by Unknown
My friend, you think only of bad spirits, but were my magic always bad, should I not take this fine young body in place of my old wrinkled one and keep it?9
In the spring of 1928, while he was struggling with Post Oaks, Howard struck out in another experimental direction. In answer to his friends' urging to write about places and events he knew from personal experience, Howard wrote a novelette entitled "Spanish Gold on Devil Horse." In it he attempted to tell a conventional Western adventure story with his home town as a setting. As in Post Oaks, Cross Plains became "Lost Plains." The protagonist this time is "Mike Costigan" instead of "Steve Costigan." With a touch of wishful thinking, Howard makes him a young writer who has already achieved success, with several books to his credit, several published magazine stories, and a comfortable bank account. Mike helps a beautiful girl of Spanish descent to overcome a pair of villainous treasure hunters who plan to steal her claim.
While the tale is lively and holds the reader's attention, it is marred by amateurish elements. For one thing the villains are so patently wicked that each should have had a V tattooed on his forehead. The leader's eyes were, for example, "inhumanly cold and inhumanly expressionless— more like a snake's eyes than those of a man."10
Howard, moreover, falls back on the idiot plot—subjecting his characters to attacks of stupidity to keep the plot moving. In one place the bootlegger Leary passes up a chance to shoot Mike, or at least to cover him with his gun, in order to indulge in a fistfight. This ploy gave the author a chance to detail every straight left, uppercut, and right hook, as well as to dwell on the evil bootlegger's battered face and gore-bespattered lips.
While these flaws were not necessarily fatal to a tale designed for the Western pulps, whose fiction was the world's most conventional, cliche-filled, and formula-ridden, this story met with rejection. Howard put it away and returned to writing stories laid in Africa, Afghanistan, the lost Atlantis, and other exotic milieux far removed from the little town he lived in.
Robert also continued to write for The Junto, the round-robin monthly sheet that circulated among his literary friends. The things he wrote were strictly for amusement. They were mostly minor poems and little pieces of the sort that now fill the pages of numerous fan magazines. There were a review of several movies; an article attributing Lindbergh's sudden fame to carefully-organized hero worship; a piece urging that beer be guzzled, not sipped; and a jibe at sophisticates who mock at sentiment.
Two of these little pieces are of more than passing interest. In "Etched in Ebony" he indulges in a phantasy of making violent love to a black woman: "Her fingers, hooked like talons, rent the skin from my face in strips until I smashed my fist into her panting mouth and dropped her across my knees with a trickle of blood starting from the corners of her lips. ... I struck her again and again full in the face. Each blow was a mad caress. She knew—she laughed."11
The passage shows plainly the extreme violence seething under
Howard's usually quiet exterior. It also shows that he embraced the common white man's myth that Negroes are more sensual, more sexually potent and intense, than Caucasians. And it shows the extreme sexual frustration that unleashed such phantasies as this in a young man whose only contacts with women were with his mother. He had in all probability never even talked to a black woman since the days of his childhood; he admired blond, Nordic women—golden girls; and yet thoughts of a black woman aroused both cruelty and passion to fever pitch.
The other piece, "Ambition by Moonlight," recounts a perhaps not wholly imaginary conversation among Clyde Smith, Truett Vinson, and Robert Howard, in which each tells of his secret ambitions. Smith wants luxury, including a yacht, and far-flung travel. Vinson wants to reform the world, eliminate sham and prudery, start a renaissance of art, and abolish war. As for Howard, he wrote: "I'd like to be the strongest man in the world. ... I want to know all the hidden, secret things. ... I want to delve into all the secret cults and demoniac mysteries. ... I want to write dark and forbidding books which will freeze the blood and burn the ears of men . . . And I'd like to have about four hundred women who thought they understood me."
Despite this sultanic phantasy typical of a healthy young man, Howard's more usual attitude toward women is reflected in an article called "Something About Eve." This short work is an appreciation of the novel of that name, written by James Branch Cabell (1879-1958), an aristocratic Virginian who started as a writer of sentimental romances.
