A View From A Tall Hill - Robert Ruark in Africa
by Terry Wieland
“None of it is any good unless you work for it, and if the work is hard enough you do not really have to possess the trophy, to own it” wrote Robert Ruark fifty years ago, making him the patron saint of PHs constantly struggling to instill that message in clients more interested in record books than the art of the hunt. Hunters have adopted Ruark as our own because few fiction or non-fiction writers inspired by Africa go there with a .470 Nitro Express, .375 H & H Winchester Model 70 (and one by Westley Richards), a Remington .30-06, as well as a Churchill 12-bore and Sauer 16 side-by-sides, and then write about it. It is not far off target to credit Ruark’s work for fueling the African big-game safari industry – and its players – that we know today.
Fans of Terry Wieland’s clear, clean writing (from its origins – like Ruark and Hemingway’s – in newspaper work) will enjoy this exploration of Ruark’s lifelong quest for himself - an elusive trophy that he could never really name and never quite catch. Although A View From A Tall Hill covers the whole life, it focuses, above all, on the nearly 15 years Ruark spent hunting East Africa starting in 1951 until his death in 1966. The purpose of this particular biography is to firmly place the man and the fruits of his life within the context of his time and place, examining how Africa provided not only the storylines of works like Something of Value and Uhuru, but also the friendships, safaris and cocktails that formed them. An inexhaustible writer capable of producing and almost endless stream of work, Ruark was a man with fatal flaws of Shakespearian proportion - drink, dames, and desperate need for public acclaim, to name only a few.
A hard-working columnist (or “reporter with an attitude”) whose first book after Corrine Etching, the surprising non-fiction bestseller Horn of the Hunter (1953) should be on the bookshelf of anyone who has ever shot anything, resulted from Ruark’s first safaris with a young man named Harry Selby (who apprenticed with Philip Percival, who himself guided Hemingway in 1933), and covers Ruark’s experiences in Kenya, Tanganyika. (He later traveled to Uganda and Mozambique, Ethiopia, Somalia, South Africa and Southern Rhodesia.)
The rest, as they say, is safari history – a history about which Selby himself seems to be mum. We hope that Selby’s own biography will someday soon see the light of day, although many of his unforgettable quotes like “It’s the dead ones that kill you” get re-played here.
Few writers publish a best-selling novel after a best-selling non-fiction, but Ruark did so with his Mau Mau time set struggle for Africa in Something of Value (1955). Its natural sequel, Uhuru (“Freedom”) appeared only in 1962, and in-between there were anthologies of his columns for Field & Stream – the so-called Old Man books, as well as Poor No More, a novel Ayn-Randesque in its size and scope.
The movie version of Something of Value with Rock Hudson and Sidney Poitier made Ruark a rich man, allowing him to self-destruct despite the Rolls-Royce, the high-life of New York City, and retreat on the coast of Spain. This was a man doggedly dragging himself daily to his typewriter, despite his natural (perhaps greater) affinity for the life of the Kenya white settler with its “chilled gin, big tuskers and warm girls in the form of BOAC and SAA stewardesses overnighting in Nairobi.” He never allowed the pace of his production to slow – streams of newspaper and magazine columns for Field & Stream, Collier’s and The Saturday Evening Post, coupled with the grueling work of churning out a half-dozen 400-page novels whose characters and centers consistently hold.
Terry guides us down the Ruark trail, from his hardscrabble childhood in North Carolina with dangerously drunken and emotionally fragile parents who bled him both financially and emotionally and held his spirit prisoner; through his marriage up-the-ladder to a prominent and tolerant woman with drinking troubles of her own; through the maze of friendships, publishers, drinking sprees, travels – all set to the rhythm of the current events of his time. If I thought at first that Terry devoted too much time and detail to the naval history of wartime transatlantic convoys, that included the death-defying story of Lieutenant Ruark, R.C., Jr., USN. It is fantastically recounted chapter of WWII history, and readers will ultimately be grateful that he went into such depth on this little known war theatre that affected Ruark deeply.
Ruark’s self-examination as a hunter culminates in his safari with Selby, John Sutton and Don Bousfield in the remote bare rocks of Karamoja Bell country of northeastern Uganda. Hunting with Bell’s own bolt-action .275 Rigby led him to examine not just the weapons, the killing, or the size of his trophies; now he asked questions about conservation, and studied the philosophy and feelings awakened by the chase. “If you have learned nothing else from hunting, you have learned patience and stubbornness and concentration on what you really want at the expense of what is there to shoot. You have learned that man can as easily be debased as ennobled by a sport, and that optimism is the most vital ingredient of any sort of chase from girls to greater kudu.”
There are piles of information here for hunters, revisiting the great past of East African safari life, with the retelling of the story of John Dugmore and Safari South, Bob Lee’s bongo hunting in 1959, the history of Ker & Downey, Jack O’Connor in Africa, and more.
“When the green hills of Africa go brown and change afflicts the land, and the old good things are no longer as they were, there are worse memorials to a great life than a book or a tusk,” wrote Ruark. The same can be said of Terry Wieland’s book.
A View From A Tall Hill , 430 pages and no photos, is published by Countrysport Press and costs $45.00.