Too Close to the Sun: The Audacious Life and Times of Denys Finch Hatton - Softcover

Wheeler, Sara

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0812968921 ISBN 13: 9780812968927

Verlag: Random House Publishing Group, 2009

Inhaltsangabe

A champion of Africa, legendary for his good looks, his charm, and his prowess as a soldier, lover, and hunter, Denys Finch Hatton inspired Karen Blixen to write the unforgettable Out of Africa. Now esteemed British biographer Sara Wheeler tells the truth about this extraordinarily charismatic adventurer.

Born to an old aristocratic family that had gambled away most of its fortune, Finch Hatton grew up in a world of effortless elegance and boundless power. In 1910, searching for something new, he arrived in British East Africa and fell in love–with a continent, with a landscape, with a way of life that was about to change forever. In Nairobi, Finch Hatton met Karen Blixen and embarked on one of the great love affairs of the twentieth century. Intellectual equals, Finch Hatton and Blixen were genuine pioneers in a land that was quickly being transformed by violence, greed, and bigotry. Ever restless, Finch Hatton wandered into a career as a big-game hunter and became an expert bush pilot. Mesmerized all his life by the allure of freedom and danger, Finch Hatton was, writes Wheeler, “the open road made flesh.”

Über diesen Titel

Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

Like Denys Finch Hatton, Sara Wheeler was educated at Brasenose College, Oxford. Her books include Terra Incognita: Travels in Antarctica; Travels in a Thin Country; and Cherry: A Life of Apsley Cherry-Garrard, all available from the Modern Library. When not traveling, Wheeler lives with her family in London.

