Richard Halliburton - Travel As An Unconventional Career

Travel As An Unconventional Career

Leaving college temporarily during 1919, Halliburton became an ordinary seaman and boarded the freighter Octorara bound from New Orleans to England. He toured historic places in London and Paris, but soon returned to Princeton to finish his schooling. Travel inspired in him a lust for more travel. Voiced in different ways, seizing the day became his credo. The words of Oscar Wilde, who in works like The Picture of Dorian Gray enjoined experiencing the moment before it vanished, inspired Halliburton to reject marriage, family, a regular job, and conventional respectability as the obvious steps after graduation. He liked bachelorhood, youthful adventure, and the thrill of the unknown. To earn a living, he intended to write about his adventures, yet, with gentle irony, he dedicated his first book to his Princeton roommates, "whose sanity, consistency and respectability ... drove to this book".

His father advised him to get the wanderlust from his system, return to Memphis and adjust his life to "an even tenor."

"I hate that expression", Richard responded, expressing the view that distinguished his life-style, "and as far as I am able I intend to avoid that condition. When impulse and spontaneity fail to make my way uneven then I shall sit up nights inventing means of making my life as conglomerate and vivid as possible.... And when my time comes to die, I’ll be able to die happy, for I will have done and seen and heard and experienced all the joy, pain and thrills—any emotion that any human ever had—and I’ll be especially happy if I am spared a stupid, common death in bed"

Halliburton idolized mountain climber George Mallory, who died in 1924 while trying to climb Mt. Everest. He knew and admired aviatrix Amelia Earhart. He knew journalist Lowell Thomas, who had made Lawrence of Arabia a living legend. Halliburton craved the celebrity of Rudolph Valentino, the great romantic screen star of the silent era.

Richard was acquainted with and looked up to swashbuckling cinema star Douglas Fairbanks, Sr., who was also a world traveler. Halliburton himself, though several times approached about film versions of his adventures (notably by Fox in 1933 for The Royal Road to Romance), only appeared in one movie, the semi-documentary Walter Futter-produced, India Speaks (1932; re-released in 1947 as Bride of Buddha or Bride of the East), which is lost except for the garden scene with co-star Rosie Brown (Rosita Schulze) and some stills. As with newsreels in which Halliburton appeared, notably of his second descent into the Mayan Well of Death and his crossing the Alps atop an elephant, a complete copy of the 78-minute 16mm film continues to be sought by Halliburton enthusiasts.

Halliburton's first book, published in 1925 by Bobbs-Merrill as The Royal Road to Romance, became a bestseller. Two years later he published The Glorious Adventure, which retraced Ulysses' adventures throughout the Classical Greek world as recounted in Homer's The Odyssey, and which included his visiting the grave of English poet Rupert Brooke on the island of Skyros. In 1929 Halliburton published New Worlds To Conquer, which recounted his famous swim of the Panama Canal, his retracing the track of Cortez' conquest of Mexico, and cast him in the role, in full goat-skin costume, of Robinson Crusoe (Alexander Selkirk), "cast away" on the island of Tobago. Animals figure prominently in this adventure as in many of Halliburton's adventures. (Douglas Fairbanks Sr., who had rejected Halliburton's overtures that he make a film version of The Glorious Adventure, did recall, almost as a tribute, Halliburton's recreation of the castaway in his Mr. Robinson Crusoe.)

Halliburton's friends during this time included movie stars, writers, musicians, painters, and politicians, including writers Gertrude Atherton and Kathleen Norris, Senator James Phelan and philanthropist Noel Sullivan, and actors Ramón Novarro and Rod LaRoque. Casual acquaintances were many, as lectures, personal appearances (notably to plug his movie India Speaks), syndicated columns, and radio broadcasts made his name a household word associated with romantic travel.