This is a rather long post but I thought I should post this interesting article in its entirety before it disappears from the Internet. (Things have a way of disappearing from
www.findarticles.com as I've learned in the past.) If you're a fan of Hemingway or Ruark (or both) then I think you will find this article interesting.
-Bob F.
![[Linked Image]](http://www.npg.si.edu/img2/hemingway/horns.jpg)
![[Linked Image]](http://www.bunduki.com/bob/selby/Selby-Ruark-waterbuck.jpg)
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�African Journeys: Hemingway�s Influence on the Life and Writings of Robert Ruark.�by John R Bittner , The Hemingway Review 21.2 (Spring 2002): 129-45.
BIOGRAPHERS HAVE COMPILED AN EXTENSIVE INVENTORY of the writers who influenced Hemingway's writing. Strains of Jack London and Ring Lardner appear in Hemingway prose published in The Trapeze at Oak Park High School. C.G. (Pete) Wellington helped hone Hemingway's style at the Kansas City Star. Sherwood Anderson became a castoff role model, but introduced Hemingway to his Paris mentors Gertrude Stein, James Joyce, Ezra Pound, and FE Scott Fitzgerald. From the past, Tolstoy, Turgenev, and Dostoyevsky offered additional guidance, all of which helped to mold the man and his mystique. Although such influences are important to understanding the genesis of Hemingway's works and his creative process, Hemingway's impact on other authors, both of his own and of subsequent generations, is equally important, as the tributes paid to Hemingway at the time of his death suggest.1 Now, as archives offer up new information and new insights, we have the opportunity to explore just how widespread the Hemingway influence has become. One of the writers heavily influenced by Hemingway was Robert Chester Ruark, Jr.-the prolific author, journalist, and internationally syndicated columnist for the United Features Syndicate and the Scripps-Howard Newspaper Alliance.
In 1951, Ruark took his first trip to Africa on a well-publicized safari, its sole purpose to follow in Hemingway's footsteps and produce a book of the same genre as Green Hills of Africa (1935). Michael McIntosh, writing in the introduction to Robert Ruark's Africa, said of the safari: "Ernest Hemingway was Ruark's hero, and it's hardly surprising that Hemingway's lifestyle was a blueprint for the one Ruark took on.... [It] isn't hard to imagine that he was looking for the same mysticism that Hemingway had found in big-game hunting" (xiv). For his hunting guide, Ruark selected . Harry Selby, the understudy of Philip Percival, Hemingway's white hunter on the Green Hills of Africa safari. As Hemingway and Percival had become friends; so did Ruark and Selby-Selby's son would become Ruark's godson. Along with Selby, Ruark also hired some of the native Africans who had accompanied Hemingway twenty years earlier (Foster 104).
Ruark had been back in New York for less than a year when Kenya became embroiled in a political and social uprising far more important than big game hunting. An emerging dash between the political, missionary, and social values of British colonialism and a group of native black Kenyans increasingly intolerant of British domination quickly became an international crisis. A secret society of Kikuyu tribesmen known as the Mau Mau arose out of tensions over British-imposed segregation and restrictions on native land use and ownership. Driven by the teachings of Jomo Kenyatta, articulated in his book Facing Mount Kenya: The Tribal Life of the Kikuyu (1938), the tribesmen began to organize and, conduct night raids on farms, complete with the terrorist butchering of white residents. When Mau Mau killings began to include government officials and their black sympathizers, the British declared a state of emergency.
Into this foreign cauldron, Life's editors sent the one person they felt was best equipped to cover the Mau Mau story. By early January 1953, Ruark had again hired Selby and was back on safari in Africa to give Life's readers a first-person account of the Mau Mau rebellion. Continuing at the same time with his newspaper columns, he wrote of inter-tribal warfare and the worry on every face...the mounting daily list of killings, violence, and desperation.... This land of peace and beauty has suddenly become a hell of terror and insecurity" (Column, 14 Jan. 1953). He told readers:
When my friend Harry Selby, the youngster who hunts with me, came to collect me at the hotel in Nairobi for a trip to the center of the Mau Mau violence, he was wearing a .45 strapped to his hip. It was not until I got to Thomson's Falls, a charming little farm community in the Aberdare hills, that I understood the meaning of Harry's gun. The entire town goes armed.... The unconcealed holster is as much a part of the costume today as on the pioneer days of our old West. (Column, 15 Jan. 1953)
The following day he wrote: "In an attempt to demonstrate the widespread seriousness of this Mau Mau business in Kenya today, you can say that a white man who loses his weapon is subject to an almost irrevocable six months in jail. A native in possession of a gun is subject to being shot offhand without query" (Column, 16 Jan. 1953). Later columns covered the Mau Mau loyalty oath, examples of violence, and the politics of Kenya. Ruark felt the rebellion threatened the way of life the British had established and that white settlers had promulgated, one that, in his view, had benefited native Africans.
