REH: Two-Gun Raconteur
The Definitive Howard Journal
The Definitive Howard Journal
| Herbert Klatt: The 4th Musketeer by Glenn Lord |
As one that loves a wanton knowing well
That she is false, I yield to thy spell.
But when my cup is foaming to the brim,
Yea, when I dream that I have clasped the prize,
I see the scythe, and mark the face of him
That is thy lover, leering from thine eyes.
– Viereck
In the years when he was a struggling writer, i.e., 1923-1929, Robert E. Howard’s correspondents were
literary minded fellow Texans: Tevis Clyde Smith, Harold Preece, Booth Mooney, Truett Vinson and Herbert
C. Klatt. Readers of the Howard biography, Dark Valley Destiny (Bluejay Books, 1983) by L. Sprague de
Camp, Catherine de Camp and Jane Whittington Griffin (hereafter “de Camp”) can find a modicum of
information on Smith, Mooney and Vinson. Had it not been for the present writer, the name of Herbert Klatt
would not have appeared at all; Jack Scott, the former newspaper editor at Cross Plains, had tentatively
identified the fourth party to spend a wild night at Clyde Smith’s uncle’s ranch just after Christmas of 1925
as Winifred Brigner. I informed de Camp that ‘Hubert Grotz’ as this person was named in Howard’s semi-
autobiographical novel, Post Oaks and Sand Roughs (here after “PO&SR”) was Herbert Klatt.
De Camp erred when he wrote that “Howard made plans to visit Clyde Smith and Truett Vinson after
Christmas 1925 in order to introduce them to his new pen pal . . . Herbert Klatt, the son of an oil driller.” It
was, in fact, Vinson that introduced both Howard and Smith to Klatt. In a letter to Smith, dated April 26, 1926,
Vinson wrote: “H. Klatt is now corresponding with Robert, and he tells me in his last letter that Robert
advises him to read Talbot Mundy for some real thrills. Robert tells him that you and I don’t agree with him
on the subject of T. Mundy, and so I write Klatt and tell him that we don’t.” Vinson at this time was
publishing an amateur journal, The Toreador (editor slogan: “We are out to slay the bull”); Klatt and Howard
were listed on the masthead as the editorial writers.
And it seems rather obvious that Klatt’s father, C. F. Klatt was a farmer . . .
Smith began corresponding with Klatt at about the same time, with the first letter from Klatt being dated
May 27, 1925. Much of the information in this article comes from the slender file of letters from Klatt to
Smith, that Smith’s nephew made available to me after his uncle’s death in late 1984.
Biographical information on Klatt is meager. He was born January 5, 1907 in Bosque County. The date of
the family’s move to Hamilton County is not known; they settled on a farm near the small village of Aleman.
According to The Handbook of Texas, the population of Aleman (in 1947) was 25; the name comes from a
Spanish word meaning “German,” which nationality apparently predominated in the area. Klatt graduated
from both the Aleman and Ireland (another Hamilton County town) high schools.
Klatt’s correspondence with Smith indicates he had been active in Lone Scout journalism for some time.
In his second letter to Smith he wrote: “I have a collection of about 700 amateur Lone Scout papers. These
and my copies of Lone Scout constitute one of the most valued parts of my library. Linked with some of the
pleasant memories of my life, they always will interest me. Somehow there is nothing other like them. They
enhold the essence of boyish enthusiasm, ambition and pep.”
According to Harold Preece, the Lone Scouts were a loosely knit organization started by Chicago
publisher W. D. Boyce as competition to the highly formalized Boy Scouts of America. Joining the Lone
Scouts meant that you could scout all by yourself if you didn’t want to join the Boy Scouts or if the Boy
Scouts did not exist in your area.
Klatt seemed to be surprisingly well read, despite great difficulties in obtaining books – “my financial
status makes it impossible to buy very many books and there aren’t any local libraries available. I used to
get books at the Hamilton Library under difficulties but they have changed the rules now to where it is
almost impossible for out-of-town people to get books.” His reading, in addition to Lone Scout journals,
consisted of such popular magazines as Saturday Evening Post and Colliers, and the 5¢ Little Blue Books –
“right here I want to say the Little Blue Books are great even if E. H. J. [E. Haldeman Julius] is their creator.”
