by Unknown
Hester Jane Ervin was no longer the handsome spinster who had been courted by her Goldthwaite suitor a decade earlier. Now in her mid-forties, her health failing, her face lined by the toil of a semifrontier existence, she showed every year of her life. Although her big frame had filled out, she carried herself well and seemed calm, self-assured, and ladylike—"the perfect Southern gentlewoman," as some acquaintances described her. When neither keeping house nor supervising her son, her main occupation was reading.
When patients called at the Howard home for medication, Mrs. Howard always greeted them with graciousness tinged with melancholy. Although her home was well-kept and, by local standards, nicely furnished, she rarely invited neighbors in. Excellent cook though she was, Hester Howard almost never asked the doctor's associates to dinner, except when custom demanded that patients coming from a distance be offered refreshment; and such rare guests as she did have found her meals fancy and citified and thought she was putting on airs. One of the Baker boys reported that, while she did accompany her husband and son to the Baker farm for Sunday dinner, she returned the courtesy only at intervals of years. "A peculiar woman" was his assessment.28
Hand in hand with her self-imposed isolation from the community went Hester Howard's total absorption in her son. Watching him every minute, she "just lived for Robert and Robert for her."29 This excessive preoccupation with her child had its roots in Hester Howard's deep-seated uncertainty about her competence as a mother. Moreover her constant fatigue led her to resent the demands of motherhood that she found herself unable to fulfill. This unconscious resentment toward her child leads the insecure mother to overprotect her young. So it was with Hester Howard.
Abetted by her husband, Hester strove to protect Robert from all pain, shock, and frustration. Both parents tried to keep him from contact with anything "unpleasant," such as sex, childbirth, illness, and death.30 Since a child who is constantly protected from emotional crises does not learn to deal with difficult or painful situations, Robert never found out how to cope independently with his fears, hates, and angers. He grew up depending entirely on the presence and support of his mother in times of crisis, a dependence that was to have fatal consequences:
All through Robert's life, his mother spoiled him. This may have been in part because of his early frailty, in part because of his great dependence. Perhaps his openness, his kindness, his vulnerability invited spoiling. Years later Kate Merryman, who criticized Mrs. Howard for making Robert a "mama boy," sheepishly admitted: "I petted him, too, I guess."31
Everything seemed to conspire to keep Robert attached to his parents, especially to his mother: the frequent family moves, his early ill health, his mother's lengthy illness and negative attitudes toward life, the schoolyard bullies, his father's daily absences, and the failure of his parents' marital relationship.
His mother's own feelings of dependency caused her to focus all her attention on her son, and her possessive overprotection magnified the boy's suppressed fears and rages. Robert must have felt at times enormous resentment of his mother's constant demands and the daily restraints she placed upon him. But by clinging to his mother, Robert, boy and man, could reassure himself that his hostile wishes would not come true and that he would never feel the helplessness, the guilt, and the loneliness that would engulf him if his death wishes for her were realized.
Robert's extreme reliance on the presence of his mother to resolve his anxieties and control his turbulent emotions, while distressing, was reassuring to Hester Howard. She felt that her devotion was justified, that she was indispensable, a perfect mother. The sacrifice of life to love was the theme that ennobled Hester Howard's existence and dominated her relationship with her son. From the day she gave him birth to the day he died, she was unable to let him go. *
Early in 1936, Mrs. Howard reported to her nurse that when Robert was a very small boy he began to tell his mother that if she died, he would die too.32 This remark, typical of a six-year-old, would have seemed poignant and memorable to Mrs. Howard because of her ill health; but to Robert it was probably only an expression of his normal fear of separation. A child of six has no understanding of death; he cannot comprehend the thought of his own nonexistence. We suspect that Hester, charmed by her son's devotion, conveyed her approval by smile or gesture; and that this unspoken approval reenforced Robert's youthful resolve.
