BY THOMAS MCINTYRE
Famous before the internet (“FBI”), columnist, novelist, product of a Carolina boyhood, Big Apple roisterer, and big-game hunter, Robert Chester Ruark was the author of Horn of the Hunter (1953), Something of Value (1955), and The Old Man and the Boy (1957). He also, for better or worse, shaped at least some of my life. Now, my friend Terry Wieland is telling the story of Ruark in the book you are holding, A View from a Tall Hill.
Terry can explain why he was drawn to Africa, and in these pages why Ruark may have been drawn, too. My own obsession with Africa predated even my ability to read, to an indelible childhood impression of an actual person I knew who had come back from what must have been, based upon his tales of buffalo, elephant, and the people he met, the most enthralling place on earth. In time I did read about Africa, but before Roosevelt or Hemingway, before Pete Capstick became “Peter Hathaway Capstick,” it was Ruark I read first when I was barely a teenager and Ruark was still alive and something of a Papa manqué. One might take the position that it was the ruination of a young life. Or not.
Time has not been generous to Ruark’s reputation. A country lad who learned a love of the outdoors from his two grandfathers, he was something of a prodigy, entering college at fifteen, then venturing from Chapel Hill to the bright lights and big city and newspapers. By the time of his far-too-early death in the mid-1960s he had become a fading ember, disarrayed philanderer, and victim of strong drink and guttering talent. Yet for some ten years from the start of the ’50s to the start of the ’60s he was a genuinely estimable bestselling author; had a money-losing A-list movie, starring Sidney Poitier and Rock Hudson, made from one of his books; was a one-shot actor in television’s Playhouse 90; and in what may or may not have been the golden age of magazine journalism, a certifiable celebrity of the first order, all of it accelerated by Africa.
“Bestselling” and “author” is a rather dismissive coupling of words today; but it was hardly a ringing endorsement even half a century ago. On top of that, Ruark found his subject in Africa and, worse, hunting, though far from entirely that. Only one writer of the day was, as we know, permitted to write about those two subjects with any hope of being taken seriously. Yet Ruark’s coming to Africa can be seen as a direct-line product of an American tradition begun with Roosevelt and carried on by Hemingway—Roosevelt in emulation of the British hunter-explorer Frederick Courteney Selous, Hemingway in emulation of Roosevelt, Ruark of Hemingway, and more of us than we might care to say in homage to Ruark. The three American men and writers came to Africa almost exactly twenty years apart, each after his own war, in Cuba, Italy, and the North Atlantic, each very much a product of his own generation. Today, the power in the kind of Africa the three were drawn to can be seen in its anti-generational attraction for many of us still, in the twenty-first century.
Though initially something of a lesser hunter than either of his predecessors, Ruark went on to spend more time in Africa than the other two combined, as well as hunting in more far-flung regions, including beyond Africa, and for more charismatic game, Hemingway never hunting elephant or tiger; Roosevelt never tiger or leopard; neither hunting Alaska, as Ruark did for brown bear. Of the three, Ruark wrote arguably the most vividly and entertainingly about Africa, Hemingway more intent on belle lettres pontificating around campfires, and Roosevelt a serviceable, utilitarian writer with a tendency to read like a penny-a-liner, yet not without agreeable grace notes.
Ruark, more than either, was a true working writer. Professional hunters, most now dead, recalling Ruark on safari, remarked on how the day would come when he uncased the manual typewriter from the looming massif of impedimenta he brought and, waving away all distraction, sat at a deal table in the yellowish shade of the fever trees, doubtlessly with a large glass of iced gin near at hand, producing a stack of manuscripts to be sent back to the offices of the Scripps-Howard syndicate par avion. With his bank balance thus on the way to being replenished, he could return to hunting with something like a clear conscience.
Ruark’s being drawn to Africa and his sensitive insights into, and love of, it and Africans, black and white, would seem to belie his superficial biography. A product of the Depression-era Jim Crow South, Ruark would seem an overwhelming candidate for prejudice, yet was anything but. Roosevelt had a vexingly conflicted regard for black people, mingling progressive politics (he praised the “buffalo” soldiers—“We’re fighting bulls of the Buffaloes”-who reinforced his Rough Riders at crucial moments during their battles in the Spanish–American War, only later to say of them, “Negro troops were shirkers in their duties and would only go so far as they were led by white officers,” and even later unjustly ordering the dishonorable discharge of one hundred sixty-seven black troops after a racial incident in Brownsville, Texas, in 1906, the troops being pardoned sixty-six years later when only one survived). Of the Africans he met on safari, he contended they were “strapping grown-up children.” With Papa, what I would deem affected hardboiled talk came all too trippingly to his tongue, along with his exhibiting an open disdain for many of the Africans working diligently and skillfully to find game for him. (In fairness, Hemingway did feel a genuine warmth for some Africans, in particular those he perceived as regarding him as the uber-hero he hankered to be.)
