Dark Valley Destiny (30 page)

He confided to his mother that he could scarcely believe he was actually selling his stories. When she cautioned him that he had a long row to hoe before he was truly established, he brushed the warning aside. "With the start I got, I'd be a dub if I didn't succeed in a few years. . . . But the first story is the hardest, and after that it's comparatively easy.. . . All the great ones amounted to something by the time they was |sic] twenty."
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Fired by the sale of three stories, Robert sought no job but remained at home, writing furiously. He tried stories on several markets other than
Weird Tales;
when they were rejected, he sent five others to Wright, with no better success. In some of his letters of rejection, Farnsworth Wright took the trouble to point out flaws in style or plot, and this the young, untutored author accepted with negligible grace, believing the faults to be minor.

A short werewolf tale set in medieval France was Howard's next

story. The plot of "In the Forest of Villefere" is simple: the narrator, walking through the woods, meets a stranger who, when the moon rides high, turns into a wolf and attacks him. The tale has its shortcomings^ The nature of the sinister stranger is glaringly obvious from the start; in fact, he even bears the name "Lee Loup." In addition the authoi experimented, not too successfully, with slightly archaized English^ Nonetheless, Wright called the story a "gem" and promised eight dollars upon publication.

For several weeks, Howard took a respite from his typewriter. He visited R. Fowler Gafford, a slightly older playmate from his Cross Cut days. Gafford had been a farm boy who was crippled by a hip disease and now made a living as a real estate agent. He, too, had literary ambitions and had once sold a story to a confessions magazine; but, although his work had strength and power, it was rendered unsalable by impossibly poor grammar, spelling, and diction. Still, he was somebody to talk shop with, and so Robert renewed his acquaintance, despite Mrs. Howard's disapproval. ;

Howard now had four acceptances from
Weird Tales
but had received no money whatsoever. To earn a little ready cash, he took a part-time job as a stringer on several papers in Texas and Oklahoma, | agreeing to furnish oil-field news on a regular basis. He pestered oil-j company officials and accosted oil workers on the street to glean materiajj for his weekly columns. He made around twenty-five dollars a month.J

f

At last, in June of 1925, "Spear and Fang" appeared in the July issue] of
Weird Tales.
In the once-in-a-lifetime euphoria of seeing his first; by-line in a professional magazine, Howard bought several copies and gave them to his friends. This policy, he soon found, was a mistake, for people came to expect him to provide them with copies of every issued containing one of his stories, a practice bound to wipe out his meager profits. After the August issue, in which "In the Forest of Villefere"; appeared, no more Howard stories were published in 1925. His total earnings from his literary work for the year were, therefore, twenty-four dollars.

About the time that "Spear and Fang" hit the stands, his discouraging shortage of cash drove Robert to take another salaried job. This time , he became an assistant to an oil geologist at three dollars a day, hauling

a stadia rod to areas indicated and holding it upright while his employer sighted on it with a transit. Howard later said that he was no good at this job, being as likely as not to take the rod up the wrong hill; but this evaluation smacks of an excess of modesty. He liked the outdoor nature of the work; the heavy boots he bought to fend off rattlesnakes, however, proved to be too large. As a result, during the whole two months of surveying, he was plagued by bleeding blisters.

The geologist, "a slow, good-natured Easterner who feared rattlesnakes and occasionally told a joke," was patient with his assistant's mistakes. This, Robert said, was a good thing, because his "quick, passionate nature made him restless of any restraint, and the lonely surroundings in which they usually worked made him more untamed, more leaning to violence, than ever."
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Robert wrote that he asked his boss about many of his techniques but that he could never remember the oral explanations. This inability to profit from oral instruction contrasts markedly with the extreme eye-mindedness that permitted him to memorize a whole printed page in a matter of seconds. This is not a unique mental organization. Parents of children who never seem to follow oral commands may do well to offer their young written directions instead of punishments.

Although Robert disliked this job less than any other he held, one scorching day he collapsed from heat exhaustion. This episode led him to believe that he had a heart defect, an erroneous conclusion in the light of his medical records; but he was glad when early in August the geologist completed his survey and departed.

