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Books So Bad They're Good: Rocked in the Reflecting Pool of the Taj Mahal (gastroenteritis rewind) [1]
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Date: 2022-07-23
The human thirst for adventure, for risk, for tales of courage and discovery, has always been with us — think of The Odyssey, or the journey of Marco Polo, or the legends of Zheng He. Many a brilliant narrative has been written about the exploits of the daring, or even the ordinary forced to do what they never dreamed they could. What is Anabasis, after all, but the story of a soldier who’s forced to take up the mantle of command to save himself and his comrades? West with the Night the tale of a woman who refused to give in to the conventions of her day? Adventures can be large and small, great and mundane. It’s the telling that truly makes them extraordinary.
Think about it — how many thrillers have you watched? How many traveler’s tales have you read? How many times have you begged a parent to say what they did in the war, or during the demonstration, or about the time they shook a famous person’s hand? How many times have you longed to travel to an exotic land, seen sights no human ever seen? Thrilled to a legend of a lost civilization or stood on a famous battlefield, fighting back tears at the courage of the brave warriors who risked all upon that very spot?
As much as we long for adventure, for romance and amazement, not all books purporting to satisfy our needs are what they appear to be. History may be rife with travelers’ tales and legends of the faraway, but for every true account there are plenty of stories that are exaggerated, misinterpreted, or outright false. The travel adventure is no more immune to the Book So Bad It’s Good than any other genre, and at certain times and places there are more false ones than true.
So it was at the turn of the last century. European exploration, colonialism, and the increasing access of the middle class to the money and means to take the occasional trip resulted in a flood of exaggerated travel tales, snobby narratives of white people facing danger in areas that were about as perilous as a suburban backyard, and the occasional faked bit of exploration. Darkest Africa, the fever-choked Amazon, the untamed West, the lovely paradise of the South Seas...all came in for their share of travel fakery.
Tonight I bring you not one, not two, nor even three, but four Travel Books So Bad They’re Good. One is a parody of exaggerated travel adventures, one is an exaggerated travel adventure, the third is outright fiction disguised as an exaggerated travel adventure, and the fourth is simultaneously a sequel to the parody and a parody of every single one of them.
Confused? Bemused? Wondering what all this means? Believe me, you aren’t the only one…..
The Cruise of the Kawa: Wanderings in the South Seas, by “Captain Walter E. Traprock” (George S. Chapell) - Possibly the first of the 1920’s Exotic Adventure Travel spoofs was this amusing trifle. Written by then-popular humorist George Chappell, The Cruise of the Kawa purported to tell the story of one Dr. Walter E. Traprock, a Connecticut native who’d gone a-sailing the tropical seas in the Kawa under the steady hand of lovable old salt Ezra Triplett, and never mind that he looks like a bus driver. Chappell filled the volume with such delights as the discovery of the Filbert Islands (so called because the trees were groaning with filberts) and a hitherto unknown species of bird that laid square eggs with mysterious dots that looked very much like gambling dice. There was even a picture of Dr. Traprock and his lovely native bride, who’s wearing a hula skirt and what appear to be fuzzy carpet slippers.
Despite this and plenty more that should have tipped off even the most casual reader to The Cruise of the Kawa’s true purpose, the public bought it, read it, and immediately decided that the book chronicled a real voyage to the exotic and mysterious South Seas. Partly this was due to publisher George Putnam, the future Mr. Amelia Earhart, issuing a press release written as if Dr. Traprock and the Kawa were real. Even so, there is no excuse for the National Geographic Society inviting Dr. Traprock to Washington to regale its editorial board with a personal account of his travels. Nor was there any excuse for the business community of Derby, Connecticut, Dr. Traprock’s alleged hometown, to issue a similar invitation. “You have put Derby on the map,” they wrote, little knowing just how the book had drawn attention to their peaceful little town.
Even so, both the National Geographic Society and the town fathers of Derby, Connecticut, were better off than the readers who wrote to the publisher applying to join Dr. Traprock on his next venture, scheduled to take place on the charmingly named Love Nest. Among these was a garage owner from New Haven, Connecticut, only ten miles miles from Derby, who was so convinced Dr. Traprock was real that he planned to sell his garage and invest the entire amount in the cruise of the Love Nest. He even offered to bring a Model T Ford along in case the Love Nest landed an on an uncharted island that had paved roads, which is no more ridiculous than birds that laid square eggs.
Then again, it should not have surprised anyone that at least a portion of the reading public took The Cruise of the Kawa for a real memoir, given the vogue for exotic adventures by dashing explorers in far-off lands. Hadn’t Winston Churchill (the future prime minister, not the novelist) had first made a name for himself writing about his escape from the Boers? Hadn’t Teddy Roosevelt been chosen for the national ticket largely on the strength of his account of the Rough Riders in the Spanish-America War? Hadn’t Henry Stanley made a name for himself finding Dr. Livingstone? Weren’t books like Gertrude Bell’s Syria: The Desert and the Sown and Teddy Roosevelt’s Through the Brazilian Wilderness flying off the shelves at Brentano’s and Barnes & Noble? If all of these were real, why not the exploits of Walter Traprock and the crew of the Kawa?
