RUARK & HEMINGWAY
Throughout his serious writing career, Robert Ruark found himself being compared with Ernest Hemingway. The early references were mostly flattering; in later years, they were denigrating. And so Ruark’s attitude toward Hemingway varied from ambiguous to venomous. While he always professed to revere “the master’s” writing, he eventually came almost to hate what he represented, because the long Hemingway shadow was always falling in the way of Ruark’s own ambition.
This was more than mere rivalry between two writers. And even the most rabid Ruark admirer would admit that, in terms of literature, he was not and never could be a rival for Hemingway, whose impact on prose changed the English language. The problem for Ruark was that everything Hemingway touched became, in the public mind, his intellectual property. This created an immense obstacle for any writer coming later who wanted to write about the same subjects.
To understand this, it is necessary to appreciate the stature that Ernest Hemingway enjoyed in the 1950s, not just in the United States, but all over the English-speaking world and much of the rest of the world as well. He was a genuine personality, a man whose life was just as much a public property as his work. Hemingway’s name was in the gossip columns, and his picture appeared regularly on magazine covers. Even when he published a book that was mediocre, or that received negative reviews, his critics gained stature just from being his enemies. Today, with celebrity measured in fifteen-minute segments according to Andy Warhol’s formula, Hemingway’s overpowering presence, combined with his longevity — almost forty years in the limelight — is difficult to comprehend.
Looking back, however, it is easy to see why Hemingway became what he was: He possessed both a profound talent for writing and a powerful, magnetic personality. He made people want to be with him, to emulate him, compete with him, or beat him. People not only wanted to read what he wrote, they wanted to read what others wrote about him. Other writers attained literary success, and other personalities became great celebrities, but no one combined the two the way Hemingway did. He may or may not have been the greatest prose stylist of his time, but he was unquestionably the most influential writer in terms of shaping the lives, as well as the styles, of writers who came after him. An entire generation of novelists grew up determined to beat Hemingway, and more than a few destroyed themselves in the process. A considerable number simply drank themselves into oblivion, either by trying to emulate Hemingway in that department, or by drowning their sorrows in the knowledge that they could never be him.
Ernest Hemingway was one of the generation of writers that came out of the literary incubator that was Paris in the 1920s. It was an era that spawned (or tolerated or indulged, depending on your point of view) many experimental writing styles, from James Joyce to Gertrude Stein. After the florid, verbose, obscure styles of many of the Victorians, this new generation of writers wanted to break away and create something new. Most did not last: Gertrude Stein, for example, is both unread and unreadable — an academic footnote to literature; James Joyce is more revered than read, except among a small few; Ezra Pound is respected more for his influence on poetry than for the actual poems he wrote. Hemingway’s only serious rival as a novelist, F. Scott Fitzgerald, left one major work, The Great Gatsby. Only Ernest Hemingway, who chose clarity as his goal over opacity, and who pursued economy of words rather than expansive, repetitive prose, comes out of the century with his reputation intact.
Hemingway’s style was essentially journalistic. He conveyed basic emotions by describing specific details so truly that the larger picture would take shape of its own accord in the reader’s mind. The key to doing this was to experience the emotions and recognize them for what they were. Equally important, as he pointed out more than once, was knowing what to leave out. In his search for material he lived a voracious life, travelling and experiencing everything he could. While other writers lounged around cafes in Paris, he was glacier skiing in the Austrian Alps; while they drank late into the night, he was in Pamplona studying the cape work of the matadors. Fitzgerald might be passed out in a saloon, but Hemingway was in the foothills of the Pyrenees with his fly rod, with a bottle of wine chilling in a mountain stream.
Given his personality, it was only natural that the things he did would be of just as much interest as the things he wrote; from there, it was a short step for people to try to gain some of the same cachet by following in his footsteps. The ranks of Hemingway imitators began to grow almost from the time he achieved his first literary success in the 1920s. During an early visit to Pamplona for the Fiesta of San Fermin, Hemingway and his wife, Hadley, were the only foreigners in attendance; today, eighty years after that first glimpse and almost forty years after his death, the running of the bulls in Pamplona is Spain’s largest single tourist attraction — all due to Hemingway.
