Read Too Close to the Sun Online
Authors: Sara Wheeler
Too Close to the Sun
CONTENTS
Chapter 2:
TAKE YOUR HAT OFF, HATTON
Chapter 5:
BABYLON, MESPOT—IRAQ
For
WGW
and
RGW
INTRODUCTION
I
HAD SPENT YEARS THINKING ABOUT THE ANTARCTIC, AND MORE THAN
half of one living in it. Then I went to Africa. After so many long white nights in a place where the sun never set, I balked at the balsamic colors of an equatorial sunset, and after the biological haiku of the South Pole I was overwhelmed by the cauldron of life that foamed in East Africa. Kenya, Tanzania, Somalia, Uganda, Ethiopia: I followed Denys Finch Hatton there, though those countries had been called by different names when he trekked across them. I had first noticed him in his lover Karen Blixen’s poetic memoir
Out of Africa.
His mysterious otherness caught my attention: he appeared as the eternal wanderer. I quickly discovered that he left few traces, and that I was at the end of a long line of women searching for the real Denys. But the real Denys had escaped into legend. (In the Hollywood version of Blixen’s book, Robert Redford even gave him an American accent.) As he left no diaries and only a couple of dozen short letters, his inner life remains opaque. He died in 1931, so there is no one alive with adult memories of him. “The real Denys” is unknowable. But through literature
—Out of Africa,
Beryl Markham’s
West with the Night—
he has become an iconic figure in the inner lives of millions. My aims in writing his life were threefold: to depict a figure in a landscape, to explore the universal themes threaded through his story, and to find out why he was an engine of myth. The character who emerged at the end of my researches was not the buccaneering adventurer I expected.
This is an ordinary story of big guns and small planes, princes from England and sultans from Zanzibar, roulette, a famous divorce case, a Welsh castle and a Gilbertine priory, marauding lions, syphilis, bankruptcy, self-destruction, and the tragedy of the human heart. It moves from the smoky orange lights of the Café Royal to the geometry of the desert hills in the Northern Frontier District, and it is infused alternately with the whiff of cordite, of elephant spoor, and of a bucket of eau de cologne tipped over onto the linoleum of an Eton schoolroom. The action shifts between London, Paris, Mesopotamia, and the steppes of the Rift Valley from Lake Baringo to Maasailand—what Martha Gellhorn described as “the paradise section of Africa.” Denys was there during the short-lived colonial phase, a period in which a previously protean assemblage of tribes was frozen into unnatural suspension by an imperial administration. I tried to see East Africa through his eyes. He responded profoundly to landscape, and many of the significant relationships of his life were with places rather than people. But he never really settled in Kenya; he kept coming and going. Abrupt scene changes appealed to him, as did cultural chiaroscuro. He was divided by his love for worldly things and his desire to escape them, as I am. In terms of a career—positions held, books published, the shibboleths of success one lists in
Who’s Who—
there was nothing. Six feet three and a superlative athlete, Denys was vital and restless, and in his apparently paradoxical fusion of the rebellious and the traditional he was a curiously eighteenth-century figure. (In fact, he was born in 1887.) Elegant and boisterous, simple and sophisticated, with a gift for gracious living and for the parsed existence of the wilderness, he would have been as comfortable in Hogarthian London as he was in the broken blue foothills of Mount Meru. He was a loose-limbed heartbreaker, and his defining characteristic was charm—he went about disarming the world before it could engage with him. “Charm,” Anthony Blanche warns Charles Ryder in
Brideshead Revisited,
“is the great English blight…. It spots and kills anything it touches.” In Denys’s case it killed ambition and purpose, at least until the final years. But he was not flighty, or in any sense superficial, and he had an immense capacity for friendship. He had a powerful effect on everyone he met. “The man with about the most impressive personality I have ever known,” wrote Bertie, Lord Cranworth, who fought alongside him and knew his share of big personalities. Again and again, acquaintances spoke of Denys’s individuality; the usually weak adjective “unforgettable” was applied regularly, but nobody ever did forget Denys. His servants spoke lovingly of him for decades after his death, in England, Wales, and Kenya. Seventy-five years on, his reputation rests chiefly on the romance of the white hunter, a beguiling enough subject for investigation, and on the portrait painted by Blixen in
Out of Africa.
Working for three years with only the dead for company, I excavated the sources, searching for clues among the unending clutter of hours and years. I was looking for scraps of illuminating detail among huge heaps of negligible things, something that would release currents of energy connecting Denys Finch Hatton to me, and his world to the one we inhabit. In this book I have sought to integrate the rainbowlike intangibility of personality with the solidity of fact. I followed Denys on a journey of self-realization until he finally found some kind of purpose, and patterns did emerge from the mosaic of his life. But I had to subject the material to a process of rigorous questioning in order to sort myth from reality. Denys achieved legendary status in his lifetime, and as a result anecdotes were ceaselessly retailed and recycled, facts were reinterpreted, and versions of Denys—oral and written—were layered one on the other like a palimpsest. He was a figure buried under his own reputation. But when I looked only at the primary sources, he rose to life again. Sifting through the versions, discarding the unreliable and the unprovable, I asked myself what we can know of a man, and increasingly I came to see the lack of material not as a biographical handicap but as a cipher for the unknowability of anyone else’s inner life (or of one’s own, for that matter). The absence of data itself stood for that fumbling search for certainties which so often stalls before arriving at a conclusion. This sustained me when I heard little but the sound of trees crashing across my path. Acceptance of the unknowable is a vital step on the human journey.
