…on December 29, 1915, Robert Chester Ruark, Jr. was born.
I’ve mentioned Ruark in passing a few times, but I’ve never tried to tie him together for folks. Much of the information that follows is drawn from the Jim Casada edited The Lost Classics
Ruark was born and grew up in North Carolina. He spent a great deal of time as a boy hunting and fishing with his grandfather from his mother’s side of the family; later in life he turned those experiences into a long-running series of Field and Stream stories, and two books: The Old Man and the Boy
(Some years ago, I found a cheap paperback copy of The Old Man and the Boy at Half-Price books: I think maybe I paid 60 cents for it. I gave it to my stepfather as a stocking stuffer. A few weeks later, he asked me, “Remember that book you gave me for Christmas?” “Yep.” “That was a hell of a book.” He was right: it is.)
The junior Ruark was apparently a precocious child (and some folks who have written about him hint that his childhood may not have been as idyllic as Boy makes it sound). Shortly after his grandfather died, when Ruark was 15, he went off to the University of North Carolina. His grandfather’s final illness, as well as Depression economics in general, left the family broke and Ruark poor as dirt while he was in school; supposedly, he paid the bills (including his expenses as a member of Phi Kappa Sigma) by bootlegging and “hustling in local bording-house bordellos” (says Casada). He graduated in 1935 with a BA in journalism and did a bit more hustling. He worked for a small North Carolina newspaper, then as a merchant seaman, then did some time with the WPA, and eventually fetched up at the Washington Daily News, where Ernie Pyle (yes, that one) was his editor. During this period, he also married Virginia Webb.
When WWII came around, Ruark became a naval ensign and a convoy gunnery officer. (There’s some great writing in Horn of the Hunter about his convoy experiences.) Ruark was also still writing for various publications, and had planned out a path to make himself notorious. He signed on as a columnist with Scripps-Howard; one of his first columns was a ringing condemnation of current women’s fashions. This got him the attention and notoriety he may have wanted. Before too long, Ruark was a celebrity. He moved in rarefied social circles in New York City, knew everybody who was anybody, was earning $50,000 a year in 1950 dollars (almost $500,000 a year today)…and he was incredibly unhappy. His doctor told him he had a year to live if he stopped drinking immediately.
So Ruark decided to do something he’d wanted to do since he was a small boy running around with his grandfather; he went on a safari in Africa. He was a great admirer of Hemingway, and booked his safari with a white hunter named Harry Selby, just so he could use the same tracker Hemingway used.
Selby and Ruark struck up a great friendship, and Ruark wrote a successful book, Horn of the Hunter
There was a part of me, of us, back there on a hill in Tanganyika, in a swamp in Tanganyika, in a tent and on a river and by a mountain in Tanganyika. There was a part of me out there that would stay out there until I came back to ransom that part of me. It would never live in a city again, that part of me, nor be content, the other part, to be in a city. There are no tiny-gleaming campfires in a city.
Africa seems to have something of a calming influence on Ruark. He organized the rest of his life in such a way that he was able to return frequently. At the same time, though, Ruark saw the direction Africa was headed in, with the end of colonialism and the resurgence of racial hatreds. He wrote what I’ve seen described as a sprawling bloody book, Something of Value
He had enough money to get out of New York, and did. He moved to Spain and kept writing. This was the period when he was writing “The Old Man and the Boy” for Field and Stream, and he did a second African novel, Uhuru
He and Virginia divorced and he resigned as a newspaper columnist, but he continued writing until late June of 1965, when he was hospitalized in London. On July 1st, 1965, Ruark died of complications from liver failure.
Casada estimates that he wrote 4,000 newspaper columns and 1,000 magazine articles. Today, it seems like Ruark is mostly forgotten, except by a small handful of people.