Ernest Hemingway broke ranks with the other writers of his time, and with the Victorians before him, by writing about very basic things — supposedly unintellectual pursuits like hunting and fishing. Hunting, fishing, and bullfighting are all concerned with life and death, and with a man’s or an animal’s behavior in the face of death, all of which fascinated Hemingway. In his early short stories he wrote about hunting and fishing; in 1929, he published a full-length nonfiction book, Death in the Afternoon, which dealt at length with the arcane pastime of bullfighting in Spain. In the mid-1930s, he wrote Green Hills of Africa, a book about a big-game hunting safari. Such was his reputation and influence, once he had written about a subject it became, in the minds of the public and the critics, his own personal property for all time. Every writer since who has attempted to write about these subjects has found himself running headlong into the Hemingway mystique. First the writer’s work is compared with Hemingway’s, usually to its detriment, then the writer himself is accused of trying to emulate Hemingway. It is a trap that refuses to go away.
***
In 1953, Robert Ruark published his first serious book, Horn of the Hunter. In a review in Newsweek, a critic mentioned Ruark’s status as a columnist, called the book “independently deserving” as an account of an African safari, and then rather shrewdly concluded that Ruark’s ambitions went beyond recognition as a columnist. He now had his sights set on “a mark (established) by a hairy-chested fisherman and hunter now resident in Cuba and named Ernest Hemingway.” The reviewer then went on about the mysticism Ruark and Hemingway had discovered in big game hunting, as well as in bullfighting. If the corrida was a passion Ruark “shared” with Hemingway, as was alleged, it was one he had kept well hidden until this point.
Although Ruark later professed to be irritated with the constant comparisons, there is no question that he brought them upon himself. First, in Horn of the Hunter, he recalls seeing Hemingway before the war, in the Floridita Cafe in Havana. He tells how he was there for two weeks and saw Hemingway almost every day, sitting in a corner reading El Diario, and how he, Ruark, was “too shy or too proud” to go over and introduce himself, or to have Constante (the proprietor) introduce them. He even mentions he had been told he looked like Hemingway in his younger days — at least he had a moustache, just as Hemingway had one when he was young. Consciously or unconsciously, Ruark invited — indeed, almost begged for — the comparison which the reviewer duly made. At the time, Ruark was no doubt flattered and gratified. Once out of the bottle, however, this particular gini could never be made to climb back in; he grew bigger with every subsequent safari and book, and was always there, looking over Ruark’s shoulder.
Horn of the Hunter was published in mid-1953; in August of that year, Ruark wrote a column in which he told of meeting Hemingway in Pamplona a month earlier, during the fiesta. According to the column, the pair attended a bullfight together, in which the star performer was Antonio Ordonez. Many years later, Ruark referred to the meeting as the time he and Hemingway “got notably drunk together.” From that time on, he said, “we corresponded occasionally.” According to Ruark, “We were friends; I greatly admired some of his work. But we were not close friends.”
Hemingway’s life has been exhaustively documented; books were written about him while he was alive, and many more after he was dead. There are complete biographies as well as biographical works covering specific periods of his life, such as the years in Paris. His major biographer, Professor Carlos Baker, also published his collected letters and included correspondence with people both famous and obscure. Nowhere in this vast documentation of the life and times of Ernest Hemingway have I found even the slightest reference to Robert Ruark — no mention of meeting him, no letter from or to “the poor man’s Hemingway.” Nothing.
