Dark Valley Destiny Read Free

death was a premeditated act. He knew that Robert had been thinking about suicide and death for a long time. When Robert put his affairs in order and informed his father of his wishes for the disposition of his small property, Dr. Howard tried to dissuade him from the act.
    Still, the troubled father appeared to be almost resigned to his son's decision. When, on the day before he died, Robert went to Brownwood and made funeral arrangements and then, returning to his room, spent the evening sorting out his papers, Dr. Howard seemed curiously detached. Perhaps he found his son's agitation difficult to grasp, or perhaps he was weary of futile persuasion.
    Dr. Howard seemed to know that Robert had "lost himself." Perhaps he sensed his son's compulsion—as if there were some kind of destiny laid upon him from which he had no recourse. Dr. Howard believed that his son's fatal attachment to his mother crystallized in his mind when he was a small child because Robert's mother had been the boy's only companion and because he, the doctor, busy with his practice, had had little time to "cultivate and shape" his son's course through the years. All this the distracted father wrote to Robert's friends Frank Torbett and H. P. Lovecraft during the June weeks that followed the tragic day of Robert's death. 9
    Robert E. Howard—"Robert" to his family and neighbors and "Bob" to his few close friends—was an enigma not only to his father but also to the young men who knew him best. Tevis Clyde Smith, his first publisher and a staunch friend to the end of Howard's life, often felt distress at Bob's bitterness, his frequent expressions of suicidal intent, and his fear of nonexistent enemies. He reported that Bob's expectation of personal assault was such that he ordered his pants cuffed two inches higher than the current style because he wanted his feet, always encased in high-topped shoes like a prizefighter's, to be free from entangling trouser legs should he have to defend himself. 10
    Truett Vinson, another close friend—who, along with Smith, was one of the Brownwood writing group—found incomprehensible qualities in Howard, with whom he briefly became a rival for the attentions of a local schoolteacher. Vinson considered Howard odd, although he could never quite define the nature of this oddness. A restrained and literate man himself, Vinson had little patience with Howard's excesses. He considered his friend's stories "trash" and said so. Consequently the two men rarely discussed their writings. 11
    Yet, Vinson continued his friendship with Howard, even though he did not understand him. But then, claimed Vinson, no one else understood him either. Each accepted the other as he was; and on this brusque honesty the friendship rested.
    E. Hoffmann Price reported to Lovecraft that some people considered Howard "freakish, uncouth . . . provincial in some respects." Despite this judgment, Price felt great affection for Howard and added that Bob was "a courtly, gracious, kindly, and hospitable person." 12 Still, Price recognized the complexity of Howard's personality, which he described as all light and shadow, deeply ambivalent, paranoid on occasion, full of dreamings and broodings. This very complexity was a challenge to Price, who was still trying to sort it out eighteen years later. 13 Price believed that Howard's attachment to home and family had deprived him of the social interaction essential to any child for the development of a clear-cut sense of self and others—an insight widely supported in the psychological literature of today.
    Even Harold Preece, who was introduced to Howard in 1927 by Truett Vinson and who defended Howard's soundness of mind as proved by his creativity, spoke of Howard as "a strange man." "Reading Howard's collected verse made me realize he was always a stranger even if I called him a friend," wrote Preece. He regretted that this "Tristan," as Howard's cousin Maxine Ervin called him, had not found an "Isolde"