Dark Valley Destiny (37 page)

Howard turned out Sailor Steve stories faster than the fight-story magazines could absorb them. So ten stories that started out as Sailor Steve tales were published with a different protagonist. When in late 1930 Farnsworth Wright launched a companion magazine to
Weird Tales
under the title
Oriental Stories,
Howard sold him several yarns of Oriental adventure or fantasy. Then he had a marvelous idea: take some unsold Sailor Steve stories with Oriental locales, change a few names, and submit them to Wright. Thus Sailor Steve Costigan became Sailor Dennis Dorgan; Steve's white bulldog, Mike, metamorphosed into Dennis's white bulldog, Spike; and Steve's ship
The Sea Girl
sailed forth as Dennis's ship
Python.

Unfortunately
Oriental Stories,
begun as a bimonthly, never paid for itself. It presently became a quarterly, changed its name to
Magic Carpet
at the beginning of 1933, and ended with the issue for January 1934. Thus, while Wright accepted four Dennis Dorgan stories, only one, "Alleys of Darkness," was published, and that in the final issue of the magazine. Because Howard had another story in that same issue, "Alleys of Darkness" carried the by-line Patrick Ervin.

The entire series of Dennis Dorgan stories has been printed in recent years in a hardcover book,
The Incredible Adventures of Dennis Dorgan.
The stories are entertaining parodies of real life. Two of the yarns, "In High Society" and "A Knight of the Round Table," introduce Dorgan to the upper crust in San Francisco. These children of Mammon flutter limp paws, stare through lorgnettes or monocles, say "my deah" and "rawthah," and swoon at the sight of blood. They obviously reflect impressions of the privileged few by one who had never met the breed; lmt then, neither had most of Howard's readers.

A serious boxing story was also among Howard's early sales in this genre. "Crowd Horror," sold to
Argosy All-Story Weekly,
appeared in the iHHue for July 20, 1929. He received one hundred dollars for the 8,000-word tale, much his best rate so far. To sell to the high-class pulps, such
Argosy,
had long been Howard's burning ambition, and this sale must luive given his self-confidence a tremendous boost. As things turned out, however, he was not to sell to
Argosy
again for many years—in fact, not until the last months of his life.

"Crowd Horror" tells how true love saved a virtuous young boxer in a championship bout. "Slade" Costigan, like most of Howard's heroes, is an idealized version of the author, being about six feet tall, "slim-wuisted and tapering of legs, with remarkably broad shoulders and heavy arms. Dark-skinned, with narrow, cold gray eyes, and a shock of black hair falling over a broad forehead. . . ."
³¹

By the end of 1929, Robert Howard had received checks for the year's work totaling $772.50. While this was not affluence even in the year of the stock market crash and the descent of the Great Depression, many local farmers might have envied him. And Robert's parents made no further suggestions about his getting a "regular job," for instance as a bookkeeper.

In the spring of 1929, when Tevis Clyde Smith graduated from Howard I'ayne College, he and Bob celebrated by repeatedly riding down the k iddie slide at the amusement park. But such lighthearted pastimes were lew, for a minor upheaval was brewing in the Howard family.

Isaac and Hester Howard had long been somewhat estranged. Hester confined her affections and attentions to her son and scorned her ItiiHband for his crudities of manner and financial fecklessness. She objected to his constant gossiping with the patients and to his curious habit of carrying no cash but paying for even the pettiest of purchases, Mich as fifty cents' worth of gasoline, by check.

The rift was widened by Hester's growing phantasy that she and Hubert were of royal descent and so entitled to the prerogatives of noble blood, while Isaac was an untutored commoner. Not unnaturally, the doctor spent most of his time away from home and complained to all who would listen about the treatment accorded him by his wife. He had hinted that one of these days he would leave home and get a divorce. Furthermore, as Robert began to sell his stories regularly and so grew in self-confidence, he started to take his father to task for neglecting his ill mother. The result was a series of furious quarrels between father and son, sometimes followed by emotional reconciliations. Their loud voice** raised in anger could be heard in neighboring homes.
³²

Early in 1929 a professional colleague had told Isaac Howard of a cotton boom in sparsely-inhabited Dickens County. This was the real West Texas cattle country, the Lower Plains adjoining the High Plains still further west. The vegetation there was thin. The climate, while not so severe as on the High Plains, was exacting enough, with over twenty inches of annual rainfall, temperatures ranging from 10°F to well over 100°, and lots of wind.

