Dark Valley Destiny (32 page)

An epidemic of measles swept through Brownwood in the fall of 1926. The Powells' baby girl caught the virus and eventually died. When the elder Howards heard of the visitation, they rushed down to Brownwood lo rescue Robert, who had never had the disease. But Robert did not want to go home. In a rare, flaming rebellion against his parents' wishes, lie went to the bathroom used by the sick child, drank out of her glass, mid buried his face in her towel, hoping no doubt to be quarantined. But

dark valley destiny j

his parents took him home anyway; and presently he came down wit a severe case of measles, which confined him for two months. Thus wa his attempt to break away from parental domination thwarted, and thu did he become even more dependent on his parents' ministrations.

In this whole episode and in the events that followed it, we see tha Howard, while able to appraise himself coolly, was not able to tak appropriate action based on that appraisal.
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Later Robert tried to persuade the bursar's office at Howard Payn either to refund his fall tuition or to credit it against a second term. Th college refused. He had to start the course over at midyear, payin another tuition fee. He entered upon the spring term in a leisurelj fashion, neglecting his studies, spending most of his time at the movie or in playing seven-up with his fellow boarders, and writing poetry. Lat« he reported that one of his reasons for returning to college was thi college was easier than work.
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During the school year of 1926-27, Robert became a regular co^ tributor to the Howard Payne student paper,
The Yellow Jacket.
Hi contributions were mostly slapstick comedy sketches, which—as is ofte the case with writers of comedy—contrasted markedly with the "fiero melancholy" of his personality.
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In the issue for January 13, 1927, ra: "The Thessalians," a short skit about the havoc wrought during a plaf by a drunken stagehand, a hornet, and a skunk. "Cupid vs. Pollux, which appeared on February 10, tells of a boxing match in colleg between "Steve" and "Spike," the names Robert gave himself an Lindsey Tyson in
Post Oaks.
There were other contributions, too, amon them "Ye College Days," an amusing satire on a college football gam< Although Lindsey Tyson again had to drop out of college to ten his invalid father, Robert completed the spring term of 1927. He pass0 all his courses, but he later admitted ruefully that at term's end bool keeping "was a bigger mystery to me than when I started it."
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Robert's classes ended in May, but commencement exercises were n< held until August, at the end of the summer-school term. To fill the gap, I 8:00
p.m
. on Saturday, May 21st, Robert departed with Truett Vinson oni vacation trip. The Santa Fe was offering bargain rates for round trips froi Brownwood; and the boys, sitting up all night, reached Galveston at eigl the following morning. The high point of the trip was the Miss Univera

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apprentice pulpster

l>cauty contest, technically the International Pageant of Pulchritude and Annual Bathing Girl Review, a spectacle that has been held each year since 1921, save for a break during the Depression years of the 1930s.

On Sunday morning, when the vacationers took a motorboat ride around Galveston Bay, Robert had his first experience on the sea. This was a dream fulfilled; for he had long relished the marine poems of Masefield and Flecker, and four years before had composed
The Sea,
a |>oem of eight sestets, having a fine swing, despite its conventional imagery:

The sea, the sea, the rolling sea!

High flung, wide swinging, so wild and free,

The leaping waves with their white-capped crest

That plunge and lunge on the ocean's breast

Like wild, white horses racing free,

With the swing of the rolling, surging sea!
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The afternoon was devoted to the Pageant of Pulchritude. The young men sat like gulls along the sea wall. Although a sea breeze riffled through their hair, the bleachers were so crowded that no refreshing coolness drifted through the press of bodies. People stepped on their loes. Yet, despite the sudden rise of women's skirts after the First World War from instep to knee, the sight of shapely female legs was rare enough to excite curiosity and to pin the onlookers to their uncomfortable perches. Robert wrote:

But we were there to see legs, and legs we were going to see if we sat there till Hell froze over and the Devil took sleigh rides on the ice. At last they came—riding in floats, which the designer fondly believed to resemble Neptune's dolphin chariots.
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That evening Robert and Truett took another twelve-hour day-coach ride hack to Brownwood, not tarrying until the twenty-third to see the blond Miss New York (Dorothy Britton of Jersey City) crowned Miss Universe, while Miss Florida (Ada Williams) became Miss America.