Besides, only a few years later someone with an even more romantic, dashing, and spirited story came down the pike….
The Royal Road to Romance, by Richard Halliburton — if any of the wild adventure tales of the 20’s was true, surely it was this and its successors. Richard Halliburton, dashing author of nearly a dozen books recounting a series of outrageous but allegedly genuine exploits, was a real man, unlike Dr. Traprock. The handsome, Princeton-educated son of a civil engineer from Tennessee, Halliburton was an accomplished violinist and golfer, a fearless traveler and raconteur, and an adventurer whose claimed exploits would have put Indiana Jones to shame.
I mean, get a load of what Halliburton did and where he went between the early 1920’s and his loss at sea in 1939:
Retraced Hannibal’s trek across the Alps whilst riding an elephant he named “Miss Elysabethe Dalrymple.”
Swam the Panama Canal.
Traveled to Tibet, Angkor Wat, and Japan, where he ascended Mount Fuji.
Retraced Ulysses’ journey in The Odyssey.
Hired a plane he renamed the Flying Carpet, then spent the next two years flying around the world accompanied only by the pilot, Moye Stephens, whom he hired on the strength of a handshake.
Retraced Hernando Cortez’s expedition to Mexico City.
Swam in the reflecting pool of Taj Mahal
Appeared in a film based on his adventures, playing himself.
Gave extensive lecture tours recounting his exploits.
Explored (and possibly swam in) the “Mayan Well of Death,” which was probably the famous cenote at Chichen Itza.
Wrote numerous articles, film scripts, books, etc., etc., etc.
Rubbed shoulders with assorted royalty, movie stars, and other celebrities, which presumably included swimming in their luxurious pools.
Lived in a cutting edge modern home he dubbed “Hangover House,” which is probably the inspiration for “Heller House” in Ayn Rand’s paean to architecture and selfishness, The Fountainhead.
That Halliburton did all this despite a weak heart and a delicate constitution only made him seem all the more dashing, and he became the model for the archetype of the adventurous, unstoppable American traveler for millions of Americans in the 1920’s and 1930’s.
That Halliburton might – just might – have exaggerated his deeds just an eensy-weensy itsy-bitsy tiny-winey bit didn’t matter. So what if the reflecting pool of the Taj Mahal was only three feet deep? So what if the Flying Carpet was a well made plane flown by a skilled pilot, not Halliburton himself? So what if Halliburton was only able to climb mountains, purchase elephants, and go swimming in strange places thanks to being from a wealthy and unusually indulgent family? That he was bisexual with a strong preference for men was not known until years after his death, nor that his life partner, Paul Mooney, ghostwrote much of his last few books. All the public knew was that Halliburton was the living embodiment of pulp heroes like Jack Armstrong (the All-American Boy), Clark Savage, Jr., and similar wonder men, and that he was happy to share his romantic doings with one and all.
Halliburton even died romantically. He commissioned a luxurious Chinese junk, the Sea Dragon, from a shipbuilder named, my hand to God, “Fat Kau,” and announced plans to sail her from Kowloon to San Francisco in time for the 1939 Golden Gate International Exposition on the aptly named “Treasure Island.” Despite a series of cost overruns, design problems, and other issues Halliburton attributed in part to the ongoing war with Japan, the Sea Dragon set sail in early March of 1939 with a crew composed of college students, Paul Mooney, and an experienced captain, en route for California’s golden shores.
Alas for Halliburton, the voyage of the Sea Dragon was doomed from the start. Her sea trials had been such a disaster that two of the few crewmembers with actual sailing experience pulled out at the last minute, and of course there was that pesky thing called “war” that caused yet more delays. That may be why she was caught by a typhoon only three weeks into her voyage, where a cruise ship spotted her wallowing in heavy seas about 1200 miles west of Midway (the island, not the airport).
Halliburton’s captain initially seemed to think his exotic craft could handle the storm, but soon it became evident that she couldn’t. Rescue efforts were delayed by the US Coast Guard’s belief that Halliburton, ever the publicity hound, might have faked a maritime disaster to publicize his voyage, but it soon became evident that the Sea Dragon had gone down with all hands. Halliburton’s grieving parents reluctantly had him declared dead seven months later, and had his empty coffin buried in the family plot in Tennessee.
In a final exotic twist, what might have been the skeleton of the Sea Dragon washed ashore in San Diego in 1945. The final days of World War II completely overshadowed the probable solution to the ongoing mystery of what had actually happened to Richard Halliburton, and the find did not attract nearly as much attention as it might have only a few years earlier. Besides, America had much more important things to worry about than a missing adventurer when so many fine young men were dying in combat.
