‘The Iron Harp’

James LaFond's impression of Dark Valley Destiny: The Life of Robert E. Howard by De Camp, De Camp & Griffin, Bluejay Books, 1961-83, 402 pages.

Imagine if you were a boy who was very different in outlook, born out of time if you will, brutally beat up in early elementary school, sickly in middle school years, and then, when you had grown strong and smart and the bullying stopped, you found out that school and its brain-washing teachers did not interest you—but you were told by society that your way out of the local world you didn’t fit into was through more school, and seated jobs, even though you had come to be a physical man.  Imagine having well-read parents who told stories and encouraged you to do the same, and thence wanting to be a writer.  This would, and had, with early writers, ignited a wanderlust, a feature that would become the centerpiece of Howard’s fantasy characters, but which he couldn’t engage in without abandoning his mother as she slowly died.  Now return to imagining that you are Howard, or his spirit and that three school-teacher, money-maker types, two of them Yankee academics, decided to write your story according to the incestuous theories of the perverted coke head Sigmund Freud.

Dark Valley Destiny is a biography of a counter-culture traditionalist written by the very sissy church-ladies of modernity who extinguished his stripe of writer.  The book went through many editions, is very strong on local East Texas history and biographical detail, and was focused as a commercial venture on the Conan character, as the lead author was the editor of that resurrected body of work—with CONAN the largest word on the cover.  This book is by fits and turns excellent and disgusting, with the authors obviously jealous of Howard’s natural ability yet wishing he had taken their academic course instead, in awe of the money he posthumously put in their pockets yet declaring that he would have served the world better as a book keeper or accountant, dismissive of much of his work as trash and seemingly wishful that he would have been like them and made no lasting imprint on the human consciousness.

Most disturbing were the authors’ constant insistence that the Howard family, troubled, with a sick mother who cock-blocked her son relentlessly as she died, was the problem with Robert, the reason why he committed suicide.  There are many things revealed and swept away as unworthy of consideration, such as Robert’s brutal experience being bullied in early grade school, which is nicely illuminated with a quote by Texas author Larry McMurtry and then forgotten as they accuse Howard of making up imaginary enemies later in life when in fact he had experiential reasons for suspecting that he would be attacked someday.  Such blindness is the gift of cozy modernity, a life of bookish ease in which one is not rudely reminded of the seething cruelty lurking just below the surface of human society.

Robert’s parents had fallen out early, very displeased with each other, and had molded the family unit to focus on their son, their joy, both of them immensely proud of him and eventually dependent upon him.  Robert became very strong swinging a sledge against a post every day, singing and shadow boxing on county roads and typing away at night.  He bought the car that took his mother to clinics, paid her bills and became a partner in financing the family with his father who openly loved him and was obviously the model for the fierce, black-haired blue-eyed warriors such as Kull, Kane, Bran Mak Morn, Black Vulmea and Conan.  His father was also a generous man, a doctor who treated patients on the promise of produce while his mother wanted the womanish things that only money may buy.

He had a lifelong obsession with suicide, lived like a visitor on this planet and wrote of suicide longingly in no less than 7 works.  Yet the authors blame his suicide on his parents, zeroing in on his father, who brought people over to watch Robert, who hid one of his guns and to whom Robert declared calmly that he would be killing himself and that he knew his father—heroized in so many tales—had the mettle to go on with life.  Robert seems to have been tender about his discussion with his father and shot himself in the head before his mother expired to trick the suicide watch.  Besides, the sickly boy had grown into a bull of a man with a quiet resolve and was not going to be deterred.

The authors continued to suggest that Howard was dependent on his mother, that she made him weak, misinterpreting the evidence they show, that he did not ever argue with her, quietly did as he pleased against her wishes, nursed her, keeping vigil by her bed and conducting hospice care all night, transported her and regarded her quite obviously as a vulnerable dependent under his care, despite her passive-aggressive attempts to keep him from seeing young women.  Hester Howard was a shit mother in many ways, but she supported her son in his creative work, unlike most modern mothers who stand as gatekeepers and invalidators against their son’s dreams.

Isaac Howard, while as shit a husband as his wife was a shit wife, was devoted to her care regardless and also to the development of his son, of whom he was obviously proud.  When young Robert, bent on suicide, tenderly informs his father that he is strong enough to go on and asks where he will go when Robert is gone, his father, in his response, says that he will go were his son goes, revealing that the 30 year old son had become the leader of the family, more than its focus—this reader keeping in mind that his parents were in their 60s.  Robert E. Howard seems to have only remained among the living to keep from hurting his mother, and he never lived to see the age of his parents when he was born, having lived less than half their spans.

According to those he left behind, Howard, though strange, was kind, giving and helpful and always gave more to a relationship than he got, with vast spans of quiet politeness, punctuated by occasional loud song, incessant typing, public shadowboxing and moments of acute paranoia about whatever memories or demons haunted him. He was a man who dated a beautiful willful woman for many long hours and never tried to have sex with her although she said of him that he was a passionate kisser.  Howard’s life, reads to this reader as a visitation by a soul unfit for his time and place yet dedicated to those who shared his exile space.  Loyalty to Howard was a talisman.

This reader is indebted to the wretched authors of Dark Valley Destiny for their work and forgiving of their twisted opinions, for they wrote when the world that Howard somehow intuitively knew was a lie, was in its glory season, its fat time of fleeting plenty borne on false wings, and they its delicately budding fruit of delusion.  Howard’s biographers come off as the lotus eating zombies of various dying cities he wrote of in his fiction.

Howard was deeply sensitive about death and suffering in others yet longed for his own end.  As a person who tried to will myself to suicide every night as a teenager as I sat in bed with my knife, unable to bring myself to do the thing because of the image of my mother crying hysterically over my gutted body, I can empathize with someone as out of place in life as Robert E. Howard, and also with him not wanting to hurt his mother by way of his departure while also assuming his father could handle his death.

To close with some of Howard’s suicide poetry, typed moments before his suicide:

All fled—all done, so lift me on the pyre;
The feast is over and the lamps expire.

And from The Tempter:

“Who are you?” I asked the phantom,
“I am Rest from Hate and Pride.
“I am friend to king and beggar,
“I am Alpha and Omega,
“I was councilor to Hagar
“But men call me Suicide.”
I was weary of tide breasting,
Weary of the world’s behesting,
And I lusted for the resting
As a lover for his bride.

Throughout Howard’s own work suicide is considered as the last honorable act of the doomed, a taking away of oneself from the fields of humiliation which some experience in life.  For a postmodern look at a Howard like character, I would suggest the movie Phenomenon, starring John Travolta, the story of a socially awkward rural man stricken with an odd insight that set his mind to racing.  Howard’s prodigious output as a writer and considering his age, his odd jobs and the care of his mother and time spent musing alone and in company, suggests that his mind might have been locked into some kind of overdrive, which may have driven his death wish as much as his sense of being a man out of place and out of time.

Thanks to Nero the Pict for the loan of this important book.

(c) 2019 James LaFond