Dark Valley Destiny (48 page)

During the spring of 1934, Robert Howard's zealous letter-writing paid off. E. Hoffmann Price and his new wife, Wanda, en route from Paw-huska, Oklahoma, to California, arrived at the Howard house in their Model A Ford on the afternoon of April 8th. Price, who had been eking out his minuscule earnings as a writer by working as a garage mechanic, detoured southward to meet his pen pal; and on the way they had an adventure.

Having driven all the night, the Prices crossed the Red River bridge Into Texas a little after sunrise. Travel-weary, Price asked Wanda to light t cigar for him. As she bit off the end and struck a match, a posse of sheriffs deputies leaped out of the bushes and stopped their car. Seeing
a
woman lighting a cigar led them to believe that they had come upon the notorious outlaw couple Clyde Barrow and Bonnie Parker, who were being sought after throughout the state. The astonished young people established their identities and chugged on to Cross Plains.

Since the date of the Prices' arrival was uncertain, Bob Howard had gone out of town. The elder Howards welcomed their visitors warmly. Mrs. Howard even turned over her bedroom to the guests and led the sleepy bride away to rest. Ed Price was not so fortunate; he was grilled for hours by Dr. Howard, who wanted to know all about writing and publishing; about Seabury Quinn, H. P. Lovecraft, and the other
Weird Tales
authors; and especially about the long delays of Robert's checks.

Price told him: "Doctor, we are all getting screwed. No one is discriminating against Bob. Well, yes, Wright, the editor, and Sprenger, the business manager, do get their pay checks regularly, but we authors ..."

After dinner Isaac Howard again fixed Price with his hypnotic gaze and continued the inquisition, while the exhausted young writer smothered his yawns.

Price found the doctor's aggressive personality formidable and unforgettable. Many years later Price reported: "At times I got the fantastic notion that the father rather than the son must have been the author. I cannot remember ever having met another man who had eyes as penetrating as Dr. Howard's; clear, ice-blue, vibrant with expression, seconding his voice with gestures. White-haired, shaggy-browed, a face marked by rugged lines. . . ."
¹³
We are fortunate indeed that E. Hoffmann Price not only has a discerning eye but also a surpassing memory; for, thanks to his reporting, we have gained many valuable insights into the complex relationships among members of the Howard family.

The following morning at breakfast, the Prices met Bob, who had arrived home after they were asleep. Price remembers that he was "Tall, broad, towering—squarish tanned face, deep chest, short and very solid neck—a lot of man. His expression was stolid, phlegmatic until he thrust out a big hand, and smiled, and spoke. The quiet friendliness of his voice came as a surprise. . . ."
¹⁴

Price needed a haircut, so he and Bob set out for the village barbershop, talking as they went. Price noted two idiosyncrasies in Howard's speech: He pronounced the noun "wound" to rhyme with "sound," and the word "sword" like "sward." It is probable that Howard had learned these words from early childhood reading, long before he had heard them pronounced by other people.

On this occasion Bob used none of the proletarian locutions that he sometimes affected, but he said something that was most revealing: "Ed, I am God damn proud to have you come to see me."

"I don't see what the hell
you've
got to be proud of in my coming," Price replied. "It's kind of t'other way about."

"Nobody thinks I amount to much," said Bob. "So I am proud to show these sons of bitches that a successful writer goes thousands of miles out of his way to visit me."
¹⁵

At this, Price reflected on the year he had spent scrambling for the money for groceries and on the fact that Howard was doing better than he was as a writer.

After his haircut, Price expressed an interest in the local methods of drilling for oil, so Howard took him to a lot outside the town on which a shallow-well drilling rig was chunking away. The Dutchman in charge explained the machinery. As they walked away, Bob asked his visitor: "Did he cut you off short? If he did, I'll go back and give him hell; none of these bastards can snub my friends!"

Reassured that the oilman had been most cooperative, Howard asked abruptly: "Ed, have you got any enemies?"

Price stared in surprise. "I don't think I have."

Howard received this denial with such amazement that Price lamely added: "Well, there are a few bastards, but they are so chicken-shit that I can't pay them the compliment of calling them enemies."
¹⁶

Howard, who felt man's hate for man to be the normal state in human relationships, seemed relieved by this avowal.

