HOME NO MORE
Robert Ruark stayed in Kenya covering the Mau Mau Emergency for about two months before returning to New York with his head filled with the sights, sounds, and smells of the violent upheaval in the colony. Undoubtedly, the seeds of Something of Value were already in his mind. Unfortunately, he returned to a life that was even more pressure-filled than before.
As well as his daily column for Scripps-Howard, he now had a deal not only to produce the “Old Man” series for Field & Stream every month, but also a half-dozen feature articles for that magazine every year, on top of the regular freelance writing he was already pursuing. This work load was undoubtedly lucrative, but it was also extremely demanding even for a writer of Ruark’s energy. After the leisurely pace of Kenya’s NFD, even on a cover safari for a journalistic assignment, Manhattan seemed like a madhouse.
Robert and Virginia Ruark were never known for their frugality, and the money flowed out as fast as it flowed in — and sometimes faster. No matter how hard Ruark ran, his financial situation was like a treadmill that kept picking up speed. Like most high-income people, he began to worry about his tax situation. To people at that time, income taxes seemed like an abnormal burden, and Ruark began to look for ways of minimizing this. Not surprisingly, memories of his trip to Spain the year before gave rise to the idea of living abroad, not only for its less frenetic pace, but also for the tax advantages it would afford. The Ruarks had been talking about moving to Europe from the moment they returned from Spain, and word of their intentions got around. In March, Time reported that Ruark was planning to leave New York and settle in Europe, probably in Rome, for the tax advantages.
There was another problem as well: Ruark’s health. As early as December, 1951, his doctor had warned him to stop drinking, or there was a real possibility of his developing cirrhosis of the liver. Ruark reportedly responded by going to “Twenty-One” and downing the first of what would become a decade-long succession of farewell scotches. He fell off the wagon almost immediately. In the spring of 1953, the warning was repeated, more forcefully this time, but it was not really needed — Ruark knew very well what was happening to him. He even said so in print. He had somehow found the time to write a sequel to his first novel, Grenadine Etching, called Grenadine’s Spawn (many years later he referred to it as a “very unfunny sequel”). It was “respectfully dedicated to the author’s liver, without whose constant encouragement he would feel no choler and would also be dead.” In June, 1953, he reviewed his situation: “In the past seven years I have written five books, about 200 magazine articles, and something like 2,000 columns. I have travelled over a million miles by air alone, and sat up too late too many nights while drinking entirely too much social whiskey. This has given me a dreadful liver and a tendency to quiver in crowds. So this is a left-handed way of announcing that I am going to cut down...”
Ruark “cut down” by renegotiating his contract with Scripps-Howard. Henceforth he would write only three newspaper columns a week instead of five, and his contract was transferred to the United Features payroll. He remained a United Features columnist for the next eleven years. To escape what he saw as the destructive influence of Manhattan, Robert and Virginia Ruark left for Europe in May, taking their household goods and their dogs, a boxer and a poodle. They rented Andrew Heiskell’s villa in Palamós for the summer while they looked for a permanent home. Ruark then proceeded to illustrate that Hemingway’s observation — “you take yourself with you wherever you go” — was all too true. If anything, his arduous pace picked up once he arrived in Europe, and over the next few months he would dateline his columns and articles from London, Madrid, Paris, Munich, Oran, French Morocco, and even Sidi-bel-Abbès, Algerian headquarters of the French Foreign Legion.
Around this time he met an upper-class Spaniard, Ricardo Sicré, who would become a close friend. Sicré was a wealthy man with high connections in the Franco government. According to Hugh Foster, Sicré was also a friend of Ernest Hemingway and introduced the two writers during the Fiesta of San Fermin, in Pamplona, in July, 1953. If there is any truth to this, it is not supported elsewhere. Ricardo Sicré is not mentioned in Carlos Baker’s biography of Hemingway, and it seems highly unlikely the fervently republican author would have a friend so highly placed in the Franco regime. As well, that year Hemingway was outspokenly anxious about his personal safety returning to Spain for the first time since the end of the Spanish Civil War. He was then en route to Africa to begin his second safari. Ruark did write a newspaper column about attending a bullfight with Hemingway in Pamplona, and in later years referred to getting “notably drunk” with Hemingway that summer.
In Palamós, Ruark found a villa for sale that suited his purposes perfectly. Ricardo Sicre helped him with the financing, and he settled into the house that would be his permanent home for the rest of his life. Apparently, however, while Ruark’s devotion to work did not suffer, his attention to detail did. His agent, Harold Matson, complained that his articles were not as professional as they should be — excessively long, or with overlapping subjects when magazines were expecting exclusivity. Ruark responded by hiring an ex-British Army sergeant, Alan Ritchie, to become his combination secretary and major domo. Ritchie moved into the house in Palamós and instantly became a fixture in Ruark’s life. Ruark’s affectionate portrait of Ritchie’s fictional counterpart in The Honey Badger, Luke Germani, is an indication of just how important Ritchie became to him.
Ritchie’s purpose in life, essentially, was to run the house, ensure there were adequate supplies of all the necessities (from Gordon’s gin to carbon paper), do the cooking, act as a sounding board or as Ruark’s conscience, collect the mail, answer the telephone, and clean-copy Ruark’s prose before it was sent off to the Matson agency in New York. In other words, he had responsibility for doing everything in Ruark’s life that was either an irritation or that might have distracted Ruark from the activity that paid the bills: sitting down at his typewriter and putting fingers to keys. From that day on, Ruark could travel the world, with or without Virginia, and know the house would be well looked after and waiting for him, in perfect order. As a novelist, hiring Alan Ritchie might have been the best thing he ever did.
***
By the fall of 1953, Ruark was well settled in Spain and leading a very relaxed life, if you believe the things he wrote in his column. Late that year, in an article in Reader’s Digest, he explained exactly why he had left New York and the rat race. He referred to the chains that had bound him and said that when lying on the beach in Palamós, he was “fettered by no chains not of my own making.” A Newsweek article in December, talking about Ruark, remarked wryly that the same was true of his life in New York — the chains were all of his own making. As well, it said, Ruark’s New York lifestyle had been “a boulevardier’s dream, though...not the dream of most newspapermen.”
Ruark had become not only a man who wrote, but a man about whom others wrote — a personality, a celebrity — with all the negatives that implies. He both enjoyed and rued the attention. Many years later, in an autobiographical sketch, he stated that as a reporter he was so shy he had to steel himself to face a stranger for an interview. This is completely at odds with his reputation for being a braggart who loudly insisted he knew everything about everything, but the two traits are not incompatible. Many shy people compensate by being overly outgoing, all the while cringing inside. As well, alcohol can be a great social lubricant and shock absorber for the psyche, and Ruark used it freely.
Ruark was riding high professionally and making extraordinarily good money. Horn of the Hunter had been published in July, received excellent reviews, sold out the first printing very quickly, and was in its second printing within months. True to form, however, he was living beyond his means. Hugh Foster reported that Matson wrote to Ruark in Spain in the fall of 1953 to warn that his finances were “in chaos,” with the Internal Revenue Service demanding payment of $5,600 in back taxes for 1952 and Ruark’s bank account already $6,000 in the red because of all his travel. His reaction was to plan an even longer trip — four months in Australia, the South Pacific, and the Far East — that would provide fresh material for his column. As well, he was now deep into planning Carrion Men, the original working title for Something of Value. While he packed his portable typewriter and headed for points east, Virginia Ruark went home to her family in Chevy Chase for the holidays. Ruark celebrated the New Year with a column in which he reviewed his non-stop travel, beginning with the Mau Mau in Kenya on New Year’s Day, 1953, and ending with him “plumb wore out” on New Year’s Day, 1954.
