(no subject)

[skygiants]

I picked up The Rivers Ran East -- a theoretically factual 1950s account of an explorer's journey in the Peruvian jungle -- based entirely on seeing a tumblr post featuring the quote "Ever since he had aimed that gun at my throat, I had liked him immensely. And now I liked him even better, and was terribly sorry he was not going in search of El Dorado with me," because I did not fully believe this was something that a real human had written in a theoretically factual account.

Reader, it was, and he did.

The Rivers Ran East might as well be titled "I'm Leonard Clark, and welcome to Jackass." Clark is an asshole, the book is deeply racist in the worst pulp-adventure Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom style, and everything it contains needs to be taken with at least 500 grains of salt, but here are the broad outlines of this theoretically factual adventure:

Leonard Clark arrives in Peru with $1000 in his pocket determined he is going to go into the jungle under cover of seeking indigenous botanical medicines, but secretly he is going to try and find GOLD! in EL DORADO!! Then he puts up in the most expensive hotel so people will think he's impressive while he stocks up on supplies & finds a buddy for the trip.

A PROFESSOR: Here are the thirty different kinds of poisonous snakes you can expect to encounter in the jungle. Of course, you'll have anti-venom!
LEONARD CLARK: "I had not dared to tell Professor Rosell I had no funds to purchase anti-venom. I knew from previous experience in Latin America he would consider me a hopeless visionary, a crank, and so cease his briefing."

WELL MAYBE IF YOU HADN'T PUT UP AT THE FANCIEST HOTEL -- anyway. ANYWAY. This is just 8 pages in. We continue.

Leonard Clark eventually finds a very handsome travel companion named Jorge. It's very important that we know how handsome Jorge is. Clark assumes that Jorge is a down-on-his-luck university student who needs the money, but in fact! someone else they meet along the river confides in him that Jorge is secretly the HEIR to VAST ESTATES AND FORTUNE, and is going into the jungle simply because he has a yen for adventure! more on this later!

Anyway Clark is very pro-Jorge but decides he cannot tell him about the El Dorado plan until he knows he can trust him.

JORGE: so why are we here, what is the plan?
CLARK: lol idk we're just going to wander around until we find someone to demonstrate indigenous medicine to us I guess
JORGE: ....so we have basically no supplies and there are two of us and there are some active wars on?
CLARK: Well, it's true that many well-funded, well-staffed expeditions into the Amazon have failed and resulted in many deaths, but on the other hand, nobody's ever tried going in basically without supplies and staffing before, so MAYBE THAT'S THE SECRET! :D
JORGE: I am not so sure I want in on this jackass expedition anymore
CLARK: FINE THEN I WILL DO IT MYSELF
JORGE: ...you will be dead
CLARK: lol u scared
JORGE: ....or I could shoot you in the head right now and save the jungle the trouble??
CLARK: LOL DO IT

This is of course the aiming of the gun at the throat referred to in the above quote, after which Clark is even more *____* about Jorge than before

Soon Clark and Jorge encounter a hypothetical 'missionary' who in fact is selling indigenous Ashaninka converts as slave labor to rubber plantations. Clark goes on for a while about how slavery is terrible and how shocking it is that such practices are still extant in the 1950s etc.

CLARK: Surely the United States would not condone this slavery if they knew about it!!
SLAVER: Buddy who do you think buys all our rubber??
CLARK: ...welp, no wonder everybody hates us.
CONSTANT READER: OK, Clark, I guess you have at least a fraction of a clue --

Then Clark and Jorge promptly buy six slaves to help them get through the jungle.

CONSTANT READER: omgwtf????!?

A couple of chapters later, he offhandedly mentions that their former slaves were now free men with official paperwork to prove it, but by that time they're already stuck in the middle of the jungle on this jackass expedition and SEVERAL of them are already dead, so like? buddy??? I don't think you get any morality points for that one.