Having gathered information from Nairobi and other areas, Ruark moved out of Mau Mau country to write his feature for Life. Promoted on Life's cover and appearing in the 16 February 1953 issue under the title, "Your Guns Go with You," the article begins:
It is very quiet and peaceful here in Kenya's Northern Frontier, where we have set up our hunting camp. This is, a vast sun-scorched desert land inhabited mostly by elephant, rhino and a few nomadic herdsmen whose first concern is Water.... This is not Nairobi or Nyeri or Nakuru or Thomson's Falls or Kinangop. They are in the country of the Kikuyu tribe-Mau Mau country.... There you put the pistol in the soap tray when you take a bath, because you remember that Eric Bowyer of Kinangop was chopped up while bathing.
The often-gruesome narrative continued for nine pages in a sweeping commentary about the terrain, the politics, and the brutality of the rebellion.
Ruark's experiences in Africa, however, had also made him reflective. In short, his drinking and his fast-paced lifestyle were now killing him. About the African experience, McIntosh suggests: "Had he not discovered Africa when he did, Ruark almost certainly would not have lived to see his fortieth birthday, and he would have left behind little of enduring worth. As it happened, however, Africa provided not only a reprieve from self-destruction but also engendered the full reach of his talent" (xiii-xiv).
Ruark now wanted out of New York. Spain, he felt, would permit him the freedom to write at his own pace. The exchange rate and his tax status would provide both him and his wife, Virginia, with their accustomed style of living. Also, Spain was Hemingway country. By the summer of 1953, when the Ruarks met the Hemingways, the Ruarks were settled expatriates living in Spain.
Ruark met Hemingway for the first time in July 1953 during the festival of San Fermin in Pamplona. Ruark biographer Hugh W. Foster speculates that Spanish financier Ricardo Sicre may have introduced them (148). At Lecumberri, just outside Pamplona where the Hemingway entourage was staying, Ruark spent some of the week partying with the Hemingways and their friends. About the week of San Fermin, Mary wrote in her diary that their social life had become "a marathon of reunions With old friends, drinks, rendezvous, snacks, more drinks, more friends" (How It Was 330).
For Ruark, however, the highlight of the week was attending the bullfights with the Hemingways. Enamored of being part of the Hemingway entourage, he wrote in his column: "You will pardon a small boy's enthusiasm for a current event, but the other day I sat with Ernest Hemingway to watch a bullfight in the same town he immortalized in the best book he ever wrote, called The Sun Also Rises, a quarter-century ago...." In addition to watching Ord6fiez, whom Ruark called, "a miracle of grace," they also watched:
A brave but rather bad bull killer named Cordoba dedicated a bull to Mr. Hemingway. He sent up the cape and we spread it out on the barrera in front of us.... Then C6rdoba....went out and performed very badly with the bull. We had a wineskin along and took a slug out of it.... Mr. Hemingway looked sadly at his dedicating friend and then even more sadly at me. He took a large bite out of the wine skin, and spoke. "There is nothing we can do for our friend now," he said, 11 except not to spill any wine on his cape.' (Column, 13 Aug. 1953).
Together in Spain in 1953, both Ruark and Hemingway were well-read and well-traveled. Both had an attachment to Cuba. Both were accomplished, published writers in the media of newspapers, magazines, and books. Both were fond of alcohol (and abused it). Both were fiercely independent: Both were celebrities and public figures. Although Ruark was fifteen years younger than Hemingway and had yet to publish a major novel, he was an internationally syndicated columnist, a household word with a daily readership that Newsweek estimated at 15 million (20 July 1953: 58). Both were earning significant financial rewards from their writing. A November 1949 five-page profile of Ruark in Life magazine estimated his income from writing at $75,000 annually (Havemann 61). But equally important to their common backgrounds and their shared fame, both men possessed a deep appreciation for Africa.
Ruark experienced a landmark month in July 1953. In addition to meeting the Hemingways, Ruark published Horn of the Hunter, a non-fiction book that emerged out of his first safari, and was his answer to Green Hills of Africa. Published to generally favorable reviews, Horn of the Hunter contained many references to Hemingway. Hassoldt Davis wrote in the New York Times, "Though his book owes much to Hemingway, it is a roistering good yarn and a true one." Less complimentary was the Saturday Review "Ruark's problem appears to be that ,he is torn between humor and Hemingway.... Ruark professes the deepest admiration for Hemingway, and his style often threatens to become a parody of the Master. The Lord save him from his friends these days." One-third of Newsweek's 20 July 1953 review of Horn of the Hunter discussed the Hemingway connection. Newsweek reported:
If there is anyone whose mark Ruark plans to shoot at, it is no columnist but rather a hairy-chested fisherman and hunter now resident in Cuba and named Ernest Hemingway. Like Hemingway, Ruark has found a mysticism surrounding hunting in Africa just as real as that surrounding bullfighting in Spain, another interest he shares with Hemingway.... Hemingway-like, also, Ruark is able to digress at length comparing heroism in the hunt with heroism in war. One difference between the writing styles of the two men, discounting the stature of one as opposed to the other, seems a result of war. Ruark, a naval officer during the second world war, writes with the vernacular of such recently bright braveries as Okinawa and Malta as compared to Hemingway's weathered vocabulary from Caporetto and Barcelona. ("Ruark and the Lions" 58, 60).
