Dark Valley Destiny (38 page)

Howard's models were the major Anglo-American poets of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, men such as Benet, Dunsany, Harte, Kipling, Masefield, Noyes, Service, Swinburne, Tennyson, Vie-reck, and Wilde, although with a man of Howard's eclectic tastes and omnivorous reading habits, the influence of many other poets can be seen in his verses. At full maturity, Howard's serious work far outranks the rather pedestrian rhymes of Dunsany and Tolkien or Lovecraft's leaden Georgian couplets.

Robert Howard made superb use of personification. This endowment of inanimate objects with the attributes of animals and people comes naturally to children and primitives and adds enormously to the vitality and richness of the language. One of Howard's favorite verse forms was the iambic heptameter triolet, a three-line stanza favored by Kipling. This verse form and his effective personification both appear in these lines from Howard's
The Ghost Kings:

The ghost kings are marching; the midnight knows their tread,

From the distant, stealthy planets of the dim, unstable dead;

There are whisperings on the night-winds and the shuddering stars have fled.
³⁹

Considering the outstanding quality of the lines already familiar to readers of this biography, why was so much of Howard's poetry ignored during his lifetime? One of the editors who returned his submissions stated that the poems were too bitter and rebellious. Bitter and rebellious some of them certainly were; but this
per se
would not condemn a poet's work. The problem lay in part with the change in fashion that was taking place at the time that the skald of the post oaks was tuning his lyre. Fixed-form verse, the mode of the Romantics of the nineteenth century, was giving way in the early twentieth century to a new concept of poetry. The carefully crafted meter, rhyme, and stanza were becoming things of the past. Save for the work of a few well-established poets like Edna St. Vincent Millay and Robert Frost, "free verse," the unschooled, untamed expression of confused emotions, was becoming the only acceptable mode of expression.

At the time we are writing, this condition still obtains. If public taste ever veers back to fixed-form verse, the true worth of Howard's poetry may be reassayed. In the interim, those of us who admire the sheer poetic power of the man may look at his poems with a less prejudicial eye and point out the features that make them memorable.

While Howard was not unaware of the revolution then beginning in English and American poetry under the leadership of Ezra Pound and T. S. Eliot, he remained almost untouched by it. He favored the well-established forms like the ballad and the sonnet. He relied on an exquisite choice of simple words, unlike the turgid language of his contemporaries. And he obtained his sonorous effects by carefully crafted rhyme and meter, which from earliest times have made poetry easy to remember.

Although a few of Howard's longer poems are narrative, telling a story—sometimes a comic story—the vast majority of his works are lyric poems, setting forth the writer's feelings and philosophies. There is no archness in him; his unswerving honesty shines through every line, revealing the essence of the man himself. Since honest poems are a window on the poet's soul, consideration of the major themes of the poems show us the main concerns of the lonely young man in Cross Plains.

Howard's love of nature is clearly revealed in both his prose and poetry. From tiny field flowers to the broad expanse of a Texas sunset or a star-stitched velvet sky, the colors, textures, smells, and changing vistas of the land were precious to him and carefully recorded. One of Howard's very few poems in free verse was
Adventure.
It is not only a superior example of this form of art, but also valuable in illustrating his Wordsworth-like view of nature in terms of Greek myth, his rich fantasy life, and his sublimation of sex into love of adventure during his post-adolescent years.

Adventure, I have followed your beck

Through all the ages. I have sought no other lover.

I have followed o'er land and sea, dim vale and mystic moon mountains.

I have heard Pan's pipes amid moon-dappled woodlands and have seen the satyrs frolicking with nymphs upon

The fragrant sward, while the night-breezes murmured among the leaves. ...

And I've seen your nameless mountains rise from the sea of tangled

forest, and stand like sightless sombre gods Against the twilight. Adventure, I desire no other lover. . . .
⁴⁰

Even more emotionally exciting to him was the sea, and this is odd in view of the fact that he saw it but a few times in the entire course of his life. Lovingly he describes its breaking waves, its quiet surge, its storm-tossed, angry waters, and the cockleshells of ships in which puny man endeavors to conquer his ancient, timeless enemy, the raging main. Ships held an enormous attraction for him and for his heroes Kull, and Kane, and Conan. Shades of Masefield's verse can be found in the following noble lines:

Sailing-ships are anchored about that ancient isle, Ships that sailed the oceans in the dim dawn days, Coracles from Britain, triremes from the Nile. Anchored round the harbors, anchored mile on mile, Ships and ships and shades of ships fading in the haze. ...

