Playboy
Richard Hafliburton. His Story of his Life's Adventures. (Bles. iss.) THIS is the story of a playboy of the Western world told in letters to his parents : the man who rode across the Alps on an elephant, flew round the world, swam the Hellespont (not such a difficult feat), dived into what he called a Well of Death in Yucatan, went almost everywhere—Arabia, Abyssinia, Japan, the East Indies, London, Eng.—and drowned in a junk in the Pacific before he was forty. Startlingly good-looking, with lots of money (his travel-books were astronomical best-sellers in the States), he was an astonishing example of energetic futility. His idol, understandably, was Rupert Brooke, who appealed to the adolescent, the sentimentalist and the would-be writer. It was Halliburton's misfortune that he just missed the war : all his adventures were little ones : he never got higher than a stunt, and perhaps his chief success was to die young and stormily— but the stunt spoilt even that (for who but a stunt-merchant would buy a Chinese junk to sail the Pacific in?). The chief interest for English readers will be the account of his lightning tour of this country—naive, pathetic, pursuing a vision of himself as Brooke's biographer, even dallying with the idea of turning undergraduate—anticipating Robert Taylor and The Yank at Oxford. Meeting Sir Edward Marsh and Mrs. Brooke, " exploring the Rugby school campus," spending a day at Cambridge, a day at Grantchester, having tea with Brooke's " most serious sweetheart," he begins to see his subject : " the first half of the book must be utterly gay, vividly, strenuously alive ; and the last half . . . must be noble, gallant, lofty, spiritual, memorial. The first half all song and laughter, the last half martyrdom." More meals—" tea with ex-Premier Asquith's daughter ; lunch tomorrow with a Beverley Nichols, who is the enfant terrible of England." All doors seem to have blown open at this tremendous golden blast from the States—even the Prime Minister's—but somehow nothing came of it all. Back to America and contracts with the Ladies' Home journal, and then Mexico and climbing Popocatepetl (again nor so difficult); on to South America and back to Hollywood ; then the East and India and Switzerland, and the absurd ride across the Alps on a reluctant elephant, and so to the final junk which makes a poor joke even of his death. Somewhere en route the Brooke project had died : perhaps it was too like real work.
GRAHAM GREENE.
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