Dark Valley Destiny (34 page)

And like a counterpoint, he answers with a prisoner's bar-rattling cry: "I want to live awhile." But could he break free? Could this man, who was "a dreamer and a dweller in citadels of illusion," survive in a world that was "vibrant with reality?"
⁷⁷

A silver scroll against a marble sky,

A brooding idol hewn of crimson stone, A dying queen upon an ebon throne, An iron bird that rends the clouds on high, A golden lute whose echoes never die—

A thousand dreams that men have never known Spread mighty wings and fold me when alone Upon my couch in haunted sleep I lie.

Then rending mists, the spurring whisper comes

"Wake, dreamer, wake, your tryst with Life to keep!" Yet, waking, still a throb of phantom drums Comes hauntingly across the mystic deep; Their echo still my thrilling soul chord thrums— Which is the waking, then, and which the sleep?
¹

Robert Howard proved to be a noisy neighbor. He continued to write in spasms, often sitting up all night or even for two nights in a row. In the warmer weather, when the windows were open, the all-night clatter, disturbed the Butlers' sleep. Mrs. Butler complained to Mrs. Howard, but the doctor's wife would brook no criticism of her son. She cut the Butlers from her list of friends, and the next time young LeeRoy Butler innocently dropped in for a chat with Robert, Hester Howard made him feel unwelcome. \

Robert continued to pound his log by day and type by night. When resting from these labors, he sat in the porch swing, bellowing out a song in a voice that wafted across most of Cross Plains. The song was usually
Bye, Bye, Blackbird,
to the tune of which he would improvise verses by the hour. When stimulated—whether by joy, or anger, or potent brew—«

he would sometimes rush out of the house to run, jump, and yell.
²

Robert also did a lot of walking. He could be seen each weekday triding down the dusty road to the post office in the center of town, and many a time he carried home bags of groceries from the little market run by Annie Newton Davis and her husband. While this exercise built him up into a mass of muscle, it also increased the appetite he had developed in earlier years. He drank much milk, loved cheese, and had a special weakness for pancakes. Kate Merryman, who kept house for the Howards during Hester Howard's last illness, said: "I bet I've cooked a million hotcakes for him. He loved them for dinner, supper, or breakfast."
³
But he showed an un-Texan preference for tea over coffee.

As a result of this gargantuan appetite, Robert's weight rose to 200 pounds and sometimes topped that figure. His broad face grew round and a little jowly. In the fall of 1928 he boasted to Preece that, by Spartan Helf-denial, he had brought his weight down to 184 pounds for a boxing match.
⁴
This struggle between his appetite and his hatred of obesity continued all his life.

As opportunity and finances permitted, Robert began to collect weapons, some of which decorated the bathroom wall itself, while others were stashed with his guns in the long closet built into the west wall of the room. The collection eventually included a pair of foils, a cavalry naber of Civil War vintage, a Latin American machete, a boomerang, and several knives and daggers, one of which was a World War I trench knife with a triangular blade and a scalloped knuckle guard. He even obtained a long French double-curved bayonet of a type copied from the Turkish yataghan.
⁵

Robert and Lindsey took a pair of empty brass cartridge cases, taped them over the ends of the foils, and tried to fence without the fencer's usual mask, jacket, and gloves. Luckily no eyes were injured. Robert also fenced a little with Earl Baker. As far as we can tell, Robert Howard never knew an experienced fencer nor read a book on the art. Presumably he got his ideas about handling the foils from the movies in which Douglas Fairbanks, Sr., tried to put on a good show without neriously endangering the other actors.

Viewed objectively Howard's life, during the years that followed his graduation from Howard Payne, may seem dull and uneventful. As the oil boom petered out, the town settled down to its former quiet, Godfearing ways. Changes in the weather, local births and deaths, the coming of paving on Main Street—these were the concerns of the townspeople of Cross Plains.

But for Robert Howard the realities of the world around him were never so enthralling as his own dreams and illusions. Thus, for him the years spent in his tiny room, hunched over his typewriter, were rich and wonderful years of adventure and action. The bustle and clutter of the! oil-boom days, with huge derricks in backyards, brawling roustabouts on' the streets, oil magnates vying to snatch an oil lease from some less luckyj fellow, and painted girls in handsome dresses brazenly selling their! charms held no interest for him. 