E. Haldeman Julius’ debunking magazines (The Debunker, E. H. J. Weekly) were a source of irritation to Klatt:
“this world is more and less filled with and bunk but one E. H. J. is trying to prove this matter so
exhaustively that to me it seems he is bunk, himself. In a way he admits it. But I think, the way he is going,
he could do a quicker job by listing the things that are not bunk. His list would then undoubtedly be short
enough to be printed on a postage stamp.”
Klatt wrote, not only for the Lone Scout journals, but also for farm magazines such as Semi-Weekly Farm
News and Southland Farmer; he edited a page once a month for the latter.
But life was not all books and writings; this was, after all, the 1920s on a poor farm in Central Texas.
Occasionally hints of the drudgery would appear in his letters: “the last week or so I have been pushing a
pair of lazy mules over a cotton grass patch. The mules pull a cultivator of course. The mules, the grass
and several other things combined are enuf to make a preacher swear in seven languages and I am not a
preacher by any means . . . I am picking scrappy cotton under a broiling sun theses days. Some times it is
hard to marshal a little energy for other things after the day’s work . . . I dug ditches today and ditching is
decidedly not a white collar job. This morning I used a shovel mostly so it wasn’t so bad . . . but in the
afternoon I started a new ditch where it was so rocky that I had to cuss all time. The plow hooked about
every half second and the mules kept on going the wrong way. Such are the things that provoke me to
profanity – goddams, and all the rest.”
Klatt would meet Howard only once, when on December 26 1925 he came to Brownwood the meet Smith,
Vinson and Howard. In his letter to Smith in which he agrees to come, he wrote: “I’ll swipe the Ford if I have
to, some gas and some change . . . I am in a helluva fix, dead broke. I’ll just be able to scrape together enuf
to come and go in the Ford.”
Howard repeats the version in PO&SR: That Howard, Smith and Vinson drove 40 miles to meet Klatt, “train
connections are never of the best in West Texas, and this town was as far as Grotz [Klatt] could come on
the line which brought him from Hantsun [Hamilton].” Since PO&SR is an admixture of fact and fiction, it is
risky to accept everything at face value. While it is possible that the trio did drive to Comanche – 31 miles
northeast of Brownwood, 28 miles west of Hamilton – the terminus of the branch of the St. Louis
Southwestern (Cotton Belt) Railroad that ran through Hamilton, it seems to me that Klatt could have caught
a connecting train at Comanche on the Fort Worth & Rio Grande, a division of the St. Louis – San Francisco
(Frisco) Railroad on into Brownwood. The Frisco track, now part of the Santa Fe, was a rather major line,
whereas the Cotton Belt branch has long since been abandoned, so connections on the Frisco should have
been fairly easy to make.
Howard discussed the wild night on Clyde’s uncle’s ranch in a letter to H. P. Lovecraft: “I remember a wild
night I passed on an isolated ranch in mid-winter, several years ago. One of the party was wild drunk on
beer and another was struck crazy on raw Jamaica ginger, with obsession that he was a werewolf. One of
the bunch was a young German who didn’t drink and wasn’t use to the violent drunks common to
Americans; he backed up against a wall and I couldn’t help laughing at his expression when the Jamaican
victim began to smash furniture, gallop about on all-fours and howl like a mad dog. About midnight a
howling blizzard came up to add to the general lunacy.”
Klatt commented on the occasion thusly:
Stone Ranch
We arrived in the night of a new day under a leering moon
with a new norther and Truett drunk on three bottles of beer
We found well-under-porch-roof nondescript house, stove, table, chairs.
Bed and a cot, lamp and chaps, and a bottle of blackleg medicine sitting
on a two cent stamp.
Talking, laughing, roaring. Clyde and Bob sick on Jake. Truett and Clyde
slept and I and Bob sat at the stove and talked till the vague cutting
cold sunless dawn.
