Memoriam

Robert E. Howard fandom has lost two tireless supporters of late. And I’ve lost two friends.

First, Steve Tompkins died March 23rd, although I didn’t find out about it until Friday, April 3rd. Steve was in REHupa with me, the Robert E. Howard foundation. We found out from his brother that he had been admitted into the hospital after a bout with food poisoning, but then had a heart attack, which is what killed him. He had been rallying from the food poisoning when the heart attack occurred. Steve lived in New York City where he worked for The Bank of New York. His parents and three brothers are still living and I know they must miss him terribly.

I only met Steve once in person, in Cross Plains, Texas for Howard Days, but we corresponded many times over the years. Steve was the most erudite person I’ve ever known, with a prodigious memory for literary works and a wonderfully witty style of writing about literature. He single-handedly raised the level of Howard scholarship with his many essays for REHupa, as well as his blog posts and his beautifully researched introductions and/or essays for a number of recent Howard books. He will be missed by many, and I’m one of them.

Then, on Saturday, April 4, I found out that Joan McCowen had died after a year long battle with cancer. Joan was a member of Project Pride, the local Cross Plains group that bought and restored the Robert E. Howard house and turned it into a museum. She always supported Howard's Legacy, and the Howard fans who trooped through Cross Plains every year. Joan was a strong presence every time I went to Cross Plains for Howard days. She was a personable and energetic woman, although in the last year or so she had really been hit hard by her illness. She too will be missed, and everywhere I look in Cross Plains this year there will be a blank spot hiding part of the world.

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Cross Plains Return: Part 2

Day 2 of my Cross Plains journey began about 8:00. I normally have a hearty biscuit and gravy breakfast at Jean’s Feed Barn, but I wasn’t terribly hungry so I walked up to the Howard House instead. Some Project Pride folks were setting up and I and another Howard fan pitched in to set up the sign-in pavilion. I won’t tell you how much trouble we had figuring that out. The day’s temperature was already high but a nice breeze made it pretty comfortable.

Chris arrived at the house a bit later and we headed out to find the ruins of Camp Colorado. Howard had a keen interest in history and had written of the camp. Chris and I discovered a high fence with two strands of barbed wire along the top surrounding the place, and there was a house on the site with a freshly mowed lawn. But we didn't see anyone around. As we trod along the fence we found a game trail where animals had been going under the fence so we slipped under as well and took some pictures. (I’ll post those eventually.) Unfortunately, Chris twisted his ankle badly, and though he didn’t let it slow him down much he felt the pain for the rest of our trip.

One of the best things about Howard Days is getting to visit again with old friends that I typically see only once a year. Besides Chris, there was Scott Hall and his wife Kim. Scott is one of the two other “long-hairs” in REHupa. Coincidentally? Or not! We have very similar tastes in music, tastes that run decidedly toward the heavier end of the music spectrum. Scott brought along some new friends, Big Mike Myers, and Jody. Jody and I had some great semi-drunken conversation about evolution and I found he’d read many of the same books I have on the subject.

There was also Rusty Burke, who knows more about Howard than any living man, and Indy Bill Cavalier, the head honcho of REHupa. Bill brought his wife, Cheryl, who is quite a classy individual [although most anyone would look pretty classy next to Bill ;)]

There was Frank Coffman, a fellow academic and expert on Howard’s poetry, and Gary Romeo, a good friend who I can only describe as a liberal contrarian. Rob Roehm represented the California contingent of REHupa, and there was Mark Finn, this year’s guest of honor. Dave Hardy, a recent convert to REHupaism but a long time fan of Howard, brought along his wife and daughter. Mark also brought his wife. Rob brought his parents! Frank just brought a Hummer and booze. Amy Kerr, one of only two female REHupans, was hanging around, as was Angeline Hawkes, our other female member and a writer with a lot of notches under her belt. Angeline and her husband, Christopher Fulbright, who she often collaborates with, are the only married couple who are both members of REHupa. No, they didn’t meet through our august group.

