While Novalyne’s
refusal to accept the stereotypical role of wife and homemaker
no doubt made some impact on Howard, it is clear that his progressive
views on women stretched further back. A lengthy letter to Harold
Preece in 1928 is an impassioned defense of women: “Men
have sat at the feet of women down the ages and our civilization,
bad or good, we owe to the influence of women.” Though many
of his female characters are merely props (as are many of the
men), it is evident that Howard, perhaps in response to his mother’s
influence, was more sympathetic to women than might be expected
from a man of his time. Indeed, some of the top women fantasy
writers, such as C.L. Moore, Leigh Brackett, Jessica Salmonson,
and Nancy Collins, have expressed their admiration for Dark Agnes
de la Fere.
Through 1935 and 1936, Howard’s mother’s health deteriorated
rapidly. Increasingly, she had to be taken to sanitariums and
hospitals, and even though Dr. Howard received a discount on services,
the medical bills began to mount. Robert was faced with a dilemma
- his need for money was more acute than ever, but he had little
time in which to earn it. Weird Tales owed him around $800, and
payments were slow. With his own meager savings exhausted, Dr.
Howard moved his practice into his home, which meant that patients
were now coming and going day and night. Father and son finally
hired women to nurse and keep house, but this further filled their
home with people and provided Robert little opportunity to be
alone and concentrate on his writing. This, combined with the
despair he felt as his mother inexorably slid towards death, placed
enormous stress upon the young writer, and he resurrected an apparently
long-standing plan not to outlive his mother.
This was no impulsive act. For years he had told associates such
as Clyde Smith that he would kill himself were it not that his
mother needed him. Much of his poetry, most of it written during
the 1920s and early 1930s, forcefully reflects his suicidal frame
of mind. He was not at all enamored with life for its own sake,
seeing it only as a weary slog at the behest of others, with scant
chance of success and precious little freedom. On one occasion,
in 1925, he had written to Smith, at a time when he thought he
had let his friends down:
“I sat and thought. My thoughts ran, shall I live and continue
to be a failure, to grind my life out and at last pass on, a failure,
among failures OR?
“I really never expected to leave that office when I entered
it, alive.”
A 1931 letter to Farnsworth Wright contains several statements
of common Howard themes: “Like the average man, the tale
of my life would merely be a dull narration of drab monotony and
toil, a grinding struggle against poverty... Life’s not
worth living if somebody thinks he’s in authority over you...
I’m merely one of a huge army, all of whom are bucking the
line one way or another for meat for their bellies... Every now
and then one of us finds the going too hard and blows his brains
out, but it’s all in the game, I reckon.”