After lunch Price settled down in Bob's small room to talk about writing. Price, who had read some of the manuscripts of the humorous Westerns on which Bob had begun working, said with enthusiasm: "This is great stuff. You'll make the big slicks or the quality mags; this is real!"
¹⁷

In the course of the conversation, Howard explained that he did
not
outline a story in advance. As we have learned from other sources
tnd
from surviving synopses of his unfinished stories, this was not altogether true. Many of his stories were carefully planned. Some writ
ers,
whose subconscious minds do the necessary planning before the
Writing
begins, do seem to write "off the top of their heads." But a Writer using this technique often finds that his subconscious has gone
on
strike, leaving him stranded in mid-story. The fact that Howard did lometimes try to write in this plunging fashion may explain why he left lo many tales uncompleted. He may also have exaggerated the extent to which he wrote without planning, being swayed by the romantic picture of the writer who, afire with his own genius, whips out a masterpiece without the mundane tasks of plotting and outlining.

Price later reminisced: "He composed instinctively, without any conscious attention to form. He told me, 'Of every three stories; I scrap two and offer the third; it's easier than trying for conscious technique which would give me perhaps only a third as many stories, all of which Would sell. What in hell's the difference; I like to write.' "
¹⁸

Howard was fascinated by Price's discussion of the martial arts, •uch as fencing. He later wrote Lovecraft regretting the fact that fencing masters were rare in Texas and that, when he and a friend tried to teach themselves using army swords as foils, he ran his sword through his friend's hand. After that, he never tried to fence again.
¹⁹

As the afternoon wore on and the two young men were closeted in Robert's small room, Wanda Price and Mrs. Howard were chatting in the parlor, a few steps from the closed door. The telephone rang. When Mrs. Howard answered, Wanda heard a woman's voice asking for Robert. Hester told the caller that her son was not at home, although his voice
Could
be heard through the closed door.
²⁰

Who the caller was remains a mystery to this day; but this strange incident suggests that Robert, at twenty-eight, had sewn the seeds of friendship with at least one of the local girls, that she was attracted by the charm that Bob could display upon occasion, and that she, at least,
did
not dismiss him as the town eccentric.

The incident, moreover, may shed light on Robert's lack of feminine companionship. We know that a year later, when her son did begin dating regularly, Hester Howard did all she could to discourage the friendship, including the interception of telephone calls. Had there been earlier tentative efforts by Bob to make friends with a local lass, they would have withered away in the heat of Hester Howard's implacable hostility.

Of this, if he knew of it, Robert said nothing to his visitor. After all, to permit his mother to turn away his feminine acquaintances would not have cast him in a heroic mold—a mold Bob Howard fostered to mask his very vulnerable spirit.

The next day, April the eleventh, Howard drove the Prices out to see the countryside. Price was less than ecstatic about the scenery: ". . . nothing to see except 'post oak', the scrubbiest of scrub oak, and vast stretches of space, relieved only by far off mountain ranges."
²¹

As Bob talked Texan lore along the road to Brownwood, the car neared a clump of mesquite. Price reports that Bob stopped the car, took his pistol out of the glove compartment, and stalked toward the mesquite in Western gunfighter style. Soon he returned to the car, saying: "I have a lot of enemies; everyone has around here. Wasn't that I figured we were running into anything, but I had to make sure . . . the way everyone is feuding even to this day . . . you're likely to run into an enemy almost everywhere you go."
²²

Texans were notorious for the japes they played on tenderfeet. They liked to persuade their visitors that they were about to be scalped by Comanches or shot by badmen, so we asked Price whether Howard's bizarre behavior was a Texas "put-on." Price emphatically rejected this idea, saying that it would have been entirely out of character, considering Howard's high regard for Price and the earnest efforts he made to offer hospitality to his guests.