It's doubtful Ruark was surprised by the comparisons to Hemingway. When Ruark can't hold steady for a clean shot at a standing old gazelle, and hits the animal in the hind left -ankle, finally killing the gazelle only when the animal leaps into the path of his fifth shot and has its neck broken, Ruark laments his lack of shooting prowess. Harry Selby comforts him and blames it on the light, saying: "`Take it easy, take it easy....It happens to everybody. Even Hemingway"' (Horn of the Hunter 56). A lengthy, self-disclosing, reverent tribute to Hemingway-some of it written in Hemingway prose-appears over three pages at the beginning of Chapter 14, where Ruark wrote: "One day I looked around and realized I was in Tanganyika, shooting lions with the same basic string of blacks that Hemingway.had used fifteen years before. I had a handsome white hunter, just like the late Francis Macomber had a handsome white hunter, and a pretty wife I hoped wasn't going to shoot me in the head for convenience. I hoped I wasn't going to acquire gangrene or get chewed up, either" (284).
Later, after escaping a herd of charging buffalo, Ruark and Selby find themselves back in the middle of the herd. Describing the hunt, Ruark writes:
The sweat was running down in solid sheets, the salt of it burning my eyes. Grass seeds were secreted in my socks and chewing on my ankles like bugs. I had more thorns in my crown than any man needs. This was costing me a minimum of a hundred dollars a day after transportation.... "God damn Ernest Hemingway," I said bitterly, and when the bull lurched up, crooked-kneed, I walloped him. The bull went down. He got up again. "God damn Ernest Hemingway," I said again. "This has gone far enough." (299-300)
After tracking the blood trail through the bush for three hours, "we found him dead The bull had been hit by Ruark's bullet but killed by Selby's. "`God damn Ernest Hemingway and Francis Macomber,'I said" (302-303).
On 22 December 1953, Hemingway himself, now in Kenya on the safari that produced True at First Light sat down with his blue-ink fountain pen and onionskin typewriter paper and penned a Christmas letter to Robert Ruark. Filled with small script, margin to margin, the letter is a minichronicle of Hemingway's safari and has a tone of familiarity much like a letter to an old hunting buddy who knows about the sport, understands the language of Africa, and can identify with the thrill of the kill.
Thanking Ruark for a copy-of Horn of the Hunter, Hemingway tells him about his upcoming feature in Look, saying he could send Ruark a copy, and suggesting that Ruark will like the photographs, none of which are posed. He praises Mary-who is taking photographs with Hemingway's new Hasselbad camera-for adapting to the rough life of Africa. He tells Ruark that their hunting party has killed a substantial amount of game, noting how the rhinos are comical and the leopards are always dangerous. He writes about the weather, how it has been dry in the East and in Northern Rhodesia, and that it rained in Kenya in early November. He has a month more of game warden work, and tells Ruark about the native girl he's engaged to-"Debba" in True at First Light-and how she reminds him of Brenda Frazier-rich, beautiful, and has a good smell to her. With two more days until Christmas, he plans to go up into the hills to shoot Christmas dinner. Having become somewhat proficient in throwing the spear, he says that killing buffalo with a spear would be like boxing Tom Heeney,2 and that he's practicing his spear throwing, to be chronicled in his upcoming feature for Look. He remarks that he has lost weight, getting down to 187 pounds, and that he looks like Bob Fitzsimmons.3
Exactly when Ruark received Hemingway's Christmas safari letter is not known, but he replied almost a year later, on 3 November 1954. Writing to congratulate Hemingway on winning the Nobel Prize, Ruark told him about duck hunting in Seville, and about shooting a tiger in India. On 14 January 1955, Mary, who had learned that Ruark had stopped in Havana and had not contacted them, wrote from the Finca Vigia to tell him that they weren't receiving any visitors, including the press, but would have liked to have seen him as a friend. Ernest penned a hand-written note on the bottom of Mary's letter, telling Ruark that he was working on a book and was on page 183-the "African book," which became True at First Light. On 1 March 1955, Ruark sent a deferential letter of explanation and apology to Ernest and Mary, saying he did not want to interrupt Hemingway's writing or wake them when they were asleep.
