by Unknown
While the dates of Isaac's moves are uncertain, it appears that his sojourn in Spur lasted at least half a year. He must have come back often to Cross Plains to visit his family, for the townsfolk of Cross Plains seem to have been unaware of his absences. In mid-1929 he probably returned home to stay for at least half a year, because of Robert Howard's absence during this time. We do not know whether the doctor returned to Spur during the first half of 1930; in any event he transferred his church membership back to Cross Plains on August 28, 1930.33
The doctor's departure was not the only change that disturbed the little house. In mid-1929 Robert Howard left home in his turn. Gather-tng up his typewriter, he moved to Brownwood and spent the latter half of the year in a cheap hotel and then in a room at Mrs. Keeler's boardinghouse at 816 Melwood Avenue. There he stayed until early
1930.
The occasion for this move was probably the impending death of the dog, Patches. The records of this event are contradictory. In telling of it in a letter to E. Hoffmann Price, Dr. Howard implied that the dog died in 1927, and that at the time of the death Robert stayed in Brown-Wood for a few days only.
On the other hand, Robert's sojourn in Brownwood through the Utter half of 1929 is proved by the address he gives in The Junto, from the issue of August 1929 to that of February 1930. The doctor's aging memory was far from infallible about details like dates when he wrote of them a decade or more later.
Since no other explanation of Robert's remove to Brownwood is known, we agree with Glenn Lord, who consulted with Tevis Clyde Smith •bout the matter, that events probably unfolded as follows: Dr. Howard returned from Spur for a long stay at home in the summer of 1929. Soon thereafter Robert moved to Brownwood. (He would not have gone before his father returned home, since the men would not have left Hester alone In the house.) Robert remained in Brownwood until the dog died, probably about January 1930, and returned to Cross Plains in February.34
The aging Patches, now over twelve years old, was more than a pet to Robert. He furnished the uncritical, warm-hearted friendship that Howard generally found wanting in human beings. The thin-skinned young man's eccentricities had always drawn criticism from kith and kin ind disparaging remarks from townsfolk, who wondered why he did not gtt a decent job instead of fooling around with silly stories, which Appeared in magazines with lurid covers. Since Robert would not or OOuld not change his ways, the disapproval continued. He knew his own Intolerance of even the most well-meant correction, writing, "... one of the main reasons I'll never amount to a damn, is I'm too damned tonderskinned. . . ."35
To such a spiritual outcast, the dog's devotion was so precious that Ml master could not bear to see him die. When the dog declined, Robert picked a suitcase and told his mother: "Mama, I'm going." Although he telephoned home every morning, he did not return home until the dog Was dead and buried. Robert's father later reminisced:
He always spoke thus: "Mama, how are you?" When his mother would reply, he would say: "How is Patch?" After the fourth day when his mother told him the dog was going, he never inquired any more. ... I had the dog buried in a deep grave in the back lot, then had the lot plowed deeply all over to destroy every trace of the grave, so sensitive was he to the loss of the dog. And only once did he ever allude to the death of hi* dog again. He said to his mother one day: "Mother, did you bury Patch under the mesquite tree in the corner of the lot on the east side?" She said yes, and the matter was never mentioned by any of us again.36
As usual, the Howard family coped with unpleasant facts by pretending they did not exist. Robert's despondency over the death of Patches was so marked that for a time the older Howards feared he might kill himself. Some of his friends considered it incomprehensible that e grown man should "run away and hide" from the death of a pet, no matter how beloved.
Although the pages of his stories drip with gore, in the real world Robert was usually hypersensitive to suffering in others, whether human or animal. On the one hand, this made him sympathetic and compassionate to the weak or ill. On the other, this sensitivity triggered selfish revulsion at the idea of a medical career and forced the abandonment of his faithful, dying dog. Except in the case of his mother, while he might sympathize intensely with the sufferer, the need to protect his own raw feelings from the sight of pain was so imperative that it overrode any wish to comfort the afflicted.
Howard was equally solicitous of his own normally robust health —"overly solicitous," a friend called it, to the point of hypochondria.37 By protecting him from the harsh realities of life, his parents aggravated these tendencies. Robert Howard was like an infant raised in a sterilized, germ-free environment, who, when exposed to this unsterile world, promptly dies of some minor disease to which he never developed immunizing antibodies. And like that infant, Howard's exposure to reality wan fatal to him.
