Denys Finch Hatton (1887-1931) may evoke for millions the visage of Robert Redford, who plays this quintessential British adventurer with an American accent in “Out of Africa.” Finch Hatton, the original, had sherry-colored hair and “topsoil brown eyes,” Sara Wheeler reports in “Too Close to the Sun: The Audacious Life and Times of Denys Finch Hatton” (Random House, 320 pages, $27.95). His aristocratic ancestors gambled their money away, and Denys was confronted with two choices: become a decadent nobleman in the manner of a Henry James protagonist in search of a rich American heiress, or restore the family fortunes by seeking new worlds to conquer in virgin territories such as Africa, where European powers were slicing apart the continent and setting up their own preserves like so many casinos on the Atlantic City Boardwalk.

Finch Hatton decided to pursue the family franchise; that is, he continued his forebears’ gamble with existence, ultimately crashing an airplane in Kenya on his way to Nairobi. He believed that to live fully and well meant travel, or as Ms. Wheeler puts it, “movement between opposing environments.”

That phrase occurs early on in “Too Close to the Sun,” when Finch Hatton becomes aware of his family’s need to sell off thousands of acres while hunting and otherwise frolicking on the remainder, collecting rents, and inheriting new properties at a time when Britannia ruled one-quarter of the world’s land mass. The Eton-bound Finch Hatton peregrinated from Surrey to London to that most exotic of places for an Englishman: the peaty hills of Wales, another family property.

A captain in the Allied forces in East Africa during World War I, where Finch Hatton witnessed a grim and protracted guerrilla war — a portent of things to come — he became a big-game hunter, renowned bush pilot, and, of course, the devastating lover of Karen Blixen (Isak Dinesen) and Beryl Markham, the aviatrix author of the autobiography “West With the Night.”

Finch Hatton has mainly served biographers as a foil to Blixen and Markham. I wondered how Ms. Wheeler would fare with a much-told story. Here is a sample of her Blixen, known to African English settlers as Tania: At 33, she had “deep-set dark eyes, a beak nose, and abundant chestnut hair, and her face was sometimes beautiful and at other times all wrong.” Markham is best summed up in one word: “patherine.”

Markham and Blixen knew each other, and though Beryl was a man stealer, Tania was tolerant. Exactly why, Ms. Wheeler does not say, but Tania may have recognized that Beryl and Denys were two of a kind, happiest when they were in motion — in this case often riding together on their beloved horses. Ms. Wheeler observes that “Tania was wafty and incorporeal, whereas there was something earthy and physical about Beryl.” These opposites attracted: “Beryl was a man’s woman (actually, she liked men and horses equally) with few close female friends, and she grasped the hand Tania held out to her.” That last phrase is meant to be taken literally and metaphorically, and it demonstrates how deftly Ms. Wheeler negotiates the terrain between fact and figuration.

But what of Ms. Wheeler’s main character? Denys Finch Hatton charmed so many women and men that Markham alleged he was bisexual. Ms. Wheeler finds no evidence of that, but she explains his appeal by quoting one of Tania’s letters: “I have always felt that he has so much of the element of air in his makeup … and was a kind of Ariel.” Then Ms. Wheeler gives Beryl her due, quoting a Markham passage about Finch Hatton’s flying skills: “The competence which he applied so casually to everything was as evident in the air as it was on one of his safaris or in the recitations of Walt Whitman he performed during his more somber or perhaps during his lighter moments.”

People just liked to watch Finch Hatton walk. He was evidently one of the most poised men to ever grace the earth, the spirit made flesh — or so this stylish biography would have us believe.

crollyson@nysun.com