At sunset the Prices bade farewell to Bob at a service station on the outskirts of Cross Plains. Ed Price preferred to drive at night in the hope that his 1933 license plates would pass unnoticed until he reached California, where the cost of new plates was low. Mindful of what Price had revealed about his meager earnings from writing during the early months of 1934, Bob said in parting: "Ed, I know you are going to make it. You God-damn well are going to. Good luck!"
²³

As Bob Howard waved him off, Price was left with an impression that has not faded in the intervening years. He concluded that Howard was:

A complex and baffling personality one can't—couldn't—get all at once. An overgrown boy—a brooding anachronism—a scholar—a gripping, compelling writer—a naive boy scout—a man of great emotional depth, yet strangely self-conscious of many emotional phases which he unjustly claimed he could never put into writing fiction—a burly, broad faced, not unduly shrewd-looking fellow at first glance—a courtly, gracious, kindly, hospitable person—a hearty, rollicking, gusty, spacious personality loving tales and deeds that reeked of sweat and dust and dung of horses and sheep and camels—a blustering, boyishly extravagantly-spoken boy who made up whopping stories about the country and people and himself, not to deceive or fool you, but because he loved the sweep of the words and knew you liked to hear him hold forth—a fanciful, sensitive, imaginative soul, hidden in that big bluff hulk.
²⁴

Many years later, in a letter dated June 21, 1944, Dr. I. M. Howard Confirmed the accuracy of Price's character analysis. The letter begins thus:

Dear Mr. E. Hoffmann Price:

Just received the copy of Diablerie. You do not know how real your picture of Robert's personality was portrayed. So real it was that I could almost feel as if Robert stood before me again, alive, laughing, talking as when he was here with me; that I could feel again the warmth of his living person, could see him smile and hear his soft voice in all its penetrating clearness, even the tone of it wholly unimpaired. The wonder of it, how one with only two visits could gather so perfectly his personality. Having lived right with Robert in such close association with him from his babyhood to the end of his life, I could not have portrayed the man as you did with only a passing hand touch with him. Robert had many acquaintances, but only two boys in Cross Plains were close to him. Indeed, Robert was a lonely man because the people around him understood little of his life and the character of the man. His writing little appealed to those around. The newsstands carried the magazines which carried his stories for a time, but quit altogether handling WEIRD TALES and other magazines carrying Robert's stories. Robert is dead to the people of Cross Plains; he is, I dare say, a forgotten memory. . . .
²⁵

E.
Hoffmann Price was not the only visitor to the little house in Cross Plains in 1934. In May, Truett Vinson spent his one-week vacation with
Bob.
The first day the pair drove southwest in Vinson's car to Ballinger, looking for movies and beer. In the course of this drive, they conceived the idea of a longer trip; and the next morning they set out, Vinson again at the wheel. After a hard day, they reached the famous Carlsbad Cav erns. Howard was astounded by the giant cave system. He felt that nature had indulged herself in a riot of fantasy and suspended natural law in creating this twilight underworld. As he clambered along narrow ramp* and stairs that led upward from the depths that engulfed him, Howaril imagined that he was living a nightmare in his waking hours. Being » young man who had experienced silence and scenes no less eerie during a lifetime of night terrors and nightmares, the great, gray vaults struck an echo of horror in the depths of his heart.
²⁶

The friends went on to El Paso, at the western tip of Texas, and crossed over to Ciudad Juarez to drink beer and tequila before returning home by a southerly route via Fort Stockton and San Angelo. They had driven 1,137 miles in four days. On his return Howard sent his pen pal Lovecraft a large, hairy arachnid, either the evil-smelling, harmless vinegarroon or one of the mildly venomous burrowing mygalomorpli spiders commonly called "tarantulas," safely enclosed in a bottle ol alcohol.
²⁷
Then he settled back to his writing.

Conan stories, previously discussed, poured out of his typewriter. But Howard also found time to spin other yarns of derring-do. He plunged into a series of tales about Francis X. Gordon, which he had started in the twenties, and sold five. Nine others were never finished, and three were finished but never sold. In these stories Howard's fictional Gordon, a former gunman from El Paso, Texas, is a soldier of fortune in the Middle East during the early years of this century. Gordon combines the traits of the real "Chinese" Gordon and Sir Richard Francis Burton, as described in
Dreamers of Empire
(1929) by Achmed Abdullah and T. Compton Pakenham, and of Thomas Edward Lawrence, as set forth in
With Lawrence in Arabia
(1924) by Lowell Thomas. Both books Howard had read.