High ships, proud ships, towering at their poops, Galleons flaunting their pinnacles of pride, Schooners and merchantmen, and long, lean sloops, Kings' ships riding with galleys on the tide.
⁴¹

And in a touching passage from "The Song of Belit," Conan of Cim-meria's true love, Belit the pirate maid, is consigned to the gentle bosom of the deep:

Now we are done with roaming, evermore;

No more the oars, the windy harp's refrain; Nor crimson pennon frights the dusky shore;

Blue girdle of the world, receive again Her whom thou gavest me.
⁴²

With striking frequency, the poems speak of Howard's all-consuming hatred and violence, as do his letters and the recollections of those who knew him—to say nothing of his stories. His
Hymn of Hate,
quoted at the head of Chapter VIII, overflows with the venom he feels for man and the works of man. We do not know the reason and can scarcely understand this always-present hatred for his fellow human beings; it speaks to his childhood rejection by infant playmates, to the sidelong stares of townsfolk who regarded him as something of a freak, and possibly to the seemingly negligent attitude of a father who was always uut among his patients and who, himself, suffered perennial hurt from (He rejection of his wife. So possessed by hate was the man who penned the following lines that the wonder is it never spilled over into acts of violence:

There burns in me no honeyed drop of love, Nor soft compassion for my brother man: I would indeed humanity possessed A single throat a keen-edged knife could span.
⁴³

Basic to Howard's nature and frequently expressed in his poetry is a sense of the sweetness of death, death that rejects no one, death that is a gateway to a happier tomorrow. Because of his deep devotion to his 111 mother, he early determined never to leave her; and he set his days' number on the life span of the one person on whose affection and companionship he could fully count. If anyone doubts that Howard's decision, made early in his life, was irrevocable, he has only to read the poetry written when Howard was in his late teens or early twenties. The famous lines in
The Tempter
state his feeling simply and unequivocally:

I was weary of tide breasting, Weary of the world's behesting, And I lusted for the resting As a lover for his bride.
⁴⁴

In another poem,
The Bride of Cuchulain,
Howard beseeches some woman (his mother?) to leave the dreary world with its bent and ancient moon and slip away with him beneath the breaking waves:

There where the spent spray lashes white sands forevermore, I will weave the pale sea flowers To twine on your pallid brow

That you may forget lost hours and Time be only Now.

Then all Earth's joys and sorrows Shall pass like ocean spray

Till all the sad tomorrows fade in one dim Today.
⁴⁵

Closely allied with Howard's celebration of death is his sincere belief that life is an obscene joke played by fate; that human beings are bestial, lust-ridden, and degenerate; and that the perceptive man can see—just beyond the ken of ordinary folk—the monsters, fetid corpses, and Devil-nurtured fiends that people the earth:

Life was a cesspool of obscenity— He saw through eyes accursed with unveiled sight— Where Lust ran rampant through a screaming Night And black-faced swine roared from the Devil's styes; Where grinning corpses, fiend-inhabited, Walked through the world with taloned hands outspread; Where beast and monster swaggered side by side, And unseen demons strummed a maddening tune; And naked witches, young and brazen-eyed, Flaunted their buttocks to a lustful moon.
⁴⁶

Robert Howard was a man who talked with demons in hells beneath hells, reeled under the assault of a soul-sucking monster with gryphon feet, saw crawling, slimy serpent-shapes at midnight, and followed the paths of ghosts. So vivid and unrelentingly persistent were these creatures of the dark, and so varied their myriad hideous forms, that we have no need to wonder why Robert, boy and man, was given to nightmares, or why as a student alone on the upper floor of a rooming house he shivered in terror when he heard a door creak. It is even less surprising that, feeling himself monster-haunted and unloved, life held no charm, gold turned to rust, and even success lacked the power to lure him back from the welcoming arms of death.

And yet, in
Recompense,
one of his most beautiful poems, Howard, ever fiercely prideful, exults in visions that transcend the horrors writhing like maggots in his skull. Undoubtedly those soul-shaking ghouls and black fiends among whom he lived were the price the artist had to pay to gain the intensity of feeling and that secret pool of magic, mysticism, and myth whence he dredged up wizards, warriors, serpents, and scoundrels to disport themselves with ceaseless energy throughout the Hyborian World. From this same intensity of feeling sprang the poetic imagery and arresting concepts, which so often enthrall us and which are so bountifully scattered throughout the following lines:

And I have felt the sudden blow of a nameless wind's cold breath, And watched the grisly pilgrims go that walk the roads of Death, And I have seen black valleys gape, abysses in the gloom, And I have fought the deathless Ape that guards the Doors of Doom.

I have not seen the face of Pan, nor mocked the dryad's haste, But I have trailed a dark-eyed Man across a windy waste. I have not died as men may die, nor sinned as men have sinned, But I have reached a misty sky upon a granite wind.
⁴⁷

There is some fun and laughter in Robert Howard's rhymes. Readers Stay enjoy the lighthearted ballad called
The Kissing of Sal Snooboo,
fklhioned as a parody of a poem by Robert W. Service or the narrative Vtrse titled
Fables for Little Folks,
which tells of a massive boxer knocked Hit by a smaller man. Howard's humorous verse is, in marked contrast to lis serious lines, uniformly undistinguished. He himself said: "Poetiz-Ing's work and travail, rhyming's pleasure and holiday. I never devoted lifer thirty minutes to any rhyme in my life."
⁴⁸
Yet, while he classed all ||a poems as mere rhymes, they vary from superb poetry to unexceptional terse.

There is one truly happy poem of childhood, quoted as a heading p Chapter VI. And in one poem—just one—the young poet sets forth If'
¹
less than lethal way to escape from the trials and confinement of a Pookkeeper's job. In
Emancipation
the miserable underling gloats over his newly gained freedom: i

But I've told the boss he can go to Hell. ^ I left him singing his hymn of Hate—

And I'm headed West on a Red Ball freight!
⁴⁹

I

" This life-loving alternative to suicide—riding the rails as a hobo— || also the solution selected by Steve Costigan, Howard's
alter ego
in
|rOtt Oaks and Sand Roughs.
But a realistic alternative for Robert himself

t
was not. A sheltered dreamer, brought up in an environment of othering protection and poor at interpersonal relations, could not have irvived the bufferings of weather, poverty, and sharp-eyed fellow hobos.

Much more real to Robert Howard were the demons and goblins )m the depths of hell, the strange and evil creatures from other worlds, the hate-filled, unregenerate humanity—the larcenous oil men, the prostitutes, and the witches who passed as fellow mortals along the

streets of Cross Plains. These "swinish" creatures, as he called them, started to gather more than ten years before that fateful dawn of Junr 11,1936. And stamping their cloven hooves and taloned feet, they began to beat out a measured funeral march from which the haunted man found no avenue of escape and sought none. He had already turned his back on life a decade or so earlier, when he penned
Lines Written in the Realization That I Must Die:

Let my name fade from the printed pages;

Dreams and visions are growing pale,

Twilight gathers and none can save me.

Well and well, for I would not stay:
⁵⁰

Some of Robert Howard's friends, including Lovecraft, have said that Howard was primarily a poet. We disagree. We consider him a great storyteller first and foremost, and one who made his prose soar at time* because he brought poetry to it. Uneven as are his poems and his prose, some of the great passages in his fiction possess the color, the imagery, the verve, the precision of language, and the rhythm that give them a dimension akin to poetry.

At times his sentences have the simple but sustained rhythmic roll that we associate with the King James Bible, possibly because in childhood his parents often read to him from the Old Testament. Or possibly that marvelous, fluid rhythm descended to him through earlier generations of Ervins and Howards, who came from the Southeast bringing with them to Texas some of the lilting speech patterns of the seventeenth century Scotch-Irish settlers. Howard liked to say: "All Celts are poets," and although he was not so pure a Celt as he wished to believe, some of the fine old speech rhythms may have come down to him through hi* storytelling Howard grandmother.