Dark Valley Destiny (29 page)

My mind is open; I refuse either to deny or affirm. . . . I've never heard a theological argument which convinced me beyond the shadow of a doubt in the existence of a Supreme Being; nor have I ever heard a scientific argument that convinced me that such a Being did not exist. ... I guess Agnostic is what I am, if that means scepticism regarding all human gropings. Perhaps the main reason that I dislike to take a firm stand in any direction, is because of the respect I have for my father's intelligence. He is not by any means convinced that there is nothing in the matters mentioned.
²⁸

Robert went on to say that he favored the same open-minded attitude toward life after death and reincarnation. Yet he harbored a mystical dense of the existence of unknown forces and beings that affected the lives of men:

I am by no means certain that unseen and only dimly suspected forms of life and energy do not impinge upon us from Outside. ... I am not certain there are not invisible beings and forms of matter, above and below our senses of discernment, which are not altogether oblivious or indifferent to mankind. This is no question of the supernatural; there may be beings and forms of life natural enough in their sphere and plane, yet still intangible to us.
²⁹

183

He said of himself that he "was prone to lean vaguely toward the belie of Hindu philosophers that the creation of anything set spheres an elements in motion that endured down the ages."
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Since his fellow fantasist Clark Ashton Smith, in California, provei more receptive than Lovecraft to such otherworldly speculations, How ard continued to indulge in them in letters to Smith:

While I don't go so far as to believe that stories are inspired by actuall existent spirits or powers (though I am rather opposed to flatly denyinj anything) I have sometimes wondered if it were possible that unrecognize< forces of the past or present—or even of the future—work through th thoughts and actions of living men. . . .

It certainly does seem that certain individuals occasionally get in contac with forces outside themselves; something like cog-wheels grinding awa; in their spirits, that suddenly, perhaps only momentarily, slip into th notches of gigantic, unseen cog-wheels of cosmic scope. . . . Sometimes il seems to me that the interlocking of unseen cog-wheels lifts a man tq heights he would never have attained by his own efforts.... Then the samq cosmic law that locked the wheels, unlocks them, leaving him in the gap, Dazed, stunned and helpless he comes down crashing in the ruins of his glory. . . .
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This mechanistic mysticism—this sense of otherworldly wheels within wheels—stayed with Howard. It first appeared in 1928, when he wrote to a "Fort Worth newspaper predicting the outcome of the Tunney-Heeney prizefight. He prophesied that Tom Heeney would beat James J. "Gene' Tunney because of parallels between the career of Tunney and that o: an earlier fighter James J. Corbett. Both men had the same first nam< and middle initial. Howard pointed out that Corbett had defeated Johl L. Sullivan in 1892, just as Tunney had defeated Dempsey in 1926. Il each case the more scientific boxer had triumphed over the harder hitter Moreover, both challengers, Robert Fitzsimmons in 1897 and Tom Heeney in 1928, were New Zealanders of Irish ancestry and ex-black smiths to boot. Just as Fitzsimmons beat Corbett, so now Heeney was bound to beat Tunney as the cosmic cog-wheels repeated their revolution This time, alas, the cosmic cog-wheels evidently "unlocked," for on July 26th Tunney knocked out Heeney in the eleventh round and retiree undefeated from the ring.
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Probably Howard's half-belief in reincarnation remained with him,

although in his more mature years he spoke about it less than he had in his youth, when for a while he was wholeheartedly committed to the doctrine. One of his friends has even suggested that a contributory cause of his suicide was an intense curiosity about the afterworld and an impatience to explore it.
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Robert Howard often used the reincarnation theme in his stories. Whether or not an author believes in a doctrine makes little difference; in writing a fantasy, he can assume the truth of any theme that will enhance the plot. Yet, belief tends to make the theme more convincing to the reader of the story.

One of Robert's favorite boyhood books, which he read and reread many times, was entirely based on the concept of reincarnation. This was Jack London's
The Star Rover
(1915), a long novel told in the first person by one Darrell Standing, a man in a California jail, awaiting execution. This book influenced Howard's adult thinking and writing in a number of ways.

