Writers Who Hated The World

Hawera Star, Volume LI, 13 September 1930, Page 9

Writers Who Hated The World

Novelists Living Their Novels

TT is. not very long ago that, having crossed, the Kalahari Desert in Africa for the first time, L and my companions came, lip against a solitary hut. It was a pathetic attempt at a house made with a- few sticks and some earth. All around! was the sand and .scrub, the flat horizon and haunting mirages that had made this land one of mystery and excited speculation, says IW. J. Makin, in “John o’ London’s Weekly.”

There are many such literary exiles up and down the world. They do not form themselves into little coteries, and sit in city drawing-rooms drawling purple nonsense about the. latest vogue in. literary reputations. They are queer, solitary fellows, many of them with ideals as well as ideas. Nearly all have a lust for sunshine, land and glinting seas, and prefer, infinitely to talk with a: rascally trader or a blasphemous sailor than to listen to the meand'erings of a Bloomsbury intellectual.

To our profound' astonishment, there stepped from the hut a, white man. He was dressed in ludicrous Dickensian fashion, stiff Micawbcr collar and a bright cravat. To our travel-stained and unshaven selves, he was as unreal as the mirages. “Good morning, gentlemen,” he said, gravely, as though he received visitors every day. We must have been the first white men he had seen for years.

They are the gallant vagabonds of the world of letters. Sometimes, like? Robert Louis Stevenson, they have been “ordered south” because of their health. The rigours of the. English climate'are not for them. They must perforce scribble their thoughts in lands of eternal sunshine, where too often it would appear folly even to think. When I was in the South Seas I marvelled at; the industry that, possessed Robert .Keable, an industry that kept him writing day after day while the lazy fall of surf on (white beaches called one away to loaf in the glorious sunshine. Robert liveable d-iedi in that lotus-eating land as did Gauguin the French painter. Both were held captive by hibiscus and a paradise of the primitive. Both were gallant vagabond's from civilisation.

“Good morning,” wo replied, each receiving; a little ceremonious bow. Jt took nearly an hour before the lonely white man would! satisfy our curiosity and talk about himself. But even then, he hesitated. It was not until we reached’ an outpost, over a hundred’ miles' away, that we heard from others the story, of his solitary existence. He was a writer. For years he had endured the daily routine of a schoolmaster in an English city. Then, like the shopwalker in the <). Henry story, he revolted suddenly against- civilisation and fled to the wilds. With a few books and some precious paper he settled in this, the most desolate- part of Africa. He began to write. A pile of manuscript lies heaped up in that lonely hut. But I doubt whether anyone will read it until the one-time schoolmaster dies. Even then, some prowling hyena, or jackal may destroy it before it is discovered. A few bush men live around that hut, and upon these natives (lie white man depends for his food and water. What, he has written may never be iworth reading, although a man could not live such a solitary existence without discovering' a good deal about himself. He is a hater of civilisation, and sought solitude to express himself.

Nowadays, if you visit Honolulu, a skyscraper city in the South Seas, you are sure to be lured away to -tlie famous Waikiki Beach. There, in a luxurious hotel, you may dance on a floor that stretches towards the sea. the surf

lapping gently at one end' ol’ the tl.nnce room. Many millionaires possess bungalows on Waikiki Beach for the whole island has been seized by the real estate merchant. v One dlay t glimpsed a. desolate, tumbledown 'bungalow, half-sunken in the sand and about two hundred yards away from' the sea. ‘“That bungalow seems romantic enough for a South Seas -adventurer of the old days,” .1 said to an American friend'. “It’s an eyesore,” he replied. “A feller named; Stevenson used to have:

Keable and R.L.S. in the South Seas

i ha*, bungalow and write in it. I guess j it will be, cleared anviay in ;i few! weeks and another fifty-thousand dollar home, built there.” J’i .Samoa, where'Stevenson is buried, the grave is now “one of the sights.” A good many people who visit the grave are sure to write an article, or perhaps a. book, on ‘ ‘ Robert Louis Stevenson in Samoa. ” aiding the story with the discovery of an old Samoan; chief who remembers Tusital-a as he lived among them. Only one writer, a friend of mine, had the courage to- set down his true experiences in Samoa. He asked one i or two old natives if they remembered j R.L.S. One said, ‘‘Stevenson! Him the j fella keep motor garage, I think.” ; So it is that when chance has flung [ me into Aden —no one ever visits Aden by choice—l try to visualise the hell that Arthur Rimbaud, the French poet, must have endured, there. When he ran away from that tragic friendship with. Verlaine, he was also running. away from himself, the esoteric mind that had driven him. f onwards every | vice and every perversity in verse. 1 Most people who greet you in. Aden \ want to whisk you away in a fast motor car to the water tanks in the *, desert beyond. I. usually} prefer 'to ! wander through the 'bazaar and peer' into those queer trading stores where Arthur Rimbaud once sweated and | worked' as a 'trader’s clerk. J

It was, indeed, ironical for a young literary man to be swept away from a marble-topped table, and absinthe in Paris to these mountains of burnt sienna crumbling in the fierce heat of

I tho sun. Instead) of writing exquisite I poems under the influence of hashish, he grappled' with figures, snaky French . fives and sevens written, down, in purple jink under an African sun. die made notes about coffee, .hides, and firearms. ! And this gallant vagabond could i laugh harshly when a letter was 'brought to him in his exile, telling of a, group in Paris who had' exalted him into a legendary genius. At the moment he was engaged in gun-running for an Arab chief. ■ The venture failed, and he returned to Paris to die miserably and unknown in a hospital.