Dark Valley Destiny (33 page)

But Robert Howard's other dream did not come true. His sales to
Weird Tales
no longer thrilled him as they once had. He felt he needed a better market, one that paid on acceptance; and he wanted desperately to sell to
Blue Book
and
Adventure Magazine.
This dream eluded him.

Robert decided to write a book, "a tale of his own life ... a realistic account of the drabness of small town life, the futile and abortive grop-ings of humanity, and the failings and ambitions of such strugglers as himself." And as a title he chose
Post Oaks and Sand Roughs,
a name descriptive of the land in which he lived.

As the reader may have already discovered from previous quotations, the book describes the author's life between the ages of eighteen and twenty-two. It catalogues the friends he made, the jobs he held, and the early poems and stories he sold, with the names of people and places too thinly disguised to fool anyone. With a few exceptions for the sake of the story, the facts match closely those we have uncovered by careful research.

Howard thought the work would be easy; but as the book progressed, he found that turning the incidents of daily life into vivid and exciting fiction was the "hardest of all feats." Before he was through with it, he realized that the story was "too vague," "too disconnected," "too full of trivial incidents," and "violated all rules of literature." He was not surprised when the book was rejected.
⁶⁷

Howard's artistic sense did not desert him. Yet, while the work ,' would have no appeal whatsoever to the general public, it affords his [ biographers a treasure trove of information about the workings of Rob-
¹
ert's mind. With a cool and sometimes jaundiced eye, he looked at himself and, wearing the transparent mantle of "Steve," unhesitatingly set the record straight as to the direction of his inmost thoughts. The picture he paints of an inexperienced, struggling, poverty-ridden young writer, set by an unkind fate in a boom town among people who could not understand him, evokes in all who have striven to establish themselves as writers a compassion beyond words.

Howard, in the guise of Steve, reveals that when at last his spare adolescent body filled out at the age of twenty-two or twenty-three—and for the first time in his life he achieved "really impressive proportions" —he "felt as if he had been transported to the peaks of glory."
⁶⁸
He had always dreamed of being a broad-shouldered, powerful man, like the giant heroes of his stories. At least this wish was granted to him by the careless gods.

In his later letters, Howard revealed a dread of living to an age at which the mighty physique he had built up would inevitably decline. In

1933 he wrote: "I'd like to round out my youth----But good God, to think

of living the full three score years and ten!" He told August Derleth: "I don't want to live to be old. I want to die when my time comes, quickly and suddenly, in the full tide of my strength and health."
⁶⁹

One facet of Howard's personality stands out above all others: the
■
oppressed fury that ate into his soul like a canker. He was furious at everybody who, he believed, belittled him or took advantage of him. He wus a Black Celt, he said, and they never forgive or forget. An athletic coach who once spoke harshly to him became an implacable enemy. Years later, when the man was down and out, Robert took delight in I Hunting him when they chanced to pass on the street. He hated all the patrons of the soda fountain, particularly the roughneck who with a sneer purloined a magazine and nearly paid for it with his life. Robert later wrote that, while he served his sodas with an "immobile face, all hell •teethed in his brain."
⁷⁰

From childhood his fury waxed a bright red against anyone who had authority over him, with the single exception of his mother, and this fury was transmuted into implacable hate. Even teachers, who found the lad ipiiet and mannerly, became the unknowing recipients of this festering hatred. Save for the geologist whose stadia rod Robert carried, everybody who gave him a job and then sought to supervise him became Robert's lifelong enemy. Sooner or later he exploded into anger at his bosses and ipiit or grew so surly that he was fired.

