The Honey Badger
If there was a tragedy in Robert Ruark’s literary life, it was the fact that he died a few months before the publication of his last and greatest novel, The Honey Badger. Had he lived even six months or a year longer, the book would not have been tagged a “posthumous” novel — almost always the kiss of death. Nor would the critics have felt so completely unconstrained in savaging it. As it was, with Ruark safely dead and no one to defend the book, everyone from the New York Times to Newsweek had a field day. Newsweek called it “a legacy of weakness,” while the New York Times described it as “a luxuriously bad novel,” among other things.
These comments are puzzling to anyone who has read the book and paid attention to the words Ruark wrote. The reviews leave the impression that they had less to do with the novel than with getting back at a man who could not only write rings around all of the critics, but who also espoused unfashionable causes, unfashionable pastimes, and had the disquieting habit of telling the truth as he saw it. It is well known, also, that by this time, Robert Ruark had very few friends among the literary establishment.
In September, 1963, True magazine published an autobiographical article by Ruark, titled “The Man I Know Best.” It was a deeply introspective piece in which he said he would like to see, someday, “Ruark the man separated from Ruark the columnist and Ruark the magazine writer from Ruark the novelist in at least one review of a book. I am tired,” he wrote, “of having books evaluated in terms of whether or not the reviewer objects to the last column I wrote on Adlai Stevenson, or whether the reviewer disapproves of shooting for sport.” He then acknowledged that he was asking a lot of reviewers, who were “a poozly lot at best.” There was a great deal of prescience in those observations, considering the reception The Honey Badger received two years later.
Even today, it is still not completely accepted as part of the serious Ruark pantheon. Various recent critics, writing about his position in the firmament of outdoor writers, dismiss The Honey Badger. One called it “unreadable.” Another suggested it was “unworthy” of the author of Horn of the Hunter. Yet there are also admirers of Ruark who consider it to be his finest work overall, a mature piece of literature by a complex man who had so completely mastered the art of writing that he made it look effortless.
When you strip away the ad-copy hype that litters the dust jacket of The Honey Badger, when you remove the innuendo that is usually attached to it (that it was written by a worn-out alcoholic), and when you actually read the book, what you are left with is the best portrait yet of what it actually means to be a writer.
Without a doubt, The Honey Badger is Robert Ruark’s autobiography in everything but name, although there are many who contest that statement. There are those, Harry Selby among them, who insist that Poor No More was his autobiography, and that Ruark explicitly said so, more than once. That may well have been true in 1959, when Poor No More was published, but The Honey Badger appeared six years later. A great deal had happened in those six years, and Selby admits he never spoke to Ruark after 1962. What may have been the heart-felt truth for Ruark in 1959 could certainly have been revised by 1965. There are obvious autobiographical aspects to Poor No More, and many of the incidents early in the book are drawn from Ruark’s younger life. But it is not an autobiography, fictional or otherwise. The Honey Badger, on the other hand, is based on Ruark’s life from beginning to end. Upon publication, there was a brief flurry of controversy over just how autobiographical the book actually was, partly because it contained what were considered some highly unflattering portraits based on real people. Ruark’s ex-wife, Virginia, wrote a scathing note about the book in the flyleaf of a copy she gave to a member of her family, in which she denounced the work as “a cruel book (that will) possibly hurt many people.”
At the time, there was a half-hearted effort made to distance the book from real-life people, and there were even a few newspaper articles that purported to prove that the hero of the novel, Alec Barr, was not based on Robert Ruark at all, but rather on an obscure magazine writer of the time. To anyone who has read the novel seriously, and has any knowledge whatever about Ruark’s life, such claims are simply fatuous. Alec Barr is Robert Ruark, and Robert Ruark is Alec Barr, psychologically at least. Certainly some differences exist, but these serve only to underscore that essential point. The two are inseparable.
The Honey Badger is the story of a man who “comes hungry out of Kingtown, South Carolina,” learns the newspaper business in Washington, marries a girl from Chevy Chase, and ends up a successful novelist living in a penthouse on Manhattan’s upper east side. The events described take place mainly between August, 1952, and the summer of 1962. Alec Barr has all the trappings of success, but he is missing its essence. He is not completely happy with his life or his marriage, and is naggingly dissatisfied with his work. He is certain he has bigger, more serious novels yet to be written, but he feels trapped by the various demands that are made upon him. The one thing he craves above all else (or so he believes) is to be truly in love — to find someone he would care about even more than he does about his work. But that is something he is unable to find. The one thing that commands his complete fidelity is his typewriter, the Iron Maiden, the “mistress he keeps in the back room.” Much as he may think he wants other things outside of writing, his only irrevocable loyalty is to his work.
Structurally, the novel is the most complex Ruark ever attempted, and the fact that he was able to pull it off given his own physical and mental condition during the last two years of his life is conclusive proof that, if nothing else, he was a superb craftsman and a true professional. As well, such complexity is the result, largely, of instinct — of a storyteller setting out to tell a tale and doing so in his own way, not knowing really why, just knowing that it works. It would be impossible to plan a novel like The Honey Badger and work from a structural diagram. The writer would certainly start out with the broad structure in his mind, but the intricate weave of forward and back that makes up the novel could only come about as the writer wrote, and the characters assumed minds of their own.
The Honey Badger is a novel of layered flashbacks, flashbacks within flashbacks, and flash-forwards. It opens on a steaming hot night in Manhattan in August, 1952, with Barr walking out on his wife, Amelia, as they are preparing to go to a dinner party. Three months later they attempt to reconcile, but during that period Barr has an affair with an actress with whom he had struck up an acquaintance a few months earlier. In the meantime, separate flashbacks have covered Barr’s wartime career in the Navy, his newspaper apprenticeship in Washington, his wife’s life in Washington during the war, and Barr’s childhood, university, and the beginnings of his climb to success in New York. It also covers, concurrently, Amelia’s reaction to the break-up and how she deals with it. There is then a brief, present-day interlude, during which the Barrs’ marriage again falters, the Mau Mau Emergency erupts in Kenya, and Barr departs to cover it for Life magazine.
