Howard’s
letters frequently express the feeling that he was a misfit in
a cold and antagonistic world: “The older I grow the more
I sense the senseless unfriendly attitude of the world at large.”
In nearly all his fiction, the characters are strangers or outcasts
in a hostile land. One wonders if his childhood experience of
being uprooted on a regular basis as his father gambled on one
boom town after another may have contributed to this sense of
himself as an outsider. In some of his letters to Lovecraft he
expressed another variation on this theme: the feeling that he
was somehow born out of his proper time. One cause of their ‘barbarism
vs. civilization’ debate was Howard’s expressed wish
that he’d been born during the barbaric epoch in Germany
or Gaul; he frequently bemoaned the fate that had him arrive too
late to have participated in the taming of the frontier. “I
only wish I had been born earlier - thirty years earlier, anyway.
As it was I only caught the tag end of a robust era, when I was
too young to realize its meaning. When I look down the vista of
the years, with all the ‘improvements,’ ‘inventions’
and ‘progress’ that they hold, I am infinitely thankful
that I am no younger. I could wish to be older, much older. Every
man wants to live out his life’s span. But I hardly think
life in this age is worth the effort of living. I’d like
to round out my youth; and perhaps the natural vitality and animal
exuberance of youth will carry me to middle age. But good God,
to think of living the full three score years and ten!”
Howard also seems to have abhorred the idea of growing old and
infirm. A month before his death he’d written to August
Derleth: “Death to the old is inevitable, and yet somehow
I often feel that it is a greater tragedy than death to the young.
When a man dies young he misses much suffering, but the old have
only life as a possession and somehow to me the tearing of a pitiful
remnant from weak fingers is more tragic than the looting of a
life in its full rich prime. I don’t want to live to be
old. I want to die when my time comes, quickly and suddenly, in
the full tide of my strength and health.”
For a young man, Howard seems to have had an exaggerated sense
of growing old. When he was only 24 he wrote to Harold Preece,
“I am haunted by the realization that my best days, mental
and physical, lie behind me.” Novalyne Price recalls that
during the time they were dating, between 1934 and 1935, Howard
often said that he was in his “sere and yellow leaf,”
echoing a phrase from Macbeth: “I have lived long enough,
my way of life | Is fal’n into the sere, the yellow leaf...”
Also in his May 1936 letter to Derleth, Howard mentioned that
“I haven’t written a weird story for nearly a year,
though I’ve been contemplating one dealing with Coronado’s
expedition on the Staked Plains in 1541.” This suggests
that ‘Nekht Semerkeht’ may well have been the last
story Howard started and, significantly, it dwells upon the idea
of suicide. “The game is not worth the candle,” thinks
the hero, de Guzman.
“Oh, of course we are guided solely by reason, even when
reason tells us it is better to die than to live! It is not the
intellect we boast that bids us live - and kill to live - but
the blind unreasoning beast-instinct.
“Hernando de Guzman did not try to deceive himself into
believing there was some intellectual reason, then, why he should
not give up the agonizing struggle and place the muzzle of his
pistol to his head; quit an existence whose savor had long ago
become less than its pain.”