For all his astuteness at self-appraisal, Robert Howard never divined the fuel that fed the fires of his destructive fury. We venture to •uggest that the unending domination of a strong-willed mother, whose demands were reinforced by her long years of invalidism, evoked in her | *on an urgent desire to rebel, but that this desire was forever thwarted
j
hy his pity for her suffering. Compounding this frustrating situation was (he forceful presence of an imposing father, whose freely-expressed pronouncements had the force of law both in the community and in the home, and whose commands were to be respected and obeyed without question. Unable to burst the iron bonds that wore the guise of tender
j
restraints, Robert suppressed his anger and displaced it onto all others

who directed or thwarted him. ' Robert Howard thus became a man at odds with the world. Such

n
man must either adapt himself to the world or modify the world to suit himself. Howard refused to adapt, and changing the world was beyond liin power. Hence he spent his life in a fury of frustration. As he later wrote, life was "full of things that punish you fiercely and that you can't come to grips with. Punishment isn't so bad if you're handing it out at ihe same time . . . driving your knee to his groin, sinking your fists in

dark valley destiny

his belly. . . . The hell of it comes when you're up against a battler yoi can't hit. . . . That's Life, fighting shadows, taking lickings you can' return."

He defended his emotionality: "I am motivated more often h emotion and sentiment than by cold logic ... my nature is emotioni rather than intellectual. ... I had rather be dead than live in aj emotionless world. . . . Without emotion or instinct I would be a dead stagnant thing." But he admitted that he might be better off if let intransigent: "A materialistic resignation to unalterable laws is sensibli but repellent to me. A man who does not resign himself is like a cagei wolf who breaks his heart and beats his brains out against the bars q his cage . . . resignation isn't in my blood. . . . Defeat awaits us all, bu some of us, worse luck, can't accept it quietly."
⁷¹

A deep savagery seethed within Robert Howard. For example, hi rejoiced in the pain of an injured oil-field worker who had earlier arouse* his enmity. Sometimes, when he boxed with a friend, a "ruthless barba rism" took over and made him as dangerous as a wild animal.
⁷²
j
He nearly always, however, kept his violent urges under control Only once that we know of did he use direct action against an offendei He and his parents, probably during one of their family trips by automat bile, went to dinner at some restaurant or boardinghouse. Their place ai table was back in a corner, and a man already eating had his chair il such a position that the Howards could not squeeze past. Robert politely asked the man to move his chair a little. Ignoring him, the man continuei to eat. Robert repeated his request with the same result. Then Robej picked up the chair, diner and all, dumped the man out on the floor, an waved his parents through. j

Nevertheless, Robert harbored much kindness, too. He was gene] ous in his praise of the literary work of other struggling writers, eve; when he secretly thought little of their efforts. He often expressed coj cern for the financial strain imposed on his aging parents by a son wh had little to contribute to the family income. He admired his polish® Brownwood friends, sometimes with an extravagance that was unmet ited.

Like most shy people, Robert was painfully aware of his socil shortcomings. While he early learned to cultivate the pose of not givin a damn for the approval of classmates, friends, or townsfolk, he wt extremely sensitive to their reactions to him. Everyone in town, he wrot<

apprentice pulpster

"knew he was a jest, an eccentric." And he accused his Brownwood friends of laughing at him behind his back because of the way he dressed. But instead of protecting his ego by conforming in dress and manners, Howard flaunted his eccentricities like an unfurled flag in the foremost battle line. Except for the most formal occasions, his clothes were baggy and shabby, partly because he had little money to spend and partly because he refused his parents' offers to buy him new garments.

Robert's adoption of working-class English was another affectation lliat further estranged him from the townspeople of Cross Plains. His frequent use of such sentences as "I don't reckon him and me will ever he the friends . . . you and me are" contrasts vividly with the genteel speech of his parents and his own excellent written English.

While pent-up fury is the most constant and compelling feature of Howard's character, scarcely less remarkable is his acting ability. With hit* clear self-knowledge, he wrote in
Post Oaks
about himself in the guise nf Steve:

But the basic honesty of Sebastian's nature prompted Steve to be as much like his real self as it was possible for a natural actor to be. After all, what was his real self, he who had acted so many parts in his life?
⁷³

An example of his acting skill—that protective coloration for an exposed mid aching spirit—may be seen in the way that Robert, who had never kiHsed a girl before, copied the ubiquitous clinch-before—fade-out seen in nearly every movie of the time. Observant moviegoer that he was, he followed the actors' techniques so closely that the astonished recipient of the kisses asked: "What sort of bunch do you run with . . . anyhow? Are they all as wild as you?"
⁷⁴

Despite this bit of clever acting to foil a cruel joke, Robert had a rather skewed and low opinion of women. This is not surprising, since he never dated a girl until he was over twenty-eight and, except for his mother, had had no contacts with the opposite sex. In
Post Oaks
he several times expresses a curious sort of gallantry mixed with condescension, an attitude with which he—and later his barbarian heroes—regarded the fair sex.