The second part of the novel opens six years later, and the intervening time is covered, sporadically, in small flashbacks as the book moves to its conclusion.
Such a structure, while enormously difficult to orchestrate from a writer’s point of view, keeping all the dates synchronized, offers several advantages. For one, it allows Alec Barr always to be the focal point, even when, as in sections about Amelia, he is not even present. It ensures that no walk-on character will steal the show, and it also eliminates any requirement to develop characters beyond a certain depth, or to intertwine their lives and activities beyond what is required to tell Barr’s story. Whether Ruark intentionally made everything else in the novel merely a frame for a portrait of Alec Barr, or whether he just knew instinctively how to do so, it certainly works. And in storytelling, that is what counts.
***
When basing a character on himself, a writer generally does two things: First and most obviously, he attributes characteristics and qualities that are identical to his own, good and bad. Less obviously, where a character differs from his model, he is given both virtues and vices the writer would like to have had himself. In other words, an autobiographical character like Alec Barr is a combination of what Ruark was and what he would like to have been. In Ernest Hemingway’s Islands in the Stream, for example, the hero, Thomas Hudson, is closely modeled on Hemingway. But while he has many of Hemingway’s characteristics, he also has several that were distinct improvements on the original. He drinks moderately, or at least is able to when he wants; he has also learned “the usages of divorce,” and how not to quarrel with women, and how not to get married. In many ways Hudson is what Hemingway would like to have been. The same can be said of Alec Barr and Robert Ruark.
While the similarities between Barr and Ruark are seemingly endless, there are some differences. Physical appearance is one of them. Alec Barr is tall and lean, while Ruark tended to be overweight. Barr is ash-blond and “clean-shaven, always.” Ruark was dark and had a moustache his entire adult life. And where on Ruark the finest suit of clothes looked like they had been “flung at him in a fit of rage,” on Barr clothes “hang elegantly from his ropy frame.” Writers view their creations as real people and give them qualities and even material possessions almost as one would give a gift to a loved one, and in this respect Ruark was generous to Barr. One thing Ruark allowed him, which he himself did not possess, was a certain disdain for money; toward the end Barr becomes a millionaire, “a fact which failed to impress him.” Conversely, financial success impressed Ruark mightily, especially his own. Where Ruark hungered after and then flaunted his Rolls-Royce, Barr showed no interest in such a status symbol.
Naturally there are other differences between Ruark and Barr, yet despite the fact that most of them are minor, people sometimes cite them as evidence that the two cannot be one and the same. What they overlook, of course, is the fact that a man’s life is not the plot of a book. It is too messy and has too many loose ends to translate directly into a tightly crafted plot. To make a viable plot, some things are left out and others are either altered or moved forward or back. For example, Ruark was born in 1915; as close as one can figure, Barr was born in 1911. The few years difference here was done purely because of the demands of plot. Ruark went to college when he was just fifteen, while Alec was a more mature nineteen. This allows him to be “barely on the right side of thirty” at the time of Pearl Harbor to qualify for the rank of Lieutenant. (j.g.) rather than Ensign in the Navy. It also allows him a credible level of professional achievement before the war begins.
On the other side of the ledger, the evidence is conclusive. Alec Barr was born in South Carolina rather than North Carolina, an inexplicable difference, but his childhood was Ruark’s own. His mother and father, as well as his paternal grandparents, are all drawn from real life. The portrayal of Alec Barr’s mother, Emma, is as scathing as Ruark’s description of his own mother in magazine articles and interviews late in his life. In fact, many of the same phrases keep cropping up, such as “a driving woman.” Emma Barr is a domineering woman, a hypochondriac, a morphine addict; like Charlotte Ruark, she has a history of repeated miscarriages. Although Ruark was an only child, Barr ends up with a younger brother, Martin, who is a wastrel and is referred to, but never appears in, the novel. James Barr, his father, is a weak, ineffectual man, dominated by his wife. Late in life, both parents are in and out of institutions, supported by remittances from their successful son in New York. In real life, the Ruark parents’ affairs were financed by son Robert and managed by his Aunt Mae; Barr’s parents are looked after by his Aunt Sal.
The vagaries of the Barr parents, with their escalating demands for money to pay hospital bills (mostly unnecessary) and frantic late-night ambulance rides, as well as their chronic bad debts, is a recurring theme in the book, just as that situation was a real problem for Robert Ruark late in his life.
Young Alec learns to read early, is a loner, and spends a great deal of time off in the woods with a shotgun or a book. With the Great Depression of 1929, his father loses his job, and the family home becomes a boarding house and quasi-bordello. Alec flees to university as soon as he can, returns home to visit only sporadically, and eventually shuns his home town altogether — again, just like Ruark.
Oddly enough, given his birthplace and the residency requirements of state universities, Alec goes to college in Chapel Hill, North Carolina, Ruark’s own alma mater and an institution he both resented and revered the rest of his life. Dirt poor, Alec is forced to hold down two jobs to support himself, all the while begging the Student Loan Fund for another infusion and spending the rest of his time studying. He falls in love with a young woman who is majoring in journalism and find himself drawn into the class of a journalism professor, Skipper Henry. From there, Barr settles on writing as a career, and his subsequent progress is so closely drawn from Ruark’s life that it can hardly be called fiction. From Barr’s first job on the one-horse weekly in Center City in the Piedmont (Hamlet, North Carolina, in Ruark’s actual case), to shipping out on the tramp steamer S.S. Sundance, to going to work in Washington — all are Ruark. Only the odd jobs, dead ends, and false starts — such as Ruark’s career as an accountant with the WPA — are left out as distractions, and young Barr works his way up from detail boy to copy boy to reporter just as Ruark eventually did.
From his spartan boarding house to the menu at Papa Livera’s Italian restaurant, to the people he worked with at the Washington Daily News, the details of Barr’s life in Washington could be drawn from Ruark’s resumé. For example, when Barr is hired by the News, his boss is John Barry, who jokes about the similarity of their names; when Ruark worked for the News, the managing editor was John O’Rourke. The authenticity of the detail in Ruark’s loving depiction of the newspaper business is apparent from the beginning. It stems from the fact that Ruark was drawing on memory, not on imagination or third-party research. Like Hemingway’s descriptions of deep-sea fishing in Islands in the Stream, drawn from experience, Ruark’s newspaperman’s Washington has the unmistakable ring of truth.
