Richard Halliburton's Storm and Stress and The 1920s

Excerpt from an unpublished version of Don't Die in Bed: The Brief, Intense Life of Richard Halliburton

Although it had gone to war, America returned to isolationism. By 1920, the Bolshevik Revolution had struck fear in American minds.
Thanks to the vindictive Peace of Versailles, Germany had launched into hyper-inflation. As a foreign correspondent, Ernest Hemingway reported Germans using a wheelbarrow of Deutsche marks to buy a loaf of bread. Germany was demonized in the American press. Socialists, labor organizers, immigrants, were all suspected as bomb-carriers. In 1920 the Nineteenth Amendment became law, giving women voting rights. Earlier that year, the Eighteenth had been enacted, prohibiting alcohol. Warren G. Harding was nominated as the Republican candidate for President and took office in 1921. Only later did the public learn of the Tea Pot Dome Scandal and his corrupt cronies.

 The social fabric became rewoven. The Roaring Twenties. The Jazz Age. The Lost Generation. Lounge Lizards. Flappers. Hip flasks. Raccoon coats and sis-boom-bah. Songs expressed the irreverence, the lack of seriousness toward old customs and standards. There was, In the morning, in the evening, ain’t we got fun? In the meantime, in between time, ain’t we got fun? Another hit of the day was, It ain’t gonna rain no mo, no mo, it ain’t gonna rain no mo. So how the heck can I wash my neck if it ain’t gonna rain no mo? Electricity lit up farming towns like What Cheer, Iowa. The Bijou, the Strand, the Grand—motion picture theaters could be found on almost every corner. Ministers preached against the evil of closed motor cars for young people. Clara Bow was the It Girl. Douglas Fairbanks swash-buckled with pirates while Mary Pickford fell into his arms. Charlie Chaplin’s tramp shambled into the hearts of laughing audiences. Rudolph Valentino acted in Passion’s Playground while next year his Latin rival, Ramon Novarro, appeared as a dancer in Small Town Idol. A new phenomenon, celebrity cults, developed around movie stars. The stock market boomed with rampant speculation for quick profits. It ain’t gonna rain, no mo, no mo. It did, in October 1929 when the Dow Jones plunged the nation into the Great Depression.

In 1920 Sinclair Lewis published Main Street, and outraged Sauk Center, Minnesota, and others throughout the USA with his cynical depiction of hypocritical businessmen. Rotarians, Optimists, chambers of commerce, were all his targets. George Follanbee Babbitt is Lewis’s model for the hypocrisy of middle class society and businessmen. Lewis’s narrow-minded and conformist citizens dare not dream beyond the edges of their small minds and towns. They are conformist to the core, a mockery of the rugged individualism that shaped the country. Lewis captured the changing times of soulless materialism. Money alone did not make the world go round, he insisted. He condemned the market mentality that had replaced the ideals of Democracy and personal freedom.

Richard Halliburton’s determination had been strengthened by his successes with the Prince and the Pic, but as yet it had no life purpose. He saw what was in store for him—business, money, the so-called good life—and he had reservations about it all. While his classmates prepared for their careers, he wondered what career was worth having. He laughed, drank, and partied with them. He crammed for exams with them. Yet, he saw himself as different. For all his friendship, for all theirs, he gradually came to see his difference as something he must follow.

When a freshman, he had flaunted his difference. Frosh were expected to wear a traditional beanie cap. He did not. They were forbidden to walk on campus lawns. He did. Aware that these acts threatened his popularity, he arrogantly explained, “I am a non-conformist.”  In The Magnificent Myth, Jonathon Root asserts that but for Halliburton’s room mates he would have been “barred from several campus activities, the Cap and Gown Society among them.” (Myth 45)

Something had been growing within him during his Princeton years and, like most adolescents, he had difficulty articulating it. An unease had settled on him. It was a restlessness that manifested as a kind of physical discontent. He had to be active. He had to walk, to run, to ride a bicycle. He had to be doing something.

