by Unknown
Lovecraft confided to Howard that the American Revolution had been a terrible mistake; in rebuttal the Texan cited English oppression of his own Irish forebears. Lovecraft advocated an Anglo-American military alliance, while Howard, turned isolationist, wrote: "Let each nation defend its own."15
On a more intimate level, Robert wrote about rattlesnake lore, Negro ghost stories, the sanguinary career of "Billy the Kid," and the feuds of the old Wild West. He told of his hopes—unfulfilled save for a single article—of writing a serious history of his region or of the frontier, or the Southwest, or Texas, or at least of Callahan County. He wrote of Scottish, Southern, and Southwestern folk songs.
Lovecraft replied with disquisitions on the history, scenery, and architecture of his beloved New England. The Northerner asked whether his young friend had taken the name of the Atlantean sorcerer in "Skull-Face" from Lovecraft's Cthulhu mythos. Howard said no; the name "Kathulos" was merely a coincidence.16
Late in 1930 Howard began to correspond with another member of the Weird Tales circle, a blond, burly youth of German extraction who lived in Sauk City, Wisconsin. August William Derleth (1909-1971) became a successful writer in a wide range of genres: fantasy, detective stories, and realistic regional fiction, and, in the course of twenty-nine years, published over 130 stories in that magazine. At Lovecraft's urging, Derleth, along with Robert Howard, Clark Ashton Smith, and other Weird Tales writers, traded imaginary deities, fictitious books of sinister lore, and other props for the fantastic tales they wrote. After Lovecraft's death, Derleth devoted much of his life to publishing Lovecraft's stories. Arkham House, the small publishing firm that he founded, still exists.
Robert Howard's letters to Derleth were shorter, more factual, and less argumentative than those to Lovecraft; for the down-to-earth Derleth was not given to high-flown, fine-spun philosophical arguments. But one notable letter to Derleth gives a long dissertation on the Indians of Texas, telling the story of Cynthia Ann Parker and her son Quanah Parker, the last great war chief of the Comanches.
As the months passed, Howard began corresponding with other members of Lovecraft's circle. One was Wilfred Blanch Talman, who worked for the Texas Company and who sold a few stories to Weird Tales. Through Talman, Howard sold a short article, "The Ghost of Camp Colorado," to the company's house organ, the Texaco Star. Howard hoped that this little article about an abandoned U.S. Army post might become the first of a series on Texan lore.
This was not to be. In June 1931 he sent the magazine a second article, "Kelly and the Conjure-Man," about a Negro who, in the mid-nineteenth century, practiced folk medicine and magic in Arkansas and who vanished under mysterious circumstances. The Star rejected the article, whose content was slight, and Howard is not known to have tried again. Perhaps he found reality so confining that he let himself be easily discouraged from writing about it.
Howard's attempts to engage other writers in correspondence proved less successful. Clark Ashton Smith (1893-1961) of Auburn, California, was perhaps the most brilliant member of the circle, being both an eminent West Coast poet and a writer of fantasy and science fiction. His letters, however, tended to be short and dryly factual, inviting only brief replies.
More serious problems than a dearth of intellectual fellowship beset the young Texan. When Herbert Hoover replaced Calvin Coolidge as president, it looked to many as if the United States government had solved the problems inherent in capitalism and ensured for all Americans a life of perpetual affluence. But in the fall of 1929, the stock market began to sag; and on October 29th, it crashed. Millions of investors who had bought stocks on small margins were wiped out. Several bankers and stockbrokers killed themselves by jumping from skyscraper windows. Through the following months unemployment spread like a plague.
The impact of the Great Depression on Texas varied. The state was still largely rural; and the farm population, long inured to hard times, was comparatively self-sufficient. Although the West Texas oil boom had dwindled, in October of 1930 a new boom struck East Texas, starting in Rusk County near the Louisiana border.
The new governor of Texas, a rotund oil millionaire named Ross Sterling, who had replaced "Ma" Ferguson in the statehouse, was not one wantonly to interfere with business enterprise. But the glut of petroleum spewing forth from the new fields so depressed the price of oil that he was impelled to ration production. This action caused litigation and scandals over bootleg oil and may have contributed to his defeat two years later.