It’s difficult to discover similar inclinations in Ruark, perhaps because he knew hard times growing up or recalled the alienation of being a loner, and so an outsider, as a child. He may have associated, as an ordinary seaman on ships in the Merchant Marine in the 1930s or as a gunnery officer in the World War II Navy, with blacks on equal footings. Or it may simply be that as a Southerner he grew up in far closer association, and with deeper empathy for, blacks than Northerners like Roosevelt and Hemingway ever could experience.
Ruark was a full-time stop-the-presses journalist, an occupation which was mostly a part-time one for Roosevelt and Hemingway. For Ruark, as such, getting the story straight was, indeed, something of value. It also sent him, when he made Manhattan his headquarters, into an endless rounding of the nightclub circuit to forage for material for his columns (I came across a photo of a scrum of mid-century men in coats and ties laughing a little too heartily at the bar at 21, one of them, not identified by name, unmistakably a rather florid Ruark, who was probably in his head cataloging a story; Hemingway, on the other hand, is said to have had after-hours sex with a gangster’s moll in the club, having met her only that night and never getting her name for the record).
Ruark’s alcoholism was apparently well-established before he ever stepped foot in Tanganyika (he’d been marked for it, both of his parents substance abusers). A story from a reliable source tells how Ruark, before his first safari, took his new and unfamiliar rifles to the shooting range at the Camp Fire Club near Chappaqua, New York, of which Roosevelt was one of the earliest members. He was, however, far too worse for the drink to sight in his rifles himself, and the Field & Stream shooting editor, Warren Page, another club member, got all of them zeroed for him. (Another story, which may or may not have involved alcohol, was his accidental shooting of a native Indian during a tiger beat and having to flee the country with his wife to escape a charge of homicide.)
The once young, now deceased, professional hunter Harry Selby, whom Ruark made renowned, commented on the air of dissipation and sallowness he saw in Ruark upon his many rearrivals in Africa. And how within a week or two on safari, he appeared far more healthy and alive. Hemingway meant to return soon after his first time, and told how he would in the thoughts he had during his drive back to the main camp in Green Hills of Africa after taking the kudu he had been fixated on throughout his hunt:
I’d make some money some way and when we came back we would come to the old man’s village in trucks, then pack in with porters so there wouldn’t be any damned car to worry about, send the porters back, and make a camp in the timber up the stream . . . and hunt that country slowly, living there and hunting out each day, sometimes laying off and writing for a week, or writing half the day, or every other day, and get to know it as I knew the country around the lake where we were brought up. I’d see the buffalo feeding where they lived, and when the elephants came through the hills we would see them and watch them breaking branches and not have to shoot, and I would lie in the fallen leaves and watch the kudu feed out and never fire a shot unless I saw a better head than this one in the back, and instead of trailing that sable bull . . . all day, I’d lie behind a rock and watch them on the hillside and see them long enough so they belonged to me forever . . . I would come back to where it pleased me to live; to really live. Not just let my life pass.
Of course, it never came to pass. Divorcing the rich wife whose family funded the first safari, it took Hemingway almost twenty years before Look magazine and the colonial government of Kenya provided him with another African hunt, when it was too late for him to be saved. Ruark’s situation was different; and while you might wish to imagine that a life in the African bush could have been Hemingway’s salvation, it seems less likely that it could have been Ruark’s (he tried it), who had perhaps been too long bound to his sinecure in Manhattan high society—at least the sort of high society that made it into the inside pages of the papers—for there to be true hope of redemption.
Yet Africa is where Ruark said he had to go “to meet God” (and perhaps of no lesser consequence, to learn to love food). With campfires and canvas it displaced boîtes and a grand hacienda in Spain, for interludes, and almost certainly granted him more honest words to put down on paper and more years to put them there, perhaps merely forestalling a London surgical theater and death at forty-nine, but forestalling it all the same. Whatever his possible outcome—none ideal—no better gauge of Ruark’s powers as an author, fired by his miraculous discovery of Africa, may be evidenced by the thousands of others he beguiled into following him to the tall hills he had found, as if no one else had ever set foot on them.
Almost thirty years ago, when my son was born, I wanted to give him something he could keep in a pocket, as it were, knowing it was there to draw some strength from if needed, but not to have to broadcast it to the world at large. It was his middle name. Long after I may or may not have been ruined by that name, long after the name might have gone out of fashion, I thought my son could have it for whatever power it might contain, and as a possible way of explaining something about his father to him. So, of course, there was nothing else to be done but to give him the imperfect yet enduring “Ruark” for such a name.
For forty years and more, Thomas McIntyre has written about the world of hunting, with a special regard for Africa. He has been a contributing editor to Sports Afield and Field & Stream throughout those decades. He is the author of numerous books, most recently Augusts in Africa. As well, he has written more than eight hundred scripts for outdoor television. Currently, he is at work on a book about the African buffalo, Thunder Without Rain, and a television series about an alternate history of the North American Indian.