by Unknown
Chapelle-aux-Saints until they were recovered in 1908. Later discovers have narrowed the gap between Neanderthal men and modern man, $ that now Neanderthal men are believed to be merely a primitive type < Homo sapiens, persons of short, stocky, muscular build, probably ligli colored, who stood as straight as other men. Instead of falling victim a war of extermination, it now appears that Neanderthalers were mere assimilated by waves of immigrants into Europe, waves of which til Cro-Magnons were only one. Robert Howard, however, could only haV used what information was available at the time he wrote.
In style "Spear and Fang" is hardly distinguishable from the pros of scores of other pulp-magazine writers of the day, whose work wa competent but in no way extraordinary. There is only a hint of the ra1 vitality, the headlong rush of action, and the hypnotically vivid cadence prose of later years. Not for several years did Howard begin to develo the style that makes his writings memorable.
That summer of 1924 it seemed to Robert Howard that he was gettin nowhere with his long-cherished career as a writer. He had not sold single piece and was still working at odd jobs for petty wages.
Robert at eighteen was hammering out his manuscripts on an ol secondhand typewriter by the time-wasting method of hunt-and-pecl Yet his ineptitude was more than counterbalanced by his passional desire to write. In Post Oaks and Sand Roughs, Robert tells how Stev Costigan
... would sit down to his typewriter and scarcely eat or sleep until he ha pounded out what seemed a masterpiece. He would mail it, and then woul follow days of haunting the post office. His heart would sink as he woul finally receive a bulky envelope, and his mood would be almost too bitti to open it. However, he would open it, hoping to find a line from the edito He would curse savagely at the sight of the rejection slip, and plod hom< to sit down and write another story.15
As the pile of rejection slips grew, so did Robert's sense of futility; y< he continued to write. A rejection slip so deeply wounded his basi egotism, Robert said, that he seldom submitted a story to more than om magazine. A hardened professional, which Howard eventually became learns to take rejections in stride and to send out rejected works ove itnd over again until every possibility has been exhausted. By that time I he first magazine may have a new editor who will snap up the piece the old editor turned dowh.
This and similar advice of value to a professional writer might have heen available to Robert Howard had he sought out a course for writers. Hut such courses he affected to despise, saying: "I'm determined to succeed, if I do, without any help of that sort."16
It is quite possible that there was no one in the vicinity capable of giving the young author significant advice. In a town the size of Cross Plains and even in surrounding communities, there were few if any who possessed the skills he needed. Robert was well aware of his utter isolation from professional contacts. As he wrote a decade later, his was
... a profession which seems as dim and faraway and unreal as the shores of Europe. The people among which I lived—and yet live, mainly—made their living from cotton, wheat, cattle, oil, with the usual percentage of business men and professional men. . . . But the idea of a man making his living by writing seemed, in that hardy environment, so fantastic that even today I am sometimes myself assailed by a feeling of unreality. Never the less, at the age of fifteen, having never seen a writer, a poet, a publisher or a magazine editor, and having only the vaguest ideas of procedure, I began working on the profession I had chosen. ... I had neither expert aid nor advice. I studied no courses in writing; until a year or so ago, I never read a book by anybody advising writers how to write. Ordinarily I had no access to public libraries, and when I did, it was to no such libraries as exist in the cities.17
It was at last decided, whether by Robert or by his parents or by a family conclave, that he should at least improve the manual skills required for commercial writing. When the fall term of 1924 began at the Howard Payne College in Brownwood, Howard was enrolled in the commercial school for noncredit courses in typing and shorthand.
Howard Payne had a subdivision, the Howard Payne Academy, which was a college preparatory school offering classes all the way from kindergarten through high school. Many aspiring college students, whose high-school preparation did not qualify them to matriculate as college freshmen, took a year or two at the Academy prior to entering the college.
The Academy in turn had a branch or division, the Howard Payne Commercial School, which offered noncredit courses in such practical subjects as bookkeeping and commercial law. Robert was a student it the Commercial School, which was run by James Edward Basham, a lean distinguished-looking oldster with white hair and a drooping mustache A kindly, gentle man, Basham taught Robert shorthand. Robert also tool classes in typing.
