THE UNIVERSITY OF NORTH CAROLINA
If Ruark’s later writing is to be believed, he left for college with no clear idea of what he wanted to do in life beyond the simple desire to make money. Coming from an impoverished family, in a poor part of the country, with no family business to inherit or professional tradition to adhere to, he went to Chapel Hill with the idea that “pants were unimportant if you had some, but very, very important if you did not,” and that in the business world to come, a man without a degree would stand “pantless in the halls of commerce.” It was a very perceptive view for 1930, when even high school graduation was a notable feat in small southern towns, but Ruark had already set his sights high. He may not have known exactly what he wanted to become, but he certainly knew what he did not.
The first obstacle, however, was to get through four years of college on almost no money. His family was chronically unable to contribute, and he set off that first year with fifty dollars in his pocket, the proceeds of a summer spent working in a parking lot.
The picture he later painted of Chapel Hill in 1930, first in Poor No More, later in The Honey Badger, is both loving and resentful — loving in the sense of what it was and what it represented, but resentful in that much as he might want to, he did not fit in there any more than he had in Wilmington. First, he was very young. Even in 1930, starting college at fifteen was unusual. Second, he was poverty-stricken, yet he was forced to rub elbows with students who were going to college riding on their fathers’ bankrolls. The children of wealthy people have a way of looking down on those who are not, and young Ruark felt the full weight of their disapproval. He managed to get into a fraternity, but then paid his dues by waiting on tables at meals. He held down one or two jobs, pinching pennies endlessly, enduring humiliating interviews with the dean, pleading for one more student loan — going through college, as he put it, on one threadbare suit.
That, at least, is the picture of the Chapel Hill that Ruark’s alter ego, Alec Barr, attended. It is a poignant picture, to say the least, but not completely true in Ruark’s own case. He was not rolling in money, but nor was he starving. Alec Barr, having left home (Kingtown, South Carolina) never looked back; in the novel, he goes home for a visit one time with a classmate and flees after being humiliated by his mother’s behavior, never to return. Ruark looked around him at Chapel Hill and saw a bastion of privilege; he saw, even in “the teeth of the Depression,” students from wealthy families driving cars and drinking mint juleps on the veranda. He heard, from a distance, the music of Hal Kemp and Ray Noble. Although he formed a couple of lasting friendships at Chapel Hill, Ruark’s college career only deepened his already intense desire to make it big and then rub everyone’s nose in it.
The question was, make it big at what? Medicine and the law were equally unattainable given the shortage of funds. Teaching was, as he put it, too long a road with not enough money at the end. And so he worked his way through the first three years cramming in as many courses as he could, studying when others were socializing, working when they were relaxing. His natural ability in English garnered him an “A” in a course whose professor had never before given an “A” to anyone “including Thomas Wolfe.”
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In truth, Robert Ruark had a somewhat checkered college career, in the sense that he was nagged by money problems, family problems, and the demands of fitting into a society where he felt like an outsider.
Ruark had completed one year of university when the financial situation at home became so severe that he was forced to drop out and return to Wilmington. There he found things going from bad to worse. By 1931, only one of his grandparents, his paternal grandmother Caroline, was still alive; she was living with his parents, was very ill, and required constant, expensive medical care. For their part his parents continued their feckless ways with drugs and alcohol. There were still boarders in the house, which had been expanded into a “nursing home” and now included convalescents. Ruark missed one semester, then went back to university.
Charlotte Ruark, who is at best an enigmatic character in Ruark’s life, decided she wanted to be near her son and took a room in a boarding house in Chapel Hill. She became a source of eternal embarassment. Occasionally Ruark would be forced to stay with her, sleeping on a cot in the front hall of the boarding house.
Ruark had become a member of a fraternity and was living, for the most part, in the fraternity house. According to Hugh Foster, he acquired a reputation for drinking and carousing, and even helped with the home-made gin when the legitimate supplies ran out. In interviews later in life, Ruark claimed he made money hustling anything that moved, including women for his fraternity brothers. How much of that is true, and how much is nostalgic fantasy, is impossible to determine. It is apparent Ruark was neither as ascetic nor withdrawn as Alec Barr in The Honey Badger, but he was not a highly social student either, mainly because of financial constraints.
In his fourth year, an event occurred that determined the course of his life: He met a girl and fell in love. Her name was Nan Norman; she was a year behind him and financially considerably better off, coming from a well-to-do family in the western part of North Carolina. She even had her own car. Since she was a journalism major, Ruark decided to sit in on her journalism classes, which were run by a professor named “Skipper” Coffin. Ruark wrote a couple of trial articles for Coffin, one of which the professor sold on his behalf to the newspaper in Raleigh for twelve dollars. It was Ruark’s first income as a freelance writer.
