Dark Valley Destiny (28 page)

Howard's story "Spear and Fang" is scarcely more than a juvenilium—a caveman tale of the kind favored by many young writers of imaginative fiction. Such stories lie on the border between science (iction and historical fiction. Even the great H. G. Wells wrote at least two.
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A common theme of such stories is the supposed conflict between men of the Neanderthal race and those of the tall, aristocratic Cro-Magnon race, which overran Europe in the Pleistocene period, at the end of the fourth glaciation.

This, too, is the theme of "Spear and Fang." The story tells how the artistically gifted Cro-Magnard, Ga-nor, rescues his girl, A-aea, from the clutches of a Neanderthaler who has carried her off. The apish Neanderthaler "plunged forward on short, gnarled legs. He was covered with hair and his features were more hideous than an ape's because of the grotesque quality of man in them. Flat, flaring nostrils, retreating chin, fangs, no forehead whatever, great immensely long arms dangling from sloping, incredible shoulders. . . ,"
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In Howard's day, Neanderthal man was described in print as having
m
hunched, apelike posture and a shambling gait. This assumption derived from the first nearly complete Neanderthal skeleton found, that of an arthritic old man whose deformed bones lay in the cave of La

Chapelle-aux-Saints until they were recovered in 1908. Later discovers have narrowed the gap between Neanderthal men and modern man, $ that now Neanderthal men are believed to be merely a primitive type <
Homo sapiens
, persons of short, stocky, muscular build, probably ligli colored, who stood as straight as other men. Instead of falling victim a war of extermination, it now appears that Neanderthalers were mere assimilated by waves of immigrants into Europe, waves of which til Cro-Magnons were only one. Robert Howard, however, could only haV used what information was available at the time he wrote.

In style "Spear and Fang" is hardly distinguishable from the pros of scores of other pulp-magazine writers of the day, whose work wa competent but in no way extraordinary. There is only a hint of the ra
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vitality, the headlong rush of action, and the hypnotically vivid cadence prose of later years. Not for several years did Howard begin to develo the style that makes his writings memorable.

That summer of 1924 it seemed to Robert Howard that he was gettin nowhere with his long-cherished career as a writer. He had not sold single piece and was still working at odd jobs for petty wages.

Robert at eighteen was hammering out his manuscripts on an ol secondhand typewriter by the time-wasting method of hunt-and-pecl Yet his ineptitude was more than counterbalanced by his passional desire to write. In
Post Oaks and Sand Roughs,
Robert tells how Stev Costigan

... would sit down to his typewriter and scarcely eat or sleep until he ha pounded out what seemed a masterpiece. He would mail it, and then woul follow days of haunting the post office. His heart would sink as he woul finally receive a bulky envelope, and his mood would be almost too bitti to open it. However, he would open it, hoping to find a line from the edito He would curse savagely at the sight of the rejection slip, and plod hom< to sit down and write another story.
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As the pile of rejection slips grew, so did Robert's sense of futility; y< he continued to write. A rejection slip so deeply wounded his basi egotism, Robert said, that he seldom submitted a story to more than om magazine. A hardened professional, which Howard eventually became learns to take rejections in stride and to send out rejected works ove itnd over again until every possibility has been exhausted. By that time I he first magazine may have a new editor who will snap up the piece the old editor turned dowh.

This and similar advice of value to a professional writer might have heen available to Robert Howard had he sought out a course for writers. Hut such courses he affected to despise, saying: "I'm determined to succeed, if I do, without any help of that sort."
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It is quite possible that there was no one in the vicinity capable of giving the young author significant advice. In a town the size of Cross Plains and even in surrounding communities, there were few if any who possessed the skills he needed. Robert was well aware of his utter isolation from professional contacts. As he wrote a decade later, his was