***
In Kenya, the second full year of the Mau Mau Emergency began with the continuation of what had become a full-scale military campaign. General Erskine now had three battalions of British troops to augment six battalions of KAR, as well as the Kenya Regiment, the Kenya Police, and the African loyalist Home Guard. He had artillery and several Royal Air Force units for reconnaisance and bombing missions. The main military targets were still the mountainous forests of Mount Kenya and the Aberdares, and the aircraft engaged in both strafing and bombing. These were not lighthearted sorties. Erskine had at his disposal nine four-engine Lincoln bombers, capable of dropping thousand-pound bombs, to go with his Harvard light bombers; even the Cessnas and Pipers of the Kenya Police Air Wing were equipped to drop small bombs, and the planes flew constant missions against the Mau Mau. The army was skeptical about just how effective the air war really was, but later interrogation of Mau Mau prisoners showed that, while the bombing and strafing may not have caused many casualties, they did force the Mau Mau to move their camps constantly, and this took a serious toll on morale. By the end of the Emergency, the Royal Air Force had dropped an astounding fifty thousand tons of bombs and expended more than two million rounds of machine-gun ammunition in strafing runs in the mountains.
On the ground, late 1953 saw several pitched battles between the Mau Mau and units of the Home Guard. By October, General Erskine had more than 10,000 British troops under his command, including a battalion of the Black Watch, fresh from Korea. The insurgents were careful to avoid getting into a serious shooting war with the British Army battalions, many of whose professional, experienced soldiers had acquired their combat skills in the jungles of Malaya. Generally, the Mau Mau would break off an engagement with the Home Guard and disappear back into the forests before the regulars arrived on the scene.
The year ended with a series of battles in which General Erskine tried to surround Mau Mau units south of Nyeri. These engagements involved artillery, mortars, machine guns, and rifles on the British side; the Mau Mau returned fire with rifles and light machine guns. At times, the battles degenerated into hand-to-hand combat.
According to Robert Edgerton, Mau Mau losses by the end of 1953 amounted to “3,064 confirmed killed, 1,000 captured, and an unknown number of wounded. In addition, almost 100,000 Mau Mau supporters had been arrested and 64,000 of these had been brought to trial.” For their part, on Christmas Eve the Mau Mau killed Major Archibald Wavell, a company commander in the Black Watch, in a battle near Thika. Major Wavell was the son of Field Marshal Wavell, one of the greatest British soldiers of the second world war. As well, the Mau Mau struck for the first time in Tanganyika, wiping out a loyalist Kikuyu family. The British responded by rounding up 650 Mau Mau suspects and returning them to Kenya for trial.
Although the major military actions were taking place in the mountains, the crowded black districts of Nairobi remained the nerve center of Mau Mau activity. It was in Nairobi that the Mau Mau War Council met, and it was there supplies and money were gathered to support the movement. By early 1954, Mau Mau activity in Nairobi had become so widespread and brazen that a battalion of the Royal Inniskilling Fusiliers was sent to patrol the city with fixed bayonets. The terror that had gripped the white community with the first killings and mutilations of 1952 and ‘53 continued as well: In April, 1954, the four-year-old son of a Royal Air Force officer was decapitated with a panga as he was riding his tricycle outside the family’s home in Nairobi. His parents were inside cooking breakfast at the time.
General Erskine realized that, try as he might, he could not defeat the Mau Mau by attacking them in the mountains alone. To kill that particular snake he needed to cut off the head, and the head was in Nairobi. He began to plan a massive military and police operation against the Mau Mau strongholds in the city. It was codenamed “Anvil.”
Later students of counter-insurgency methods point to Anvil as one of the great operations of its type — a model for wars to come. It was a sweep intended to clear the town of Mau Mau sympathizers once and for all. Troops surrounding the city would be the anvil; police going from house to house, from hiding hole to hiding hole, were the hammer. The theory of such an operation is simple, but the execution is not, mainly because of the need to maintain complete secrecy while preparing a massive effort. Without the element of surprise, the main targets will fly the coop ahead of the police. The British established the main detention center at an old military camp in Langata, a few miles outside Nairobi beside the Nairobi Game Park. Two more camps were set up in eastern Kenya. On the night of April 23, 1954, General Erskine surrounded the city with 25,000 troops. The citizens awoke on the 24th to find themselves in a huge trap. Police units moved in and swept one area after another, screening and arresting suspected Mau Mau. If a door would not open, they broke it down. Anyone who was in the least suspicious was sent to Langata. In the first forty-eight hours, 8,300 people were detained; by the end of a month, the number had risen to 24,000. As well, the British gathered up almost ten thousand women and children and shipped them out of Nairobi, back to the Kikuyu Reserve. They joined thousands who had already been evicted from squatter camps and slums in smaller towns and from the farms in the white highlands.
One Kenyan who was arrested and roughed up by the police was Tom Mboya, a radical young Luo activist who would later become a prominent politician and Robert Ruark’s particular bête noir in Kenya. At one point Ruark asked Mboya how it felt “not to be Kwame Nkrumah’s bum-boy anymore” — forgetting, Ruark insisted disingenuously, the original British meaning of the term. The memory of this exchange was so delicious that Ruark bestowed the incident on Alec Barr. For his part, after publication of Something of Value, Mboya travelled to Europe and the United States, campaigning against continued white rule and the idea of white supremacy, which he said the book promoted.
Operation Anvil was undoubtedly brutal, but it was an overwhelming success. A few Mau Mau leaders escaped the net, but most were in custody, and the Mau Mau hold on Nairobi was broken. “The effect (of this) on the men and women fighting in the forest would soon become devastating,” Edgerton noted.
Having cut the head off the snake, General Erskine turned on the remaining supply lines along which food and ammunition moved from the Kikuyu settlements to the insurgents in the forests. He ordered the construction of an immense moat — a fifty-mile-long ditch, ten feet deep and sixteen feet wide. This barrier was strung with barbed wire and planted with sharpened bamboo stakes and booby traps, and police posts were located every half mile. Its purpose was to cut the flow of supplies into the forests and prevent the Mau Mau from emerging to attack villages and police posts. General Erskine’s moat was an eerie echo of the double lines of barbed wire and blockhouses with which the British had crisscrossed the South African veldt during the Boer War fifty years earlier. Three years later, the French Army copied Operation Anvil almost to the letter when it broke the Algerian insurgents in the Battle of Algiers. Clearly, General Erskine’s time studying counterinsurgency methods in India, Egypt, and other parts of the crumbling empire had taught him a great deal.
