I could see the lights of the tiny town of Merca far across the rustling sea speeding past us. Now I knew a fellow there once who …
A portrait of Gerald Hanley, drawn in the 1970s
by the film maker John Huston
Afterword to the 1993 edition
‘THE SUN WAS QUIVERING in soft pink and green veils when Jama and I lit cigarettes. The dawn threw slow wings of brilliant light beyond the mountains until the soft flux of darkness and false light began to retreat and reveal the shabby desiccated world, and the jagged rocks stood out, flinging long shadows on to the surface of our particular barren world, the enormous silence undisturbed by a single cough.’
Every good writer has a special ‘signature’ in his style – a very recognisable trademark, a warrant of excellence. Gerald Hanley’s style is at once taut, muscular, masculine – but tender, always sensuous, especially in his descriptions of the harshest places. And the style is very much the man.
But how did the man come to be the style? What was he like? What can be usefully said of his personal life which may annotate or illuminate the work? What was the raw material of the man which he refined, so very reticently, into those tough-tender words? How did Gerry, as we always knew him, come across to me, one friend among many? He had more than a gift for friendship: he was someone who, once met, and at every meeting, altered your angle to the world, redirected you with the lightest, usually most ironic touches of his vast experience, knowledge and quiet authority, giving you a heightened awareness of the possibilities, a truer compass bearing in the foggy journeys.
I saw this happy manna in Gerry soon after we first met, quite by chance one evening, at the bar of the George next to Broadcasting House in 1963, after he’d made a quick-footed unobtrusive passage through the crowd of BBC writers and producers (of whom I was one) – shackled men, noisy or morose as a result, bibulously rattling their chains. Here was a newcomer, yet someone who obviously knew many in this crowd from the old Features and Drama departments, knew them but was not of them, someone clearly unshackled.
I had no idea who he was, this nimble footed, solid looking man with wary, very blue, slightly protuberant eyes, dressed (as he nearly always was) in a navy blue windcheater and polo-necked jumper, dark slacks and rubber-soled shoes. He had something of the air of a welterweight boxer, tough and a little raffish, in his late forties, half out in clover, but still retained by the fairground, well able to deal with any challenger. He had the lightly tanned and roughened skin, the sunswept eyes, of someone who has lived most of his life outdoors, who had seen much and lived with danger – those quick eyes swinging round now, alert to every move and nuance in the bar – of someone who would rather have had his back to the wall then, and not to the door.
Yes, the boxer. Or perhaps (much more appropriately as I confirmed later) here was the mysterious lone ranger, horse and saddle out in the livery stable behind the saloon, suddenly arrived in town after months living rough under the stars out on the plains.
He took a half pint, lit a cigarette, drew on it deeply. He was clearly waiting for someone, a little tense, on edge. Was there to be a showdown of some sort? A shoot out, with the sheriff or the baddie? Something to do with the papers under his arm?
I too had some papers under my arm – a draft film script developed from an idea which John Gibson, a BBC producer from Belfast, had given me: a story set during the earlier Irish ‘Troubles’. So that when the stranger asked the barman if John Gibson had been in yet, I piped up ‘No, but he’s due any moment.’ Since we had this mutual friend we introduced ourselves and started talking. ‘That’s funny,’ Gerry said, ‘I’ve got a script for Johnny, too.’ After some further talk, all was revealed. John Gibson had given us both the same idea to develop, which we’d both been slaving over for several weeks – Gerry with some payment, me with none.
‘What’ll we do with him, when he comes?’ Gerry asked with nice malice, in that ever husky, cigarette deepened voice of his. ‘Hit him?’ I suggested, seeing how Gerry, if not I, clearly had the strength. ‘No, we’ll do the script together. And get you some money, too.’ Which we did, though the film was never made.
