How the Boy became The Old Man
Robert Ruark’s
Legacy
by Terry Weiland
 Late in his life, on a safari in East
Africa with some American friends, Robert Ruark came to a startling
conclusion. “As I approach senility I find that I am the Old Man now,” he
wrote, “And I get my kicks out of not hunting, but of making it possible
for other people.” At the time Ruark was only 42 – usually the prime of
life for an active man, and for many writers the beginning of their most
productive years. Not for Robert Ruark. Although he did not know it, he
was nearing the end. Ruark’s comparison of himself with his most enduring
character – the Old Man of the Field & Stream columns – was more
accurate than he knew. In seven years, he would be dead – worn out at the
age of 49 from a lifetime of simply living too damned
hard.
Robert Ruark was fond of adding things up. He liked to
look at the word count from his typewriter each day. He liked to total up
the number of miles flown, the number of column-inches printed, and the
number of newspapers around the world that printed those columns. He was a
man fascinated by accomplishment, and he was constantly looking for ways
to measure and quantify the things he had done. And, truth to tell, he was
fond of rubbing other people’s noses in it.
On the wall over my desk, I
have two shelves of books. One is devoted to Ernest Hemingway, the other
to Robert Ruark. The Hemingway shelf is twice as long as Ruark’s, but
Ruark is no slouch: The shelf space required for one copy of each of his
first editions is more than two feet long. These books – six anthologies,
six novels, and one non-fiction masterpiece – were produced in the amazing
span of just 15 years – a decade and a half in which Robert Ruark went to
Africa on safari at least once and often twice a year, in which he circled
the globe repeatedly, and hunted and fished from Kenya to Alaska to New
Zealand.
“Christ,” his autobiographical self wonders in The Honey
Badger, looking at his own books lined up on a shelf. “When did I have
time to make the trips, shoot the animals, drink the booze, chase the
dames?” When, indeed.
That Robert Ruark was a driven man who spent half
his life driving himself, and the other half trying to escape from his
driving self, is neither a great insight nor a revelation. Even the
question “why?” is no real mystery: Ruark was a poor boy from a small
southern town who felt he had a lot to prove.
If there is a mystery, it
is this: Why, almost 40 years after his death, does his writing still have
such magic? There were other safari writers before, and there have been
many since. Africa has changed, and safari has changed, forever and not
for the better. By any meaningful measure, Ruark’s work is out of date --
“obsolescent if not obsolete” as he might have put it. Yet, for African
hunters real and imagined, Ruark is still the name that symbolizes it
all.
Why?
Robert Ruark was born in North Carolina, in the town of
Wilmington, on December 29, 1915. Wilmington is a unremarkable community
on the Cape Fear River, just upstream from the coastal town of
Southport.
In many ways, Ruark was born in just the right place at just
the right time. Inland from Wilmington could be found swamps and woods and
fields, that harboured whitetail deer, wild turkeys, squirrels and – above
all – bobwhite quail. The river and the surf that washed the coa stline were full of fish. There was duck
hunting in the fall and surf casting in the summer.
Ruark’s maternal
grandfather, Edward Hall Adkins, was a retired sea captain, and his Uncle
Rob skippered the ferry that ran between the two towns. If a boy had any
bent whatever toward the outdoors – and Bob Ruark did – there was
unlimited scope for boyish adventures.
This was not Ruark’s personal
Garden of Eden, however. His home life was anything but peaceful. Both his
mother, Charlotte, and his father, Robert Ruark Senior, had personal
weaknesses that grew into serious problems as the years went by. His
mother carried on a constant battle of wills with her mother-in-law, who
lived with them, and a similar battle of the sexes with her ineffectual
husband. Ruark was an only child, but it was not for want of trying. A
succession of unproductive pregnancies were blamed on husband, son,
in-laws, or any number of other causes. Dinner every night was a
battlefield. Eventually, his mother took refuge in morphine, and his
father in alcohol.
Repelled by it all, the young Ruark spent more and
more of his time alone in the woods with a book and a shotgun, or on the
river in a boat pretending he was Sir Francis Drake, or with his
grandfather – later the model for the Old Man – at his home in
Southport.
Bobby Ruark was precocious, and in spite of his later
acerbic writings about his family, did not have a completely negative
childhood. He ate regularly, and always had a place to sleep. His
grandmother taught him to read at an early age – he could read well before
he ever started school – and he devoured books like popcorn. His paternal
grandfather, a ne’er-do-well named Hanson Ruark, had one redeeming
quality: he adored books, and had a substantial library. With an
all-consuming curiosity, Ruark went through the family supply of books
like a wolf through a flock.