Yet, where he could vest with drama some strange idea or event that! caught his fancy, his imagination seized upon it and made it scintillate! like fireworks across a velvet sky. To give an example: Two days before! Christmas 1927, in the town of Cisco, four robbers entered the First National Bank, the leader in a Santa Claus costume. A gun battle erupted during the holdup, and when the robbers escaped with hostages, they left the chief of police dead and seven citizens wounded. One bandit died; but after a three-day manhunt, the rest were captured, tried, and sentenced. One man was sentenced to life; one who tried to escape was lynched by aroused citizens; the leader was electrocuted. The president of the bank, in his memoir of the incident, says that while Helms, the leader, struggled as he was taken from his cell, he finally walked to the chair and submitted to execution in silence. Howard in his dramatized report wrote: "Helms .. . went to the chair, roaring and cursing blasphemies, fighting against his doom so terribly that the onlookers were appalled."
⁶

In the year that his father allotted him to establish himself as a writer, Robert Howard not only worked on
Post Oaks and Sand Roughs,
his unsuccessful autobiographical novel, but also saw both "The Dream Snake" and "Red Shadows" published in
Weird Tales.
"The Dream Snake" is one of Howard's least distinguished works, a simple formula piece of average acceptability. In it a man tells his friends about a recurrent dream of being pursued by a giant serpent in Africa. Each night the creature undulates through the long grass, coming ever closer. After his friends retire—as any
Weird Tales
reader could guess—the friends hear a shriek and rush in to find the doomed man crushed as though by a huge constrictor. And as every Howard enthusiast knows, giant snakes regularly slither into his stories and coil their hideous bodies around the sore-tried hero.

"Red Shadows," originally called "Solomon Kane," is of more pith and moment. It introduces Solomon Kane, the upright hero of one of Howard's most popular series. Conceived while Howard was in high school, the fighting Puritan had lain fallow in his creator's brain for five years before he burst into print and bestowed fame on the twenty-two-year-old author.
⁷

Set in West Africa, like several of Howard's early tales, the story involves a murderer, witchcraft, a giant black who moves with catlike ease, and a gorilla. Here we see the beginnings of the distinctive prose style that makes much of Howard's later work hum with vitality. There are many elements of his verse in his prose: rhythm; alliteration; a kaleidoscope of color words richly sprinkled with names of gems; leaping, plunging verbs; memorable metaphors; and a generous use of personification—treating inanimate objects and impersonal forces as if they were living beings. When Kane first arrives in Africa, we hear the beat of the drums in the very words that describe the sound and message:

Thrum, thrum, thrum came the ceaseless monotone of the drums: war and death (they said); blood and lust; human sacrifice and human feast! The soul of Africa (said the drums); the spirit of the jungle; the chant of the gods of outer darkness, the gods that roar and gibber, the gods men knew when dawns were young, beast-eyed, gaping-mouthed, huge-bellied, bloody-handed, the Black Gods (sang the drums).
⁸

Note that this pounding prose is reminiscent of the poetry of Edgar Allan Poe or Howard's contempoary Vachel Lindsay—a lush, dramatic style of writing, which a decade later fell into disfavor to be replaced by the Hemingwayesque style of short sentences, bald fact, and laconic terseness. But, fortunately, the Hemingway revolution was still in the future. For the kind of fantasies that Howard wrote, his robust, imaginative style is decidedly more suitable. The picture of black Africa, so eloquently evoked, is, we scarcely need to say, one which Howard gained from reading pulp fiction. It bears but slight resemblance to a modern anthropologist's view of native life.

Between 1928 and 1931, Howard wrote nine Solomon Kane stories and three poems about him. Howard also started but apparently did not finish four other stories. The tales became longer as he got used to the novelette length, which runs between ten and twenty thousand words, an advantageous length for stories of fantasy-adventure.

One completed tale, "Blades of the Brotherhood," lacks the supernatural element of the other Kane stories. It is all swordplay. Although he hoped to sell it to one of the better-paying pulps, both
Adventure
and
Argosy
rejected it. The story appeared only in recent years, when it was published both in its original form and as rewritten by John Pocsik, who furnished a touch of the supernatural.