It was a happy beginning to a friendship that always worked well. Professionally, Gerry did reviews for the book programme I ran at the BBC then. Later, as an editor with Hamish Hamilton, I brought Warriors to the firm – or Warriors and Strangers as it was originally called, when it included a second part, in quite a different tone, dealing with Kenya. Personally, it was splendid talking, eating, and drinking together, in one of the then happy watering holes which surrounded Broadcasting House. And it was into such places that Gerry, in his lone ranger mode, would suddenly arrive out of some far distant blue, from India or Africa, in his usual all weather, all eventualities garb, staying at the YMCA or the NCOs’ Club off the Edgware Road, or with his friend Richard Attenborough out in Richmond.
Gerry, who was then living in the Wicklow mountains (where he was suffering the attentions of the Irish Revenue Commissioners), came to London on ‘business’, of some not always mentioned or clearly defined sort. (Though I learnt later that, as a result of these fiscal attentions, he often came to London simply to pick up ‘cash-in-hand’ from his agent David Higham.) In fact throughout the 1960s he was largely engaged in writing film scripts, for The Blue Max and doing all the early drafts for Attenborough’s Gandhi. In these pubs and clubs and Indian restaurants we talked of everything under the sun; in particular of an interest which, as Irishmen, we might not have been expected to have at all – the British Empire, its manners and mores, its decline and fall.
This is a central theme in most of Gerry’s books – as it was in many of the BBC feature programmes I was doing then, on India, Egypt, and East Africa. We shared an obsession to record and dissect the nature of this colonialism, to talk, write books and do programmes about it, fascinated by the mechanics, human and political, of a system that had not only done so much to ruin our own country for more than seven hundred years but had taken a quarter of the globe along the same uncomfortable path.
Yes – though from opposite sides of the Irish track, Gerry as a Catholic from a Liverpool-Irish family, me as a Protestant from a mercantile Dublin family – we were both Empire buffs. I think it was a case of our both hating the narrowness of Irish life, and both finding happy niches (in the British army and the BBC) which involved much travel about the old empire, so that we came to this fascination as treasure seekers, sensing crocks of gold in far distant climes, grist for our fictional and BBC mills. And the treasure we found lay in the people of empire, the rulers and ruled, not the rule.
Gerry’s knowledge of all this was much deeper than mine. In harsh romantic places he had done all the Boys Own Paper things that I had longed to do as a boy, inspired by my reading of Henty, Percy Westerman and other Empire glorying writers. Gerry was a living exemplar of all this type of Edwardian derring-do. Only a few years before he had actually fought with a Service Webley at his hip, at the head of a platoon of askaris, pursuing and subduing other assegaicarrying natives, who were getting restless …
But despite the many topics we covered, in long chats over tandoori chicken and cold lagers, Gerry, as far as the personal was concerned, remained the mysterious lone ranger. In all the years I knew him he never spoke of his childhood, his parents, his wife or wives, or any of his family. He never mentioned them and I never asked him. This was strange. I was aware of it at the time – this lacuna in our relationship. I put it down to a very reticent temperament and perhaps to a residual stiff-upper-lippery in an ex-army officer.
It was only in hearing and garnering over the years odd bits of information about him from BBC and other friends we had in common that I saw there might well be another reason for his reticence. His marital and familial life appeared not only very complex but one which, for an Irish Catholic, must have been agonising.
There was a first wife, Diana Fittall, met in Kenya and married there soon after the war. A
child was born before Gerry came back with her to London in the late 1940s to work for the BBC Overseas Service in Bush House. Here he met Asha, a beautiful Kashmiri girl, who worked in the Indian section there. It was a head-over-heels affair. He divorced Diana, married Asha and went off to live with her in the Kashmiri hills for several years, where they had two children. But tiring of her and returning to Kenya he had met Diana there again. Gerry spent days agonising about what he should do, while staying in Eldoret at the house of his great friend Antony Dean (who has generously helped me complete the difficult jigsaw of Gerry’s life). He realised how badly he had treated Diana. And so, officially still married, they took up again as man and wife. Seven more children were born, until, at some time in the mid-1960s, he and Diana separated again. Of all these many children, from two wives, one drowned aged two and a half and another was left permanently brain damaged after a motor-cycle accident. It was clear that Gerry – the lone ranger, the canny pathfinder through the bush – had followed equally dangerous, tortuous trails through places in the heart: facing bloody battles there and terrible choices, abandoning wives, children and his faith, perhaps, in the course of it all. Not, indeed, a topic for casual pub talk.