Further adventures on this leg of the trip include:

- deciding that the only way to get over some bit of terrain is to RIDE THE RAFTS DOWN A WATERFALL and then REBUILD THE SHATTERED PIECES AT THE BOTTOM, while hoping they don't die
- Clark and Jorge trying and failing to kill a crocodile for so long (against the explicit advice of their former slaves, who to a man are like 'THIS IS DUMB') that eventually when they are about to kill him they decide they just don't have the heart even to try anymore, THE CROCODILE EARNED ITS VICTORY
- Jorge coming down with malaria but it's fine! he's fine!! everything's fine!!!
- a couple of encounters with indigenous groups anthropologically documented in, as aforementioned, wildly racist language

Right at the end of this journey, they get held prisoner by an annoyed local tribe. Clark is convinced they are going to try to eat his heart because they think he's a powerful witch doctor. Again: five hundred grains of salt. Anyway, after several days of starving in a hut with Jorge wasting away from malaria, the last remaining Ashaninka guy on the expedition, whose name is Jose, single-handedly rescues them and manages to get them to an actual legit mission that is not a cover for slavery operations.

CLARK: I guess Jose is all right?
JORGE: Yeah, I guess Jose is all right.

But good old Jose has a shoulder injury at this point and cannot continue on adventures, so they pay him off and leave him at the mission. Clark says, "the priests assured me they would make him the first Indian capitalist on the Ucayali, purchase barbasco cuttings for him, and get him started as a small plantation owner." What Jose might actually want to do with his money is not gone into by the text, because apparently single-handedly saving the lives of two white guys is not enough to allow him financial agency.

Shortly afterwards, Clark decides he and Jorge have gone through enough Adventures Together that that he can finally tell his new best friend the Secret of El Dorado! --

-- EXCEPT Jorge finds a letter waiting for him at their next stop, calling him home immediately because his brother has died and he has to go home and take care of his vast estates and fortune!! GOODBYE JORGE.

Reader, I laughed. This is why it's not always a good idea to travel with the most handsome romantic lead you can find in Peru!

Extremely bummed by this twist of events, Clark goes to hang out in the city of Iquitos and try and find a new travel companion for the next, El Dorado phase of the journey. Here he finds Inez Pokorny, an American woman who has just spent eight months traveling up the Amazon by herself.

Inez decides she is going to be Clark's new traveling companion. Clark decides she's playing an elaborate practical joke.

INEZ: "I'll probably have a lot of things to buy, would you tell me what I'll need?"
CLARK: "A few cans of sardines, some crackers, and maybe a few bottles of that excellent Oporto over at Johnny's?"
INEZ: "...You aren't very bright this morning, are you, Mr. Clark?"

Inez buys the rest of the supplies for the expedition, meets with the appropriate officials to arrange transport down the river (a task with which Clark has had no luck whatsoever), and has Clark sign an elaborate waiver relieving himself of responsibility for any damages that might occur to Inez while they're traveling down the river. Clark signs the document and cheerfully continues to assume he's being elaborately punk'd.

INEZ: OK, my pal Baron von Wolfenegg, a disenfranchised Austrian aristocrat in exile, is going to take us 700 miles downriver --
CLARK, NOW ACTUALLY ON THE BOAT, WITH INEZ: .....but you're not really going?!?
BARON VON WOLFENEGG, A DISENFRANCHISED AUSTRIAN ARISTOCRAT IN EXILE: Buddy, I'm Inez's friend, not yours, and if Inez doesn't go, you don't go!

So Inez and Clark head off, but alas, Baron von Wolfenegg's boat breaks down when they're only halfway there. Clark tries to send Inez home with von Wolfenegg. Inez scoffs!

INEZ: "I'm not afraid of Indians. Headhunters - pooh! Bugs bother you worse than they do me. Any real woman can get through this jungle."

Clark explains his position that women "belong in their father's house, or in their husband's house, or at least in somebody's house." Inez alternately ignores him, and cheers herself up by making fun of his clothes. Von Wolfenegg chugs back sadly to Iquitos in his broken boat. Goodbye, disenfranchised Austrian aristocrat in exile!

Shortly afterwards, Clark is attacked by a snake which spits venom in his eyes and spends most of the rest of the journey half-blind and with a horrible eye infection.

INEZ: We're backtracking a little bit to make for a settlement to get your eyes treated.
CLARK, MOSTLY BLIND, WITH HORRIBLE RED EYES: "What a girl!"
(INEZ, PROBABLY: ...what an asshole!)

Eventually, Clark decides that the time has come to reveal to Inez what he never managed to reveal to Jorge, the real reason for his journey:

CLARK: So you probably won't believe me or will think I'm delusional when I tell you that I'm here questing! for EL DORADO!!!
INEZ: oh that's nice, I'm actually part of an international El Dorado-hunting syndicate and figured your wacko lone expedition would make a good cover for mine. Thanks, weirdo!
CLARK: .......