I think I would have liked to meet Ruark, but I’m not sure. He sounds like a man who would go to the wall for his friends, but he also sounds like he may have been an unbearable drunk. It sounds like he might have been at his best on safari with Selby, when his drinking was more under control. (In some of his later African essays, he talks about his enjoyment of helping his friends hunt, rather than taking his own trophies. But he also talks a great deal about his irritation with some of his “former friends” who he felt didn’t take well to safari life.)
More biographical material from Wikipedia. The Robert Ruark Society.
If you’re going to read just one Ruark book, I would recommend the collected The Old Man and the Boy; actually, I would teach the first chapter of that book in schools, as it is one of the best pieces of writing on safe gun handling ever written. I also don’t feel like you should limit yourself to one. At the very least, I would read Horn of the Hunter as well. Both of these books, but especially Boy, tweak the somewhat sentimental side of me. I’m kind of embarrassed by how much I like Boy, given the level of sentiment in it. However, Boy also contains some interesting social observation. For example, Ruark at one point writes about his relationships with other adults; basically, he was “it takes a village” before Hillary. But at the same time, he doesn’t negate parental responsibility, and many of the men who “took him to raise” along with other boys would cause Hillary’s head to explode.
I reckon that 65 per cent of the men who took me to raise couldn’t be admitted to a club, a church, or a tea party. I reckon that most were unread, most were profane, most broke laws, most didn’t work, most drank too much, and most had dirty fingernails. And I reckon if we filled the schools with them as instructors today, and gave them jobs as cops, and set them up as tutors and baby sitters and camp counselors, we wouldn’t have so much of a problem of delinquency.
(One of the other things I find unattractive about Ruark is a tendency he has, mostly in Boy Grows Older, to sneer at contemporary youth for being more interested in spaceships and rockets and science fiction than in hunting and fishing. I think if Ruark had suggested that there needed to be a balance – that kids need down time to hunt and fish and explore, as well as to play “Call of Duty” and write Python code on their Raspberry Pis and build robots – he would have been on the right track. As it is, he comes across in that book more as a cranky old man who doesn’t get that the world was changing: or else he did, and didn’t like it.)
(On a more positive note, Ruark also wrote really well about food. Especially camp food, or safari food, or Christmas food…)
If you don’t like those two, I don’t think you’ll like Ruark. If you get serious, I really enjoyed Casada’s Lost Classics and the Michael Mcintosh collection Robert Ruark’s Africa
Short shameful confession: I haven’t read any of his fiction, including Something of Value and Uhuru; I hope to fix that in the coming year.
Two quotes, if you’ll hold still for them:
I was wearing a Countess Maria necktie and driving a blue Buick convertible. I was writing a syndicated newspaper column and selling stuff to magazines and going to the Stork Club and Twenty One for lunch. Toots Shor called me by my first name, and I was living in a penthouse and owed money to the bank.
And I felt like a complete fraud. I felt like I was wearing somebody else’s clothes and driving somebody else’s car and going around under somebody else’s name, so long as the Old Man’s House stood there empty and sad, lonely and despoiled of firelight and laughter.
–“The House Comes Home”, The Old Man’s Boy Grows Older
(It’s probably cheap psychoanalysis, but it seems like Ruark struggled with the idea that he was a fraud for most of his life. This would explain a lot of his behavior; not just his drinking, but his desire for wealth and fame, mostly it seems so he could publicly show off the trappings of both.)
“What went wrong with it all?” I asked.
“They shot off the buffalo, and they over-hunted the game. They slaughtered the waterfowl, and they give the vote to the women. The women stirred up a ruckus about their menfolks spending too much time in the saloons, and so they got Prohibition and handmade corn whisky and what they call ‘speakeasies’ in the cities, where you can drink gin that is made out of embalming fluid and go blind for twice the price. They invented the automobile and the airy-o-plane and speeded everything up. They got mixed up in other people’s wars and got to betting on the stock market and altogether they’re in a hell of a mess. And no free lunch.”
–“Terrapin Stew Costs Ten Bucks a Quart”, The Old Man and the Boy