The Honey Badger’s authenticity based on memory is reminiscent of the better pieces in Ruark’s memoir of childhood, The Old Man and the Boy. Later in his life, commenting about the Old Man series, Ruark talks about unlocking his memory and exploring areas of his childhood he had not thought about in years. He talks about the effect of certain aromas, like Christmas, and evergreens, and wood fires, and the delicious smells of cooking that flooded the house. He never cites Marcel Proust, either as forerunner or mentor, but both The Old Man and the Boy and The Honey Badger contain passages that directly follow Proust’s style in Remembrance of Things Past. In all likelihood, Proust would have been too highbrow for Ruark to mention, given his he-man persona, but that would not be the case for Alec Barr, who might well have included Proust on the extensive bookshelves in his Manhattan penthouse office.
***
After 1945, an entire generation of writers built their reputations on war novels or memoirs. Ruark was the exception: Although he was an officer in the U.S. Navy for the entire conflict, and served in some hair-raising theatres such as the North Atlantic convoys, he never wrote a novel drawing on his experiences. The closest he came was putting Alec Barr into a naval officer’s uniform and giving him most of the same experiences he himself had, starting with the North Atlantic run as part of the Armed Guard, a naval service posted to the merchant marine to shoot at submarines and prevent “a wholesale diversion of our ships to Russia if Ivan signs a separate peace.” Ruark served in the North Atlantic and in some of the hottest (gunfire-wise) parts of the Mediterranean before he was posted to the Pacific and ended the war in a series of staff jobs.
These experiences are mentioned briefly in Horn of the Hunter, but only in The Honey Badger do they play a major role in shaping the protagonist. For his part, Alec Barr plays down any idea of personal heroism. Although Barr did not have all the same experiences Ruark did, he had none that Ruark did not, with the exception of making it to Murmansk on one run. Like Ruark, Barr has a boxing match on the number-three hatch with an insubordinate seaman from New Jersey named Zabinski. And speaking of boxing, Alec Barr once gets into a fistfight with a professional baseball player, just as Ruark had his own inflated encounter with pitcher Louis Norman (Buck) Newsom of the Detroit Tigers.
After 1945, Ruark moved to New York. Similarly, Alec Barr migrates to New York. Ruark went on safari in 1951. Barr, by implication, goes hunting in Africa as well. One deviation from fact is that Ruark gives his hero considerably more experience hunting Africa than he himself had had by 1952. Both cover the Mau Mau Emergency for the magazines, but it is important for dramatic reasons that Barr be asked to go on the basis of his considerable experience there. So when the book opens in 1952 Barr already has a house full of hunting trophies and shelves of books on Africa, as well as the extensive scars from a wounded leopard, something which did not happen to Ruark until his trip to India in 1962. The Mau Mau Emergency accords Ruark and Barr a certain notoriety, which leads each to be considered an authority on Africa. In Barr’s case, as in Ruark’s, this has a significant impact on his career and his marriage.
An especially important parallel is the fact that, like Robert Ruark, Alec Barr is sterile. They have childless marriages, and in each case it is their fault, not the fault of their wives. Although Ruark never wrote about this in his own case, it plays a prominent part in The Honey Badger by implication; it is mentioned near the beginning of the book and then crops up several times later. In one of the most poignant scenes, Amelia Barr raises the possibility of adopting a child, sparking a tirade from Alec and the usual tears and recriminations; in the end, Amelia is sobbing in the bedroom while Alec tries to read the paper. For some reason, he finds Art Buchwald to be not as funny as usual.
One of the most basic instincts in human life is the desire to have children, and beyond the simple biological urge to procreate, it is generally conceded that having children is the average person’s only real hope for immortality. For a writer, a book confers immortality, because as long as that book sits in the Library of Congress, and as long as your name is in the card file, you are immortal. Books are to an author what children are to a woman. Understand this and you go a long way toward understanding both Robert Ruark and Alec Barr. While Alec may have been able to overcome the psychological effects of sterility by substituting books for children, the same outlet was not available to Amelia — nor, for that matter, to Virginia Ruark. In the end, Alec felt sorry for Amelia, but there was nothing he could do about it. And adopting a child, he was convinced, was not the answer.
***
There is one vital area where Ruark made Barr different from himself, and that is in his affairs with women. On the surface, the book is about a series of extramarital affairs, but in reality Alec Barr was more faithful to his wife than most men, given the opportunity. He was not promiscuous, he was not a notorious womanizer, he was not a gratuitous flirt, he did not set out to seduce every woman he met — none of which could be said about Ruark. Did Ruark consciously create Barr to be different than himself in this way, or is this how he actually saw himself? No one will ever know. Certainly Barr has a few high-profile flings, the affair with actress Barbara Bayne being the focal point of the first half of the book. By and large, however, he leads a writer’s typically drudgelike existence: up in the morning, work, eat, try to sleep, get up, start over. For long periods, he is at least sexually a faithful husband. Unfortunately, Amelia is convinced otherwise; she is perpetually suspicious of his absences, certain that he is carrying on constant love affairs.
This suspicion is central to the conflict in their marriage. Ruark rather plaintively points out that Barr is not a philanderer (“I’m not that good, Sweetie, I’m really not,” he says to Amelia at one point) and that his occasional falls from grace are due to circumstance more than deliberate intent —which is true of most married men, but was most certainly not true of Ruark himself. Devotees of pop psychology might argue that Ruark’s constant pursuit of women was an attempt to prove his manhood in spite of his sterility, and possibly there is an element of truth in that. If so, it was a quality he mercifully withheld from Alec Barr.