Gerry’s love life, I feel, was driven by a very high current of emotion, involving no more than three or four women in his life (for he was no womaniser), women for whom he probably felt a correspondingly over-rich emotion, asking or offering too much; or an emotion which foundered on the common dilemma – exacerbated in a novelist by his usually jittery financial/psychological circumstances, his trade in fantasy – of looking for both workaday security and exotic vivacity in the same person.
Does such personal knowledge of a writer, and surmise about his close relationships, annotate or illuminate the work? Well, up to a point – the point being with Gerry that only in his novel Without Love did he ever get to serious grips with the major conflicts, emotional and religious, which I think he faced with women. And to know a little of his private life is to get a better understanding of his work: the problems he faced, his strengths and weaknesses there, what he left out and why – and why what he put in was so male orientated.
Apart from Without Love the feminine portraits in his other novels lack the passionately felt quandaries which Gerry must have experienced with women in his life. This crucial personal dimension is absent in most of his fictional women, so that they lack conviction. His depiction of men, however, of the vital dependency and camaraderie between them, be they black, yellow or white, is not only convincing, but comprehensive and highly charged – so sensual in description that I have heard a reader (who must have judged only by the books) ask whether Gerry was homosexual.
Just the opposite. I feel on the one hand he was overly concerned with women, and on the other was plagued by his Irish Catholic upbringing and the hell-fire versions of the faith which Irish priests had dunned into him. He was ‘unmanned’ to a certain extent by the doubts he had inherited from all this, by the strict prohibitions which this faith imposed on his serial relationships and marriages. So that in the end both God and the women drew the short straw. Gerry could never entirely resolve this conflict in his life or in his books, so that he depicted women partially, with suspicion or through rose-tinted glasses – while running an even more partial, suspicious, on and off, love-hate relationship with God.
It’s an Irish Catholic version, this, of the ‘romantic agony’. And Gerry, as the army doctor Humf tells him in Warriors, was a romantic par excellence. Gerry’s tenderness, in his fiction and his emotions, would always be at risk with women; a risk of terrible hurts, confusions and ensnarements there, of ‘messing’ in the apt Irish use of that word, which would not be the case in his real or fictional dealings with men.
In this and other ways, both as man and writer, Gerry resembles Hemingway, whom he worshipped long before Hemingway described him as ‘the foremost writer of his generation’. They were both primarily men of action, which the writing flowed from as a secondary bonus. They took their subject matter only from what they had directly experienced; often violent subject matter, of killings, woundings (both literal and psychological), suicides and sexual/emotional failure. They share – in Gerry’s case because he was surely influenced here – the same sort of crisp, vivid narrative style, the very clear and thus marvellously evocative focus on action, the choice of the most relevant detail, the minutiae of an event as it actually happens, so that you are entirely ‘there’ later, in the reading of it.
They both have the dramatist’s technique of taut, allusive, understated dialogue, so to emphasise what is not there in the words, the looming, more important sub-text. Above all (and this came from Gerry’s nature, not from any influence) they both subscribed to a heroic code of behaviour, of the absolute necessity for honesty, courage, compassion and good manners in life; of hanging on, stoically, in face of the worst life has to offer, as it will; of getting through it decently and honourably, with no bleating or excuses, with little fuss, and leaving as little mess as possible behind. It’s a code which Gerry sums up well on the first page of this book: ‘… there is no solution, except to try and do as little harm as possible while we are here.’