Counterbalancing the hectic prosperity generated by the oil boom was the severe drouth that set in during 1930. Once more the cashless farmers of Callahan County paid Dr. Howard's bills with promises or farm produce.
Despite the Depression and the drouth, Robert Howard's fortunes improved. He ended 1930 with twelve stories and four poems published and $1,303.50 in pocket, a respectable earning in those days for a young man without dependents. The following year seventeen stories, an article, and a poem brought him $1,531.26. Thenceforth Howard was one of the best-paid men in town. With typical Texas exaggeration, it was said that one year he was the only man in Cross Plains with income enough to pay an income tax.
Howard never got rich, but now he had enough money to do some of the things he wanted to do—to buy books and weapons, to travel, and to help the family when occasion demanded. The occasion demanded more and more; for Hester Howard's health worsened, and Robert was called upon to aid with her medical bills.
He had no sooner built up a savings account than he received another heavy financial blow. In June 1931 the Farmers National Bank of Cross Plains failed, and his modest savings were wiped out. He then began to put his savings into the other town bank, the First State, only to have that institution go under in September. All over the nation, financial institutions toppled like dominoes. So widespread was the epidemic of bank failures that Franklin D. Roosevelt, right after his inauguration of March 4, 1933, ordered a general bank holiday for four days. Thereafter Howard kept his spare money in a postal savings account, which was backed by the U.S. Treasury.
Drouth and Depression notwithstanding, Robert and members of his family enjoyed a number of outings and short trips. In telling his pen pals about these travels, Howard usually omits such details as with whom he traveled and what transportation was used; but we do know that on many trips the doctor, who alone had a car at this time, drove the others and that Mrs. Howard accompanied her son on nearly every trip he took ifter he finally became a car owner.
In 1930 Robert went to the cattle country of Northwestern Texas, the Llano Estacado, probably in connection with Dr. Howard's setting Up a practice in Spur. In February of 1931, he was again in San Antonio, visiting the Alamo but reporting that the Latinized city was "rather too cosmopolitan for my tastes." He also met a Communist Slav with "mutual distrust and lack of understanding; tinged with resentment on my part and a hint of contempt on his."17 The resentment stemmed from the young Slav's poise, versatility, and perfect manners—qualities Howard realized were in short supply in his own personality.
In May, Howard set out to go to Fort Worth, Waco, and Temple, where in all probability Mrs. Howard went to resume her treatments. Later in that summer he again visited Fort Worth, this time returning by way of Peaster, his birthplace, and Dark Valley, the scene of his early childhood. In the autumn he made a longer trip, going southwest to San Angelo and Sonora; then southeast to San Antonio and Victoria, a dozen miles from the Gulf coast; and finally home via Austin and Brownwood. Since it would have been impossible in that day to ride a train to all those places in the course of a one week's journey, and since some of the towns even lacked rail connections, it is probable that this, too, was a family outing by car. We suspect that Dr. Howard was trying to make up for his previous neglect of his ill wife.
During this comparatively peaceful period, Robert Howard's days were largely spent at home, in the small room that served as his study-bedroom. He must have been distressed to learn that Weird Tales, his most steady
market, was forced to go bimonthly and give up running serials. But, like every dedicated writer, he not only continued writing heroic fantasy but also branched out into other fields. By early 1932, when the magazine recovered enough to go back to a monthly schedule, Howard had sold a fight story, "The Apparition in the Prize Ring," and experimented with a short fantasy about a man who had a vision of his own future murder. Both were written under the pseudonym "Taverel," another of Howard's favorite names.
At this time Howard had another unsuccessful try at his incomplete sequel to Skull-Face, to which he gave the title Taverel Manor. He wrote three more Solomon Kane stories: "The Hills of the Dead," "The Moon of Skulls," and "The Footfalls Within." These stories feature typical Howard elements: giant serpents, lost cities, ferocious black warriors, assorted fiends, and noble, Tarzan-like heroes. In "The Moon of Skulls" however, Howard introduces a new note, a scene in which one woman flogs another—but offstage. This sadistic act reappears boldly onstage in several later stories.