Dr. Howard learned that many new people would be coming into the region to grow cotton by irrigation. Undoubtedly they would have need of a physician. Thinking this a chance to make some quick cash, Isaac Howard went to Spur, a town of moderate size in Dickens County, 112 miles northwest of Cross Plains.

On May 4, 1929, he took out his licence to practice medicine in Dickens County. He transferred his letter of membership in the First Baptist Church of Cross Plains, which he had joined in 1924, to the Baptist Church in Spur. He evidently meant to stay for some time in Spur, one of those places on the fringe of things to which he had always been drawn. We can only guess what part was played in Isaac's move by his discomfiture over his wife's royal pretensions, his son's animosity, and the necessity of sharing his small house with a roomer.

While the dates of Isaac's moves are uncertain, it appears that his sojourn in Spur lasted at least half a year. He must have come back often to Cross Plains to visit his family, for the townsfolk of Cross Plains seem to have been unaware of his absences. In mid-1929 he probably returned home to stay for at least half a year, because of Robert Howard's absence during this time. We do not know whether the doctor returned to Spur during the first half of 1930; in any event he transferred his church membership back to Cross Plains on August 28, 1930.
³³

The doctor's departure was not the only change that disturbed the little house. In mid-1929 Robert Howard left home in his turn. Gather-
tng
up his typewriter, he moved to Brownwood and spent the latter half
of
the year in a cheap hotel and then in a room at Mrs. Keeler's boardinghouse at 816 Melwood Avenue. There he stayed until early

1930.

The occasion for this move was probably the impending death of
the
dog, Patches. The records of this event are contradictory. In telling
of
it in a letter to E. Hoffmann Price, Dr. Howard implied that the dog
died
in 1927, and that at the time of the death Robert stayed in Brown-
Wood
for a few days only.

On the other hand, Robert's sojourn in Brownwood through the Utter half of 1929 is proved by the address he gives in
The Junto,
from the issue of August 1929 to that of February 1930. The doctor's aging memory was far from infallible about details like dates when he wrote
of
them a decade or more later.

Since no other explanation of Robert's remove to Brownwood is
known,
we agree with Glenn Lord, who consulted with Tevis Clyde Smith
•bout
the matter, that events probably unfolded as follows: Dr. Howard returned from Spur for a long stay at home in the summer of 1929. Soon thereafter Robert moved to Brownwood. (He would not have gone before
his
father returned home, since the men would not have left Hester alone
In
the house.) Robert remained in Brownwood until the dog died, proba
bly
about January 1930, and returned to Cross Plains in February.
³⁴

The aging Patches, now over twelve years old, was more than a pet
to
Robert. He furnished the uncritical, warm-hearted friendship that Howard generally found wanting in human beings. The thin-skinned young man's eccentricities had always drawn criticism from kith and kin ind disparaging remarks from townsfolk, who wondered why he did not
gtt
a decent job instead of fooling around with silly stories, which Appeared in magazines with lurid covers. Since Robert would not or OOuld not change his ways, the disapproval continued. He knew his own Intolerance of even the most well-meant correction, writing, "... one of the main reasons I'll never amount to a damn, is I'm too damned tonderskinned. . . ."
³⁵

To such a spiritual outcast, the dog's devotion was so precious that
Ml
master could not bear to see him die. When the dog declined, Robert picked a suitcase and told his mother: "Mama, I'm going." Although he telephoned home every morning, he did not return home until the dog Was dead and buried. Robert's father later reminisced:

He always spoke thus: "Mama, how are you?" When his mother would reply, he would say: "How is Patch?" After the fourth day when his mother told him the dog was going, he never inquired any more. ... I had the dog buried in a deep grave in the back lot, then had the lot plowed deeply all over to destroy every trace of the grave, so sensitive was he to the loss of the dog. And only once did he ever allude to the death of hi* dog again. He said to his mother one day: "Mother, did you bury Patch under the mesquite tree in the corner of the lot on the east side?" She said yes, and the matter was never mentioned by any of us again.
³⁶

As usual, the Howard family coped with unpleasant facts by pretending they did not exist. Robert's despondency over the death of Patches was so marked that for a time the older Howards feared he might kill himself. Some of his friends considered it incomprehensible that e grown man should "run away and hide" from the death of a pet, no matter how beloved.