Years later, when he created the Old Man,
Ruark combined the best attributes of both grandfathers into one
admirable, well-rounded, and unforgettable character.
Young Ruark’s
bookishness did not stand him in good stead at school. While his teachers
admired his abilities, his schoolmates did not. The fact that he was
rather plump and had no aptitude for team sports did not help. Being
ostracised by his peers made Ruark even more of a loner. He was a
“hardened recluse,” he later wrote, by the time he was 12.
But his
grades were good – so good that he graduated from high school early and
entered the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill when he was only
15.
It was then 1930, and two momentous events occurred that changed
things forever. Ned Adkins died of cancer, leaving the family with little
except debt, and the Great Depression descended on the land, wiping out
anything that was left.
Ruark entered university with no money and few
prospects. He managed to stick through four years, however, and with no
means to do much else, studied hard and graduated with honours. In his
fourth year, having little idea what he wanted to do with his life, he
began sitting in on a journalism class because he was in love with a
journalism major. The professor took an interest in Ruark, saw that he had
serious writing talent, and pointed him the right way when he graduated.
Ruark never got the girl, but he got something worth far more: He found
his calling in life.
Ruark went first to a small weekly newspaper in
the Piedmont. When that job ended six months later, he pulled some family
strings to get himself a berth on the tramp freighter Sundance as an
ordinary seaman. He shipped out for Europe, survived three voyages under a
tyrannical skipper, and a year later was back ashore, broke, unemployed,
and barely 21, in Washington, D.C.
It was then 1936, and newspapers
were not hiring. Still, Ruark found a job as a copy boy with the
Washington Daily News and, a few lucky breaks later, found himself as a
staff reporter covering everything from fires to football games. Along the
way, he married a local girl from a well-to-do family. Virginia Webb and
her parents and brother provided Ruark with the respectability that he
craved on the one hand, however, the invisible bonds that hold a man in a
family like that began to chafe almost immediately.
The pattern of
truancy established in childhood, born of family turmoil and social
ostracism, was to become a recurring theme, in his writing as well as his
life. Ruark called himself a “compulsive truant.”
The first opportunity
for serious truancy occurred on December 7, 1941, when the Japanese bombed
Pearl Harbor and “we all went shopping for military suits.” Ruark was
covering a football game when he heard the news. A few months later, he
received his commission from the Navy and was ordered to report for basic
training. By the end of the year, Ensign Robert C. Ruark, Jr, was a naval
gunnery officer commanding a unit of the Armed Guard aboard a freighter on
the trans-Atlantic convoy run.
Although he tended to play down his
accomplishments in the Navy, Ruark was immensely proud of the fact that he
had been a serving officer, and saw action in several of the most
hazardous theatres of war. The Atlantic convoys 1942–43, running munitions
to England during the Blitz, are a curiously unsung part of the war, yet
they were horribly dangerous missions in which merchant crews and their
naval escorts faced packs of U-boats, Luftwaffe dive-bombers, winter
gales, and the certainty of death if their ships were sunk.
Ruark
survived two such convoys at the height of the Battle of the Atlantic, as
well as one convoy into the Mediterranean. His ship, carrying a cargo of
aviation fuel, was torpedoed in the Med; the torpedo failed to detonate,
and the ship survived to make it home. Ruark dodged fate several times,
and was eventually transferred to the Pacific, where he ended the war in
Australia.
In later accounts, Ruark dismissed any idea of personal
heroism, but did acknowledge that he had been extraordinarily lucky to
survive the war when so many of his friends had not. His wartime
experiences appeared infrequently in his writing. A few recollections
occur in his book about his first safari, Horn of the Hunter; the war
plays a major role in the life of Alec Barr, Ruark’s alter-ego in his
last, autobiographical novel, The Honey Badger. But he never wrote a pure
“war novel,” and never traded on his war record. It was, for him, a very
private matter – as it was with most men who saw and survived serious
combat.
After the war, Ruark returned to his newspaper job in
Washington, but it was a brief stay. Being the “meek morning editor” of
the Daily News was no longer enough. Ruark had higher ambitions. He wanted
a syndicated column, and he wanted to live in New York, where “the big
money grows”. In 1946, Robert and Virginia Ruark relocated to the Big
Apple, taking an apartment in Greenwich Village, and Ruark embarked on the
next – and in many ways most destructive – stage of his life.
