Dark Valley Destiny (26 page)

Perhaps Isaac realized, however dimly, that something ought to be done to break, or at least stretch, the cord that bound Robert to his mother, or perhaps he simply hated living alone. We shall never know what arguments raged and what compromises were struck.

Robert signed up for the science course, a surprising choice for one who had never shown any interest in science. Dr. Howard probably pushed his son into this elective—an obvious preparation for a premedi-cal college course—hoping that Robert would discover a true medical bent. This hope well illustrates a total lack of realism on the part of a parent who failed to perceive that his son's dislike of people and revulsion at the sight of gore and suffering precluded his selection of this particular career.

The result of this course of study was unexpected. Although Robert considered his biology teacher a poor misfit, unable to control the hel- i lions in the class, he got excellent marks in science. He made 100 on the final examination, compared to 85 for economics and 80 for English. Yet he remained totally indifferent both to economics and science.
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Both subjects represented the drab, prosaic, confining, unromantic aspects of the universe to a young man whose imagination beckoned in \ another direction. ,

A decade later Robert was inveighing against the vain and ephemeral god of science and the tyranny of his materialistic reign. He excused himself by saying that he meant nothing against "true science," merely against the pretensions of some scientists and engineers whose self-confidence outran their knowledge. He also claimed that he had never tried writing science fiction because he had forgotten all the science he had learned at Brownwood High and was too ignorant of the subject to write convincingly about it.
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Robert said he had the ability to be a good biologist; in fact his teacher had urged that career upon him. He might, he said, have made a better biologist than a pulp writer, but he had not the slightest desire to become the first and a burning desire to become the second. '

Actually, Howard had a lively interest in such social sciences as ( anthropology and archaeology. He wished he could have spent his life digging up the ruins of ancient cities, but without college he never had ! a chance to study those subjects in a systematic way. What he learned \ about them he acquired by wide and indiscriminate reading of books— books that often set forth already obsolete views. In one story Robert mentions the anthropologist "Boaz," but it is unlikely that he ever read anything by Franz Boas (1858-1942), an early debunker of Aryanism.
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i Howard uttered similar strictures on economics, saying that he
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found it a repellent subject of which he knew nothing. This did not stop } him from expressing strong opinions on governmental economic policies or showing, during his last years, considerable shrewdness in slanting and selling his stories.
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Still, his disdain for economics did affect his writing. Solomon Kane would be a more plausible character if he had ' a regular means of support, instead of conveniently stumbling upon : caches of treasure whenever he needed money to finance his wanderings.
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Robert would probably have flunked his mathematics course had, not the examination been given in two installments. When he appeared

Cor the second part, he was the only pupil to show up. The teacher remarked that he had barely passed the first half and expressed the hope that he would improve on the second. No, said Robert; he had already worked the only problem in the book that he could solve. Learning that Robert's other marks were good to excellent, the teacher saved himself trouble by letting his student's grade of 60 on the first installment stand for the year.
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The high-school teacher who influenced Robert most was young Osee Maedgen, who taught early American literature and acted as censor of the school paper,
The Tattler.
Miss Maedgen took Robert's prose in hand, taught him to polish it, and explained such mysteries as similes and metaphors.
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His Brownwood High School period saw Robert's first appearance in print.
The Tattler,
which began publication the year before Howard's arrival at the school, magnanimously offered prizes for the best short Htory. Robert swept the field with two tales, both of which appeared in the issue of December 22, 1922. For "Golden Hope Christmas" he received a ten-dollar gold piece; for "West Is West," a five-dollar coin. While neither story is immortal, both are literate and well above the standard of the usual high school theme.

"Golden Hope Christmas," a sentimental trifle, tells of a Western badman who sells a worthless gold-mining claim to a tenderfoot and is outraged when the tenderfoot strikes it rich. He lies in wait for the lucky miner but gives up his plan to shoot him because it is Christmas morn. "West Is West" is a mere three-page anecdote about a tenderfoot who rides a bucking horse. It is informed with arch, juvenile humor:

"Get me," I told the foreman of the ranch where I was spending my vacation, "a tame and peaceful bronc for I would fain fare forth among the hills to pursue the elusive bovine and, as thou knowest I have naught of riding skill, therefore I wish a quiet steed and if it be aged I care not.
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Although he never joined the staff of
The Tattler,
Robert remained a regular contributor. In fact, he sent in so many stories that the paper was ntill publishing them a year and a half after he had graduated. In the issue of March 15, 1923, appears a laudatory editorial, which foreshadows by some fifty years the opinions of his modern admirers:

DARK VALL1Y DBIT1WY
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ROBERT HOWARD, SHORT STORY WRITER

Have you been reading Robert Howard's short stories in The Tattler for several issues back? If you haven't you are missing a treat. His Christmas story received commendation from the editor of The Brownwood Bulletin and his later stories are just as good.

We are fortunate in having such a good writer here in our school and we hope he will keep up his contributions. The stories are mostly written in the style of O'Henry [sic], Bret Harte, and Mark Twain, and are just as interesting as their stories. His stories have plenty of action and are spicy with near-cuss words and slang. If for nothing else The Tattler is worth a dime and over if it has a story written by Robert Howard. Read "The Sheik" in this issue!
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Another of these youthful tales that has survived is "Aha! Or the Mystery of the Queen's Necklace." This is a Sherlock Holmes burlesque, but one which would have given Sherlock's creator little cause for alarm.