For one thing Standing enjoys dreams in which he relives many earlier lives. In one he is an Elizabethan sea rover on a South Pacific island. In another he is the man who tamed the horse. In still another he is a giant Viking commanding a Roman legion in Palestine at the time of the Crucifixion. "I was of the flaxen-haired ^Esir, who dwelt in Asgard, and before I was of the red-haired Vanir, who dwelt in Van&heim. ... I have been an Aryan master in old Egypt ... I have been a king in Ceylon, a builder of Aryan monuments under Aryan kings in old Java and old Sumatra. . . ."

Undoubtedly the AEsir and Vanir of the Conan stories come straight from London's novel, although Howard also read popular books on mythology. Around 1933 he wrote a series of stories told in the first person by a man named James Allison, a cripple who dreams of his past lives as Standing did. In these dreams Allison always appears as a primitive hero of the ^Esir or some other Nordic tribe.

While London was addicted to Aryan-race nonsense, incongruously combining Marxism, racism, and romantic primitivism, one passage in
The Star Rover
must have struck a sympathetic chord in Howard. London's hero says: "I do see myself today that one man who appeared in the elder world, blond, ferocious, a killer and a lover, a meat eater and a root digger, a gypsy and a robber, who, club in hand, through millenniums of years, wandered the world around. . . ,"
³⁴
Here is a preliminary sketch for one of Howard's stalwart barbarians—Hunwulf, Kull, or Conan.

Finally, Standing's confession of the uncontrollable temper that has brought him to his present pass must have struck an iron bell in Robert Howard's inmost being. Standing says: . . ."the snarl of my anger was blended with the snarls of beasts more ancient than the mountains, and the vocal madness of my child hysteria, with all the red of its wrath, was chorded with the insensate cries of beasts. . . ." Robert Howard was aware that he, too, had a murderous temper, so much so that he actively feared that he might some day kill somebody in a fit of rage. In describing a drugstore job Steve held in 1926, Robert writes of his
alter ego:

He had been keyed up for murder, swift and without warning, had been frozen to such a point that the reaction was slow in setting in. And when it did come, it left him with the firm conviction that if he worked very much longer at this hellish job, he would, in a moment of semi-insanity, either kill or be killed.
³⁵

But this was later.

Lindsey Tyson dropped out of college after the Thanksgiving holidays, and Robert found himself with a new roommate, a young man with whom he was merely on terms of mutual tolerance. The new roommate staged poker and crap games in the room while Robert was trying to sleep and snored like a sawmill when at last he did retire.

After Lindsey's departure from Brownwood, Robert had no sparring partner with whom to practice boxing. Although Tyson's enthusiasm still inspired Robert to continue to lift weights and to take long walks, he found it harder to keep up his exercises. As his lean, spare body grew harder, his unquiet spirit yearned for someone to box with, because battering another human being was a mode of expression with him. We see his boxing as an acceptable way of working off some of the accumulated fury that seethed within him and that, from time to time, erupted like a volcano, spilling its hot hate over bosses and innocent bystanders.

To add to his deprivations, Robert was hungry all the time. Having the voracious appetite of an adolescent, he could never seem to get enough to eat. He had practically no money, since his parents gave him no allowance, and he was too shy to ask his landlady for extras between meals. One day he found a dime in the pocket of an old pair of pants and feasted on two apricot tarts from the local pastry shop. Years later he remembered those tarts.
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Robert Howard, however, could always find consolation at the keys of his typewriter. When he was not practicing typing, he wrote stories. That autumn of 1924, he turned out several boxing and Western tales, confident that, since he was now an "established writer," whatever he wrote would sell. When all returned with small pink slips, he could not imagine what was wrong.

He hesitated to try
Weird Tales
again so soon after his first acceptance; but as other markets proved obdurate, he undertook a second tale of primitive life, laid in Bronze Age Britain. In "The Lost Race," the Briton Cororuc, a blond giant of a man, is returning from a visit to a Cornish tribe when he spies a wolf being mauled by a panther. After he saves the wolf, the creature vanishes. Later he is captured by a band of dwarfish Picts, whose five-hundred-year-old shaman plans to have Cororuc burned at the stake in retaliation for ancient wrongs. Another Pict, wrapped in a wolf's skin, arrives just in time to save the blond giant who had earlier rescued him and sends him on his way laden with gifts.