Denys lived through tumultuous times—from Lord Salisbury, the patrician prime minister, to the sensational fictional heroine Lady Chatterley. As the son of a peer (his father was the thirteenth Earl of Winchilsea and the eighth Earl of Nottingham), he witnessed at first hand the marginalization of his class when agricultural interests were overtaken by economic modernization. Throughout his life, almost all the male members of his family struggled to shift their resources out of land, with varying degrees of success. Old privileges were eroded, and so were the social certainties of the first three-quarters of the nineteenth century. (When I went to inspect the family’s town house in a venerable London square, I found a Ferrari parked outside, with a personalized license plate.) The lack of conventional structure in Denys’s own adult life was a paradigm of modernism: fragmented, disordered, and, for many years, ostensibly sterile. He went to look for a new world, and in Kenya found the colonial over-spill of assumed suzerainty. It was neither the dream of fortune that drew him there nor the quest for identity. It was a desire for freedom and danger. In the end, he found something more profound and infinitely more valuable. Tragically, it turned out to be too late.
An unknown war slices through the middle of the story. Our notions of the First World War derive primarily from images of sodden trenches in France and Belgium—an iconography burned deep into the national imagination. The same war was fought for more than four years in East Africa, though not with tanks and mustard gas, and not on a line where success was measured in yards per week. It was an old-fashioned war involving bayonets, nineteenth-century smoking guns, and hundreds of miles of unmapped bush in which men were as likely to be routed by a rhino as by the enemy. It was also a unique theater, with its own particular horrors. British East Africa was the only part of the empire to be invaded by the Germans, and the campaign that ensued—as bitter and killing as all war—lasted longer than anywhere else in the fighting world, as news of the Peace failed to reach the distant East African battlefields until after the armistice. It was typical of Denys to find an obscure and unregulated front. Even the diligent official history cites “exceptionally scanty material,” as many nonregular units of the kind in which Denys began his military career kept no records at all. It happened like that not by chance but because people who liked filing reports tended not to scarper to Africa. “We found accounts of battles [in East Africa] which differed not only as to the hour, day and even week when they occurred, but also in every other possible detail,” wrote a desperate historian toiling in the Official War History office in London.
As far as the psychic landscape was concerned, I thought it was important to uncover layers of emotional and imaginative experience as well as the factual kind. Denys’s romantic life in particular can be viewed at best through a glass darkly, but I know that he never crossed that odd line between affection and addiction, and that seemed worthy of consideration. Karen Blixen, who found global fame as a fiction writer under the pen name Isak Dinesen, played an important part in the last decade of his life, and she left a detailed record of their relationship, published and unpublished. At first I disliked her intensely. But as I dug deeper I saw that, like many monsters, she had a lovable heart. Of Denys’s spiritual life I had a clearer glimpse, at least of its darker moments: at times he was almost pathologically convinced that life is stale and weary. But this is a story, too, about the redemptive power of landscape. The deep joy with which Denys responded to nature took him close to the mystery of it all, and gave him a gratifying awareness of the human need to reach out to the transcendental.
Many of the topographic descriptions in the book come from my own African travels. I wrote those passages late at night, when tiny comet-tailed geckos invaded the pages of my notebook and ostriches boomed in their peculiar hollow way not far from our camp. It was only when I flew low in a small plane over banks of purple delphiniums on the slopes of the Aberdares that I understood what it meant to Karen Blixen to take wing with Denys. Like landscape, grand passion can redeem. “It is worth having lived and suffered, been ill, and had all the
shauries
[difficulties], to have lived for this week,” she wrote once after Denys had been on her farm between safaris. He left her; went off with someone else; was killed. But it was his love that enabled her to write a masterpiece. She had learned from the classics that misery was the food of ancient heroes, bestowed by the gods to be transmuted into something noble. Most people who fail, as Karen Blixen did in Africa, by any worldly standards, do not go on to smelt art from the crucible of disappointment. This was her great achievement. She recognized it. “No one came into literature more bloody than I,” she once wrote.
Apart from the fieldwork, both in Africa and in Europe (and a couple of times in the United States), I worked with such written material as there was, among documents and shadows, and developed those of the emerging themes that interested me. Chief among these was the gap between character and accomplishment, being and doing. Almost everyone who knew Denys spoke of his greatness, yet he did little. I wondered if we are tyrannized by the need for achievement. I was also interested in the universal human dilemma between going and staying, a theme that Denys’s story seemed to throw into relief. It was the age-old choice between four walls and the open road, security and freedom, or, as Karen Blixen put it, the lion hunt and bathing the baby—a dilemma that dogged my own life for many years. My cast of characters, from the Marlovian Bror Blixen to the future Edward VIII, all made different choices at different times in their lives, as most of us do. But Denys never wavered. He was the open road made flesh.