A rather strange coincidence also occurred Friday. A guy came up and handed me a printed copy of web comic called “The Marsh God,” which I had been reading and enjoying, and which I had just commented on in a forum I haunt. The artist for the comic was named Miko and he had actually emailed me just before I left for Cross Plains about his interest in doing an illustration based on the Taleran books. I’d sent him some stuff, and now as I looked up at the guy who was giving me the printed comic I saw “Miko” on his tag. This was his first Howard Days and neither of us had been aware that the other was going to attend. So, it was a bit of “well-met in CP” for the two of us. Miko is a very fine artist and if you get a chance check out his website here.

Friday night at Howard Days there is a banquet put on by Project Pride for visitors and locals alike, and over 100 of us crammed into a small community center for great country fried steak and sweet cherry cobbler. There was also a silent auction of Howard related items, and a dramatic reading of Howard's fiction by Mark Finn. After that, most Howard heads returned to the Howard House for the "Cimmerian Awards,” which are voted on by readers of The Cimmerian Magazine, the most frequently published of the several small magazines that are regularly printed about Howard. I missed all but the tail end of the awards this year, but was glad not to miss what followed, the first annual “Robert E. Howard poetry throw-down,” where fans read their favorite REH poems.

I've argued that much of the secret to Howard’s powerful prose is the poetry that runs like a spine throughout it. To show this, I’ve been working for years on what I call “Found Poems,” where I take a paragraph or two from a Howard short story, remove the punctuation and a few function words, and put the words into poetic format. I read a couple of these, including the one below, and they were well recieved.

Dangerous suppleness
Of a panther
Cold as blue ice
Kite-shaped shield
Like a flash of summer lightning
Like the purr of a hunting tiger
He is mad
None molests him

Other fans read their favorite REH poems, too, and we turned several into drinking “songs,” an act of which I heartily approved and to which I joined in with gusto. Howard wrote a lot of poetry in his private letters to friends, which he had never submitted for potential publication. Toward the tail end of the night some of this poetry made its first appearance to a wider audience; some of it was quite bawdy.

Although everyone who read did an amazing job, the clear winner in my mind was Amy Kerr, who captured the dramatic intonations and the pauses precisely for best effect.

Sleep came sometime between 3:30 and 4:30 this night. I know I was feeling pretty old when I finally climbed into bed. But what a great evening to be a Howard fan.

To be continued:

Cross Plains Return: Part 1

I’m back from Cross Plains, Texas, which was home for Robert E. Howard throughout most of his life. Howard is best known, of course, as the creator of Conan, who in popular culture is often referred to as “the Barbarian.” I think I might take a few blog posts to tell everyone about my journey, and about Howard, who did far more than create Conan. I hope there’ll be a few tidbits here to enthuse the writer types who visit, and, of course, I learn more about Howard and about myself every time I make the journey. It helps sometimes to write those kinds of things down. Plus, there’ll be stories of beer drinking for the Heff’s who visit here.

My trip began very early Thursday morning, June 12, when the incomparable Lana Gramlich dropped me off at the New Orleans airport and I flew out for Dallas. I met Chris Gruber, a REHupan friend of mine who is an expert on Howard’s Boxing stories, in Dallas, and we drove down together. Cross Plains is 170 miles south and west of Dallas, but we didn’t take the direct route. We went through Dark Valley, Texas. We had a reason.

Bob Howard was born in Peaster, Texas, about forty miles from Fort Worth, but his family lived in Dark Valley at that time. The Dark Valley community consisted then of some fifty folks, but when Chris and I went through we found only a closed business, a cemetery, some fenced land upon which cattle and mesquite were being grown, and the creek from which the community got its name. We stopped at the cemetery and then walked out some of the local fields. Apparently, the Howard home in Dark Valley is no longer standing, but it was still a powerful feeling to walk over the land and to look along the rocky creek, which was mostly dry and drowsing in the hot June day.