While the British were winning the military battles with the Mau Mau on most fronts, the Emergency was causing a serious upheaval in the colony’s social structure. There was the obvious impact of relocating tens of thousands of Kikuyu back to the reserves from the cities and off the farms, and of gathering the Kikuyu from their traditional small holdings into villages that were more easily defended. There had also developed a deep mistrust between black and white Kenyans that would never really disappear thereafter, and rifts appeared within the ranks of the whites as well. Early on, there were suggestions that Jomo Kenyatta should be released as a way to bring about peace and reconciliation. This idea was promoted by none other than Ewart Grogan, Kenya’s most influential settler, a man who had become famous early in the century for walking from the Cape to Cairo to win the hand of a lady. Grogan’s proposal was shouted down. By now, relations among the colonial government, the settlers, and the military were openly hostile. General Erskine remarked at one point that Kenya was “a sunny land for shady people” and stated flatly that he hoped never to see another Kenya settler in his life.
***
Robert Ruark arrived back in Nairobi in April, at the end of his long swing through the Far East, just in time to witness Operation Anvil. Virginia Ruark had joined him in Australia. Ruark had already spent some time in Indonesia, and the couple went on to New Zealand, where Ruark went on a fishing trip, then took in Singapore, Ceylon, and India. In India, Ruark went tiger hunting for the first time. Both the tiger hunt and the fishing showed up in Field & Stream later that year. Ruark also wrote an article for The Saturday Evening Post, in October, 1954, titled “The Tiger Doesn’t Stand A Chance.” The title pretty well sums up the message of the article. Ruark professed to find tiger hunting absurdly easy, shooting from a machan at night over baits. He pointed out that the tiger had been little hunted since before the second world war, that the tiger crop in central India had become both “bumper and bumptious,” and that a hunter wanting a rug for the den “may order up a tiger as coolly as he’d buy a rug from a department store.” Ruark killed two tigers that trip and wounded a third that appeared to be dead, but later escaped because he was merely creased and temporarily unconscious. Ruark did not put in a finishing shot because he did not want to damage the skin unnecessarily. The story, he said, preceded him to Kenya and was a “source of shame.” And well it should have been, considering the prominence he had given to Harry Selby’s motto, “It’s the dead ones that kill you,” in Horn of the Hunter, stressing the importance of always putting in a finishing shot. But if you hunt long enough, these things happen. Ruark reported it faithfully, if ruefully, and took full responsibility. Such frankness was one of his most endearing traits in his early hunting writing.
By the time he landed in Nairobi, he had been on the road for the better part of four months. This was his new “relaxed” schedule. The day Operation Anvil was launched, Ruark wrote a bitter newspaper column about events in Kenya that today would be reviled as racist, but was aimed more at “primitive savagery” than at Africans merely because of the color of their skin. The influence of some of the more radical settler elements was beginning to show up in Ruark’s writings. Oddly enough, the hyperbole and overstatement of his newspaper columns of 1953 and ‘54 do not occur in Something of Value, which is very even-handed (and, in fact, incurred the wrath of some of those same settlers for that very reason). Ruark had a tendency to go off half-cocked in his newspaper writing, jumping to conclusions and not digging beneath the surface. Even so, the Operation Anvil column is outrageous: “If (the settlers) had been allowed to pursue a completely ruthless extermination policy in the beginning — repaying one murder with a hundred deaths, using wholesale torture to extract information and killing the innocent with the guilty, they might have wiped out the early nucleus and prevented its spread...” Ruark virtually recommended that such a policy would have been the proper response. “The horror and evil that spread never will be completely sponged away by time, and I am very much afraid that beautiful, turbulent Kenya...can never again be tranquilly described as ‘white man’s country’.” Kenya and the “whole surging seething mass of Africa,” he wrote, would be left to the “stewardship of savages.”
This column is a weird combination of bitter invective, bordering on racism, and thoughtful analysis calling for a compromise “painful on both sides.” Ruark’s sympathies were clearly with the settlers, who had come to Kenya, cleared the land, established the farms, fought the elements and the animals and the tribes, and were now in danger of losing everything. But he also recognized that the Kikuyu and other black Kenyans had rights as well. Whatever happened, he knew, life in Kenya could not, and would not, go back to what it had been.
By this time Ruark had friends among the settler community as well as professional hunters like Harry Selby. The previous year, he met a young woman named Eva Monley, the adopted daughter of a farm family named Nightingale. Born in Germany, Eva and her mother had emigrated to Tanganyika in 1932, but were not welcome among the colony’s German community because they were part Jewish. They continued on to Nairobi, where Jews were more than welcome — Abraham Block and his family had helped found the city, and the Blocks were both loved and respected — and settled there. They became close friends with the Nightingales, who were farmers, and Eva’s mother asked them to formally adopt her daughter. This they did. Ironically, when war came their German background counted against them, and Eva’s mother was interned as an enemy alien. Because she was legally part of the Nightingale family, however, Eva was left alone. When Ruark met her, Eva Monley was working in the film industry as one of the crew of Mogambo. She and Ruark became close friends, a relationship that lasted until the day he died.
Naturally, she introduced the American writer to her adopted family and their circle of friends in the highlands, and they played a significant role in his life in Kenya for the next several years. He used the Nightingales as models for Brian Dermott’s family in Uhuru.
Having witnessed the latest events in the Mau Mau saga, Robert and Virginia Ruark continued on to Spain, arriving in Palamós in May. Ruark wrote to Harold Matson that the two of them had come down with a “bug,” from which it took several weeks to recover, and that, as he got older, travelling was taking an increasing toll on his constitution. Realistically, he admitted his drinking was not helping the situation, and accordingly he and Virginia had decided to “take the veil” for the summer. Ruark was now almost forty years old, and both his health and age began to preoccupy him. He wrote about both, in letters to his agent and to his editor at Doubleday, and for public consumption in his column. In one instance, he described coming across his old naval uniforms and trying them on, finding they still fit well, and used the incident as a peg to reflect on the twelve years since he had ordered them and prepared to go off to war. This incident showed up later near the beginning of The Honey Badger. For Ruark, as for many men and women, his looming fortieth birthday caused considerable introspection.
Once he was feeling better and his alcohol intake had been cut down, he returned to work in earnest on his new novel, and his editor was pleased to hear that he hoped to have the manuscript ready by August. The plan was to put the book on the publisher’s winter list. Ruark’s literary star was clearly ascending. Horn of the Hunter, he was told, had now sold 18,500 copies and was expected to sell even more during the months before Christmas. Coming out with a major African novel hard on the heels of this non-fiction best-seller would be, they were all confident, a smash hit.
Unfortunately, it did not work out that way. August came and went, then September, then October, and still the novel was not finished. For the first time, Ruark ran into the difficulty of producing a major effort like a novel, while continuing to earn a living with other writing and, at the same time, coping with the demands of house and spouse. The villa in Palamós required renovating, which Virginia undertook; still, it was impossible to work in a house under renovation and not be distracted. As well, when the bills for the work began to pour in, Ruark was faced with a rapidly depleting bank account.
Writing a novel is a massive undertaking, requiring the writer to live within his creation, thinking his characters’ thoughts, following their actions, and allowing them to develop and grow on their own. As Ruark pointed out years later, “In the working life of a professional author, when he is lucky, the fictional characters take over and become fleshly people, with solid dimensions and minds of their own. They do things the author never intended. They say things the author never dreamed of. The happy author is thus reduced to the minor role of coachman, using no whip, driving only slightly with a very slack rein.” It is never that easy, of course, and such a happy state of affairs does not occur readily, especially when carpenters are hammering on the roof, stonemasons are making deliveries at the back door, and the little woman is knocking with timid insistence, asking if she can interrupt “just for a moment, sweetie — I need to know which pattern you like.”