He believed that women are weak: ". . . the co-eds were kowtowing us women will ever kowtow to the victor, right or wrong." "Women are the spoils of the victor, and they know it and are afraid." Women—and men, too—were unconsciously dishonest as they watched a football game, said Robert. Although they claimed to come to see a touchdown! like the ancient Romans in the amphitheaters who talked of the skill andf beauty of the chariot races, they really came to see bloodshed and deaths in battle. (

Women, he said, use their charms to lure men for their own endl, Beneath the gray eyes of the girl he kissed, "lurked the hard calculation of all women's eyes when they rest on a man—any man." Robert said that he knew little of women and "did not know how to entertain them without making love to them—and who does?" Women are anxious and] nosy about things that are none of their business. Of a librarian he wrote that she "came running, anxious, womanlike, to poke her nose intdf something which did not concern her." '*

After Robert had "proved himself a man" by kissing and
then
cuddling the young woman, one of the perpetrators of the trick asked whether he had become sexually excited during the contact. "She didn't get me hot at all," he answered truthfully. Then going on to say that th« girl was too young and frail, he added: "I pity her. . . . Weakness is tht most pitiful thing in the world, even the natural weakness of woman."
⁷
® In a final barbed thrust at womankind, he reflected that the "only reason a woman could give for [a man's] lack of interest in her was— another woman." Later, when he discovered that what had started as I joke nearly ended a friendship, he "detested the sight of women," particularly bold women "cutting their cow-like eyes" at men.

In
Post Oaks,
Howard frankly reveals his strict code of morality, He "did not gamble, drink, and ogle ten-cent whores"; and like many a young man before him, he wondered if those who did so considered him a weakling because of his abstinence. Writing of himself at the agf of twenty-two, he said that his "innate virility was submerged by hit ambition and his love of his work. The cold white fire of his intellect . . . had burned his body free of desires and almost bare of flesh and muscle."

Although he broke his nonalcoholic promise to his mother, madt some beer, and from time to time got drunk—"uproariously" accordin| to him, "mildly" according to his friends—Robert "despised a drunkefl man, and saw neither cleverness nor humor in his maunderings." If hi had no sympathy for a drunkard, "he despised and even hated a liber« tine, whom [sic] he was convinced was the lowest mortal living."
⁷⁶
While "his inferiority complex rode him with burning spurs," HoMf« ard was endowed with a modicum of self-assurance as far as his writing was concerned. As untaught and inexperienced as he knew himself to be at eighteen or twenty, he could write: "I'm not a great writer now, but I will be some day." A friend with writing ambitions once told Bob that he lacked fire, and in that same friend Bob sensed "there was power there, struggling and halting, groping for life and expression, chained down by ignorance . . ." It was this very poetic fire, this power to turn cold words into hot action, that Robert Howard, himself chained down by ignorance, managed all unaided to develop in the ensuing years. So fertile was his imagination that it was easier to start another story than to rewrite and revise tales that had met with no success. When he got going, "he was most prolific, hammering out, sometimes, several short stories and many rhymes in one day."

Finally, in the closing section of
Post Oaks and Sand Roughs,
a section where the autobiographical narrative gives way to a labored and tapering ending, we find a stunning summation of Howard's life experience, as wistful as it is replete with self-knowledge. "Bewildered and baffled by life, full of a savagery he could not control and knew not where to direct, hurling his ferocity at random against what seemed to him to be obstacles, battered and beaten, never winning, never admitting defeat, doomed to go down that rough road forever. Was that to be [his] fate?"