Richard Halliburton - Character of Published Work

Character of Published Work

In his colorful and simply-told travel adventures Halliburton was the "innocent abroad", receptive to new ideas and with a quiet erudition. He displayed a romantic readiness which shone through his best prose, prose at once picturesque, gently informative, extroverted (yet self-engaged), and personally confiding. He often described his attaching himself to a famous historic person (and key event for which that person was known) or a revered place, such as the Taj Mahal. Acting as sort of an emcee, or performing some often cleverly garish stunt, he recalled that person and invoked a place associated with him; by so doing, he escorted readers into a different time and to a different locale, with of course some compelling modern touches. Thus he duplicated Hannibal's crossing of the Alps by elephant – naming the pachyderm he had gotten from a Paris zoo Miss Elysabethe Dalrymple; he emulated Ulysses' myriad adventures in the Mediterranean dressed often as a beach-comber or playboy; he re-enacted Robinson Crusoe's island solitude, adopting a menagerie of domestic pets with names such as Listerine, Kitty and Susie. Examples of the device filled his work and defined his public image: of further note, he retraced the fateful expedition of Hernando Cortez to the heart of the Aztec Empire; like his hero Lord Byron, he swam the Hellespont, metaphorically bridging Europe and Asia; and he lived among the French Foreign Legion in North Africa. He did not just view legendary places and landscapes, but often embraced them by some athletic feat ultimately intended to thrill armchair travelers as well as to educate them: he swam the Panama Canal, climbed the Matterhorn and Mt. Fuji (its first documented winter ascent), and twice he descended into the Mayan Well of Death, the Sacred Cenote of Chichen Itza. The occasional trouble that he received from authorities only contributed to the drama of his adventures: taking photos of the guns at Gibraltar (and being arrested for it as a breach of security); attempting to enter Mecca, which is forbidden to non-Muslims; hiding from gatekeepers on the grounds of the Taj Mahal, to experience in solitude the sunset as well as to swim in the pool facing the tomb under the moonlight.

Halliburton's books, free of gratuitous philosophizing or advocacy of a single point of view, were meant for the general reading public. What erudition they had was mild. Reliance upon the values that had resulted in World War I had eroded and new philosophies had become popular. Colonialism and the "white man's burden" were ending. Freedom and democracy had different nuances. These ideas influenced many of the writings of the time. What racial comments Halliburton made were casual and, for his time, not exceptional. For instance, describing a hiking trip in the Rocky Mountains at age twenty, he commented that his two Indian guides were "as irresponsible as our southern niggers."

Halliburton's love of the world's natural wonders, and such monuments of mankind which seemed best to blend into those wonders, derives in part from the Romanticism of poets William Wordsworth and Samuel Taylor Coleridge (acquaintance with whom may have been sharpened by his exposure at Princeton to English Professor Henry Van Dyke, a popular essayist and poet of his time, who also had been a teacher of Halliburton's editor David Laurance Chambers). As theirs, Halliburton's view of technology was dim, and he gently urged that one see the world's marvels before "modern Progress" obliterated them.

Halliburton subscribed to the notion that to the wise and good man the whole world is his fatherland; he also believed that one might become wise and good by exploring the world. Like Greek historian and geographer Herodotus, Halliburton was a cultural relativist: he adhered to the credibility of multiple perspectives and believed that "culture was king", stances which may explain his purchase of a slave child in Africa, or adopting the garb of a particular region to "go native." As a sort of cultural ambassador, he met heads of state from Peruvian dictator Augusto Leguia, to Emperor Haile Selassie of Ethiopia, to the Last Emperor of China, to King Feisal al Husain of Iraq and his son the Crown Prince.

Though Halliburton subscribed uncritically, in his books, to America's democratic ideals, as passages in Seven League Boots and the two Books of Marvels, especially those on Russian topics, show, his writings remain free of preachment other than the insistence that every young person decide upon a curriculum, before it is too late, of far-ranging travel as a means to self-knowledge, career choice and spiritual enlightenment. An early letter (1923) expressed his "virulent antipathy for democracy as practiced in America" and a hatred "for the laboring class", but these views contrast with the plight he shared with the downtrodden, as at Devil's Island, and his occasional working with rough-hewn seamen. His last writings, done in collaboration with journalist Paul Mooney, the four letters (of a projected seven) comprising Letters from the Sea Dragon as well as the fifteen articles comprising The Log of the Sea Dragon, suggest, in their descriptions of the displacement of peoples that the Japanese advance caused, the war-reportorial course his future writing might have taken had he lived. A news correspondent's role is also suggested by his skilled interview with the executioner of the Romanovs, the last ruling dynasty of Russia. Distinguished by their readerliness, the essays of historic personages appearing in both his books and newspaper articles, notably of Spanish-American War hero Captain Richard Hobson and of Haitian leader Jean Christophe, show the skills of the natural biographer, and offer further hint of career evolution.