Robert E. Howard, who based a prolific pulp-fiction career of the 1920s and ’30s at a backwater west of Fort Worth, is known today as the creator of Conan the Barbarian, a mythical warrior whose exploits symbolize Howard’s distaste for the industrialization of rural Texas.
His novelistic Conan series and its modern-day transmedia spinoffs are the most prominent outcropping of a wealth of rambunctious storytelling, including Western-frontier adventures and a terrifying selection of Southern Gothic horrors that made Howard a favorite among readers of an influential magazine called Weird Tales.
Howard’s posthumous fame has come full circle with Cross Plains’ Robert E. Howard Days festival, scheduled June 7-8. Cross Plains lies two hours’ drive from Fort Worth, via Interstate 20.
Howard Days, an annual tradition, represents a belated process of honoring a literary artist who might have made his adoptive hometown more secure — if only he had been granted a measure of localized respect during his lifetime. Howard (1906-1936) has long since become a titanic figure of adventurous storytelling on a worldwide scale.
Certainly, Cross Plains has known times more economically productive than the recurring occasion known as Robert E. Howard Days, but the boon of tourism is what a region makes of it. The event coincides with the occasion of Howard’s suicide at age 30.
Visitors come from around the world to take part in discussions of Howard’s writings and study the very environment — his family’s residence — in which he worked. The Cross Plains Library offers for sale copies of original typescripts.
Robert Ervin Howard was a native of Peaster — son of a physician who ranged from town to town, chasing prosperity, during the turbulent oil-boom days. The family settled for the long term in 1919 at Cross Plains. Howard’s surviving correspondence expresses gratitude for the overdue anchorage of a hometown, tempered with resentment at his being considered an outsider. Only since the 1980s has Cross Plains grown to champion Howard as one of its own, made good, as if astonished that anybody from Cross Plains, Texas, might have any business making good outside the jurisdiction of the Chamber of Commerce.
To the world at large, Howard was a bestselling pulp-magazine author. To the locals, he was a prominent eccentric who held no conventional job. Howard is most widely known for his most extravagant creation, the battle-stoked Conan of Cimmeria: “a thief, a reaver, a slayer, with gigantic melancholies and gigantic mirth,” per Howard’s description. Conan has survived via perpetual reprints, new yarns by come-lately authors, and a handful of movies to which Arnold Schwarzenegger probably owes his Hollywood image.
Howard eventually became a character in a movie called “The Whole Wide World” (1996), adapted from a memoir by a schoolteacher who might have become Howard’s wife. Her name was Novalyne Price, and she was close enough kin to my branch of the Welsh-immigrant Price family that I’ve always felt some kind of bond, there. The film features Vincent D’Onofrio as Bob Howard, with Renée Zellweger as Novalyne Price.
Not that I require bloodlines to cinch an affinity with any fellow West Texan devoted to making up stories and writing them down in case they might entertain somebody. The beauty of Howard’s writing — hardly a
flawless or highfalutin’ body of work — lies in its sense of locale, its colorful speech, and its ferocious surges of emotion. One senses autobiography, however fanciful, between those lines of blood-and-thunder mayhem and self-amused hooliganism.
Howard’s mythical kingdoms might as well be the Western frontier (still clinging to the 19th century, in Howard’s day) where he couched many another story of roughhouse bravery, apart from the Conan series. His vivid wordiness was a sign of his narrative generosity and a strategy calculated to earn more money per yarn. (In “The Whole Wide World,” a character asks Howard how he can afford to write for magazines that pay only chump-change on a per-word basis. Howard grins in reply: “I’m ver–bose!”)
A nearer ancestor of mine in the writing business, the pulp-magazine author E. Hoffmann Price, was a cousin of my dairyman grandfather, A.A. Price of Canyon, Texas — and one of the few professional wordsmiths whom Howard actually met, face-to-face. In a memoir of 1936, Hoffman set the stage decisively:
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“To say that Texas is a large state is not a crisp observation,” Hoffman Price wrote as a visitor from Oklahoma, where he worked as an industrial-plant foreman while launching his own mass-market career within the Weird Tales circle. However, the words get a pointed meaning for anyone who has driven from out of state and into Cross Plains. Geography, and lots of it, kept Robert Howard isolated to a degree which his fellow writers can hardly appreciate. He owed nothing to the guidance or encouragement of veteran authors; he never met any.
“The post-oak belt does not have the [literary] tradition of Boston or Providence,” Hoffman continued. “A writer is regarded as a harmless freak. That Robert earned considerable sums right from the start, merely made him conspicuous.”
Howard’s self-murder in 1936 had nothing to do with his career, which was going great guns on several fronts. His Conan stories were sure-fire crowd-pleasers for Weird Tales magazine. His Western and seafaring yarns commanded prominence in other pulpwood-paper publications. And his tales of ghostly terrors (such as “The Dead Remember,” a retribution piece with a frontier setting) captivated yet another readership.
A master at portraying the approach of death in fiction, Howard could not handle such a prospect in his immediate orbit. His mother’s imminent death, following a lingering illness, drove Howard to suicide. And upon that grim closure, Cross Plains let its memories of Bob Howard lapse without comprehending his greater cultural impact. Beyond a prominent obituary notice in the local newspaper, the local impression proved fleeting until the 1980s.
The rest of the whole wide world, however, would not allow Howard’s spirit to fade. And eventually, Cross Plains began to attract visitors intent upon seeing where the creator of the Conan books had performed such feats of tale-spinning.
Only after Cross Plains had fallen into economic despair, though, did some of its citizens begin wondering how the town might exploit that Howard mystique. The family’s homestead, gone decrepit under a succession of ill-attuned owners, was purchased during the late 1980s by a local-boosterism coalition known as Project Pride. The modest property stands restored today as the Howard House Museum — a shrine ripe for pilgrimages.
Cross Plains’ Project Pride website (howarddays.com) will yield the particulars of the event. Enthusiasts can gain as much enjoyment from the stories: “A Man-Eating Jeopard” is Howard’s most rousing Western yarn, thick with jolly mayhem and ghastly mirth. “Pigeons from Hell” is his most gripping tale of supernatural menace, descended from generations of nightmarish folklore. Howard’s Conan saga begins with “The Phoenix on the Sword.” The works have remained in print and inspired newer talents, including Joe R. Lansdale and Timothy Truman in the present day, to compose additional stories in the Howard style.
But then, of course, the opportunity for any devotée to visit the town that had provided a practical springboard for such a talent is not to be missed.
