Today we have another guest post by John Bullard.

Today, June 24^th, is the birthday of writer, reporter, and Civil War veteran, Ambrose Bierce. I originally wrote this piece  last year after having thought about Bierce’s influence on some of Robert E. Howard’s stories. Well, I have recently read another Bierce story that Howard may have read, and influenced a story he wrote. At the very least, they both wrote a story on the same idea- the psychological effects of horror on a person’s mind involving snakes. Did Bierce’s story influence Howard in writing his story?

Massive Spoilers follow for both stories.

Ambrose Bierce

As I previously wrote last year, Bierce was one of Howard’s favorite writers. . Most of Bierce’s work is readily available. An online site that has most of his fiction, including the story mentioned in this piece is here:

http://www.ambrosebierce.org/works.html

Known for his stories of soldiers during the Civil War, fantastical stories, satires, and reporting, Bierce loved to examine the psychological effects people experienced in dealing with tense situations, often leading to horrific endings for the protagonists. The story I will look at is “The Man and the Snake”.

“The Man and the Snake”

In his story, “The Man and the Snake”, [read online here “The Man and the Snake” (ambrosebierce.org) ], Bierce writes of what happens to a man staying at a friend’s house. It’s a short story, quickly read in a few moments, so please go read it yourself and come back. The story was first published in a newspaper in 1890, and reprinted in Bierce’s Tales of Soldiers and Civilians in 1891¹.

Spoilers

The story deals with a man, Harker Brayton, who is quite educated, staying at a friend’s house, the quite sensible Dr. Druring, who is a herpetologist, and has many snakes and toads that he keeps in one of the wings of his house that occasionally escape their containers. Brayton is reading from a fictitious book, Morryster’s Marvels of Science, in the style of Lovecraft’s Necronomicon and Howard’s own fictional book, Unspeakable Cults. The passage that leads off the story talks about how a snake will hypnotize its victims with the snake’s gaze, and force them to come to the snake to be killed and devoured.

Brayton, the educated man, stops reading and scoffs at the notion, until he looks over and sees a snake under the bed in his room watching him. He of course finds himself drawn against his will to the snake by the hypnotic gaze of its eyes, and a scream startles Druring who runs to the room to find Brayton partly under the bed. They pull him out and see Brayton has died of fright. And the snake under the bed turns out to be a stuffed snake with shoe buttons for its eyes.

End of Spoilers.

Inspirations for the Story

This story shows Bierce doing two things:

First, Bierce loved to examine the psychological effects people experienced in tense situations, generally causing their deaths from their own fears. Some of the stories where this happened in Bierce’s work are “One of the Missing”, where a Union soldier scares himself to death after being caught in a house’s collapse, “A Tough Tussle”², where the officer in a Civil war engagement dies from his fear that a dead Confederate he is hiding next to is not really dead, and “A Watcher by the Dead”², where an educated man sitting by a recently deceased man starts to fear the dead man may reanimate and is scared to death when the dead man moves. All characters in these stories had unhappy endings due to their imaginations running wild and scaring them to death. Bierce continues this theme in this story by having Brayton believe he is being hypnotized and drawn against his will to a horrific death from a stuffed snake with fake eyes.

Secondly, the story shows Bierce’s love of making fun of people who claim to be so smart or well educated. Bierce definitely loved to prick other pompous people’s high opinions of themselves, as witnessed by his most famous work, The Devil’s Dictionary with its satirical definitions of words and people. And, as already mentioned, in his story “A Watcher by the Dead”, the doomed watcher is described as having no fear, and he even monologues with himself how he is too smart to be afraid.

In this story, Brayton, the well-educated man, first makes fun of a bit of myth as being ridiculous, then falls for it himself. His well-educated mind refuses to realize what is actually happening and ends up killing him. The story was first published in a newspaper in 1890, and reprinted in Bierce’s Tales of Soldiers and Civilians in 1891.

Robert E. Howard

As previously written in the first blog on Bierce and Howard, Howard was a huge fan of Bierce, naming him as one of Howard’s favorite writers. I argued that Bierce’s influence shows up in some of Howard’s stories in the previous article. We don’t know if Howard read a copy of Bierce’s Tales of Soldiers and Civilians, but it seems like he did based on the similarities in some of Howard’s stories as I pointed out. In 1927, Howard also wrote a story about a man and his fear of a snake that ended badly, “The Dream Snake”, which was published in the February 1928 issue of Weird Tales. Let’s look at how Howard handled the same idea that Bierce wrote in “The Man and the Snake”.