This is more than passing strange, because had any such correspondence existed, it would have come to light. By the time Ruark was allegedly corresponding with him, Hemingway was the recipient of the Nobel Prize for Literature. His letters had been collectors’ items for some years, and people who received letters from him had been tucking them away for literary posterity, if not financial gain. Given his respect for Hemingway, Ruark would never have destroyed, discarded, or otherwise disposed of any letter he received from him. Ruark’s remaining correspondence, down to and including electricity bills for his house in Spain, are stored at the University of North Carolina in Chapel Hill. These have been sifted through and pored over. As well, Ruark’s remaining artifacts that were of any worth have been disposed of by his heirs. Again, no Hemingway letter has surfaced.
This is not conclusive proof of anything. Perhaps Ruark and Hemingway did cross paths in Pamplona, and perhaps they even sat together at the bull ring, either by accident or design. At this late date, no one will ever know for certain.
***
Robert Ruark wrote about Ernest Hemingway many times over the years, first in his newspaper column and later in retrospective magazine articles. One of the earliest pieces is a column he wrote shortly after Hemingway published his first post-war novel, Across the River and into the Trees, in 1950. The novel is short — almost a novella, really — and tells the story of an American infantry colonel, Richard Cantwell, who is dying of heart disease and spends his last days in Venice with his teenaged Italian sweetheart. Passed over for promotion, Colonel Cantwell is bitter about the treatment he received from the army after the war. For much of the novel, he lectures the girl on life. Without going into detail about personalities, suffice to say the characters in the novel were based upon real-life models, including the British general, Eric Dorman-Smith (Hemingway’s old friend “Chink” from his Paris days) and the American soldier, Buck Lanham. The novel was not about war so much as it was about old soldiers. Considering that Hemingway was a war correspondent in Europe and did not actually serve in any military unit during the conflict, and so was unqualified to write a war novel “from within,” it is understandable that he would write what he did. He could not tell “how it was” — which was his stock in trade — because he did not really know, first-hand, how it was, and he was honest enough to acknowledge that. No war correspondent, no matter how diligent and self-sacrificing, understands what it is really like to serve in the military in war. This was one area where Ruark did know, and Hemingway did not. But then Hemingway wisely chose to write his war novel on a different subject.
Regardless of the motivation, Across the River and into the Trees met with a resounding chorus of boos. On balance, it is one of Hemingway’s weakest efforts, and Robert Ruark, in his column, became one of the chorus:
I am afraid Papa is getting old. This new one is garrulous as an old man is garrulous, and irritable as an old man is irritable, and kind of patchy in over all hide as a saddle long worn will wear the hair away. His mood is petulant, his plot an incident, and the purpose of his narrative a lecture.
While Ruark softened his criticism somewhat by praising Hemingway’s previous work and noting that “he never wrote a cheap word in the twenty odd years I have worshipped him, while never knowing him,” Ruark’s words look, half a century later, both patronizing and presumptuous. The column was written in the Winchell-esque gossipy, slangy style he affected for his newspaper pieces and comes across, finally, as simply uncalled-for. It is ironic, too, that in later years Ruark would rant and rave about literary critics and their cheap shots, since he was never loth to use his column for the same purpose.
Three years later — after Ruark’s first safari, the alleged meeting in Pamplona, and the publication of Horn of the Hunter — Hemingway published The Old Man and the Sea and in 1954 was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature. Ruark reacted with a column that was more congratulation than anything and began by knocking both Sinclair Lewis (for his “drab dramatization of the drab...done drabbily fine”) and William Faulkner, America’s other recent Nobel laureate. “(Faulkner) has given us the same kind of prose that James Joyce produced, which is to say it is largely incomprehensible to the people who do not .speak unknown tongues.” Hemingway, on the other hand, Ruark had always been able to understand “even in his poorer efforts.”
Ruark rather shrewdly noted at the time what others have only grasped since, that the Nobel Prize was probably given to Hemingway not just for the one fishing novella, wonderful as it was, but for “a couple of plane crashes” when it should have been given “earlier on other merit.” Hemingway had just returned from his second, rather bizarre African safari, during which he had endured some serious physical damage in two airplane crashes. He was reported dead, and the newspapers were carrying his obituaries, when he emerged from the bush, alive if not well. Hemingway, who had been more or less in steady competition with William Faulkner (in his own mind, if not in Faulkner’s) for almost thirty years, received the Nobel Prize five years after Faulkner did.