... a profession which seems as dim and faraway and unreal as the shores of Europe. The people among which I lived—and yet live, mainly—made their living from cotton, wheat, cattle, oil, with the usual percentage of business men and professional men. . . . But the idea of a man making his living by writing seemed, in that hardy environment, so fantastic that even today I am sometimes myself assailed by a feeling of unreality. Never the less, at the age of fifteen, having never seen a writer, a poet, a publisher or a magazine editor, and having only the vaguest ideas of procedure, I began working on the profession I had chosen. ... I had neither expert aid nor advice. I studied no courses in writing; until a year or so ago, I never read a book by anybody advising writers how to write. Ordinarily I had no access to public libraries, and when I did, it was to no such libraries as exist in the cities.
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It was at last decided, whether by Robert or by his parents or by a family conclave, that he should at least improve the manual skills required for commercial writing. When the fall term of 1924 began at the Howard Payne College in Brownwood, Howard was enrolled in the commercial school for noncredit courses in typing and shorthand.

Howard Payne had a subdivision, the Howard Payne Academy, which was a college preparatory school offering classes all the way from kindergarten through high school. Many aspiring college students, whose high-school preparation did not qualify them to matriculate as college freshmen, took a year or two at the Academy prior to entering the college.

The Academy in turn had a branch or division, the Howard Payne Commercial School, which offered noncredit courses in such practical subjects as bookkeeping and commercial law. Robert was a student it the Commercial School, which was run by James Edward Basham, a lean distinguished-looking oldster with white hair and a drooping mustache A kindly, gentle man, Basham taught Robert shorthand. Robert also tool classes in typing.

Since Bob Howard's friend Lindsey Tyson had already complete* the college preparatory course at the Academy and was matriculated iij the academic course in Howard Payne College, Bob made arrangement* to room with him at 417 Austin Avenue, a couple of blocks from th< campus. It was a happy arrangement. I

Lindsey had continued to be an avid sports fan. One fine fall daj he persuaded Bob to attend a football game between Howard Payne an< a neighboring college. For all his distrust of group activities and his pos< of aloof cynicism, Bob—perhaps to his surprise—was caught up in th« vicarious thrill of battle aroused by the sight of struggling, tumbling bodies. Here was a living simulation of those imaginary spectacles o: bloodshed and slaughter that had so long occupied his mind and, later his typewriter. Steve Costigan, Robert wrote, "sat in the grandstands t< see men clash and bleed, and he was frank in his admission of the fact.'' He found himself yelling: "Tear their god-damned guts out! Kill th« bastards!"
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whereas others only rooted for a touchdown. From that da) forward Bob Howard remained an ardent football fan. i

One happy day that autumn, Robert received a letter from Farns-worth Wright, the editor of
Weird Tales,
saying that the magazine hat accepted "Spear and Fang" and would pay sixteen dollars on publica* tion, at the magazine's regular rate of half a cent a word. Tyson latel reported that, when Bob got that letter, he was "about the happiest mai that I have ever seen." Declaring, "I am going to thank my God for this,' Bob knelt down by the side of the bed and was silent for a few minuted When he rose, he said: "I'm so grateful, not just for this story, bu because now it won't be so hard for me to sell. Now that I've finallj broken in, it'll be easier." :

For a while thereafter Robert Howard walked on air. When hi! friends congratulated him, he replied expansively: "Yes, I'm prettj young to be selling stuff. Looks like I'm going right on up. . . ."
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Sucl optimism, he later learned, was premature. He haunted the newsstand! for each monthly issue of
Weird Tales,
hoping to see his story in print but month after month went by without the story's appearance.
i

In the meanwhile, spurred on by thoughts of success, Robert continued to turn out poems and work on stories whenever his classwork was done. Sometimes the creative urge was so compelling that he typed far into the night, and his long-suffering roommate made no complaint. At times, he later admitted, he even neglected his homework for his writing.