A child's concept of death involves some sort of reversible action. When, as an adult, Robert persisted in his decision to die with his mother, he made the same mistake that he made as a six-year-old: he confused the irreversible reality of death with its symbol of rebirth. As a rule, the child of nine or ten, having acquired a more realistic concept of death, understands that someday he will be left alone. He therefore strives for independence, for emotional separation from his mother, by making a hero of his father. Robert, however, never took this developmental step. His mother, disappointed in love, isolated from her peers, jealous of her husband's popularity, neglected and ill, was not about to let her offspring go. Convincing herself that the boy's efforts to free himself from her apron strings were the result of her husband's attempts to take her child from her, Hester set about thwarting the doctor's efforts to spend time alone with his son. In the end she won the battle and, in ho doing, sealed Robert's fate.
One of Robert's Cross Cut acquaintances described the nine-year-old Kobert as "what a boy would term a sissy."33 Herself a dressier woman than the village wives among whom she lived, Mrs. Howard kept her son in white shirts when the local boys wore khaki or denim. This alone would have made Robert a marked boy in the neighborhood, but in addition he was shy and withdrawn. If he was, as we surmise, recovering I rom childhood tuberculosis or rheumatic fever, his lack of vitality would have increased his shyness and wariness.
Moreover, his mother's obsessive devotion to his welfare and his consequent dependence on her fostered Robert's earlier dread of going to school. The bullying he had endured made him distrustful, and his mother's constant concern endowed him with the belief that he was the center of the universe. He could never feel comfortable in the classroom, l iven when, in Cross Cut, and later in Burkett and Cross Plains, he was no longer teased or threatened, Robert transferred his unconscious resentment of maternal restraints to resentment of his teachers and of all other authority figures. Many years later he wrote:
I got through school by the skin of my teeth. I always hated school, and as I look back on my school days now, I still hate them with a deep and abiding hatred. Outside of mathematics—at which I was a terrible mugg —I didn't particularly mind the studies, but I hated being confined indoors —having to keep regular hours—having to think up stupid answers for equally irritating questions asked me by people who considered themselves in authority over me.34
It is curious to note that, except in mathematics, Robert was a good student; and as far as his schoolmates remember, he seemed to get along well with his teachers. Yet, this intense resentment of restraint remained with him all his life and affected his decision not to go to college.
All the doctor's friends knew that the Howards were not getting on well. They quarreled almost daily about money, about the doctor's boisterous-ness, and about their son. Isaac, loud and bombastic, was a constant! embarrassment to his wife. When annoyed with people, he would shout:! "I'd just like to take my knife and slash their entrails out and hang thern^ on the wire fence!"35 At patients' homes, he more and more ofteni demanded food and drink before refreshments were offered to him. He< monopolized the conversation with crude jokes and undisciplined hyper bole, not infrequently at Hester's expense. Trying to correct him only made matters worse.
Her sense of propriety outraged, Hester drew further away. In time] she embroiled young Robert in the family tug-of-war as she tried to shut; her husband completely out of the family circle. She went on drives wit' father and son to monitor the conversations and keep the two fro growing closer. Isaac responded in kind. The more his wife regarded hi with distaste
, the more he teased her in public with bad jokes an" egregious behavior. And when she answered his clowning with scornfu silence, he spent less and less time at home. *
The doctor often sought solace from his neighbor-patients, Mrs. J W. Newton—an aunt of Austin Newton—and her attractive unmarrie daughter Annie. Dr. Howard regularly got his family's drinking wate.
from the Newtons' cistern, asserting that their water was more palatable than his own. On angry evenings, if he found the Newtons' sitting-room lamps lighted, he would set down his bucket and come in for a visit.
According to Annie Newton Davis, Dr. Howard was a great talker who wanted to chat with someone all the time. He presented himself as the misunderstood husband, not only rejected by his wife but also separated from his child by his wife's close intimacy with the boy. It was he who first told the Newton ladies of his wife's earlier attachment to the gentleman from Goldthwaite and of the bitter disappointment that robbed him of her companionship at home.