Since Bob Howard's friend Lindsey Tyson had already complete* the college preparatory course at the Academy and was matriculated iij the academic course in Howard Payne College, Bob made arrangement* to room with him at 417 Austin Avenue, a couple of blocks from th< campus. It was a happy arrangement. I
Lindsey had continued to be an avid sports fan. One fine fall daj he persuaded Bob to attend a football game between Howard Payne an< a neighboring college. For all his distrust of group activities and his pos< of aloof cynicism, Bob—perhaps to his surprise—was caught up in th« vicarious thrill of battle aroused by the sight of struggling, tumbling bodies. Here was a living simulation of those imaginary spectacles o: bloodshed and slaughter that had so long occupied his mind and, later his typewriter. Steve Costigan, Robert wrote, "sat in the grandstands t< see men clash and bleed, and he was frank in his admission of the fact.'' He found himself yelling: "Tear their god-damned guts out! Kill th« bastards!"18 whereas others only rooted for a touchdown. From that da) forward Bob Howard remained an ardent football fan. i
One happy day that autumn, Robert received a letter from Farns-worth Wright, the editor of Weird Tales, saying that the magazine hat accepted "Spear and Fang" and would pay sixteen dollars on publica* tion, at the magazine's regular rate of half a cent a word. Tyson latel reported that, when Bob got that letter, he was "about the happiest mai that I have ever seen." Declaring, "I am going to thank my God for this,' Bob knelt down by the side of the bed and was silent for a few minuted When he rose, he said: "I'm so grateful, not just for this story, bu because now it won't be so hard for me to sell. Now that I've finallj broken in, it'll be easier." :
For a while thereafter Robert Howard walked on air. When hi! friends congratulated him, he replied expansively: "Yes, I'm prettj young to be selling stuff. Looks like I'm going right on up. . . ."19 Sucl optimism, he later learned, was premature. He haunted the newsstand! for each monthly issue of Weird Tales, hoping to see his story in print but month after month went by without the story's appearance. i
In the meanwhile, spurred on by thoughts of success, Robert continued to turn out poems and work on stories whenever his classwork was done. Sometimes the creative urge was so compelling that he typed far into the night, and his long-suffering roommate made no complaint. At times, he later admitted, he even neglected his homework for his writing.
Unfortunately, that autumn Howard's prickly personality deprived him of a source of information of the greatest value to a writer. He had a row with the librarian in the public library at Brownwood and felt that thereafter the library was barred to him. Since, for some unknown reason, he had never investigated the library at Howard Payne College, he now had no ready supply of reading matter and became a person who rarely opened a book. He relied on The Saturday Evening Post and followed with insatiate interest a series of articles by Charles Francis Coe, which set forth the reminiscences of notable prizefighters.20
Robert's silent prayer of thanksgiving, that day when he received the notice of acceptance of his story, was his most definite recorded commitment to a belief in God. Some of his friends have said that "he believed deep down in God and in God's forgiveness for sins" and that he "claimed to have his own personal kind of religion."21 Actual
ly he flitted about among religious beliefs somewhat as his father did but was more inclined to disbelief.
Like his father, Robert loved to talk and argue on the subject. At one time, they say, he would be an enthusiastic Campbellite; at another, a Baptist; at still another, a convinced reincarnationist or a dyed-in-the-wool agnostic. He was somewhat anti-Catholic, sitting out the Hoover-Smith presidential election of 1928 on the ground that "I won't vote for a Catholic and I won't vote for a damned Republican. . . . My ancestors were all Catholic and not very far back. And I have reason to hate the church." To Clyde Smith he expressed
. . . detachment toward the Christian Faith, stating that he did not know what he believed, adding that he supposed he was an agnostic, and saying that no Howard had ever had any religion after leaving the Catholic Church. Then he'd add: "I say all that, and when my time comes I'll probably die howling for a priest."22
apprentice pulpster
dark valley destiny
Robert sometimes avowed that, if a supreme being existed, he suspected it of being malignant rather than benevolent:
If mankind's affairs are tinkered with from Outside, it must be with malicious intent. If a man walks across a ten-acre tract in the dark, with one rock on it, he'll invariably bust his toe on that rock.23
Later he said he had been joking about the rock. But since there are sq many hints scattered through his writings that he viewed the universe as actively hostile, we may doubt if he wrote altogether in jest. It seema likely that he really thought the cosmos was out to get him.
