The Jungle and the Damned

166 Pages·1952·2.778 MB·English

by  Davis, Hassoldt, Millman, Lawrence

© 1952 by Hassoldt Davis
Introduction © 2000 by the University of Nebraska Press
All rights reserved
First Bison Books printing: 2000
Most recent printing indicated by the last digit below:
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ISBN: 978-0-8032-8891-1 (epub)
ISBN: 978-0-8032-8892-8 (mobi)
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INTRODUCTION
Lawrence Millman
“I was home again, in the dank discomfort which I loved.” So writes Hassoldt Davis of French
Guiana at the outset of The Jungle and the Damned.
Like many other celebrants of discomfort, whether of the dank, dry, or hypothermic variety,
Davis grew up in relatively cushy circumstances. His father, a greeting card magnate, provided
his family with all the amenities, including an estate in the fashionable Boston suburb of
Wellesley Hills and a roomy summer house on Maine’s Penobscot Bay. Young Bill (he used
Hassoldt, his mother’s maiden name, as a kind of nom de plume) tried to escape such amenities
from the beginning. The very beginning—at birth he refused to breathe, whereupon a nurse
anointed him with alcohol, and he bawled with life.
Books offered him a world quite different from both his family’s world and the gray
puritanical world of early twentieth-century New England. Especially Tarzan books. He
became so obsessed with Edgar Rice Burroughs’s arboreal hero that he even tried to look like
him; he took a Charles Atlas physical-culture course and did in fact win a magazine prize for
being “The Best Developed Boy in America.” This wasn’t enough though. At the age of
thirteen, he packed a slingshot, maps, and a compass, and set off for Africa. He got no closer to
the Dark Continent than Tremont Street in downtown Boston. Even so, he established a
paradigm for his subsequent travels: shoot for the proverbial moon, for the risky, the distant,
and the exotic, rather than the cozy world next door.
Romantic interests inevitably replaced his urge to swing from tree to tree. When he was
nineteen, he traveled to Paris and promptly took up with an artist’s model named Dodo. His
father wouldn’t have approved of Dodo. So much the better. Meanwhile, Davis was writing a
novel about l’amour and taking artistic photographs of prostitutes. The bohemian idyll ended
when he joined a public protest against the execution of Sacco and Vanzetti and was expelled
from France as an undesirable alien. Back at home, he entered Harvard, boxed, and wrote
poetry. Then came the incident that changed his life: he took some nude photographs of his
seventeen-year-old sister, Aline.
Actually, the pictures are pretty tame, even by the standards of their time. Made with a lens
screen and opal printing paper, they show Aline wearing a scarf around her waist and
balancing a hoop, her back demurely to the viewer. But his father, a man very possessive of his
daughter, found them totally indecent and kicked Bill out of the house. Thus began his career as
an author and perennial wanderer.
First Davis went to San Francisco, where he worked as a freelance journalist, although he
achieved more fame—or at least notoriety—as a maker of death masks. Then he booked
passage for Tahiti, where he met Nordhoff and Hall (authors of Mutiny on the Bounty), the
great documentary filmmaker Robert Flaherty, Paul Gauguin’s son, and any number of obliging
native women. Inspired by his friend Flaherty’s tales of even more exotic islands, he was
suddenly on a ship again, visiting Fiji, the Celebes, and Bali; whatever the destination, he
would travel deck class in order to experience the rough edges of shipboard life. Footloose
and seemingly fancy-free, he wrote to Aline: “The future will take care of its bastard self.”
From these early travels came the first Hassoldt Davis book, Islands under the Wind.
Brimming with purple, nay, ultraviolet prose, Islands under the Wind is not a particularly
good book. Apart from a splendid description of a shark fight in the Celebes, it is chiefly
remarkable for its sexual frankness; its author both kisses and tells, a combination somewhat
unusual in a travel book and even more unusual for a travel book published as long ago as
1932.
There’s often a fine line between travel and exploration, and Davis crossed that line in the
late 1930s when he signed on as a writer, still photographer, and self-styled whipping boy with
the Denis-Roosevelt Asiatic Expedition. Led by filmmaker Armand Denis, the expedition spent
eight arduous months in the most isolated parts of Burma, northern India, and Nepal. Davis
wrote up this experience in The Land of the Eye, a book vastly superior to his first. Here for
the first time he exercises his passion for the bizarre and the grotesque, a passion that was to
become one of his trademarks. He describes what it’s like to have hundreds of gorged leeches
clinging to your skin; he reports on an aphrodisiac composed of owl dung, powdered
snakeskin, and bone dust; and he gives a blow-by-blow account of the ritual decapitation of
water buffalo in Nepal, after which “my moccasins squished with blood.”