Howard only lived in Dark Valley during his infancy but he later suggested that the valley had a strong influence on the darkness of his own personality, and he seemed to recall it as a somber and brooding place. I personally doubt that the somberness and darkness was ever in the valley, or that Howard would have remembered it anyway given how young he was when the family moved. When Chris and I passed through we found that Dark Valley is a very shallow depression along the creek, hardly a valley in the usual sense, and it was certainly bright in the sun, although I’ve been along enough country creeks in my day to know that the atmosphere can be somber in the shade where the trees overhang remaining dark pools of stagnant water. No, the darkness that Howard mentioned would much more likely have come from within than from without. I think a lot of writers have a bit of the same darkness.

From Dark Valley we continued on our way into Cross Plains, stopping at a town named Ranger to stock up on beer and ice. Cross plains itself is in the dry county of Callahan. You can’t buy beer or liquor, or officially drink it in the open, but despite this the local police tend to give the REHupan group some leeway as long as we don’t drink in public and make fools of ourselves. We do most of our drinking in the evenings in the courtyard of the 36 West Motel, the only motel in town, or at the open pavilion which has been built right next to the Howard house.

Once we got checked in, Chris and I had a few beers in our room while we talked about Howard’s work. A new beer that I tried was Tona, a product of Nicaragua. My favorite beers are mostly Mexican dark beers, such as Bohemia and Negro Modelo. Tona couldn’t match these two but it went down smoothly, without an aftertaste, and I liked it pretty well. After that we ventured into the courtyard to yak with some other REHupans and various other Howard fans who were staying at the 36 West, and then the group headed for dinner at a local place called Jean’s Feed Barn. We were by far the largest and most boisterous group there, and I know sometimes the locals don’t quite know what to make of the Howard fans, many of them long-haired and tattooed. But many of us have also made good friends among the people of Cross Plains, particularly among the group known as Project Pride, which is the local community group that purchased the Howard House, restored it pretty much as it was in Howard’s Day, and maintains it as a historic site and museum.

The first night ended for me around 3:00 in the morning. In the dark you wonder, what made Robert E. Howard? How did a small town Texas boy learn to write of lost ages and fabled cities? How did he create barbarians and dueling swordsmen and iron man boxers whose exploits still sing for so many readers of today? How much biology was involved? How much experience? Or was it, as Howard sometimes seemed to suggest as possible, the intrusion of past lives into the present? Is there a chance that some of us have lived before, in other times, other bodies? Could that explain certain dreams I’ve had? You’ve gotta wonder.

To Be Continued:
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Cross Plains Journey

I’m going to be leaving on a jet plane very early Thursday and will be getting home late Sunday. I probably won’t get to post again or check other folks’ posts until the following Monday. I’ll be in Cross Plains, Texas for the annual Robert E. Howard Days celebration and a meeting with some of my friends from REHupa, the Robert E. Howard United Press Association. That’s a fancy name for a group of amateur ziners who put together a private publication on Howard every two months.

Cross Plains is very small and I’ll be very busy so I doubt I’ll even have a moment to check email. That is assuming I could find a computer available there that was running internet. But I wish everyone in the blogosphere well while I’m absent. I’m sure the internet won’t come to a standstill, and I promise to catch up on everyone’s blogs when I return.

Today is a rather special day for those who remember Robert E. Howard. June 11 is the day that he killed himself. It was back in 1936, a Thursday morning in that year, and he’d just been told that his mother, who was in a coma and dying, was not likely to regain consciousness. Robert went out to his car, in the driveway of the small house in Cross Plains where I’ll be standing in about a day, and shot himself once in the head. He actually didn’t die until hours later, but he never regained consciousness either. His mother, Hester, died the next day and the two were buried at the same time on June 14. His father lived on for quite a few more years, and I always think of him around this time of year as well. Imagine losing your wife to illness and your son to suicide at virtually the same moment.

