A View from a Tall Hill by Terry Wieland

Author:Terry Wieland
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781510737143
Publisher: Skyhorse
Published: 2020-05-13T16:00:00+00:00

Chapter Nine

HOME NO MORE

Robert Ruark stayed in Kenya covering the Mau Mau Emergency for about two months before returning to New York with his head filled with the sights, sounds, and smells of the violent upheaval in the colony. Undoubtedly, the seeds of Something of Value were already in his mind. Unfortunately, he returned to a life that was even more pressure-filled than before.

As well as his daily column for Scripps-Howard, he now had a deal not only to produce the “Old Man” series for Field & Stream every month, but also a half-dozen feature articles for that magazine every year, on top of the regular freelance writing he was already pursuing. This work load was undoubtedly lucrative, but it was also extremely demanding even for a writer of Ruark’s energy. After the leisurely pace of Kenya’s NFD, even on a cover safari for a journalistic assignment, Manhattan seemed like a madhouse.

Robert and Virginia Ruark were never known for their frugality, and the money flowed out as fast as it flowed in — and sometimes faster. No matter how hard Ruark ran, his financial situation was like a treadmill that kept picking up speed. Like most high-income people, he began to worry about his tax situation. To people at that time, income taxes seemed like an abnormal burden, and Ruark began to look for ways of minimizing this. Not surprisingly, memories of his trip to Spain the year before gave rise to the idea of living abroad, not only for its less frenetic pace, but also for the tax advantages it would afford. The Ruarks had been talking about moving to Europe from the moment they returned from Spain, and word of their intentions got around. In March, Time reported that Ruark was planning to leave New York and settle in Europe, probably in Rome, for the tax advantages.

There was another problem as well: Ruark’s health. As early as December, 1951, his doctor had warned him to stop drinking, or there was a real possibility of his developing cirrhosis of the liver. Ruark reportedly responded by going to “Twenty-One” and downing the first of what would become a decade-long succession of farewell scotches. He fell off the wagon almost immediately. In the spring of 1953, the warning was repeated, more forcefully this time, but it was not really needed — Ruark knew very well what was happening to him. He even said so in print. He had somehow found the time to write a sequel to his first novel, Grenadine Etching, called Grenadine’s Spawn (many years later he referred to it as a “very unfunny sequel”). It was “respectfully dedicated to the author’s liver, without whose constant encouragement he would feel no choler and would also be dead.” In June, 1953, he reviewed his situation: “In the past seven years I have written five books, about 200 magazine articles, and something like 2,000 columns. I have travelled over a million miles by air alone, and sat up too late too many nights while drinking entirely too much social whiskey.

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