In PO&SR Howard writes “. . . a letter from Hubert, who said that, as college was put off for another year,
he had decided to run for the legislature. Something was wrong with his legs, and his campaign would
have to be a front porch campaign. Herbert explained that he did not expect to be elected but was doing it
more for the experience which it would afford him . . .” A bit later, it is stated that he had indeed been
defeated.
While it is true that Klatt did contemplate running for the legislature – “I am polishing up on public
speaking a bit and sometimes have even entertained crazy notions of running for the Texas Legislature
next year. Unless I get some financial windfall this would be impossible as well ridiculous.” – I suspect that
he version in PO&SR is mostly fictional. The quote was from Klatt’s March 7, 1927, and final, letter to Smith.
In just 14 months, Herbert Klatt would be dead.
In this same letter, he wrote: “But speaking of life, I can perhaps chant with Viereck” and then goes on to
quote the verse heading this article. Was Klatt’s health already beginning to deteriorate, and did he
suspicion that it might never improve?
He would teach for a few weeks at the German church school in Aleman where his “effective initial work –
and his promise of pedagogical eminence – were duly esteemed.” Some time in early 1928 he entered a
sanitarium and died in early May. In PO&SR the cause of death for ‘Hubert Grotz’ was given as
consumption, i.e., tuberculosis, and I have no reason to question the accuracy of that.
After Klatt’s death, there were efforts made, chiefly spearheaded by Vinson, to publish a memorial
volume – ranging all the way from a pamphlet to a clothbound book – but apparently nothing ever came of
this. Booth Mooney announced plans to make the July 1928 issue of his little travelogue, The Junto, a
special Klatt Memorial issue. Unfortunately, this issue apparently no longer exists (there being but one
copy per issue). Klatt also had a contribution in the first, April 1928, issue of The Junto; this, too, apparently
no longer exists.
Upon learning of his friend’s death, Howard wrote this poignant letter to Clyde Smith, circa May 1928.
Salaam:
So Klatt has gone West. I don’t know; it seems hard lines. Struck down in the very beginning of his
manhood – without a chance to fight.
Maybe this is right:
Flower of the Morning
Bill Adams
Tell them when I’m gone. Then.
Say, “He was glad to go.”
Say, “He heard a ringing voice, a great wind blow.”
Say, “He’d always wandered in sort of a maze.”
Say, “He knew this would bring
An end to wonder:
Flames of light and sons a-wing,
And doubting trampled under.”
Tell them
“Death is but a birth
A burst of flowers
Fairer than the blooms of earth
Its beauty ours.”
Yet what do such things signify? A mere tangle of words. Empty sounds. Bare vocal noises.
Where are the sunrises and the sunsets, the lights and the shadows, the sting of winds, the vivid shiftings
of radiances and colors, when a man is dead?
Yet the body of him will go back to the elements again; he will throb with life in the sap of the tree, in the
haze of the heat. Flowers and hot grain will spring up and wave and live and the essence of their being will
be the essence of him.
Yet the pity of it, that his manhood and his great dreams should perish before he had a chance to make
them live – that all his killing toil and struggles should go for nothing.
He was a fighter but the odds were far too many. Yet I know he went out smiling.
What shall am an say when a friend has vanished behind the doors of Death? A mere tangle of barren
words, only words.
Still, I feel that there is such a thing as a Hereafter that he will find a place among his fearless ancestors
in the high hall of Valhalla and I like to think of him sitting at the right hand of Thor amid the glory of
everlasting revel.
Yes, if there is a Hereafter, as Longfellow says:
There from the flowing bowl
Deep drinks the Viking’s soul!
Skoal! To the Northland! Skoal!
Thus the tale ended.
In 1925, Howard published – if a typewritten original and possibly three carbon copies can be deemed
publishing – three issues of a little journal, The Right Hook. As might be expected, he wrote nearly all of the
material; the only exception was a poem by Klatt in Volume 1, Number 2.
Rope
Hempen coils from the gibbet
Dangling in the air
Meet the condemned eyes
With unutterable despair.
The Alp climbers trust
Strands across relentless snow
The hair-breadth safety
From dangers below.
Restraint in custom and law
A line that excludes hope
And keeps me within
Narrow bounds – rope.