"The Footfalls Within" appeared in the September 1931 Weird Tales with an interior illustration grotesque enough to dishearten any writer. The artist, gnomish C. C. Senf, who painted most of the magazine's covers from 1927 to 1932, merely glanced at the text and learned that it involved an Englishman, Arabs, and an oasis. Then he carelessly portrayed Solomon, the seventeenth-century Puritan, in the cork sun helmet, peg-topped riding breeches, and spiral puttees of the year 1900. To complete the monstrosity, Solomon is still wielding his seventeenth-century sword.
Howard sold only one more Kane story, "Wings in the Night," which appeared in Weird Tales for July 1932. This tale, involving aerial demons, is one of the best of the series.
Other heroes shared Howard's small writing room during the early 1930s. The comic boxing hero Sailor Steve Costigan, as already noted, inspired thirteen successful stories in Fight Stories. In a similar series of boxing tales, written for Sport Story Magazine, the mighty-thewed, dim-witted hero is called Kid Allison. This fighting man proved less popular, for only three of the ten tales about him sold during Howard's lifetime.
The Kid's name probably derives from one of the Southwest's more notorious thugs of the post-Civil War period. A man whose wanton killings have been estimated between fifteen and twenty-six, the real Clay Allison came to an ironic end. Reeling out of a saloon, he jumped aboard a wagon, lashed the horses, fell off, and was run over.
Although Howard had explored the Celtic theme in earlier years, in 1931 his use of Irish elements ballooned. A major stimulus for this interest was the young Texan's discovery of a book by P. W. Joyce, A Short History of Celtic Ireland. Dr. Joyce, while himself a patriotic son of Ireland, exposed the turbulent factiousness, implacable vindictiveness, and jealous egotism that kept the Irish kinglets at each other's throats while the invading Vikings and later Anglo-Normans overran the land. Howard ardently identified himself with these Irishmen, who treasured their enmities and hatreds as other men treasure their precious jewels.
A number of Howard heroes spring from Joyce's pages. Am-ra, who appears in the Kull story "Exile of Atlantis," comes from antra, an Irish word meaning "elegy." Cormac Mac Art was a legendary third-century High King. Conn the serf, in the unsold tale "The Grey God Passes," derives from Conn Cedcathach, or Conn of the Hundred Battles, another legendary king of the second century. There were also two historical characters named Turlogh O'Brien: the first a grandson of Brian Boru, who died at fifteen in the battle of Clontarf in 1014; the second a would-be High King in the late eleventh century.
In 1931 Howard launched a series of Dark Age fantasies about an eleventh-century Irishman, Turlogh O'Brien, a man who was outlawed by his clan. It is notable that several of Howard's heroes (whatever the psychological explanation) are men on the dodge from their own clans, tribes, or nations, usually for having killed outside the law. Perhaps they expressed some of the pent-up violence that seethed within the mind of their creator.
Turlogh represents a theme, hinted at in some of the earlier stories, that became increasingly prominent in Howard's later works: the man obsessed by hatred. Into such characters Howard could pour his own feelings toward his "enemies." This roiling emotion gives the stories a peculiar intensity, but the hate-ridden characters are not easy for normal readers to identify with.
Howard sold two Turlogh stories to Weird Tales but failed to finish two others of the series. Turlogh, whom fate sends on a mission to rescue a princess from invading Vikings, is a tall, black-haired man, "combining the strength of a bull with the lithe quickness of a panther. . . . From under heavy black brows gleamed eyes of hot volcanic blue."18
Readers of Howard stories will meet many heroes of this kind. In fact, this description of Turlogh fits nearly all of Howard's heroes. Although we never learn what shade of blue might properly be called "volcanic," the description fits perfectly the young Isaac Howard, whose great height, black mane, piercing blue eyes, and air of authority have often been remarked upon by those who remember him in his youth. To a small child this huge man, whose eyes, alight with anger, would burn with inner fire, could readily become both the role model of the hero and the man his son would have liked to be.