Successful author though he was, Ruark’s main income came from his column and magazine writing, and the need to take time from the novel to write them was a worse distraction than the renovations. According to Hugh Foster, Ruark wrote checks on his New York account totalling $20,000 in the three months between May and August 3, when he sent Harold Matson a progress report on the book. It was coming along well, he said, but more slowly than expected. It would likely run to at least five hundred pages, and maybe even six hundred (it ended up at 566). He said he doubted he could make the new deadline of September 15 and blamed at least two months of delays on the work being done on the house. Ruark then warned Matson that he could not promise the manuscript, realistically, before November, and he was writing to his editor at Doubleday, Lee Barker, to inform him of that. Having dealt with the logistics of the book, Ruark then gave a literary assessment of what he had accomplished so far. “I think that this book to date is as honest a piece of construction as Herman (Wouk, another Matson client) did in Caine Mutiny in which the characters are built by what they do and say completely on stage.”
Money was a problem that steadfastly refused to go away. Ruark tried to solve it by writing magazine articles in bursts of feverish activity, throwing the pieces together and sometimes allowing subjects to overlap in submissions to competing magazines. As well, Matson reportedly complained more than once that Ruark was not even submitting properly typed copy. Since the Matson agency prided itself on the professional quality of its submissions to editors (and demanded professional sums of money in return), this was not to be taken lightly. Ruark responded to the first charge, somewhat testily, that the trips he took were expensive, and he could not limit himself to just one article for one magazine from a long and costly venture to some remote area.
The final straw, apparently, was a renewed demand for money from his parents in North Carolina. Ruark responded with a long, detailed, bitter letter upbraiding his father and mother for their feckless ways, for his father’s alcoholism and his mother’s drug addiction. He pointed out that he had bought his grandfather’s old house in Southport specifically for them to live in, and that the purchase had plunged him deep into debt from which he had only just emerged. There is an air of over-reaction about this letter, like the exasperation that sometimes appeared in his columns. He ended it with what amounted to an order to his father to stop being childish, and rather self-righteously noted that he, Robert, had “never allowed himself to be a child.”
Somehow, some way, Something of Value was finally finished, and Ruark booked passage to New York for himself and Virginia. He intended to deliver the manuscript personally, stay in New York for about a week, then go on an extended shooting vacation with friends around the country. From there they would go to Haiti and Cuba for a couple of weeks and return to New York toward the end of January. As it turned out, Virginia went home for a while to visit her parents, and Ruark ended up in a hospital in Houston for an operation for varicose veins. He took this opportunity for a complete check-up, which he gleefully reported showed him completely free of “cancer, clap, and most important, liver.”
The combination of completing a major novel and having his health at least under control gave Ruark a feeling of “palpable freedom,” according to Hugh Foster. “His financial and family concerns, though worrisome, (were) virtually forgotten.” In a letter Ruark wrote to his friend Ben Wright, he said that for the first time in his life “nobody but me knows when, where or why I am going to do anything and after a lifetime of being told to come and go it is a wonderful feeling.”
The idea that the seemingly footloose Ruark was actually living in chains would have been surprising news to the average reader of Field & Stream, working on an assembly line by day and reading, by night, Ruark’s accounts of trout fishing in New Zealand, of tiger hunting in India, or of chasing Mau Mau terrorists on the slopes of Mount Kenya. This theme of shedding chains is repeated over and over in Ruark’s life — when he first was given the freedom of a syndicated column and settled in New York, and again when he left New York and moved to Palamós, and yet again when he completed Something of Value and began anticipating the financial security a major best-seller would bring. The Newsweek columnist who had remarked the previous year that Ruark’s chains were all of his own making, wherever he lived, had hit the nail on the head. Years later, Ruark rather ruefully agreed when he made this a major theme of The Honey Badger and reflected on the strange conflict of emotions a writer calls upon in order to do his best work. In what amounts to a caustic piece of self-analysis, Ruark realizes (through the fictional Alec Barr) that he needs to feel chains in order to do his best work “despite.” And so his life was one long flight from the imagined chains, and one long return to them, like a small boy running away from home.
***
Something of Value was officially released on April 6, 1955, to a blizzard of extreme reviews, both good and bad, legal hysteria over possible libel actions, and instant best-seller status. It was made the Book-of-the-Month Club selection that month, and in its assessment the club said the novel “made Hemingway look like a tenderfoot.” Ruark commented that the remark would irritate Hemingway, but might finally free him of his inferiority complex “about the great man.” Unfortunately, it did not.
The reviews concentrated on the blood and gore in the book. Those who loved the novel reflected that it was accurate in its depiction of events and, in the words of The New York Times, showed it was written by a man “deeply shaken by the enormity of change.” Other terms included “high voltage shocker,” “pile driver of a book,” and “most sensational novel of the year.” But it also had its detractors. Harper’s and The Atlantic Monthly both condemned it, the latter challenging Ruark’s use of Swahili, which the reviewer insisted he could not have had time to learn in his brief visits to Africa. The legal problems were irritating, based on various lawyers’ reservations about what might and might not be libelous. Ruark pointed out somewhat acidly that no one was likely to “declare himself a murderer” in order to identify with a character in the book, and so he was not about to spend the next year wet-nursing lawyers or chasing quit-claims. While the reviewers and attorneys wrung their hands over the perceived problems or shortcomings of Something of Value, the public responded by sweeping it off the shelves as fast as they could be restocked.
The reaction in Kenya was mixed. Tony Seth-Smith, a professional hunter who at the time was a young man, taking part in the military operations against the Mau Mau, says the novel depicted the Emergency “as it actually was. Ruark compressed events, but all the things he talked about and the stories he told were true.
“Everything we did at the time reads differently now, though,” he reflected. “For example, we wanted to identify people we had shot. We would simply cut the hands off and take them back with us for fingerprinting, and the hyenas would eat the bodies. It was callous by today’s standards. But look at the Mau Mau: I remember one incident where they captured a British soldier, tortured him, killed him, and then skinned him. One of the Mau Mau went around for a time, wearing the skin.”
Most of the objections from Kenya dwelt on Ruark’s perceived sympathy for the Kikuyu, rather than an outcry from people who thought they had been unfairly portrayed. But then, as Ruark shrewdly noted, who would proclaim himself a murderer in order to claim damages, particularly in a country where he might have his head chopped as a result?
By the time the book actually went on sale, Ruark was back in Palamós, hard at work as a journalist. He had neglected his newspaper column as work on the novel became more intense, and the editors showed their displeasure by relegating the column to the travel pages, or else not running it at all. The syndicated column was still his bread-and-butter — and, just as important, kept him in the public eye — and he needed to mend fences. Harold Matson and Ruark’s editor at Doubleday, Lee Barker, kept him informed by mail as Something of Value racked up one triumph after another. Matson sold the paperback rights to Pocket Books for $100,000, until then the highest price ever paid for a novel, and Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer bought the movie rights. Ruark’s financial return from the novel was large and immediate. Hugh Foster says he eventually made more than a half-million dollars altogether, the equivalent of several million dollars in today’s (1999) terms. But not everything was rosy. Ruark’s relationship with Doubleday began to deteriorate over a number of issues, and he was having problems with United Features as well. These were the usual writerly things: not enough money, too much interference, over-eager editors sabotaging his copy. Ruark began to look around for a new publisher and a new syndicate to sell his column. For the time being, however, both issues blew over.
