Doing nothing in particular very well
Sam Leith
TOO CLOSE TO THE SUN: THE LIFE AND TIMES OF DENYS FINCH HATTON by Sara Wheeler Jonathan Cape, £18.99, pp. 284, ISBN 9780224063804 ✆ £15.19 (plus £2.45 p&p) 0870 429 6655 ‘W e are here on earth to fart around,’ that wise man Kurt Vonnegut once wrote. ‘And don’t let anybody tell you different.’ Denys Finch Hatton — who was born into the English aristocracy in 1887, and died in a plane crash in Africa not long after his 44th birthday — was one of the great farters-around of all time.
That we know of him now is largely down to his long and tortured love affair with the ill-starred Danish coffee-farmer Karen Blixen, who under the pen name of Isak Dinesen described their relationship in Out of Africa. The image most of us have of him, then, is of a tanned and sunny Robert Redford heading nonchalantly to his doom in a Gypsy Moth. Denys differed from Robert Redford in one important particular. He was, as his biographer puts it, ‘as bald as a billiard ball’. He always wore hats.
Languid, charismatic, casually erudite, and, in his charming way, a bit of a shit, Denys (as Wheeler calls him) made fecklessness into an art form. After enjoying universal adulation at Eton for his good looks, sporting prowess and wit, he was examined for a scholarship to Balliol. Asked to write an essay saying what he’d do if he came into a million pounds, he wrote that he would pension off the older Balliol dons. Nobody likes a smart-arse. He didn’t get the scholarship, and seems to have decided, thereafter, that achieving things was a mark of vulgarity. His was, in many ways, the classic disappointment of the Etonian who never gets over being popular at school. He went up to Brasenose, concentrated on gambling, showing off and smashing crockery, and was quite happy to come away with a Fourth. (Even in adulthood, he was an enthusiastic thrower of bread rolls.) Getting a job never occurred to him. He went off to Africa (‘London always seemed too small for Denys Finch Hatton,’ wrote the Evening Standard after his death) in search of adventure and, having invested in a bit of land and a chain of convenience stores, he found it. He won the MC for his part in a little described sideshow of the Great War: the nightmarish and ramshackle fight against German East Africa. Combatants were as much at risk from wild animals (battles were interrupted by charging rhinos and swarms of angry bees), disease, and parasitic, penis burrowing grubs as they were from the enemy. And that’s before you get to the rations, ‘so green with rottenness and so full of weevils and maggots that they could only be eaten with the eyes closed.’ When they ran out, hungry soldiers experimented with rat pie, hippo chunks and in one case the rawhide spars of a bridge.
After the ruin and disillusionment of the war, argues Wheeler, Denys’s sense of ‘the futility of accomplishment’ made him ‘the perfect anti-hero for an age’. He certainly took his time getting going. ‘At the age of 27,’ she writes at one point, ‘Denys had just begun to use his gifts.’ Then the war set him back. Later: ‘now at the age of 37 he discovered his vocation’. That vocation was as a white hunter — and it was only towards the very end of his life that he cottoned on to the importance of conservation, campaigning forcefully for visitors to start shooting with cameras instead of guns. Then he died. Asked at one point how he had come to his profession, he replied typically, ‘Oh, it just happened, if you know what I mean.’ Denys was a man of divers parts. He was very attractive to women, and pathologically reluctant to commit to them. He was a crack shot. He knew how to mend a leaky car radiator with an egg. He admired the poetry of Walt Whitman, maintained that it was impossible to fall asleep while reading Proust, and commended the Bible to his 10year-old nephew as ‘a good book’. He could tear a pack of playing cards in two. He could guess the size of a set of kudu horns to within half an inch, through binoculars. To impress the Prince of Wales (the future Edward VIII), when he took him on safari he sneaked up behind a sleeping rhino and stuck postage stamps to either side of its bottom.
Sara Wheeler’s sympathetic biography is filled with such amusing stuff. She has a great eye for the casual absurdities of aristocratic life in his age, both in England and in the Kenya that he made his home.
A lovely footnote mentions, en passant, that Queen Victoria gave Kilimanjaro to the Kaiser as a birthday present. There’s the story of the golf club that instituted a rule allowing members to move a ball a club’s length away without penalty if it landed too close to the recumbent body of the drunken green-keeper. There’s the macabre death of Blixen’s pet owl Minerva, which swallowed the end of the cord for the window-blind and was found swinging in the breeze. There’s the invariable African supper of the third baron Delamere: gazelle chops, blancmange, tinned peaches, and ‘All Aboard for Margate’ playing on the gramophone in the background.
Wheeler has clearly researched her book carefully and is properly scrupulous in confining anecdotes or conjectures for which she can’t find sufficient evidence to footnotes. The root-and-branch structure of Too Close to the Sun, then, is admirable. It’s in the foliage that the reader encounters problems. Wheeler finds occasion for the odd dig at Dinesen’s ‘lacquered prose’ (where characters ‘supped rather than ate, bid rather than asked and things happened on the morrow’), but her own is deep violet bordering on the purple. It’s not that you wish it better written, exactly — rather, that you wish it less writerly. Wheeler’s instinct for creative reimagining too often pulls her biography in the stylistic direction of a romantic potboiler.
One of Denys’s friends is about to die: ‘Loss, like a baneful predator, was waiting for Denys among the purple shadows of the rift.’ Denys likes golf: ‘He grew addicted to the grandeur that blossoms out of a well-lofted slice, the dizzy instants of whiz, hover and fall, the clipped satisfaction of a bunker chip slashed in an arc of sand.’ We meet Beryl Markham, ‘tall and lissom, with arctic-blue eyes, long legs that scissored beneath her like a colt’s when she sat down and sandy hair bleached by years on horseback’. Adventure books contain ‘derringdo’; the towers of All Souls, Oxford are ‘dreaming’; Lords and the MCC are ‘hallowed’ twice on a single page.
We’re constantly being told how things smelt, what Denys was thinking, how people moved, what adjectival glories of landscape they saw out of the train window. This is, I think, a problem in a non-fiction book: if you’re scrupulous about the larger facts, why do the small matter less? It’s hard to imagine how we know that Beryl Markham’s eyes were ‘arctic’ — rather, than, say, ‘cerulean’ or ‘cobalt’ or ‘azure’ — blue, or that her legs scissored in that particular way; and if there’s a contemporary account, surely best put the descriptions in quotes.
But this isn’t a huge cavil. People less priggish than I will enjoy Wheeler’s lush lyricism, and it’s surely better to have a writer imaginatively immersed in Finch Hatton’s world — particularly given the shortage of primary sources — than otherwise. After years of Antarctic shenanigans, Wheeler has fallen in love with the African landscape and, a little, with Denys Finch Hatton. Her book is, in its way, a romantic project, and one that at less than 300 pages does not outstay its welcome. Abundant with anecdote, it gives at its best a sense of a fascinating particular time in a fascinating particular place.
When ‘Cockie’, Karen’s successor as Baroness Blixen, died in 1988, she did not know how to boil an egg. She insisted in her will on being late for her own funeral. As Wheeler remarks in a footnote, ‘The last line of her obituary in the Daily Telegraph read, “Her species has become extinct.” ’ Denys Finch Hatton may have been handier with a boiled egg, but his species, too, is long gone.
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