Another great adventurer of the 1920’s was long since retired by the time what might have been Richard Halliburton’s junk appeared on the beaches of southern California. Now a real estate agent in Brazil known as “Dona Joana,” barely fifteen years earlier she had been the toast of America for what she swore was her autobiography….
The Cradle of the Deep, by Joan Lowell — the Kawa had discovered a new source of nuts for fine European chocolatiers and Richard Halliburton had ridden an elephant across the Alps, but their exploits were nothing compared to what Joan Lowell experienced during her childhood.
And what a childhood it was! According to her wildly popular 1929 autobiography, Joan had first felt salt breeze in her hair and the rolling ocean beneath her feet when she was only a few months old, or well before Ezra Triplett and Dr. Traprock were so much as a thought in George Chappell’s cerebrum. That was when Joan’s father, master of the windjammer Minnie A. Caine, brought his starving child aboard to raise her on fresh fish, tropical fruits, and the clean air of the seven seas.
Or at least the sea lanes of the South Pacific, where the Minnie A. Caine hauled copra between various tropical isles and Australia for the next seventeen years. Young Joan, the only “woman thing” on the Minnie A. Caine except her name, grew up wild, free, and beautiful. Oh, she had to learn about the facts of life by dissecting a mother shark, and developed masculine skills such as strip poker and spitting into the wind rather than feminine fripperies like dancing, putting on makeup, and styling her hair, but so what? What dainty landlubber could boast of seeing her father blast apart a water spout with rifle fire? Harpooning a whale by herself? Knowing enough swear words to curse for four minutes straight without once repeating herself?
If all of this weren’t romantic enough for the reading public of 1929, there was young Joan’s escape from the fire that eventually ended the exploits of the Minnie A. Caine and her dauntless crew. For Joan, rather than launching a lifeboat and heading for shore, jumped into the briny deep, three small kittens digging their tiny claws into her back, and swam three miles to shore in Australia.
Even Richard Halliburton couldn’t top that.
It’s little wonder that Cradle of the Deep was a smash hit. Written in a breathless style that seemed made for the movies, it earned Joan $50,000 in royalties at a time when a nice new house in a garden suburb cost a tenth of that munificent sum. Critics praised it for its authenticity, the Book of the Month Club chose it for its March offering, and no less a director than D.W. Griffith himself bought the film rights for a stunning $75,000. Surely this was a dream come true for a daughter of the sea!
And surely it would have been, if only Joan Lowell had truly been a daughter of the sea, rather than the granddaughter of a Lowell of Boston who’d been raised primarily in the untamed wilds of Berkeley, California.
Yes. Really.
Oh, part of Joan’s story was indeed true. Her father really was a sea captain who’d skippered the Minnie A. Caine, but he’d only helmed her for a year. Young Joan had indeed spent some of that year onboard, but far from being the only female, her mother (maiden name “Lowell”) and two brothers had come along for the ride. The Caine had suffered some fire damage while docked in Adelaide, but she’d been repaired long since, and in 1929 was moored in San Fracisco, well away from the sea lanes, water spouts, and suspiciously well muscled kittens of Joan’s account.
As for Joan herself, far from being the California equivalent of Pippi Longstocking, she’d gone to a fine private school, where she’d shown a flair for the theater that she turned into a career as an actress before she’d even graduated from high school. By the time Cradle of the Deep hit the bestseller lists, she’d been in numerous motion pictures, presided as “Queen of the Fourth of July” in Tijuana, and even married (and divorced) a minor playwright named Thompson Buchanan.
Needless to say, word that Cradle of the Deep was basically a novel, not a memoir, was a huge scandal…except that it wasn’t. D.W. Griffith never made the promised film but the book continued to sell, and even a debate in The Bookman between critics Lincoln Colcord (appalled) and Heywood Broun (amused) didn’t much a of a dent in Cradle of the Deep’s popularity. Joan herself insisted that 80% of the book was true and the rest “colored up,” and claimed that “Any damn fool can be accurate – and dull” as an excuse for the blatant fabrications in her book.
Eventually the scandal died down, as such things always do, and Joan Lowell went on with her life. She worked as a reporter in Boston for several years (and wrote another memoir), then left her ancestral city for good after a booking agent attacked her and served less than eighteen months. She worked briefly for WOR in New York, then remarried in 1936, this time to an actual sea captain with the implausible but real name “Leek Bowen.”
This time the marriage stuck, and Joan spent the rest of her life living with Leek in, of all places, Anapolis, Brazil, working on a coffee plantation and selling real estate. “Dona Joana” was a beloved local figure for the next thirty years, eventually writing yet another memoir about an epic drive down the Belem Brasilia highway in a Volkswagen. She died in 1967, her alleged life harpooning whales and rescuing juvenile felines long forgotten except by anyone who happened to own an old copy of Cradle of the Deep.
