Dark Valley Destiny (52 page)

On these journeys Robert Howard closely observed the landscape and eloquently described it, almost as if he were looking at it with the eyes of one who did not expect to see it again:

Those rains in April and May certainly changed the aspect of the country. ... The rich green foliage reaches almost tropical luxuriance, and red and

yellow wild flowers make a carpet of color gleaming vividly against the green background.
⁷

Although it must have been obvious even to nonmedical persons that
Hester
Howard had terminal tuberculosis, Robert never mentioned the
word
in his letters. He was following the family practice of burying, denying, and ignoring unwelcome facts. Since, at that period, no cure for tuberculosis was known, to have named the disease would have been, for Robert, to admit what was to him the most catastrophic of all facts: that his mother's days were numbered.

By mid-November, Hester's condition had deteriorated to the point where the Howards took her to the Torbett Sanitarium in Marlin. There Robert's occultist friend Thurston lived with his father, Dr. Frank Tor
bett,
who assisted his brother with the work at the clinic. Robert thought
it
unfortunate that Thurston Torbett, who had studied art for three years
in
California, had given up his artistic interests for occult pursuits.

More than a gallon of fluid was drawn from Mrs. Howard's pleura; •nd when Robert learned that his mother would have to remain at the sanitarium for a week or more, he drove his father home, picked up his typewriter, and returned to Marlin, where he pounded out stories in a boardinghouse. He also gleaned historical lore from Dr. Frank Torbett, who had lived through strenuous times in the country, when "he never dared open the barn door in the morning to feed his horse without having
a
pistol ready in his hand."
⁸

Hester Howard finally returned to Cross Plains; but after two weeks
at
home, her pleura filled again. This time the Howards drove her to San Angelo, 105 miles to the southwest. After a few days in the Shannon Hospital, they moved her to a sanitarium in the village of Water Valley, northwest of San Angelo. There she remained for six weeks. On one of his almost daily drives to see his mother, Robert bought a broad-brimmed tan or light-brown Stetson, a much less spectacular hat than his black Mexican sombrero.

As Hester's condition continued to worsen, she was moved back to San Angelo for twelve days, "and then we drove her home, since it seemed they had done all they could for her."
⁹
She continued to require frequent pneumothorax treatments, which Robert called "aspirations." In this treatment, a needle is inserted between the ribs into the pleural cavity, and air is blown in, causing the lung to collapse. A resting lung, it was thought, might build up some resistance to the tubercular infection. Although the treatments were painful and exhausting, according to Robert, his mother bore her troubles with heroic fortitude.

All this traveling about and care of the sick drastically reduced Howard's writing time.
¹⁰
His leisure for letter-writing also declined. Whereas we have twenty-five letters written in 1934, for 1935 only seventeen are known. While he undoubtedly wrote many other letters that have not survived, these figures do indicate the stress under which he lived at this time.

Nevertheless, Howard continued to write as circumstances permitted. It must not be forgotten that there were two stabilizing forces in Robert Howard's life: his mother's presence and his creative writing. When his mother had to spend week after week in hospitals, his need to write became more compelling, especially so since, during the summer and fall of 1935, he had lost the intimate contact he had enjoyed with Novalyne, the only other woman with whom he had ever been close.

Late in 1934 he finished, but did not sell, a novelette, "Sword Woman," laid in Renaissance France. Perhaps he was influenced by the work of a beautiful young writer who had just entered the heroic fantasy field, Catherine Lucile Moore, who wrote under the name of C. L. Moore. In the October 1934 issue of
Weird Tales
appeared "Black God's Kiss," the first of five novelettes about a red-haired medieval warrior-woman, Jirel of Joiry, who defends her castle and demesne against foes both natural and supernatural. When a second Jirel story was published, Howard sent Miss Moore a letter of congratulation and a manuscript of his "Sword Woman."