Another Kane story, "The Right Hand of Doom," also failed to sell in Howard's lifetime. The plot revolves around the concept of a dead man's hand crawling spiderlike to take vengeance on the slayer of the deceased. The idea was a strong one when it was first introduced into fiction; but by the time Howard made use of it, it had become too familiar to stir up either horror or excitement.

One of the best Kane novelettes, "The Hills of the Dead," appeared in
Weird Tales
for August 1930. In it Howard takes an unexpectedly benign attitude toward African Negroes. N'Longa, the fetish man whom Kane had met in "Red Shadows," joins forces with Kane to vanquish a tribe of immortal vampire-men who prey on nearby villagers. To accomplish this, N'Longa's soul leaves his body in a distant coastal village and takes possession of the body of Kran, a young lover of a native girl whom Kane had saved from a vampire. After the vampires have been destroyed, N'Longa returns Kran's body to him, remarking that Kane knows little of the ways of magic and adding:

My friend, you think only of bad spirits, but were my magic always bad, should I not take this fine young body in place of my old wrinkled one and keep it?
⁹

In the spring of 1928, while he was struggling with
Post Oaks,
Howard struck out in another experimental direction. In answer to his friends' urging to write about places and events he knew from personal experience, Howard wrote a novelette entitled "Spanish Gold on Devil Horse." In it he attempted to tell a conventional Western adventure story with his home town as a setting. As in
Post Oaks,
Cross Plains became "Lost Plains." The protagonist this time is "Mike Costigan" instead of "Steve Costigan." With a touch of wishful thinking, Howard makes him a young writer who has already achieved success, with several books to his credit, several published magazine stories, and a comfortable bank account. Mike helps a beautiful girl of Spanish descent to overcome a pair of villainous treasure hunters who plan to steal her claim.

While the tale is lively and holds the reader's attention, it is marred by amateurish elements. For one thing the villains are so patently wicked that each should have had a
V
tattooed on his forehead. The leader's eyes were, for example, "inhumanly cold and inhumanly expressionless— more like a snake's eyes than those of a man."
¹⁰

Howard, moreover, falls back on the idiot plot—subjecting his characters to attacks of stupidity to keep the plot moving. In one place the bootlegger Leary passes up a chance to shoot Mike, or at least to cover him with his gun, in order to indulge in a fistfight. This ploy gave the author a chance to detail every straight left, uppercut, and right hook, as well as to dwell on the evil bootlegger's battered face and gore-bespattered lips.

While these flaws were not necessarily fatal to a tale designed for the Western pulps, whose fiction was the world's most conventional, cliche-filled, and formula-ridden, this story met with rejection. Howard put it away and returned to writing stories laid in Africa, Afghanistan, the lost Atlantis, and other exotic milieux far removed from the little town he lived in.

Robert also continued to write for
The Junto,
the round-robin monthly sheet that circulated among his literary friends. The things he wrote were strictly for amusement. They were mostly minor poems and little pieces of the sort that now fill the pages of numerous fan magazines. There were a review of several movies; an article attributing Lindbergh's sudden fame to carefully-organized hero worship; a piece urging that beer be guzzled, not sipped; and a jibe at sophisticates who mock at sentiment.

Two of these little pieces are of more than passing interest. In "Etched in Ebony" he indulges in a phantasy of making violent love to a black woman: "Her fingers, hooked like talons, rent the skin from my face in strips until I smashed my fist into her panting mouth and dropped her across my knees with a trickle of blood starting from the corners of her lips. ... I struck her again and again full in the face. Each blow was a mad caress. She knew—she laughed."
¹¹

The passage shows plainly the extreme violence seething under

Howard's usually quiet exterior. It also shows that he embraced the common white man's myth that Negroes are more sensual, more sexually potent and intense, than Caucasians. And it shows the extreme sexual frustration that unleashed such phantasies as this in a young man whose only contacts with women were with his mother. He had in all probability never even talked to a black woman since the days of his childhood; he admired blond, Nordic women—golden girls; and yet thoughts of a black woman aroused both cruelty and passion to fever pitch.