Ruark’s dependence on alcohol, which was almost total and a governing factor in his life, is another area where their paths diverge. In The Honey Badger, just about everyone does a great deal of drinking, but Alec Barr is not an alcoholic. In fact, when he gets down to serious novel-writing, he purposefully goes on the wagon for months at a time. As a young reporter in Washington, he tells his future father-in-law, “I can work, or I can drink, but I can’t work and drink.” Many years later, living in New York and writing seriously, he finds that the two most emphatically do not mix. Again, this is the exact opposite of Ruark, who, it could almost be said, could not work without drinking. Certainly he worked while he was drinking, and worked marvelously well. Harry Selby said of him, “Liquor was essential to him. He needed it. Drinking lit him up and fired his imagination.” For whatever reason, however, Ruark did give Alec Barr this trait — just as Hemingway made his alter ego, Thomas Hudson, a man who occasionally drank too much but always had it under control. When Alec Barr does drink, it is sometimes romanticized, but never glorified; he does not revel or take refuge in alcoholism as did Malcolm Lowry, Dylan Thomas, Faulkner, Fitzgerald, or James Dickey (author of Deliverance). Considering literary fashions of the mid-20th century, he could certainly have gotten away with it, and it would have provided a blanket explanation for many of Barr’s shortcomings. Perhaps Ruark saw that as taking the easy way out. The real explanation of Barr’s faults lay in the strange genes that make a man a writer, something that Ruark did not pretend to understand, much as he wanted to. In the end, The Honey Badger, taken as a whole, is as close to an answer as anyone is likely to get.
***
For most of the major characters in The Honey Badger, there are obvious real-life models. There is Ruark’s immediate family in Wilmington, North Carolina. At Chapel Hill, there is Skipper Henry and the lissome co-ed, Fran Mayfield; both are based on real characters (Skipper Coffin, the journalism professor, and Nan Norman, his unrequited sweetheart), as is Mrs. MacPhail, Ruark’s fraternity housemother. The story of how Ruark was drawn to the journalism course by an attractive female student is “absolutely true,” says Eva Monley. “Bob told me that story many times.” Then there is Jimmy James, Barr’s best friend, classmate, and roommate in Washington, and the man who introduces Barr to Amelia, his ex-girlfriend and lover. In real life, it was Ruark’s best friend, Jim Queen. Like Queen, Jim James is killed in the war.
In New York, the most important person in Alec Barr’s professional life is his agent and close friend, Marc Mantell, who is modelled on Harold Matson. The Mantell Agency and The Matson Agency are one and the same, both occupying offices in Rockefeller Plaza. In The Honey Badger, Ruark name-drops shamelessly on Alec Barr’s behalf: Toots Shor, Joe DiMaggio, Angelo Dundee, the denizens of The Twenty-One Club. These are all real friends and acquaintances from Ruark’s life as sportswriter, syndicated columnist, and man-about-town, and he bestows their friendship on Barr almost like a benediction.
Needless to say, Amelia Barr is very much Virginia Webb, which makes her parents, Walker and Betsy MacMillan, Virginia’s own. The entire Webb family can be forgiven if they found the portrait of themselves to be less than flattering. Alec’s recollections of being broke and hungry in Washington, faced with the overladen table of the MacMillan family Sunday dinners, and the feeling of wanting the domestic stability they represented but feeling trapped by it at the same time, all have a ring of horrifying truth to them. The Webbs may have been very nice people, but even nice people have their dark side, and Ruark painted it with a vividly vindictive flair.
Unlike Ruark, Alec Barr is not an expatriate. He lives in a penthouse in New York, but has a country house in New Jersey, where he spends much of his serious writing time. The Jersey house is modeled directly on Ruark’s hacienda in Palamós, and the major domo, ex-Navy petty officer Luca Germani, is Alan Ritchie, the ex-British Army sergeant who ran the house in Palamós and who is buried in the municipal cemetery there, a few yards from Ruark’s own grave. In Africa, professional hunter Mike Denton (a minor character) is modeled at least partly on Harry Selby, while Barr’s closest friend is Brian Burrows, manager of the New Stanley Hotel. He is none other than the real-life Brian Burrows, real-life manager of the New Stanley Hotel for many years and a good friend of Robert Ruark.
Given so many obvious models, it is logical that people close to Ruark should look for the counterparts of the few major characters who were not blatant. Who, for example, was Barbara Bayne? Who was Ben Lea? Who were Jill Richard and Dinah Lawrence? In all likelihood there were no specific models for the women in Barr’s life, except for Dinah Lawrence, and even she was probably an amalgam of several people, not just one. Friends and acquaintances of writers always look for themselves in books, inevitably with one of two outcomes: If they do not find themselves, they are disappointed; if they do find themselves, they are shocked, dismayed, insulted, outraged, and, often, litigious. This is why authors are at such pains to put disclaimers in the front of their books, to obtain written quit-claims, and to affect surprise and pain that anyone should be offended. This was a serious problem for Ruark in his home town after the publication of Poor No More, in which all his former acquaintances saw themselves painted in various unflattering hues. Since he was dead, it was less of a problem with The Honey Badger, but both his publisher and his heirs were concerned about the possibility of a libel suit that would drain an already depleted Ruark treasury. This accounts for the denials that took place, distancing the book from its autobiographical nature. It was in everyone’s best interests. There was little enough left to go around as it was, without handing most of the money over to the lawyers.
***
Acknowledging the autobiographical basis of The Honey Badger is important to appreciating and understanding the book, not for the facts it presents, but as a foundation for accepting that, if Alec Barr is Robert Ruark, then his thoughts are Ruark’s thoughts, and his principles Ruark s principles. If that is the case, and I believe it is, then Alec Barr’s view of life and how it should be lived, with all its stresses and contradictions, are all Ruark. Having made Alec Barr a surrogate for himself, Robert Ruark was free to express, through Barr’s words, his own deepest feelings.
There are specific instances throughout the book, but two especially stand out. One is a conversation Barr has with Luke Germani when he receives the news that Ernest Hemingway has committed suicide. Alec Barr is friends with Hemingway, something to which Ruark alluded in his own case. According to Ruark, they met in Pamplona in 1953, attended a bullfight, and got drunk together. Supposedly, Hemingway imparted many words of wisdom, both then and in later conversations when Ruark had a growing record of literary achievement. If any solid evidence of this relationship exists, however, I have been unable to find it. Ruark’s name is mentioned nowhere in any of the Hemingway biographies, nor is there any correspondence between the two included in his collected letters. Hemingway’s visit to Pamplona in 1953 has been documented, in detail, but Robert Ruark’s name is nowhere to be found. Considering that Ruark himself was a man of some celebrity at that time, it is hard to believe it would not be mentioned somewhere, by someone.
