Dark Valley Destiny Read online

  To investigate the relationship between Robert Howard's life and his art is the purpose of this book. Who was this man who transformed Dark Valley, Texas, into Cimmeria and all West Texas into a continent contemporary with Atlantis? What essence of self was projected into his fictional characters? Was he a barbarian, like Conan? A buffoon, like Breckenridge Elkins, his comical cowboy character? Or was he the desperately tragic hero of his poetry? What events influenced his personal development? What was the impact of the times upon his personality? What assumptions and dispositions determined his values? And, finally, what led him to take his own life when he stood on the threshold of a successful literary career?

  II. DESTINY'S CHILD

  At birth a witch laid on me monstrous spells, And I have trod strange highroads all my days, Turning my feet to gray, unholy ways. I grope for stems of broken asphodels; High on the rims of bare, fiend-haunted fells, I follow cloven tracks that lie ablaze; And ghosts have led me through the moonlight's haze To talk with demons in their granite hells.1

  Robert Ervin Howard was born on January 24, 1906, in Peaster, Texas, a village in Parker County, ten miles northwest of Weatherford and thirty-five miles due west of Fort Worth.2 The Howards at that time lived in Dark Valley, a community of some fifty souls in Palo Pinto County, near the Parker County border; but Dr. Howard had taken his wife to Peaster, a larger settlement in the adjacent county, as her confinement drew near. He wished, presumably, to insure adequate medical facilities for her lying-in, as well as the services of Dr. J. A. Williams, the physician who attended Mrs. Howard at the birth of her only child.

  Although little is known about his condition at the time of his birth, it is fair to say that Robert Howard's personality was to be determined, not only by his childhood health and the surroundings in which lived, but also by the kind of people his parents were. It is, therefore, instructive to review the family history and to consider his parents' personalities, experiences, and beliefs.

  Robert Howard was proud of his mother's family, the Ervins, whose name he bore. He wrote his friend Lovecraft that, whether or not he ever wrote his projected history of the Southwest, people of his blood had had a hand in making it. His kinsmen, he said, were among the riflemen at King's Mountain and with Andrew Jackson at New Orleans. He had three uncles in the gold rush of '49, a Howard and two Martins, one of whom had left his bones on the trail. Both grandfathers, he went on, had ridden for four years with Nathan Bedford Forrest, the Confederate cavalry general. A great-grandfather had served in the Confederate Army, too, as had several great-uncles, one of whom fell in the battle of Macon, Georgia.

  Howard also related how his maternal grandfather, Colonel George Washington Ervin, arrived in Texas while the land was still wild. He went on to New Mexico before it became a state to work a silver mine until he was driven out by Geronimo's Apaches. An aunt went to live in Indian Territory with her husband before the Settlements of 1889; and an uncle settled in Oklahoma while it was still a territory swarming with untamed Indians and fugitive white criminals from other parts.3

  The Ervin family had been established since 1724 in the northeastern part of North Carolina near the Virginia line. Here in 1801, Howard's great-grandfather, the first Robert Ervin, was born on a plantation close to the shores of Currituck Sound. At the age of twenty-three, Robert Ervin married Jane Tennyson, also a member of an old Tidewater family. The couple settled on a plantation near Raleigh where, in 1830, George Washington Ervin first saw the light of day.

  Caught up in the westward movement of the 1840s, Robert Ervin took his family to Tennessee and thence, in 1842, to a farm near Iuka in Tishomingo County at the northeastern corner of Mississippi. Here George Washington Ervin grew to manhood and here, on July 26, 1849, in his twentieth year, he married Sarah Jane Martin, the daughter of Dr. Thomas Martin, who had recently come to Tishomingo County from Tennessee.4

  The drift of population westward continued; and the young couple soon said good-bye to Sarah Jane's brothers Joseph and Benjamin Franklin Martin who, smitten by gold fever, were off to California. The first child of G. W. Ervin and Sarah Jane was Marilda, born on November 13, 1850. Her sister Chestena followed on Christmas Eve of 1852. Christopher C. Ervin arrived in 1855, and his brother was born eighteen months later. Before her death in 1874, Sarah Jane Martin had borne her husband ten children.5

  ROBERT E. HOWARD'S PATERNAL LINES OF DESCENT

  THE HENRYS

  Shamus McHenry (Jim Henry)

  b. circa 1778 on shipboard d. 1861

  (m) in 1796 Anna O'Tyrrell, who was

  born in Ireland Family moved from South Carolina to Tuscaloosa County, AL, to farm.

