A TUSK AND A BOOK
In the end, all that counts in a writer’s life are the books he leaves behind. Nothing else really matters: not the drinking, not the women, not the ego, not the broken friendships, not the betrayals. Robert Ruark left a collection of books, the quality of which varied widely, from serious to almost trivial, and after his death a cottage industry grew up anthologizing his magazine articles, almost all non-fiction. The first appeared in 1966, and the most recent thirty years later. All have sold well, which is a testament to his continuing appeal as a writer, if not to the limitless depth of first-class material available.
Ruark would probably have wanted to be remembered as a novelist first and a newspaperman second. Michael McIntosh and others have noted that he was one of the best magazine writers who ever lived, but magazine writing has little status as an art form. The other major form of fiction in the twentieth century was short-story writing, but while Ruark wrote a few, they were not very good, and none was memorable. At least two have been included in the clutch of anthologies, but more as curiosities than as examples of Ruark’s writing at its best.
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At the end of the twentieth century, hundreds of lists were compiled attempting to assign authors and their works a place in history. Depending on which list you read, either Marcel Proust’s Remembrance of Things Past or James Joyce’s Ulysses was generally acknowledged as the century’s foremost novel, or the most influential, or both. The greatest American novel, according to most polls, was F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby. Ernest Hemingway and William Faulkner, both Nobel laureates for literature, appeared less than one might have expected, and Robert Ruark appeared not at all.
This is not surprising, and it is not my purpose to present a case for or against any of the above. To the best of my knowledge, Ruark’s works of fiction do not comprise any part of any literature course; nor is he considered one of the serious novelists of the twentieth century, whether as a stylist or as an innovator. You are unlikely to find yourself embroiled in any discussion of his work in a modern-day New York literary salon, if such things still exist. There is, however, a phenomenon that grows up around significant works of art, and that is the small, devoted coterie of admirers, enthusiasts, and, at times, obsessive fans who live, eat, and drink a particular work. For example, Richard Wagner’s Ring of the Niebelungen cycle of music-dramas is widely admired by critics, and generally acknowledged as a contender for the title of greatest work of art in history. At the same time it has a legion of Wagnerite fans who know the works inside out, have memorized entire passages, know the characters like family members, and endlessly attend performances. Similarly, there are people who have read and re-read Proust’s Remembrance and can discuss the arcane foibles of even its more obscure characters. Hemingway and Faulkner have comparable followings, and annual festivals are devoted to examining and celebrating their works.
It would be hard to imagine three more disparate worlds than Wagner’s Valhalla, Faulkner’s Mississippi, and Proust’s Paris, yet all three engender a remarkably similar reaction in the people who admire them: Somehow, in some sublime and unfathomable way, they strike a chord in certain people who read the work and become part of its extended family. Wagner, Proust, and Faulkner each created a unique world. Whether these worlds ever really existed as portrayed no longer matters: Because of these writers, those worlds will exist forever in the pages of their books and in the minds of their readers. Every writer dreams of achieving this goal, but remarkably few (considering the number of words written and pages published) ever do.
In his own way, Robert Ruark also created a unique world. While he never assembled a formal series of novels, linked by plot or characters or chronology, several of his books taken together do form a whole, although it is largely subliminal. Horn of the Hunter, Something of Value, Uhuru, and The Honey Badger, combined with some of his short non-fiction pieces, created a world of the modern African safari. This world owes its reality to the fact Ruark poured so much of his own genuine love of Africa into the pages of his books, and that reality continues to shine through, to inspire others, and to evoke a world many of us try to share and all of us envy.