“What Papa got the prize for, it seems to me, was more for being Hemingway than for any particular thing he wrote,” Ruark said. “One of his short stories is called The Undefeated, and that is Papa all the way. He doesn’t quit, and doesn’t care what the fellows say in the store.”
There was no doubt, he added, “no doubt whatsoever” that Hemingway had had “more lasting effect on prose as she is writ today than anybody who came down the literary pike in the last fifty years. His disdain for cheapness of composition alone would make him worthy of an award.”
Ruark then ended the column with a collection of cheaply composed bullfighting analogies about Hemingway being awarded both ears and the tail.
Over the next half-dozen years, the circumstances for both men changed considerably. After The Old Man and the Sea, Hemingway deteriorated both physically and psychologically. By the late 1950s, he was a shell of what he had been. His last major project was a series for Life Magazine, which later became the book The Dangerous Summer. It was about the rivalry between two matadors, Antonio Ordonez and Luis Miguel Dominguín, in the 1959 bullfight season. The magazine pieces were widely perceived as a disaster, and the book, when it was eventually cut to size and published in 1985, was not a great deal better.
During the same period, Robert Ruark went from strength to strength. He travelled the world, made at least one safari in Africa every year, wrote one big novel after another, and became recognized as an authority on African affairs. With every novel that was published, however, the comparisons with Hemingway became more vitriolic. The critics did not approve of Ruark’s novels, by and large. Something of Value and Uhuru, his two novels about emerging Africa, did not strike the right political chord with most literary critics. They did not fit the accepted liberal view in America about the oppressed African blacks and their struggle for freedom. The story of the Mau Mau, graphically presented in Something of Value, was too bloody and shocking; Uhuru contained a lower level of gore, but also struck an ambivalent pose in terms of right and wrong. The view of Kenya, as seen from Manhattan literary salons, was one of clearly delineated principles, not the shades of grey that Ruark recognized more and more in the course of working for a decade, seeing Africa up close.
By 1961, the sneering epithet, “poor man’s Hemingway,” had become an irritating cross for Ruark to bear, and he seemed to be fighting a running battle with the critics. He complained that he would like to see, just once, a review based on the actual novel, not on the reviewer’s views on shooting for sport, or on his opinion of Ruark’s “last column on Adlai Stevenson.” His resentment of any comparison with Hemingway had become almost palpable.
In a feature written for True Magazine in September, 1963, Ruark reflected on his own life as a writer and took the opportunity for a final view of Hemingway, and of what he became later in his life when “the myth obscured the man.” Ruark was both harsh and blunt.
“That bullfight thing he did for Life was excruciatingly embarrassing for anyone who had known the man and loved the work,” he wrote. “It was, at best, a pitiful parody of the style which had made Hemingway famous.” He said he was a “reasonably good friend and great admirer” who had never called him “Papa, or Ernie, or Hem.” (In fact, Ruark often referred to him as “Papa” in print.) They were both embarrassed, he said, by the title “poor man’s Hemingway,” which someone had hung on him “possibly because we resembled each other physically, and certainly because my life had followed a similar pattern.” Ruark then continued:
It used to bother me — at least, annoy me — until one day, well taken in wine, Hemingway said: “Look, kid. Screw ‘em all. You’ve been a better reporter, been in better wars, seen more bullfights, shot more big game, know more about Africa, lived longer in Spain, seen more of the world....”
The passage went on in the same vein, with Hemingway allegedly telling Ruark all the areas in which he had outdone “the master.” It finished, rather lamely, with the comment that Ruark would “probably write more books, although I doubt if any will be as good as my best or as bad as my worst.” If Ernest Hemingway ever actually said that to Robert Ruark, there is no known documentary evidence, and anyone who believes that Ernest Hemingway would actually say that to anyone, regardless of his wine intake, would believe almost anything. A better reporter? Better wars? More bullfights? Even if it were true — and that is debatable — it would take a man who had been seriously keeping score to utter such a thing, and the man who had been keeping score was not Ernest Hemingway, it was Robert Ruark.