During his first year at Brownwood High, Robert had made friends with a classmate, a youthful resident of the town, named Truett Vinson. One spring day in 1923 a fellow student asked Vinson if he knew Robert E. Howard. This other student—a very tall, lean boy with a commanding voice, named Tevis Clyde Smith—still remembers:

We were on the school grounds at Brownwood High, and Truett said, "Yes, there he is now." I told Truett that I'd like to meet Bob, and he called Bob over, introducing us to one another. We shook hands, if it could be called that, for Bob extended a limp hand and executed what is known as a "dishrag shake."
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Clyde Smith, as his friends called him, although two years younger than ; Howard, also had literary ambitions. With Vinson's help, he had been publishing a small amateur journal on a hand press. Not long after this] meeting, he and Robert began collaborating on a story, "Under the Great? Tiger," which they meant to run serially in Smith's magazine. While they soon abandoned the project, the three young men remained good friends until Robert's death thirteen years later.

To the other students at Brownwood High, Howard presented the same facade as at the Cross Plains school. He was always courteous but remained isolated, taking no part in collective activities. The school had a society, the Heels Club, for outstanding male students. (The girls had an equivalent sorority.) On the strength of his grades, Robert was en-

Robert E. Howard at seventeen years of age, Brownwood, Texas, 1923

rolled in the Heels Club and is so listed in the yearbook, along with Truett Vinson and Austin Newton, his earlier friend from Cross Cut. The activities of the Heels Club seem to have consisted in the main of "outings"—picnics in the woods—with, perhaps, some surreptitious tippling. Yet, despite Robert's love of the outdoors, survivors of the Heels Club do not remember him as taking part in these excursions. He did not even sign the imprint of the sole of a shoe, which bore the signatures of all the other Heels and which was reproduced in the yearbook.

One unhappy event cast a long shadow over Robert. As Clyde Smith tells it:

At the period of which I write, Bob was a Senior and I was a Sophomore. One of his classmates killed himself a few weeks before graduation. Bob was 17 at the time, and I was 15. The suicide had an impact on him, and, as the years went by, he became more constant in defending the right of self destruction, dropping hints of the value of such an ending.
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We have not been able to learn much about this tragedy beyond what Smith reports. After Howard's death his father is said to have stated that, at Brownwood, Robert had joined a suicide club, members of which were pledged to kill themselves when their mothers died. It was also said that two other members of the club killed themselves before Robert did, but this sounds like village gossip of the sort that credited Robert with leaving an estate of ten thousand dollars or of having rigged a contraption in his car so that his pistol would automatically fire the fatal shot when he got in. Such tales are not to be taken seriously.
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Late in the spring of 1923, Robert received his diploma, and Dr. Howard came to fetch home his wife and son. Then the question arose: Since Robert was determined not to follow a medical career, should he go to a liberal arts college? Brownwood had two, Howard Payne and the smaller Daniel Baker.

Even though Hester Jane Howard risked letting her son slip out of her grasp, she urged him to matriculate along with his friends Tyson and Vinson. But Robert Howard balked. He did not want to go to college, he said. He had had all he could take of sitting in classrooms, being droned at by teachers, and keeping to schedules. Moreover, in college lie would have to take a lot of required courses in subjects that did not interest him.
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He professed to despise writing courses in particular, although he had never taken one. He preferred to stay at home, perfecting his skill as a writer and earning his keep by such jobs as he could find.

Here Robert made an elementary mistake, one which other young people—especially would-be writers—often make. This is to think that, because some required college subject might bore them or seems to have no immediate application, they should not waste time on it. A writer never knows what odd body of knowledge may come in handy; in a lifetime of writing, practically everything a writer learns will prove useful. A decade later Howard seems to have had, too late, an inkling of this truism. He wrote:

A literary college education probably would have helped me immensely. That's neither here nor there; I didn't feel I could afford it, and that's all there was to it.

I might have liked college, but I hated grammar and high school with a vindictiveness that has not softened in later years.
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Howard's claim that poverty kept him from college can be dismissed as an
ex post facto
rationalization of his blunder. In reality he could have managed. Tuitions were low, and he could easily have found part-time work. Certainly Dr. Howard, ambitious for his son, would have helped. The real reason, we think, was that which Robert Howard gave for his dislike of his grade-school days:

I hated school as I hate the memory of school. It wasn't the work I minded; I had no trouble learning the tripe they dished out in the way of lessons —except arithmetic, and I might have learned that if I'd gone to the trouble of studying it. ... I generally did just enough work to keep from flunking the courses, and I don't regret the loafing I did. But what I hated was the confinement—the clock-like regularity of everything; the regulation of my speech and actions; most of all the idea that someone considered himself or herself in authority over me, with the right to question my actions and interfere with my thoughts.
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In other words it was not poverty but fierce independence of spirit and intolerance of any sort of supervision, except from his mother, carried by an imperfectly socialized human being to the point where it became counterproductive, that kept Robert Howard from going to college. Few of the ironies of Robert's life are more poignant than the fact that in this matter, for one of the very few times in his life, he flatly disobeyed his mother's behest; and that in this matter, for one of the very few times in her life, Mrs. Howard was right and her son was wrong. College might have given Robert Howard his final chance to escape the fate awaiting him.