Dark Valley Destiny (25 page)

I used to work in a Jewish dry-goods store. Before each sale—and Jewish sales go on forever—I would "mark down" the goods according to instructions. For instance, the regular retail price of a pair of trousers would be $5.00. I would mark in big numbers on the tag—$9.50, and then draw a line through that and mark below, $5.50.
^4S

In 1921, fifteen-year-old Robert became a regular reader of
Adventure Magazine,
the aristocrat of the pulps, which was published three times a month. One day, having exhausted all the local reading matter and being desperate for some new material, he suddenly realized that magazines could be bought at the drugstore. Tramping into town, he pawed avidly through the bright covers on the rack, made his selection, then discovered that he lacked the twenty-five cents to pay for his prize. Undaunted, he charged the magazine and paid for it ten days later when the next issue appeared, to be charged and enjoyed in its turn.

Young Robert and his cronies sometimes went "hunting." Such expeditions were what we should call nature walks. As Tom Wilson explained: "He'd go hunting, but he wouldn't kill anything."

Robert's purpose, he liked to say, was to "get back to nature." Once, in 1923, after his graduation from Brownwood High School, Robert went hunting with Baker, Tyson, and Wilson, purportedly to hunt raccoon and opossum. They caught a 'possum; the creature played dead. Robert picked it up and examined it. When he set it down, it suddenly came to life and fastened its teeth into its captor's calf, biting hard enough to draw blood. Robert hopped about, frantically trying to kick the 'possum loose. Eventually he freed himself from the needlelike teeth. "Even then he wouldn't let us kill it," said Wilson.
⁴⁶

Robert's love of nature and wildlife fits the pattern of his personality. A psychiatrist, Harold F. Searles, argues that a child first experiences complete dependence upon and attachment to its parents. Then some of the childish interest shifts to material objects, such as a favorite teddy bear or security blanket. Dr. Searles calls these "transitional objects." In the normal person, love of things gradually matures into love of persons, and this change is triggered by the growth of sexuality in adolescence. Thus, most children move from complete dependence on their parents to a self-reliant relationship with their peers—classmates, sweethearts, friends, neighbors, and fellow workers. Searles goes on:

Those persons who . . . fail to make this final achievement of normal adolescence continue throughout their lives to identify themselves more with Nature than with mankind. Toward Nature they experience a passionately close relationship, toward mankind they have a misanthropic attitude; their fellow men seem alien to them.
⁴⁷

Dr. Howard, at least to some extent, shared this feeling for nature. Jack Scott, the distinguished editor of
The Cross Plains Review,
recalls an autumn afternoon when the doctor stopped his car in front of the newspaper office and repeatedly honked. Extricating himself from a confusion of customers ordering ads, posters, and other handbills, and the ringing of the telephone with reports of news items—all concerns of the town's only printer and newspaper publisher—Scott went out.

"Hell, Doc," he said. "We don't give curb service here! What do you want?"

"Get inside," commanded Dr. Howard, indicating the seat beside him. "I want to tell you something."

His natural courtesy overriding his impatience, Scott climbed in and sat, ignoring the customers who stared at him through the plate-glass window.

"I just came from Cottonwood," the doctor began. "You know how driving down that road is? The trees grow so close together on either side of the road that they overlap above. The leaves kept falling down on me or floating across the road. I just stopped my car and thought about these people, the ones I brought into the world, and the ones I had seen during their last illness. People are like the leaves on the way over to Cottonwood. They live, and then they just float down to earth and die. They're dead and forgotten."

The doctor sat in a moment of quiet reverie. Then he said, "That's all there is to it. Get out! Just wanted to tell you that!"

In his brusque way, Dr. Howard was expressing the same notion that Robert put to his friend Harold Preece. To the Celt, said Robert, the fall of a leaf can have more significance than the fall of an empire.
⁴⁸

During adolescence Robert Howard increasingly showed two traits that fit Searles's picture of the misanthropic nature-lover. One was his estrangement from the human world; the other was his tardy, hesitant approach to sex. While adolescence is usually a time for delighted discovery of the opposite sex, Robert made a fetish of trusting few men and no women, save his mother. He ignored the fair sex in the classroom and avoided school dances and class outings. On the rare occasions when he found himself in a mixed company of his peers, he acted shy and ill at ease, escaping as quickly as he could.