At any rate, there was a rivalry between the two throughout Ruark’s professional life, at least in the minds of the reviewers and in Ruark’s as well, although probably not in Hemingway’s. Being a pale imitation of Hemingway was an accusation that dogged Ruark for many years and that he deeply resented. He reacted by consciously trying to outdo Hemingway in some ways, and to a great degree he succeeded. By the end of his life, Ruark was a genuine authority on Africa and African big game hunting, something Hemingway never was (but never really purported to be, either). Ruark himself heard the news of Hemingway’s death while he was in Africa, on a safari with Harry Selby. He immediately wrote a couple of journalistic tributes about Hemingway and his place in the literary world. These, however, were reaction pieces, while the conversation between Luke and Alec is Ruark’s thoughtful assessment of what Hemingway was and why he had died, written several years later when his thoughts had distilled and gained perspective. It is summed up by Alec’s comment: “I never called him Papa. I always thought of him as Mr. Hemingway.” Ruark might have resented Hemingway as a rival in some ways, but he did not let the public image obscure the real man, and he never questioned the respect Hemingway deserved as a writer.
The second example of Barr speaking for Ruark occurs during Alec’s eighteen-month odyssey through Africa. Convinced that Africa is too big an assignment for one man, the magazine for which he is working dispatches an assistant to help him. This young reporter, Larry Orde, promptly gets himself shot during a gunfight in the Kasai province of the Belgian Congo. Larry Orde was modeled on a real person, Scripps-Howard reporter Hany Taylor, who was killed in the Congo. Robert Ruark knew Taylor, and his death affectied him quite deeply. The obituary Barr wrote for Orde is included in The Honey Badger as a comment on the nature of Africa and its eternal demand for blood. Barr’s reflections on Orde, on reporting, and on Africa generally, are as close to a philosophical statement as Ruark allows himself to get. As a reflection of everything Ruark had learned about journalism, however, it is a masterpiece.
In fact, The Honey Badger is itself an excellent primer on writing and journalism, and many of the nuts-and-bolts aspects of the business. For example, in the first meeting between Barr and his future agent, Marc Mantell, the older man draws a diagram of the structure of a proper magazine article, to show the would-be magazine writer where he was going wrong in the structure of pieces that he had been unable to sell. Ruark’s description of that classic construction could be used in a journalism class today, and would probably be more useful than any number of creative writing courses. If there was one type of writing of which Ruark was the undisputed master, it was magazine articles. Interestingly enough, Ruark drew just such a diagram himself, showing the structure of a novel, and gave it to his friend Leida Farrant just before his death.
***
Alec Barr has many weaknesses that Ruark makes apparent in the book, and which are sometimes pointed out to him by his wife and his friends. He also has many strengths. In other words, he is a very believable human being, not some sort of mythical hero. To a great extent, he is a man who just wants to be left alone to do his work, which is all-important. At the same time, he feels trapped by the work as much as by the demands of his life in New York and his marriage, and he longs to break out of it, to fall in love, to have some fun, to be free of his wife, his parents and his “dreary Aunt Sal.”
While the book is primarily a portrait of Alec Barr, the other major characters are given considerable depth, especially Amelia. On first reading, The Honey Badger appears to be a book about a man who has several extramarital affairs — or as an acquaintance of mine summed it up after skimming the book quickly, “It’s about a guy who cheats on his wife. And you love it!”
This is a superficial summary of a book that is anything but superficial. Certainly Alec Barr cheats on his wife, but he is not a serial womanizer in the modern sense, and at various times Amelia Barr does her own share of cheating (such as when Alec is in the North Atlantic during the war and she is stuck, alone and lonely, in Washington). Read the book once and Amelia comes across as the villain; read it twice or three times and you begin to see a different side to her. She is actually a very sympathetic person — beautiful, intelligent, well-read. If she was a harridan, or a lush, or a shrew, or a cretin, Alec himself would be a far less complex person; the fact that he is dissatisfied with his life with a woman that most people would be more than happy to be married to merely adds to the depth of his contradictions.
Because of its structure and its wealth of detail, The Honey Badger is like an iceberg: Much of its substance is hidden beneath the surface. In other ways, it is like a hologram. Looked at from different angles, it reveals different shapes and shades and colors. When I first read it as a teenager, I saw one story; reading it years later as a married man, I saw another, and years later still, as a writer, something different yet again. With each reading, the characters acquired more depth. People that, at first glance, might have appeared to be caricatures, or villains, are shown to have good qualities as well. For example, there is Amelias lifelong friend, the homosexual Francis Hopkins. Francis appears at various times throughout the book as Amelia’s confidante and advisor, travel companion, and stand-in at dinner parties Alec refuses to attend. He is variously described in negative terms; the word “faggot,” which Ruark employs liberally, is politically highly incorrect today, to say nothing of “fairy” and “pansy;” even in 1965 they would have been considered insensitive at best — something Alec is occasionally accused of, and that he sometimes ruefully admits. The portrait of Francis is not unremittingly negative, however. By the end of the book there is even a glimmer of understanding, and repeated readings reveal Francis in a more and more sympathetic light.
Because of what he wrote about emerging Africa in his newspaper column, Ruark was occasionally accused of racism (a blatant libel), and his portrayal of Francis, among other things, could lead to the assumption that he also hated homosexuals, especially overt ones. What is not commonly known is that Truman Capote, that most overt of homosexual writers, was a good personal friend of Ruark and regularly stayed at the Ruark house in Palamós. What Ruark disliked was not homosexuals themselves; it was any overweening display of homosexuality.
