by Unknown
During the winter of 1935-36, Robert Howard indulged in sartorial quirks. He grew a large, black walrus mustache. Novalyne, who had said that she liked a small, trim mustache on a man, thought that Bob was sporting this outsized hirsute ornament just to annoy her. After their final date, he shaved it off.
Then, somewhere Robert obtained a light blue-gray nineteenth-eentury gentleman's knee-length frock coat; people who remember it report that it might have been a Confederate officer's coat. In cool weather he wore this unusual garment around town, along with the once-discarded Mexican sombrero. This bizarre attire made Howard an even more strange and suspect figure, confirming his fellow townsmen's worst opinions of him. According to our late collaborator, Dr. Jane Griffin, such a bid for attention was a silent cry for help.
It was a cry that none could answer, for no one could spare Howard the agony of seeing his mother in her terminal decline. With the usual ups and downs of tuberculosis, her steep declines were followed by minor rallies. When she seemed to be better, euphoria seized Robert. He would go about the house singing, or he would retire to his study to type at furious speed. Often he would rock vigorously back and forth on the porch swing, singing all the while at the top of his powerful lungs.
When his mother sank lower, Robert would fall into one of his blackest moods. He would "just go out of his head."25 In one of these dark moods, he wrote:
This has been a bitter winter, and the harshness of the weather has hurt her. First one woman and then another we hired to help wait on her has taken sick herself, so the job of nursing my mother has been done largely by my father and myself. ... I find little, if any time to write, which ia why this letter is brief . . . and disconnected. . . . There seems to be little we or anyone can do to help her, though God knows I'd make any sacrifice, including my own life, if it could purchase her any relief.26
That winter Dr. Howard moved his office from the drugstore to his house. Patients came in through the front door and were received on the sleeping porch.
Early in 1936, the Howards hired their neighbor Kate Merryman to serve as housekeeper and nurse. Mrs. Howard's nocturnal sweats required that Miss Merryman and Robert change the dying woman's nightclothes several times during the night; and because of her sensitivity to cold, the task had to be done beneath the covers. Robert and Miss Merryman spent alternate nights sitting up with the patient; but while Robert could catch up on his sleep the following day, Kate Merryman had to cook and clean. Yet, even when Robert slept, he left the window between his room and his mother's wide open so that he could hear any sound that she might make.
Eventually the overload of work wore Kate Merryman down. In May 1936 she was forced to quit. The Howards then hired two nurses and a cook to handle the work that Miss Merryman and Robert had been doing; but, even then, Miss Merryman often came back to help. According to Kate Merryman, Robert never was much help as a houseworker. This is not to his discredit; for in that day housekeeping was "woman's work," and men and boys were discouraged from invading their womenfolk's domain.
In seeking a food that might build up Hester's strength, the How-•rdl bought a pair of milch goats, and Robert learned to milk them. The goats' milk seemed to help Hester for a while, but then pleurisy set in again. Since she was unable to travel, a doctor was called in from Brownwood to draw off the fluid.
By the latter part of February, father and son, desperate in the face ©f the inevitable, took Hester to a sanitarium in East Texas. There was nothing the doctors there could do. Trapped and frustrated, Robert lashed out at specialists and all their hospitals:
I have certainly been disillusioned. . . . Most of the specialists . . . have proved to be blatant jackasses, incompetent theorists. . . . theories— theories—theories—my God, I've had my belly-full of theories in the past few months. ... To show his authority, he [the specialist's doctor son] neglected my mother—or tried to . . . But before we got through with him he was damned glad to do everything my father suggested—suggested, hell, ordered. (The greatest jackass of them all was a fellow from California .. . inclined to regard a human being as a guinea pig . . .; no man's going to experiment with any of my folks while I can stand on my feet and hold up my hands.)27
The Howards brought Hester home for the last time in early March, and she hung on for a few months more. By May, Robert wrote Lovecraft:
I don't know whether she'll live or not. She is very weak and weighs only 109 pounds—150 pounds is her normal weight—and very few kinds of food agree with her; but if she does live, she will owe her life to my father's efforts. . . .28
Beneath Robert's rant against "theories" and patients being used as "guinea pigs" lie the facts that he could not admit to himself: that his mother was dying of tuberculosis, possibly complicated by cancer, and that at the time there was no cure for tuberculosis. Although Hester was nearly sixty-seven years old and had reached the average life span of her generation—a fact which the senior Howards had carefully kept secret —neither Robert Howard's basic personality nor his parents' lifelong denial of reality equipped him to accept the the imminence of her death.