Although the pages of his stories drip with gore, in the real world Robert was usually hypersensitive to suffering in others, whether human or animal. On the one hand, this made him sympathetic and compassionate to the weak or ill. On the other, this sensitivity triggered selfish revulsion at the idea of a medical career and forced the abandonment of his faithful, dying dog. Except in the case of his mother, while he might sympathize intensely with the sufferer, the need to protect his own raw feelings from the sight of pain was so imperative that it overrode any wish to comfort the afflicted.

Howard was equally solicitous of his own normally robust health —"overly solicitous," a friend called it, to the point of hypochondria.
³⁷
By protecting him from the harsh realities of life, his parents aggravated these tendencies. Robert Howard was like an infant raised in a sterilized, germ-free environment, who, when exposed to this unsterile world, promptly dies of some minor disease to which he never developed immunizing antibodies. And like that infant, Howard's exposure to reality wan fatal to him.

Yet, this very sloughing off of reality is the essence of a poet. And Robert Howard was a poet. The poet lives, untrammeled by reality, strolling through a world of rainbow-tinted dreams and fancies or—an with Howard—shouldering his way to despair among horrors beyond the ken of ordinary mortals.

To understand this singer in the shadows, we must take a long, thoughtful look at the poems he left behind him.

Robert Howard's first published poem,
The Sea,
appeared in the weekly newspaper of his hometown in 1923, when he was seventeen. By the time that he had turned twenty-two, he had written the bulk of his poetry. True, he continued to express himself in rhyme upon occasion and, from time to time, to polish poems lying unsold in his files. But—like most of the world's poets—thoughts and feelings poured forth more readily in his early writing days.

Because of Glenn Lord's enterprise in collecting and arranging them for publication, many of the more than four hundred known poems have now appeared in limited hardcover editions under the titles
Always Comes Evening
(1957),
Singers in the Shadows
(1970), and
Echoes from an Iron Harp
(1972). The latter two titles were selected by Howard himself for collections that he never saw in print.

Of the thirty-odd poems published during Howard's lifetime, most were accepted by
Weird Tales.
A few appeared in such minor publications as
The Fantasy Fan
and
The Daniel Baker Collegian,
of which Tevis Clyde Smith was editor while a student at Daniel Baker in Brownwood. Howard compiled a manuscript of his poetry under the title
Singers in the Shadows
and sent it to Albert & Charles Boni, Inc. of New York; but in April 1928 they returned it, averring that they were not publishing poetry. A year later the little poetry journal
American Poet
published two poems under the pseudonym of Patrick Howard; one other poem,
Skulls and Dust,
won a three-dollar prize as the best poem in the issue of
The Ring,
a magazine devoted to prizefight lore. What was this poetry like?

Howard's verse, like his prose, is vigorous, colorful, strongly rhythmical, and technically adroit. Although, as he said, he "was born with the knack of making little words rattle together," he was unduly modest about his abilities: "I know nothing about the mechanics of poetry—I couldn't tell you whether a verse was anapestic or trochaic to save my neck. I write the stuff by ear, so to speak, and my musical ear is full of flaws."
³⁸

Actually Howard had a better command of poetic techniques than he admitted. He knew perfectly well what a ballad was, and a sonnet. He was familiar with feet and meter, internal rhymes, and a wide variety of verse and stanza forms. We should be less than honest if we said that Howard never took liberties with his stressed and unstressed syllables. But such flaws are minor in view of the passion, vitality, and splendid imagery in the works.