  THE HOWARDS

  Family settled in Oglethorpe County, GA, in 1733.

  James Henry, Jr.

  b. 1811 in South Carolina

  1884 in Quachita, County, AR Sept. 9, 1834, Mary Ann Walser, who was born in Georgia, 1816 daughter of Sam Walser Family moved to a plantation in Mississippi and hired William Benjamin Howard as manager.

  Louisa Elizabeth (Eliza) Henry

  d.

  (m)

  Dec. 6, 1856 (m)

  Henry Howard

  Living in Oglethorpe County, GA, in 1849

  A schoolteacher and farmer; had three sons, all of whom went west during The Gold Rush.

  William Benjamin Howard

  b. 1840 in Alabama; a da. of James Henry, Jr., and Mary Ann Walser d. 1916 in Delia, TX; buried in

  Antioch Cemetery, nearby (m) William Benjamin Howard 1856 and had 6 children, including Isaac Mordecai Howard.

  Circa 1830 in Oglethorpe, GA, a son of Henry Howard 1885 in Holly Springs, AR Dec. 6, 1856, Louisa Eliza Hei for whose parents he served as plantation manager Fought in the Civil War.

  d.

  (m)

  b. Jan. 24, 1906, in Peaster, Texas

  d. June 11, 1936, in Cross Plains,

  Isaac Mordecai Howard

  b. April 1, 1871, in Holly

  Springs, AR d. Nov. 12, 1944, in Ranger, Texas Physician who practiced medicine in various locations.

  ROBERT E. HOWARD'S MATERNAL LINES OF DESCENT THE ERVINS THE MARTINS

  Family settled in North Carolina near the Virginia border in 1724.

  Robert Ervin

  b. 1801 in North Carolina near

  Currituck Sound d. date unknown

  (m) in 1824 Jane Tennyson, da. of an old Tidewater plantation family in North Carolina Family moved to Tishomingo County, MS.

  July 20, 1849 George Washington Ervin (m)

  b. 1830 near Raleigh, NC, son of Robert Ervin and Jane Tennyson d. 1900 in Exeter, MO A colonel in the Civil War; a restless promoter who moved family often. Had 16 children in all.

  Thomas Martin

  A physician who came to Tishomingo County, MS, from Tennessee Circa 1835 with his infant daughter, Sarah Jane.

  Sarah Jane Martin

  b. 1832 in Tennessee; a da. of Dr. Thomas Martin. Grew up in Tishomingo County, MS. d. June 2, 1874, in Fayetteville, AK (m) July 20, 1849, George Washington

  Ervin, as his first wife Had ten children, including Hester Jane Ervin.

  (m) July 20, 1849, Sarah Jane Martin, who had 10 children, inc. Hester Jane, (m) April 14, 1875, Alice

  Wynne, by whom he had 6 children Alice Wynne was a kind stepmother. Hester Jane Ervin and her son, Robert, continued to keep in touch with the children of Alice Wynne Ervin.

  _Hester Jane Ervin

  b. July 11, 1870, in Dallas, Texas (Although she claimed that she was born several years later, her proper date of death appears on tombstone.) d. June 12, 1936, in Cross Plains, TX (m) in 1904 Dr. Isaac Mordecai Howard

  The tranquility of the Ervins' domestic life was disrupted by the War Between the States. G. W. Ervin fought in the Confederate Army as a colonel under General Forrest. After the war, Colonel Ervin viewed his devastated property and, deciding that restoration of his holdings without slaves was well-nigh impossible, set out for Texas with his family, now expanded to in
clude four boys and three girls. In 1866 the family settled in Hill County, Texas, between Fort Worth and Waco— a county adjacent to Limestone County where, twenty years later, the Howard brothers would establish themselves on a farm.6

  Although the farm prospered, the Ervins did not remain long in Hill County. Robert E. Howard attributed his grandfather's move from Hill County to restlessness, but there are other possibilities. While Colonel Ervin was primarily a planter, he was also something of an entrepreneur. He lent money, dealt in cattle, and speculated in real estate. It may be that the Hill County farm did not give him enough scope for his many enterprises, especially since planters all over that part of Texas were having trouble getting harvest hands. Many freed slaves refused to enter into labor contracts, and those who signed contracts did not always live up to them. Believing their new freedom meant freedom from work, many of these ex-slaves gathered in the towns and eked out a subsistence by begging and stealing while the crops lay unharvested in the fields. Spring planting, likewise, was delayed or curtailed.

