by Unknown
How Robert, or any child, gains control over his natural functions is not of itself important. What is important is how he feels about the forces that lead to this control. Robert seems never to have understood the need for accepting regulation. His fierce resentment of direction or control remained with him all his life. Indeed, it colored both his thinking and his behavior, as a schoolboy who resented his teachers and as a man who hated his bosses. It made him feel that he had legions of enemies, that he had to have his gun at the ready or his fists up at all times. It peopled the world of his imagination with demons and forces too strong for a man to overcome.
The struggle for power during his nursery days was so intense that it also left him with a sense of helplessness, a feeling so deeply ingrained that it affected his thinking and actions throughout his life. For, struggle as he might, he had no chance to win. As all parents do in such circumstances, his parents won this battle of wills. They had to win, because the world of the frontier child is a dangerous place; and the child knows he needs protection.
Robert later wrote about some of the childhood dangers he experienced. Once a runaway horse threw him from the buggy, rolling him around on the dusty road so that he banged his head. The episode frightened him but left no permanent damage.7 He was more fortunate than one of his three-year-old friends who got into a corral and had his brains stamped out by a "killer mule." Texas children were on occasion hooked by half-grown steers, kicked by milch cows, shot while hunting, bitten by rattlesnakes, set upon by rabid dogs, drowned, or killed by falls from bluffs, or from the backs of horses, or from the high branches of trees. Howard told Lovecraft that there was nothing so treacherous as a pecan tree limb; it would break without warning.8 Undoubtedly he knew this from experience, being a great tree climber in his boyhood.
Howard later recalled an even more chilling example of childhood helplessness. A small girl tumbled into a hog pen, and the hogs dismembered and half devoured her before anyone could come to her rescue.9 It is not surprising that young Robert came to fear all situations that made him feel helpless.
Preschool children frequently fail to distinguish among being forbidden to perform by parents, being unable to perform through lack of skill, and being incapable of performing because some object or force of nature resists being acted upon. "I am not allowed," little Robert might have said, "to drink coffee, or ride a bronco, or lift the Cap Rock."10 As long as this conceptual indiscrimination exists, the child will be angered by both the limitations of reality and the prohibitions of his parents and feel himself at war with the world.
Fortunately, for the average child in a normal home, time tends to rescue him from his impotent frenzies. Motor development allows him to move about with increasing assurance and to achieve more physical distance from his mother than before. This new competence increases when the toddler becomes able to form mental images, whether images as in a painting or as in a motion picture. Mental imagery aids in personality organization because it enables the child to experience the world around him.
Unfortunately for Robert Howard, his was not a normal home. Although indulgent parents in many ways, the senior Howards saw their role as "changing and shaping" their son. Hester Howard watched him continually, from infancy to manhood, selected his food, screened his friends, guided his reading, and hovered over him. Catering to his every whim, she was devoted to his needs; but her constant instruction and her myths of family importance gave him no chance to develop a life of his own. His father, when not too busy with his practice, continued—often quite consciously—to present young Robert with a warped view of reality. The child must have been confused by the doctor's tall tales, his polite lies to protect his wife's ego, and his insistence that his family live in the world as it ought to be, rather than in the world as it really was.
At three, while Robert developed the ability to move about by himself and so to grow away from his mother physically, he also learned to talk. Because of his intelligence and because his mother talked and read to him a great deal, he grew closer to her psychologically. Sensitive and imaginative, he early conjured up childish visions of monsters, ghosts, and demons; and keenly aware of his mother's fear of Indians, he peopled the outside world with evil beings, terrifying although ill-defined.
As his imagination grew, Robert invented make-believe people with whom to talk and animals that had never been. His mother entered into this pretend play, just as she did, years later, when she sought to acquire a brogue in order to give substance to her son's phantasy of being of largely Irish origin.