Writing does not seem to have been Davis’s favorite pursuit. “You sit by yourself all day
long,” he says in his 1957 autobiography World without a Roof, “and, if you get tight enough,
half through the night, living with the ghosts of memory or the imagined ones of fiction, hoping
the telephone will ring, that your most calamitous friend will drop in on you, forgetting your
work to call up women you really don’t give a damn about …” Like Ernest Hemingway, who
later became his friend (they would ring each other up and complain about their relationships
with women), he considered himself a man of action at least as much as a writer. And to a
large extent he was a man of action, perhaps more so than Hemingway.
Unlike Hemingway, who went to great lengths to prove that he was a war hero, Davis
actually was a war hero, albeit in a French rather than an American uniform. In 1941, he joined
the Free French forces of General Leclerc in French Equatorial Africa and was soon serving
as a combat captain with a crack Spahi (Moroccan cavalry) regiment. He saw action all over
Africa and, eventually, in Europe. His wartime memoir, Half Past When, describes his many
brushes with “Papa Death,” a phenomenon he seems to have been more than half in love with.
Still, Half Past When is an uncommonly modest book. If you blink while reading it, you might
miss the fact that its author won both the Legion of Honor and the Croix de guerre (twice) for
conduct under fire. Maybe its author won something else, too—the knowledge that he was no
longer a villain in the eyes of the country that had once expelled him.
After the war, in New York, the much-decorated soldier met a professional photographer
named Ruth Staudinger. Ruth was a blonde, and Davis had once stated in print that he didn’t
care for blonde women because they smelled like boiled milk. Ruth was different, however.
She smelled like caramel and hot rum, or so he says in World without a Roof. Likewise she
was adventurous, a first-rate cameraperson, and very attractive. She became the second Mrs.
Davis (the first was a temperamental Russian woman named Hinny, about whom he wrote:
“We didn’t want each other, but loneliness was the colder choice.”).
“Where were you to turn, Explorer, in a world so shrunken by war—mapped, exposed, foul?
…” Davis now inquired of both himself and Ruth, newly adopted as an explorer. To the
Francophile and aficionado of dank discomfort, the answer came almost immediately: French
Guiana. Ruth, to her credit, was not put off by the idea of a honeymoon in what her husband
cheerfully referred to as “rotten country.”
France has always been a bit peculiar about what it chooses to colonize—what other nation
would have tried to colonize the Sahara? Pestilential, bug-ridden, and covered with
impenetrable jungle, French Guiana is hardly less daunting in its own way than the Sahara. Its
infamous penal settlements were at least situated on a group of offshore islands. Known as the
Iles du Salut (Islands of Health), they got their name not because they were healthy—perish the
thought—but because the colony’s interior was so unhealthy.
It was this interior that Davis wanted to explore. He proposed to paddle up the five-
hundred-mile Maroni River and then trek into the remote Tumuc-Humac Mountains, the
presumed location of Sir Walter Raleigh’s lost city of gold, El Dorado. This plan had certain
risks. For one thing, the Maroni boasts eighty or so rapids, most of them whitewater with a
vengeance. For another, the local Indians had a reputation for being not very good hosts—the
Oyaricoulets, for example, had killed all but one member of a recent expedition to the
Maroni’s headwaters (the lone survivor had been asleep in a tree). But travel, for Davis,
wasn’t satisfying unless it had an element of risk.
The Davises arrived in French Guiana without their provisions, which had been held up by a
dock strike in Martinique. Having little else to do, they began gathering information about the
colony’s convicts, many of whom were on restricted parole. One convict cut Davis’s hair
without, he was happy to note, also cutting his throat. Another would sing hymns of praise to
his blanket, the only thing in the world that was truly his. Yet another was a disgruntled author
who’d killed his publisher.
In The Jungle and the Damned, Davis seems to devote an inordinate amount of space to
these convicts—the “damned” of his title. A reader impatient for vicarious thrills and death-
defying adventures might be inclined to say, “Get on with it, give me some action, enough about
these bloody prisoners …” Davis was a writer always willing to bend a narrative out of shape
to accommodate a good story, and the convicts’ stories are often very good indeed. Yet I
suspect there’s another, more personal reason why he gives so much attention to the convicts:
he identified with them. Kicked out of his home, he was a societal reject, a sort of convict, too.