As they travel upriver, Clark is shocked to find out that despite all his dire predictions about death and murder and rape etc., Inez -- by generally being polite and taking some time to study the language -- manages to cheerfully get along with most of the indigenous people they meet.

Finally they find a river where the local Jivaroan people pan for gold, and manage to trade for enough of it to make the trip worthwhile, and Clark decides this is good enough, he has Discovered El Dorado. Also! finally! after multiple chapters of whining about her! -

Clark: "I could see that the real conquest of El Dorado had not been due to me at all, but to the efforts of one thin girl with a winning smile and a knack for the Jivaro dialect."

Anyway, despite one last bit of difficulty involving staggering through the desert and losing a couple of their bags of gold, Clark considers the expedition overall a raging success and makes $16,000 in gold!

(The fact that multiple people died in the first leg of the journey while he and Jorge were flailing through the jungle in order for him to make his $16,000 does not appear to bother him or anybody else in the least.)

Inez puts on lipstick and a chic suit and hops a plane back to London to report on the results of the adventure to her international El Dorado-hunting syndicate (??) and Clark ends the book by telegraphing Jorge, his first and truest love, to ask if he's bored of being a rich landowner yet and wants to go El Dorado-hunting again!

Will they actually take an appropriate amount of supplies and hire consenting staff members this time? JURY'S OUT.

Comments

[seekingferret]

How is this not a Johnny Depp movie already?

[coyotegoth]

RIGHT?

[davidgillon]

I'm thinking the sheer level of carelessness demands Keanu Reeves.

ETA: grrr, blasted speelchucker, that should have been 'cluelessness'.

[jadelennox]

Reader, I lol'd.

[brownbetty]

I hit Inez and immediately felt this book was about the wrong person.

[skygiants]

I have to admit, I would watch the (almost certainly also wildly racist) Katharine Hepburn movie.

[watersword]

YES PLEASE WHY WAS THERE NO KICKSTARTER IN THE 1930S.

[okrablossom]

LOL.

Thank you for sharing this :)

[skygiants]

Man, I have been sharing in disbelief with everyone I know for the past three days, I am sure at this point all my friends are like 'PLEASE SHUT UP ABOUT THIS HAREBRAINED EXPEDITION'

[rymenhild]

.............

*facepalming forever*

[skygiants]

The most distressing part is how many Goodreads comments are unironically like 'what adventure! what a role model!!'

[elsane]

This was IMMENSELY ENTERTAINING, and the sheer amount of headdesking implied rather boggles the mind.

Everything about this, including the name Wolfenegg, cries out for a fictionalized treatment with Inez at the center.

[skygiants]

VON WOLFENEGG. I almost can't blame Clark for thinking he was being punk'd when he was introduced to the illustrious Baron Von Wolfenegg.

(And yet, he takes 'international El Dorado-hunting syndicate' perfectly in stride without batting an eyelash!)

[landofnowhere]

Wow that was amazing. Thank you for writing this up.

[skygiants]

it was a genuinely wild ride from start to finish

[landofnowhere]

I was understandably curious about Inez Pokorny, so I went on google and ancestry.com (I have institutional access) to see what I could turn up, which did not include the international El Dorado-hunting syndicate, but did include:

Inez Ethel Pokorny was born in Michigan in 1911. (There's another Inez Pokorny (nee Roberts) who was born in 1918, but this is clearly the right one.)

Some passing mentions in a high school yearbook/magazine, which are disappointingly dull, the only at all interesting one being "The past semester has found the Euterpe club doviting its time to the study and appreciation of the Short Story. Mary Mumford and Inez Pokorny arranged a well-planned study which provided for the reading of one work on an author from every country." Later census records indicate that she did not attend college.

Ships' manifests indicate that she was indeed a world traveler: she went from Honolulu to Shanghai, then a few months later Hong Kong to LA in 1935, also Boulogne, France to New York in 1937. Presumably there were other legs of these journeys also, and perhaps also other journeys that aren't recorded?