“The Dream Snake”

Spoilers

In his story, Howard has the protagonist, Faming, tell a group of people assembled and staying at a home of a dream he has been having since he was a baby. In this dream, Faming and an unnamed Hindu man are staying in a bungalow somewhere in Africa. Faming states that he feels this dream is possibly of an earlier life he lived. In the dream, Faming returns to the bungalow carrying a broken rifle and sees a huge trail of bent and broken grass going up to the bungalow. Inside, Faming doesn’t find the Hindu, but finds signs of a great struggle. He then realizes that the Hindu was carried off by a huge snake that created the trail through the grass. Not having a weapon, Faming waits until dawn through two nights, in his dream’s time, with the snake returning and circling the bungalow looking for a way in. In the morning, still in his dream, Faming takes off running away from the bungalow and the snake’s trail, but as often happens in dreams, he finds he never makes it to the coast no matter how hard he tries, and ends up at dusk, on a hill watching a giant wake sliding through the tall grass coming after him. Each night that he has the dream, the snake keeps getting nearer and nearer.

Everyone goes to bed, but are later all awakened by a loud, maniacal laugh followed by a horrible scream. Everyone runs to Faming’s room, where they find:

“Faming lay dead upon the floor, where it seemed he had fallen in some terrific struggle. There was no mark upon him, but his face was terribly distorted; as if the face of a man who had been crushed by some superhuman force – such as some gigantic snake.”³

Inspirations for the Story

Howard sold “The Dream Snake” in September 1927 (Smith, ca. Mid-September 1927). In a letter to his friend, Clyde Smith, Howard states that his inspiration for writing “The Dream Snake” came from “[A] real dream with a fiction. conclusion”. (Smith ca. February 1929)⁴. For most of his life, Howard had strong, realistic dreams, many of which he held may have been dreams of his previous lives or ancestral memories of his family. Some references by him in his letters are: (Preece, ca. October 1930):

“I never saw such things; yet they gleam plainly in my dreams. I see them with the eyes of old Samuel Waltser [one of Howard’s grandfathers], who knew them and loved them in his youth, aye, and with the eyes of a thousand generations of blue-eyed, red-haired fishermen and sailors and Vikings behind him, who were his ancestors, and who were no less ancestors of mine.”;

and to H.P. Lovecraft, ca. January 1931:

“I believe that many dreams are the result of ancestral memories, handed down through the ages. I have lived in the Southwest all my life yet most of my dreams are laid in cold, giant lands of icy wastes and gloomy skies, and of wild, wind swept fens and wildernesses over which sweep great sea-winds, and which are inhabited by shock headed savages with light fierce eyes.”.

This idea of dreams perhaps being of past lives ties into Faming’s statement that he feels the recurrent dream he has is perhaps of a previous life of his.

We know from several of his letters that Howard had a great interest in snakes. In a letter to Lovecraft, he writes

“… [T]his may sound like a regular Texas snake-lie, but I had (and may still have, for all I know) a curious ability to sense the presence of a snake, particularly a rattler, before I saw, smelt or heard him. This ability was very strong in me during the ages of nine, ten and eleven, and gradually dwindled as I grew older, though it’s never failed me entirely — yet. … That they have hypnotic power is well known. Squirrels, prairie dogs and birds are unable to flee when transfixed by the basilisk power of the serpent’s stare, though they may leap up and down, flutter wings or limbs, and give vent to the most pitiable outcries. I hate snakes; they are possessed of a cold, utterly merciless cynicism and sophistication, and sense of super-ego that puts them outside the pale of warm-blooded creatures.” (Lovecraft, ca, February 1931)

In this letter, Howard repeats the myth of snakes hypnotizing their prey that makes up the central theme of Bierce’s story. Howard wrote several letters to H.P. Lovecraft where he mentions his interest in snakes, and even wrote up an essay to send with some rattlesnake’s rattles in a letter to Lovecraft ca. mid-October, 1932⁵.

At the time Howard wrote “The Dream Snake”, he was extremely interested in psychology, and it was influencing his writing for some of his stories. Howard writes in a letter to Clyde Smith about “The Dream Snake”:

“P. S. Since writing you that other letter I’ve sold another mss.[“The Shadow Kingdom”] …The subject of psychology is the one I am mainly interested in these days. The story I sold before this [“The Dream Snake”] was purely a study in psychology of dreams and this ms. deals largely in primitive psychology.”(Smith, ca. mid- to late-September 1927).