Even as published in its revised form, "The Lost Race" is amateurish. It assumes that a clear-eyed man in daylight could mistake a man in a wolfskin for a genuine wolf. Cororuc bears a shield of buffalo hide, although no animal of that species had existed in Britain for thousands of years. And the fauna includes a panther.

Howard loved panthers and introduced them into many of his stories. It is unclear what sort of animal he had in mind, for the term may be applied to several of the larger cats—the leopard, the cheetah, and the American puma or cougar. Howard's probable source for this ubiquitous beast is the "black panther" of Kipling's
Jungle Books,
for Howard was a great admirer of the works of Kipling. Be that as it may, Britain has harbored no such feline since the Pleistocene. Had the eighteen-year-old writer spent a little time in research, his tale would have had a louder ring of truth. But this he had yet to learn.

Howard's next tale was "The Hyena," a short first-person fiction set in the East Africa that Robert recreated from his reading. The hero, one of Howard's many "Steves," is a young American visiting at a Boer ranch. As the story develops, we detect many of the plot elements that later became identified with Robert Howard's works. We see, too, some of the author's feelings and beliefs, which—as with all writers—are woven into the fabric of the tale.

The young hero early acquires a violent hatred of a local fetish man, Senecoza. Such hates, for trivial causes or none, came easily to Robert Howard, and he readily attributed such passions to his characters. Years later E. Hoffmann Price found Howard to be "A man of strange, whimsical, bitter and utterly illogical resentments and hatreds and enmities and grudges." Howard took a perverse pride in his rancorousness, writing of himself (in the guise of Steve Costigan) as "a black Celt, and there is no race which cherishes a hate longer."
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The Steve of "The Hyena" explains his hatred for the abhorred native thus:

Because I came from Virginia, race instinct and prejudice were strong in me, and doubtless the feeling of inferiority which Senecoza inspired in me had a great deal to do with my antipathy for him.
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Though a scoundrel, Senecoza is tall, magnificently built, dignified, and courteous. Here we see Howard's mixed racial feelings clearly expressed: on one hand, a white Southerner's traditional hostility toward the lesser breeds whenever they step out of their servile roles; on the other, a grudging acknowledgment of the barbarian's physical and personal superiority. Admiration for the barbarian—or Howard's idea of the barbarian —is a theme that runs through nearly every story and through his every waking thought.

The hero also expresses Robert's deep feeling for wildlife. When riding through the veldt, the American visitor refrains from shooting because "it seemed to me a shame to shoot so many things. A bush antelope would bound up in front of me and race away, and I would sit watching him . . . my rifle lying idle across my saddle-horn."
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Finally, Robert introduces one of those magical elements that so enliven his later stories. As if violence in the tale were not enough, the fetish man turns out to be a were-hyena. This, added to chases, shootings, and a knife duel between the main protagonists, keeps the action moving in the manner for which Howard is justly praised.

Christmas vacation arrived. All the boarders left for home except Howard, who gallantly practiced his typing and shorthand against the final examinations. His roommate having gone with the rest, Howard occupied the upstairs room alone in a nearly empty house, and

... all his old horror of upstairs rooms returned in full force. Closets opened in the rooms, each letting into the attic, and it froze [his] blood to lie there in the darkness and silence and reflect that a man, or anything, could make an ingress and prowl all over the house without coming into the open. Time and again he bounded from his bed, to stand shivering in the cold dark, his heart in his mouth and his muscles clenched in knots of iron, as he awaited the attack of some ghostly marauder.
⁴⁰

For several days a blizzard delayed the older Howards' coming to pick up their son. When he finally reached home, he was delighted to find a letter from Wright, accepting "The Hyena" and promising twenty-five dollars for it on publication. The letter also urged changes in "The Lost Race" before
Weird Tales
would take it.

Like many writers, Howard disliked the idea of revising his work. When he finished a story, he felt he was through with it and was eager to start another.
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But at length he undertook the revision, sent the altered story off, and added two others. The latter Wright rejected, but he accepted "The Lost Race," promising thirty dollars on publication. Robert's hopes rose like a hot-air balloon.