The 1937 manifest notes that she was living in Florida, and she's still there in the 1940 census. Her occupation is listed as Wardrobe Department in the moving pictures: a Google books result says that she worked on a 1939 film called "The Honeymoon's Over." She's living with her parents (her father is a builder.) At some point in the early 40s she moves to LA.

Then in the 1940s she was in fact in Latin America! In 1944 she flew from Mexico City to El Paso. There's a Brazilian tourist visa from 1946. Profession is given as "escritoria" (writer). Too bad that nothing she wrote seems to have be anywhere that I can find it...

In 1947 there's a manifest for a ship she took from Panama back home LA. It only lists two US citizens as passengers (though that's pretty normal), the other one being Leonard Francis Clark. (So much for taking a plane to London?) She travels again in 1948, taking another plane from Mexico City to El Paso.

Then in September 1949 she marries cinematographer Lucien Ballard, who is important enough to get his own Wikipedia page. Filmreference.com says they have two sons, but otherwise I couldn't find any records of her until her death in 1982.

[skygiants]

oh man, I can't believe you found this! I just kind of assumed 'Inez Pokorny' was a pseudonym but APPARENTLY NOT :O So much indeed for the plane to London! And so much for poor Jorge, who I guess never did get to go on his second adventure to El Dorado.

(Clark says that she traveled all over the world as part of this secret syndicate under cover of being a dancer & hints that she might also have been a spy?)

[landofnowhere]

I guess it hadn't occurred to me that it might be a pseudonym? (I guess because I didn't realize she was maybe a spy? Also because when I searched for her I found http://www.theriversraneast.com/?page_id=43 which has a comment from someone who met her and another from a distant relative... but also it seems like the folks who run that website, who seem to be taking Clark too seriously, also assumed that Inez was an assumed name.)

I'm curious what she was actually up to in her travels... I didn't see any indication anywhere that she was a dancer, though she could've been for all I know. But maybe she put her Wardrobe Department skills to good use in her spying!

(She reminds me a bit of my late grandmother. When she was alive, she struck me as a stereotypical Jewish grandmother, who would worry that it 'might rain' and call me up to tell me that I should wear long underwear. But after she died my dad found some old letters of hers that indicated that she'd gone to Uruguay in her youth and had her bus get stuck in a mudslide...)

[skygiants]

I tried Googling von Wolfenegg, too, and while I did not find much evidence of him I did come across the Facebook page of a current von Wolfenegg descendant living in Peru! So apparently the whole thing was much less pseudonymous than I thought. :O I was basing my assumption off a comment from someone else on the Google Books page who claimed to be the son of the person that Jorge Mendoza is pseudonymous for.

(Way to go your grandma! I'm assuming she got out of the mudslide.)

[rachelindeed.livejournal.com]

Oh, goodness -- I think that makes her stepmother to Carroll Ballard (who directed a favorite film of my childhood, The Black Stallion).

[sovay]

she marries cinematographer Lucien Ballard

Okay; that's neat. I knew he had (famously) been married to Merle Oberon, but not to anyone else. I got the following out of a terrible OCR of the Miami Daily Record, mostly about Lucien Ballard visiting his home town:

"The cameraman's wife, the former Inez Pokorny, attracted world wide recognition as an explorer and adventurer by visiting practically every country on the globe, She is credited with being the first white woman to travel by canoe up the Amazon River in South America from the Atlantic side to the Pacific ocean. She spent a year in making the long and hazardous journey. Other explorers have floated down the Amazon river from the Pacific to the Atlantic coasts, but few have made the trip upstream. Of Bohemian parentage, Mrs. Ballard is an accomplished amateur photographer. Mr. and Mrs. Ballard were acompanied here by their two sons, Christopher, 3, and Anthony, 15 months old. Ballard formerly was married to Merle Oberon, noted motion picture actress."

[landofnowhere]

Nice find!

[loligo]

Hey, coincidentally I just watched an episode of Globe Trekker all about Iquitos and the rubber boom. (Odd that the article doesn't list the episode number or title, so I'm not sure how someone would track down the actual episode from that write-up.)

[skygiants]

Oh, cool! I actually was not familiar with Globe Trekker before Googling it just now.

[sovay]

an international El Dorado-hunting syndicate

That woman is living her pulp fiction dream.

The bit where I recognize Iquitos and the Jivaros from Werner Herzog's Fitzcarraldo (1982) is perfectly reasonable geography, but also feels telling.