A short time later, he took a job as a stenographer in a law office specializing in oil leases. Although the pay—thirty dollars the first month—was a fraction of what he had made lugging the stadia rod, he was lured by promises of monthly increases as his work improved. But, ns he reports, he was an inefficient stenographer, absentminded and untidy. He approached this job, as he did every new job, afraid that he could not measure up; then, as he became familiar with it, he viewed it with loathing and did not hesitate to let his employer know just how he Celt.

He spent long evenings writing his oil-news columns, another task with which he was disenchanted, and found he had no time at all for creative writing. To make matters worse, his old typewriter broke down completely, and he had to spend all the money he had saved to buy a new one. He was lonely. Lindsey Tyson now moved in another crowd; and a rare visit from his Brownwood friends, Truett Vinson and Clyde Smith—the latter full of reminiscences of his recent tour of the Old South—left him depressed.

One day several oil promoters with offices in the building where Robert worked invited him in for a glass of beer. He had once promised his mother never to drink alcoholic beverages; but on this occasion she; was out of town, and Robert found it easier to go along with the friendly offers than to keep his childhood promise. Sipping the brew hesitantly, he found it pleasant and refreshing. Soon he was drinking occasional bottles of beer and even buying some of the fine whiskey imported into the town by ever-busy bootleggers.

As the weeks went by and his mother continued her visit away from home, Robert learned the formula for making beer and brewed a quantity in his family kitchen. His father did not approve, but neither did he forbid the unaccustomed activity. And the twinges of conscience that had assailed Robert faded as he assured himself that his mother had been unreasonable to extract the promise from him.

Later Robert did get "uproariously drunk" on several occasions; then, swinging to the opposite extreme as was his wont in so many situations, he gave up drinking altogether for a time. Finally, he reports that, while he detested the taste of all drinks except beer, he spent from three to four dollars a month on a regular basis for "wine elixir, alcoholic tonics, beer, and, occasionally, bootleg whiskey. . . . When he drank, hei got terrifically drunk, but between these debauches he seldom touched liquor of any kind."
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The midsummer heat made dust devils dance on the unpaved roads of Cross Plains. Business was slow. Robert decided to take a few days ofl and go to Brownwood to see Clyde Smith and Truett Vinson, who ha( a summer job as a bookkeeper. Bob, whose sensitivity enabled him tc read the intentions and reactions of people he knew from a shadow o: a smile or a flip of a wrist, sensed that his friend Clyde planned to play a trick on him to humiliate him in some way. He was, therefore, preparec when his friend drove him to the home of a young girl and invited hei to go on a short drive with them. As all three of them sat in the fronl seat, the girl suddenly asked: "Why are you afraid of women?" She snuggled close to him, her eyes inviting.

Bob caught a glimpse of Clyde's half-smile, perceived the trick, and with a sardonic grin kissed the girl. Though appalled at his own temerity —it was the first time he had ever kissed a girl—he was determined not to let his friend embarrass him. Since the girl seemed not to mind and Clyde seemed amused, Bob kept his arm around her throughout the ride and showered her with kisses.

Later Smith and Vinson confessed that they had planned to have the girl bestow endearments on Bob to discomfit him. But he had turned the tables on them. In fact, Clyde's girl found Bob a romantic figure, and she made this all too plain.

After Robert returned to Cross Plains, letters from Brownwood revealed that his friends thought Bob had taken too many liberties with another fellow's girl. The exchange grew alternately angry and apologetic. While they finally agreed to forget the whole thing, Bob's next visit to Brownwood stirred up more controversy. Bob went with Clyde to the public library to display his extraordinary skill at leafing rapidly through a book and accurately photographing each page on his mind. But then he saw a young woman across the room who resembled the recipient of his first kiss. Brimming with embarrassment and unwilling to meet her, Bob clambered out of a window and dropped to the lawn. Clyde's hilarious laughter brought the librarian on the run, and her disapproving remarks compounded Bob's discomfiture.

