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