This general softening of characters as their true personalities are revealed extends also to the other women in Barr’s life, especially the actress Barbara Bayne, who may be the love of his life, if there is such a thing. The failures of these love affairs are shown to be, with a relentless honesty, at least as much his fault as the fault of the women involved, all of whom are desperately in love with Alec at some point, yet are unable to come between him and his work.
***
In The Honey Badger, Ruark created a real world, occupied by real people. They are not cardboard cutouts, nor are they caricatures. None of them is universally good, nor universally bad. There are no heroes, and no villains either. As a novelist he retained the one essential quality of a good journalist, and that is the ability to see both sides and to present them fairly and evenhandedly.
This quality emerged first with Something of Value. Although Peter McKenzie is the hero, he is far from totally heroic; and while Kimani is the villain, he is a villain not of his own making, nor totally villainous either. When that novel appeared, Ruark was seriously criticized by some of the settlers in Kenya for precisely that reason: He presented both sides, and the novel is sympathetic to everyone, to a degree, both black and white, who are caught up in a situation of historical magnitude, that was not of their making. Horrible things happened on both sides. By the time he wrote Uhuru, perhaps the best novel ever written about the conflicts involved in the decolonization of Africa, there were almost no blacks and whites anymore, only shades of grey. There are some unremittingly bad people in that book, but it has less to do with their skin color than with their nature and upbringing, and the really good people come in all colors.
In its own way, The Honey Badger is just as journalistically sound as those two great African novels, although it deals with one man’s life and times rather than those of a country or a people.
Professional hunters, those anachronisms of the twentieth century that Ruark idolized, are central characters in the African novels, but play only bit parts in The Honey Badger. Hunting is not central to the novel, although it is certainly an important element, as is Africa. Robert Ruark loved Africa as a man might desperately love a faithless woman, or a woman adore a favorite child gone bad. Only in The Honey Badger does he really express that love. Through Alec Barr’s words, you see Ruark’s feelings for “the country, the people, the animals — the country.” He muses about it in front of a fireplace in London with Jill Richard, then goes off to Africa on his long assignment. In the end, he chooses an extra few months of bugs and dust and horror, rather than a lifetime with her (although he does not know it at the time). For her part, realizing she would always play second fiddle to Barr’s work, Jill Richard marries someone else. After he comes to terms with the hurt of the rejection, on the surface at least, Alec Barr realizes his greatest emotion is relief. Everything is “suddenly simpler.” Now I can go home, he says, “and write my book.”
***
Barr does go home, to find that Amelia has divorced him because she is tired of being married to a will o’ the wisp. At the age of forty-eight, he finds himself alone. Eventually the big book does get written, and he achieves solid financial success as well. He marries a woman much younger than himself. At his moment of greatest literary triumph, he finds that he is suffering from prostate cancer — or so it is assumed, since he never says explicitly where the cancer is except in the vicinity of the lower bowel. The immediate effect of the illness and its treatment is to render Alec Barr impotent. He is given ten years to live at the outside — ten years of progressive torture. Barr reacts the way most men would want to react, bearing up manfully on the outside in spite of being a squirming mass of fears and regrets underneath.
At this point, Ruark introduces a story that is his masterpiece of introspection on life and death: the ancient elephant of Illaut. It is a metaphor for Alec Barr, and it is also a metaphor for the Africa Ruark loved. This passage in The Honey Badger is, by itself, worth the price of admission. Ruark wrote about that same elephant three times for publication. The first two were in magazine articles; the last was this section of the novel. By the time the account reached this stage he had refined it to the point where every word was perfect.
***
A honey badger, as is pointed out in the dust jacket copy, is a small African animal, a relative of the wolverine that, among other unlovable traits, tends to go for the groin when cornered, rather than for the throat. It is suggested that, as a title, it is a metaphor for modern American women and their desire to emasculate men, figuratively at least. Ruark may well have intended that meaning in part, but taking it as the whole story diminishes the novel’s significance considerably. In my opinion, there is a broader meaning to the honey badger. It is not so much a metaphor for women as it is a metaphor for life. There is an actual honey badger in the novel that kills, wantonly, a large flock of tame exotic fowl at a game wardens headquarters in Tanganyika. An animal that kills for the fun of it, because it enjoys the taste of blood, might seem to be an unqualified villain, but even here Ruark’s sense of fairness comes through. The animal, dreadful as it may be, was just “acting according to its lights,” and while the game warden traps and kills the honey badger all the same, he does it quickly and without malice.
At the end, emasculated himself, Alec Barr and Amelia reconcile yet again, this time with the first real hope that they will be able to live together without the jealousy and conflict that sex inspires. The idea that she will no longer have any cause for suspicion, and therefore no conflict, is an intriguing one. For his part, Alec Barr looks at the time he has left and thinks “Ten years. I can do five books in ten years. That’s a fair shake.”
***
The Honey Badger, as it was published, was a “big novel” in the fashion of the day — almost 600 pages long. Robert Ruark worked on the manuscript all through 1964 and into 1965. Its original form was much longer than even the final published version. At one point, he wrote his agent, he had cut 30,000 words from the most obviously “mushy” parts, and he continued to refine the book through the manuscript stage and even with the galley proofs, which he proof-read not so much to correct typographical errors as to polish the words even further. Considering the subject matter, it would be fascinating for anyone interested in Ruark’s life to see those 30,000 words. The final manuscript that was clean-copied by Alan Ritchie was bound into two volumes of about 500 pages each, double-spaced. Even after it reached this stage, however, Ruark continued to edit it. He made many excisions on the manuscript, removing whole passages and changing individual words and sentences. When he then followed his normal practice of making two copies of the original, one for his agent, Harold Matson, and one for Virginia Webb, these changes were reproduced on the photocopies. Even these late alterations produce some fascinating insights into the characters in the novel.