Two months later, Ruark's life changed dramatically when he published his first attempt at autobiographical fiction. Based on his safari for Life and published by Doubleday, Something of Value (1955) was a 300,000word novel that presented in gruesome detail the social and political context of the Mau Mau emergency. The timing of the book was perfect. The Mau Mau conflict and its world press coverage had converged to create a public appetite for information about the African conflict. The critics called Something of Value "brutal," "debased""banal," "vulgar," "violent," "ludicrous," "monstrous, and "horrible" (Book Review Digest 1955). Orville Prescott wrote in the New York Times that Ruark's book was "the most loathsome novel I have read in nearly twenty-five years of reviewing.... clumsily constructed, repetitious, crudely characterized and filled with irrelevant material...perverse and nauseating,;like something suitable for the library of the Marquis de Sade.... The white atrocities committed in retaliation, murder of women and children and obscene tortures, Mr. Ruark describes with no apparent realization that they were a betrayal of civilized conduct and therefore infinitely worse.'
Critic John Barkham saw it differently. In a full-page, front-page review for the New York Times Book Review, Barkham wrote: "I have no hesitation in nominating it as the most sensational novel of the year.... It has been said that on many African questions the interest of Americans exceeds their knowledge. No such charge can be brought against Ruark.... [The novel] is an astonishing virtuoso performance.... a pile driver of a book." Hollywood and the public agreed with Barkham. Something of Value stayed on the New York Times Best Seller List for 42 weeks, and was select-, ed by the Times as an "Outstanding Book" of 1955 ("A List..."). The sale of paperback rights set a record for a novel and Book-of-the-Month Club sales added to the total. The book was translated into ten languages, M.G.M. bought the film rights for $300,000, and on royalties and rights combined, Ruark made upward of $1 million (Casada xx). In 1957, the film version appeared under the title Africa Ablaze. Along with Sidney Poitier, the film starred Rock Hudson, who the next year starred with Jennifer Jones in the re-make of Hemingway Is A Farewell to Arms.
In Cuba, working on his own African book from late 1954 through 1956 (Burwell 136-139), Hemingway wove the title of his adoring friend's novel into the narrative that appears in Chapter 12 of True at First Light. It is shortly before Christmas 1953 when Ernest and Mary engage in an affectionate dialogue about Ernest's native fiancee as Mary prepares to leave for Nairobi, where she will see a doctor and buy Christmas presents. The plane summoned to take Mary to Nairobi arrives carrying cables and mail, which Ernest opens after the plane departs. One letter is from a woman he has "known for eighteen years, knowing her first when she was eighteen, and loving her and being friends with her and loving her while she had married two husbands and made four fortunes from her own intelligence..,.' (230).4 Reading the letter triggers a biting, humorous, and nostalgic response in Hemingway that stretches over two pages of True at First Light. He laments the fact he will never see the woman again unless her husband, a businessman consumed by his need for a long-distance telephone, "sends her on a business mission to me" (231). The reader learns the chances of that happening would improve if Conrad Hilton would build one of his hotels in Laitokitok where there would be hot and cold running White Hunters with every room all wearing leopard-skin bands around their hats and instead of Gideon Bibles by every bedside along with the long-distance telephone there would be copies of White Hunter, Black Heart [Peter Viertel, 1953] and Something of Value autographed by their authors and printed on a special all-purpose paper with portraits of their authors done on the back of the dust jackets so that they glowed in the dark" (231).5
Ruark meanwhile continued his writing regime. Drinking and smoking heavily and writing in overdrive, Ruark took time out in October 1955 to reply to a letter from Harvey Breit asking for his input into a New York Times Book Review Christmas feature about influential books and writers. Ruark wrote: "'I believe I received more satisfaction from `Big Two Hearted River; by Hemingway than from any formless short stories I ever read..... I would say that the gorgeous simplicity of Steinbeck's collection, `The Long Valley; had to merge with `.The Sun Also Rises' and 'A Farewell to Arms' in making me despair of ever being able to write simply and well" ("Authors...")
Ruark ended 1957 with still another book-fortuitously titled The Old Man and the Boy-mostly a collection of his columns about growing up with his grandfather. The Time magazine reviewer wrote: "Page after page of The Old Man and the Boy is mock-Hemingway in style and he-boy sentiments. Indeed, if Ernest Hemingway did not exist, it is difficult to see how Robert Ruark, man or boy, could ever have been invented" ("He-Boy Stuff"). In 1959, Ruark's Poor No More appeared. Critics panned -the autobiographical book about growing up poor and the false rewards of fame and financial independence. A sequel to the Old Man volume, The Old Man's Boy Grows Older, reached bookstores in February 1961.
That summer, on 2 July 1961, suffering from depression, high blood pressure, and other ailments, Hemingway died of what Mary called "an accident while cleaning his gun," and authorities called "a self-inflicted gunshot wound to the head." Later in the-week, the press labeled it suicide. Hemingway was sixty-one.