  To add to the planters' anxieties, Indian unrest was increasing. During the Civil War, the western frontier had retreated eastward, and settlements heretofore secure from Indian raids were again being encroached upon. Although the movement westward had picked up again, the front line of white settlements still lay east of its outer limits in 1860. Many planters were predicting a full-scale Indian war before the Indian problem was resolved.

  These prophecies proved correct. After a series of campaigns intended to expel the Indians from Texas, General R. S. Mackenzie in 1873 engaged them in a decisive conflict that brought an end to the Indian depredations in West and Northwest Texas. But before that time, caught between disorganized bands of hungry blacks roaming the countryside and the Indian threat from the west, many planters sold their farms and moved away. These factors, also, must have entered into Colonel Ervin's decision to move his family to Dallas.

  The year 1868 was sad for the Ervins. Although it began auspiciously with the birth of Robert F. Ervin in January, the family was crushed by grief in October when young John Ervin died two months short of his thirteenth birthday. Less than two years later, on July 11, 1870, there in Dallas, Hester Jane Ervin, the girl who was to become Robert E. Howard's mother, was born.

  In his autobiographical sketch, "The Wandering Years," Robert Howard reports the events somewhat differently: "There [in Dallas, Texas] in 1876, just three years after the last Comanche raid in Central Texas, my mother, Hester Jane Ervin, was born."7 If this date were correct, then nothing in Robert's account of the Ervins' Texas experience is consistent.

  Mrs. Howard could not have been born in 1876 because by that time her mother had been dead for two years. Her husband must have consciously entered into the deception about her age, because Mrs. Howard's death certificate, based on information supplied by Dr. Howard, records her birth date as July 11, 1874. Even this modification is incorrect. Hester Jane's mother died of complications attendant upon the birth of her last child, Lizzie Ervin, on June 2, 1874.8 Mrs. Howard's tombstone, however, carries the correct date, 1870.

  This discrepancy in ages seems such a small, inconsequential thing that it is hardly worth mentioning except for Mrs. Howard's attitude about it. Mrs. Howard was older than Dr. Howard, who was born in

  1871. In those last months of her life, when she confided this age difference to Miss Merryman, her nurse, Mrs. Howard's admission was in the nature of a confession. Since in those days a wife was ideally about five years younger than her husband, Mrs. Howard and her husband invented the polite fiction that led their son Robert wrongly to believe in this difference between his parents' ages.9

  Why such a fiction was necessary is unclear. Perhaps it was to protect Dr. Howard's ego, or Mrs. Howard's vanity, or both. Women in her time were usually married much earlier than was Hester Jane Ervin; those who were not were considered old maids. Hester Jane's mother herself was only seventeen—although sixteen would not have been uncommon—when she married her impetuous young husband, George Washington Ervin, who was only nineteen at the time. Mrs. Howard could well have recalled other women who were older than their husbands and who were ridiculed by local gossipers: "Robbing the cradle, she was!"

  Similarly, Isaac Howard, aware of the need for a doctor to fit the cultural pattern assigned to him, would have winced when it was said that his wife was almost old enough to be his mother. As scathing as common were the catty remarks: "Married to get a mother, he did!" Or, "Can't be much if all he could catch was an old maid!"

  Still, this concealment of their age difference was an overreaction, even by the standards of the Howards' day. The difference of only one year in their ages, while not so trivial as it would be now, still would not have borne the import that Hester Howard seemed to have attached to it by her "confession." This reaction, however, does give us an insight into the Howards' sensitivity to public opinion and into the small deceptions that they practiced to satisfy their need to be thought well of.