Yet, this very sloughing off of reality is the essence of a poet. And Robert Howard was a poet. The poet lives, untrammeled by reality, strolling through a world of rainbow-tinted dreams and fancies or—an with Howard—shouldering his way to despair among horrors beyond the ken of ordinary mortals.
To understand this singer in the shadows, we must take a long, thoughtful look at the poems he left behind him.
Robert Howard's first published poem, The Sea, appeared in the weekly newspaper of his hometown in 1923, when he was seventeen. By the time that he had turned twenty-two, he had written the bulk of his poetry. True, he continued to express himself in rhyme upon occasion and, from time to time, to polish poems lying unsold in his files. But—like most of the world's poets—thoughts and feelings poured forth more readily in his early writing days.
Because of Glenn Lord's enterprise in collecting and arranging them for publication, many of the more than four hundred known poems have now appeared in limited hardcover editions under the titles Always Comes Evening (1957), Singers in the Shadows (1970), and Echoes from an Iron Harp (1972). The latter two titles were selected by Howard himself for collections that he never saw in print.
Of the thirty-odd poems published during Howard's lifetime, most were accepted by Weird Tales. A few appeared in such minor publications as The Fantasy Fan and The Daniel Baker Collegian, of which Tevis Clyde Smith was editor while a student at Daniel Baker in Brownwood. Howard compiled a manuscript of his poetry under the title Singers in the Shadows and sent it to Albert & Charles Boni, Inc. of New York; but in April 1928 they returned it, averring that they were not publishing poetry. A year later the little poetry journal American Poet published two poems under the pseudonym of Patrick Howard; one other poem, Skulls and Dust, won a three-dollar prize as the best poem in the issue of The Ring, a magazine devoted to prizefight lore. What was this poetry like?
Howard's verse, like his prose, is vigorous, colorful, strongly rhythmical, and technically adroit. Although, as he said, he "was born with the knack of making little words rattle together," he was unduly modest about his abilities: "I know nothing about the mechanics of poetry—I couldn't tell you whether a verse was anapestic or trochaic to save my neck. I write the stuff by ear, so to speak, and my musical ear is full of flaws."38
Actually Howard had a better command of poetic techniques than he admitted. He knew perfectly well what a ballad was, and a sonnet. He was familiar with feet and meter, internal rhymes, and a wide variety of verse and stanza forms. We should be less than honest if we said that Howard never took liberties with his stressed and unstressed syllables. But such flaws are minor in view of the passion, vitality, and splendid imagery in the works.
Howard's models were the major Anglo-American poets of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, men such as Benet, Dunsany, Harte, Kipling, Masefield, Noyes, Service, Swinburne, Tennyson, Vie-reck, and Wilde, although with a man of Howard's eclectic tastes and omnivorous reading habits, the influence of many other poets can be seen in his verses. At full maturity, Howard's serious work far outranks the rather pedestrian rhymes of Dunsany and Tolkien or Lovecraft's leaden Georgian
couplets.
Robert Howard made superb use of personification. This endowment of inanimate objects with the attributes of animals and people comes naturally to children and primitives and adds enormously to the vitality and richness of the language. One of Howard's favorite verse forms was the iambic heptameter triolet, a three-line stanza favored by Kipling. This verse form and his effective personification both appear in these lines from Howard's The Ghost Kings:
The ghost kings are marching; the midnight knows their tread,
From the distant, stealthy planets of the dim, unstable dead;
There are whisperings on the night-winds and the shuddering stars have fled.39
Considering the outstanding quality of the lines already familiar to readers of this biography, why was so much of Howard's poetry ignored during his lifetime? One of the editors who returned his submissions stated that the poems were too bitter and rebellious. Bitter and rebellious some of them certainly were; but this per se would not condemn a poet's work. The problem lay in part with the change in fashion that was taking place at the time that the skald of the post oaks was tuning his lyre. Fixed-form verse, the mode of the Romantics of the nineteenth century, was giving way in the early twentieth century to a new concept of poetry. The carefully crafted meter, rhyme, and stanza were becoming things of the past. Save for the work of a few well-established poets like Edna St. Vincent Millay and Robert Frost, "free verse," the unschooled, untamed expression of confused emotions, was becoming the only acceptable mode of expression.