Now on his third safari in Africa, Ruark used four of his columns, three in newspaper syndication and one in Field & Stream, to write in reverent tones about his old idol. From Nairobi, about the reports that Hemingway had died while cleaning his gun, Ruark wrote: "It is a very difficult trick to shoot yourself with a loaded gun while cleaning it, because any old hunter like Hemingway would know that you cannot clean a gun while a shell is in the chamber. But one often reads of such accidents in the papers" (Column, 6 July 1961). From Baragoi, Kenya, he wrote: "Sentimentally I shall try to see this old, Africa this last sad time for my old friend, Ernest Hemingway, who first infected me with a love for his troubled, bloody continent. He would like to know that the long, low hills are still green and the gin around the campfire comforting. He would also like to know that this country) where he missed death twice by a whisker, is deeply affected by his death" (Column, 7 July 1961). Also from Baragoi,he chided literary critics:
He was always an object of contention alive-dead they will probably succeed in separating the writer from the man, and the man from the myth. And they will forget the basic Hemingway, who was really a very simple fellow who combined vibrant writer with lusty man and made a myth of the whole.... There was a lot of ham in Hemingway, as there is ham in every good writer. You cannot dramatize other people without dramatizing yourself.... But phony, Hemingway was not, and poseur he was not.... He was an immensely kind man, a nonpatronizing man, and he was easily wounded and sometimes cruel as a child in his dismissal of people he regarded as phony or pretentious or crashingly dull. (Column, 4 Aug. 1961. "Ernest Was...")
In Field & Stream, he talked about Hemingway's simplicity: "It is a fashion of the literati to speak knowingly and loftily of the 'art' of a Hemingway, the 'significance' of a Hemingway, and blandly ignore the fact that he was being neither arty nor sophisticated... but was merely worshipping at the shrine of wood and water, men and women, animals and birds, wine and bread and onions and cheese-worshiping as an antidote to-the predestination of all his pieces to end in disaster. In the same column he compared Hemingway's death to the death of outdoor writer Negley Farson, saying both Hemingway and Farson "had died more or less by their own hands in the last year. Farson didn't actually kill himself-he wore himself out just living hard and free" (Column Oct. 1961).
Ruark would have done well to heed his own observation. His own body worn out from liquor, from chain-smoking, and from a Hemingway lifestyle, he died four years after Hemingway, almost to the day, on 1 July 1965. Ruark was forty-nine. Before he died, he wrote Uhuru (1962), another novel grounded in the Mau Mau rebellion. Harshly criticized for its gory details and white emancipation politics, Uhuru was nonetheless commercially successful. With Horn of the Hunter and Something of Value, Uhuru completed what is now considered Ruark's African trilogy
Posthumously published to mixed reviews was Ruark's The Honey Badger (1965), a novel about six women and an almost painful, loosely autobiographical walk through his own impending self-destruction. The book has a strange Hemingwayesque undercurrent; the protagonist is a writer and big game hunter who was wounded by 'shrapnel. Use Enough Gun (1966), a collection of Ruark's writings about hunting, and Women (1967), another collection, were also published posthumously.
In Robert Ruark we see one example of the kind of influence both Hemingway the man and Hemingway the writer had on another artisan of his time. But Ruark also taught us what can happen to a writer who identifies too closely with his more famous counterpart. During the early days of his career at the Washington [North Carolina] Daily News, Ruark began to display Hemingway mannerisms. According to Foster, Ruark was\paralleling more than Hemingway's career path. He was also drinking heavily, "just as Hemingway did" and developing "a reputation for foolhardy courage and confrontation just as Hemingway had" (34).
In his 1950 review of Across the River and Into the Trees, Ruark made his admiration for Hemingway a matter of public record and cemented the Ruark-Hemingway connection in the public mind. Ruark's lifestyle made the connection even stronger. His safari book, Horn of the Hunter, openly acknowledged Hemingway's influence and set the agenda for the book's reviewers, influencing future criticism of Ruark's work. Even after Ruark's death, Newsweek's review of The Honey Badger read, "Bob Ruark's last book contains everything that made him an osterized puree of Hemingway...." ("Paper Tiger" 103). His obituary reinforced the link and set the agenda for his posthumous literary reputation ("Robert Ruark Dead...").
What Ruark had not learned, and Hemingway had, was that you can borrow from other writers, but if you want an independent literary repu-, tation, you don't make a public display of it. Moreover, because Herringway overshadowed him, Ruark is seen first and foremost as a journalist, not a novelist. The enormous quantity of Ruark's newspaper and magazine journalism contributed to this image, but unlike Hemingway, he never left newspaper journalism, even during the years that he was writing the African trilogy. Critics still view Ruark more as a journalist who wrote books than as a serious writer who practiced journalism. Hemingway realized early in his career that his serious writing would suffer if he remained in journalism. Ruark not only stayed in journalism, but did so as a prolific daily columnist. Only at the end of his life, when it was too late, did he have the financial independence and the confidence-and only then after being thrust into the turmoil of the Mau Mau rebellion-to begin writing serious book-length manuscripts.
