Paul L. Briand

We come back to things. We come back to things that enchanted us early in life. And I have done so with the works of Nordhoff and Hall. I first encountered them in my early years, back in the middle 1960s, and the Bounty Trilogy (Mutiny on the Bounty, Men Against the Sea, and Pitcairn's Island) made an impact on me that has lasted a lifetime. Call it wanderlust, if you will, I was never satisfied with "home." Seeing new places wasn't enough. I needed to live in them. So, that now as I move into the last years of my life, I'm looking once again at the novels by Nordhoff and Hall that so inspired me. And I'm also, for the first time, looking at the lives of the two authors, Charles B. Nordhoff and James Norman Hall.

Paul L. Briand's biography turned out to be a key to understanding the two writers--World War I airmen who flew for the Lafayette Escadrille and then turned their backs on a modernizing America after the war and moved to Tahiti to write books of adventure, travel, and high drama in the South Seas. Briand follows the narratives of their work. I can see evidence of it from Kitchener's Mob and Faery Lands of the South Seas. But Briand has supplemented those works and others (I presume) with copious records, correspondence, and notes from both Nordhoff and Hall. Briand also has a flare for writing himself. This is one of the smoothest and most enticing biographies ever written.

Briand also notes the ironies of Nordhoff and Hall's career. At first, Nordhoff carried Hall and made his eventual success possible. Then, towards the end of Nordhoff's life, Hall stepped in to support and guide his partner and friend. Briand also tells us the extended story of a character who appeared in Faery Lands of the South Seas. It is a memorable passage of Hall's 1920 encounter with Cridland, a British hermit in search of a lonely islet on which to live out his life. In Faery Lands, we last see Cridland from Hall's perspective aboard a trading schooner, waving in the distance, his fate and life a mystery with an unknown ending. But Briand notes two more encounters that took place. First, some ten years later, when Hall visits the hermit, he finds a Cridland whose mind is disintegrating amidst the vast loneliness of the Pacific and his desert island. Just over ten years after that visit, the dying Cridland summons Hall to his deathbed to reveal the reason for his desertion to the South Seas. Briand describes Hall's reaction: Cridland's was a discarded life and Cridland was a "mistake of nature."

In the midst of this double biography, we also get a look at how Nordhoff and Hall's most famous works came about, The Bounty Trilogy, The Hurricane, Botany Bay, and The High Barbaree. But theirs was a life almost, if not more, exciting than the subjects of their novels.

And now I'm reading them again. It makes you wistful for the past, reading this biography. But you are also cautioned to follow the lesson Hall learned: never return to a place for which you have happy memories; disappointment and frustration will result if you do. Instead, search for paradise. Personally, I always thought the notion of Shangri-la a wonderful dream. But deep down I also knew that I would always prefer The High Barbaree.… (mais)