Yet, troubled as Howard was, during the winter of 1935-36 he managed to write five Westerns and sell them to the high-class pulp Argosy, a magazine to which he had sold but one story before and to which he had long hoped to become a regular contributor. Two of the tales were straight Westerns—run-of-the-mill, formula stories: "The Dead Remember" and "Vultures' Sanctuary." But the other three are among Howard's best humorous Westerns and will provide the reader with much sidesplitting amusement. "A Gent from the Pecos," "Gents on the Lynch," and "The Riot at Bucksnort"—all published between August and November 1936—prove that, given leisure and a place to write, a dedicated storyteller will turn out his copy even in adversity. The stories also prove that from the literary point of view, Howard was a young writer with great expectations.
He was less successful with the other work that he undertook in 1936. He almost completed a 50,000-word novel, Almuric, as well as a novelette; but both reveal the strain that he was under.
Almuric was his third book-length story, if we exclude the autobiographical Post Oaks and Sand Roughs. This short novel was a sword-and-planet tale in the manner of Burroughs's stories about John Carter on Mars. Like Burroughs, Howard paid no attention to scientific plausibility, and he put himself into the story to a greater extent than ever. We may guess that he hoped to sell the work to one of the science-fiction magazines, the number of which was growing rapidly in the 1930s.
A scientist, who has invented a machine to send a human being instantly to some far planet, aids Esau Cairn to escape the law by sending him to the planet Almuric. Cairn, the world's strongest man, is described by the scientist in terms that fit Howard himself, or his idealization of himself, as neatly as a diver's wet suit:
Many men are born outside their century; Esau Cairn was born outside his epoch. Neither a moron nor a low-class primitive, possessing a mind well above the average, he was, nevertheless, distinctly out of place in the modern age. I never knew a man of intelligence so little fitted for adjustment in a machine-age civilization. . . .
He was of a restless mold, impatient of restraint and resentful of authority. Not by any means a bully, he at the same time refused to countenance what he considered to be the slightest infringement on his rights. He was primitive in his passions, with a gusty temper and a courage inferior to none on this planet. His life was a series of repressions. Even in athletic contests he was forced to hold himself in, lest he injure his opponents. Esau Cairn was, in short, a freak—a man whose physical body and mental bent leaned back to the primordial.29
Id college Cairn's football playing is literally bone-snapping. He is blackballed from the ring when he accidentally kills a sparring partner with I misplaced punch. In politics a colleague quarrels with him, and Cairn, in lelf-defense, smashes the man's skull. Hence his flight to Almuric.
In Almuric, Cairn finds himself among a race of immensely strong
Neanderthals who live in cities and have attractive women. Cairn lives happily among them until he and his sweetheart are captured by winged, demonlike raiders. These Yagas take their captives to the black citadel of Yugga, on the rock Yuthla, by the river of Yogh, in the land of Yagg. Here they meet the wicked queen Yasmeena. As one critic exclaimed: "Yumping Yiminy!"30
The uproarious gusto of the tale may be enjoyed in a mindless sort of way by readers who can ignore its incongruities and absurdities. Although it appeared in Weird Tales in 1939 as a three-part serial, it is in some ways one of Howard's worst stories.
The tale ends on a singular note. Esau, the earth man, and his mate plan to instill the civilization of the planet Earth into the rude culture of his adopted planet. So foreign to the rest of the story—with its noble savages and romantic primitivism—is this ending that we suspect it was added either by Otis Kline, the literary agent, or by Farnsworth Wright, editor of Weird Tales, to forestall an outcry from the readers.