Conversely, Hemingway tried to avoid mixing art with politics. His treatment of the Mau Mau era of Africa and the background role it plays in True at First Light reflect this. Carl Eby, however, reminds us that "in True at First Light, Hemingway never strides into the shops of Laitokitok without his pistol in his well-fondled holster" (27). Eby adds that as "Honorary Game Warden," Hemingway knew he was receiving "special treatment from the Game Department because the colonial government hoped reports of his safari would bolster its wounded tourist industry." Ruark, on ,the other hand, waded head first into the politics of Kenya, and emerged as a white-hunter client in the European colonialist tradition. By the 196os, the move toward racial integration in America and the Kenyan independence movement's displacement of British domination put Ruark's writings behind the curve.6 Ruark was gradually seen as out-ofdate, and out-of-step, his upbringing in the racially segregated, sometimes violent, South of the 1920s reflected in the racial stereotypes found in the African trilogy. His reinforcement of the colonial myth of the native Kenyan as inept, lazy, and violent opened him up to charges of racism (see Chick and also Maughan-Brown 1982,1985).
The passage of time has contributed to a more objective analysis of racial struggle in twentieth century Africa. Had Hemingway's True at First Light been published during the Ruark era, it could -have attracted the same socio-political criticism that Ruark's works invited. With Hemingways influence over Ruark already established in the eyes of the critics, and with Something of Value and A Farewell to Arms both on the silver screen, Hemingway's African book would certainly have been compared to Ruark's novel, and may have been reviewed less favorably. The critics who disliked Across the River and Into the Trees were still on the prowl, and Hemingway's fame would have made him an easy target. As it turned out, the 1999 centennial of Hemingway's birth provided True at First Light with an opportunity to enter the marketplace in a very different era with respect to racial prejudice. The time is right for a reassessment of Hemingway's role in Africa, his writings about Africa, and a critical analysis of the literature of Africa as it relates to Hemingway's works.
In retrospect, Hemingway's writing career spanned approximately forty years; Ruark's almost thirty. Both men were visible, prolific authors. Hemingway enjoyed the advantage of acknowledged critical acclaim early in his career, later winning both the Pulitzer and Nobel prizes. But had there been no Ernest Hemingway to act as a muse for Robert Ruark, Ruark might not have ventured beyond journalism and attempted serious writing, and Something of Value-with the dust jacket picture of its author glowing in the dark-would not have appeared in the fictional rooms of the Laitokitok Hilton.
NOTES
1. At the time of Hemimgway's death, the New York Times quoted tributes by Archibald MacLeish, Lionel Trilling, Alfred Kazan, James Thurber, Tennessee Williams, J.B. Priestley, Cyril Connolly, VS. Pritchett, C.P. Snow, Harvey Breit, John Dos Passos, Van Wyck Brooks, Lillian Hellman, Oliver LaFarge, Carl Sandburg, William Faulkner, John O'Hara, and Robert Frost. (See "Authors and Critics Appraise Works" 6 July 1961: 6).
2. Tom Heeney was a heavyweight boxer from Bimini who first fought Hemingway in an exhibition fight in 1935. The two remained acquaintances for years. About the fight in Bimini, Carlos Baker wrote, "Ernest took great pride in the event, which loomed larger in his imagination every time he told about it" (275).
3. Bob Fitzsimmons was a champion boxer who held at different times in his career during the late-nineteenth and early twentieth century, the lightweight, middleweight, and heavyweight boxing titles. The balding Fitzsimmons continued fighting into his fifties, and had a brief career in theatre. (Davis 76-93, and photos). Hemingway owned a copy of "Ruby Roberts" Alias Bob Fitzsimmons, by Robert H. Davis (New York: George H. Doran, 1926)., See Brasch and Sigman entry #1678, p. 95.
4. We know from Hemingway biographies and from Patrick Hemingway's introduction to True at First Light, that the woman is the wife of motion picture producer Leland Hayward, the former Slim Hawks, who was once married to director Howard Hawks.
5. Peter Viertel wrote the screenplay for The Sun Also Rises and The Old Man and the Sea. He appears dozens of times in Hemingway biography. (See Reynolds, 165, 289, 298). White Hunter, Black Heart, although having an African theme, is more about the motion picture industry than big game hunting. It tells the story of a Hollywood script doctor who is called to Africa to work on a film. Loosely based on the story of John Houston's production of The African Queen, Viertel's novel received mostly positive reviews praising his treatment of colonial society and scenery (Book Review Digest 1953). In 199o, White Hunter, Black Heart was made into a motion picture starring Clint Eastwood.
6. Long before either Hemingway or Ruark arrived in Africa, gun-bearing safaris were being complemented, and later replaced, by camera-bearing safaris for tourists who preferred the viewfinder as the way to shoot big game in Africa. As early as 1905, when photographic techniques were still primitive, C.G. Schillings brought his photographs of African wildlife to an international audience in his book With Flashlight and Rifle: A Record of Hunting Adventures and of Studies in Wild Life In Equatorial East Africa, containing more than 300 photographs taken by day and night. His follow-up work, In Wildest Africa (1907) also contained more than 300 photographs. Brasch and Sigman list the title among books owned by Hemingway (329).