Among the tangled threads of the skein of his supernatural beliefs, reincarnation was one of the strongest. All his life he had heard his father speculate endlessly on the subject. A couple of his young friends dabbled in the occult, and of one Bob said:
An occultist of my acquaintance, who has gone deeper into the matter than any man I ever knew, says I have a very ancient soul, am a reincarnated Atlantean, in fact! Maybe if there's anything to this soul business, or to reincarnation, that theory may be right.
The acquaintance was probably S. T. Russell of Cottonwood, who wrote Howard letters full of portentous phrases extolling Cosmic Consciousness and exhorting Robert "to keep his Spiritual Eye on His Star—His Planet —which is always leading upward towards The Light.' "24
In later years H. P. Lovecraft wrote Howard long, learned letters, arguing with elaborately reasoned logic for the philosophy of scientific materialism and dismissing all supernaturalism as too unlikely, in the light of evidence, to bother with. But he never fully convinced Bob. Wilfred Branch Talman published in Weird Tales a poem titled Death:
A stately ship stands in the offing now,
Out past the reef where broken waves are drumming, Her sails lit up with sun, bright gilded prow,
And rigging taut through which the breeze is humming. Some day another ship is coming; No breath of wind shall whisper through her spars, And I, through phantom sails, shall view the stars.25
Howard wrote Talman, praising the poem and saying: "It's difficult to capture a completed thought in so short a verse, but you seem to have succeeded admirably."26 The ideas expressed in this poem seem to have coincided with Howard's basic belief of death as a promising rite of passage, an escape or liberation. He never became reconciled to the idea of the finality of death.
Yet Howard was able to tailor his supernatural pronouncements to the views of the recipient of his letters. In the early stages of their correspondence, he wrote with boyish enthusiasm to Lovecraft:
Some senses of connection with past ages seem so unerring, so strong and so instinctive that I sometimes wonder if there is a bit of truth to the theory of reincarnation. . . . Perhaps you were an armored Roman centurion and I was a skin-clad Goth in the long ago, and perhaps we split each other's skulls on some dim battle-field!27
Though inept and impractical in worldly affairs, Lovecraft was a skilled debater, a lover of intellectual argument, and an aggressive materialistic atheist. He promptly punctured his pen pal's balloon of speculation, so that Bob had to retreat to a dignified agnosticism, writing:
My mind is open; I refuse either to deny or affirm. . . . I've never heard a theological argument which convinced me beyond the shadow of a doubt in the existence of a Supreme Being; nor have I ever heard a scientific argument that convinced me that such a Being did not exist. ... I guess Agnostic is what I am, if that means scepticism regarding all human gropings. Perhaps the main reason that I dislike to take a firm stand in any direction, is because of the respect I have for my father's intelligence. He is not by any means convinced that there is nothing in the matters mentioned.28
Robert went on to say that he favored the same open-minded attitude toward life after death and reincarnation. Yet he harbored a mystical dense of the existence of unknown forces and beings that affected the lives of men:
I am by no means certain that unseen and only dimly suspected forms of life and energy do not impinge upon us from Outside. ... I am not certain there are not invisible beings and forms of matter, above and below our senses of discernment, which are not altogether oblivious or indifferent to mankind. This is no question of the supernatural; there may be beings and forms of life natural enough in their sphere and plane, yet still intangible to us.29
183
182
He said of himself that he "was prone to lean vaguely toward the belie of Hindu philosophers that the creation of anything set spheres an elements in motion that endured down the ages."30
Since his fellow fantasist Clark Ashton Smith, in California, provei more receptive than Lovecraft to such otherworldly speculations, How ard continued to indulge in them in letters to Smith:
While I don't go so far as to believe that stories are inspired by actuall existent spirits or powers (though I am rather opposed to flatly denyinj anything) I have sometimes wondered if it were possible that unrecognize< forces of the past or present—or even of the future—work through th thoughts and actions of living men. . . .
