Hemingway in Africa

“It was a country to wake from, happy to have had the dream.”

“All I wanted to do now was get back to Africa. We had not left it, yet, but when I would wake in the night I would lie, listening, homesick for it already.”

I picked up Green Hills of Africa this week. It apparently was not much appreciated at the time nor especially valued by later Hemingway scholars.

“Evenly divided between big game lore and salon controversy,” in the words of one 1935 New York Times review*, about sums it up. Of the big game lore, two-thirds is specifically about Hemingway and his friend Karl’s pursuit of kudu, a kind of antelope with exotically curling horns. Karl is lucky and shoots a beautiful kudu the first day. Hemingway is jealous. The next morning, he is not jealous. He will get his kudu. And so he does, many pages of fine country later.

The salon controversy is a fun guessing game with even a little knowledge of Lost Generation writers, though I don’t know and don’t care to look up which female writer got under Hemingway’s skin so thoroughly. But there are conversational asides and stream-of-consciousness meditations about writing and living well that are more and more interesting than “salon controversy.” The accounts of the evenings after a day’s shooting, where most of these asides occur, are a pleasure in general. Fireside conversation between Hemingway, his wife Pauline, and their white guide Pop returns frequently to war, to Pauline’s amusement: “Say, were either of you in the war by chance?”

I can see why one could be put off, by the pile-up of dead animals, the expectation that “Karl shot a larger rhino than I; now I am sad” be taken seriously, the rapturous communing with colonized land, etc. But if you like Hemingway at all, and you’re willing to skim where it gets repetitive, it more or less goes without saying that his safari chronicle will be enjoyable. Green Hills of Africa makes a decent case for the appeal of big-game hunting, despite its being so thoroughly out of fashion now.

Hemingway’s assessment of his own failings is surprisingly affecting; maybe it’s knowing how his life ended. “I was getting the evening braggies,” he says after his triumphant shooting of the kudu; he tells us when he’s been “a four-letter man” and tries to overcome his trophy envy and be happy for his friend Karl’s luck.

The African people in this book do not get to be fully human, and the n word is used repeatedly; if this book is bad or hasn’t aged well, it’s because of those things.

I then read his short story The Snows of Kilimanjaro. Had I read this in college I would have been mesmerized. Today I found it absurd. I like Hemingway, I think he’s worth reading even though women are peripheral and two-dimensional in his world, but there’s no writing good enough to redeem a plot like this for me. A man is dying of gangrene on a hunting trip. He is accompanied by a woman, who has ruined him with her money and her love. He thinks about all the other women who ruined him and forced him to squander his talent. The women have done this by having money, or needs in the bedroom, or simply by living a comfortable life in his view. F. Scott Fitzgerald makes a cameo appearance. Vultures and hyenas circle and the man informs his wife that “love is a dunghill.” Then he dies.

*which continues: “Sometimes dispensing with grammar, Mr. Hemingway decimates the fauna of Kenya, Tanganyika, Northern Rhodesia and the Belgian Congo along with Emerson, Hawthorne, Whittier and Thoreau. The carnage is frightful.”

A second review appeared in the NYT two days later. It’s less amusing, but comes to the more useful conclusion that “even if you do not approve very strongly of men who go out and blast innocent rhinos into kingdom come you can still enjoy ‘Green Hills of Africa’ for many other things.”