Whether Dr. Howard took part in these pretend games in Robert's childhood, we do not know; but during his adolescence Robert and his father did play variants of these pretendings. Tom Wilson reports that in 1924 when he was in college, Robert, then eighteen, sent him a shoebox full of "individual characters," "all mythical," that Robert and his father had named, seemed to know, and talked to at times.11 Tom felt that such things were beyond his imagination as well as that of most other people. While play with mythical characters might have been nothing more than a game to the doctor and his son, we wonder whether Robert was less certain that the myths had no reality in them and was seeking a reference point by which to judge his family's distorted picture of reality.
For the young child, play is a genuine mode of thought. Pretend play becomes a story, and storytelling is a useful way to think about nameless, formless things. Storytelling is an adult's way of thinking, too, when he needs to symbolize inner experience or interpret events not readily put into words. Howard's thought patterns in his adulthood leaned heavily on metaphorical and narrative sequences, because he never developed a language suitable for dealing with the taboo materials in his life—his own emotions, his inner violence, and the repressions thrust upon him by his parents.
As a result of the unsettled and repressive environment in which he grew from infancy to boyhood, little Robert had tantrums. Most young children do. But in Robert's case, the tantrums persisted all his life. He was never able to determine where the responsibility lay—how much could be expected of a man. Well into his school years, he found himself unable to control his hostile outbursts. Frequently at table he would flare up over a comment or correction by his father, kicking over his chair as he fled to the yard to pound his fist against the side of the house, over and over again, until his hand was severely bruised.12
The child who is compelled to resort to this kind of impotent discharge of anger is a frustrated, unhappy person. He is regularly teased by his peers and punished by his elders for bad behavior. He winds up with a deep sense of shame for his lack of self-control and reaches adulthood with a poor self-image.
Such a child is apt to have more than his share of nightmares. Robert had both nightmares and night terrors, as he reported in his letters to Lovecraft.13 A child caught up in a night terror will run about screaming with fear, his body bathed in sweat, his eyes staring. He is so securely locked in his trance that it may take twenty minutes to awaken him; and once awake, he has no memory of the event or of the dream that accompanied it.
Frequent or persistent night terrors usually indicate a troubled child, one who is not coping well with his life situation. They may herald the onset of an illness or reflect some other kind of stress. For Robert's parents, watching their son during one of these episodes, the night must have been most disquieting. If the Howards followed their usual way of dealing with threatening experiences, however, they would have simply denied the existence of these nightmarish fugues—a denial easy to maintain because of the amnesia of the dreamer. How many of the monsters Conan met and mastered sprang into being during these nights of terror, we shall never know, but we cannot doubt that nameless horrors slithered or clawed their way into young Howard's consciousness on these unremembered occasions.
Thus, at an early age, Robert Howard created his world of make-believe, a world that persisted throughout his life. He did not so much withdraw into phantasy as he was forced to choose among
the phantasies presented to him. The phantasy world that he constructed for himself became, as time went on, very important to him. It enabled him to consolidate some notion of self, to feel himself a master of his domain.
Through this search for selfhood coupled with his storytelling ability, the child who was Robert became Howard, the creative artist.
The Howards soon became disenchanted with the tent city of Seminole and its boom-or-bust atmosphere. In 1909, when the railroad failed, Dr. Howard took his family to Bronte,14 Texas. Bronte was one of the smallest towns that ever popped up along the Kansas City, Mexico & Orient Railroad, then being put into operation between Sweetwater and San Angelo. Bronte lies in a hilly area of Coke County, whence the plains roll down to Southwest Texas. In the Howards' day, it was cattle and sheep country, although there were arable sections in the valley of the nearby Colorado River.
In 1909, when the Howards moved there, the population of the whole county numbered about six thousand souls. Although in the spring the prairie is fragrant with the yellow clustered blossoms of the hui-sache,15 it must have been a lonely place for Hester Howard. Perhaps she sat on the front steps after the supper dishes were done, watching the sunset and discussing the progress of the railroad. Perhaps she snatched up her child when the tarantulas ventured out of their holes in the cool of the evening and hopped over the prairie on their black, hairy legs. Perhaps little Robert watched these formidable-looking arachnids, which were the size of his outstretched hand, and later turned them into the monsters of his nightmares.