By the mid-1930s, the East Africa Professional Hunters Association, of which Philip Percival served as president for more than thirty years, published tips for photographers as "the weapon of choice began to shift from the large-bore rifle to the camera" (Steinhart 255). Three years after the publication of Green Hills of Africa, Bror Von Blixen-Finecke wrote in African Hunter (1938) that "A successful photograph demands of the individual much finer sporting qualities than a gun-shot, better nerves, greater patience and endurance" (36). The conservation and environmental movements, and more recently, the animal-rights movement (Brenner 36-39), have made the camera a better fit in safari society than the high-powered rifle.
WORKS CITED
"A List of 250 Outstanding Books of the Year." New York Times Book Review. 4 Dec. 1955: 64.
"Authors and Critics Appraise Work." New York Times. 6 July 1961: 6.
Baker, Carlos. Ernest Hemingway: A Life Story. New York: Scribner's, 1969.
Barkham, John. "The Nightmare That Engulfed a Land:' New York Times Book Review.'24 April 1955: 1.
Blixen-Finecke, Bror Von. African Hunter. New York: Knopf, 1938.
Book Review Digest. 1953. Excerpts of reviews of White Hunter, Black Heart by Peter Viertel. New York: H. W. Wilson, 1954.970.
Book Review Digest. 1955. Excerpts of reviews of Something of Value by Robert Ruark. New York: H. W. Wilson, 1954.785.
Branch, James D. and Joseph Sigman. Hemingway's Library: A Composite Record. New York: Garland, 1981.
Brenner, Gerry, "(S)Talking Game: Dialogically Hunting Hemingway's Domestic Hunters." The Hemingway Review 16.2 (Spring 1997): 35-50.
Burwell, Rose Marie. Hemingway: The Postwar Years and the Posthumous Novels. Cambridge: Cambridge U P, 1996.
Canada, Jim. Ed. The Lost Classics of Robert Ruark Long Beach, CA: Safari Press, 1996.
Chick, John D. "The World of the White: European Alienation in the Novels of Robert Ruark.' In Aspects of Africa's Identity: Five Essays. Ed. by Paul F. Nursey-Bray. Kampala, Uganda: Makerere Institute of Social Research, Makerere Institute of Social Research, Makerere University, 1973.
"Courthouse." Time 50 (25 August 1947): 22. ,
Cowley, Malcolm. "A Portrait of Mr. Papa." Life 26 (io January 1949): 86-90+.
Davis, Hassoldt. Rev. of Horn of the Hunter by Robert C. Ruark. New York Times Book Review (4 October 1953):12.
Davis, Robert H. "Ruby Roberts"Alias Bob Fitzsimmons New York: Doran, 1926.'
Eby, Carl. "Hemingway's Truth and Tribal Politics." The Hemingway Review 19.1 (Fall 1999): 24-27.
Flagler, J. M. Rev. of Horn of the Hunter by Robert C. Ruark. Saturday Review 36 (25 July 1953): 11.
Foster, Hugh. W. Someone of Value: A Biography of Robert Ruark Agoura, CA: Trophy Room Books, 1992.
Havemann, Ernest. "Robert Ruark." Life 27 (14 November 1949): 61-64+.
"He-Boy Stuff." Rev. of The Old Man and the Boy by Robert Ruark. Time 70 (11 November 1957):136.
Hemingway, Ernest. The Complete Short Stories of Ernest Hemingway. New York: Scribner's,, 1987.
---. A Farewell to Arms. New York: Scribner's, 1929.
---. Green Hills of Africa. New York: Scribner's; 1935.
---. Letter to Robert Ruark. 22 December 1953. Unpublished. Robert Ruark Papers #4001. The Southern Historical Collection, Wilson Library, The University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill (SHC).
---. The Sun Also Rises. New York: Scribner's, 1917.
Hemingway, Mary and Ernest Hemingway. Letter o Robert Ruark. 14 January 1955. Unpublished. SHC.
Hemingway, Mary How It Was. New York: Knopf, 1976. "Hemingway in the Afternoon." Time 50 (4 August 1947): 80.
Kenyatta, Jomo. Facing Mount Kenya: The Tribal Life of the Kikuyu. London: Secker and Warburg, 1938.
Maughan-Brown, David. "Myths on the March: The Kenyan and Zimbabwean Liberation Struggles in Colonial Fiction." Journal of Southern African Studies 9 (1982): 93-117.
Land, Freedom dr Fiction: History and Ideology in Kenya. London: Zed Books, 1985. McIntosh, Michael. Comp. Robert Ruark's Africa. Selma, AL: Countryport P, 1991.
"Paper Tiger." Rev. of The Honey Badger by Robert Ruark. Newsweek (4 October 1965): 103-104.