For example, Ben Lea, a minor figure who is Barr’s best friend in New York outside of Marc Mantell, is a senior man in an advertising agency whose function in life consists mainly of schmoozing and boozing, living off a fat expense account and pursuing classy women. He is fat and his hair is thinning, but he is still an “exceptional lover” who has been married five times. In the manuscript, Ruark mentions that, at one point, “Three of the city’s reigning glamor women had worn simultaneous black eyes, announcing that Ben Lea had been feeling pretty testy that week.” This line was expunged from the book before it went to press, probably in the galley stage. If Lea had been based on a real person, and was identifiable, such a line would have been acutely embarrassing, if not actionable. Worse, from a literary point of view, it would have colored Ben Lea in a decidedly negative light; even in 1965, giving a woman a black eye was not acceptable, and having three girlfriends simultaneously running around with black eyes would have painted Lea as a monster. Whatever the reason, literary or litigious, by the time the book went into print Ben Lea came across as a sparkling, lovable rogue, but no worse. This is important for one reason: At various points in the book, Lea sits down with Alec Barr — over lunch or in front of the fire in a hunting camp — and reads him the riot act about his life and his marriage. Invariably, Barr admits the truth in what Lea says, even if he does not immediately follow the advice.
In another section of the manuscript, Barbara Bayne jokingly insists that she is, in fact, a lesbian. This line is removed, but there is some suggestion that in the original manuscript Ruark painted her as a lesbian, or at least a bisexual, but this aspect of her was gradually removed as the novel was reworked and polished. Sexual preferences aside, Barbara plays a major role in the novel and her character in its final form is considerably more admirable than Ruark had, in all probability, originally intended. Barbara and Alec have a stormy relationship, with violent arguments, but no actual violence. In some of these arguments, Barbara is described as a lesbian, a whore, a cheat, or all three.
This brings up an interesting aspect of writing, especially when it is applied to an author writing about himself and filling his book with real people under false names. That is, in spite of what the author may have originally intended, characters change; they develop personalities of their own, and they say and do things the author never consciously planned. Sometimes, a writer may put in a character, intending to depict him in a highly unflattering light, then finds that the character develops in an entirely different direction. By the same token, a writer sometimes finds himself incapable of writing something he knows to be untrue, unfair, or unjust. If Barbara Bayne was based on a real person, Ruark may have gradually removed the untrue references as he refined the character. In other words, the real Barbara Bayne, whoever she was, may have emerged in spite of Ruark’s original intentions. Certainly by the end of the book she is one of the most likable and sympathetic characters, outside of Alec Barr himself.
***
If Alec Barr was Robert Ruark, then Alec’s wife, Amelia, was Virginia Webb Ruark. Like Barr and Ruark, the parallels between the real person and the fictional character are extremely close. Amelia came from a well-to-do family in Washington, she was talented as an interior decorator, and at one point was determined to pursue a career in that field. Likewise Virginia. This fact that was not lost on Ruark’s ex-wife when she read the book. Her reaction to the novel was immediate and unequivocal In a note to her family, written on page one of the novel’s Book I / Amelia, she wrote:
Dear Ones —
This book has made me very sad for a man I loved. It has also disgusted me at truth and fiction being so mixed together. It is a cruel book (not too well-written) and will possibly hurt many people. Not me — I’m beyond that. I have cried and cursed but the one thing we must all remember is that it was written by a very sick and despondent man. I think not fully rational but completely aware the bells were tolling for him.
All my love — Ginny Ruark
Virginia Ruark’s harsh assessment of the book is puzzling in several ways. First of all, Amelia is a very sympathetic character throughout the book. She is beautiful, well-built, sexy, intelligent, and witty. She is self-contained, sophisticated, and talented as an interior decorator. She has good taste and knows how to employ it. She is neither a falling-down drunk nor a slut. Amelia MacMillan Barr comes from a good family, and if she has had a somewhat checkered love life, well, who hasn’t? On the negative side of the ledger, Amelia is extremely jealous of her husband, especially during his absences due to the nature of his work. Writers travel. Usually they travel alone. Amelia is portrayed as a woman who feels shut out of his life because she does not participate in his work, and is haunted by the suspicion that during these absences Alec is having endless affairs with other women. She has a “positive genius” for hoarding Alec’s sins of omission and commission and then laying them before him at some future date. Anyone who has ever been married to a woman has experienced exactly that same trait. It is as much a trademark of womanhood as the periodic indispositions that govern their adult lives. And there is nothing that anyone can do about it, least of all the women themselves, assuming they even recognize it, acknowledge it, and would want to change it.
What sets Amelia apart is that she does indeed recognize that tendency in herself and even suggests she would rather not be that way, but she cannot help herself. As for Alec, he admits that he “contributed more than his share of barbs, if a girl were in the thorn-gathering business.” At one point he says wryly to himself, “I poisoned a pretty good well.”
Like her husband, Amelia Barr is a complex and contradictory character, and it takes time to get to know her. Repeated readings of the book reveal more and more of her qualities. She emerges gradually, like a butterfly from a cocoon, and when she stands fully revealed she is, by all accounts, a woman who is at least as admirable as Virginia Ruark and, in many ways, more so. One way in which she is very much unlike Virginia, however, is in her involvement in her husbands work. According to Harry Selby, Robert Ruark depended heavily on Virginia throughout his career, to offer opinions on ideas, on work in progress, and on finished manuscripts. Alec Barr depends on Amelia, in this way, not at all; he shuts her out of his work completely, to Amelia’s regret. Virginia Ruark, knowing how important she had been to her husband’s writing, may have taken this personally. Alternatively, since the book was written in its entirety after their stormy separation and divorce, she may have simply resented the fact that he was able to work at all without her involvement, and have seen The Honey Badger as a negation of her own sizable contribution over the years.
Amelia’s non-involvement is, however, merely on the surface. A major theme of the book is the fact that Alec Barr does depend on Amelia heavily, if indirectly. In fact, it emerges, he cannot write without her. She may not participate by debating ideas or reviewing the copy he writes, but she is vital nonetheless. If Virginia Ruark chose to view this as an insult rather than as a compliment, then she was seeing only the surface facts and not what lay underneath.
***
The Honey Badger elicited a number of adverse reactions from critics, one of whom wrote scathingly that it “totemized money.” This is the kind of criticism that could come only from someone secure in the knowledge that his next paycheck would arrive on Thursday, or that the university would honor his tenure. The truth is, money is a central, central concern to every freelance writer who ever lived, and Ruark’s employment of it adds to the realism of the novel, rather than detracting from it.