It certainly does seem that certain individuals occasionally get in contac with forces outside themselves; something like cog-wheels grinding awa; in their spirits, that suddenly, perhaps only momentarily, slip into th notches of gigantic, unseen cog-wheels of cosmic scope. . . . Sometimes il seems to me that the interlocking of unseen cog-wheels lifts a man tq heights he would never have attained by his own efforts.... Then the samq cosmic law that locked the wheels, unlocks them, leaving him in the gap, Dazed, stunned and helpless he comes down crashing in the ruins of his glory. . . .31
This mechanistic mysticism—this sense of otherworldly wheels within wheels—stayed with Howard. It first appeared in 1928, when he wrote to a "Fort Worth newspaper predicting the outcome of the Tunney-Heeney prizefight. He prophesied that Tom Heeney would beat James J. "Gene' Tunney because of parallels between the career of Tunney and that o: an earlier fighter James J. Corbett. Both men had the same first nam< and middle initial. Howard pointed out that Corbett had defeated Johl L. Sullivan in 1892, just as Tunney had defeated Dempsey in 1926. Il each case the more scientific boxer had triumphed over the harder hitter Moreover, both challengers, Robert Fitzsimmons in 1897 and Tom Heeney in 1928, were New Zealanders of Irish ancestry and ex-black smiths to boot. Just as Fitzsimmons beat Corbett, so now Heeney was bound to beat Tunney as the cosmic cog-wheels repeated their revolution This time, alas, the cosmic cog-wheels evidently "unlocked," for on July 26th Tunney knocked out Heeney in the eleventh round and retiree undefeated from the ring.32
Probably Howard's half-belief in reincarnation remained with him,
although in his more mature years he spoke about it less than he had in his youth, when for a while he was wholeheartedly committed to the doctrine. One of his friends has even suggested that a contributory cause of his suicide was an intense curiosity about the afterworld and an impatience to explore it.33
Robert Howard often used the reincarnation theme in his stories. Whether or not an author believes in a doctrine m
akes little difference; in writing a fantasy, he can assume the truth of any theme that will enhance the plot. Yet, belief tends to make the theme more convincing to the reader of the story.
One of Robert's favorite boyhood books, which he read and reread many times, was entirely based on the concept of reincarnation. This was Jack London's The Star Rover (1915), a long novel told in the first person by one Darrell Standing, a man in a California jail, awaiting execution. This book influenced Howard's adult thinking and writing in a number of ways.
For one thing Standing enjoys dreams in which he relives many earlier lives. In one he is an Elizabethan sea rover on a South Pacific island. In another he is the man who tamed the horse. In still another he is a giant Viking commanding a Roman legion in Palestine at the time of the Crucifixion. "I was of the flaxen-haired ^Esir, who dwelt in Asgard, and before I was of the red-haired Vanir, who dwelt in Van&heim. ... I have been an Aryan master in old Egypt ... I have been a king in Ceylon, a builder of Aryan monuments under Aryan kings in old Java and old Sumatra. . . ."
Undoubtedly the AEsir and Vanir of the Conan stories come straight from London's novel, although Howard also read popular books on mythology. Around 1933 he wrote a series of stories told in the first person by a man named James Allison, a cripple who dreams of his past lives as Standing did. In these dreams Allison always appears as a primitive hero of the ^Esir or some other Nordic tribe.
While London was addicted to Aryan-race nonsense, incongruously combining Marxism, racism, and romantic primitivism, one passage in The Star Rover must have struck a sympathetic chord in Howard. London's hero says: "I do see myself today that one man who appeared in the elder world, blond, ferocious, a killer and a lover, a meat eater and a root digger, a gypsy and a robber, who, club in hand, through millenniums of years, wandered the world around. . . ,"34 Here is a preliminary sketch for one of Howard's stalwart barbarians—Hunwulf, Kull, or Conan.