Dark Valley Destiny (36 page)

With his questioning and brooding, Kull, like Solomon Kane, has more in common with his creator than have the more extroverted heroes like Conan and Terence Vulmea.

A little later Howard wrote one more Kull story, "Kings of the Night." The central character, who made his first appearance on paper in this tale, is Bran Mak Morn, the Pictish king of imperial Roman times. To resist a Roman invasion of Caledonia, Bran—a descendant of Kull's friend Brule—forms an alliance among Britons, Gaels, Picts, and Norsemen, although in actual fact there were no Norsemen in Britain at that time. To assure victory, a wizard summons King Kull from the past by magical time travel.

Thus did twenty-two-year-old Robert sing of strong-thewed warriors striding like giants on ancient continents. As his pen pal Lovecraft so aptly observed, he put much of himself into all his stories; but this was the self that he dreamed of being as he sat huddled over his typewriter in a very small room whose triple windows faced a dun-colored meadow. Fortunately for Robert Howard, he could dream. He could see the tides of battle sweep across that open field, reddening the grasses. And when night set the purple skies ablaze with stars, he peopled the dark land with stalking panthers and hideous monsters fugitive from Hell.

Robert did not spend all his time in the euphoria of authorship. During 1928 he kept up a lively correspondence with Harold Preece. Several of these letters, alone of all his correspondence from that period, survive. They contain much youthful cynicism; at least we would so label it if we did not know the lengths to which such thinking would eventually lead the letter writer. Howard wrote:

I am convinced of the utter, complete, absolute and entire futility of human effort, accomplishment and achievement. Man is merely a manifestation of blind energy, working through and controlling, matter. . . . it's all a game, this life, with death as the wager and the Devil holding the stakes.
¹⁹

He tells of movies he had seen, beer he had drunk, boxing matches he had slugged through, an abortive attempt to become a prizefight manager, and meetings with Smith and Vinson. He openly envies their success with women, grumbling that, while they get attention from girls, when he is along, even the girls who know all of them pass by without stopping to chat. Sadly he adds: "I suppose there is something forbidding about my appearance."
²⁰

It is clear from this and other remarks that his lack of contacts with women is not, as in the case of King Kull, a matter of choice. In recounting a visit to the Cisco dam, where he watched the bathers, he found them so beautifully built that he "revelled in their perfection," until it occurred to him that these thoughtless creatures were the natural enemies of dreamers like himself. Seeing their grace and self-confidence,

I hated them as the weak must ever hate the strong, as I thought how these splendid swine could by virtue of their physical prowess, trample the dreams of the dreamers and bend the dreamers themselves to their selfish and materialistic will. Then, Hell, my self confidence came back and it came to me that I saw no man whose ribs I could not crush. . . .
²¹

Any sort of sensual appeal could touch off thoughts of bloody violence in Howard's psyche, and here was an explosion against handsome men who were luckier in love than he.

But Robert was not always angry. In one letter he twits Preece about his fondness for what was then the un-Texan pastime of golf. He does it by telling his friend a story, which in its comedy is reminiscent of the stories told by his cowboy character Breckenridge Elkins. Robert relates how he stopped to watch a golfer who was getting ready to swing on a ball. Since in comic books a player always calls "Fore!" before he swings and since this golfer was silent, Robert, with tongue in cheek, says he decided to make himself useful:

So being of a helpful nature I yell "Fore!" and this bird lets out a squawk and jumps seven feet into the air. He also gives me a very filthy look but says nothing—maybe because I'm a couple of times larger than him. That's gratitude for you.
²²

In yet another letter to Preece, Bob sneers at higher education, saying, "I'm prejudiced against all colleges—to Hell with them."
²³
And he tells of a party with Smith and Vinson in which all three stripped down to improvised loincloths and took pictures as they threatened one another with pistols, knives, and homemade spears—just as he and his grade-school friends had played pirates ten years before. Looking at a faded photograph of this scene, we note that Smith's eyeglasses rather spoiled his personation of a fighting caveman.
²⁴