A failing of many novels is that the grubby necessity of earning a living never seems to enter into the plot, and the characters float through life blissfully immune to what Ruark called “nagging money problems.” For some reason, artists — and writers in particular — are expected to be disdainful of money, as if filthy lucre were somehow unbecoming to the higher calling of art. This is self-serving hogwash, usually employed by publishers and editors who seem to think writers exist, as Hunter S. Thompson once put it, on some sort of “divine dole.” Robert Ruark did not, and Alec Barr does not. Both came from poor, if not poverty-stricken, backgrounds, both worked and lived through the Depression, and both had only their writing on which to depend for the next check that will pay for the penthouse, the country place in New Jersey, or the repairs to the Rolls-Royce.
Freelance writing is, by definition, a precarious way to make a living. There is no job security whatsoever. Money dribbles in, usually less than expected, and almost always late. Magazines go under owing writers thousands; publishers sell their paperback rights for a song. Writers live in fear of literary tastes changing, or of a debilitating illness that might keep them away from the typewriter for a week or a month. In Barr’s case, add to this the necessity of paying the bills to live in a Manhattan penthouse, and it is no wonder that earning money is a preoccupation for him. Yet, to Alec Barr money is merely the means to an end — living and working the way he wants to — and not an end in itself. Unlike Ruark, he is not given to flaunting what wealth he has. Although the “nagging money problems” are a recurring theme throughout the book, usually when he has been playing truant from his typewriter and his agent confronts him with his overdrawn bank account and dearth of accounts receivable, Alec is never, in his adult life, poor. And toward the end of the novel, when he scores his greatest artistic (and financial) success and becomes a “millionaire in fact,” it changes nothing about him except to allow him to relax a little and not worry about paying next month’s bills.
The Great Depression and the reality of grinding poverty shaped a generation of writers. Its influence is found in John Steinbeck and Ernest Hemingway, so it is no wonder it also crops up in Ruark. Having lived through it, he was terrified of a recurrence — as is Alec Barr. “I couldn’t stand being poor again,” Barr reflects. “Not at my age.” Acknowledging the necessity of making a living, of “scuffling in the commercial end of the trade,” is a far, far cry from “totemizing money.” In another moment of harsh self-assessment, Barr reflects that if he were to find himself incapable of working and earning the money, everyone from his wife to his agent to his parents to his Aunt Sal would regard it as a personal affront, of being deprived of a tangible asset like a mink coat or a movie sale. He sees himself as their meal ticket, even if they do not.
Ivan Turgenev once wrote that “the heart of another is a dark forest.” No one really knows what is taking place in another person’s innermost thoughts, even if he has been married to that person for fifty years. Writers are not known for unburdening themselves anywhere except on the printed page, and then usually through the mouth of a fictional third party, the better to deny anything that comes back to haunt.
This may or may not have been a factor when Robert Ruark wrote the more introspective passages of The Honey Badger. But Alec Barr’s reflections on his life, his work, his wife, his family, and his background, and on the demands of the people that surround him, are an amplification of many of the views that Ruark expressed in interviews and magazine articles toward the end of his life. At the heart of the book is Alec Barr’s inability, in his own mind at least, to produce a work of the quality to which he aspires, and of which he thinks himself capable. Although he writes and produces competently and regularly, and various novels get written, none of them measures up as a “big work” in his own mind. One he dismisses as “just one more thick slice of slickness” that makes Book-of-the-Month, etcetera, and brings in a ton of cash that just as quickly gets paid out, leaving barely a ripple to tell of its passing.
Alec Barr’s life in New York, like Ruark’s own, is a directionless existence. Without children, without a meaningful married life, he sits down at the typewriter each day, produces the copy that gets sold, brings in the money that gets spent, and starts all over again the next day. Ruark gives Barr a Pulitzer early in his career, but turns him into a “steady plodder” as a novelist. Barr’s salvation is Africa, and especially the “big work” that he produces as a result of the eighteen-month safari late in the novel. This book is called Dark Dawning and is projected as the first in a series of novels, like The Forsyte Saga, that will depict all of East Africa from first colonization to the Winds of Change. It wins Barr a second Pulitzer and makes him a millionaire. And it is at that moment of triumph, when he is happily married for a second time, that he is confronted with prostate cancer and his impending death.
At the end of his life, Robert Ruark was planning his own magnum opus, a series of novels exactly like Alec Barr’s Dark Dawning, that would tell the history of Africa. In Ruark’s case, it would include Something of Value and Uhuru, plus a preceding work yet to be written (what is now called, in the movie business, a pre-quel) and a novel of post-independence Africa. Neither was ever written. What was written instead was The Honey Badger. Did Ruark know at the time that he would die before the work was completed? Did he have a terminal illness, like Barr’s, that would end his life horribly if he did not drink himself to death in the meantime? Some acquaintances, such as Harry Selby, insist that that is impossible; others, like Eva Monley, profess not to know. It is difficult to believe, however, given the relentlessly autobiographical nature of his last novel, that he did not have some inkling that his time was fast running out.
Every serious writer wants to leave in written form what he has learned of life, or thinks he has learned. The Honey Badger is a study of Ruark the writer by Ruark the man, and of Ruark the man by Ruark the writer. It is sometimes rueful, sometimes wry, often introspective, and always philosophical, although not in an academic sense. By the end of the novel, Alec Barr has learned the difference between what is really important and what is not. As presented by Ruark, the smallest truths are often the biggest ones, and the novel ends with Barr fitting a pair of cufflinks into a shirt and preparing to go into New York City, to “go home” to Amelia, and to prepare to live out his last few years as best he can. He is looking forward to seeing Francis Hopkins again, and maybe even going to dinner with the Hazeltines — an excruciating ordeal that caused him to walk out on Amelia in the first pages of the book, but which now beckons as a vaguely comforting irritant as the novel comes full circle. It is this structure that has caused more than one reader to immediately turn back to page one and begin reading it all over again. In the end, Robert Ruark creates a cast of characters, headed by Alec Barr, that you want to get to know better.