Financial success did no more to tone down Ruark’s destructive lifestyle than had the move to Europe. Both Robert and Virginia were drinking heavily, and he was smoking three packs of cigarettes a day. On a visit to London in June, Ruark collapsed in a Rolls-Royce showroom and was taken to hospital. Three doctors gave three different diagnoses, from epilepsy to thrombophlebitis to overindulgence in alcohol and nicotine. Ruark returned to Palamós to recover. He did, however, find time that summer to buy the Rolls-Royce he had been looking at, and purchased a license plate with the designation “R2R.” It was a happy coincidence this rolling status symbol had the same initials he had, and he eagerly pointed out that the “R1R” plate belonged to Queen Elizabeth. Ruark ended the year by booking passage to Australia on an ocean liner. He shipped out for Sydney just before Christmas and celebrated his fortieth birthday on December 29, 1955.
Turning forty was no pleasure for Robert Ruark. In a column filed from Australia in January, he reflected on this most dreaded of milestones; to read his words, you would think he was now a hundred years old and tottering daily from bed to bath chair, dribbling food into his frosty beard. There is no doubt, however, that he felt older than he was. Chronologically he may have been forty — really the prime of life — but in terms of mileage on his frame he was more like sixty, and a not particularly healthy sixty at that. Steadfastly, though, he refused to obey his doctor’s orders and slow down, or even moderate his almost manic liquor intake.
Through 1956, he continued to rack up the miles and work hard. He began compiling the first volume of his anthology of Field & Stream articles, The Old Man and the Boy. His exasperation with Doubleday had finally reached breaking point, and after six books he found a new publisher. Old Man would be his first effort for Henry Holt & Co., and his editor there was an outdoor writer by the name of Bill Buckley. As Ruark worked on the anthology, sifting through his columns, choosing the best and discarding others, occasionally combining those dealing with similar themes, he was struck by the sincerity and quality of the work he had done for Field & Stream over the past three years. Ruark may have been an egotist (what writer is not?) but he was a good judge of writing and his own harshest critic; even so, he remarked, what he had set out to do with the “Old Man” series had succeeded far beyond his expectations, and he thought he would “never again be able to write so well.”
Meanwhile, Hollywood was busy shooting Something of Value, starring Rock Hudson and Sidney Poitier, two of the best (and most box-office friendly) actors of the time. Ruark was riding high, and he celebrated at the end of 1956 by heading, once again, for Kenya.
***
Militarily, the Mau Mau were being steadily worn down. General Erskine had followed up the success of Operation Anvil with two major sweeps through the forests, intended to drive out the Mau Mau as a line of beaters drives pheasants to the waiting guns. Although the sweeps did bag some insurgents, both dead and captured, their main effect was to force the gangs to move their camps and go deeper into hiding. In early 1955, General Erskine completed his two-year stint and was replaced by General Sir Gerald Lathbury.
Erskine’s two years would have to be considered a success. When he arrived the Mau Mau were killing an estimated one hundred people a month; when he departed, they were down to twenty a month. From fifteen thousand insurgents in the forests, poised to strike at settlements and police posts, the Mau Mau now numbered about five thousand, many of whom were forced to use clubs and bows and arrows because of a shortage of guns and ammunition. If the Mau Mau were losing the military war, however, they were winning the propaganda war, in part because the cost of the campaign was rising and the British government and taxpayers were objecting strenuously. Britain at this time was no longer a wealthy country, and Kenya was not a priceless jewel of empire to be saved at all costs. In fact, it was becoming a money sink. Even the prime minister, Winston Churchill, no shrinking violet and a rabid defender of the Empire, was urging the colonists to reach some sort of accord with the Mau Mau and their supporters.
The two military sweeps of the forests had shown the deficiencies of conventional armies in combating guerrilla groups, especially those who, after years of hiding out, were as much at home in the bush as a fish is in the sea, and the new general changed tactics. He initiated the “pseudo-gang,” in effect one of the first “anti-guerrilla guerrilla” forces. Led by black-stained white men wearing Afro wigs, bands of reformed Mau Mau and loyal Kikuyu took to the mountain trails, tracking the Mau Mau gangs to their lairs, ambushing them, and raiding their camps. They fought silently, with knives, crossbows, and lengths of piano wire, throttling and decapitating their victims. One of the pseudo-gangsters was Tony Archer, later a well-known professional hunter in Botswana and East Africa.
Campi a Simba was still in operation, providing an anti-Mau Mau home away from home for professional hunters in the off season. One of the residents then was John Dugmore, later a professional hunter with Ker & Downey. In 1952, Dugmore, then twenty-three years old, volunteered for the all-white Kenya Regiment and spent the next two years “chasing the Mau Mau on horseback.” Because he had spent many years near Thomson’s Falls hunting in the forests, Dugmore was an expert tracker and woodsman — just the kind of man they wanted at Campi a Simba. He was assisting the game warden, Roger Hurt (father of professional hunter Robin Hurt), when he met Ruark for the first time. “I remember that Robert Ruark dropped into the camp with Harry Selby,” said Dugmore, “And later he went on to Nyeri where he hung out in the Outspan Hotel. That was a favorite watering hole for guys coming in from the mountains where they had been chasing Mau Mau. That is where he got much of his information for Something of Value — there, and at the Long Bar in the New Stanley.” Both Dugmore and Tony Seth-Smith recall Ruark’s almost supernatural ability to drink all day, all the while talking and listening, and later to be able to remember stories down to the last detail in spite of consuming an enormous quantity of booze. “Ruark was quite humble in his way,” Seth-Smith said. “Not like old Hemingway. Bob really loved hunting, and he talked with us about it just like everyone else did. He could remember the stories we told him and reproduce them word for word.”
Later, when Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer was in Kenya filming Something of Value, John Dugmore met Rock Hudson and introduced him to the joys of shooting a .470 Nitro Express. “That was on Chris Aschan’s farm, where they were filming,” he said. Like threads through a tapestry, the names from that era keep appearing and reappearing. John Dugmore himself became one of the best known professional hunters of the late twentieth century. He and his cousin, Bill Ryan, began hunting professionally at the urging of Andrew Holmberg. After leaving the Kenya Regiment, Dugmore went to work as a storeman for Ker & Downey, to learn the business. He was recommended for his full professional hunter’s license by Roger Hurt, spent a year working as second hunter to K&D’s big names, and then moved on to taking out his own safaris. He moved to Botswana in 1970, ending up as a hunter with Safari South (along with Harry Selby, Tony Henley, Lionel Palmer, and Soren Lindstrom, among others.) Today he lives in Maun, in semi-retirement, where he runs several businesses, including a photographic safari operation.
Although Dugmore’s memories of Ruark are necessarily colored by time and dominated by long evenings, bars, and bottles, he says Ruark’s influence was immense and has lasted long after his death. “Every American client I ever took out had read Robert Ruark,” he said. “Every one. And today, people still know him, still read him.” Adds Tony Seth-Smith, “Bob Ruark put Kenya on the map.”