Did Bierce’s Tale Influence Howard’s?

So, we have two weird tales on the same subject: men’s fear of snakes causing their minds to frighten themselves to death. Did Howard use Bierce’s tale as inspiration for crafting his own? Howard, in any of his existing letters never mentions reading Bierce’s story, or having had the book it was collected in, so we can’t say for certain. Howard states in his letter to Clyde (Smith ca. February 1929) came from one of his dreams but with a fictional ending. Bierce’s protagonist dies from his mind refusing to act logically due to sheer paralyzing terror. Howard’s protagonist dies from a dream he knows is a dream, and even knows he is aware of what’s happening in his dream but can’t change its inevitable deadly outcome. It appears that Howard may have been inspired by Bierce’s tale to take his snake dream he had with his life-long experiences with snakes, especially rattlesnakes, and create his tale of psychological terror. I do find it interesting that in a letter (ca. late 1927 to early 1928) to Clyde Smith written a few months after Howard wrote “The Dream Snake”, that he makes the first mention of Ambrose Bierce in his existing letters as a main character in Howard’s humorous story, “King Hootus”. The first two lines of the story introduce Bierce in the following way:

“This was an artists’ club. Ambeer Bierce was strolling along the ledge of a roof several thousand feet high — strolling, strolling with a copy of fairy tales in one hand and a rattlesnake in the other.”⁶

This shows Bierce was on Howard’s mind during the timeframe, and his depiction of Bierce appearing holding a rattlesnake may be Howard showing Bierce’s cantankerous, gadfly nature, it may also have been fixed in Howard’s mind due to his reading of “The Man and the Snake”, and using that to write his own story, “The Dream Snake”.

Notes

1. The Ambrose Bierce Project.
2. Both of these stories can be found online at The Literature Network. They are no longer available on the Ambrose Bierce Project
3. Page 34, “The Dream Snake”, The Horror Stories of Robert E. Howard.
4. In this letter to Smith, Howard writes out a table of all the stories he has written up to that point, with brief descriptions of some of them, what their inspiration was, where he submitted them, and whether they were accepted or not.
5. Letter to H.P. Lovecraft, ca. mid-October, 1932, published as “With a Set of Rattlesnake Rattles”. The Collected Letters of Robert E. Howard Volume Two: 1930-1932.
6. “King Hootus”, The Collected Letters of Robert E. Howard Volume One: 1930-1932.

Sources

Robert E. Howard’s Letters:

To H.P. Lovecraft: ca. January 1931, ca. February 1931, ca. mid-October 1932

To Harold Preece: ca. October 1930

To Tevis Clyde Smith: ca. mid-September 1927, ca. mid- to late-September 1927, ca. probably late 1927 to early 1928, ca. February 1929,

Texts

Howard, Robert E., (2008), The Horror Stories of Robert E. Howard, Del Rey

Roehm, R., Bullard, J. (Eds.) (2021), The Collected Letters of Robert E. Howard Volume One: 1930-1932, (2^nd edition), REHFP

Roehm, R. (Ed.) (2007), The Collected Letters of Robert E. Howard Volume Two: 1930-1932, REHFP

 

Websites

Ambrose Bierce Project, The. http://ambrosebierce.org/works.html

Burke, Rusty. “The Robert E. Howard Bookshelf”, Robert E. Howard United Press Association, https://web.archive.org/web/20120204120421/http://www.rehupa.com/OLDWEB/index.htm

Burke, Rusty. “Robert E. Howard Fiction and Verse Timeline”, Robert E. Howard United Press Association, https://web.archive.org/web/20120205165440/http://www.rehupa.com/OLDWEB/fiction_timeline.htm

The Literature Network. The Literature Network: Online classic literature, poems, and quotes. Essays & Summaries (online-literature.com)

John Bullard is a retired attorney who lives in Texas, and has updated The Collected Letters of Robert E. Howard for The Robert E Howard Foundation Press, which will soon be available for purchase. He became a life-long Howard fan upon reading his first Howard story in an anthology of horror stories in 1974. While working on the Letters, he started seeing the subject matter of this post and has written it up for the education and edification of other Howard-ophiles. John is currently working on several projects for The Robert E. Howard Foundation Press.