After Christmas 1928, Robert worked his way to Brownwood to see his two old friends; and Harold Preece came from Fort Worth to join them. They repaired to a wooded ravine outside the city, Bob furnishing a bottle of liquor obtained at a drugstore as a medical prescription. Preece recalled later: "I can remember his bawling at the top of his voice a verse from an Irish revolutionary song, 'The Rising of the Moon,' but he rendered it to the tune of that sentimental popular ballad, 'Where the River Shannon Flows.' "
^2S

Robert also enjoyed lecturing his friends on the theory of myths then being championed by Margaret Alice Murray, the British Egyptologist, from whose book,
The Witch-Cult in Western Europe,
published in 1921, Robert probably got the idea. This now discredited hypothesis traced European myths and legends about fairies, leprechauns, and other Little Folk to the survival in out-of-the-way places of a race of dwarfish aborigines, driven into these refuges by the invasion of modern European peoples. As with all writers, every new idea becomes grist for the mill; and Robert Howard exploited the concept in his Pictish stories.

Bob also indulged his extreme Celtomania in letters to Preece, writing him about the Celtic languages, the genealogy of the clans of Ireland, and even, on occasion, Gaelicizing his name to "Raibeard Eiarb-hin hui Howard." He studied the complicated phonology and orthography of Irish Gaelic and regularly gave his fictional heroes Irish names like Costigan, Dorgan, Kirowan, and O'Donnell.

Then, in moments of reaction, he denounced Celtic fickleness and treachery, damning the Irish blood within him that "makes me like driftwood fighting the waves and gives me no peace waking or sleeping or riding or dreaming or traveling or wooing, drunken or sober, with hunger or slumber on me. . . . Bah. My ancestors thought little enough of Ireland to leave her." But, in a more reasonable mood, he allows that "All men are swines, more or less; each race has its scuts and its saints."
²⁶

After Preece left college and, sometime in the early months of 1930, moved to Kansas, Howard saw little of him but continued a lively correspondence. Once, when Preece wrote disparagingly about women,
Haying
that the great ones could be counted on the fingers of one hand, Bob vigorously disagreed with him. He defended women, citing among the world's greatest minds Sappho, Aspasia, and Hypatia.
²⁷

Other letters to Preece show the ease with which Howard developed irrational hatreds. He denounced Kansas, his friend's new home, as a backyard of hell, although he had never been there. He hated George Bernard Shaw, whose works he had never read but whose whiskers he wished to pull out hair by hair. He quoted approvingly from G. K. (Ihesterton's narrative poem
The Ballad of the White Horse,
emphasizing with capitals and an exclamation point the line: "And hate alone is true."

A fear of old age and infirmity recurs in Howard's letters. He felt that his youth was slipping away and that at twenty-four he was becoming old: ". . . Age steals upon me in the autumn of the year, and though I am young, my soul is old and wavering like a thread-bare garment . . ,"
²⁸

After 1930 he saw Preece but rarely, and their correspondence languished. Their final get-together was on St. Patrick's Day of 1936, in San Antonio. In honor of the day, Howard sported a cloth shamrock two feet across. Preece noted with regret that his old pal was "only casually friendly to me at that last meeting. . . ."
²⁹

Ah 1928
drew to a close, Howard found he had earned only
$186.00
from his writing. Nonetheless, he had received an encouraging number of acceptances from magazines that had not yet published and paid for the stories. The two Kull and two Solomon Kane tales accepted by Wright eventually furnished him with a total of
$170.00.
More substantial yet was the expected royalty on the 33,
500-
word novella,
Skull-Face,
liits second attempt at so long a tale. When it appeared in
Weird Tales

late in 1929 as a three-part serial, Howard received three hundred dollars, the payment of almost a cent a word being higher than that magazine's usual half-cent-a-word rate.

Critics, nevertheless, generally rate
Skull-Face
as an inferior story. It is virtually a pastiche of Sax Rohmer's
The Insidious Dr. Fu-Manchu
(1913). Instead of Rohmer's Chinese supervillain, we have Kathulos, an immortal Atlantean sorcerer, with the same "high, thin shoulders" as the Chinese sage. In
Skull-Face
John Gordon plays the part of Rohmer's gallant English detective; a Circassian girl replaces Rohmer's Oriental heroine; and one Stephen Costigan, a reformed drug addict, plays the j role of Dr. Petrie, Rohmer's dim-witted narrator-pal of the clever detec-tive. Together Gordon and Costigan strive to thwart the Atlantean's plan j to unite the colored races against the ruling whites.