Robert E. Howard was gifted with a tremendous imagination, but it was hard work that made him a successful author. Not many of the pulp writers of the 1920s and 30s are remembered today. But Howard is far more famous and well known now than he was then. He, along with J.R.R. Tolkien and Edgar Rice Burroughs, transformed the landscape of fantasy. They built what is today my favorite genre.

I mentioned the other day that there are differences between storytellers and writers but that some people combine the two abilities. Of the three, REH, ERB, Tolkien, I believe that Howard combined the two skills the best. Here’s to him.

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Cross Plains: Lost and Found

If you’d like an extraordinary literary getaway that few people know about, then journey to Cross Plains, Texas for the Robert E. Howard Days festival. Cross Plains is a tiny hamlet that lies about a three hour drive south of Dallas, and it was the home town of writer Robert E. Howard, the creator of a dozen fantastic characters, including Conan the Cimmerian, Kull the Conqueror, and Solomon Kane, the Puritan adventurer from whom Van Helsing’s look was pinched in the recent movie of that name.

Howard died June 11, 1936, but his memory lives on in movies, books, comics, and in the minds of his many fans. Each June, Cross Plains hosts a Howard Days celebration on the weekend closest to the anniversary of his death. The 2007 celebration was on the 9th and 10th. I attended, as I’ve attended many others since the mid-1990s when I joined REHupa.

What is REHupa, you ask? The name stands for the “Robert E. Howard United Press Association.” This is a group of thirty individuals (never more) who, every two months, produce a personalized mailing focused on Howard and related topics. The membership of REHupa changes, but the group’s dedication to keeping Howard’s memory alive has never wavered in its over thirty years of existence. If you would like to know more about REHupa, you can find that information at the group’s website

Two current REHupans, Rusty Burke and Indiana Bill Cavalier, were among a small group of Howard fans who first went to Cross Plains in 1986 to visit his home. Town folk made them welcome, and before long the fans were making the trip an annual event. A local community group calling themselves Project Pride soon began planning for the regular visits. They purchased the Howard Home and have worked to restore it. The house is now a museum, one of the most comfy ones you’ll ever see, and it is at the house that the main events of Howard Days take place.

As for the events, they are varied. The house is open for tours and you can see the tiny, cramped room where Howard wrote his hundreds of short stories and poems. There is a walking tour of the town--sites such as the “Ice House,” where Howard used to box, are pointed out--and there is a bus tour of the surrounding country side that covers some of the local history. This year there was also a screening of a very short film about Solomon Kane, a Howard character, made by some fans. It was cool. At some point, most fans also make a trek to Greenleaf Cemetery in nearby Brownwood where Howard and his parents are buried. It’s about a half hour drive.

Although discussions of Howard go on throughout the two day event, there are panels where specific topics are examined. This last year, for example, there were panels on Howard’s boxing stories and on the layout of his fantasy world.

There is a banquet for Howard fans one evening, which costs only 10.00 dollars a head and which is catered by a local restaurant that cooks the best country fried steak I’ve ever eaten. The banquet also features a silent auction where various Howard items, books, comics, and oftentimes some rarities can be had for cheap. The speaker/guest of honor for the banquet this year was Greg Manchess, a very fine artist who has illustrated one of the Conan books.

For the second evening, a local ranching family hosts a free barbecue at their Caddo Peak Ranch, where visitors can climb the peak to see an incredible view of the local landscape. (Climbing doesn’t require ropes and pitons, just a little foot work.)

The 2007 festival is over, but plans are already underway for 2008. If you’re interested in seeing more about Howard Days in Cross Plains, or just in visiting the home, see Project Pride’s site here

Since the museum is not open for regular hours outside of Howard Days, you’ll need to write or call ahead to make sure you can schedule a tour. That information can be found on the website.

Gone to Texas

Well, I'm leaving very early in the morning (Thursday) for Cross Plains, Texas and Robert E. Howard days in that small hamlet where he lived most of his life and did all of his writing. I won't have computer access during the time I'm there, so I won't be posting on the blog or reading anyone else's until probably Monday or Tuesday of next week. I'll catch up when I return.

Until then, blog well.