On July 1, 1965, Robert Ruark died, ostensibly of a ruptured liver, in a hospital in London, England. There is no doubt that his liver was, indeed, hemorrhaging terribly, a result of advanced cirrhosis and Ruark’s refusal to stop drinking.
Those are the surface facts. The underlying truth about Ruark’s death, however, is just as elusive as the underlying truth about Ruark’s life, and it would not be overstating to suggest that the real cause of his death was a broken heart. After a lifetime of striving to succeed, and to find his place in the world, he instead found himself, at the age of forty-nine, strangely adrift.
At the time of his death, Ruark was one of America’s best-known and most controversial writers. Already a top-notch reporter, after World War II he became an enormously successful syndicated columnist, then an authority on Africa, and finally a novelist whose major works were all best-sellers. As a columnist, he was frequently described as a “gadfly,” and he referred to himself, on occasion, as “a professional wiseguy.” When he went on his first safari in East Africa in 1951, however, he began a professional transition that would turn him from a journalist into a novelist whose major works (Something of Value and Uhuru) ranked him with James Jones (From Here to Eternity) and Herman Wouk (The Caine Mutiny). When he died, he was — on paper, at least, or so he claimed — a millionaire with a Rolls-Royce and a villa in Spain, and another major novel (The Honey Badger) about to be published.
Ten years after his death, however, a friend of mine walked into one of the largest used-book stores in North America and enquired about the availability of any titles by Robert Ruark. The pony-tailed clerk, with his first whispy attempt at a beard, replied, “Who?” When it was explained who Ruark was, and what the titles were, the answer was a disdainful “We don’t have any demand for that sort of thing anymore.” It was as if Ruark and his memory had been quietly slipped overboard, to sink from sight in the wake of a departing ship. The reason for this, at least, was fairly simple: Ruark was, like Socrates, a man who spoke unwelcome truths. During the 1950s, when Africa’s many colonies were slipping toward varying degrees of independence, Ruark took up a decidedly unpopular cause — that of the white settlers, especially in his adopted country, Kenya, the place he felt “more at home than anywhere on earth.” The unpleasant truths that he spoke concerned the readiness of the average African to embrace independence in a modern world. The vast majority, Ruark wrote frankly, were simply not ready for l’indépendence. Yet selfish superpower interests (the United States and the Soviet Union) were combining with anti-imperial sentiment everywhere to pressure the colonial powers (especially Britain, France, and Belgium) to get out of Africa — immediately if not sooner, and regardless of the consequences. The result of their premature departures, as Ruark foresaw, would be decades of tribal warfare, murder, corruption and economic exploitation of the common people of Africa that far exceeded the colonial powers at their worst.
This opinion was objective and realistic, and certainly not without compassion for the various African peoples, but it was a far from popular viewpoint in the late 1950s, as the Civil Rights movement in the United States heated to a boiling point. While Robert Ruark was unquestionably not a racist, and his writings on segregation in the U.S. and on apartheid in South Africa confirm this, there was still a wide view that “the poor African” was oppressed and exploited, and must be set free. The liberal guilt of the 1950s and ‘60s has since been translated into the current environment of political correctness, in which only certain things can be said and certain other things (including, in many instances, the stark, naked truth) must never be said.
By 1965, the battle had been all but lost. Kenya, Tanganyika, Uganda, the Congo, the Sudan, Zambia — all were independent under governments that swiftly became very undemocratic. Ruark himself had been barred from Kenya, and American attention was turning to other parts of the world, especially Southeast Asia. When Ruark died, a lonely but high-profile voice of dissent on African affairs fell silent, and the politicians, diplomats, fellow-travelling journalists, and — let’s be frank — crooks and thugs and tyrants and aid agencies were left to turn Africa into what it is today. In all likelihood, that is where the career of Robert Ruark would have ended. The books would have gone out of print, the newspaper columns used to wrap fish, and his name forgotten even in his home town. The shelf life of departed journalists is short at best.
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Ernest Hemingway once wrote, “When you describe something that has happened that day the timeliness makes people see it in their own imaginations. A month later that element of time is gone and your account would be flat and they would not see it in their minds nor remember it.” So it is with books by journalists describing, in perishable depth, the news of the day or of past weeks or months; so-called journalistic works lose their value quickly and become little more than historical or academic curiosities. Hemingway went on to say that if, on the other hand, “You make it up instead of describe it you can make it round and whole and solid and give it life. You create it, for good or bad. It is made, not described. It is just as true as the extent of your ability to make it and the knowledge you put into it.”
On Africa, Ruark combined deep and extensive knowledge with an extraordinary writing ability that allowed him to create a world in literature, and the results were his greatest works: Horn of the Hunter, Something of Value, Uhuru, and The Honey Badger. As well, for almost nine years he wrote a monthly column in Field & Stream called “The Old Man and the Boy.” It ran for 106 issues and was based on Ruark’s remembrances of his childhood in North Carolina, hunting and fishing with his grandfather. The best of these columns was collected in an anthology of the same name in 1957, and this was followed, in 1961, by a second volume, The Old Mans Boy Grows Older. The subject matter was timeless, and as a result the stories themselves are immortal. It may well be that, a hundred years from now, the only book by Ruark that is still being read will be Old Man, which would not be surprising. Like a fine wine, these stories grow better with age.
Ruark once referred to himself as the “godfather of the modern safari business,” and while that may be overstating, it is essentially true. With Horn of the Hunter he inspired much of the post-war migration to hunt Africa, and his subsequent writing about safaris in Kenya, Uganda, Tanganyika, and Portuguese East Africa (Mozambique) kept interest at a high level. Between his safari writing and his columns and articles in Field & Stream, Ruark established a firm base of admirers completely independent of his general-interest syndicated newspaper column.
When he died, and his celebrity faded away to almost nothing, the hunters and fishermen who loved his work and admired the man for his many good qualities kept the flame alive. By the late 1980s, this specialized interest in Ruark had driven up prices of his books on the used-book market to the point where various publishers began to reprint his most popular works. As well, many of his previously uncollected articles were gathered into two anthologies (Robert Ruark’s Africa, edited by Michael McIntosh in 1991, and The Lost Classics of Robert Ruark, edited by James Casada in 1995) and in 1992, Hugh Foster published a biography of Ruark entitled Someone of Value.
You would think, then, that perhaps there are enough words already in print by and about Ruark. As an admirer of Robert Ruark from the age of seventeen, and with an admiration that grows the more I come to know Africa from travelling and hunting there myself, I felt there was at least one more book to be written, one that concentrated on his time in Africa and on the books that were the result of his deep love for the Dark Continent, for its people — all its people, black, white, and brown — and most of all, for its animals.
This is not intended to be a biography in the conventional sense; Hugh Foster has already done that. Instead, this is a portrait of Ruark seen in the context of events in Africa in the 1950s and ‘60s, of the places he went and the people he knew, and of his influence even after his death. To a great extent, Hugh Foster built his biography on an exhaustive examination of Ruark’s newspaper columns on contemporary topics such as American politics, Civil Rights, the Cold War, and African affairs, and gave relatively little weight to the one thing that makes him of serious interest today: Africa and big-game hunting.
The real key to Robert Ruark lies not in his journalism so much as in his major works of fiction, especially in the posthumously published novel, The Honey Badger. For reasons that completely elude me, this book, an autobiography in everything but name, has been largely ignored, if not dismissed outright, by others who have studied Ruark. But it is an omission for which I am grateful because it allows me to approach his life from a completely different direction.