With
freedom to live as he saw fit so long as he met his daily deadlines, Ruark
turned into a nighthawk who drank long, slept late, and lived large. This
was the first real budding of the alcoholism that was to become almost his
trademark. He haunted saloons, and wrote about their denizens in his
column. By 1951, he was punishing his liver unmercifully and his nerves
were frazzled. It was time for a change, and he knew it.
Since
childhood, Ruark had been fascinated by the idea of Africa, and a long
safari. In 1951, the dream came true. He took Virginia and flew to Kenya
for a two-month safari with Harry Selby, then a young, unknown
professional hunter with Ker & Downey. That safari turned out to be a
life-altering event for Robert Ruark. In Kenya, he saw a spectacular land
that he loved instantly and for the rest of his life; in the Kenya
settlers, he saw people living a life that he both envied and admired; in
the animals, and the simple pursuit thereof, he saw the “hard, true life”
that was the antithesis of his artificial existence in New York.
Robert
Ruark returned home to write his account of the safari, Horn of the
Hunter, and to plan his escape from what he now saw as a destructive
prison.
At the time, Ruark was a modestly famous and very successful
man. His column was syndicated across the country and his name was
well-known. In 1947, he had written a spoof historical novel, Grenadine
Etching, which sold reasonably well. He followed this up with two
anthologies of his newspaper column, One for the Road and I Didn’t Know It
Was Loaded.
As a journalist, he was a force. He had pioneered
investigative journalism before the term became popular, and had several
coups to his name, including a series on Frank Sinatra and mobster Lucky
Luciano. Still, he was viewed more as a muckraking gadfly than a writer
with any real literary potential.
The publication of Horn of the
Hunter, however, was a complete change of direction.
It was a serious
book, written straight and without gimmicks. It was Africa seen through
the eyes of an eager newcomer with no pretensions and no literary
reputation to live up to. As such, it was one of the most successful books
of its type ever written. For Ruark the writer, Africa provided something
that was beyond price: a vast subject that was really worth writing about.
It was a subject to which Ruark largely devoted the rest of his
life.
Horn of the Hunter appeared in 1953, and was an instant
best-seller. Ruark also wrote about Africa in his newspaper column – in
fact, he had filed many columns from Africa while he was on safari. An
accomplished magazine writer, he had also fulfilled a childhood dream of
being published in Field & Stream, and in 1953, he began writing a
continuing series about his childhood, hunting and fishing with his
grandfather in North Carolina. The series was called The Old Man and the
Boy, and it ran for the next eight years. Ruark was paid the unheard-of
sum of $1 500 per issue, an indication of both how good a writer he was,
and the value of having his name on the masthead.
In October 1952, a
series of violent attacks occurred in Kenya. Families on isolated farms
were butchered, their animals slaughtered in grisly rituals, and their
houses burned. The first Mau Mau atrocities attracted headlines around the
world, and Robert Ruark immediately left for the land he already loved, to
confront the bloody end of what he had viewed as heaven on earth. He wrote
about the Mau Mau and its roots, about colonial society and African
aspirations of independence, in a series of magazine articles and in his
syndicated column.
Out of it also came his first major novel –
Something of Value. It was published in 1955 and became a Book of the
Month Club selection. It was both hugely successful and controversial, but
in many ways it made Robert Ruark. He was now a literary name as well as a
journalistic one, mentioned by many in the same breath as Ernest
Hemingway. The comparisons with Hemingway, welcome at first, became
burdensome and irritating as the years passed.
Ruark followed up
Something of Value with a lacklustre potboiler called Poor No More, an
“autobiographical” novel about the textile industry in the South. Although
it drew on Ruark’s young life, it was autobiographical only superficially.
In many ways, it was Ruark’s revenge on the people at home who had, he
believed, looked down on his family and who now steadfastly refused to
acknowledge that he had truly made good in the big city. His determination
to prove himself, coupled with his nagging insecurity, only became worse
as the years went by.
None of this was public, however. To the readers
of the hundreds of newspapers that published his column, to readers of
Field & Stream, and to the millions who read his novels, he was a
successful and wealthy man who lived a life others could only
envy.
Ruark went to Africa every year, sometimes twice or even three
times. He also visited and wrote about hunting in Alaska, New Zealand, and
India. He hunted tigers and Alaska brown bears. Curiously, though, his
articles about these trips, while competent and readable, never had the
magic that characterised his African material. Ruark was born to write
about Africa.