These nocturnal visits worried J. W. Newton, who kept farmer's hours. Having to be up with the sun to tend his cattle, he retired early. A male caller who appeared after the head of the house had gone to bed, even if he were so esteemed a neighbor as the doctor, made him uneasy. He feared that people might talk. Still, Mrs. Newton was undergoing certain difficulties, and the doctor's almost daily attention seemed to help her. Grateful for that benefit, Newton did nothing, although he told his family that he did not like the situation.
Isaac Howard enjoyed his practice. He made friends with all his patients and spent his days chatting and joking with them. Sometimes he told them stories of the supernatural; sometimes he prayed with them. Often he dined with them, keeping them laughing at his tall tales. "Everyone loved him," said Annie Newton Davis. "He had namesakes all around, and that shows that the mothers liked him."36 Even after he had moved to Cross Plains, when a contest was held to choose the most popular man in the area, Mrs. Burns clinched the honor for Dr. Howard by sending in a letter with 250 signatures.
The doctor formed close bonds with the nearby families of the Newton brothers, with the rancher Stephen B. Stone, and with Calvin Baker, who farmed in the neighboring village of Burkett. Dr. Howard dropped in on all these friends while making his rounds. Sometimes he called on two or three of them in the course of a single round. Dr. Chambers's son recalls that "Dr. Howard came by our house at all hours of the day or night."37
Dr. Howard's best friend was, without a doubt, Dr. Solomon Roe
Chambers, whose presence in Cross Cut had induced Isaac Howard to settle there. His visits to the Chamberses' doubtless occurred on evenings when no lights showed at the J. W. Newtons'. The doctor asked advice on domestic matters of anyone who would listen. When relations with Hester were at their worst, he would sometimes threaten to "take out" —leave and get a divorce. Although most of his confidants could offer the stubborn, self-centered man no more than a sympathetic shake of the head, Dr. Chambers would set himself up as a marriage counsellor, "to iron things out." Then for a time the Howards' family life would run more smoothly.38
Dr. Chambers shared Isaac Howard's intellectual interests. Together they studied and practiced hypnotism. When Calvin Baker's wife suffered a bout of pneumonia, Dr. Howard put her into a deep sleep, from which she awakened refreshed and free of respiratory distress. And she continued to improve from that point on.39
Isaac Howard and his friend were also seriously interested in occultism. Solomon Chambers owned a book by "Yogi Ramacharaka" titled Fourteen Lessons in Yogi Philosophy and Oriental Occultism, published in 1903 and often republished. Isaac read this book and underlined many passages that impressed him. Ramacharaka was actually William W. Atkinson, a writer affiliated with the New Thought movement, founded at the turn of the century.
During the twentieth century, many adherents of New Thought became interested in the Vedanta philosophy, brought from India in the 1890s by a young swami named Vivekananda. Ramacharaka's book— one of many he wrote—contained some authentic Yogic philosophy and a great mass of the pseudo-Oriental notions concocted by Helena P. Blavatsky and her Theosophical followers. It described such wonders as astral telepathy and an astral tube whereby an adept can behold scenes on other planets.40
Robert Howard, avid reader that he was, would browse through the libraries of his father's friends whenever he could. The boy "was never interested in getting out on the farm. When he came down there, he just sat down and read."41 Ramacharaka's Fourteen Lessons, together with similar books that he read over the years, gave Robert a grounding in occult and pseudo-scientific doctrines, which he exploited in his fantasies. Both he and his father became, at least for a time, convinced reincarnationists. Dr. Howard liked to propound the theory that the human spirit evolved to a higher state with each successive incarnation. As a youth, Robert expressed the same belief. Later he declared himself a complete agnostic, neither affirming nor denying the existence of a spiritual world. Still, he continued to harbor at least a tentative belief in rebirth in other bodies.42
Despite Hester Howard's efforts to separate her son from the mate she despised, Robert did accompany his father on some of his rounds and often visited at the Chamberses'. Sometimes Drs. Howard and Chambers would sit for hours, telling Robert and Norris, as well as adult friends, about comic or dramatic events that supposedly took place at a country syrup mill. Eager to outdo each other, they would pile one unlikely happening upon another; for in the days before radio and television, storytelling was a favorite form of entertainment.
