Dark Valley Destiny

by Unknown

  Where he had no friends to put him up, Lovecraft stayed at YMCAs. He saved laundry bills by washing his own shirts and underwear in the washbasin, and cut his own hair with a gadget that enabled him to trim it in back with the help of two mirrors. By buying cheap groceries, like bread and canned beans, and eating in his room, he survived on a ten-cent breakfast and a fifteen-cent dinner. He figured on $1.75 a week for food and a dollar a night for lodging.

  In May 1932 Lovecraft set out on a journey to the South. After visiting friends in New York, he went on to Washington, Knoxville, Memphis, Natchez, and New Orleans. From New Orleans he wrote "Two-Gun Bob," informing him of the journey.

  Robert was aghast. Thrice he had invited Lovecraft to visit, promising tours of the historical sites of Texas. Now here was Lovecraft, a not impossible distance away; and he, Bob Howard, could not even afford the bus fare to go to see him!

  For some time Howard had been toying with the idea of buying •n automobile and learning to drive when he had accumulated enough ready cash. He daydreamed of driving his Rhode Island friend on a grand tour of his beloved state. But the previous year's bank failures had wiped out his savings, and the months during which he was unable to write salable copy had emptied his pipelines to the publishers. To make matters worse, even they were battening down the hatches to Weather the Depression.

  Fiction House, a regular buyer of his Sailor Steve Costigan yarns for Action Stories and Fight Stories, had suspended its entire line of pulps, leaving only Farnsworth Wright's Weird Tales and Oriental Stories as dependable outlets. Although the Conan tales showed promise, none had as yet been published and paid for.

  Not expecting Lovecraft to appear just then, Robert had spent what money he could scrape together on his trip to San Antonio and the Border. He had not even been able to accept an invitation from Kirk Mashburn in Houston to spend a weekend there. Howard had written to Mashburn, who was a minor contributor of fiction and verse to Weird Tales and a writer of nonfantastic pulp stories, to praise his writing. Mashburn then invited Howard and another Weird Tales writer, E. Hoffmann Price, to come to Houston. But Howard, out of funds, had to decline.

  Price, then in his early thirties, was a man of parts: soldier, writer, automobile mechanic, photographer, and amateur Orientalist. He was trying to keep afloat during the Depression by writing pulp fiction in New Orleans. In desperation, Howard sent Price a telegram, telling him where to find Lovecraft.

  Never having met or corresponded with Price, the shy Lovecraft "thought I wouldn't butt in and introduce myself";2 but the extroverted Price had no such inhibitions. He went around to the third-class hotel where the traveler was staying and carried him off to his own apartment. There the two men talked and ate and talked the clock around.

  Since Lovecraft's slender funds could not be stretched to cover a visit to Texas, he returned to Providence at the beginning of July. There he found his aunt in a terminal coma and a letter from Howard, bitterly lamenting his inability to go to New Orleans:

  It is with the utmost humiliation that I begin this letter. It had long been my intention, since you first mentioned, a year ago, your intention of visiting New Orleans,... to meet you and show you my native country. I intended buying an automobile. .. . But. . . the failure of certain banks, the crumpling of fiction markets, and other conditions reduced me suddenly to that penniless condition out of which I had begun slowly and painfully to climb.3

  The pen pals never did meet, although for the rest of Howard's life they kept up a voluminous, usually cordial, sometimes acrimonious, and always lively correspondence. Price was the only person to meet both of them in the flesh, and one of the few remaining to report on these meetings.

  Ever since, admirers of Howard and Lovecraft have thought it a pity that these two exceptional men failed to shake each other's hands. Well, perhaps. The meeting might have generated wide-ranging discussions that later letters would have preserved for posterity. But we cannot be certain.

  Lovecraft, always under gentlemanly self-control, could be pleasant to almost anyone; but the moody and passionate Howard, ever suspicious and hypersensitive to slights, was less predictable. He might have taken to the slim, ascetic sage of Providence; but then again he might not have. In the latter case Lovecraft might have fared no better than the uncongenial poet from the East, and the correspondence between them might have dried up like an arroyo in summertime.

