Books: He-Boy Stuff

THE OLD MAN AND THE BOY (303 pp.)—Robert Ruark—Holt ($4.95).

“Once upon a time there was a large-eared, drip-nosed fugitive from multiplication and Sunday school … He lived in the Victorian, gabled, ginger-bready house of his maternal grandpa, a sea captain with a bushy mustache. This man’s name was Edward Hall Adkins. The Negroes called him Cap’n Hawley and the white folks called him Ned Hall. Ned could shoot very fine and whittle very good and in his eyes a small boy was never never very wrong.”

These nostalgic lines from one of Robert Ruark’s columns a few years ago foreshadowed The Old Man and the Boy. With this book, 41-year-old Author Ruark (Something of Value) deserts Mau-Mau country for magnolia land. He has written a boozy-bucolic picture postcard reminiscence of his North Carolina boyhood. In Author Ruark’s memory-misted eyes the Old Man (Ned Hall) is a cross between Thoreau and Natty Bumppo, and the Boy (Robert Chester Ruark Jr.) a blend of Huck Finn and Hemingway’s Nick Adams. Less affected readers may feel that they are merely reading the diary of a bad boy scout spending an endless hunting-and-fishing trip with a garrulous, overage camp counselor.

From this prose Noah’s ark aglut with fish and fowl, an olive branch of insight occasionally extends. The Old Man has a grave regional piety towards nature, and the Boy glows with a spontaneous, open-eyed wonder before it. The cycle of the seasons takes on a sensuous reality never suggested by the city-dweller’s falling calendar leaves. But Author Ruark’s major trouble is suggested by his title. Page after page of The Old Man and the Boy is mock-Hemingway in style and he-boy sentiments. Indeed, if Ernest Hemingway did not exist, it is difficult to see how Robert Ruark, man or boy, could ever have been invented.