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Toward the end of his life, Ruark wrote that “there are worse monuments to a life than a tusk or a book.” To a writer — whether a newspaperman, poet, essayist, or hack — a book is the ultimate product, and a major novel is the ultimate book. Ruark left six novels; of these, three are major works (Something of Value, Uhuru, and The Honey Badger). Poor No More, while lengthy and serious, is really a potboiler, written to make money by cashing in on the success of Something of Value, and two can best be described as semi-comic curiosities (Grenadine Etching and its sequel). Most Ruark admirers feel Something of Value is the best novel. Certainly it was the foundation stone upon which his career as a novelist was built. It was a massive best-seller, book-club selection, and ultimately a motion picture with Rock Hudson and Sidney Poitier. It made Ruark a wealthy man and allowed him to live the life he wanted.
More than that, the novel had a wide impact politically, making people aware of what was happening in Kenya and helping to increase interest in Africa generally. And it was not just a best-seller; it was a long-seller. Something of Value stayed in print for many years, and today you can still find copies for sale in remote parts of Africa. From the Cape to Kenya, it is a rare bookshelf that does not have at least a paperback edition.
The same can be said of Uhuru, which was a loose sequel, although the names were changed so Ruark would not be limited by what he had already written about the characters. Uhuru is a more complex novel than its predecessor; there are more types of characters, and the characters themselves have more facets. In writing Uhuru, Ruark abandoned blacks and whites in favor of many shades of gray. This reflected his deepening knowledge and understanding of Africans and African life, and the realization that nothing is ever as simple as it first seems. By the time Uhuru was published, Ruark realized that not only did he not have all the answers to the desperate problems facing emerging Africa, but that there was almost certainly no one answer, and perhaps no answer at all — nothing that could apprehend the fate that lay in store not only for Kenya, but for all the former colonies that were lurching, stumbling, and occasionally slouching, toward independence.
Ruark’s third major novel was The Honey Badger. The book has more detractors than admirers, but no one reading it can deny it is one of Ruark’s major works. Finally, Horn of the Hunter is one of the foremost examples of a particular type of niche literature — the non-fiction account of a first safari. Between 1850 and 1999, literally hundreds of such books were published in Europe and America. Ruark’s stands out as one of the very best because it combines a journalist’s eye and devotion to accuracy and detail with a vivid, self-deprecating style and page after page of sheer enthusiasm.
After Ruark’s death, his memory slowly faded and most of his books went out of print. Gradually, though, a market grew up for some of his titles among big game hunters and African travellers. By the late 1980s, there was a small but thriving market for early editions of his works, particularly Horn of the Hunter and the first anthology, Use Enough Gun. So great did the demand become, in fact, that Safari Press obtained the right to reprint both books, and they have sold steadily ever since. Among the novels, Something of Value carried the highest premium, followed at a distance by Uhuru. Except among the most devoted Ruark fans, however, his other books were in little demand and could be found for a few dollars in used-book stores and garage sales.
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One area to which Ruark could lay claim, almost as a specialty, is anthologies. He published four anthologies during his lifetime, and four more have been assembled since. This attests both to his prowess and production as a magazine writer and to the continuing appetite for his work among hunters and shooters.
There are two anthologies of his syndicated newspaper column (I Didn’t Know It Was Loaded and One for the Road) and two of the Old Man series of columns for Field & Stream. Ruark was barely in his grave before his survivors were hard at work assembling Use Enough Gun. This is a book about hunting, especially in Africa. The dust jacket has a photograph of Ruark at his world-weary best and includes excerpts from Horn of the Hunter, from his three major novels, and from various magazine articles. It was edited by Stuart Rose, with the introduction written by Ruark’s close friend, Eva Monley. For the serious Ruark fan, there is little in the book that is not familiar, but it is certainly an excellent introduction to his work.
