Read Too Close to the Sun Online
Authors: Sara Wheeler
*48 The desert locust was bad; another species was on the way, the migratory locust, which arrived in 1931, the worst year of all. When oil from insects crushed on the line prevented trains from gripping, the swarms even disrupted the railway.
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*49 It happened to me once, on the West Antarctic Ice Sheet. I was hiking, and when I took the USGS map out of my pocket and looked at it I saw that I had reached a line the cartographer had drawn with a ruler and labeled “Limit of compilation.”
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*50 I worked in the archive in the basement of that Nairobi library while I was researching this book. I often peered into murky corners (and there were many), wondering if a broken-down chair had once belonged at Ngong.
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*51 Beryl told at least one author that Denys was bisexual. But she was an unreliable source. She claimed a lot of things, many of them contradictory. She suggested that Denys might have had a black child, and that Tania was sleeping with Farah. She said that she’d had an affair with Blix, and also that she hadn’t. Self-dramatizing tendencies were a smoke screen for a lack of confidence. The suggestion that Denys was bisexual or homosexual has been repeated down the years, always by people who knew little of him. There is no evidence for either, and both seem to me unlikely. The idea originated, I believe, in a pedestrian misunderstanding of the magnetic effect Denys had on other men and of his capacity for intimacy with a range of figures from Philip Sassoon to J. A. Hunter.
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*52 Beryl’s 1942 autobiography,
West with the Night,
was her love letter to Africa, just as Tania’s
Out of Africa
was hers. To many tastes,
West with the Night
is the better of the two. There is some evidence that the book was written by Beryl’s third husband. The narrative regularly departs from the truth, whoever wrote it: key events of Beryl’s childhood are reorganized, events are conflated and facts distorted. But it is a brilliant book. Hemingway recommended it to Max Perkins. “This girl,” he wrote, “who is, to my knowledge, very unpleasant, and we might even say, a high-grade bitch, can write rings around all of us who consider ourselves writers.” He was aware that the book was economic with the
actualité.
“She omits some very fascinating stuff which I know about which would destroy much of the character of the heroine; but what is that anyhow in writing?” he commented.
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*53 Two normally reliable sources told Mary Lovell, Beryl’s biographer, that Beryl was pregnant by Denys at the time. One source was Genessie Hamilton, who spoke on condition that what she said would not be attributed in her lifetime (she has died since publication of Lovell’s book). Beryl terminated the pregnancy. I have not included this in the text, as it is impossible to substantiate, but I believe it to be true.
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*54 Later that afternoon, she miscarried in shock.
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Copyright © 2006 by Sara Wheeler
All rights reserved.
Published in the United States by Random House, an imprint of The Random House Publishing Group, a division of Random House, Inc., New York.
Originally published in Great Britain by
Jonathan Cape, London, in 2006.
R
ANDOM
H
OUSE
and colophon are registered trademarks of Random House, Inc.
Permission credits for previously published material that appears in this work are located in the Acknowledgments section beginning on Backmatter.
LIBRARY OF CONGRESS CATALOGING-IN-PUBLICATION DATA
Wheeler, Sara.
Too close to the sun : the audacious life and times of Denys Finch Hatton / Sara Wheeler.
p. cm.
1. Finch Hatton, Denys George, 1887–1931. 2. British—Africa, East—Biography. 3. Africa, East—Social life and customs. 4. Africa, East—History.
I. Title.
DT365.75.F56W44 2007
967.6'030092—dc22 2006048349
Title page photos: (top left) Denys’s custard-yellow Gypsy Moth; (bottom left) Denys on safari with Edward, Prince of Wales, in 1928; (right) Denys in Kenya in the 1920s. All courtesy of the family collection.
eISBN: 978-1-58836-599-6
v3.0