robert who, as a child, was blond, blue-eyed, and slender for his age, the Pictish king whom he idealized was short, stocky, and muscular, with coarse black hair, dark skin, and black, inscrutable eyes. Even the meaning of his name, Bran Mak Morn, Howard explains, is lost in antiquity, although it is phonetically coincident with the modern Gaelic Bran Mac Morn, meaning "Raven, son of Morn."
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This identification with the Pictish king guided Robert Howard in his nearch for his own identity—a name that was constant, a personal history, a viable past and foreseeable future, and an adequate system of defenses for a chaotic world: in short, a coherent self. Although Bran Mak Morn has no real historical basis, the contrasts whereby he was constructed are artistically significant. They clearly show Howard's creative processes at work and the ageless psychological needs that underlay them.

Howard's earliest hero was Francis Xavier Gordon, nicknamed "El Borak," a man of medium size but great strength and catlike agility. Then, as Howard himself tells us:

The next was Bran Mak Morn, the Pictish king. He was the result of my discovery of the Pictish race, when reading some historical works in a public library in New Orleans at the age of thirteen. Physically he bore a striking resemblance to El Borak.
³⁴

Although Howard's memory had deleted a year from his true age, thes< progenitors did indeed sire a line of Howard heroes, the greatest of whon was Conan the Cimmerian.

To understand the uses to which Robert Howard put history and histori cal misconceptions, we must digress a bit into the historical background for the concepts of "Pict" and "Aryan," which played so large a part ii his later thinking and writing. Robert discovered in that child's historj of Britain the then current belief that the Picts were a small, dark rac( of Mediterranean type, who had been conquered and driven into woodec refuges by tall, blond Celts. This idea seems to have originated in & medieval history of Norway, which briefly described the Picts as a litth folk who lived in holes in the ground, like Tolkien's Hobbits, and wh< lost all their strength at noon and so were forced to hide. This legenc passed into folk anthropology in Robert's time and became entanglec with the Aryanist doctrines of the late nineteenth and early twentietl centuries. }

In the early nineteenth century, scholars had noted the resemblance between languages as far apart as those of India and Iceland. They alsd discovered that, around 1,500
b.c.,
India and Iran had been overrun by horse-taming barbarians who called themselves
Arya,
or "Nobles." Linguists adopted the word "Aryan" for the far-flung language family that includes English, Swedish, Russian, Italian, Greek, Armenian, Persian, and Hindi. Later the term "Indo-European" came to be preferred.

Although the term "Aryan" was never meant to designate a
race
but only a
linguistic community,
the most eminent of these early philologists^ Friedrich Max Muller, once carelessly spoke of an "Aryan race." He soon retracted the statement; but meanwhile, in the 1850s, a French diplomat and writer, Comte Joseph Arthur de Gobineau, had popularized the idea of a race of superior Aryans in his book,
On the Inequality oj Human Races
.
³⁵
Gobineau identified the Aryans with the tall, blond; long-headed Nordic type common in northern Europe. Certain of thj Aryans, the Germanic Franks, he said, had conquered France in the fiftl century and had ever since furnished that land with leadership. Franc* had ruined herself by killing off or exiling the Nordic aristocracy during the French Revolution. It was no coincidence that Gobineau was himsel: a French aristocrat.

These ideas were taken up by Richard Wagner, the composer, and by Houston Stewart Chamberlain, an Englishman who became a German citizen, a friend of Kaiser Wilhelm II, and a son-in-law of Wagner. Chamberlain's book,
Foundations of the Nineteenth Century,
³⁶
appeared in German in 1899 and in an English translation in 1911. The work, published in an American edition a year later, and very influential at the time, is a dreadful farrago of misstatements of fact and errors of interpretation. It is not surprising that, before his death in 1927, Chamberlain hailed Hitler as the savior of Germany.

