Richard Halliburton

Last week I discovered  the author Richard Halliburton. Debby has liked his works for years and has several of his books in our library, but I had never looked at one.  I picked up Glorious Adventure and was hooked. It is a splendid book – well written and thoughtful, enthusiastic without being gushing, witty and clever without being snarky. It covers the author’s attempts to follow the supposed path of Odysseus in the Odyssey with side trips for such things as climbing Mount Olympus, going to Delphi, swimming the Hellespont, and visiting the grave of Rupert Brooke.  

It is also a profoundly old fashioned book, not only because of its obvious place in the genre of 19^th and early 20^th century exotic travel and adventure books, but because with its reverence for beauty and wisdom, its sense of the  greatness and continuity of its civilization,  and its belief in the possibility and glory of adventure it displays  some of the best values and attitudes of the confident, cosmopolitan, European and particularly British led world that had been wounded in 1914 to 1918 and finally blew itself away between 1939 and 1945.  It is a very pleasant, happy, light hearted book, but it is hard for someone stuck in 2012 not to be a bit rueful as he reads it and contemplates what has been lost. It not that no one feels or thinks that way anymore. Many certainly do, but the cultural atmosphere is quite different. Halliburton was famous, and his books sold very well. It’s fairly hard to imagine books with anything like their  viewpoint doing  so these days. 

Reading the book made me curious about the author. I found that he was born in Tennessee at the turn of the century and died young, lost at sea in 1939 in an attempt to cross the Pacific in a Chinese junk. He spent most of his adult life travelling the world. He never married. As with various other  talented, accomplished bachelors who had close male friends, there are now unsubstantiated claims that he was a homosexual, just as there used to be unsubstantiated claims of often fervid deathbed conversions by talented, accomplished freethinkers. People with axes to grind will grind them. In reality what matters is  the books and the life of adventure, not whether the author liked the girls or the boys or both or neither. I recommend the book highly.