On August 3, 1927, Robert Howard received his diploma in bookkeeping. His mother and some family friends and relations drove down to ilrownwood for the ceremony. They arrived early to be sure of seats well

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down in front. The stage was masked by heavy curtains, which sway< rhythmically in the hot breeze that blew through the open window Watching the rippling draperies, Robert found his imagination churnin As soon as the ceremony was over, he rushed off to write a poem inspir< by the waving drapes. This poem was probably
Crete,
which begins^

The green waves wash above us Who slumber in the bay As washed the tide of ages That swept our race away.
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Then Howard returned home to settle down to his writing for the pr cious year allotted to him by the compact with his father. Still restlei two weeks later, when Vinson had a short vacation, Howard decided i join him for a trip to San Antonio to see the sights. The young men mi in Brownwood, but Robert was in one of his black moods, as True Vinson later reported to Clyde Smith, who repeated the tale in an articlj

. . . Bob reached into his pocket and found, to his dismay that he had le his knife at home.... Bob, somewhat shaken, stated that he would as so< board the bus without his britches as leave without a knife. ... A spri was made to a source of supply. A green-handled switchblade, never high regarded by Bob because it was so quickly selected, was purchased almO as soon as shown, and hurriedly pocketed before the return sprint to tl station. They got there on time. Bob's companion, anticipating the scint lating conversation so usual in such moments of association, was in fo| rude jolt.... Bob pulled the knife from his pocket, threw his left leg aero) his right, and began to whet his new-bought knife on his left shoe uppo at the same time addressing his remarks to the bus driver. I understai that this stropping and talking continued for most of the 192 miles in San Antonio.
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Vinson was not the only victim of Howard's unpredictable moods. Hoi ard had a literary pen pal in the East. The man's identity is not know for certain, but he was probably Benjamin Francis Musser (1889-195 poet and prominent Catholic layman), with whom Howard is known have corresponded. On a trip through Texas, the pen pal stopped off see Howard, who tells what happened next:

I once met a noted poet, who had been kind enough to praise my ver( most highly, and with whom I'd had an enjoyable correspondence. But reckon I didn't come up to his idea of what a poet should be, because li didn't write me, even after he returned East, or even answer the letter I wrote him. I suppose he expected to meet meet some kind of an intellectual, and lost interest when he met only an ordinary man, thinking the thoughts and speaking in the dialect of the common people. I'll admit that after a part-day's conversation with him, I found relief and pleasure in exchanging reminiscences with a bus driver who didn't know a sonnet from an axle-hub.
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We may guess that Robert accorded the visitor treatment of the sort he gave Vinson on their 1927 trip and that the Easterner lost his enthusiasm for keeping up the acquaintanceship.

Thus Bob and Truett rode to Brady, where they changed to the bus that ran from San Angelo to San Antonio, with a stop for lunch at Fredericksburg. They stayed for several days with Mrs. Howard's friends the Allen M. Blackburns in San Antonio. Bob enjoyed his first sight of this most picturesque of all Texan cities, through which runs a channeled stream whose banks are always decked out as if for a fiesta. The boys attended movies and prizefights, one of the latter being an open-air affair in the city and the other held in Fort Sam Houston. Save when Mr. Blackburn gave them a tour of the city in his Ford, they got around town by streetcar.

On the morning of Monday, August 22d, Vinson and Howard took the train to Austin, since neither had seen the state capital. They registered at the Stephen F. Austin Hotel and spent the afternoon sightseeing and climbing to the top of the capitol building for a view of the city.

Howard also bought several books, among them a collection of poems by the much-publicized child poet Nathalia Crane. Born in 1913, she had several volumes of verse published in the twenties, poems which are best described as sweet little jingles.

