I just finished reading Novalyne Price Ellis's 1986 memoir,
One Who Walked Alone: Robert E. Howard, The Final Years, and I feel like I've been punched in the gut.
To very quickly recap, Novalyn Price was a schoolteacher who also dreamed of being a writer. To practice her literary skills, she kept a diary in which she recorded not only things that had happened, as well as her thoughts and feelings about them, but entire conversations that she'd had. Word-for-word, she'd write down things that people had said to her, and she to them. While she eventually turned away from writing in order to focus on her teaching career, she would eventually publish this, her first book, in which she recounted her relationship with Robert E. Howard (creator of Conan the Barbarian, Solomon Kane, and other larger than life figures), covering their brief introduction in 1931 before focusing heavily on their relationship from 1934 through 1936, the latter being the year that Howard took his own life.
I purchased this book several years ago, after having watched the book's film adaptation
The Whole Wide World. I was very interested in Howard's work at the time, reading a large number of his stories, and wanted to know more about him as a person. Since the rule about the book always being better than the film is almost (though not always) true, I tracked down a copy of this and set to reading it.
I only got about a third of the way through before I stopped then, leaving it on my shelf for quite some time before starting over again last month.
It didn't take my long to remember why I'd had such a hard time with it.
I don't want to say that this book is a slog, because I don't think that's accurate; a slog is something that's hard to get through because it's (to my mind) uninteresting, filled with dense material that seems to inhibit interest and confound enjoyment. This, by contrast, was a captivating tale...but what captures you is the tragedy of it all.
Months ago, I attended a rendition of
Antigone that a friend of mine was starring in. In this slightly-updated take on the classic, one of the characters noted how (to paraphrase) "Tragedy is not simply death. Death is universal; it comes to everyone. Tragedy is not so common; what makes something tragic is that it's a catastrophe."
I'm not sure if that's true or not, but I suspect that there's something to it, because the tragedy of this story isn't simply how it ends. Nor is it even in how the characters of this tale seem to be their own worst enemies, with their strengths turned against them, ultimately bringing them to sadness that didn't have to be. Rather, to me it's in how Bob's suicide and Novalyn's heartbreak seems like it could have been avoided if only they'd understood each other just a little better.
Part of what makes this hit so hard is the narrative nature of the book. While narrative fiction is common, narrative
nonfiction strikes me as being rare in the extreme. Most nonfiction works, when they're about an individual or group of individuals, tend to portray them as figures more than people, lacking the closeness that comes from knowing them personally. Not here. Here, we have the firsthand experiences of someone who spoke often with Bob Howard, who could relate his own words as he spoke them, talk about how he dressed and his quirks and habits, his dark moods and turns of phrase. If the quality of characterization in fiction is to make fictional people seem real, then narrative nonfiction is the goal that such works shoot for, because the people
are real.
The result is that this story isn't simply a story, but real life, and so hits extremely hard.
The tale of Bob and Novalyne's relationship is one fraught with a lack of understanding, despite the two of them trying to make sense of each other. In this regard, I won't say that Novalyne is an unreliable narrator, because that term (to me) represents a device used in fiction, whereby the author intends the reader to understand that something is happening other than the narrator is relaying. Rather, what's here is a sequence of events told through a single, real person's point of view. Other people in the story talk and act; Novalyne talks and acts, but because this is her diary, we also get to know what she thinks and feels.
Time and again, Novalyn dismisses the idea that Bob Howard would ever take his own life if and when his mother died, despite having had family friends of the Howards warn her that he would. If anything, she seems to resent the idea; plenty of other people lose their mothers, and after they grieve, go right on living. Moreover, she doesn't understand why Bob's father (himself a medical doctor) can't take care of his wife, and why Bob insists that he has to be the one to do it; that question is never satisfactorily answered, though various reasons (excuses?) are hinted at.
Likewise, Bob struggles to see beyond himself, despite Novalyn's at times Herculean efforts to reach out to him. He can't imagine schools and schoolteachers actually caring about their students, despite Novalyn's repeatedly impressing upon him how much she wants to help her own pupils achieve as much as they can, since his own teachers (according to him) never cared about whether he lived or died. He makes efforts to pursue her romantically—though to my reading they had a half-heartedness that underscored a timidity beneath his bluster, representing someone who didn't know how to communicate affection and was afraid of being scorned for that—even as he goes on about how a woman only chains a man down, taking away his freedom.
In many ways, the book is a study in contrasts. Bob's come through clearly, as he bemoans not having a great cause or a great love, saying that a man (or a woman) needs as least one in order to live, while Novalyn's are subtler, portraying someone who admires Bob for what sets him apart even as she grows exasperated with how he's distanced himself from others.
Re-reading that last sentence, I think that really summarizes the poignancy here: Bob believes himself unable to live like an ordinary man, and is broken by how he can't live as one of the titans whom he writes about, whereas Novalyn admires him for his looking beyond the ordinary, even as she wishes that he'd live an ordinary life.
The catastrophe is in how close they seem to come, and yet ultimately fail, to recognizing and resolving those differences.
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