"Sword Woman" was one of Howard's many efforts to sell stories of straight historical adventure. He delighted in rewriting history in the guise of fiction and dreamed of being able to spend the rest of his life in this genre. Next to tales of barbarians, he was attracted to stories set in the European Middle Ages. He called the period: "A brave time, by Satan! Any smooth rogue could swindle his way through life, as he can today, but there was pageantry and high illusion and vitality, and the beloved tinsel of glory without which life is not worth living."
¹¹
He seems not to have realized that many aspects of medieval life would have
gone
entirely against his grain; he would have hated the intense religios
ity and
the rigidity of class distinctions of the time.

Howard began two more stories about his sword-woman, Agnes de la
Fere,
but he failed to bring either to publishable condition. It was his misfortune that the swashbuckling historical novel reached its peak in
the
1950s, two decades after his death. Had he survived, his fighting
women
—Belit, Red Sonya, Agnes de la Fere, and, later on in his last
Conan
story, Valeria of "Red Nails"—might have won fame and fortune
for
their creator.

When his historical adventure stories met with only partial success, Howard gave thought to writing serious Westerns, a type of fiction very popular in the 1930s. But now he found himself facing a dilemma. While Westerns—serious Westerns—drew him like a magnet, he began to realize that, during the years when the oil boom swept through his hometown, he had made no observations and taken no notes on the quality of life in the community. He wrote:

And now all those things are a chaotic jumble in my memory which I can't untangle. I've gone so far along the path of romantic-exotic writing that it's devilish difficult to find my way back to common-place realism.
¹²

Too late he saw that carefully-tended memories of real events, even those that are painful and stultifying to the imagination, give a writer's works an authority that cannot be gained from such vicarious experiences as reading books or watching motion pictures.

Moreover, Howard never had, and made no attempt to get, a sound knowledge of the complexities, subtleties, and contradictions of human personality. Hence, save for a few, his characters are mainly stereotypes. In writing for the pulps, that was unobjectionable, but it was not good enough for a writer striving for larger rewards and the greater prestige
of
the quality magazines.

The truth of the matter is that Robert Howard was, by personality and experience, far removed from viewing the world realistically. So all-consuming were his fear and hatred of "enemies," and so great was
the
isolation of his daily life, that the lives of the people among whom
he
lived were less "real" to him than the devils and monsters of his nightmares. He had, without realizing it, found his proper niche as a writer in the realm of the fantastic and in the fanciful, humorous Westerns of his own creation.

While the West of Breckinridge Elkins was no more real than Conan's Hyborian Age, it was equally successful. Otis Kline sent thirteen of the tales about the Nevada bumpkin to the British firm of Herbert Jenkins. The editor replied that if Howard could give continuity to the stories, he would publish them as a novel.

Howard dutifully interpolated a love interest in the person of a Glory McGraw, with whom Breck was forever quarreling over idiotic misunderstandings. The revised work had not yet been sent to England at the time of Howard's death, but a contract came through by the end of 1936 with an advance of $150. The book, published as
A Gent from Bear Creek,
appeared in 1937 and sold well enough to justify a cheap reprint. Had the sale been made a year earlier, would it have made a difference to Robert Howard's plans? Frankly, we doubt it.

Into his imaginary West, Howard introduced another humorous character, Buckner J. Grimes. This gargantuan worthy became the hero of one of Howard's best burlesque Westerns, "A Man-Eating Jeopard," a tale published in the June 1936 issue of
Cowboy Stories.
A second Grimes story, "Knife-River Prodigal," was posthumously published in the same magazine.

At the urging of his new agent, Otis Kline, Howard branched out in an unexpected direction. He sold a story to
Spicy Adventures,
one of a group of pulps called "the hots," because they made a pretence of being pornography. Compared to what one can buy openly today, the stories were as mild as milquetoast. While they told of episodes of fornication, instead of explicit scenes, the author would indicate a lapse of time by a row of dots.

The first story, "The Girl on the Hell Ship," which the editor retitled "She Devil" and which was followed by four others, introduced another typical Howard hero, Wild Bill Clanton, a sailor whose chief delight is in the ready use of his fists. Like all Howard's heroes, he was a "broad-shouldered, clean-waisted, heavy-armed man with wetly plastered black hair, blue eyes that blazed with the joy of mayhem and lips that grinned savagely . . ."