In the first decade of this century, Cabell began a series of elegant, allegorical fantasies about an imaginary medieval land. The work was full of subtly ribald humor and comments on the war between the sexes. This richly embroidered work, full of puns, anagrams, and mythological allusions, attracted a small, devoted following; but it was largely unknown to the public until John S. Sumner of the New York Society for the Suppression of Vice tried unsuccessfully to suppress Jurgen for obscenity. This 1919 case made Cabell famous and, for a time, a best-selling author. Later his writings fell back into their pre-Jurgen obscurity, and there they remained until their recent revival in paperback.
Something About Eve, the Cabell novel so admired by Howard, was published in 1927. The story relates how, in 1805, a supernatural being named Glaum persuades Gerald Musgrave, a young Virginian poet, to trade bodies with him. Glaum will thus take over the mistress of whom (lerald has wearied, while Gerald fares forth on the silver stallion Kalki lo the city of Antan, to reign as a god. But, alas, Gerald en route settles in with a middle-aged woman who makes him so comfortable that he puts off indefinitely going on to Antan. This woman, it transpires, is Eve, the prototype of all women.
In this allegory Cabell rides his favorite subjects: the futility of ambition; the masculine illusion of the perfect, irresistible, but unattainable woman; the conflict between achievement and domesticity. In the preface he muses:
Antan remains, they say, the home of all true poets. Yet no man is entirely a poet. A part of him is a husband, a part is a father, for example; and with these considerable fractions of a man's being, Antan has no concern. ... so many men are poets in their youth, yet, with age, and the accompanying growth in complexity of each man's nature, all men, and most certainly all poets, fail more or less completely as poets. I would but point out that to fail as a poet may very well be to succeed as a human being. Gerald did not reach Antan: yet he gained, so far as he could discover, the most nearly satisfying prizes which human life affords.12
Howard praised Cabell's style with enthusiasm, saying that he "writes with a diamond pen." He also relished Cabell's censor-baiting "elegant knack of being beautifully vulgar, and of concealing—from the mass— the most jubilant depravities in innuendo." We may guess that Howard had in mind Chapter XVI, wherein Gerald, before the idol called the Holy Nose of Lytreia, argues with his hosts that this object is not really a nose but a tongue. Cabell's description, however, is of quite another organ.
What most appealed to Robert Howard was Cabell's classification of women into the Evadne type, the dangerous vampire or enchantress, and the Maya type, the "good wife," who spiderlike traps men in a sticky web of domesticity. He rationalized his own gaucherie with women when he said of Cabell that he made it very plain that women—whether home-loving or wild—destroy the men who consort with them:
For in the arms of Evadne, a man loses only his manhood, his reputation, his honor, and frequently his life, while with Maya he loses his only worthwhile possessions—ideals and ambition. . . . Well, the Adversary be thanked, there is nothing about me to attract either a daughter of Eve or one of Lilith—so I will ride relentlessly down the long road to Antan and the doom that waits there, while the great majority of you, my sneering masculine readers, will be sitting under your chestnut trees. . . . watching the antics of your brood through rose colored glasses.13 1
For all this brave bluster, Howard did fall victim to a woman, one who i destroyed him as surely as the fangs of Cabell's Evadne would have f destroyed Gerald Musgrave had he no
t disposed of her first. And that woman was his mother.
The members of the Junto kept their publication going for two years. In; the fall of 1928, Mooney went away to college and soon found that study jj precluded his continued editorship. Preece's sister Lenore, a student at the University of Texas, took over the editorship and carried it on until * March 1930. Then the publication died a natural death from the pres- j sures of the Depression, Miss Preece's college schedule, and the inevita-,' ble seduction of the members by competing interests. Mooney (1912-77) went on to work as a newspaperman, to serve in the Air Force in the; Second World War, to become an assistant to Lyndon B. Johnson, andj to author ten books. |
Although the oil boom was past its peak in early 1928, housing war! still tight in Cross Plains. Thus the Howards, as usual hard up for money, | rented two rooms of their house—the living room and the dining room1 I —to a young couple named Oliver. Opal Oliver was one of Isaac HoW« | ard's patients; Nathan Oliver was an oil-field worker. While the twoj families shared the bathroom, and the Howards ate in the kitchen, we1 do not know what arrangements the Olivers had for preparing meals. , The crowding of this small house must have aggravated the strains in the Howard family. About a year later, the Olivers moved to roomier I quarters; but then for a while the Howards rented the rooms to someone else, about whom nothing more is known. By the middle of 1930, whem Robert began corresponding with Lovecraft and other fellow writers, hei makes no mention of roomers. Therefore, we may assume that by this ! time the Howards had their house to themselves once more.