Unfortunately, that autumn Howard's prickly personality deprived him of a source of information of the greatest value to a writer. He had a row with the librarian in the public library at Brownwood and felt that thereafter the library was barred to him. Since, for some unknown reason, he had never investigated the library at Howard Payne College, he now had no ready supply of reading matter and became a person who rarely opened a book. He relied on
The Saturday Evening Post
and followed with insatiate interest a series of articles by Charles Francis Coe, which set forth the reminiscences of notable prizefighters.
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Robert's silent prayer of thanksgiving, that day when he received the notice of acceptance of his story, was his most definite recorded commitment to a belief in God. Some of his friends have said that "he believed deep down in God and in God's forgiveness for sins" and that he "claimed to have his own personal kind of religion."
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Actually he flitted about among religious beliefs somewhat as his father did but was more inclined to disbelief.

Like his father, Robert loved to talk and argue on the subject. At one time, they say, he would be an enthusiastic Campbellite; at another, a Baptist; at still another, a convinced reincarnationist or a dyed-in-the-wool agnostic. He was somewhat anti-Catholic, sitting out the Hoover-Smith presidential election of 1928 on the ground that "I won't vote for a Catholic and I won't vote for a damned Republican. . . . My ancestors were all Catholic and not very far back. And I have reason to hate the church." To Clyde Smith he expressed

. . . detachment toward the Christian Faith, stating that he did not know what he believed, adding that he supposed he was an agnostic, and saying that no Howard had ever had any religion after leaving the Catholic Church. Then he'd add: "I say all that, and when my time comes I'll probably die howling for a priest."
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apprentice pulpster

Robert sometimes avowed that, if a supreme being existed, he suspected it of being malignant rather than benevolent:

If mankind's affairs are tinkered with from Outside, it must be with malicious intent. If a man walks across a ten-acre tract in the dark, with one rock on it, he'll invariably bust his toe on that rock.
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Later he said he had been joking about the rock. But since there are sq many hints scattered through his writings that he viewed the universe as actively hostile, we may doubt if he wrote altogether in jest. It seema likely that he really thought the cosmos was out to get him.

Among the tangled threads of the skein of his supernatural beliefs, reincarnation was one of the strongest. All his life he had heard his father speculate endlessly on the subject. A couple of his young friends dabbled in the occult, and of one Bob said:

An occultist of my acquaintance, who has gone deeper into the matter than any man I ever knew, says I have a very ancient soul, am a reincarnated Atlantean, in fact! Maybe if there's anything to this soul business, or to reincarnation, that theory may be right.

The acquaintance was probably S. T. Russell of Cottonwood, who wrote Howard letters full of portentous phrases extolling Cosmic Consciousness and exhorting Robert "to keep his Spiritual Eye on His Star—His Planet —which is always leading upward towards The Light.' "
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In later years H. P. Lovecraft wrote Howard long, learned letters, arguing with elaborately reasoned logic for the philosophy of scientific materialism and dismissing all supernaturalism as too unlikely, in the light of evidence, to bother with. But he never fully convinced Bob. Wilfred Branch Talman published in
Weird Tales
a poem titled
Death:

A stately ship stands in the offing now,

Out past the reef where broken waves are drumming, Her sails lit up with sun, bright gilded prow,

And rigging taut through which the breeze is humming. Some day another ship is coming; No breath of wind shall whisper through her spars, And I, through phantom sails, shall view the stars.
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Howard wrote Talman, praising the poem and saying: "It's difficult to capture a completed thought in so short a verse, but you seem to have succeeded admirably."
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The ideas expressed in this poem seem to have coincided with Howard's basic belief of death as a promising rite of passage, an escape or liberation. He never became reconciled to the idea of the finality of death.

Yet Howard was able to tailor his supernatural pronouncements to the views of the recipient of his letters. In the early stages of their correspondence, he wrote with boyish enthusiasm to Lovecraft:

Some senses of connection with past ages seem so unerring, so strong and so instinctive that I sometimes wonder if there is a bit of truth to the theory of reincarnation. . . . Perhaps you were an armored Roman centurion and I was a skin-clad Goth in the long ago, and perhaps we split each other's skulls on some dim battle-field!
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Though inept and impractical in worldly affairs, Lovecraft was a skilled debater, a lover of intellectual argument, and an aggressive materialistic atheist. He promptly punctured his pen pal's balloon of speculation, so that Bob had to retreat to a dignified agnosticism, writing: