Dark Valley Destiny (47 page)

Where he had no friends to put him up, Lovecraft stayed at YMCAs. He saved laundry bills by washing his own shirts and underwear in the washbasin, and cut his own hair with a gadget that enabled him to trim it in back with the help of two mirrors. By buying cheap groceries, like bread and canned beans, and eating in his room, he survived on a ten-cent breakfast and a fifteen-cent dinner. He figured on $1.75 a week for food and a dollar a night for lodging.

In May 1932 Lovecraft set out on a journey to the South. After visiting friends in New York, he went on to Washington, Knoxville, Memphis, Natchez, and New Orleans. From New Orleans he wrote "Two-Gun Bob," informing him of the journey.

Robert was aghast. Thrice he had invited Lovecraft to visit, promising tours of the historical sites of Texas. Now here was Lovecraft, a not impossible distance away; and he, Bob Howard, could not even afford
the
bus fare to go to see him!

For some time Howard had been toying with the idea of buying •n automobile and learning to drive when he had accumulated enough
ready
cash. He daydreamed of driving his Rhode Island friend on a
grand
tour of his beloved state. But the previous year's bank failures
had
wiped out his savings, and the months during which he was unable
to
write salable copy had emptied his pipelines to the publishers. To make matters worse, even they were battening down the hatches to Weather the Depression.

Fiction House, a regular buyer of his Sailor Steve Costigan yarns for
Action Stories
and
Fight Stories,
had suspended its entire line of pulps, leaving only Farnsworth Wright's
Weird Tales
and
Oriental Stories
as
dependable outlets. Although the Conan tales showed promise, none
had
as yet been published and paid for.

Not expecting Lovecraft to appear just then, Robert had spent what money he could scrape together on his trip to San Antonio and the Border. He had not even been able to accept an invitation from Kirk Mashburn in Houston to spend a weekend there. Howard had written to Mashburn, who was a minor contributor of fiction and verse to
Weird Tales
and a writer of nonfantastic pulp stories, to praise his writing. Mashburn then invited Howard and another
Weird Tales
writer, E. Hoffmann Price, to come to Houston. But Howard, out of funds, had to decline.

Price, then in his early thirties, was a man of parts: soldier, writer, automobile mechanic, photographer, and amateur Orientalist. He was trying to keep afloat during the Depression by writing pulp fiction in New Orleans. In desperation, Howard sent Price a telegram, telling him where to find Lovecraft.

Never having met or corresponded with Price, the shy Lovecraft "thought I wouldn't butt in and introduce myself";
²
but the extroverted Price had no such inhibitions. He went around to the third-class hotel where the traveler was staying and carried him off to his own apartment. There the two men talked and ate and talked the clock around.

Since Lovecraft's slender funds could not be stretched to cover a visit to Texas, he returned to Providence at the beginning of July. There
he
found his aunt in a terminal coma and a letter from Howard, bitterly lamenting his inability to go to New Orleans:

It is with the utmost humiliation that I begin this letter. It had long been my intention, since you first mentioned, a year ago, your intention of visiting New Orleans,... to meet you and show you my native country. I intended buying an automobile. .. . But. . . the failure of certain banks, the crumpling of fiction markets, and other conditions reduced me suddenly to that penniless condition out of which I had begun slowly and painfully to climb.
³

The pen pals never did meet, although for the rest of Howard's life they kept up a voluminous, usually cordial, sometimes acrimonious, and always lively correspondence. Price was the only person to meet both of them in the flesh, and one of the few remaining to report on these meetings.

Ever since, admirers of Howard and Lovecraft have thought it a pity that these two exceptional men failed to shake each other's hands. Well, perhaps. The meeting might have generated wide-ranging discussions that later letters would have preserved for posterity. But we cannot be certain.

Lovecraft, always under gentlemanly self-control, could be pleasant to almost anyone; but the moody and passionate Howard, ever suspicious and hypersensitive to slights, was less predictable. He might have taken to the slim, ascetic sage of Providence; but then again he might not have. In the latter case Lovecraft might have fared no better than the uncongenial poet from the East, and the correspondence between them might have dried up like an arroyo in summertime.