The nearest he came to an attack of puppy love occurred in the summer of 1921 when, aged fifteen, he meandered through the midway of the annual carnival. He wanted to see the boxing matches, since he had kept up his boxing and sometimes entertained notions of a pugilistic career.

Shoving his way through the throngs of the curious, he was dazzled by the sight of a carnie girl, presumably with the heavy makeup and the free-and-easy manner of her kind. He glimpsed the girl for a few seconds only; then she disappeared into a tent. But Robert was smitten with the terrible aching, delicious yearning that descends on adolescents with their first love—a passion of which the love object is seldom aware. To Robert this girl represented freedom, color, adventure, excitement—all the things his life lacked. For years he cherished a mental picture of the carnie girl while ignoring the more mundane and available local lasses. She—or his idealized concept of her—unquestionably shaped some of his fictional women.
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For three years, from the fall of 1919 to the end of the spring term of 1922, Robert attended the school in Cross Plains. Although, as he said later, he was seething with resentment during the entire time, he kept his feelings under control. A barbarian—or his idea of a barbarian—to the core of his being, Howard could never abide the enforced discipline of the schoolroom or work place and could never accept gracefully rules set by others or standards he had not imposed upon himself.

Yet, when he made up his mind to follow some course of action, nothing could deter him from it, as the following example shows. Like many boys embarking on the stormy sea of adolescence, thirteen-year-old Robert experimented with tobacco; but about the time that the Howards moved to Cross Plains he gave up smoking for good and all. Years later he offered E. Hoffmann Price a whimsical explanation: "The most contemptible stinker I know of smokes, and so I refuse to." With considerable insight he added: "I'm afraid I'm not consistent. I breathe, and so does that son of a bitch!"
⁵⁰

Robert's classmates remember him as a big, good-looking, slim, but well-built youth. In school he was very quiet and reclusive. Polite but reserved, he took no part in school activities, gave his teachers no trouble, and got better-than-average grades. His best subject was history, in which he led his class; his worst, mathematics, in which he just squeaked by. He studied Latin on the theory that it would help him with Spanish in college, but he never went to college and his Spanish remained rudimentary.

Robert called himself lazy and asserted that he could have done much better if he had put his mind to it. Perhaps it was not so much laziness from which he suffered as an unconscious misdirection of his energies. People who labor under severe chronic emotional stress, whether on the conscious or subconscious level, devote so much of their energy to controlling unresolved hate or anger or fear that they have little residue for constructive activities.

When not in school or doing after-class jobs for pocket money,

Robert was reading voluminously. In later life he attributed the trouble with his eyes, which compelled him to wear glasses for reading, to having been punched in the eyes while boxing and to "sitting out on the woodpile and reading until after dark." He was supposed to wear his glasses all the time but feared to do so lest, as he said, some enemy hit him in the eye while he was wearing them.
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Diligent inquiry has been made about these "enemies" of whom Robert continued to speak all of his adult life. The unanimous opinion of those who knew him is that these enemies were figments of his imagination. Since the boundary between the real and the imaginary was always fuzzy to him, Robert treated his imaginary enemies as an ever-present menace. When, in his late twenties, he asked E. Hoffmann Price about the latter's enemies and learned that Price had none, Robert was incredulous. How could a man exist without enemies? After all, every hero of adventure fiction had at least one or two. That an enemy is a liability and that constant concern about enemies is stressful and time-consuming, as well as emotionally depleting, never crossed the mind of Robert Howard.

Doctor Howard still cherished the vain hope that his son would become a physician; but as each year passed, Robert's determination to live by writing grew. Aside from his mother, who boasted to neighbors of her son's literary promise, the only person who encouraged his youthful literary ambitions—so strange and suspect to friends and acquaintances—was his English teacher, Doris Pyle.

