GALLANT VAGABONDS

Sun (Auckland), Volume IV, Issue 1078, 16 September 1930, Page 14

GALLANT VAGABONDS

NOVELISTS LIVING THEIR STORIES EXILES FROM CIVILISATION It is not very long ago that, having j crossed the Kalahari Desert in Africa tor the first time, I and my companions came up 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 < ne of mystery and excited speculation (says W. J. Makin, in “John o' I .on don’s Weekly”). To our profound astonishment there i ► tepped from the hut a white man. He ; v at dressed in ludicrous Dickensian! fashion —stiff Maoawber collar and a. bright cravat. To our travel-stained i and unshaven selves he was as unreal] ss the milages. "Good morning, gentlemen, " he said j gravely, as though he received visitors ! every day. We must have been the 1 first white men he had seen for years, j “Good morning,” we replied, each Receiving a little ceremonious bow. It 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 100 miles away that we heard from others Jhe story of his solitary existence. He was a writer. For years he ] bad endured the daily routine of a schoolmaster in an English city. Then, like the shopwalker in the O. Henry j tory. he revolted suddenly against civilisation and fled to the wilds. With r\ few books and some precious paper be settled in this, the most desolate part of Africa. He began to write. A pile of manuscript, lies heaped up in that lonely hut. Rut I doubt whether anyone will read it until the )>ne-time schoolmaster dies. Even then some prowling hyena or jackal fnav destroy it before it is discovered. A few Bushmen live around that but. and upon these natives -the white man depends for his food and water. What he has written may never be worth 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. 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 lands and glinting seas, and prefer infinitely to

talk with a rascally trader or a blasphemous sailor than to listen to the meanderings of a Bloomsbury intellectual. They are 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 Keable died 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 vagabonds from civilisation. “A Feller Named Stevenson” Nowadays, if you visit Honolulu, a skyscraper city in the South Seas, you are sure to be lured away to the famous Waikiki Beach. There, in a luxurious hotel, you may dance on a floor' that stretches toward the sea, the sur.f lapping gently at one end of the dance room. Many millionaires possess bungalow's on Waikiki Beach, for the whole Island has been seized by the real estate merchant. One day I glimpsed a desolate, tumble-down bungalow, half-sunken in the sand and about 200 yards away from the sea. "That bungalow seems romantic enough for a South Seas adventurer of the old days,” I said to an Ameri- : can friend. ] "It’s an eyesore.” he replied. “A ! feller named Stevenson used to have that bungalow and write in it. I guess I it will be cleared away in a few weeks ! and another fifty-thousand-dollar homo ] built, there.” ] In Samoa, where Stevenson is buri ied. 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 j story w'ith the discovery of an old 1 Samoan chief, who remembers TusiI tala as he lived among them. Only one writer, a friend of mine, ! had the counage to set down his true j experiences in Samoa. He asked one or two old natives if they remembered R.L.S. One said: “Stevenson! Him the 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 i that Arthur Rimbaud, the French poet, must have endured there. When he ran away from that tragic friendship with Verlaine, he was also ruri- : ning away from himself, the esoteric | mind that had driven him toward every vice and every perversity in I verse.

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 tliose queer trading stores where Arthur Rimbaud once sweated and worked as a trader’s clerk. It V as, indeed, ironical for a young literary man to be swept away from a mat ble-topped table and absinthe in Paris) to these mountains of burnt siennsa crumbling in the firco heat of the sun. instead of writing exquisite poems under the influence of hashish, he grappled with figures, snaky French lives) and sevens written down in purple ink under an African sun. He made notes about coffee, hides and firearms. And this gallant vagabond could laugh harshly when a letter was brought to him in his exile, telling of a group in Paris who had exalted him intci a legendary genius. At the moment he was engaged in gun-run-ninp for an Arab chief. Tlie venture failed and he returned to Paris to die miserably and unknown in a hospital.