The novelette "Nekht Semerkeht" was also begun at this time. This story crystalizes Howard's thinking as he tried to argue himself into overriding his natural drive for survival in order to carry out his longstanding pledge to die with his mother.
The protagonist in the tale is Hernando de Guzman, a member of Coronado's expedition of 1540-42 from Mexico to Kansas in search of gold. Hernando gets lost on the prairie and eventually finds a city of semicivilized Indians, ruled by an evil and immortal wizard, the Nekht Semerkeht of the title.
The story becomes one of Howard's vivid action tales until it dwindles to a rough draft and then, like "Wolves Beyond the Border," to a mere synopsis. Andrew J. Offutt completed the story from this synopsis and tells how, finally, Hernando disposes of the villainous sorcerer. But Hernando's triumph is short, for the Plains Indians overrun the city, killing Hernando with all the rest. The Egyptian mage, though dying, releases a poisonous gas on the attackers; thus, hero, attackers, and innocent bystanders are all slain by the end of the story.
"Nekht Semerkeht," the last story Howard wrote, is full of gloom and doom; but it is interesting for two reasons. First, it carries to its logical limit Howard's fictional theme of universal destruction. Of even more significance to his biographers is the insight the story gives into the battle between life and death that raged within Howard's breast during those months of 1936.
While lost on the plains, Hernando perceived the instinctual will to live that rose within him, even when life was not worth the struggle. Hernando ponders the absurdity of clinging to life, merely because primitive instinct bids one to do so. Howard presented this soliloquy in italics:
We men rationalize the blind instinct of self-preservation and we build glib air-castles to explain why it is better to live than to die, while our boasted— but ignored!—intellect is in every phase a negation of life! Ah, but how we civilized men hate and fear our "animal" instincts!... As we hate and fear every heritage from the blind, squalling pit ofprimordial beginnings that bred us. . . .
Oh, of course we are guided by reason, even when reason tells us it is better to die than to live! It is not the intellect we boast that bids us live— and kill to live—but the blind unreasoning beast-instinct.31
Hernando de Guzman, like the author who created him, could not deceive himself that there was a logical reason why he should continue the struggle, why he should not "quit an existence whose savor had long ago become less than its pain." He knew that even if he won his way back to Coronado's camp, even if he found the gold he sought, life would prove no less sordid than before. Yet, unlike his creator, Hernando followed his animal instincts and pushed on.
About February of 1936, two young Conan fans in Schenectady, New York, drew a map of the Hyborian World as it seemed to appear in the stories. They were P. Schuyler Miller, a school administrator, amateur archaeologist, and rising science-fiction writer, and Dr. John D. Clark, a chemist who worked for General Electric. They sent the map to Robert Howard with a letter, signed by Miller, discussing Conan's career.
On March 10th, Howard replied with a hearty, cordial letter, indicating that the Clark-Miller map and outline of Conan's life came very dose to his own concepts; and he enclosed a copy of his own working map for comparison. He could not, he said, predict Conan's eventual fate, for he was merely "chronicling his adventures as he told them to me____"32
Howard went on to say that Conan, he believed, remained king of Aquilonia for many years during a time of turbulence and warfare. He traveled throughout the Hyborian World and even visited a nameless continent to the west. Whether he conquered a vast territory and built an empire or whether he perished in the attempt, Howard did not know, nor could he foretell how much of the story of Conan's life and loves would eventually get into print. Those who spin tales of the great barbarian today and those who read them still have not unraveled that mystery, but we all know that the giant Cimmerian still bestrides the Hyborian World and still has tales to tell.
While this cheerful correspondence with his admirers gave no hint of the tremendous stress under which Howard labored nor any suggestion of his plan to end his life, in his poems and in conversations with his father, he made no secret of his intention to commit suicide. In fact, few people have set forth so openly and so eloquently the feelings that drove them to the act.