***
Ruark was in Africa when word arrived, in early July, 1961, that Ernest Hemingway had shot himself. There are conflicting reports about where and how he heard the news, and radically different versions of his reaction to it. Ruark’s thoughts as he expressed them to his friends, and those he committed to paper for publication, were not necessarily identical. To deal with the less worthy first, Harry Selby recalled many years later that he and Ruark were with a group of people at the Mount Kenya Safari Club — “Bill Holden was there; it was the night they decided to buy the place” — when they heard the news. Ruark’s reaction, according to Selby, was almost jubilant. “You know what this means?” he shouted. “It means I’m the herd bull now.” If by that Ruark meant that he would now be recognized as the pre-eminent writer on Africa, free of Hemingway’s looming presence, he was dead wrong.
By contrast, in print for all to see, Ruark reported that he was handed a newspaper with the news of the suicide when he stepped out of a plane at a remote airstrip in Kenya. “Your friend Hemingway just shot himself,” he says he was told. Regardless of how he heard, however, he wrote several tributes for publication, first in the New York World Telegram and Sun and later in Field & Stream. All were devoid of any resentment. They were written quietly, sincerely, and with a great sensitivity completely unlike the usual slang-ridden, wise-guy language of his newspaper column. He made the point that, at heart, Hemingway was a very simple man who enjoyed doing simple things, like fishing and drinking wine, but doing them as well as he could. Also, he pointed out, Hemingway was not a phony. He did the things he did because those were the things he liked doing.
Ruark added, from the vantage point of personal knowledge, that there was a considerable element of ham actor in Hemingway, just as there is in any writer, because “A writing man must of bitter necessity be acutely conscious of himself in relation to the things in the world in which he moves. Any author is all ‘me,’ or he wouldn’t be an author,” Ruark wrote. And when he did so, he was describing himself as much as Hemingway.
***
Ruark’s most penetrating analysis occurs in The Honey Badger. The hero, Alec Barr, is portrayed as a friend, although Hemingway does not make an actual appearance. Like Ruark, Barr is afflicted by constant comparisons with Hemingway; at one point, his lover, Barbara Bayne, needles him with not being “the real tough writer.” Later, Barr discusses Hemingway’s death with his secretary, Luke, and later still his writing with another lover, Jill Richard.
Sitting by the fire in her London townhouse, Alec and Jill are discussing Africa, a subject on which both Barr and Ruark were recognized authorities. The inevitable comparison arises, and Jill remarks that Hemingway caught some of Barr’s complex feelings for Africa in his two short stories, The Snows of Kilimanjaro and The Short Happy Life of Francis Macomber. Barr agrees, to a point, but suggests that he got it “superficially.” Hemingway, he says, was never in Africa long enough at one stretch and was always on “some sort of houseparty, with a new woman and a reputation for he-mannishness to maintain.”
This is a very good point. It is a measure of Hemingway’s overpowering personality that his name is irrevocably connected with Africa, yet he spent relatively little time there, and only a fraction of his work is either connected with Africa or has an African setting. He was there on safari in 1933, with his second wife, Pauline Pfeiffer. Out of that three-month trip came Green Hills of Africa and those two short stories. A third short story, An African Story, appears within the novel The Garden of Eden, which was published in 1986. Although Green Hills is not among Hemingway’s best work, the two short stories most definitely are. Macomber has been described as “the perfect short story,” while the more complex Snows of Kilimanjaro almost defines the contradictory nature of the continent, the irresistible yet often fatal nature of its attraction, and the forces that drive men to become what they are, and what they are not. Given the brevity of his experience in Africa at the time, it is remarkable Hemingway could have absorbed all this and then turned it into literature in the way he did. Ruark spent considerably more time in Africa over a twelve-year period, saw far more of the continent, and certainly knew more about its history and culture, but he never wrote anything that was even remotely comparable.