Howard's characters display the same sort of idiocy that assails ! those in Rohmer's story. While Howard was always at his best when hWeird Tales
audience.

Aside from
Skull-Face
and other tales of an Oriental and mystery-murder type, Robert Howard's stories fall into three periods. While he wrote in , all three genres throughout his career, this rough classification may prove helpful to people trying to understand the man and his work. Howard's boxing period occurred in the late 1920s; his fantasy period ; in the early 1930s; and his Western-story period in the middle 1930s.

After some years of fumbling with various types of fiction, Howard j succeeded in placing three of his boxing stories, thus launching hit t sport-story period. The first of these tales to appear, "The Apparition in ' the Prize Ring," was published in
Ghost Stories
for April 1929 under the pseudonym of John Tavarel. Strictly speaking, this is a fantasy more than a boxing story, even though the chief character is a Negro prizefighter named Ace Jessel.

While no masterpiece, the story is of interest to Howard's biogra* phers. Ace, the "ebony giant," who is described as clever, brave, good*

natured, indomitable, and unselfish, attests to the mildness of Howard
's ;

t

racism, or at least to the tolerance he sometimes felt toward other races. His antagonist, a "full-blooded Senegalese," is closer to the then current

hostile stereotype of the Negro, being pictured as a man with a bullet head, massive shoulders, and a pelt of matted hair on his chest. At the climax of the bout, Jessel is visited in the ring and inspired by the ghost of Tom Molyneaux, a real black nineteenth-century boxer who became the first American heavyweight champion.

As with his fellow pulpsters of the period, Howard's handling of dialect is crude. Ace Jessel speaks a "dese and dose" English. Moreover, his description of the Senegalese indicates the peril of writing about foreign peoples unless one has had some personal acquaintance with them or has done some intensive research. In reality most Senegalese are slender and rangy and have hardly any hair on their chests. One can only Hpeculate on Howard's reason for selling the story under a pen name. Could it have been that, knowing the intensity of Callahan County's dislike of the black man, he wished to avoid the accusation of being a "nigger-lover"?

The second of the three successful prizefight stories is "The Pit of the Serpent," wherein is introduced a third Steve Costigan: Sailor Steve Costigan, hero of a series of burlesque boxing tales.

Howard's boxing stories fall into two groups: serious and humorous. The serious stories are undistinguished standard pulp fare, but his burlesque boxing tales are something else. They show that Howard had a lively sense of humor of a broad, slapstick kind, which he developed further in his humorous Westerns. In these delightful tales, his heroes, usually sailors who fight while their ships are in port, are invincible roughnecks with fists of iron, muscles of steel, hearts of gold, and heads of solid oak. The author explained the reason for his use of thickheaded, strong-armed characters: "They're simpler. . . . You get them in a jam, and no one expects you to rack your brains inventing clever ways for them to extricate themselves. They are too stupid to do anything but cut, whoot, or slug themselves into the clear."
³⁰

The humorous boxing stories center on prizefights, usually in Oriental port cities, which are colorful impressions of Shanghai, Singapore, and similar exotic places by one who had never been there. They quiver with plots, skullduggery, mayhem, Mack Sennett chases, and virtue triumphant. The heroes are incorrigible suckers for a hard-luck story, especially one told by a fair but designing female. These featherweight yarns would probably have never been disinterred and reprinted in recent years had it not been for the popularity of the Conan stories. Still, they show ingenuity, action, and humor and are fun to read even at their pulpiest.

After the sale of "The Pit and the Serpent," Howard plunged ahead; by the end of 1930 he had sold six more Sailor Steve Costigan stories to
Fight Stories
and had seen them in print. Altogether he wrote twenty-seven Sailor Steve tales, tried two others—which he failed to complete—and placed twenty of the lot in
Fight Stories, Action Stories,
and
Jack Dempsey's Fight Magazine.
After Howard's death
Fight Stories
reprinted several Sailor Steve tales under different titles, using the by-line of "Mark Adam," evidently hoping that unwary readers would mistake them for new works. The remaining stories appeared years later in other publications.