At the time we are writing, this condition still obtains. If public taste ever veers back to fixed-form verse, the true worth of Howard's poetry may be reassayed. In the interim, those of us who admire the sheer poetic power of the man may look at his poems with a less prejudicial eye and point out the features that make them memorable.
While Howard was not unaware of the revolution then beginning in English and American poetry under the leadership of Ezra Pound and T. S. Eliot, he remained almost untouched by it. He favored the well-established forms like the ballad and the sonnet. He relied on an exquisite choice of simple words, unlike the turgid language of his contemporaries. And he obtained his sonorous effects by carefully crafted rhyme and meter, which from earliest times have made poetry easy to remember.
Although a few of Howard's longer poems are narrative, telling a story—sometimes a comic story—the vast majority of his works are lyric poems, setting forth the writer's feelings and philosophies. There is no archness in him; his unswerving honesty shines through every line, revealing the essence of the man himself. Since honest poems are a window on the poet's soul, consideration of the major themes of the poems show us the main concerns of the lonely young man in Cross Plains.
Howard's love of nature is clearly revealed in both his prose and poetry. From tiny field flowers to the broad expanse of a Texas sunset or a star-stitched velvet sky, the colors, textures, smells, and changing vistas of the land were precious to him and carefully recorded. One of Howard's very few poems in free verse was Adventure. It is not only a superior example of this form of art, but also valuable in illustrating his Wordsworth-like view of nature in terms of Greek myth, his rich fantasy life, and his sublimation of sex into love of adventure during his post-adolescent years.
Adventure, I have followed your beck
Through all the ages. I have sought no other lover.
I have followed o'er land and sea, dim vale and mystic moon mountains.
I have heard Pan's pipes amid moon-dappled woodlands and have seen the satyrs frolicking with nymphs upon
The fragrant sward, while the night-breezes murmured among the leaves. ...
And I've seen your nameless mountains rise from the sea of tangled
forest, and stand like sightless sombre gods Against the twilight. Adventure, I desire no other lover. . . .40
Even more emotionally exciting to him was the sea, and this is odd in view of the fact that he saw it but a few times in the entire course of his life. Lovingly he describes its breaking waves, its quiet surge, its storm-tossed, angry waters, and the cockleshells of ships in which puny man endeavors to conquer his ancient, timeless enemy, the raging main. Ships held an enormous attraction for him and for his heroes Kull, and Kane, and Conan. Shades of Masefield's verse can be found in the following noble lines:
Sailing-ships are anchored about that ancient isle, Ships that sailed the oceans in the dim dawn days, Coracles from Britain, triremes from the Nile. Anchored round the harbors, anchored mile on mile, Ships and ships and shades of ships fading in the haze. ...
High ships, proud ships, towering at their poops, Galleons flaunting their pinnacles of pride, Schooners and merchantmen, and long, lean sloops, Kings' ships riding with galleys on the tide.41
And in a touching passage from "The Song of Belit," Conan of Cim-meria's true love, Belit the pirate maid, is consigned to the gentle bosom of the deep:
Now we are done with roaming, evermore;
No more the oars, the windy harp's refrain; Nor crimson pennon frights the dusky shore;
Blue girdle of the world, receive again Her whom thou gavest me.42
With striking frequency, the poems speak of Howard's all-consuming hatred and violence, as do his letters and the recollections of those who knew him—to say nothing of his stories. His Hymn of Hate, quoted at the head of Chapter VIII, overflows with the venom he feels for man and the works of man. We do not know the reason and can scarcely understand this always-present hatred for his fellow human beings; it speaks to his childhood rejection by infant playmates, to the sidelong stares of townsfolk who regarded him as something of a freak, and possibly to the seemingly negligent attitude of a father who was always uut among his patients and who, himself, suffered perennial hurt from (He rejection of his wife. So possessed by hate was the man who penned the following lines that the wonder is it never spilled over into acts of violence:
There burns in me no honeyed drop of love, Nor soft compassion for my brother man: I would indeed humanity possessed A single throat a keen-edged knife could span.43
Basic to Howard's nature and frequently expressed in his poetry is a sense of the sweetness of death, death that rejects no one, death that is a gateway to a happier tomorrow. Because of his deep devotion to his 111 mother, he early determined never to leave her; and he set his days' number on the life span of the one person on whose affection and companionship he could fully count. If anyone doubts that Howard's decision, made early in his life, was irrevocable, he has only to read the poetry written when Howard was in his late teens or early twenties. The famous lines in The Tempter state his feeling simply and unequivocally:
I was weary of tide breasting, Weary of the world's behesting, And I lusted for the resting As a lover for his bride.44
In another poem, The Bride of Cuchulain, Howard beseeches some woman (his mother?) to leave the dreary world with its bent and ancient moon and slip away with him beneath the breaking waves:
There where the spent spray lashes white sands forevermore, I will weave the pale sea flowers To twine on your pallid brow
That you may forget lost hours and Time be only Now.