Here again, the events of Ruark’s life and those described in The Honey Badger are so close in all their details that the novel is almost autobiography: Nan Norman becomes Fran Mayfield, Skipper Coffin becomes Skipper Henry, and the twelve-dollar check becomes twenty dollars. And, oh yes — Alec Barr loses his virginity to Miss Mayfield in the bushes one balmy spring evening, whereas there is no indication Ruark was so blessed. In fact, there is ample evidence that while Ruark may have been in love with Miss Norman, she was definitely not in love with him. His subsequent portrayal of Fran Mayfield as a half-breed coed with “decidedly nymphomaniac tendencies” may have been an effort by Ruark to distance the fictional character from her real-life counterpart. More likely, Fran may have been the weapon through which Ruark, thirty years later, finally got even for being brushed off.
The end result of his relationship with Nan Norman and, through her, Professor Coffin, was Ruark’s decision to become a writer. He would begin by going into the newspaper business. Reporting, advised the professor, taught a writer the nuts and bolts of the business, how to meet deadlines and write under pressure, and allowed him to eat while he learned. Unfortunately, 1935 was not a good time to look for a newspaper job; the Depression was weighing upon the country in full force, and most newspapers were laying off people, not taking on new ones — especially people with no experience. Professor Coffin, however, had at least a partial solution: He arranged a job for Ruark on a small country weekly in Hamlet, North Carolina. It did not pay much — only ten dollars a week — but it offered one great advantage: the opportunity to learn every aspect of the newspaper business, from the ground up.
Again, the parallels with The Honey Badger are almost absolute. The Hamlet, North Carolina News-Messenger became the weekly in Center City, N.C. Ruark later quoted Professor Coffin as saying “the owner don’t wash but once a week, got bad breath and yellow teeth, the town is owned lock, stock and barrel by the Seaboard Railway.” Ruark became managing editor, advertising manager, ace reporter, and subscription salesman. He covered council meetings, wrote editorials, and then set them in type himself. Skipper Henry tells Alec Barr there are just as many stories in a small town as there are in a big city, and says he will learn how to hush up abortions and overlook rushed wedding dates. According to Ruark, that is exactly what happened. Hamlet may not have been the “little Sodom, a solid concentration of small-bore evil” Skipper Henry described to Barr, but it was certainly an education. Ruark lasted three months before he quit and headed for Washington in search of a real job on a real newspaper.
In The Honey Badger, Alec Barr quits because Fran Mayfield jilts him and marries someone else; he goes on a short binge, then heads for Washington in disillusionment. Ruark, on the other hand, claimed he quit because of “a problem with the daughter of a railway engineer” and said he got out of Hamlet one step ahead of the enraged father. He did indeed end up in Washington, but instead of working for a newspaper he lied his way into a job with the Works Progress Administration. The WPA was a creation of the federal government under Franklin D. Roosevelt’s New Deal. Ruark claimed to be an accountant. He was hired and sent to work on a project in Florida. When his employers discovered a few months later that his accounting skills were nonexistent, he was fired. This episode does not show up in The Honey Badger; instead, Alec Barr leaves Center City, hitch-hikes east, and gets a job on a tramp steamer — which is exactly what Ruark did after leaving the WPA. Again, there are contradictory accounts of how it came about, depending on whether one believes Ruark’s interviews or his written recollections.
In the 1964 interview, he says he got his job on the S.S. Sundance by challenging the first mate and fighting him to a standstill. Yet in his Old Man and the Boy episode “Life Among The Giants,” he credits his cousin Victor Price, an executive for the shipping company. In 1936, seamen’s jobs were harder to come by than reporting jobs, the docks were ruled by the unions, and desperate master mariners were shipping out as ordinary seamen. As well, Ruark was a college graduate — definitely not an advantage in the blue-collar world of merchant shipping. His later story of challenging the mate to a fight has a strange ring to it, much like Ernest Hemingway’s legend of riding the rods during his youth, hopping trains and living in hobo camps. Hemingway never actually did those things, nor did he ship out on the Great Lakes freighters, moving “as a boy in the company of men” and knowing how to use a knife to kill, if necessary, not to be “interfered with,” as he claimed many years later. Ruark’s suggestion that a kindly relative ran interference, helped him get the job, and kept a benevolent eye on him as he roamed the world before the mast rings with considerably more truth. At the time, Robert Ruark was barely twenty years old.
The Sundance became, in a sense, a third alma mater, after the University of North Carolina and the Hamlet, N.C., News-Messenger. It taught Ruark a great deal about real life. The ship was captained by a man who had, from Ruark’s description, many of the endearing personal qualities of such other great marine executives as Queeg, Ahab, and Bligh. Ruark’s stories of shoveling sheep manure in the hold, of cleaning the paintwork with lye, and of standing eight-hour watches across the freezing Atlantic show up over and over, in the Old Man series, in Poor No More, and finally in The Honey Badger, where:
(Alec Barr) wound up eventually in Hamburg, Germany (and) reflected, as he drank with the painted women in the Grosse Freiheit, in the company of two Russian female sailors and a Negro mess cook, that in one way he was following Skipper Henry’s advice. He was seeing life, and if you were going to be a writer, life was something you had to see.