Still, there were respites from the isolation of the nomad life. There were reunions with Dr. Howard's beloved sister Willie; her part-Indian husband William Oscar McClung; and their children. Fanny McClung Adamson remembers that "Uncle Cue,"16 as his nieces and nephews called Isaac Howard, was a frequent visitor to Crystal City, a raw frontier town in South Texas so desolate that the coyotes howled nightly at the city limits.
We know that Robert and his mother accompanied the doctor on at least some of these visits, for Robert wrote to Lovecraft in 1931 about seeing the fall of a meteorite when he was four years old. He was, he said, at the home of his uncle, an Indian, when he was awakened by a tremendous detonation and found the whole room bathed in a weird light. His uncle and his father, fearing that McClung's enemies were dynamiting the house, hastily armed themselves; but hearing nothing further, they went back to bed. The next day, eyewitnesses reported that a meteorite about the size of a barrel had exploded and burned itself out in the earth's atmosphere.
It was this colorful uncle who, until his death from tuberculosis in 1912, stimulated Robert Howard's lifelong interest in the frontier. Robert told Lovecraft that from infancy he had heard firsthand descriptions of pioneering. He added that he had had a child's part in the settlement and development of the Southwest, including the Great Plains and the lower Rio Grande Valley.17 Lovecraft accused "Two-Gun Bob," as he called Howard, of romanticizing this period, and, we think, with reason.
It is hard to imagine what part, even a child's part, Howard could have had in the development of the Rio Grande Valley during the short time he lived in Bronte or in any other part of South Texas. The Howards stayed in Bronte only a year; for on January 8, 1910, Dr. Howard presented his credentials at the county seat of Bexar County, giving his home address as Poteet, a few miles from the border. Years later Howard reported that he lived for a time on a ranch in Atascosa County, Texas, near San Antonio. These bare facts are the only records we have of the family's South Texas adventures.18
Soon Dr. Howard was on the move again. While the medical directory for 1912 does not list the doctor's address, we know that Mrs. Howard was receiving mail at Oran, in Palo Pinto County, near the village of Christian, a few miles from Robert's first home in Dark Valley. And in August of 1912, Dr. Howard's mother, Eliza Henry Howard, received a letter from a grandson in Mount Calm which was addressed to Mrs. L. E. Howard at Oran, where she was evidently visiting her daughter-in-law Hester Jane Howard.
But not all the visiting was done with members of Dr. Howard's family. Hester's sisters in Exeter, Missouri, sent her a postcard begging her to come for a visit: "You ought to be here and help us eat watermelon and peaches. We are just so busy canning fruit and stuff."19
This visit to Exeter was ultimately made. Robert always remembered his Grandmother Ervin's fine peaches, particularly her Elbertas. Lying in bed, he could hear the tree-ripened fruit fall from the laden branches; and in the morning he would help to gather up the soft fruit to be cut up and frozen in rich, sweetened cream. Boy and man, Robert could not get his fill of homemade ice cream; but he referred to his
Robert E. Howard at about five years of
Robert E. Howard at about eight years of
grandmother's peach cream as a frozen delicacy, unequaled by any other. Remembering that delicious concoction, Robert later wrote to Lovecraft that the local peaches "weren't much."20
A photograph of Robert, probably taken in South Texas and well distributed among family and friends, shows a sturdy little boy of about five, wearing a wide-brimmed hat turned back to show his face. While he does not look particularly happy, the child appears to be healthy and cooperative. To judge from his clothes, it is wintertime, and his shoes are scuffed and worn as only a healthy, active little boy can scuff them.