Another purchase was a novel by Olive Schreiner, a South African woman. The novel,
The Story of an African Farm,
which made a strong impression on Howard, was originally published in 1883 under the pseudonym of "Ralph Iron" to circumvent the British male chauvinism of the time. In the 1880s the reading public was so opposed to women writers that Gilbert and Sullivan listed "that singular anomaly, the lady novelist" as one "who never would be missed."
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Olive Schreiner's story is a good example of slice-of-life fiction, the very antithesis of Howard's romantic and fantastic tales of adventure and gore-spattered derring-do. It gives a realistic account of a girl's dreary life on a farm in the flat, sandy, colorless Karoo. The latter half of the| novel is rendered ineffective by endless lectures inflicted by one character on another.

Robert was especially struck by a small section of the work, a dreami sequence about a primitive Bushman hunter. He may also have identified! himself with a minor character, Waldo, a boy whose ideas and yearnings! were forever thwarted by a sly, villainous overseer, who smashes Waldo's model of a sheep-shearing machine and burns his books. Aftef leaving the farm to drift through several jobs, Waldo returns to die quietly while still a youth. !

At the Austin hotel, Bob and Truett met one of Truett's corresponds ents, who had been alerted to their coming. This was Harold Preece, a' young man almost exactly Robert's age, who was enrolled at Texas Christian University and who also cherished literary ambitions. Preec€l in turn had a friend of similar inclinations, a farm youth of fifteen named Booth Mooney, who lived near Decatur, Texas. Both Preece and Mooney! had been active in the Lone Scouts, one of several organizations promoted in the 1920s as rivals to the Boy Scouts of America. Preecef persuaded Howard to join the Lone Scouts, but he took no active pai in the organization and soon dropped out.

In the course of conversation, Preece mentioned a young woman^j Maxine Ervin, who worked for a Dallas newspaper. Although Robert told| his friends that Maxine was his cousin, it appears that the two never met!

That evening the young men hatched a plan to form a literary! clique, named the Junto by Preece after the famous Philadelphia Junto; of which Benjamin Franklin was the star member. They agreed that thd club should issue a periodical publication, of which a single typed copy was to circulate among the members. Mooney was chosen editor. Early members, in addition to Howard, Preece, and Mooney, included Tevil Clyde Smith and Maxine Ervin, as well as several other persons witl literary interests. They were Texans for the most part, but one lived far away as Michigan.
The Junto
began its round-robin circulation nin< months later, in April of 1928.

The autumn of 1927 found Robert Howard back in Cross Plains, writinj furiously. His spirits were buoyed up by a wave of successes. "Thl Dream Snake" and several poems were accepted by Farnsworth Wrightf and not long after, "The Shadow Kingdom" was also accepted for the munificent sum of one hundred dollars. Of course, "The Dream Snake" sold for twenty dollars, and the poems for less than five dollars each, and for none of them was payment offered until some distant date of publication. But delight of delights, Howard was a professional writer with regular sales and so need not go looking for a job.

The euphoria did not last. Puffed with pride, Robert wrote a story, "Red Shadows," and sent it to
Argosy,
spurning the lower-rated
Weird Tales.
The story came back promptly but with a personal letter written by the assistant editor. The criticism was welcome to a young writer who had never received any suggestions from an editor before. After complimenting Howard on his knack of writing vivid action, he said that the story was diffuse and disconnected and relied too heavily on miracles. After some revision, Bob sent the tale to Wright, who offered eighty dollars and promised to feature the work the following summer.

During the winter of 1928, Howard had the pleasure of seeing "The Dream Snake" and "The Hyena" in print, and in the May issue of
Weird Tales
his poem
The Sea Curse
appeared. Moreover, his health was improving. He had filled a flour sack with sand from the bed of Turkey Creek and hung it from the rafters of the sleeping porch as a punching bag. There he exercised daily, and when the weather was good, he pounded for hours with a sledgehammer at a log in the backyard. This exercise and his mother's cooking transformed him from a slender stripling into a massive-shouldered, barrel-chested man of 190 or more pounds, much to his satisfaction.

Even his father ceased to demand that he seek a bookkeeper's job and began to speak proudly of his author son. In fact, when a magazine appeared with a story by Robert in it, the doctor made a practice of buying up the three or four copies that the distributor supplied to the drugstore—whether to give them to his friends or to make certain they would not sit unsold on the stand, we do not know.