The second posthumous anthology was titled Women. It was edited by Joan Fulton and appeared in 1967. By that time Ruark’s executors were trying to sort out his estate, which, between his divorce, expatriate living, and foreign exchange controls, was in considerable disarray. More to the point, there were bills to be paid, and the executors were eager to cash in on whatever market value still accrued to the Ruark name. As a columnist, Ruark made his first big splash attacking women’s fashions and had used the war between the sexes as reliable dull-day copy for the rest of his career; it was his stock-in-trade as a mass-market columnist, so it was only natural to assemble some of his greatest hits in that direction and turn them into cash. The book was published in both hardcover and paperback. For those interested in Africa and hunting, there is little to Women except one piece extolling Virginia Ruark’s virtues as an interior decorator, displaying Ruark’s horns and hides to best advantage in the house in Palamós. Anyone with a sizable trophy collection and a recalcitrant spouse should obtain a copy of the book for that article alone.
After Women, Ruark’s executors, including Eva Monley and his agent, Harold Matson, concluded the market had been saturated. By the end of his life, Ruark’s celebrity as a syndicated columnist was largely gone anyway — the column was canceled by United Features because of low readership, and either indifference or outright hostility on the part of newspaper editors — and The Honey Badger, while a best-seller and book-club selection, received poor reviews. To all appearances, it was the end of the line. Although various of his books remained in print for several more years, in paperback at least, it was highly unlikely any general-interest publisher could be interested in further anthologies, even if they could be assembled.
The 1970s was a strange and depressing period for guns, hunting, Africa, and African literature. All appeared to be in terminal decline. The newly independent countries of Africa were flexing their political muscles and being courted by both East and West, who in turn were busy fighting the Cold War on all fronts. Ruark’s political views, especially regarding self-governing African countries, were highly unfashionable. In London, the great English gunmakers were going out of business one after another, and the remaining ones were hanging on by the skin of their teeth. Africa’s game herds were declining everywhere you looked, and both Kenya and Tanzania (the latter only temporarily) banned big game hunting. Other great hunting countries, including Mozambique, the Sudan, Rhodesia, and Angola, were all in a state of war, declared or undeclared. Under these circumstances, it is no wonder Ruark’s literary reputation went into almost total eclipse.
In the 1980s, however, attitudes changed. African countries discovered there was considerable hard currency to be gained from big game hunting, and they needed it badly. A few conservation organizations came to the belated realization that regulated hunting was the best way to ensure the survival of species like leopards and elephants, and hunting groups like Safari Club International began to gain size and influence. A trickle of American hunters going to Africa became a flood, and with increased interest in Africa came a renaissance of Robert Ruark’s reputation as a safari writer. The magazine world had also changed considerably in the interim, with a proliferation of smaller but more focused publications devoted to every aspect of outdoor life, from fine guns to wingshooting to art and literature. This evolution brought with it a new generation of magazine writers.
One of the best is Michael McIntosh, an expert on double guns who also happens to be a Shakespearean scholar and one of the most literate and graceful writers ever to adorn a masthead. Although he is a wing-shooter and shotgunner almost exclusively, he is also a historian, admirer of good writing, and has an interest in Africa and hunting history. For many years he had been an admirer of Robert Ruark, primarily because of Ruark’s Old Man articles and pieces on wingshooting. McIntosh decided there was room for another Ruark anthology, more focused than Use Enough Gun, drawing on Ruark’s previously uncollected magazine works. With the Ruark estate’s permission, McIntosh compiled Robert Ruark’s Africa, published in 1990 by Countrysport Press. It has been a steady seller ever since and has helped rekindle interest in all of Ruark’s works.
The articles McIntosh chose for the anthology range in quality, simply because he did not want to include anything that had already been collected. There is a law of declining quality in anthologies, because as each one appears the pool of remaining material grows smaller, and the material itself grows thinner. As well, the two Old Man books had already used the cream of that series. Still, there was enough first-rate material available for McIntosh to assemble an excellent overall collection. He also wrote a detailed introduction in which he recaps Ruark’s life and career and offers insights into the state of his health, both physical and emotional. Harry Selby, who knew Ruark well, says McIntosh’s analysis is very perceptive.