  During the summer and fall of 1932, Robert Howard received several substantial checks—many over one hundred dollars—for novelettes that he had sold in the first half of the year. Hence, as the long Texan summer waned, he once again found himself in funds and, being in a position to gratify a long-standing desire, persuaded his father to drive him and his friend Lindsey Tyson to Arlington, a town between Dallas and Fort Worth, to an automobile agency.

  There Bob chose a used 1931 Chevrolet, a dark-green two-door sedan. The salesman was thunderstruck when the young man, instead of asking for the usual time payment, pulled out a roll of bills, peeled off $350.00, and handed over the full sales price. On the way back to Cross Plains, Tyson showed his friend how to drive. The doctor, surpris-

  Ingly, had never done so—perhaps, according to one friend, because Robert had never shown interest in the art. He had no mechanical Aptitude; according to another friend: "Bob knew very little about math ind nothing about anything to do with machinery. He never could Understand the workings of a combustion engine."

  Asked what sort of driver Howard became, several people could Ncall nothing noteworthy about his driving one way or the other. But One friend, who made a long trip with Bob in 1935, stated that Howard WAS "a terrible driver."4 If one remembers that driving conditions were not exacting in Depression-ridden Texas, with its long, straight, level roads and its extremely light traffic, and that Texas in those days did not even require a driver's license, it is easy to see how Howard ran his car, despite poor driving skills, without causing serious damage.

  His only accident occurred a few days after Christmas in 1933. Bob had driven Lindsey Tyson, David Lee, and Dave Lee's cousin Bill Calhoun to Brownwood to watch some prizefights. Returning on the night Of December 29th, in heavy fog and rain, he ran head-on into a steel flagpole set in concrete in the middle of the street in the town of Rising Star.

  Fortunately the car was moving slowly. As it was, Bob bent the Iteering wheel into a pretzel and received a gash on the side of his jaw And cuts on his hands. One of his passengers had his scalp laid open; another suffered a badly wrenched leg. Howard telephoned his father, who fetched him home and sewed him up, while a passerby took the Others to a local hospital.

  Rising Star paid part of the cost of repairing Howard's car. After another motorist also ran into the flagpole, the town fathers had the obstacle removed. By March 16th, Robert was able to drive to Brown-Wood to see other prizefights and to go on to San Angelo for a beer bust.5

  One of Robert's first expeditions after getting his car was to drive his mother to Brownwood for medical tests at the hospital. While Mrs. Howard was so occupied, Clyde Smith took Bob to meet a college student whom he had been dating. The girl was a pretty, slender brunette of medium height, named Novalyne Price. They found her sitting on the porch of her grandmother's house, studying for a physics examination at Daniel Baker College, the school she attended.

  A lively, argumentative girl, Miss Price had grown up on a nearby farm and planned to become a teacher. She had literary leanings and had been drawn to Smith more by this common interest than by any strong personal chemistry. Novalyne had heard a great deal about Robert How-ard, whom Smith regarded as an ideal—a successful writer. The fact that Howard was a published writer showered him with the gold dust of glamour in her eyes, too.

  Both young men were in a loud-mouthed, boisterous mood. Seeing that this display of high spirits annoyed Novalyne, Bob quickly toned down his manner. Novalyne felt drawn to this massive, good-looking young man at once, despite his dingy clothing. His deep-set blue eyes, un
der their heavy brows, fascinated her.6

  The three took a short drive around the countryside before Bob had to go back to the hospital to pick up his mother. The Howards returned to Cross Plains, and for two years Bob and Novalyne saw nothing of each other.

  As the rest of 1932 rumbled by, Robert took short drives in his car, usually with his mother. He explored the country around the artificial Lake Brownwood, newly created by a dam on the Pecan Bayou. With Smith and Vinson, he talked of building a cabin on the shores of the lake and growing some of their own food there; but nothing came of these pipe dreams.7

  Over Thanksgiving, Howard drove Lindsey Tyson to a football game between Howard Payne College and Southwestern University. In a fever of enthusiasm, he spent three single-spaced pages describing the details of the game to Lovecraft, to whom no sport was of the slightest interest.