Prescott, Orville. "Books of the Times." New York Times. 2o April 1955: 31. Reynolds, Michael. Hemingway: The Final Years. New York: Norton, 1999.
"Robert Ruark Dead in London: Author and Columnist was 49." Obituary. New York Times. 1 July 1965:-31.
"Ruark and the Lions. Rev. of Horn of the Hunter by Robert C. Ruark. Newsweek (20 July 1953): 58, 60.
Ruark, Robert. Column, 16 Nov. 1945. "Now He Wants to 'Go Back to the Wars.' Newspaper clipping. SHC. Also quoted in Someone of Value: A Biography of Robert Ruark, by Hugh G. Foster. (Cited as the Washington (D.C.) Daily News). Agoura, CA: Trophy Room Books, 1992. 47-48.
Column, 20 Feb.1947. "Shame Sinatra." SHC. Also quoted in Foster, 59-60. Column, 21 Feb. 1947. "'Lovable' Luciano." SHC. Also quoted in Foster, 60-61. Column, 25 Feb.1947. "The Luciano Myth;' SHC. Also quoted in Foster, 61-62.
Column, ii Aug. 1947. "Ruark Exposes GI Slavery Under Army Brass in Italy." SHC. Also quoted in Foster, 62-64.
Column, 12 Aug. 1947. "Ruark Reveals Salute Crazy Brass Uses GIs in Italy as Own Flunkies." SHC. Also quoted in Foster, 64-65.
- Column, 13 Aug. 1947. "Gen. Lee's Whims Expensive." SHC. Also quoted in Foster, 65-66.
- Column, 20 Sept. i95o. Rev. of Across the River and Into the Trees by Ernest Hemingway. Foster, 96-97.
Column, 29 Aug. 1952. Rev. of The Old Man and the Sea by Ernest Hemingway. Foster, 122-123.
Column, 14 Jan. 1953. "Gun on Every Hip." SHC. Also quoted in Foster, 128-129. Column, 15 Jan. 1953. "Trust and Die." SHC. Also quoted in Foster, 129-130. Column, 16 Jan. 1953. "Vows of Death.SHC. Also quoted in Foster, 131-132. Column, 13 Aug. 1953. Foster, 148-149.
Column, 6 July 1961. "Papa's Death Reaches Africa.' SHC. Also in The Lost Classics of Robert Ruark. Ed. Jim Casada. Long Beach, CA: Safari Press, 1996 (cited as published in the,New York World Telegram and Sun on 4 Aug. 1961). 215-217.
- Column, 7 July 1961. "This Safari is for Ernest." SHC. Also quoted in Foster (cited as published in the Washington Daily News on io July 1961). 221-222.
Column, 4 Aug. 1961. "Ernest Was Very Simple.' SHC. Also in Casada, 211-213. Column, Oct. 1961.,"Papa Had No Use for Sham." Field & Stream. Also in Casada. 219-222.
--Grenadine Etching: Her Life and Lovei. Garden City, NY: Doubleday, 1947. Grenadine Etching. e and Lovei. Garden City NY.
Grenadine's Spawn. Garden City, NY: Doubleday, 1952. Horn of the Hunter. Garden City, NY: Doubleday, 1953.
I Didn't Know It Was Loaded. Garden City, NY: Doubleday, 1948.
I Didn't Know It Was Letter to Ernest Hemingway. 3 November 1954. Unpublished. Garden City, NY. Doubleday, 1948. Letter to Ernest Hemingway, 3 November 1954. Unpublished. SHC.
Letter to Ernest and Mary Hemingway. i March 1955. Unpublished. SHC.
Letter to Harvey Breit. 30 October 1955. SHC. Reprinted (and quoted from) "These Hit Me Hard." New York Times Book Review. 4 Dec. 1955: 6o-61.
Poor No More. New York: Holt, 1959. Uhuru. New York: McGraw-Hill, 1962.
Use Enough Gun. Ed. Stuart Rose. New York: New American library, 1966. Women. Ed. Joan Fulton. New York: New American Library, 1967.
Your Guns Go with You.' Life (16 February 1953): 120-128.
Schillings, C.'G. In Wildest Africa. Trans. by Frederic Whyte. New York: Harpers, 1907.
. With Flashlight and Rifle. A Record ofHuntingAdvertures and of Studies in Wild Life in Equatorial East Africa. London: Hutchinson 1905.
Steinhart,tl. "Hunters, Poachers and Gamekeepers: Towards a Social History of Hunting in Colonial Kenya.' Journal ofAfrican History 30 (1989): 247-264.
"Style Guide. ' The Kansas City Star. 1925. In Ernest Hemingway, Cub Reporter. Ed. Matthew J. Bruccoli. Pittsburgh: U Pittsburgh P, 1970.
JOHN R. BITTNER
University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill
The Hemingway Review Spring 2002
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