And in telling one story after another about unrepentant felons, he may have been telling his
own story.
At last their provisions came, and off went the Davises into the colony’s interior. Their
paddlers were Boni, descendants of African slaves who’d escaped to the bush years earlier.
Later they hired a group of brightly painted Roucouyenne Indians to serve as guides. For Ruth,
who was filming the expedition, the daily presence of these two relatively traditional ethnic
groups was a photographic boon. But there were not many other boons on a trip that seemed to
go from bad to worse with each successive paddle stroke. The Boni constantly threatened
mutiny, the expedition’s cook was demented, and the guides were untrustworthy … and this
was just the small stuff. “I sat snarling at the fire,” writes Davis of one particularly bad day,
“wishing I had brought along just one person whom I could sock in the teeth from time to time.”
But a book is not the same as the experience it recounts, and The Jungle and the Damned
offers triumphant proof that the world, rather than being shrunken, is a bountiful, expansive,
often quite marvelous place. It takes a trip from hell, so-called, and turns it into something rich
and strange, not to mention frequently very funny. In reading about such trips, you find yourself
saying, “Thank God I stayed at home, but thank God the author didn’t.”
After the French Guiana trip, the couple returned to New York. Ruth edited her film, which
Warner Brothers later picked up and released, much to her disgust, as Jungle Terror. As for
Davis himself, he wrote, lectured, helped with the film, and grew increasingly bored. He could
tolerate neither domesticity nor staying put, so he began planning another expedition, this time
to West Africa.
Less than a year after they got back from Guiana, he and Ruth landed at Abidjan, capital of
the Ivory Coast, and then set off into the bush in search of a reputed school for witch doctors.
With its unreliable guides, tropical maladies (Davis came down with what he called “shaking-
like-a-bloody-aspen-leaf malaria”), and arcane rituals, the trip had a quality of déjà vu about
it. In fact, Sorcerer’s Village, the book Davis wrote about this trip, can be read as a sort of
sequel to The Jungle and the Damned.
And then they were home again. But since home, for Davis, was anywhere but home, his
Fifth Avenue apartment was not so much a residence as it was a repository for his travels. He
filled it with African tribal masks, Tibetan trumpets, prayer wheels, poison arrows, tom-toms,
leopard skins, and hundreds of other artifacts. Pets included a large rattlesnake and a tortoise
named Consuela, whose shell he regularly shined with shoe polish. As a gesture toward
permanence, he kept a French perpetual soup on the stove; every week or so, he would clarify
the soup with egg, throw in vegetable waters and marrow bones, and then set the pot to simmer
again. The soup sat on his stove for years, scrupulously tended by friends when he was away.
As Davis grew older, his whims seemed to grow more peculiar. For instance, he developed
an urge to taste human flesh, not having done so on any of his trips to cannibal lands. So when a
doctor friend brought him a hand snatched from an unclaimed corpse in the city morgue, he
eagerly cooked and ate it, pronouncing it excellent: could the doctor bring him its mate?
I can’t help but think that there was a quality of épater about such behavior. But since the
person whom he wanted to outrage, doubtless his father, had long since died, Ruth got the brunt
of it. In the early years of their marriage, she put up with her husband’s eccentricities, but now
she found herself resenting them, particularly when he mixed them with alcohol, of which he
was a devotee.
Every morning he would drink orange juice crowded with vodka (he claimed he couldn’t have
food on an empty stomach). At last she divorced him. She returned to Africa and made a name
for herself by running a gallery that showed only the work of untrained artists.
Davis once described Ruth as “an excellent jungle wife.” It’s not obvious that he wanted a
wife whose talents extended beyond the jungle; even so, he felt her loss keenly. Jokingly, he
talked about the need for an organization called S.A. (Satyrs Anonymous) that would “cure us
chronic addicts of love.” His other addiction, liquor, was no joke; he was now drinking more
or less all the time. His work floundered. He took a trip around the world on a tramp steamer
but wrote almost nothing about it. Perhaps the trip was unadventurous by his standards; or
perhaps he was no longer at home even when he was away from home, and no longer at home
with himself.
There is a certain symmetry about Hassoldt Davis’s life. Alcohol helped him enter the
world, and alcohol dispatched him to his grave. On 15 September 1959, he died of its effects.
One might regret the fact that he was only fifty-two at the time of his death, but I suspect he
would have preferred it that way. For it’s unlikely he would have tolerated the infirmities of
age or indeed anything else that would have kept him from lighting out for the farflung
Territory.