The Turlogh tales, like so many of Robert Howard's heroic fantasies, are replete with cities of barbaric splendor, strange beasts, evil
serpents, swords, and supermen
priests, human sacrifice, ape-men, and demons. The second story, "The Gods of Bal-Sagoth," is a particularly fine example of Howard's headlong action, theme of universal destruction, and royal purple prose. His poetry disguised as prose soars in this descriptive passage: "Surely black wings beating from moonless gulfs had hovered over its birth, and the grisly souls of nameless demons had gone into its being."19
Along with the Turlogh stories, Howard set about developing another series. The rise of the new magazine Oriental Stories gave him the opportunity to do something he had long dreamed about: to write historical adventure fiction. He placed his stories in the Near East in the early thirteenth century. For his hero he chose Cormac Fitzgeoffrey. Cormac, half Irish and half Norman, is an exile from his native Ireland and a former comrade-in-arms of Richard the Lion-Hearted on the Third Crusade. He is, as Howard told his friend Harold Preece, "The most somber character I have yet attempted."20
Like the other heroes, Cormac is a mighty man and a formidable fighting machine, one "to whom the ways of violence and bloodshed were as natural as the ways of peace are to the average man. . . ."21
So used is he to violence that when, in the first story, "Hawks of Outremer," he falls into the hands of Saladin and the Kurdish sultan lets him go, Cormac is amazed. The second Cormac tale, "The Blood of Belshazzar," concerns a great red gem that "pulsed like a living thing."22 A third tale of the series was begun but never finished. Such was the fate of many series characters, created and abandoned by Howard when they lost their appeal for him.
Another series of historical stories proved abortive. These were four novelettes about one Cormac Mac Art, an Irish outlaw supposed to have lived in the time of King Arthur, who, according to legend, flourished around 500 a.d. For this series Howard used as background material the works of Arthur D. Howden Smith, who wrote for Adventure Magazine in the 1920s.
Cormac, a failed pirate, adventures with a Danish Viking and his band of reavers—a notable anachronism, since the Scandinavians did not take to seafaring until several centuries after 500 a.d. and Norse raids on Scotland and Ireland began in the 790s.
Undoubtedly Howard hoped to sell the series to Adventure. This Was his unfulfilled dream, because historical adventure stories were in vogue in the 1930s, while fantasies of all kinds remained little known and largely unappreciated. Only in 1974 was the series published under the title of the lead story, Tigers of the Sea.
As we have remarked before, Howard was least successful when he adopted settings from other contemporary writers or tried to write in their style. He was at his best when he created his own fantasy world and let his own
imagination lead him whither it beckoned. It was his misfortune that the type of writing at which he excelled became popular almost fifty years after his death, a fate accorded to artists in many different fields.
The first of Howard's Cthulhoid stories, published in the April—May 1931 Weird Tales, amply illustrates this point. At Lovecraft's urging, Howard, along with other writers of the Lovecraft circle, made liberal use of Cthulhoid elements in some of their fiction. "The Children of the Night" is perhaps the least well-conceived of all the stories Howard sold in his lifetime. In imitation of Lovecraft's style, Howard ends the tale when his hero, obsessed with hatred for a pre-Pictish aborigine who seems part Mongoloid and part reptile, plans to slay the foul being because
... he pollutes the clean air and leaves the slime of the snake on the green
earth. The sound of his lisping, hissing voice fills me with crawling horror
and the sight of his slanted eyes inspires me with madness.23
And yet, another of Howard's Lovecraft imitations, "The Black Stone," is an effective story, which has been reprinted many times. In it appears a theme often repeated in Robert Howard's poetry. After witnessing a night of Mongoloid folk celebrating a primitive Sabbat, replete with wild yells and dances, flogging, human sacrifice, and the appearance of otherworldly beasts, the narrator wonders "What nameless shapes may even now lurk in the dark places of the world?"24.
During his period of preparation for the coming years of full maturity as a writer, Robert Howard wrote several stories that do not fall into any particular group or series. "The Fearsome Touch of Death" is a non-supernatural horror story—in contradistinction to his Lovecraft imitations—even though Weird Tales published it. In it a man, who volunteered to sit the night with the corpse of a friend, feels what he believes to be the hand of the dead man reaching for him and dies of heart failure.