Copyright 2005 by Glenn Lord
That she is false, I yield to thy spell.
But when my cup is foaming to the brim,
Yea, when I dream that I have clasped the prize,
I see the scythe, and mark the face of him
That is thy lover, leering from thine eyes.
– Viereck
In the years when he was a struggling writer, i.e., 1923-1929, Robert E. Howard’s correspondents were
literary minded fellow Texans: Tevis Clyde Smith, Harold Preece, Booth Mooney, Truett Vinson and Herbert
C. Klatt. Readers of the Howard biography, Dark Valley Destiny (Bluejay Books, 1983) by L. Sprague de
Camp, Catherine de Camp and Jane Whittington Griffin (hereafter “de Camp”) can find a modicum of
information on Smith, Mooney and Vinson. Had it not been for the present writer, the name of Herbert Klatt
would not have appeared at all; Jack Scott, the former newspaper editor at Cross Plains, had tentatively
identified the fourth party to spend a wild night at Clyde Smith’s uncle’s ranch just after Christmas of 1925
as Winifred Brigner. I informed de Camp that ‘Hubert Grotz’ as this person was named in Howard’s semi-
autobiographical novel, Post Oaks and Sand Roughs (here after “PO&SR”) was Herbert Klatt.
De Camp erred when he wrote that “Howard made plans to visit Clyde Smith and Truett Vinson after
Christmas 1925 in order to introduce them to his new pen pal . . . Herbert Klatt, the son of an oil driller.” It
was, in fact, Vinson that introduced both Howard and Smith to Klatt. In a letter to Smith, dated April 26, 1926,
Vinson wrote: “H. Klatt is now corresponding with Robert, and he tells me in his last letter that Robert
advises him to read Talbot Mundy for some real thrills. Robert tells him that you and I don’t agree with him
on the subject of T. Mundy, and so I write Klatt and tell him that we don’t.” Vinson at this time was
publishing an amateur journal, The Toreador (editor slogan: “We are out to slay the bull”); Klatt and Howard
were listed on the masthead as the editorial writers.
And it seems rather obvious that Klatt’s father, C. F. Klatt was a farmer . . .
Smith began corresponding with Klatt at about the same time, with the first letter from Klatt being dated
May 27, 1925. Much of the information in this article comes from the slender file of letters from Klatt to
Smith, that Smith’s nephew made available to me after his uncle’s death in late 1984.
Biographical information on Klatt is meager. He was born January 5, 1907 in Bosque County. The date of
the family’s move to Hamilton County is not known; they settled on a farm near the small village of Aleman.
According to The Handbook of Texas, the population of Aleman (in 1947) was 25; the name comes from a
Spanish word meaning “German,” which nationality apparently predominated in the area. Klatt graduated
from both the Aleman and Ireland (another Hamilton County town) high schools.
Klatt’s correspondence with Smith indicates he had been active in Lone Scout journalism for some time.
In his second letter to Smith he wrote: “I have a collection of about 700 amateur Lone Scout papers. These
and my copies of Lone Scout constitute one of the most valued parts of my library. Linked with some of the
pleasant memories of my life, they always will interest me. Somehow there is nothing other like them. They
enhold the essence of boyish enthusiasm, ambition and pep.”
According to Harold Preece, the Lone Scouts were a loosely knit organization started by Chicago
publisher W. D. Boyce as competition to the highly formalized Boy Scouts of America. Joining the Lone
Scouts meant that you could scout all by yourself if you didn’t want to join the Boy Scouts or if the Boy
Scouts did not exist in your area.
Klatt seemed to be surprisingly well read, despite great difficulties in obtaining books – “my financial
status makes it impossible to buy very many books and there aren’t any local libraries available. I used to
get books at the Hamilton Library under difficulties but they have changed the rules now to where it is
almost impossible for out-of-town people to get books.” His reading, in addition to Lone Scout journals,
consisted of such popular magazines as Saturday Evening Post and Colliers, and the 5¢ Little Blue Books –
“right here I want to say the Little Blue Books are great even if E. H. J. [E. Haldeman Julius] is their creator.”