***
Ruark spent two months in Africa at the end of 1956 and returned to Palamós suffering from a particularly virulent bout of malaria. In the spring, he set sail once again for New York, this time bringing his Rolls-Royce with him. The world-travelling, lion-bearding, rich-and-famous author was coming home to rub their noses in it. There would be a special screening of Something of Value, and Ruark planned to drive down to North Carolina to visit the folks at home. Although he did not say it in so many words, he was staging for himself the equivalent of a Roman triumph, and the Rolls was the victorious general’s war chariot. Blockbuster novel, big-budget movie, Hollywood stars, the stars over Africa — Bob Ruark had it all, and by God he was going to show everyone.
Several of his business acquaintances warned him against bringing the Rolls. Why give the critics ammunition to blast him for living abroad and not paying U.S. taxes? But it was too late. “The car is already on the ship,” Ruark said. And it gave him the chance for one bit of good-humored one-upmanship. The head of the Scripps-Howard news service, Roy Howard, was in the habit of taking his columnists to lunch when they visited New York, riding in his chauffeur-driven limousine. On the day he was scheduled to meet with Ruark, Howard walked out of his office and across the sidewalk toward the car. Ruark appeared, took his arm, and guided him instead to the Rolls-Royce, which was parked a car-length behind. Everyone got a good laugh out of it. But by and large, it was all downhill from there.
Ruark spent some time in New York, dazzling the locals. The Daily News ran a profile on the now larger-than-life book author, which wavered between slavering admiration and sarcastic put-down; finally, the writer settled grudgingly on admiration. Ruark then set out for Wilmington, North Carolina, and a reunion with his younger self. The previous year Wilmington had made national headlines when its newspaper refused to run a picture of a black man on its front page. From afar, Ruark had taken his home town to task, writing at length about the good relations that had existed between the races when he was a boy — about Aunt Laura and Uncle Cornelius and Aunt Lily, ex-slaves who had helped to raise him and were respected members of the community. This was not the first time, nor would it be the last, that the Southern-born national syndicated columnist would speak out publicly against segregation and racial hatred. The anti-black views that critics perceived in his columns about Kenya, and later about other parts of emerging Africa, were not directed on the basis of race, but on the ex-colonies’ ability to govern themselves and function as modern countries in a rapidly changing world. As it turned out, even Ruark’s forebodings, dire as they were, paled against the actual events that consumed much of Africa in the four decades after his death.
At any rate, for the first time in many years, he was going back home to visit the small towns where he had spent his boyhood, and that he was now in the process of making famous through “The Old Man and the Boy” in Field & Stream. If he expected streets strewn with palm fronds as he approached, however, he was gravely disappointed. For one thing, Virginia Ruark chose to visit her own family in Washington rather than go down to Carolina with him, and Ruark drove into town alone. The reception was cordial and friendly, but not unlike what the residents might have done for one of their own who was now an accountant in Greensboro, for example, or a native son practicing law in Washington. In other words, the denizens of his home town treated Robert Ruark, Novelist, as if he were merely little Bobby Ruark come home to visit. This was not what Ruark had anticipated. But worse was to come.
Some years later, in a magazine article about his own life, he treated the whole episode with tongue in cheek, poking fun at his own expectations:
Well, sir, the Rolls and I swept triumphantly into the seaboard town in which I was unable to get a job even as a copyboy on the local paper, and my triumphs rode ahead of me, like a police escort. (Perhaps it was a police escort. At that moment I wouldn’t have put it past me to have hired one.)
But the genuine hurt he felt showed through even as he lampooned himself with wry comments. There was no civic reception, no public adulation. Some friends threw a cocktail party, but invited only one other couple. There was a small dinner party, modest to a fault. Finally, Ruark overheard a conversation between two Southern belles, “Miss Sarah Sue Somebody talking to Miss Dimity Ann Somebody Else.” Their soft voices floated “like melted marshmallow from behind an oleander bush.” One said to the other that she just did not believe a word of it, to which the other asked, “What don’t you believe a word of, sugah?” The first answered that she did not care how good they said Bobby was doing, what with his picture on the magazine cover between Prince Philip and President Eisenhower, and his being a big book author and living in Spain and all. “He can’t be doin’ as good as everybody says, or he wouldn’t have come back home after all these years in that old beat-up Pierce Arrow!” Deflated, Ruark climbed into his Rolls-Royce and drove back north, heading for New York, and Spain, and his home in Palamós — one place on earth where he was grimly confident of being treated like a somebody. Wilmington, North Carolina, was no longer his home.
***
The Old Man and the Boy was published in 1957, and Robert Ruark then turned his attention to his next big book. Established now as a major novelist, he wanted to follow up Something of Value with a book equally weighty and significant. He had already begun a novel, tentatively titled Poor No More. According to Hugh Foster, the title was given to Ruark by a friend in Houston, and originally the plot was based in Texas. His reception at home in North Carolina, however, and the sometimes ambivalent attitude of people in New York, had ignited a smoldering anger in Ruark that not only his friends noticed, but also reporters sent to interview him. One noted that he was “shaking his clenched fist at the world.” Ruark relocated Poor No More to the Carolinas and proceeded to use the printed word as a club to wreak revenge on the people who had slighted him.
If ever Ruark wrote a book “totemizing money,” a criticism later directed at The Honey Badger, it was Poor No More. The hero is Craig Price, a Southern boy from a poverty-stricken background who claws his way to the top of the business world. Along the way he coldly marries for money, betrays the one woman who really loves him, and eventually ends up as an outright crook. Much of the early action takes place in Ruark’s scarcely disguised home town, and Craig Price follows in Ruark’s footsteps from childhood through university. When the book was published in 1959, Ruark told Harry Selby, “This is my autobiography.” At the time, he may even have meant it.
By the time Poor No More appeared in bookstores, however, Ruark had already followed up Something of Value with a solid, hardcover success — albeit an unexpected one. The Old Man and the Boy, which was the antithesis of Poor No More in every way, had sold twenty thousand copies by the end of 1957, outselling Horn of the Hunter in the first few months by a substantial margin. By January, 1958, sales had reached thirty-six thousand. The reviewers loved it — how could they not? — and the American government was so taken with Ruark’s vision of small-town, small-boy life, it decided to distribute the book through its foreign service to show what America was like. Meanwhile, the movie Something of Value had opened to generally positive reviews. If Rock Hudson had been “wooden,” Sidney Poitier was “brilliant,” and the film conveyed the message that violence on either side was not the answer to Kenya’s problems. Ruark complained that the final script was not the story as he had written it, but it was a minor cavil. No novelist of the twentieth century, from Hemingway on down, was completely happy with the way Hollywood treated his creations.
Poor No More opened with a disclaimer, of sorts: “It is customary to say that the characters in this book bear no resemblance to anyone, living or dead. This would certainly be a lie, but working out just who is who is bound to be difficult,” Ruark wrote, knowing full well there would be little difficulty for anyone from his home town, and knowing equally well that everyone would buy the book and pore over it, sorting out who was who. To make the task easier, he even put in people with their real names when they were being portrayed sympathetically. The aforementioned Aunt Laura, Uncle Cornelius, and Aunt Lily appeared right at the beginning. Even the Wilmington, Brunswick and Southport railroad (WB&S), which served Wilmington and Southport and whose initials were corrupted as “Willing but Slow,” was in the book by name, proof that Ruark’s fictional New Truro was, in reality, Southport. Ruark included enough real names to ensure that everyone knew whom he was talking about, and enough fictional ones to ensure there would be no lawsuits. As a piece of literary revenge, Poor No More was about as subtle as a brick through the courthouse window.