In the next available picture, Robert is several years older. He is very thin and he eyes the camera distrustfully. Although he is dressed in an Indian costume, there is no play in him. He looks fey. This is the child whom Alma Baker King described as a little wild boy, completely emaciated, playing at killing everything.21 Something had produced a radical change in the child. He looks disturbed and ill.
We can only guess at the nature of this illness. Nursed by a tubercular mother until he was four years old—an incredibly extended period for any mother to suckle her child—and having even occasional contacts with a tubercular uncle, Robert may have developed childhood tuberculosis. Childhood tuberculosis differs from the adult disease. Being more apt to attack bones and joints, it could easily be confused with rheumatic fever, especially if there was a swelling of the lymph glands of the neck.
That he was a puny, sickly child is a fact acknowledged both by Robert in his writings and by his mother in her talks with her nurse. Mrs. Howard admitted that she spoiled Robert because he was sickly and frail, and this period of ill health probably occurred between the ages of five and seven.
This period is in every child's life a period of conflict, engendered by a complete physical and intellectual reorganization. If this period is prolonged, as it seems to have been in the case of Robert Howard, it would have increased the boy's dependence on his mother at a time when the average child seeks autonomy through attachment to his father.
For little Robert, already sickly, the usual fears of a six-year-old stirred up by such things as loud noises, a pitch-black room, rattling winds, and the threat of fire would be heightened by the knowledge that his mother was ill and thus less accessible to him emotionally. If his own illness is added to what is usually an insecure period, the child's fears are magnified, and with them comes increasing dependence.
Moreover, at a time when most children are beginning to effect some kind of separation from their mothers and turn to their fathers for support, Robert suffered an additional rebuff. Dr. Howard's profession required that he put calls by his patients ahead of the companionship needs of his son, day after day. As a result, the six-or-seven-year-old Robert must have felt rejected and his self-esteem diminished in consequence.
To make matters even worse, Mrs. Howard was fast drawing away from her husband. His volatile temper, impulsiveness, and grandiose plans provided her with traits to scorn. She began to feel that she had married beneath herself—that the Ervins were far superior to the Howards. By the time that Robert was grown, she began to confide in a few people that hers was royal blood.
As for Dr. Howard, his "Hessie" of bridal days became "Hetch" or even "Heck"
to him, and through him, to others. And our informant added: "And he didn't say it very nicely."22 Every effort Mrs. Howard made to maintain her standard of manners was ridiculed by her husband. The more "refined" she acted, the more crass his behavior became. When the cloctor invited guests for dinner, Hester, unlike the average wife in the community, would serve the meal in courses. As she cleared away the first course, Isaac, to tease her, would call to her in the kitchen: "Well, Heck, is that all there is?"23 Consequently Hester Howard entertained less and less, while the doctor took many of his meals with friends and patients and spent more and more hours confiding to them the shortcomings of his wife.
The more brash Isaac Howard became—"harum-scarum" was the term frequently applied to him by his West Texas friends—the more perfection Hester sought, to heighten the contrast between them. Her chronic invalidism became another useful weapon when all other forms of denigration failed to curb her bumptious mate.
This continuing but subtle humiliation of each parent by the other made it increasingly difficult for Robert to achieve a realistic picture of either one. As he grew older, Robert often took his father to task for "mistreating" his mother, and their loud, angry words carried across the small yard to the Butler house next door.24
The Howards' next move was to a place near Wichita Falls. Although there is no record of Dr. Howard's medical registration in the District Clerk's Office in any of the three nearby counties—Wichita, Clay, or Archer—Robert later told Lovecraft that his family had made their home in a little cattle town near the old North Texas oil field, which lies in the Wichita Falls area.25
The Howards' stay there was brief and not happy. Robert had unpleasant memories of the countryside. He found the bare land virtually uninhabitable. Endless miles of white caliche, a calcium carbonate crust, lay like the bleached bones of giants where the top soil had been swept away by the unrelenting winds. On a bright day the glare was blinding.