For all that, however, as Alec Barr points out to Jill Richard, Hemingway was not an authority on Africa and should not be considered one. The major strike against him was the fact that he never hunted elephant, “any more than he was ever really in a war.” Hunting elephant was not merely a matter of shooting a large animal. To Ruark, by that time, elephant hunting was the dividing line between those who knew and those who did not. There are two kinds of war, he says: those for “volunteer ambulance drivers on a joke front and famous war correspondents who roar in for the kill after the real fighting’s over,” and the other kind, where “you smell bad and don’t have any whiskey and may or may not trip over your own guts, physical and mental.” Barr softens the criticism with a self-deprecating assessment of his own war — “I heard shots fired in anger, but fled in fear and won no medals” — which understates his actual war record by a considerable margin.
On Ruark’s first safari, he told his outfitters he had no interest in hunting elephant, since anything that God took so long to make he did not want to be involved in pulling down. Later he did hunt elephant, of course, and killed several bulls, including two with tusks of more than a hundred pounds. Even in the early 1960s, that was a rare feat. It is interesting to note that An African Story, good though it is in some ways, deals with elephant hunting — something Hemingway had never done — and the man who prided himself on telling of things as they were failed precisely because he did not really know what it entailed.
There is a widespread tendency today to make elephants into something they are not; while elephants are undoubtedly intelligent creatures with great longevity and a complicated social structure, they are not demigods. What’s more, people who live in close proximity to elephants, who have their crops trampled and their huts pulled apart and a brother or an aunt destroyed by a furious elephant, regard them with fear and hatred more than awe. Being chased by an elephant, either a lone bull or a breeding herd of ill-tempered females bent on your destruction, gives a person a different view of this “masterpiece of God’s creation.” Elephants are huge and powerful, sometimes intelligent, sometimes bad-tempered, and almost always destructive. In the old days, elephants were free to roam the length and breadth of Africa, and their activities helped to regenerate areas through which they passed, pulling down trees and uprooting bushes, creating new little ecosystems. Today, when they are confined to small areas, they relentlessly destroy their environment and ultimately themselves, as well as almost everything else that lives there, directly or indirectly.
Elephants can be a powerful metaphor for many things. The old elephant of Illaut, which Ruark and Harry Selby shot on one of his last safaris, is immortalized in The Honey Badger and used as a metaphor for the passing of the Africa he loved; equally, it is a metaphor for Ernest Hemingway. “I did for the old elephant what Hemingway did for himself,” Barr says.
Perhaps by the time he wrote The Honey Badger Ruark’s resentment had softened, or he no longer had the same sense of being in competition. Whatever the reason, Barr’s views are considerably more temperate, and light-years more insightful, than those expressed by Ruark in his newspaper column. First of all, he notes that Hemingway invented a whole new world and then died for it. He compares him with the war correspondent Ernie Pyle, who was killed on the island of Ie Shima near the end of the war in the Pacific; although Pyle was killed by a Japanese soldier and Hemingway died by his own hand, there was very little difference in method, Barr says.
“We all come from other places, other times,” he tells Luke. “Some people belong to a particular epoch, an era, like a war. Some people can only find themselves in the time of their involuntary choosing. Some never find themselves at all.
“(Both Hemingway and Pyle) gave themselves wholly to a time. They both more or less died...for their age, for their time.”
Hemingway, he said, had hung around too long, like the old elephant at the waterhole at Illaut. Although the passage is a eulogy for Hemingway, it can just as easily be read as a eulogy for Ruark. He too only found himself in a particular place, during a particular epoch — Africa in the post-war, pre-independence era — and both writers were facing the prospect of becoming superannuated in a changing world.
In the end, through Alec Barr, Robert Ruark expresses a considerable amount of sympathy for Ernest Hemingway, perhaps because he found himself facing exactly the same fate.