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Chapter One


OUT OF TRIM

I saw him first fingering a pistol in a Nairobi  gun-shop, with the casual interest that men of action will show for such toys, and well I liked the look of his scholarly appearance, which had also about it the  suggestion of an adventurous wanderer, of a man who had watched a hundred desert suns splash with gilt the white-walled cities of Somaliland. —llewelyn powys, Black Laughter, 1925 When he heard that denys finch hatton had been killed on  the plains of Africa, Alan Parsons reflected that his friend had been “like one of his forefathers of Elizabethan days—a man of action and a man of poetry.” It was the first Sir Christopher Hatton who had raised the family to the sunlit uplands of the English aristocracy, and they languished there through the pleasant centuries while their nation prospered. Denys inherited the charm of his Elizabethan ancestor, but not his taste for the gilded baits of conventional success. A Northamptonshire man, ruffed and sharp-bearded, Sir Christopher had worked his way into court and dazzled Queen Elizabeth with his dancing. She showered him with money and honors until he was Lord Chancellor. At thirty-five, he was able to purchase Kirby Hall in East Northamptonshire, one of the great Elizabethan houses, a model of proportion replete with cupolas, pergolas, and ninety-two fireplaces. But Sir Christopher had many mansions, and for five years he was too busy to visit Kirby. By the time Denys was born three centuries later, the family was heading in the other direction (down), as his uncle George, the eleventh Earl of Winchilsea, had gambled away several fortunes. After disposing of most of the family paintings, he sold the lead from the roof of Kirby Hall. His widowed stepmother, meanwhile, was quietly bringing up three sons and a daughter at Haverholme Priory in Lincolnshire. Frances “Fanny” Rice became the tenth earl’s third wife in 1849; their second son, Henry Stormont, was Denys’s father. At Haverholme, Henry and his siblings grew to love the pared-down landscape and the winds that sped across the flatlands freighted with the chill of the North Sea. The three boys went out with their uncles, shooting partridge in the gravel pits, pigeons in Evedon Wood, and rabbits everywhere. They caught pike up and down the Slea and dace in the section between Haverholme Lock and Cobbler’s Lock, and played golf and cricket in the park. (In the untroubled 1860s, the Priory had its own cricket team.) After boarding school Henry went up to Balliol, the Oxford college favored by the ancestral earls. At nineteen, his hollow-cheeked Renaissance face was framed by sideburns the color of sweet sherry. His nose was long and sharp, his eyes deep-set, and a prehensile mustache dipped and clung to his chin below his lower lip. Finch Hattons were speculators and adventurers. By the 1870s, young men from the landed gentry had started heading south to Australia—many were hired as jackaroos on the cattle stations—and after a year Henry gave up on Balliol and steamed to the subtropical northern tip of Queensland. He rode a horse down to Mackay, a huddle of shacks quietly sweltering among the sugar plantations 150 miles north of the Tropic of Capricorn. There he joined a maternal uncle who had sailed to Australia six years earlier. Knowing little of sugar, the pair determined to set themselves up as stockmen, and reconnaissance took them to the well-watered cattle country around Mount Spencer, forty-five miles inland. They purchased four hundred square miles of bush, at first sleeping on canvas stretchers in a hut overlooking a lagoon. Henry had a table for his tin basin and a fragment of looking glass balanced on a pair of nails driven into a post. At night, he read in the sallow glow of a fat-filled jam tin wicked with a twist of tweed from his trousers. The lure of the frontier was in the blood, and within a year Henry’s younger brother, Harold, had arrived in Queensland to assist the fledgling family firm. On his first night, he found an eleven-foot carpet snake coiled in his cot bed. But it would have taken more than a snake to deter Harold, a figure of buttonholing vigor and the most voluble of the Finch Hattons. With his brother and his uncle, he turned Mount Spencer into a comfortable village of houses and huts, and the station into a going concern with twelve thousand cattle and a permanent staff of stockmen and boys. It was hard work all around. Simply chopping timber for fences was a Sisyphean task that involved pulling a crosscut saw and swinging a maul under a vertical sun, the thermometer often reaching 110 degrees in the shade. “But if a man is thoroughly sound,” Harold wrote, “. . . it is odd if he does not look back to the time when he was splitting rails for ten hours a day as the happiest in his life.” A man with a powerful sense of public duty, Harold was quickly appointed a Queensland magistrate and later became the voice of judicial authority at the goldfields, granting (or, more often, refusing) alcohol licenses. He was a model of moral seriousness and egregious self-confidence—an imperial beau idéal.* In his spare time, he learned to throw the boomerang; he included this among his achievements in Who’s Who (“only white man who could ever throw the boomerang like the blacks of Australia”). He never married. In later years, he was close to his nephews and nieces, and Denys, the youngest, worshipped his uncle Harold, the archetypal man of action. Denys loved hearing stories of the magnificent landscapes, dizzying scale, and hazards innumerable that characterized the pioneering experience of the white men who battled the Australian bush in the last decades of the nineteenth century. For those made of the right material, it was a Garden of Eden. Thirty-five years later, Denys was to find a similar paradise on the plains of East Africa. DENYS’S MATERNAL GRANDMOTHER, Helen, had married Admiral of the Fleet Sir Henry Codrington, KC, in 1849. His father had captained the Orion at Trafalgar. After fifteen years of marriage, the admiral sued for divorce on the grounds of his wife’s multiple adulteries. The Codringtons had been living in Malta, where Sir Henry held the position of admiral-superintendent of the dockyard. Since its acquisition in 1814, Malta had been one of the great British naval bases and the home of the Royal Navy’s Mediterranean fleet. Perks of the job included a high-specification gondola, and at the divorce trial in London the gondolier testified that when Lady Codrington was escorted home by a certain officer he regularly observed his vessel “getting out of trim” due to excessive movement in the cabin. Day after day, jurors heard a litany of alleged activities, including a lesbian affair and flights from private detectives—all subsequently recounted in minute detail in the pages of The Times. It was the soap opera of the moment, and through the dog days of summer in 1864 the denizens of the Establishment gasped for the next installment. The admiral, suggested Lady Codrington in a robust counterattack, had once entered her bedchamber and groped her lady companion. Lawyers read out copious extracts from diaries and letters and, in his summing-up to the jury, the judge expressed his concern that they should not be influenced by the sheer number of charges brought against Lady Codrington—“so many imputations of criminal intercourse . . . all more or less sustained by evidence.” He pointed out that even a thousand weak links did not make a strong chain. But the jurors thought the links were strong enough, and on November 23 they found Lady Codrington guilty. Her daughters, Denys’s mother, Anne—known as Nan—and her sister, Nell, were eleven and ten. The admiral...

Details zur Ausgabe

• Verlag: Random House Publishing Group
• Erscheinungsdatum: 2009
• Sprache: Englisch
• ISBN 10: 0812968921
• ISBN 13: 9780812968927
• Einband: Taschenbuch
• Anzahl der Seiten: 336
• Kontakt zum Hersteller: Nicht verfügbar
• Verantwortliche Person: Nicht verfügbar