Unfortunately for the average reader, Countrysport Press published the work, as is its custom, in both a trade edition and a leather-bound limited edition at a higher price. Unlike some publishers, Countrysport makes a practice of including one or two pieces in the limited edition that are not in the trade, to make it more attractive to collectors. Because the higher-priced edition is limited to a small number of books (typically 250 to 1,000), this means the additional articles receive relatively little circulation. In the case of Robert Ruark’s Africa this is doubly unfortunate, because the two additional articles are among the finest African pieces Ruark ever wrote. Both deserve far wider circulation than they have received.
The first, “Far-Out Safari,” was a general piece on modern-day African hunting, commissioned by Playboy very near the end of Ruark’s life; the second was one of the last Field & Stream columns, titled “A Leopard in the Rain.” It is a short, heartfelt essay that shows more clearly and sincerely what safari life can and should be — beyond the killing of animals and the collecting of trophies — than any article I have ever read anywhere.
The success of this anthology helped spawn a second some years later. McIntosh has been closely associated with the magazine Sporting Classics almost since its inception. Sporting Classics is based in South Carolina, and its book reviewer, Dr. James Casada, is a university English professor and authority on southern hunting writers, including Ruark. In fact, he wrote an article about Ruark for the magazine in 1984. In the early 1990s, Sporting Classics decided to assemble a series of anthologies of “lost classics” — previously uncollected works by writers like Ruark and Jack O’Connor. Casada edited the Ruark book, which was published by Safari Press. In overall quality, it is not as even as McIntosh’s — it suffers from the fact that there were simply not many articles left that had not been anthologized already, and Casada included a few odds and ends of the Old Man series that are frankly inferior. On the positive side, however, because he was not limited to pieces on Africa, Casada was able to include some fascinating articles such as Ruark’s autobiographical piece, “The Man I Know Best,” that appeared in True magazine in 1963. There are also three articles related to Ruark’s assessment of Ernest Hemingway, published shortly after Hemingway’s death. Finally, and fortunately, Casada included “Far-Out Safari” and “A Leopard in the Rain,” on the (quite reasonable) grounds that, since they were not in the trade edition of Robert Ruark’s Africa, they were not generally available and so could be considered “lost classics.” If some of the other pieces are weak, or repeat themes Ruark handled better elsewhere, it does not detract from the overall value of the anthology. With this book, however, it is reasonable to assume Ruark’s literary ore has been mined to exhaustion.
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That so many anthologies have been published since his death is proof of one thing: Robert Ruark did not leave nearly enough behind. A shelf devoted to Ruark that includes everything he wrote, and everything that has been written about him, is tiny when put beside a comparable collection of Hemingway. This is understandable, however, when you consider Ruark’s serious literary career lasted barely thirteen years, while Hemingway’s spanned almost forty. There is no question Ruark worked hard, produced a great deal in a short time, and made the very most of the limited time he was here, but the fact remains that he was only forty-nine years old when he died. By all rights, he should have lasted at least another decade or two had he lived a little slower and drank a little less. Well, drank a lot less.
At the end of The Honey Badger, Alec Barr is facing a shortened life expectancy due to cancer. But it will be a life unencumbered with demanding marriages, free to be devoted to literature. “Ten years, five books. That’s a fair deal,” he thinks to himself. Barr has a huge project in mind: a series of linked novels about Africa, similar to Galsworthy’s Forsyte Saga, which Barr has tentatively titled Dark Dawning. Robert Ruark was projecting a similar series that, according to Eva Monley, was to be called A Long View from a Tall Hill, although the word “long” is usually omitted when the name is mentioned. The series was to embrace Ruark’s two existing African novels, as well as one set in Kenya in the early years of the century and a concluding one that would take place after independence. Yet the first and last novels were never written. Unlike Ernest Hemingway, Robert Ruark left no huge treasure trove of material — no unpublished novels, no almost-completed manuscripts, no short stories in draft form. And so exactly what shape these novels were to take is a matter of conjecture.