Scandal, exaggeration, spoof — such were the Travel Books So Bad They’re Good that made the 1920s a true golden age for lovers of the exotic and the ridiculous. But as overstuffed as this wing of the Badbookistan Memorial Library may be, there was still room for a clever writer to outdo them all….
Salt Water Taffy; or, Twenty Thousand Leagues Away from the Sea, by “June Triplett” (Corey Ford) — That someone would have finally followed in George Chappell’s footsteps and gone after the entire genre of adventure travel should not have surprised anyone. Books about the wonders of distant lands had, if anything, only gotten worse since The Cruise of the Kawa had mocked the genre. Oh, there were some genuinely fine, and genuine, books like Roy Chapman Andrews’ tales of scientific expedition, as well as good silly fun like A. Merritt’s The Face in the Abyss. Unfortunately, for every exciting archaeological account or true travel narrative, there were several cargo pallets full of exaggerated wonder tales or outright fakes. This may be why humorist Corey Ford decided in 1929 that the time was ripe for yet another appearance by everyone’s favorite old salt, Ezra Triplett, and his daughter June.
That Corey was what my mother’s generation called “a wag” had been evidently since his early days at Columbia University, where his chief achievements had been editing a humor magazine and occasionally writing a typically sophomoric college revue. Why this qualified him to become a professional writer isn’t clear, although white male upper class privilege and the low cost of living in 1920’s New York certainly factored in.
So did Ford’s ability to make others laugh. Soon he was writing sketches for a new magazine of arts, culture, and goings on about town called The New Yorker and publishing books and humorous short stories under the name “John Riddell.” One of these early works was illustrated by the young Miguel Covarrubias, later famous for his brilliant caricatures of the rich, the beautiful, and the notorious, and if you’ve never seen his evisceration of 20th century dictators, well, that’s not my fault. Ford even ended up naming The New Yorker’s butterfly-loving symbol, Eustace Tilley, little dreaming that both Eustace and the magazine would still be around nearly as century later.
Then came Cradle of the Deep and the ensuing scandal, and Ford decided that it well past time that someone put all these adventurer fakers in their place.
Just why he decided to revive the Tripletts instead of creating his own intrepid voyagers isn’t clear, but revive them he did, and barely three months after the Book of the Month Club offered to refund the purchase price of their March 1929 selection to disappointed readers, Salt Water Taffy appeared in print. This worthy effort, which gleefully took on both Cradle of the Deep and The Cruise of the Kawa, claimed that June Triplett signed up to sail on the Kawa when she was only three hours old (take that, Joan Lowell!). Even better, June became the first white woman to witness something called “The Dance of the Virgins,” then dissected a female shark and found not its reproductive system but a copy of Margaret Sanger’s legendary “facts of life” tome What Every Girl Should Know.
Oh, she also found another nest of dice-shaped eggs, which even Richard Halliburton hadn’t managed. Take that, Mr. Royal Road to Royalties!
Salt Water Taffy became so popular that two years later Ford wrote an equally ridiculous sequel, Coconut Oil. This time the intrepid shake off the old salt described wonders such as the Itsi-Bitsi tribe of teensy-weensy pygmies, a gorilla named “Hairy Ape” in the Common Speech of the Travel Fakers, and even one “O-Yeah,” who regaled her with tales of African (??) ghosts, ghouls, and suchlike creatures.
That seems to have been the end of the Tripletts, at least as far as Corey Ford was concerned. He continued to write for the rest of his life, including a series of “Impossible Interviews” for Vanity Fair that purported to chronicle what happened when, say, Adolf Hitler met Huey Long, Joseph Stalin had a chat with John D. Rockefeller, or Sally Rand exchanged dance tips with Martha Graham.
He also did a spot of war reporting during the conflict sparked when Herr Hitler decided to explore the wilds of darkest Poland via panzer, but whether the Tripletts, Walter Traprock, or a few random timbers from the Sea Dragon were ever involved is not known. Oddly enough, though, Richard Halliburton’s pilot Moye Stephens went on forge a fine, romantic career in aviation that culminated in becoming the chief test pilot for Northrup Grumman. He even was interviewed by Ken Burns for his documentary about Charles Lindbergh, which is actually more interesting than the time he had to abort a barrel roll because Richard Halliburton had somehow forgotten to fasten the safety belt in their open biplane.
So much for the experienced and dashing world traveler, no?
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Have you ever read any of these books? Heard of Richard Halliburton? Attempted to swim three miles with a cat digging its sharp needle-like claws into your tender flesh? Rolled snake eyes with bird eggs? Now is the time to share, so hoist a mug of grog and step right up to the bonfire….
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