E. Haldeman Julius’ debunking magazines (The Debunker, E. H. J. Weekly) were a source of irritation to Klatt:
“this world is more and less filled with and bunk but one E. H. J. is trying to prove this matter so
exhaustively that to me it seems he is bunk, himself. In a way he admits it. But I think, the way he is going,
he could do a quicker job by listing the things that are not bunk. His list would then undoubtedly be short
enough to be printed on a postage stamp.”
Klatt wrote, not only for the Lone Scout journals, but also for farm magazines such as Semi-Weekly Farm
News and Southland Farmer; he edited a page once a month for the latter.
But life was not all books and writings; this was, after all, the 1920s on a poor farm in Central Texas.
Occasionally hints of the drudgery would appear in his letters: “the last week or so I have been pushing a
pair of lazy mules over a cotton grass patch. The mules pull a cultivator of course. The mules, the grass
and several other things combined are enuf to make a preacher swear in seven languages and I am not a
preacher by any means . . . I am picking scrappy cotton under a broiling sun theses days. Some times it is
hard to marshal a little energy for other things after the day’s work . . . I dug ditches today and ditching is
decidedly not a white collar job. This morning I used a shovel mostly so it wasn’t so bad . . . but in the
afternoon I started a new ditch where it was so rocky that I had to cuss all time. The plow hooked about
every half second and the mules kept on going the wrong way. Such are the things that provoke me to
profanity – goddams, and all the rest.”
Klatt would meet Howard only once, when on December 26 1925 he came to Brownwood the meet Smith,
Vinson and Howard. In his letter to Smith in which he agrees to come, he wrote: “I’ll swipe the Ford if I have
to, some gas and some change . . . I am in a helluva fix, dead broke. I’ll just be able to scrape together enuf
to come and go in the Ford.”
Howard repeats the version in PO&SR: That Howard, Smith and Vinson drove 40 miles to meet Klatt, “train
connections are never of the best in West Texas, and this town was as far as Grotz [Klatt] could come on
the line which brought him from Hantsun [Hamilton].” Since PO&SR is an admixture of fact and fiction, it is
risky to accept everything at face value. While it is possible that the trio did drive to Comanche – 31 miles
northeast of Brownwood, 28 miles west of Hamilton – the terminus of the branch of the St. Louis
Southwestern (Cotton Belt) Railroad that ran through Hamilton, it seems to me that Klatt could have caught
a connecting train at Comanche on the Fort Worth & Rio Grande, a division of the St. Louis – San Francisco
(Frisco) Railroad on into Brownwood. The Frisco track, now part of the Santa Fe, was a rather major line,
whereas the Cotton Belt branch has long since been abandoned, so connections on the Frisco should have
been fairly easy to make.
Howard discussed the wild night on Clyde’s uncle’s ranch in a letter to H. P. Lovecraft: “I remember a wild
night I passed on an isolated ranch in mid-winter, several years ago. One of the party was wild drunk on
beer and another was struck crazy on raw Jamaica ginger, with obsession that he was a werewolf. One of
the bunch was a young German who didn’t drink and wasn’t use to the violent drunks common to
Americans; he backed up against a wall and I couldn’t help laughing at his expression when the Jamaican
victim began to smash furniture, gallop about on all-fours and howl like a mad dog. About midnight a
howling blizzard came up to add to the general lunacy.”
Klatt commented on the occasion thusly:
Stone Ranch
We arrived in the night of a new day under a leering moon
with a new norther and Truett drunk on three bottles of beer
We found well-under-porch-roof nondescript house, stove, table, chairs.
Bed and a cot, lamp and chaps, and a bottle of blackleg medicine sitting
on a two cent stamp.
Talking, laughing, roaring. Clyde and Bob sick on Jake. Truett and Clyde
slept and I and Bob sat at the stove and talked till the vague cutting
cold sunless dawn.
In PO&SR Howard writes “. . . a letter from Hubert, who said that, as college was put off for another year,
he had decided to run for the legislature. Something was wrong with his legs, and his campaign would
have to be a front porch campaign. Herbert explained that he did not expect to be elected but was doing it
more for the experience which it would afford him . . .” A bit later, it is stated that he had indeed been
defeated.