[skygiants]

From your review, the protagonist of Fitzcarraldo sounds like he may honestly have a better grasp on reality than Leonard Clark.

[sovay]

From your review, the protagonist of Fitzcarraldo sounds like he may honestly have a better grasp on reality than Leonard Clark.

Scarily, he might have.

[edit] While looking for information on Inez Pokorny, I just ran into a fragmentarily accessible narrative by Clark (an excerpt from the book? later incorporated into it?) and boy howdy is that some classical exotic racism right there: "the mysterious, silent land east of the Andes . . . an uncharted green hell . . . Yet, through the strangely twisted codes of the Amazon, it was the amazing and little-known skill of these same savage witch doctors that later saved my life when death was as certain as blowing out a match." HEADHUNTER WAR DRUMS POUNDING THROUGH THE JUNGLE NIGHT GOOD LORD LEONARD CLARK.

You realize that you are now obligated to see The Lost City of Z when it comes out, right?

[skygiants]

Some of that is summary of the book and other is straight from it (the whole bit with the snake and the "I ONLY HAVE FOUR OR FIVE MINUTES!!!!" is direct text) but yeah, Clark pretty much spends the whole book just rolling around in every pulp trope he can possibly find. SURE THEY WANTED TO EAT YOUR HEART AND CLAIM YOUR WISDOM, LEONARD CLARK. Sure ... they did ........

....and I had not yet heard of it but apparently I am! :O

[sovay]

....and I had not yet heard of it but apparently I am!

I can vouch for the book, which is nonfiction, recent, and essentially about the way this sort of quest becomes a vertiginous black hole into which anyone who comes into contact with the legend, including the author of the book, inexorably gravitates and either disappears or narrowly escapes and writes about their experience for The New Yorker. I can't quite imagine what a film would look like, but I look forward to your review!

[evewithanapple]

A couple of chapters later, he offhandedly mentions that their former slaves were now free men with official paperwork to prove it, but by that time they're already stuck in the middle of the jungle on this jackass expedition and SEVERAL of them are already dead, so like? buddy??? I don't think you get any morality points for that one.

I was gonna say, maybe if he at least immediately freed them and paid them fair wages . . . ? Which it sounds like he KIND of did, but he neglected to give them a say in whether or not they wanted to go on his and Jorge's honeymoon jungle tour.

[skygiants]

Yeah it really does not seem like anybody was given an opportunity to refuse this exciting career opportunity. But, I mean, what kind of loser DOESN'T want to ride a couple of crappy rafts down some roaring river rapids to their inevitable destruction, right??

[allchildren]

Inez is my favorite Carmen Sandiego character ever. (What???)

[skygiants]

Scouting ahead for Carmen's theft of El Dorado WHICH IS WHY NO ONE ELSE EVER ACTUALLY FOUND IT!

[frith_in_thorns]

Wow, this sounds incredible. I cannot stop laughing.

[skygiants]

The experience of reading this account was just one WTF after another!

[sovay]

if he's bored of being a rich landowner yet and wants to go El Dorado-hunting again!

You saw that this is a contagious haunting?

[skygiants]

YUP. "We vow to find proof of Clark's grand claims!" I mean. GOOD LUCK WITH THAT, GUYS.

[starlady]

This is totally par for the course for white guys wandering around the Amazon but also way more batshit than even many of those outings. Now I need to watch some Werner Herzog movies…

[skygiants]

I keep remembering things I forgot to put in the post, like how he has to explain to the Peruvian government that he's just a harmless explorer and not a spy, except then they wire to the States and find out that in WWII ... he totally was a spy. OOPS!

[lilysea]

OMG WTF BBQ?

Thank you for sharing! ^_^

[skygiants]

I COULDN'T NOT

[lnhammer]

So, Yuletide nomination next year, right?

[skygiants]

Would you have to classify it as RPF?? I still can't believe there is evidence of an actual canon Inez Pokorny!

[lnhammer]

RPF all the way, baby.

[brigdh]

I've also seen that tumblr post! Thank you for hunting down the source and providing us all with even more amusement.

Then Clark and Jorge promptly buy six slaves to help them get through the jungle.
omgwtf indeed!!

[skygiants]

"We needed to pose as slavers or we would never have gotten through!" OK, but that doesn't mean you have to actually -- come on. COME ON!!