In its final published form the novel runs more than eight hundred pages, long by any standard except Marcel Proust, and the writing of it did not come easy. In fact, it was a re-run of the pattern Ruark had fallen into with Something of Value: one missed deadline after another in delivering the manuscript to Bill Buckley at Henry Holt, with the newspaper column neglected to the increasing irritation of newspaper editors. The column became repetitive and was generally not up to Ruark’s usual high standard. Ruark defended himself on the novel’s delay, insisting it was better to take the time necessary to produce a good book rather than rushing and producing a bad one.
In September, 1958, he escaped to Alaska for a vacation and hunting trip. This was one of the very few real hunting expeditions Ruark ever undertook, for magazine purposes, that was not in Africa. Although he hunted and fished there, as well as in India, New Zealand, and Australia at various times, those articles never contained the magic spark of his African pieces. Ruark had a mystical affinity for Africa; the Dark Continent fascinated and rejuvenated him, and he returned the compliment by bringing it alive in the printed word and giving it immortality. Ruark liked Alaska, enjoyed his time with the Alaskans, and wrote a couple of competent articles about the adventure. He also suffered another collapse, similar to the celebrated Rolls-Royce showroom incident in London, and ended up in hospital in San Francisco. From there he limped home to Palamós to recuperate. When he arrived, he found a letter from Harold Matson advising him that the partial manuscript of Poor No More indicated the book was going to be a “helluva novel,” but suggesting massive rewrites and revisions. Ruark’s poor health, combined with the daunting prospect of starting almost from the beginning with a book he had thought was virtually finished, caused him to flee once more to Kenya for rest and rejuvenation.
Harry Selby says that in the later years he would meet Ruark at Embakasi Airport in Nairobi and see the author descend slowly from the airplane onto the tarmac, looking grey and ill. After a week in Africa he would be noticeably better, Selby says, and after a month or two he would be back to the chipper, laughing, enthusiastic man who had made their first safari together “such a joy.” Africa worked on Ruark like a tonic, and it was a tonic he found himself dipping into more and more often as the years passed. After 1955, he visited Africa once and sometimes twice a year, becoming more the old hand each time out, a regular at the Long Bar in the New Stanley, and a fixture in the dining room of the Muthaiga Club — the haven that was founded by the early settler, Berkeley Cole, “so I can at least get my drinks the way I like them,” and which by that time had become the gathering place for the elite of Kenya Colony (as it is to this day).
As Ruark became an old hand, he also became good friends with many of the settlers and professional hunters. He was no longer a sometime client; he was now part of the family. In 1957, Selby followed Ruark’s urging and left Ker & Downey Safaris. He went into partnership with Andrew Holmberg to form Selby & Holmberg, capitalizing on the fame he had achieved, partly due to his prowess as a professional hunter, but augmented considerably by the publicity Ruark gave him. Horn of the Hunter had made Harry Selby one of the most sought-after hunting guides in East Africa, constantly in demand, especially by wealthy Americans. Why should someone else profit by this, Ruark reasoned, when Selby could go on his own and make the money himself? Selby & Holmberg hired many top names away from Ker & Downey, including John Sutton, Reggie Destro, and Mike Rowbotham. Naturally, Ruark used the firm for almost all of his Kenya safaris until he left the colony for the final time in 1962.
Another famous American who was a fixture in Kenya at that time was the actor William Holden. Holden first visited Kenya in the mid-1950s and was so taken with the place that he came back, year after year, until he was almost a resident. On his arrival in Nairobi in January, 1959, Ruark ran into Holden, and the two proceeded to “tie one on” at the Norfolk Hotel, according to a letter Virginia Ruark wrote to Alan Ritchie at the time. The Ruarks then left on safari; they were in Africa for two months. Meanwhile, William Holden went on safari with an oilman named Ray Ryan. Their professionals were from K&D — Terry Mathews and Tony Archer. During the course of the safari, Ryan was slightly injured when his rifle recoiled and the scope hit him in the eye. To recuperate, Ryan and Holden were taken to the Mawingo Hotel, an estate on the equator that looked out onto the peaks of Mount Kenya.
The Mawingo was a former coffee plantation, fitted out like a luxury hotel on the French Riviera. It had been purchased in the early fifties by Jack Block, of Block Hotels, who also owned the Norfolk, the New Stanley, and a chunk of K&D. Ryan was so impressed with the Mawingo’s spectacular setting that he said he would like to buy it. Jack Block said he could have it for fifty thousand pounds — an enormous sum in Kenya at that time — and everyone was taken aback when Ryan replied instantly, “Done!” Ryan bought the Mawingo Hotel on the spot, and then proceeded to pour money into developing what became the showpiece of the colony: The Mount Kenya Safari Club. Over the next few years, the club was host to everyone who was anyone, from Winston Churchill to John Wayne to Prince Bernhard of the Netherlands. One of the regular visitors, of course, was Robert Ruark.
Technically, at this time, the Mau Mau Emergency was still in effect. In reality, the insurrection had long since ended, but the government did not declare it over officially until 1960. As long as the Emergency was in effect, so were the arbitrary laws that supported it, and the civil rights suspended under its provisions stayed suspended. The last British troops left Kenya on November 2, 1956. The official government figures for Mau Mau killed by the police and army was 11,503, but Robert Edgerton says, “There can be little doubt that this figure is a substantial, and intentional, underestimate.” He says many more died of their wounds in the mountains, and the bodies were never found — eaten by hyenas and other scavengers that leave no trace. As well, he insists, prisoners who died during interrogation were buried in unmarked graves and not included in the overall numbers. Edgerton’s conclusion from the published figures is that the ratio of dead to wounded Mau Mau was seven to one, evidence that the emphasis among the security forces was on killing the insurgents, not wounding or capturing them alive. Exactly why this should surprise him, or be taken as an indication of General Erskine’s inhumanity, is puzzling. For their part, Edgerton reports the Mau Mau killed 590 members of the security forces, of whom only sixty-three were white, as well as 1,819 loyalist Kikuyus, and twenty-six Asian civilians. Although the primary target of the Mau Mau gangs was supposedly the white settlers and farmers in the highlands, only thirty-two were killed during the entire Emergency. “Over the same period of time, more white Kenyans were killed in traffic accidents in Nairobi alone than were killed by the Mau Mau rebels,” he wrote.
The number of dead and wounded on both sides has been argued for more than forty years and will never be known with absolute certainty. There is no doubt whatever, though, that the Mau Mau dead outnumbered the white-settler dead by a huge margin. Entire declared wars have been fought with fewer casualties than the Kikuyu suffered over the four years of fighting in the Mau Mau Emergency, from 1952 until 1956.
Gradually, peace returned to Kenya. Women started going to parties again without a revolver on their hip. The security precautions of the Mau Mau years — the burning lanterns at night, the prearranged signals — were relaxed. Never, however, would the sparkling little colony return to the carefree days the settlers had known before the Emergency. Locks on doors and windows, the security bars and tiger screens, had come to stay — and remain to this day. As well, relations between the races in Kenya were permanently scarred. Certainly there had been racism and injustice before, but there had also been mutual trust and respect, at least among individuals. The suspicion and fear born during the Mau Mau Emergency became a permanent part of Kenya life.