That Ruark did not live long enough to write these, especially the last one, is a great loss. By the time he wrote The Honey Badger, his skill as a writer, both in his style and ability to structure a complex novel, was at its height, and it would have been fascinating to see what he produced — especially given the wide knowledge and understanding of Africa that he then possessed.
Two books that would have been naturals for Robert Ruark, given his background and interest in the subject, are a comprehensive non-fiction work on safaris and a journalistic non-fiction work on emerging Africa similar to the one Alec Barr wrote in The Honey Badger. To the best of my knowledge, he never considered writing either one. In a way, this is a greater loss than the uncompleted series of novels. Very few books have been written about safari life and organization from an objective standpoint, rather than from first-person experience. His friend Robert M. Lee wrote Safari Today in 1960, and after Ruark’s death several other such books appeared, most notably James Mellon’s African Hunter (1975), and a history by Bartle Bull (Safari, 1988). Imagining what “Far-Out Safari” might have been if expanded to book length — honest, critical, and suitably world-weary — is enough to make a Ruark fan weep. As a writer, Ruark always leaves you wanting more, which is why he continues to enthrall us so many years after his death.
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In literature, there are various genres, and Robert Ruark made solid contributions to three of them. The two Old Man books fit into a niche shared with writers like Archibald Rutledge and Havilah Babcock. Generally speaking, it is a niche of short articles largely populated by bobwhite quail, white-tailed deer, and white-haired elders; a lot of dogs sicken and die, and many memories are explored. At its worst, it includes tear-jerking stories about the autumns of our lives; at its best, it evokes memories of the important times in life, times which are never truly treasured until they are gone. Exactly which rung Ruark’s work occupies on that particular ladder is a matter of opinion, with various authorities assigning Ruark either a very high position or putting him somewhere in the middle.
To me, the very fact that Ruark never resorted to the easy, maudlin approach sets the Old Man stories several notches above most of the others. Even in writing about the Old Man’s death, for example, the story is simple and straightforward and, in the end, uplifting. You don’t want to cry; you want to cheer. To some, this quality is somehow a detraction, as if anything so relentlessly upbeat cannot be any good. As any outdoor magazine editor will tell you, however, the most common submission he receives, from professional and amateur writers alike, is the “my old dog up and died” story. Most are rejected, a few are printed, and even fewer deserve to be. Almost none achieve lasting stature as literature. As Hemingway commented, the hardest thing to do is write honest prose about human beings. That is what Ruark attempted and, in large part, succeeded in doing with the Old Man. And he did so by avoiding clichés and almost never taking the easy way out. In the end, most of those articles look effortless. Perhaps for Ruark they were, although I doubt it; making writing look smooth and effortless is very hard work. But that quality can cause critics to dismiss entire books as not being serious.
The second genre is the non-fiction safari book, of which Horn of the Hunter is an example. It was a spectacularly lucky work in several ways, not least of all in the fact that it was perhaps the last book of its type to appear before the Mau Mau Emergency erupted and swept away the old Kenya, along with our delusions about Africa. It captured a magical place at a precise moment in time, just before it ended, never to be regained.
Finally, the three major novels. They really should not be compared with books by Proust, Hemingway, Fitzgerald, or Faulkner, and I rather doubt even Ruark would suggest it. Their counterparts are works like Herman Wouk’s The Caine Mutiny, or James Jones’s From Here to Eternity.
The test for such a novel is not how many copies are sold but whether people are still reading it ten, twenty, or thirty years later. By that measure, Ruark’s works must be placed in the solid second echelon of twentieth century novels, because they are still being read, still changing hands, and still being written and talked about many years after the novels finally went out of print. The reason lies not merely in the subject matter, but in what Ruark did with it: Like Proust’s Paris of the belle époque, he created an Africa that may or may not have existed, but certainly exists now in the pages of his books. The Africa Ruark knew is gone, but the Africa he created for us will live forever.