Then all Earth's joys and sorrows Shall pass like ocean spray
Till all the sad tomorrows fade in one dim Today.45
Closely allied with Howard's celebration of death is his sincere belief that life is an obscene joke played by fate; that human beings are bestial, lust-ridden, and degenerate; and that the perceptive man can see—just beyond the ken of ordinary folk—the monsters, fetid corpses, and Devil-nurtured fiends that people the earth:
Life was a cesspool of obscenity— He saw through eyes accursed with unveiled sight— Where Lust ran rampant through a screaming Night And black-faced swine roared from the Devil's styes; Where grinning corpses, fiend-inhabited, Walked through the world with taloned hands outspread; Where beast and monster swaggered side by side, And unseen demons strummed a maddening tune; And naked witches, young and bra
zen-eyed, Flaunted their buttocks to a lustful moon.46
Robert Howard was a man who talked with demons in hells beneath hells, reeled under the assault of a soul-sucking monster with gryphon feet, saw crawling, slimy serpent-shapes at midnight, and followed the paths of ghosts. So vivid and unrelentingly persistent were these creatures of the dark, and so varied their myriad hideous forms, that we have no need to wonder why Robert, boy and man, was given to nightmares, or why as a student alone on the upper floor of a rooming house he shivered in terror when he heard a door creak. It is even less surprising that, feeling himself monster-haunted and unloved, life held no charm, gold turned to rust, and even success lacked the power to lure him back from the welcoming arms of death.
And yet, in Recompense, one of his most beautiful poems, Howard, ever fiercely prideful, exults in visions that transcend the horrors writhing like maggots in his skull. Undoubtedly those soul-shaking ghouls and black fiends among whom he lived were the price the artist had to pay to gain the intensity of feeling and that secret pool of magic, mysticism, and myth whence he dredged up wizards, warriors, serpents, and scoundrels to disport themselves with ceaseless energy throughout the Hyborian World. From this same intensity of feeling sprang the poetic imagery and arresting concepts, which so often enthrall us and which are so bountifully scattered throughout the following lines:
And I have felt the sudden blow of a nameless wind's cold breath, And watched the grisly pilgrims go that walk the roads of Death, And I have seen black valleys gape, abysses in the gloom, And I have fought the deathless Ape that guards the Doors of Doom.
I have not seen the face of Pan, nor mocked the dryad's haste, But I have trailed a dark-eyed Man across a windy waste. I have not died as men may die, nor sinned as men have sinned, But I have reached a misty sky upon a granite wind.47
There is some fun and laughter in Robert Howard's rhymes. Readers Stay enjoy the lighthearted ballad called The Kissing of Sal Snooboo, fklhioned as a parody of a poem by Robert W. Service or the narrative Vtrse titled Fables for Little Folks, which tells of a massive boxer knocked Hit by a smaller man. Howard's humorous verse is, in marked contrast to lis serious lines, uniformly undistinguished. He himself said: "Poetiz-Ing's work and travail, rhyming's pleasure and holiday. I never devoted lifer thirty minutes to any rhyme in my life."48 Yet, while he classed all ||a poems as mere rhymes, they vary from superb poetry to unexceptional terse.