During the summer and fall of 1932, Robert Howard received several substantial checks—many over one hundred dollars—for novelettes that he had sold in the first half of the year. Hence, as the long Texan summer waned, he once again found himself in funds and, being in a position to gratify a long-standing desire, persuaded his father to drive him and his friend Lindsey Tyson to Arlington, a town between Dallas and Fort Worth, to an automobile agency.

There Bob chose a used 1931 Chevrolet, a dark-green two-door sedan. The salesman was thunderstruck when the young man, instead of asking for the usual time payment, pulled out a roll of bills, peeled off $350.00, and handed over the full sales price. On the way back to Cross Plains, Tyson showed his friend how to drive. The doctor, surpris-

Ingly,
had never done so—perhaps, according to one friend, because Robert had never shown interest in the art. He had no mechanical Aptitude; according to another friend: "Bob knew very little about math
ind
nothing about anything to do with machinery. He never could Understand the workings of a combustion engine."

Asked what sort of driver Howard became, several people could
Ncall
nothing noteworthy about his driving one way or the other. But
One
friend, who made a long trip with Bob in 1935, stated that Howard WAS "a terrible driver."
⁴
If one remembers that driving conditions were
not
exacting in Depression-ridden Texas, with its long, straight, level
roads
and its extremely light traffic, and that Texas in those days did not
even
require a driver's license, it is easy to see how Howard ran his car, despite poor driving skills, without causing serious damage.

His only accident occurred a few days after Christmas in 1933. Bob had driven Lindsey Tyson, David Lee, and Dave Lee's cousin Bill Calhoun to Brownwood to watch some prizefights. Returning on the night
Of
December 29th, in heavy fog and rain, he ran head-on into a steel flagpole set in concrete in the middle of the street in the town of Rising
Star.

Fortunately the car was moving slowly. As it was, Bob bent the Iteering wheel into a pretzel and received a gash on the side of his jaw
And
cuts on his hands. One of his passengers had his scalp laid open; another suffered a badly wrenched leg. Howard telephoned his father,
who
fetched him home and sewed him up, while a passerby took the
Others
to a local hospital.

Rising Star paid part of the cost of repairing Howard's car. After another motorist also ran into the flagpole, the town fathers had the obstacle removed. By March 16th, Robert was able to drive to Brown-
Wood
to see other prizefights and to go on to San Angelo for a beer bust.
⁵

One of Robert's first expeditions after getting his car was to drive
his
mother to Brownwood for medical tests at the hospital. While Mrs. Howard was so occupied, Clyde Smith took Bob to meet a college student whom he had been dating. The girl was a pretty, slender brunette of medium height, named Novalyne Price. They found her sitting on the
porch
of her grandmother's house, studying for a physics examination
at
Daniel Baker College, the school she attended.

A lively, argumentative girl, Miss Price had grown up on a nearby
farm
and planned to become a teacher. She had literary leanings and had been drawn to Smith more by this common interest than by any strong personal chemistry. Novalyne had heard a great deal about Robert How-ard, whom Smith regarded as an ideal—a successful writer. The fact that Howard was a published writer showered him with the gold dust of glamour in her eyes, too.

Both young men were in a loud-mouthed, boisterous mood. Seeing that this display of high spirits annoyed Novalyne, Bob quickly toned down his manner. Novalyne felt drawn to this massive, good-looking young man at once, despite his dingy clothing. His deep-set blue eyes, under their heavy brows, fascinated her.
⁶

The three took a short drive around the countryside before Bob had to go back to the hospital to pick up his mother. The Howards returned to Cross Plains, and for two years Bob and Novalyne saw nothing of each other.

As the rest of 1932 rumbled by, Robert took short drives in his car, usually with his mother. He explored the country around the artificial Lake Brownwood, newly created by a dam on the Pecan Bayou. With Smith and Vinson, he talked of building a cabin on the shores of the lake and growing some of their own food there; but nothing came of these pipe dreams.
⁷

Over Thanksgiving, Howard drove Lindsey Tyson to a football game between Howard Payne College and Southwestern University. In a fever of enthusiasm, he spent three single-spaced pages describing the details of the game to Lovecraft, to whom no sport was of the slightest interest.