  Howard continued arguing with Lovecraft about the relative importance of the mental and the physical. The sage of Providence conceded the importance of a sound body, but he deprecated the habit of the unthinking masses who spent valuable hours watching sporting events. What disturbed Lovecraft, and many another philosopher, was that these people were wasting time needed to develop their intellectual and artistic-faculties.8

  Although Lovecraft kept his lectures impersonal, his hypersensitive correspondent persisted in taking his friend's pronouncements personally. Vehemently Howard replied that physical development was valuable to anybody who, like himself, was forced from time to time to do hard manual work, such as moving bales of hay or feed for animals. Actually, Howard was not handy with tools and did little work on the house and grounds, save when some task requiring great strength was required.

  And so the argument raged, with Lovecraft taking an impersonal view of the antics of his fellow primates and Howard taking umbrage at Lovecraft's abstract generalizations. After one especially sharp reply to Lovecraft's arguments, Robert tried to make amends. He wrote:

  The fact is, I wrote while in the grip of one of the black moods which occasionally—though fortunately rarely—descend on me. With one of these moods riding me, I can see neither good nor hope in anything, and my main sensation is a blind, brooding rage directed at anything that may cross my path—a perfectly impersonal feeling, of course. At such times I am neither a fit companion nor a gentlemanly correspondent. I avoid personal contacts as much as possible, in order to avoid giving offense by my manner. . . .9

  Howard blamed his moodiness on his Celtic ancestry, but we doubt that his Irish forbears were all as violent-tempered as he. Nonetheless, his assertion about his irascibility was probably true enough, and his "outbursts of really dangerous fury, when crossed or thwarted"10 led him to fear that he might kill someone in a fit of rage, a fear that was not altogether unfounded.

  Although Lovecraft, who was in his absentminded way the most tactful and considerate of men, never descended to making biting remarks or to sneering at his pen pal, "Two-Gun Bob" continued to take many of his remarks personally and to be angered by them. But then, Howard took a personal view of everything; his many virtues did not include detachment, impersonality, or objectivity.

  Throughout 1933 Robert Howard's outer life appeared to be placid, routine, and uneventful. He sat at home and typed to his heart's content. He attended numerous prizefights and football games. He took his ailing mother on automobile trips. He listened to such cultural programs as he could pick up on his radio—talks by Irvin S. Cobb, Mohandas K. Gandhi, Sax Rohmer, George William Russell, and Alexander Woollcott. He enjoyed plays by Moliere, Shakespeare, and Sophocles, as well as music by Beethoven, Liszt, and Wagner.11 It is a pity that Howard was unable to indulge his cultural bent more widely. Although he pretended to be just a common man with common tastes, it is likely that he would have immersed himself in more elite entertainment had it been within his reach.

  Howard did continue to read omnivorously. One fine piece of storytelling in particular captured his attention. This was his pen pal August Derleth's autobiographical novel Evening in Spring, a work that Derleth started in 1930 but that was published only in 1941. A tale of young love in rural Wisconsin, the story tells of a Catholic youth who falls in love with a Protestant girl, only to have the match destroyed by the two mothers' fierce opposition. Since Howard's taste in literature was generally poles apart from Derleth's bucolic realism, we wonder whether Robert's interest in this story reflects in some way his chaffing under the yoke of his parental domination.

  At the end of March 1933, Robert tucked his mother into his Chevrolet and drove to Austin, then on to San Antonio to escape the spring sandstorms in their own region. He endured several weeks among Hester Howard's friends, until a heat wave drove them back to Cross Plains. Howard was not sorry, for after a week in any city he felt "caged, imprisoned."12

  During the ensuing months, Howard made several other short trips. Three times he went to Dallas on business, the nature of which he did not disclose in his letters. On his way home he meandered about the state, seeking historical lore in the ruins of old army posts and abandoned forts. He also took excursions, usually with his mother, through the neighboring counties; and once he drove to Stamford, 135 miles away, to see the annual rodeo. Then, after Christmas, he made the ill-fated trip that ended up in collision with the flagpole.