It was a kind of sturm und drang, storm and stress. He could not reconcile his feelings. While still hoping to go into action during the war, he wrote his father that “the older I get the more sadness there seems to be in the world. Maybe it’s just because my emotions have become unusually sensitive in the last year or two.” His entry into Princeton, then Wesley’s death, followed by America’s entry into the war, seemed to hone his sensitivities. They coalesced into something to get through. In the letter, he said,

"There seems to be something in turmoil inside me all the time. I intend to keep myself in control until the war is over and my education, and ­then I’m going to bust loose and let my restless, discontented spirit run its course. The idea of leading a monotonous confined respectable life is horrible to me. Some day the fires inside are going to break out and I’ll push my working table out the window and just be a wild man. I’ve got in the habit of running instead of walking.

Something keeps saying faster, faster—move! It isn’t nerves. I sleep like a log. I feel wonderful all the time."  

On the one hand, he found a sadness in the world; on the other, he felt “wonderful all the time.” He was filled with energy. A clinician might classify his personality as bipolar. If that be the case, then one could argue for a genetic predisposition, although little family evidence avails itself. If that be the case. The manic phase could be argued as manifesting itself in his impulsive spending, without much other evidence of self-destructiveness. Certainly his father reveals no such symptoms, although at least one of Richard’s letters to his mother indicates that she was depressed an entire summer. Environmentally, the catalyst would have been the death of his brother, which he took hard by all accounts.

While still groping for identity, he tramped through the Pyrenees to Andorra, spending a week there. He was loath “to return again to the world, with its complexities, its unhappiness, and burdensome wisdom.” At bottom, the exuberant youth felt a weltenschmerz that plagued him throughout his short life. Not yet 21, he felt a weariness, a sorrow, with the world. Andorra was a place far from the Twentieth Century he had been born into. On the other hand, he stayed with a highly educated Englishman, Ainesworth, who owned an island about seven miles square off the Burma coast. Ainesworth lived alone except for two Chinese servants and one hundred natives who worked his teak and camphorwood sawmill. The gentleman was properly English—mannerly, witty, charming—and Richard saw his as a tropical paradise with white beaches, vibrant flowers, and vividly colored birds. For all that, Halliburton could not understand why he chose such an idle life.

In the 1930s while riding through coastal hills of California rye grass, he followed Creek Canyon to climb to the summit of a ridge. At the top he reined in his horse to lean on the pommel and gaze down on Pacific waves gleaming under the sun. Here he built his own Shangri-La. He was advised not to build on the ridge, but he did. He called it Hangover House. It was a place where he could escape the cold, insane world. His home hung, seemingly precarious, on a sheer drop overlooking the ocean, and today Laguna Beach designates it as a historical structure. He would not have built it had he been less bedeviled. In his life, we find a complex tension between a need for peaceful, lazy solitude on the one hand and a restless exploratory spirit on the other. With its lofty perch and quiet haven, the house itself offers a metaphor of his life: a need for risk confusedly entwined with a desire for peace.

He walked. He couldn’t sit. In letters home, his complaints increase about his restlessness. Another modern term springs to mind, Attention Deficit Disorder, and today it serves to describe a host of symptoms, sometimes offering excuse for those so described. No such term existed then. Richard took no excuses. He worked hard and played hard. He often went to Lawrenceville, six miles distant, where he visited his former teachers, although he avoided Wesley’s dorm room. He walked to Trenton, ten miles away. Once, he tramped on to Philadelphia. He always pushed the edge of the possible. The forty miles took him all night and barely left him time to catch the train back for his morning’s classes. He had an energy demanding its release and a compulsion to push his luck.

Great physical activity is a classic sign of hyperthyroidism. In his twenties he fell ill; a New York City doctor diagnosed it as hyperthyroidism. Although another physician discounted the analysis, certain symptoms were his: distractibility, fatigue, trembling, impatience, over activity, mood fluctuation, and rapid heart beat. Some believe that stress or emotional disturbance can trigger it. Individuals with bipolar disorder have a significantly greater risk for a hyperthyroid. When he turned fifteen he had experienced tachycardia and spent four months at Battle Creek Sanitarium in Michigan, and even then he was restless.

In the end, a physical or psychological explanation for his personality must remain incomplete. Not enough is known about his medical history. We do know that he was a creature of conflicting needs, and that they found expression in a particularly modern manner. He intellectually rebelled against the strait and narrow path of worldly success. He had an individual view of the spiritual as feeling-through-adventure. As a child of the century, he wanted success but on his own intellectual and spiritual terms. His story becomes a tale in which he sets out in his life, refusing to compromise his values. By its end, life has compromised him in ways he could not have foreseen.