I recently bought a copy of Errol Flynn’s autobiography. Supposedly he wanted to title it “In Like Me” (in reference to the famous phrase, “in like Flynn”) but his publishers insisted on a different title:

My Wicked, Wicked Ways is not a promising title, but I suppose it probably was more likely to sell more copies.

I’ve skimmed portions of it and I’m not likely to read the whole thing. From everything I can tell, Errol Flynn was not a good man and to some degree he was realistic about this. He did agree to the title—and not ironically, as far as I can tell. This is always sad. As Leon Bloy said, “The only real sadness, the only real failure, the only great tragedy in life, is not to become a saint.” It can still be interesting when the man who is (so far) a failure in life has insight and can tell you with precision where he as gone wrong. That makes it all the sadder, in one sense at least, but it rewards you for the reading. When the bad man doesn’t see where he went wrong and wants your sympathy—this is merely sad and nothing else.

At the close of the book he answers the question of where he is now. He just turned fifty and bought himself a birthday present—a house in the Caribbean. The final words are written sitting on his porch there, looking out at the sea he loved so much. And the final line is:

The second half-century looms up, but I don’t feel the night coming on.

Less than four months later, he would die of a heart attack with cirrhosis of the liver listed as a contributory factor on his death certificate and this book would be published posthumously.

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According to the introduction, portions of the book are certainly fiction and some others likely to be so. Oddly, many of these parts are the more lurid stories, such as killing a man in New Guinea. The thing is very much played up—for example, before the first page there’s both lyrics from a song suggesting that young men sow their wild oats when young so they can be happy in their old age and quotes from the bible about how there is no peace but sorrow for the wicked.

Of course, the autobiography was actually written by a ghost writer by the name of Earl Conrad, so however far one trusts Errol Flynn—and I’m not sure that should be very far—there is no reason to trust Earl Conrad, whose only real motivation was to sell as many books as possible. And certainly this was the motivation of the editor, whoever that was. And of the original publisher.

The result is a book it is impossible to trust, which has no really good object anyway. Flynn was charismatic and everyone in his life used that to make money. He did, Hollywood did, and finally his publishers did. I suppose this is fitting, in a sense. He set no higher value on his life than to derive benefit from being liked and to enjoy those benefits as much as he could. Why should anyone else have set a higher value on it?

Which brings us back to the fact that the saddest thing in life is to not be a saint.