In 1953, for tax reasons as much as anything, Robert and
Virginia Ruark left New York and settled in Palamos, on the Mediterranean
coast of Spain, east of Barcelona. Their villa there would be Ruark’s home
for the rest of his life.
As one African country after another moved
towards independence, Ruark travelled the continent, covering the events
as a journalist. In 1962, he published another major novel, Uhuru, a story
set in Kenya and based around the murder trial of Peter Poole, a white man
hanged for the murder of a black. Uhuru is a complicated work, with
considerably more depth than Something of Value. Calculated to infuriate
African nationalists as well as their liberal apologists in Europe and the
United States, Uhuru was the catalyst for Ruark’s final departure from
Kenya.
Although he later claimed that he was declared a prohibited
immigrant because of what he wrote in the book, he actually left the
country for the last time to avoid a process server attempting to serve
him with papers relating to a lawsuit filed by Chief James Gichuru, a
Kikuya politician whom Ruark had falsely named as a Mau Mau.
Harry
Selby, Ruark’s long-time friend and professional hunter, smuggled him to
the airport on July 10, 1962, and Ruark left Kenya. He never returned, and
he never saw Selby again.
Back in Spain, Ruark’s life began to fall
apart. His drinking had reached epidemic proportions; in 1963, he and his
wife, Virginia, were divorced. Money troubles piled up. He spent his
advances as fast as his publishers could send him the checks, and he fell
behind in his obligations to provide manuscripts. Even his newspaper
column, his bread and butter for years, suffered, and eventually the
syndicate terminated his contract.
In June, 1965, Robert Ruark suffered
liver failure. He was flown from Barcelona to London, where he died in
hospital on July 1. He was only 49 years old.
The bare facts of Ruark’s
life and death do not begin to convey his importance as a writer at the
time, as a prognosticator on Africa’s future as a collection of
independent nations, nor his continuing influence as a writer on Africa 40
years after his death.
Shortly after Ruark died, his last novel, The
Honey Badger, was published. It was the autobiographical story of a New
York novelist. Within a year or two, two anthologies of his work, Use
Enough Gun, and Women, also appeared. And after that, nothing. Ruark was
very quickly forgotten by mainstream America. His name carried enough
cachet that his agent, heirs, and publishers tried to cash in wherever
possible, but one by one his books went out of print. Only the collections
of his Old Man columns, published in two volumes (1957 and 1961) stayed in
print.
The message that Ruark had insisted on delivering about Africa’s
prospects, although uncannily accurate and far-sighted in retrospect, flew
at the time in the face of both Cold War wishful thinking and a burgeoning
political correctness. If the independent African emperor truly had no
clothes, most Americans did not want to know about it.
Robert Ruark’s
name would have been completely forgotten but for one thing: as a hunting
writer, he was in a class by himself. His most enduring fans were the
people who had read his stories about safari, and animals, and Africa.
While his novels did not exactly become collectors’ items, there was a
continuing market among used-book dealers for anything he had written
about Africa.
During the African hunting boom of the 1980s and ‘90s,
interest in Ruark picked up. Two more anthologies of his magazine writing
appeared – Robert Ruark’s Africa, 1991, edited by Michael McIntosh – and
The Lost Classics of Robert Ruark, 1995. There was even a biography,
Someone of Value, written by a retired American bureaucrat who, curiously,
focused on Ruark’s political writing and largely ignored the area in which
his name really lives on – as a writer on African hunting.
Both of his
African classics, Horn of the Hunter and Use Enough Gun, were reprinted by
Safari Press.
Which brings us back to the question: What is it about
Ruark’s writing that is still so compelling, so many years later? The
answer, I believe, is simple: Ruark saw Africa with a freshness and
enthusiasm that still shines through. Even when his writing took on a
world-weary tone and he was writing about how disgusted he was with the
way things were changing, he still showed us a world the way we would like
to remember it, the way we wish it still was.
Robert Ruark was always
The Boy, seeing things for the first time, with an excitement he could
barely conceal and wanted to share. Later in life, telling us this, he
became for many of us, the Old Man, a source of wisdom and insight,
pointing us in the right direction, but never lecturing, never
condescending.
The world he wrote about may be gone forever, but the
world he created is still with us, and will be as long as his books are
read. A writer could not ask for much more.
Photos for this article are from Someone of Value: A
Biography of Robert Ruark by Hugh Foster. Available from Outdoor Visions,
14 Canyon Creek Village, Richardson, TX 75080. E-mail: hunters@outdoorvisions.com
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