Nursing his wounded pride, Robert returned to Cross Plains, got drunk, and discovered the next morning that another oil boom had swept into town. Oil workers and magnates strutted along Main Street. The wells lay under the very buildings; one derrick operated in the front yard of the First Baptist Church. Movable spudders towered up in many backyards.

Although acquaintances told him here was great material for a story, Robert despised the promoters and swaggering roughnecks and "hated them all too much to write about them."
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The town was jammed; and with his mother still away Robert ate in restaurants and developed indigestion.

He had already given up reporting on oil-field matters, saying quite correctly that he would never make a good reporter, who had to be thick-skinned enough to ask questions of hostile strangers and not react to their indifference with flaming anger. Now he lost his stenographic job. The work load grew heavy as oil leases multiplied, and his employers found a girl who could do the work better and more cheaply—and, we may guess, present less of a personality problem.

Robert did not particularly mind the loss of his job. He was much more interested in the fact that Farnsworth Wright finally sent him eight dollars for "In the Forest of Villefere." An oil man offered to let him use a room in his office and set himself up as a public stenographer. There he typed letters for other oil men, some of whom went away without paying his modest fees.

In this small office, amid the bustle and clatter of the town-site boom, when business was slow, Robert wrote. He wrote of mist-shrouded lands and hate, lust, and death among strange men who walked like giants on the earth. At first he was timorous, fearing that he had lost whatever talent he had; but as his confidence grew, he began a work longer than a short story, a serial-length fantasy called "The Isle of the Eons." This is a tale of two men cast ashore on a Pacific island when their ship goes down in a storm.

Robert was well into "The Isle of the Eons" when he abruptly stopped work on it and wrote instead his first novelette: "Wolfshead." This 7,500-word tale is a sequel to "In the Forest of Villefere" and a more impressive work. The style is the same, and the time remains vaguely Renaissance or early Baroque. But Howard has a stronger, denser plot and a larger cast of characters, whom he makes more effort to characterize.

While de Montour, the narrator of "Villefere," appears in the story, this time the tale is told by another Frenchman, called simply Pierre. Pierre tells how, years before, he visited a Portuguese slave trader on the west coast of Africa, who had invited a host of European friends to a party in his lonely castle. After a series of shocking murders interrupt the party, Pierre learns that de Montour, one of the guests, is animated by the demon who once inhabited the body of the werewolf and has become a killer in spite of himself.

While the tale is lively and readable, it is not completely free of inconsistencies. We never learn, for example, how the wealthy trader fetched his highborn guests from Europe—a feat which in those days would have taken months and cost a fortune. Moreover, the rules for killing a werewolf without being haunted by its demon are somewhat clumsily contrived.

It is interesting to note that the story reflects the occult dabbling of Robert and his father. When de Montour tells of the curse upon him, he explains that, when the earth was young, grotesque, fiend-ridden beasts wandered over the wild land, and the forces of good warred with those of evil:

A strange beast, known as man, wandered among the other beasts, and since good or bad must have concrete form ere either accomplishes its desire, the spirits of good entered man. The fiends entered other beasts, reptiles and birds; and long and fiercely waged the age-old battle.
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Anyone with ears attuned to the occult world of the 1920s can hear echoes of the works of the queen of the occultists, Helena Petrovna Blavatsky, the founder of Theosophy. Madame Blavatsky, a fat Russian adventuress, launched her cult in the 1870s. She published her famous
chef d'oeuvre, The Secret Doctrine,
in 1888. This six-volume work, riddled with plagiarism and fakery, is based on a mishmash of contemporary scientific, pseudoscientific, mythological, and occult works, all cribbed without credit and used in a way that showed only skin-deep acquaintance with the subjects discussed. One quotation from
The Book of Dzyan,
an imaginary work from ancient Atlantis, reads in part:

The Wheel whirled for thirty crores more. . . . The great Chohans called the Lords of the Moon, of the Airy Bodies: "Bring forth Men, Men of your nature. . . Animals with bones, dragons of the deep, flying Sarpas were added to the creeping things. . . . The Lhas of the High, the Lhamayin of Below, came. They slew the Forms which were two- and four-faced. They fought the Goat-Men, the Dog-Headed Men, and the Men with fishes' bodies. . . .
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