The Book of Talbot
[Harcourt, Brace, $3.50]
TALBOT CLIFTON of Lytham has been called an Elizabethan horn out of time; but it is more to the point to say that he was a symbol of his own age. There is a valid line of descent from Raleigh the Elizabethan to the ’mad’ Englishman of the nineteenth century. Clifton, Wilfrid Scawen Blunt, Winwood Reade, who explored single-handed in Africa, quarreled with the honor he might have had, and wrote The Martyrdom of Man, Doughty, ‘Chinese’ Gordon — all of these, diverse as they were, can be made to look like late-born Elizabethans; but only by using the wrong end of the telescope. All bear the mark of the same colossal age, the span of Queen Victoria’s reign. It was an age when the full tide of English history had begun to back up a little on itself, but it was a magnificent age none the less, with so good a title to an independent place in history that it need not borrow from the glamour of Elizabeth. Its great men and women had all the power of the Elizabethans, but not the same instinct of drive and direction; and, lacking this inevitability of direction, they created, in their erratic search for somewhere to go, the distorted but still noble legend of the ’mad Englishman.‘
None of them was madder, or more English, than Talbot Clifton. He had breeding, wealth, and a fierce, ingrowing discontent; and he lived at a time when disappointment in love was admitted by the best people to be almost a respectable reason for traveling in wild places and shooting dangerous game. Yet he had in him a kind of Ishmaelite genius which made him more than a wealthy eccentric.
ft seems to have been a winter alone among the Eskimos of the Barren Lands that matured him— and confirmed his untamableness. He was then twentyeight. He had already been twice round the world before he was twenty, had played the incredible Englishman in the California of the nineties, driving a coach, riding man-killing horses, and calling a mankilling gambler a liar to his face.
His disturbing sense of instability and the plague of aimlessness had turned him to the Catholic Church, and already he had shown his instinct for scorning the flesh by traveling in Mexico with an abscess eating into his chest. He learned Spanish, sketched, and read Shakespeare while the abscess grew. With the same kind of dispassionate intolerance he noted in his Siberian diary of a later year the course of double pneumonia: fevers of 103 and 104 degrees; then the unadorned statement, ‘Did not spit much blood to-day.’ On the ninth day he played the flute and on the tenth day he dined out.
He played the flute also during an earthquake in South America, sitting up in bed in a hotel; and thus his life went. He had an arrogance that made civilized men stand aside, and a wild self-confidence that gained the respect and loyalty of primitive people. He was not trying to find out their secrets, after all, but his own. A Swahili boy who had followed him and been beaten by him for the sake of justice swam two miles through a sea full of sharks, trying to get on the ship that carried Clifton home.
Clifton lay in his furs arguing calmly with Eskimos who had begun to discuss a plan for killing him. He shot into the air to frighten a drunken Cossack who had stabbed him — because the man, being drunk, did not deserve to die. He sailed a racing yacht and made himself all island patriarch in the Hebrides, where he entertained two Arab sheikhs and a couple of their wives. In his own county of Lancashire he gave away over £150,000 in benefactions and endowments.
Then, after traveling in Alaska, the Canadian Arctic, Africa, Siberia, Tibet, Burma, and South America, Clifton at the age of thirty-eight met and married a woman whose fierceness and tenderness answered to his—a woman like an echo out of Norse legend. She bore him children, traveled with him in Africa, and stood beside him on a dim night in Ireland when he shot one Sinn Feiner and bluffed six others, who had stolen his ear. She had remembered to kiss the baby first, and to take along some red pepper in case it should be necessary to blind anybody. Clifton and the Sinn Feiners made peace, in time, and later he came back to Ireland as a guest of the nation.
It is to Violet. Clifton that we owe this book of splendor and pride. It is written in a language that is not normal, and yet after a few pages gives no feeling of abnormality, because it fits so adequately the life of the wayward and passionate but always utterly honest Talbot Clifton. As he drove always, dissatisfied, eager, and questing, to the hearts of men and the hidden places of the world and the fringes of the secret of death itself, so the book, piercing and remorseless, goes to the heart of his life and character. It skirts the edges of a mysticism that might be mawkish, but is redeemed by naked sincerity. It recounts a life of more than common fire in prose of more than common sinew, and may yet be remembered as a little masterpiece, not exactly of travel, but of the life of a great traveler.
OWEN LATTIMORE