These similarities Gerry shared much more with the earlier Hemingway, as man and writer, than with the declining, bombastic ‘Papa’ he met in Nairobi in 1953, where Hemingway had come to recuperate after his two near fatal air crashes in Uganda. They were in Nairobi for several weeks together, meeting on the café terrace of the New Stanley Hotel every morning with mutual friends, big game hunters, film people, other writers. These were unsullied times until one day Hemingway said to Gerry, ‘Kid, come upstairs. I want to talk seriously.’ In his bedroom he made Gerry kneel down, while they intoned the Litany to the Virgin Mary together, with Hemingway substituting the word ‘fuck’ for ‘bless’ on every occasion. Gerry emerged quite shattered. He was a cradle Catholic, who could never dabble in or seriously mock the faith, as his mentor did.
Even if Warriors carefully avoids the really private, it offers instead the fullest account of what I think was the central and most formative factor in Gerry’s life: his experiences in and love of wilderness, ‘the Shag’ as he called it; his trials and tribulations, his growing to true knowledge there in face of that punishing solitude – comradeship with his askaris and with their ‘enemies’, the happily warring tribes, in those sun-blasted, rock tortured desert spaces of Somalia. This absolute zero of wilderness, where most white men, as he so painfully describes, either went mad or killed themselves – this was the making of Gerry. He survived it all. And to do so was to survive the worst that life could throw at him afterwards.
And in Warriors Gerry looks back on this Somali wilderness by clearly proposing the love/hate conflict – and then resolving it. He gives a fair bill of his quandaries. ‘The years I spent on that silent moon did me more harm than good.’ But ‘Some characters are made for wilderness … come to their happiest in that dry, sterile loneliness.’ And ‘I knew I was still lacerated inside by the wilderness, which I still loved.’ And then the very moving ending to it all, in the words of the Italian sailor, on Gerry’s return to the liner after his three hours in Mogadishu, ‘What was it like? … Like when you see a woman you loved years ago. The fever has gone and you can look at her without trouble. Was it like that?’ ‘Yes, it was like that.’
And here, surely, in this apt simile from the Italian sailor, is the nub of Gerry’s character: the wilderness was his real woman – loved, hated and learned from, having been nearly driven mad and killed by her. Wilderness was what he really gave his soul and lost his heart to. Nothing and no one else in his life was to mark him so forcibly. And it’s here in Warriors that he most completely resolves his conflicts, between faith, thought and action, between the muscular and the tender: all given to that wilderness, which in return, in his mastering it, gave him an inviolate strength, fulfilling every disparate need in him.
Warriors, if we add this little abo
ut his personal life, becomes Gerry’s most self-revealing book. And it is an irony therefore that it was very nearly never published at all. He wrote it in Kenya in the mid-sixties, in Antony Dean’s house – Antony being one of Gerry’s closest and most helpful friends, an ex-army officer too, wounded at Tobruk and invalided down to Nairobi where Gerry met him just after the war. Gerry sent Warriors and Strangers to his publisher Billy Collins with particularly high hopes. Collins was passionately interested in East Africa – at least in its more colourful aspects. He had a house in Kenya and had made a fortune from books set in the area, such as Joy Adamson’s Born Free.
But Collins was also an imperialist at heart. He hated Gerry’s book for its criticisms of British colonialism in East Africa, and for its description of the arrogance and deceitfulness of most of its administrators, who had the cheek to claim they represented a higher civilisation than the tribes whom they degraded and betrayed.
Collins wouldn’t publish the book. Gerry, hurt and furious, put it away in a very bottom drawer. It wasn’t until I joined Hamish Hamilton in 1970 and suggested to him that he go back to East Africa and do a ‘Return to the Old Places’ type of book, that he told me he had done just that, six years before, giving me the typescript of Warriors and Strangers. I loved it and showed it to Roger Machell, then chief editor. He wrote a memo almost by return. ‘I think this is marvellous stuff. Some of the most enthrallingly interesting writing about Africa that I’ve ever come across. Every bit as good as Thesiger’s “Marsh Arabs”. Collins must have been crazy to turn it down.’ Indeed … And it seemed then that Gerry was all set for a new and splendid career as an author with Hamish Hamilton.
Warriors: Life and death among the Somalis Page 21