Telling of his new venture, Howard wrote Lovecraft:

One market I tried was Spicy Adventures, a sex magazine to which Ed [Price] is the star contributor. I sold the first yarn I tried, but... it requires
a
deft, jaunty style foreign to my natural style. . . . Why don't you give it a whirl? . . . the sex element is a cinch; . . . Just write up one of your own sex adventures, altered to fit the plot. That's the way I did with the yarn I sold them.
¹³

The advice must have astonished the puritanical Lovecraft. For a man who prided himself on being an old-fashioned New England gentleman, the idea of such exploitation would have been horrifying. As for Robert Howard himself, we are glad that he had such a vivid imagination to fall back on, plus the ancestral name of Sam Walser to borrow for a pseudonym.

Howard worked on other stories with indifferent success. He sold a Francis X. Gordon tale for publication in
Top-Notch
for June 1935. The next story of the series, "Blood of the Gods," places Gordon in Arabia, seeking a mystical nobleman who, with a treasure in jewels, marches off into the desert. Another jewel-encrusted yarn, "The Trail of the Blood
stained
God," is set in Afghanistan and involves a man-sized, gem-studded, golden idol and rival treasure hunters.

Otis Kline had little hope for this story. He told his client: "The theme of jewels or treasure secreted in an idol has been done over and over so much editors are beginning to tire of it."
¹⁴
As predicted, the story failed to sell and did not see print until it was rewritten as a Conan story twenty years later.

Recollecting tales he had heard or read about pre-Civil War life in the Deep South, Howard wrote a science fiction story, which was published in
Weird Tales
for February 1935, under the title of "The Grisly Horror." The story involves a colossal carnivorous ape from Africa and a villainous African cultist.

A tale with even stronger racist overtones was "Black Canaan," published in
Weird Tales
for June 1936. Here in jungle swamplands, a Negro uprising, organized by another cultist, is put down by gallant whites. The brutal racism of the white men in this story may infuriate some modern readers. Still, it is a realistic portrayal of the attitudes of some landowners in the Deep South a century ago. And at about the same time that "Black Canaan" was written, Howard also composed "The Dead Remember." In this fantasy the writer's sympathy is with a Negro couple murdered by the vicious cowboy narrator, who suffers supernatural retribution.

These and other lesser tales occupied Howard's busy typewriter during the last year or so of his life. He left more than eighty unsold stories when he died, and fragments of many others. We do not know when most of these were written and can only guess at their publishing history. Some have been rescued from oblivion and turned into Conan stories. Others have been completed by various writers and published in the wake of the recent wave of interest in Robert Howard and his great barbarian hero Conan.

As we have indicated, the work is uneven in quality. Certain plot elements appear and reappear too often; sometimes his people are mere stock characters or unintentionally funny; frequently Howard's very ideas dry up. Had not Conan stood at Howard's shoulder and dictated stories for his scribe to set down, Robert Howard would be forgotten today. Fortunately Howard's cadenced prose, his wide canvases splashed with bright and unforgettable word pictures, his headlong action, and his way of entering into every story and dragging us in with him confer an element of greatness on him.

Despite numerous trips to hospitals, anxious bedside watches, and feverish pounding of the typewriter, Robert Howard managed to have some social contacts with people of his own age. Still, they were not always heartwarming contacts; and we suspect that some of his difficulties, at least, should be attributed to the impossible position in which he found himself. He was dutifully caring for his mother and frustrated by the restrictions the nursing service imposed on him. He was eager to break into new writing fields, and all he got from the new editors were rejection slips. He craved freedom, but life's demands hemmed him in.

One of Bob's cooling friendships involved Novalyne Price. When Novalyne got back to Cross Plains after her stay in the Brownwood Community Hospital, she gave thought to her social future. She began to see Bob again, but on a less intimate basis than before. He was obviously out of the running as a long-term best friend, let alone as a husband; so it behooved her to widen her circle of acquaintances. She
had
heard a lot about Bob's tall, handsome Brownwood buddy Truett Vinson; and she told Bob that, when she went back to Brownwood for
her
summer vacation, she would try to arrange a meeting with Vinson.