During the summer of 1928, Robert and Lindsey Tyson took a; vacation trip. They traveled by train to Galveston, the city which Robert and Truett Vinson had visited the previous year. The young men rented;
ii cabin near the. sea and boarded an excursion boat, which took them more than ten miles out into the Gulf of Mexico. This second sight of the sea so excited Robert that he sat on the beach most of the night, composing another poem, probably The Call of the Sea:
White spray is flashing O'er the grey sea White waves are lashing Calling to me, "Follow the sea-ways, "Follow the sea."14
Later he confided to Tyson that, when he died, he wanted his ashes cast into the sea from the bow of a ship.
Before 1928 faded into 1929, Robert Howard wrote another Solomon Kane story, "Skulls in the Stars." It tells how Kane, crossing the moor at night, becomes involved with the murderous ghost of a murdered lunatic. Crazed as in life, the ghost tears to pieces everyone it catches near the site of its demise. This tale, while competent, may be classed with standard Weird Tales fare, in contrast to the outstanding previous Kane story.
He also sold "The Shadow Kingdom," written the year before. This vigorous, fast-moving, colorful novelette of 13,000 words presages Howard's greatest fictional success: the Conan stories. While "The Shadow Kingdom" owes something to the author's readings in occult and Atlan-liMt literature and to the fiction of Lord Dunsany and probably of William Morris, it is largely the product of Howard's own exuberant imagination.
The story takes place in the heyday of Atlantis, which the author assumed to be over 15,000 years ago. The scene is laid, not in Atlantis itself, but on the continent of Thuria, corresponding to Eurasia, whose i name the author borrowed from Edgar Rice Burroughs's moons of Mars. The leading nation of this fictitious continent is the decadent kingdom of Valusia.
Kull, the hero, is an Atlantean who flees his native land, becomes a soldier in the Valusian army, and fights his way to the throne of that kingdom. In creating Kull, Howard had in mind the careers of the
Germanic chieftains—Genseric, Odovacar, Clovis, and the several Theo-dories—who in the fifth century overthrew the West Roman Empire andj carved it up into Dark Age kingdoms.
Of the three Kull stories that sold in Howard's lifetime, he reported that they "wrote themselves, without planning on my part." He also said that he had dreamed them before he put them on paper. All this may be true. But although Howard liked to talk as if he raced through hit stories without advance planning, in many cases he actually planned' them rather carefully, writing out a detailed synopsis before embarking! on each story proper.15 j
The Atlantis of the Kull stories is presented not as a center ofj civilization but as a wild land inhabited by skin-clad savages armed with flint-tipped spears. Kull is one of these primitives, reared in the jungle by tigers, much as Mowgli was by wolves. Despite his rude background, Kull is described as clean-shaven. Perhaps more significantly, we are?
informed several times that Kull has no interest in women. I
1
Howard posits Lewis Spence's theory, which links the Atlanteani f with the Cro-Magnard folk of postglacial Europe, although Kull's army I includes a force of Lemurian archers, straight out of Churchward's Mu, I The story assumes that a race of serpent-men, men with reptilian heads, | once disputed the earth with true men. Defeated but not exterminated, 1 the serpent-men plot to seize Valusia, using their hypnotic power to disguise themselves as ordinary men. This conflict is but one battle in the long war between men and monsters—a concept from the higher wisdom of Madame Blavatsky. Kull's friend, a Pict named Brule, telll the legend of this struggle in terms resembling those which de Montour employed in his speech to Pierre in "Wolfshead."