The American edition of this book was probably the source of the vehement Aryanism espoused by Robert Howard's later friend H. P. Lovecraft. Chamberlain's ideas were adopted by other American writers as well, among them Madison Grant and Lothrop Stoddard, whose popular works influenced the American immigration law of 1924.

The burthen of all these books was that the white or Caucasoid race was superior to all others, and that the Nordic or Aryan type was far and away the best kind of white, being responsible for all advances of civilization. Since the blood of these noble Nordics must be guarded against contamination by the lesser breeds, Aryanism provided Wagner and Chamberlain with a rationalization for their loathing of the Jews— an obsession not, however, shared by Gobineau.

Modern anthropology tells quite a different story. According to present-day science, the distinctive physical characters of the various racial types evolved in prehistoric times as a response to climate. The Negro's rangy build, dark skin, and built-in sun helmet of kinky hair are protections against the African sun; while the Nordic's pale complexion evolved as a response to one of the world's most cloudy climates, where a lack of sunlight tends to cause rickets in dark-skinned children. Moreover, there is no reason to think that there ever was a pure blond race. Physical types have always varied within any group. Although the frequency of any trait varies from place to place, the percentage of a character such as blondness changes gradually, not sharply, as one travels across the face of the earth.

Furthermore, the original advances in civilization were made, not by Nordics, but by swarthy southerners in the Near East and by yellow-skinned easterners in Farther Asia. The self-styled Aryans were seminomadic, cattle-raising barbarians who, around 2,000
b.c.,
first tamed the horse somewhere in Poland or the Ukraine. Thence they set out in all directions in their rattling chariots and, with this terrifying new weapon, conquered their neighbors, imposed their language, customs, and beliefs upon them, and eventually mingled with them. Their progeny in turn conquered their outlying neighbors, and so on until the descendants of the original horse-tamers had spread their steeds, their bronze swords, their sky gods, and their grammar from Portugal to Assam.

These Aryans—if so we may call the horse-tamers and their near descendants—never did constitute a race. They were probably stocky, broad-headed people looking like present-day Slavs, but whatever their original type, it soon disappeared through intermarriage with the more numerous peoples they conquered.

Robert Howard's thinking was tinged by Aryanism, partly through his reading and partly through his later correspondence with Lovecraft. Less enchanted by mere blondness than Lovecraft, he was proud of the dark hair and blue eyes of his adult years. Since the combination of very dark hair and blue eyes appears more frequently in Ireland than elsewhere, his coloring probably fed Howard's phantasies of being an Irishman and a Celt.

Although nineteenth-century British archaeologists, coming upon the remains of pre-Roman Celtic storage pits, decided that these were the underground houses attributed to the Picts by Norwegian legend, in the light of modern knowledge there is no reason to believe that the Picts differed appreciably from the folk of modern Scotland. The original Scots were Irishmen who, in Roman times, invaded Scotland from the west. The Picts held their own against them until Norsemen also attacked them from the east. Then in the ninth century Kenneth MacAlpin, a Scottish leader who was himself half Pict, conquered the Picts and set up the united kingdom of the Picts and Scots. The two groups merged, and their descendants became the Scots of today.
³⁷

So far from the Nordic Celts' suppression of small, dark Pictish aborigines, it looks as if the opposite train of events ensued. The original Nordics of Britain were at least twice overrun and conquered by smaller, darker southerners, first by the prehistoric Beaker Folk from Spain, around 1,700
b.c.,
then in the first century by the Romans. From early times to the Norman Conquest, Britain was subjugated over and over again, each time by conquerors who had some technical advantage— bronze weapons instead of stone; iron instead of bronze; or Roman discipline instead of slapdash Celtic onslaughts.

At any rate, Robert Howard embraced the legendary doctrine of small, dark Pictish aborigines, as did Rudyard Kipling in two of the tales in
Puck of Pook's Hill:
"On the Great Wall" and "The Winged Hats." A great admirer of Kipling, Howard paraphrased the second stanza of Kipling's poem
A Pict Song
in the first stanza of his own verse,
The Song of a Mad Minstrel.