  It is important to note that this deception is but one of the many small fictions maintained by the family, which, taken together, gave young Robert a distorted view of reality. In this case it was a small distortion of little importance, easy to maintain because of Robert's isolation from the Missouri branch of the family; but the effect of such untruths, if they are accepted as fact, is the same as that of a delusion. Given Mrs. Howard's assumed birth date, the details of the family history did not add up. Robert's only choice was that of a person bound to a delusional system: he adjusted the facts to square with his belief that his mother was five years younger than her husband.

  Such accommodation to a delusional system is not of itself strange. All individuals, and by extension all families, have their systems of fictions and myths, which determine their view of the world. The child modifies these views as he gains a more accurate focus on reality, either through contact with other members of the family group or through experience with the world.

  Human development is a continuous process of organizing and reorganizing, by means of which the world and one's concept of the world come increasingly to match one another. Convergence of thought with reality may come about gradually as a process of growth and development, or suddenly when insights accrue so rapidly as to produce an unsettling conceptual chaos. A sense of chaos tantamount to world destruction often occurs when members of the family have been isolated and so deprived of the normalizing functions of social interaction.

  Isolation was an important part of Robert Howard's problem. Through an accident of geography, together with the isolation inherent in his exceptional intelligence and talent, the overprotection of his parents, and his subsequent withdrawal, Robert had few experiences with the real world. All of his responses were reasonable, logical, and often brilliantly conceived within his view of reality. It was his major premises, his underlying assumptions, that were faulty.

  Would it have made any difference in Robert Howard's ability to accept his mother's death, had he realized that she lacked but a few years of her allotted span of three score years and ten, rather than having been prematurely snatched away at the age of sixty? Would his sense of injustice and his subsequent anger have been less?

  According to Robert Howard, Colonel Ervin left Dallas when he became convinced by deaths in his family that he had brought a curse upon them by killing a whippoorwill. But it was not whippoorwills that were responsible for his wife's failing health. More probably it was tuberculosis that proved to be the curse of the Ervins.10

  Whatever the reason, the family left the Trinity Basin, which was considered unhealthy, and moved to Fayetteville, Arkansas, where Colonel Ervin became a storekeeper. On March 4, 1872, according to the family Bible, George W. Ervin, Sarah Jane Ervin, and their seventeen-year-old son Christopher C. Ervin joined the Methodist Church South at Shady Grove, Sulphur Springs Circuit, Fayetteville, Arkansas.

  If Colonel Ervin expected this move to a more settled community to alleviate some of
the strain on his wife, his hopes were soon dashed. It was too late; Sarah Jane Martin was doomed. In twenty years or so of marriage, she had lived out the devastation and hardship of the Civil War, raised a large family, and averaged a major resettlement approximately every five years under the most adverse circumstances.

  Such privation and stress would take its toll of even the strongest constitution. For Sarah Jane Martin it was to prove fatal. She was not merely sick; she was plain worn out. Although she was only forty-two years old, she had borne nine children, three of them still under ten years old. When the tenth child, Lizzie Erwin, was born on April 10, 1874, neither she nor her mother was able to recover from the ordeal of the birth. On June 2, 1874, Sarah Jane died, and the baby joined her the following day. Hester Jane Ervin, not quite four years old, was without a mother.

  Hester Jane was not to remain motherless for long. Less than a year later, on April 14, 1875, she acquired both a new mother, Alice Wynne Ervin, a Missouri woman, and a new home in Lewisville, Texas, in Denton County. A new sister, Coralie, was born to Colonel Ervin and his young wife early in 1876.11

  The effect of these moves, separations, and family changes on Hester Jane's personality should not be underestimated. The child was not quite four when her mother died and five when her father remarried. This is a critical period in a child's life, a time when a disruption of the family splinters the child's personal organization. Colonel Ervin's remarriage and relocation so soon after her mother's death must have confirmed Hester Jane's sense of inadequacy and enhanced her feelings of rejection and dependence. These feelings she seems to have retained all her life.

  Ambivalent though she must have felt about her father's new wife, Hester Jane was too dependent to be openly hostile. She got on well with her stepmother and readily took on the role of assistant mother. After Coralie's birth, other siblings followed rapidly: Jessie was born in 1880, and Annie Laurie followed two years later.