  During the spring of 1934, Robert Howard's zealous letter-writing paid off. E. Hoffmann Price and his new wife, Wanda, en route from Paw-huska, Oklahoma, to California, arrived at the Howard house in their Model A Ford on the afternoon of April 8th. Price, who had been eking out his minuscule earnings as a writer by working as a garage mechanic, detoured southward to meet his pen pal; and on the way they had an adventure.

  Having driven all the night, the Prices crossed the Red River bridge Into Texas a little after sunrise. Travel-weary, Price asked Wanda to light t cigar for him. As she bit off the end and struck a match, a posse of sheriffs deputies leaped out of the bushes and stopped their car. Seeing a woman lighting a cigar led them to believe that they had come upon the notorious outlaw couple Clyde Barrow and Bonnie Parker, who were being sought after throughout the state. The astonished young people established their identities and chugged on to Cross Plains.

  Since the date of the Prices' arrival was uncertain, Bob Howard had gone out of town. The elder Howards welcomed their visitors warmly. Mrs. Howard even turned over her bedroom to the guests and led the sleepy bride away to rest. Ed Price was not so fortunate; he was grilled for hours by Dr. Howard, who wanted to know all about writing and publishing; about Seabury Quinn, H. P. Lovecraft, and the other Weird Tales authors; and especially about the long delays of Robert's checks.

  Price told him: "Doctor, we are all getting screwed. No one is discriminating against Bob. Well, yes, Wright, the editor, and Sprenger, the business manager, do get their pay checks regularly, but we authors ..."

  After dinner Isaac Howard again fixed Price with his hypnotic gaze and continued the inquisition, while the exhausted young writer smothered his yawns.

  Price found the doctor's aggressive personality formidable and unforgettable. Many years later Price reported: "At times I got the fantastic notion that the father rather than the son must have been the author. I cannot remember ever having met another man who had eyes as penetrating as Dr. Howard's; clear, ice-blue, vibrant with expression, seconding his voice with gestures. White-haired, shaggy-browed, a face marked by rugged lines. . . ."13 We are fortunate indeed that E. Hoffmann Price not only has a discerning eye but also a surpassing memory; for, thanks to his reporting, we have gained many valuable insights into the complex relationships among members of the Howard family.

  The following morning at breakfast, the Prices met Bob, who had arrived home after they were asleep. Price remembers that he was "Tall, broad, towering—squarish tanned face, deep chest, short and very solid neck—a lot of man. His expression was stolid, phlegmatic until he thrust out a big hand, and smiled, and spoke. The quiet friendliness of his voice came as a surprise. . . .
"14

  Price needed a haircut, so he and Bob set out for the village barbershop, talking as they went. Price noted two idiosyncrasies in Howard's speech: He pronounced the noun "wound" to rhyme with "sound," and the word "sword" like "sward." It is probable that Howard had learned these words from early childhood reading, long before he had heard them pronounced by other people.

  On this occasion Bob used none of the proletarian locutions that he sometimes affected, but he said something that was most revealing: "Ed, I am God damn proud to have you come to see me."

  "I don't see what the hell you've got to be proud of in my coming," Price replied. "It's kind of t'other way about."

  "Nobody thinks I amount to much," said Bob. "So I am proud to show these sons of bitches that a successful writer goes thousands of miles out of his way to visit me."15

  At this, Price reflected on the year he had spent scrambling for the money for groceries and on the fact that Howard was doing better than he was as a writer.

  After his haircut, Price expressed an interest in the local methods of drilling for oil, so Howard took him to a lot outside the town on which a shallow-well drilling rig was chunking away. The Dutchman in charge explained the machinery. As they walked away, Bob asked his visitor: "Did he cut you off short? If he did, I'll go back and give him hell; none of these bastards can snub my friends!"

  Reassured that the oilman had been most cooperative, Howard asked abruptly: "Ed, have you got any enemies?"

  Price stared in surprise. "I don't think I have."

  Howard received this denial with such amazement that Price lamely added: "Well, there are a few bastards, but they are so chicken-shit that I can't pay them the compliment of calling them enemies."16