As much as a decade earlier, Howard's poems cried out: "Life is a liar and a drear eyed whore. . . ."; "Jets of agony lance my brain . . ."; and "The years are as a knife against my heart."33 He felt that he had squandered his life, that he was never free, that people were dreary, noisy cattle, and that fame was shifty-eyed and unreliable. In The Tempter, Howard practically shouted his intention:
In a shadow panorama Passed life's struggles and its fray. And my soul tugged with new vigor, Huger grew the phantom's figure, As I slowly pulled the trigger, Saw the world fade swift away. Through the fogs old Time came striding, Radiant clouds were 'bout me riding, As my soul went gliding, gliding, From the shadow into day.34
Although some of Howard's intimates, like Truett Vinson and Novalyne Price, had no intimation of his plan to die by his own hand and were stunned when they heard of his death, Robert Howard told Clyde Smith: "My father is a man and can take care of himself, but I've got to stay on as long as my mother is alive." According to Kate Merryman: "Mrs. Howard said, all his life he said if she died, he was going to kill himself . . . but she said she thought she had talked him out of it." But from Mrs. Howard's attitudes, Miss Merryman suspected that, secretly, she "really did want him to die with her—kill himself."35
Robert also told of his plan, by indirection, to his literary agent Otis Kline. Later Kline reported:
Several weeks ago he wrote me saying that in case of his death I should get in touch with his father. As he had heart trouble, I thought he was afraid he might drop over from a heart attack, and did not expect suicide. About that time, also, he sent me a story of a hill-billy who was violently prevented from committing suicide over the fact that his girl had jilted him, and who finally ran off with the sweetheart of his benefactor.36
About Monday, June 8th, Hester Howard sank into a coma. At that time Kate Merryman noticed a curious change in Robert. Instead of the dour expression that he usually wore when his mother's health worsened, he suddenly became quite cheerful, with the cheer of a man who, in a perplexing predicament, had made up his mind about what course to follow.
For the next three days, Robert slept only in snatches. He ate little but drank countless cups of coffee, a beverage that he normally disliked and that, taken in vast quantities on an empty stomach by one unused to it, can induce a state of hallucination. When Robert began his coffee binge, Kate Merryman asked him: "Do you want sugar and cream?"
Robert replied: "Well, I don't know. I just want something to keep me going." And he drank his coffee black.
Robert spent most of his time in his mother's bedroom. On Wednesday the tenth, he asked his father whether he thought that Hester would ever regain consciousness.
Isaac Howard said he thought not. Then his son added: "Where will you go, Dad?"
To this the doctor replied: "Why, wherever you do." At that, Robert got out his car and drove to Brownwood. He went to the Greenleaf Cemetery and asked Mr. Bass, the secretary of the
Cemetery Association, to reserve Lot 13, Block 5, for three burials. Before completing the interview, he added: "I want to know if the lot Will be kept in order. My father and I will go away and never come Again." Bass thought Robert was implying that the doctor would not lurvive the shock of his wife's death.37
Back home, Robert found his father crying in the living room. He put his arm around the old man's shoulders and said: "Buck up! You Are equal to it; you will go through it all right. Everything has to come to an end." Then Robert left the room singing, which Kate Merryman thought decidedly odd.
Later he gave Miss Merryman a large envelope, saying that, if anything happened to him, she should give the envelope to Dr. Howard.38
During the afternoon Isaac Howard concluded that his wife would probably die within the next few hours. He also became concerned about the increasingly strange behavior of his son. Deciding that he wanted company to see him through the night, he got in touch with his colleague, Dr. J. R. Dill of Rising Star, and persuaded him to come to Cross Plains, bringing with him two in-laws, Vera McDonough and Leah Bowden. He also asked a young local couple, the teacher Clarence S. Martin and his wife Birdie, to sit out the watch with him.
The Martins arrived about sunset. When Robert appeared, Mrs. Martin said: "Robert, if you get the hose, I'll water the flowers."
"No, Miz Birdie," he replied. "There's no use for that."39
During the evening Isaac Howard came out of the small, stifling sitting room and sat on the porch swing, rocking. Robert soon joined him and walked up and down, back and forth. Each time that he approached the swing, Robert came close to his father and stared at him in a strange manner.