While it is true that Klatt did contemplate running for the legislature – “I am polishing up on public
speaking a bit and sometimes have even entertained crazy notions of running for the Texas Legislature
next year. Unless I get some financial windfall this would be impossible as well ridiculous.” – I suspect that
he version in PO&SR is mostly fictional. The quote was from Klatt’s March 7, 1927, and final, letter to Smith.
In just 14 months, Herbert Klatt would be dead.
In this same letter, he wrote: “But speaking of life, I can perhaps chant with Viereck” and then goes on to
quote the verse heading this article. Was Klatt’s health already beginning to deteriorate, and did he
suspicion that it might never improve?
He would teach for a few weeks at the German church school in Aleman where his “effective initial work –
and his promise of pedagogical eminence – were duly esteemed.” Some time in early 1928 he entered a
sanitarium and died in early May. In PO&SR the cause of death for ‘Hubert Grotz’ was given as
consumption, i.e., tuberculosis, and I have no reason to question the accuracy of that.
After Klatt’s death, there were efforts made, chiefly spearheaded by Vinson, to publish a memorial
volume – ranging all the way from a pamphlet to a clothbound book – but apparently nothing ever came of
this. Booth Mooney announced plans to make the July 1928 issue of his little travelogue, The Junto, a
special Klatt Memorial issue. Unfortunately, this issue apparently no longer exists (there being but one
copy per issue). Klatt also had a contribution in the first, April 1928, issue of The Junto; this, too, apparently
no longer exists.
Upon learning of his friend’s death, Howard wrote this poignant letter to Clyde Smith, circa May 1928.
Salaam:
So Klatt has gone West. I don’t know; it seems hard lines. Struck down in the very beginning of his
manhood – without a chance to fight.
Maybe this is right:
Flower of the Morning
Bill Adams
Tell them when I’m gone. Then.
Say, “He was glad to go.”
Say, “He heard a ringing voice, a great wind blow.”
Say, “He’d always wandered in sort of a maze.”
Say, “He knew this would bring
An end to wonder:
Flames of light and sons a-wing,
And doubting trampled under.”
Tell them
“Death is but a birth
A burst of flowers
Fairer than the blooms of earth
Its beauty ours.”
Yet what do such things signify? A mere tangle of words. Empty sounds. Bare vocal noises.
Where are the sunrises and the sunsets, the lights and the shadows, the sting of winds, the vivid shiftings
of radiances and colors, when a man is dead?
Yet the body of him will go back to the elements again; he will throb with life in the sap of the tree, in the
haze of the heat. Flowers and hot grain will spring up and wave and live and the essence of their being will
be the essence of him.
Yet the pity of it, that his manhood and his great dreams should perish before he had a chance to make
them live – that all his killing toil and struggles should go for nothing.
He was a fighter but the odds were far too many. Yet I know he went out smiling.
What shall am an say when a friend has vanished behind the doors of Death? A mere tangle of barren
words, only words.
Still, I feel that there is such a thing as a Hereafter that he will find a place among his fearless ancestors
in the high hall of Valhalla and I like to think of him sitting at the right hand of Thor amid the glory of
everlasting revel.
Yes, if there is a Hereafter, as Longfellow says:
There from the flowing bowl
Deep drinks the Viking’s soul!
Skoal! To the Northland! Skoal!
Thus the tale ended.
In 1925, Howard published – if a typewritten original and possibly three carbon copies can be deemed
publishing – three issues of a little journal, The Right Hook. As might be expected, he wrote nearly all of the
material; the only exception was a poem by Klatt in Volume 1, Number 2.
Rope
Hempen coils from the gibbet
Dangling in the air
Meet the condemned eyes
With unutterable despair.
The Alp climbers trust
Strands across relentless snow
The hair-breadth safety
From dangers below.
Restraint in custom and law
A line that excludes hope
And keeps me within
Narrow bounds – rope.
Copyright 2005 by Glenn Lord
 |  |  |  |  |  |  |