Howard continued arguing with Lovecraft about the relative importance of the mental and the physical. The sage of Providence conceded the importance of a sound body, but he deprecated the habit of the unthinking masses who spent valuable hours watching sporting events. What disturbed Lovecraft, and many another philosopher, was that these people were wasting time needed to develop their intellectual and artistic-faculties.
⁸

Although Lovecraft kept his lectures impersonal, his hypersensitive correspondent persisted in taking his friend's pronouncements personally. Vehemently Howard replied that physical development was valuable to anybody who, like himself, was forced from time to time to do hard manual work, such as moving bales of hay or feed for animals. Actually, Howard was not handy with tools and did little work on the house and grounds, save when some task requiring great strength was required.

And so the argument raged, with Lovecraft taking an impersonal view of the antics of his fellow primates and Howard taking umbrage at Lovecraft's abstract generalizations. After one especially sharp reply to Lovecraft's arguments, Robert tried to make amends. He wrote:

The fact is, I wrote while in the grip of one of the black moods which occasionally—though fortunately rarely—descend on me. With one of these moods riding me, I can see neither good nor hope in anything, and my main sensation is a blind, brooding rage directed at anything that may cross my path—a perfectly impersonal feeling, of course. At such times I am neither a fit companion nor a gentlemanly correspondent. I avoid personal contacts as much as possible, in order to avoid giving offense by my manner. . . .
⁹

Howard blamed his moodiness on his Celtic ancestry, but we doubt that his Irish forbears were all as violent-tempered as he. Nonetheless, his assertion about his irascibility was probably true enough, and his "outbursts of really dangerous fury, when crossed or thwarted"
¹⁰
led him to fear that he might kill someone in a fit of rage, a fear that was not altogether unfounded.

Although Lovecraft, who was in his absentminded way the most tactful and considerate of men, never descended to making biting remarks or to sneering at his pen pal, "Two-Gun Bob" continued to take many of his remarks personally and to be angered by them. But then, Howard took a personal view of everything; his many virtues did not include detachment, impersonality, or objectivity.

Throughout 1933 Robert Howard's outer life appeared to be placid, routine, and uneventful. He sat at home and typed to his heart's content. He attended numerous prizefights and football games. He took his ailing mother on automobile trips. He listened to such cultural programs as he could pick up on his radio—talks by Irvin S. Cobb, Mohandas K. Gandhi, Sax Rohmer, George William Russell, and Alexander Woollcott. He enjoyed plays by Moliere, Shakespeare, and Sophocles, as well as music by Beethoven, Liszt, and Wagner.
¹¹
It is a pity that Howard was unable to indulge his cultural bent more widely. Although he pretended to be just a common man with common tastes, it is likely that he would have immersed himself in more elite entertainment had it been within his reach.

Howard did continue to read omnivorously. One fine piece of storytelling in particular captured his attention. This was his pen pal August Derleth's autobiographical novel
Evening in Spring,
a work that Derleth started in 1930 but that was published only in 1941. A tale of young love in rural Wisconsin, the story tells of a Catholic youth who falls in love with a Protestant girl, only to have the match destroyed by the two mothers' fierce opposition. Since Howard's taste in literature was generally poles apart from Derleth's bucolic realism, we wonder whether Robert's interest in this story reflects in some way his chaffing under the yoke of his parental domination.

At the end of March 1933, Robert tucked his mother into his Chevrolet and drove to Austin, then on to San Antonio to escape the spring sandstorms in their own region. He endured several weeks among Hester Howard's friends, until a heat wave drove them back to Cross Plains. Howard was not sorry, for after a week in any city he felt "caged, imprisoned."
¹²

During the ensuing months, Howard made several other short trips. Three times he went to Dallas on business, the nature of which he did not disclose in his letters. On his way home he meandered about the state, seeking historical lore in the ruins of old army posts and abandoned forts. He also took excursions, usually with his mother, through the neighboring counties; and once he drove to Stamford, 135 miles away, to see the annual rodeo. Then, after Christmas, he made the ill-fated trip that ended up in collision with the flagpole.