Books: Couldn’t lay claim

HAROLD THE WEBBED or THE YOUNG VIKINGS: Being Volume Two of the Life and Works of TRADER HORN—Alfred Aloysius Horn and Ethelreda Lewis—Simon and Schuster ($3.50).

A year ago it was expensively announced that an ancient peddler in South Africa had told a thrilling life story, and the announcement has since been repeated with excerpts and illustrations—”Trader Horn” heavily bearded, chugging a pipe; the same man, less bearded, dragging Cecil Rhodes from the jaws of a crocodile. Critics cavilled, questioned the veracity of many incidents, doubted this man had experienced them all. Whether his narrator’s instinct consciously prompted the use of the first person, or whether in his senility he confused hearsay with his own experience, or whether he actually experienced the myriad thrilling episodes of his reminiscences, was subject of speculation.

No speculator, a certain Dr. Fred Puleston* is violently convinced of fraud. In righteous indignation he marshals evidence to prove “that bleary old Műnchausen . . . an unmitigated liar” who has “grossly slandered Livingston, Stanley, Cecil Rhodes.” The slander: that Livingston married a black, that Stanley was a murderer, that Rhodes, drunk on prickly-pear brandy, had to be rescued from the crocodile. Employed for many years by the English firm (Hatton & Cookson) which sent “Horn” to Africa, Puleston declares that the recorded exploring expeditions, river charting, native battles, elephant hunts, “gorilla purveys,” and rescue of a captive English girl, were impossible for any young employe, virtually a desk-bound office boy, of Hatton & Cookson. Unfortunately “Horn” lays claim to these experiences during his term of employ by that prosaic firm—a term which Employe Puleston computes as three to six years rather than the implied “lifetime” of 20-30-40 years.

In the face of such criticism, Ethelreda Lewis, discoverer, editor, and co-author of Trader Horn, maintains confidence in her garrulous and often tedious old peddler. And by way of backing up her publishers’ brilliant advertising campaign, based as it is on the essential truth of Trader Horn, she writes a 52-page introduction to volume two, refuting all past and future doubts as to authenticity. She emphasizes the difficulty of computing dates because the trader’s 74 years have (conveniently) mingled and mellowed into great confusion: instance his conviction that the Great War was in 1902. She records his various returns to Africa—offering an unmistakable loophole for the “lifetime” in Africa.

Thereupon follows a story which was written at the same time as volume one, but even the trader admits “I couldn’t lay claim this time to its being autobiography.” Himself a Lancastrian, “Horn” grew up with all the folklore of a yarn-swapping race, and out of remembered bits from the mouths of old men he has woven a maundering tale of his Viking ancestors: Young Harold, born with webbed hands and feet —emblem of luck in a seagoing world—set out a-pirating with a crew of other “elderly boys”; the climax to their voyage, a sharp exchange of their arrows for rocks catapulted from the majestic ship of none other than “Julius Seaser.”

Naïvely Author Horn declares himself “plot-locked.” Indeed, the merit of his new “works” lies not in the yarn, but in occasional vivid transfer of sight or sound or smell. Better yet, the recorded conversations concerning his writing, and further shoes and ships: prohibition in America, evolution, Queen Victoria, comforts of the Catholic Church. Fortunately the trader did not realize that this chatter was to be published, else it would no doubt have been formalized out of pleasant recognition. For his is the manual laborer’s awe for bombastic standards of Literature. Half an eye cocked on “literrariness,” half on the must-be-amused Americans, and another on cinema possibilities, he begs his author to put in the “highlights and so on.”

* Now practicing in Daytona, Fla. In 1894 British Vice-Consul at Kabinda, West Africa, in the so-called “Trader Horn Coast.” The photograph shows Dr. Puleston in his Vice-Consul’s uniform, complete with “fore and aft hat.”