In Texas, where the tall tale is the currency of social conversation, one never knew what to believe. Youngsters of nine or ten, whose thinking is very concrete, cannot always distinguish between an exaggeration and a factual report. In Robert's case, hearing adults tell tall tales would have condoned his own invention of ego-saving whoppers. It would also have further blurred for him the line between fiction and reality.
Neither Isaac Howard nor Solomon Chambers did much to edit their conversation before the boys, and sometimes topics were chosen less for humor than for shock value. Particularly grisly were their reminiscences about medical school and early practice. Dr. Howard liked to tell about a job he did for his medical school. He would take a corpse out in the woods and boil the flesh off it in a black iron wash pot or cauldron. When the bones were properly cured, the skeleton would be reassembled for use as a model for instruction. One day Isaac Howard was boiling a black body—most of the cadavers being Negroid—when he was discovered by a black man. The doctor's account of the poor Negro's fright and flight always triggered great mirth among his auditors; but to the young son of the pot boiler such a tale would inevitably acquire a sinister connotation.
Years later Norris Chambers, who reported the story, added:
Dr. Howard was a master at using strong language to describe violent action. No doubt this conversation influenced Robert's writing. [Dr. Howard] often told what should be done to certain characters in the community, and the list was longer than any torture routine ever described in fiction. My dad was good at this, too, and when they got together, the conversation was pretty smoky.43
Norris Chambers believed that no one took these conversations very seriously. Although he did not, it is doubtful whether this was true for young Robert. As Robert grew older, he and his father did some yarning together, each trying to top the other's story, a competition which E. H. Price observed on his visits to the Howard home in the 1930s.
Fortunately, not all between Isaac and his son was competitive phantasizing. Norris Chambers indicates that while "Much of the conversation was on the Bible and history," the doctor also "told about things that Robert was reading, so Robert must have discussed his business with him some."44
Tales told during visits to the Chambers family were not alone in giving Robert ideas for later horror stories. His paternal grandmother, Eliza Henry Howard, was another source of ghostly happenings, which influenced young Robert's fancies and gave him material for h
is fantastic tales.
When Robert and his family lived in Cross Cut, Eliza Howard spent her time shuttling between the farms of her son David and her widowed daughter Willie Howard McClung, both of whom lived just east of Waco. In time her eyesight dimmed, and a trip to Arkansas for a cataract operation failed to restore her sight. Although she became completely blind before her death in 1916, all her relatives—save for her daughter-in-law Hester Howard—remember her as a "tremendous woman."45
Eliza Howard, though blind, continued to knit with great skill. On Sundays, with a relative to guide her, she marched to church with a Bible under her arm, clad in nineteenth-century style with a black bonnet tied under her chin and a black taffeta dress over four or five petticoats.46 And when the families visited back and forth, she told glpst stories to young Robert, tales he would never forget, tales that surpassed even the shockers that he had heard from Mary Bohannon in Bagwell. In 1930 Robert wrote to Lovecraft:
But no negro ghost-story ever gave me the horrors as did the tales told me by my grandmother. All the gloominess and dark mysticism of the Gaelic nature were hers, and there was no light and mirth in her. . . .
As a child my hair used to stand straight up when she would tell of the wagon that moved down the wilderness roads in the dark of the night, with never a horse drawing it—the wagon that was full of severed heads and dismembered limbs; and the yellow horse, the ghastly dream horse that raced up and down the stairs of the grand old plantation where a wicked woman lay dying; and the ghost-switches that swished against the doors when none dared open those doors lest reason be blasted at what was seen. And in many of her tales, also, appeared the old, deserted plantation mansion, with the weeds growing rank about it and the ghostly pigeons flying up from the rails of the verandah.47