June 22, 1999
BOOKS OF THE TIMES
By MICHIKO KAKUTANI
A Fictional Memoir.
By Ernest Hemingway Edited with an introduction by Patrick Hemingway.
319 pages. Scribner. $26.
Poor Hemingway: although his instantly recognizable style helped remake the writing of English prose in the first half of this century, it would grow mannered and flaccid in the latter part of his career, and it would make him an easy mark for f*ckless imitators and hostile critics. His public persona, which initially brought him fame and wealth, would become a kind of prison, and in the years after his death, it would also make him an object of derision among feminists and multiculturalists intent on judging him by contemporary mores as a bigoted, sexist pig.
No one has given such critics more ammunition than his estate and publishers, who have brought out a succession of posthumously published books consisting of writing that Hemingway himself chose not to publish -- books that show Hemingway in the worst of all possible lights, his prose a near-parody of his earlier style; his self-portraits exercises in self-aggrandizing bravado. The latest of these volumes is "True at First Light," a so-called "fictional memoir," laboriously extracted by Hemingway's son Patrick from a 200,000-word, untitled manuscript.
The book, which is roughly half the length of the original manuscript, purports to chronicle a safari trip in Kenya that Hemingway took with his fourth wife, Mary, in 1953. It recounts the story of Mary's efforts to kill a lion that she has been tracking for six months, and the narrator's involvement with a young woman from the Wakamba tribe who is referred to as his "fiancée" or "extra wife."
John F. Kennedy LibraryErnest Hemingway in Kenya. c.1953. Related Links
Hemingway Gets a Kick in a Kickoff (April 14) Posthumous Novels Reveal the Role of Literary Executors (April 8) Hemingway's Latest: A Blend of Life, Fiction and an African Bride (August 24, 1998) Excerpt: Ernest Hemingway's 'True at First Light' Although "First Light" is not as embarrassing a performance as "Garden of Eden" (published in 1986) or "The Dangerous Summer" (published in 1985), it is decidedly mediocre Hemingway, a pallid, perfunctory echo of "Green Hills of Africa," a 1935 nonfiction work that itself holds up poorly next to his two classic African stories, "The Snows of Kilimanjaro" and "The Short Happy Life of Francis Macomber."
As Edmund Wilson has observed, Hemingway was able to externalize and objectify the conflicting elements of his own personality in his fiction. This capacity for self-criticism, however, tended to fade away when he wrote in the first person, and it disappeared entirely as Hemingway became increasingly concerned with living up to his public persona and mythologizing his own life -- problems pointed up all too clearly in "First Light."
Indeed, this book seems completely intent on creating a portrait of the author as the white alpha male, an Übermensch fought over by women and looked up to by Africans. He protectively watches over his wife, making sure she is not hurt while she is hunting, and he takes it upon himself to help the local villagers rid themselves of the scourge of marauding lions and leopards. He presumably embodies Hemingway's belief that blood sports are a test of manhood and honor, and he adheres to the hunter's code of ethics -- that is, always kill cleanly and never leave an animal wounded.
He looks at a picture of a man strangling two lions and is "deeply moved." He declares that "love is a terrible thing that you would not wish on your neighbor." And he thinks to himself "how nice it was that there was no African word for I'm sorry." He seems to think of himself as brave and honorable, when in fact he comes across as patronizing, paternalistic and self-deluding. He makes a lot of snide remarks about the Masai, describing them as "a syphilis-ridden, anthropological, cattle-worshiping curiosity," and petulantly knocks such literary rivals as Henry James, John O'Hara and F. Scott Fitzgerald."In Africa a thing is true at first light and a lie by noon and you have no more respect for it than for the lovely, perfect weed-fringed lake you see across the sun-baked salt plain. You have walked across that plain in the morning and you know that no such lake is there. But now it is there absolutely true, beautiful and believable."
BOOK EXCERPT -- an excerpt from 'True at First Light'
Although Patrick Hemingway argues in his introduction that "First Light" is not a journal but a work of fiction, the book hews closely to accounts of Hemingway's 1953 safari set down by biographers, who have pointed out that the author did become involved with an African woman and did "go native," shaving his head and hunting with a spear. The main difference between these biographical accounts and "First Light" concerns Hemingway's -- or "the narrator's" -- prowess as a hunter and all that that implies in the author's macho esthetic. While the biographies stress the writer's humiliating difficulties with his marksmanship on this trip, "First Light" focuses on Mary's disappointing encounter with a lion: an encounter in which the Hemingway character must come to her aid, kill the lion and then try to cheer her up.
As in so much of Hemingway's later work, all this spinning of his own legend is reflected in the deterioration of his prose. What was special -- and at the time, galvanic -- about his early writing was its precision and concision: Hemingway not only knew what to leave out, but he also succeeded in turning that austerity into a moral outlook, a way of looking at a world shattered and remade by World War I. His early work had a clean, hard objectivity: it did not engage in meaningless abstractions; it tried to show, not tell.
In "First Light," however, his angular language has turned maudlin and flabby. The narrator is given to tendentious comments like "revelation stands in the same relation to human reason as heavenly water does to the earthly water." Or "Who knows what the carrot feels, or the small young radish, or the used electric light bulb, or the worn phonograph disk, or the apple tree in winter." The other characters are just as bad. "Nobody knows the night," says one of his African crew. "Not me. Not you. Nobody." As for Mary, she is made to utter such absurdities as: "I am a warrior. I'm your wife and your love and your small warrior brother."
The famous rhythms of Hemingway's prose have similarly devolved in these pages into empty mannerism and nervous tics. Of one character, he writes: "He coughed his cough at once so there would be no doubt of it and it was a legitimate cough." And of his narrator's drinking: "Whisky can be as right as it can be wrong and it said I was not a stranger and I knew it was correct at this time of night."
In his introduction, Patrick Hemingway makes no great claims for this book, saying he has licked the manuscript "into what I hope is not the worst of all possible shapes." "Only Hemingway himself could have licked his unfinished draft into the Ursus horribilis it might have been," he adds. "What I offer in 'True at First Light' is a child's teddy bear."
Patrick Hemingway has done a more coherent job of editing this book than his predecessors did with "The Garden of Eden" and "The Dangerous Summer": in comparison with those volumes, "First Light" at least possesses a certain narrative tension and drive. That, however, is beside the point. This book, which Hemingway worked on while recovering from terrible injuries sustained in two plane crashes (including a fractured skull, two cracked disks, and a ruptured liver, kidney and spleen), was consigned to a bank vault by its author, who did not regard it as fit to print.
"First Light" never should have seen the light of day.
frica was a fine subject, and he had written about it well and truly in the past, but the old days were gone now, and he was old and weary and ailing, and what he wrote this time was not good and it was not true. The writer was a proud man and he took pride in his writing, and when the writing of the Africa book did not go well, he put it away. Long ago, he said that there was nothing worse for a writer than for his writing "which has been rewritten and altered to be published without permission as his own," and he believed this as he believed few things. Later, when he was gone, others would forget his pride and his love of words, and they would publish his Africa book and other books he had put aside. They would publish the books because the writer was a famous writer and he had many readers, but they would do damage to his name. 