With Miss Pyle's encouragement, Robert wrote a story and sent it to
Adventure Magazine.
It was promptly returned with a rejection slip. Although this is the usual fate of an early literary effort, Howard seems to have taken the rejection as a personal affront. Twelve years later he complained: "I never have been able to sell to
Adventure;
guess my first attempt cooked me with them for ever!"
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To sell a piece to
Adventure
was Howard's lifelong ambition. While he submitted many stories, he never sold one there; although they did publish, gratis, two minor contributions by him. The magazine had a department, "Old Songs That Men Have Sung," and in 1926-27 they ran the words of two traditional songs that Howard submitted:
Young Johnny
and
Sanford Burns.

Robert's failure to sell to
Adventure
had nothing to do with his 1921 effort, which the editors had long since forgotten. The fact was that

Robert was competing with such able and finished writers as Harold Lamb and Talbot Mundy. Howard's stories, then and later, were not up to the literary standards set by these talented men. Had he lived to mature further, both as a writer and as a human being, while
Adventure
writers of the older generation passed from the scene, he might well have achieved his goal.

When he was sixteen, Robert conceived one of his major heroes: Solomon Kane, an English Puritan who adventures around the world in the late sixteenth century, during the closing years of the reign of Elizabeth I. Solomon Kane differs from most of Howard's heroes. Instead of a hell-raising roughneck, a lawless plunderer, or a rapacious opportunist, Kane is a sternly moral man who devotes his life to righting wrongs. Somber of dress, dour of manner, and rigid of principles, he is troubled by doubts about his soul, his worthiness, and his faith. Kane is more complex and—within the limits of adventure-fantasy fiction— a more credible character than some of Howard's later, more popular heroes.

In creating his protagonist, a fictioneer often takes certain aspects of his own character and personality—including some of his secret urges, fears, and hopes—exaggerates them, and builds his hero around them. Of Solomon Kane, Howard wrote:

Solomon Kane ... I created when I was in high school, at the age of about sixteen, but, like the others I have mentioned, several years passed before I put him on paper. He was probably the result of an admiration for a certain type of cold, steely-nerved duellist that existed in the sixteenth century.
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Solomon's dueling expertise aside, Howard's actual personality came closer to Kane than to Conan. Like Kane, he was basically a Puritan. So far from being lawless was he that he would not even cut across other people's lots, as everyone else did in walking about Cross Plains. Instead he punctiliously strode around the corners of his neighbor's lawns. The only exception that he made was the lot of his friend Lindsey Tyson, across which he would cut. When he found a wallet containing fifty dollars—equal to several hundreds of dollars today—he hunted down the owner despite difficulties and returned it to him. The owner gave him ten dollars. Later, with wry irony, he remarked to Tyson: "I make ten dollars by being honest; at the same time I lose forty dollars by being honest." Another time his friend Tevis Clyde Smith shrewdly observed that Robert "was Solomon Kane, off paper, even more than he was Conan."
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In Texas in the 1920s, eleven years of precollege schooling was required for college entrance. Since the Cross Plains school system in those days offered only the first ten grades, pupils with collegiate ambitions went to Brownwood, some twenty-three miles away, for their final year. Even pupils from towns that offered eleven grades were often sent to Brown-wood High to complete that final year, for the Brownwood school was larger, had better facilities, and offered a wider variety of courses.

In the autumn of 1922, after a family trip for a seaside visit to the Chamberses in Galveston County, Robert Howard entered the eleventh or senior grade at the high school in Brownwood. The school was badly overcrowded, with three pupils jammed into a seat designed for two, a condition eased the following year with the completion of the junior high school.

Mrs. Howard decided to go to Brownwood to keep house for her son throughout the school year. Dr. Howard opposed the plan. He complained to the Bakers that Hester and Robert were isolating him from his own family.
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But he gave in and rented a house for them at 316 Wilson Street, a few blocks south of the center of town, at the corner of Hawkins. Isaac Howard remained in Cross Plains to tend his practice, but he went to Brownwood every weekend or two for a visit.