In a series of newspaper columns written during the safari and filed from various points in Kenya, Ruark reflected on the changes he saw occurring around him. He was not optimistic about the direction in which Africa was heading. At home he might revile the governor of Arkansas, and the Southern rednecks who tried to stall the coming of racial integration, but in Africa he was outspokenly critical of the ability of black Africans to run a country, or even a modern farm. Kenya, he said, was “nervous and edgy,” with the black majority now demanding more than mere equality with the white population. Africa’s two hundred million inhabitants were “no more ready for democracy than they are to build guided missiles.” He predicted that, come independence, the unsophisticated many would be exploited by the sophisticated few, and all of them would fall prey to the communists, who would find easy pickings among the newly independent states. Again Ruark sided with the settlers who had fought the hard battles to create something out of nothing in much of Africa. The history of colonial Africa was not nearly so bad as the exploitation of the American Indian, Ruark contended. Where the white man had exploited the native North American, “poisoned his blankets and gave him diphtheria, fed him bad booze and stole his land,” the Kenya colonists had “attempted to dissuade people from eating each other” and “tried to introduce improvements in hygiene, agriculture, land preservation and the maintenance of the integrity of certain wild tribes which do not readily adapt to trousers.”
Ruark was indisputably correct on many of the points he made. Some years later the Rhodesian whites used the same reasoning to defend their record, having stopped the Ndebele and the Shona from killing each other and by so doing having ensured they themselves would eventually lose control to the black majority. As arguments go it may well be true, but that does not make continued minority rule right or just, and Ruark knew it. His main point was that there were good aspects to colonialism as well as bad. Emerging Africa should remember this, he suggested, and preserve the good aspects as it pursued independence and political power. There had to be a place in “Africa for the Africans” that recognized the rights of those Africans who happened to be white, or yellow, or brown. Ruark’s obvious bitterness stemmed from his doubts that such a state of affairs could actually come to pass in an atmosphere increasingly poisoned with hatred, resentment, and mistrust.
***
Ruark returned to Palamós in March, 1959, revitalized and ready to renew his attack on his partially written novel, Poor No More. By late July, the rewrites and revisions were complete. He headed for New York with the manuscript in his briefcase and handed it over to Harold Matson in August. Ruark then continued on to Texas for a vacation while the book was set in type and Holt prepared for publication. It appeared in October, just in time for Christmas.
Ruark now had three serious books in print, and a fourth just coming out. His rather precarious health aside, to all appearances he was in great shape, financially and professionally. As usual, though, while the money was certainly coming in by the bucket, it was leaving by the barrel. The nagging financial worries that dogged Ruark throughout his professional life, no matter how successful he became, continued to bedevil him. As well, certain unpleasant character traits were becoming more and more dominant.
Robert Ruark was a charming man, shy with strangers, but open and witty and amusing with people he knew. With women, especially, he could be charming beyond belief, and his seductions were legendary. As he got older and became recognized as an authority on Africa and on certain aspects of big game hunting, it was as if he began to believe his own press clippings. His shyness was replaced by arrogance, and he became more and more of a braggart. As Hugh Foster notes, “No one could tell Bob anything he didn’t already know.” Combined with the combativeness stemming from his reception from the folks at home, the bragging and arrogance became overwhelming.
Although he was still producing his syndicated column for United Features, his relationship with that organization was deteriorating. Both his writing style and choice of subjects had suffered while writing Poor No More, which once again raised the ire of the newspaper editors who bought the column. Ruark accused the editors at United Features of “gutting” his column. His old friend Roy Howard tried to smooth things over, attributing the specific problems to one editor in particular and assuring Ruark it would not happen again, but other executives felt the real problem was the fact Ruark now believed his work was above criticism.
This unlovely side of Robert Ruark is illustrated by an incident described by Hugh Foster. When Poor No More was published in October, 1959, Ruark attended a private party thrown by Henry Holt at the Elysée Hotel. Foster says Ruark walked from the Holt offices back to the hotel that afternoon “carrying a copy of the book held to his chest with the photograph of his face on the back cover in plain view.” No one on the sidewalk recognized him, apparently. The exercise in self-aggrandizement fell flat. Critically, at least, the book fell even flatter.
The reviews were anything but positive. Almost no one liked the novel. Newsweek was the harshest of the important publications, saying “the generally boorish pronouncements for which the columnist-author Ruark is paid $110,000 a year lose much of their charm and relevance in the pages of a novel.” It was Ruark’s first serious encounter with hostility toward a book that stemmed not from the relative merits of the book itself but from the reviewers’ dislike of him personally, of his political leanings, or of the views he expressed in his newspaper column. Reading Poor No More, it is hard to see exactly what some of the critics were referring to, just as later criticisms of Uhuru and The Honey Badger seem completely divorced from what Ruark actually wrote. It was as if the reviewers had been saving up their dislike and disapproval of him personally, and the novel gave them both the opportunity and the excuse to rake him over the coals. He could have written War and Peace, it sometimes seemed, and he would still have been castigated as a racist, bloodthirsty boor.
In spite of the nasty reviews — or perhaps because of them — Poor No More quickly became a best-seller, but even so it was eminently forgettable. Another “thick slice of slickness,” to quote Alec Barr, that made little more than a ripple in the greater literary scheme of things. Ruark’s purpose in writing it, however, was more than achieved: He had taken a roundhouse right at the folks back home and connected square on the jaw. As he expected, the book was widely purchased, handed around, and pored over by the people he knew in Wilmington and Southport. “Friends and family tried to identify their roles in the book and after a time concluded that they would not speak to Bob again,” Foster recorded.
The novel created a permanent breach between the novelist and the people who saw themselves crucified in its pages. Ruark obviously liked the novel at the time he published it, for the simple reason that no writer publishes something he does not like, but his view of it changed as the years went by. When it came out, he certainly saw it as autobiographical, as Selby insists, but that view did not last. The bravado that later caused him to remark, “I don’t know anyone except bartenders, fishermen, and professional hunters,” was the same sentiment that caused him to identify with Craig Price. Price is a hard-boiled, ruthless man who will stop at nothing to get to the top. This may have been part of the persona Ruark presented to the world, but it was not the persona he presented to himself.
In a later evaluation of his success as a novelist, Ruark concluded that in Something of Value, by the grace of God, he made no major mistakes, but when he “tackled another one about the home country, Poor No More, (he) made every mistake there was, doubled and redoubled.” If nothing else, however, the novel served to get a lot of things off Ruark’s chest. Every novelist has to write at least one autobiographical work. For most it is the first effort, and the majority never go beyond that first one because they have nothing else to write. In Ruark’s case, the huge catharsis and cleansing of old hurts and resentments occurred with his second, and once it was out of the way he could continue with the work he was really put on earth to do: writing about Africa.
In Poor No More, however, there was one very cogent insight that almost (but not quite) redeems the book. By the end, Craig Price has clawed, fought, stolen, defrauded, and betrayed his way to a state of inverse grace in which he has no more friends, no woman to love, and no business empire. He does, on the other hand, have a million dollars squirrelled away in a Swiss bank account. He drives, alone, one step ahead of the law, reflecting on his curious state. “How very rich he’d be, Craig suddenly thought, if he owned anything except the million dollars waiting for him in Switzerland.”