Later, when Kull ascends the throne, Brule becomes his right-hand man, since the Picts are allies of the Valusians. Howard derived the namt ) of "Brule" from Brude, the appellation given a number of Pictish kinglf in the medieval manuscripts collectively called the Pictish Chronicle. J Other characters in this story are Ka, Ka-nu, Kaanuub, and Tu. One of f the other Kull stories even mentions a Kananu. J
Here appears one of Howard's weaknesses. Because of his linguistic ! naivete, or perhaps because he simply refused to take the time and ( trouble, he tends to give his characters names that are often unpleasing j and confusingly similar. In the Conan stories, for example, three of th| monsters bear the names Thak, Thaug, and Thog. This curious disregard] for the sounds of words reminds us of his similar lapse of imagination in choosing names for his modern characters; hence the plethora of Steves and Mikes, and Costigans, Allisons, and Gordons. It is probably a result of his extreme eye-mindedness. The choice of names in his later prehistoric fantasies are more varied and interesting. For those he adopted or adapted historical names for the inhabitants of his imaginary lands, even though Lovecraft carped at this usage.
Delighted with the acceptance of "The Shadow Kingdom," Howard dashed off eight Kull stories and began but failed to finish three more. Some of these tales are only marginally fantasies; they have an imaginary setting but little or no supernatural element. One of these, "By This Axe I Rule!" tells of a plot against Kull by dissatisfied noblemen. The plotters burst in on Kull in the dark of night; but hastily arming himself, the giant lays them down one by one in pools of their own blood. Although this Kull story was rejected by both Adventure and Argosy, we shall hear of it again.
After the manuscript was returned, the young author bundled it up with all the other Kull stories and shipped the lot to Weird Tales. Wright selected one and sent the others back. Howard had not as yet learned never to submit more than one piece to any publication at one time; for if the harried editor receives more, he is likely to pick the one he likes best and return the rest. This was the discouraging fate of the bundle.
The second Kull story accepted by Weird Tales was "The Mirrors of Tuzun Thune." This story is deemed by some critics one of Howard's best, perhaps because he put more of himself into this tale than into his other prehistoric fantasies. Bored with kingship, Kull is persuaded to visit the House of a Thousand Mirrors of the wizard Tuzun Thune. In one the wizard shows the king visions of the remote past. In another the king sees the future when, after the sinking of Atlantis, the very continents have changed their outlines. So fascinated is King Kull that he neglects his kingdom to spend hours each day before the mirrors, listening to the wizard's philosophy. "Live now, Kull, live now," Tuzun Thune admonishes.
"The dead are dead; the unborn are not. What matters men's forgetfulness of you when you have forgotten yourself in the silent worlds of death?"16
It is regretable that the author of this momentous thought did not relate it to himself and abjure his already-formed plan to die by his own hand. We wonder whether Howard was reflecting, in his writing of that passage, the philosophy of Omar Khayyam, who struck from the calendar "Unborn To-morrow, and dead Yesterday."17 We do know that Robert Howard shared with his generation a fondness for the Rubaiydt and could quote at great length Fitzgerald's elegant translation of it.
When, viewing his reflection in the magic mirror, Kull wonders which is the real Kull and which the image and yearns to go through the mirror to explore the world on the other side, his faithful friend Brule slays the wizard and exposes the plot to get rid of the barbarian ruler. After the rescue, when the king asks what could have made so learned an ascetic become a traitor, Howard, with refreshing realism, has Brule explain: "Gold, power and position. . . . The sooner you learn that men are men whether wizard, king or thrall, the better you will rule, Kull."18
With his questioning and brooding, Kull, like Solomon Kane, has more in common with his creator than have the more extroverted heroes like Conan and Terence Vulmea.
A little later Howard wrote one more Kull story, "Kings of the Night." The central character, who made his first appearance on paper in this tale, is Bran Mak Morn, the Pictish king of imperial Roman times. To resist a Roman invasion of Caledonia, Bran—a descendant of Kull's friend Brule—forms an alliance among Britons, Gaels, Picts, and Norsemen, although in actual fact there were no Norsemen in Britain at that time. To assure victory, a wizard summons King Kull from the past by magical time travel.
Thus did twenty-two-year-old Robert sing of strong-thewed warriors striding like giants on ancient continents. As his pen pal Lovecraft so aptly observed, he put much of himself into all his stories; but this was the self that he dreamed of being as he sat huddled over his typewriter in a very small room whose triple windows faced a dun-colored meadow. Fortunately for Robert Howard, he could dream. He could see the tides of battle sweep across that open field, reddening the grasses. And when night set the purple skies ablaze with stars, he peopled the dark land with stalking panthers and hideous monsters fugitive from Hell.