Truly Un-Enlightening

True At First Light. E Hemingway. Fiction. Scribner 1999. Hardback pp 311. $26.00. ISBN 0-684-84921-6.

When I showed some of my writing to a relative, he remarked: “Well, it’s so-so, but I prefer stories that tell you something. Writers like Hemingway for example,…”

Not having read Hemingway (cringe) I figured I should find out what was so great about him, and when I came across True At First Light reduced from $26 to $6, I bought it.

Overview
Setting - Early Fifties. Africa, its stunning scenery, against which the events unfold, its people and wild creatures which feature prominently in the story (usually at the receiving end of a bullet).

Characters – The author/protagonist (Papa/Ernie) and his wife (Miss Mary), are out in the wilds on safari, along with some native Africans who help with hunting, cooking, camp and driving duties and others who come and go, both white and African throughout the story.
[NB At the end of the book is a “Cast of Characters” which, in my opinion, would have been better placed at the beginning.]

Themes
Hunting, Love, Africa – the land, its people, animals and the author’s interaction with them.

Plot
The first - Miss Mary’s preoccupation with the hunting down of a particular lion.

The second - a ‘relationship’ which the author, who is deeply into African culture, strikes up with an African woman, his ‘fiancée’.

How It’s Done
Much of the book’s interest (if one can call it that) is the interaction of the author with the other characters, their perceptions of each other, especially across the cultural divide and his relationship with Africa itself. However, much of the prose seems repetitive and I kept thinking: “I’m sure I’ve read this before…. “ There is no sense of the story moving forward, since each event or happening seems frozen in time, without suspense or atmosphere.

The narrative often rambles. Take for example this very long uninterrupted sentence, which runs the risk of losing the reader:
I hoped piously that there were such circles left and I thought of O’Hara, fat as a boa constrictor that had swallowed an entire shipment of a magazine called “Collier’s” and surly as a mule that had been bitten by tsetse flies plodding along dead without recognizing it, and I wished him luck and all happiness remembering fairly joyously the white-edged evening tie he had worn at his coming out party in New York and his hostess’s nervousness at presenting him and her gallant hope that he would not disintegrate.

Miss Mary spends a great deal of her time (when she isn’t whingeing about conditions not being right for shooting the lion), either in a state of moodiness or childlike pleasure (judging by her manner of speaking). When she does shoot the wretched beast, there is much agonizing and petulance because she believes her husband’s bullet landed first. Then the husband/author frets because she is in a bad mood. Ultimately, however, no-one, least of all the reader, really cares.

Her diction is often inane. The husband asks:
What were you smiling about in your sleep after you had your tea?”
“Oh, that was my wonderful dream. I met the lion and he was so nice to me and so cultured and polite. He’d been at Oxford, he said, and he spoke with practically a BBC voice. I was sure I had met him someplace and suddenly he ate me up.”
“We live in very difficult times,” I said. “I guess when I saw you smiling was before he ate you up.” (etc, etc.)

Surely adults don’t say “eat someone up - isn’t this kids’ speak?

The wife is portrayed as a strange, inconsistent character who alternates between normal, intelligent speech and childish diction. She says she ‘loves’ the lion but her attitude is patronizing – “my” lion, she says, as if it belongs to her – and she wants very much to kill it, to prove that she can do so ‘cleanly’ thereby gaining prestige. (In fact, both of the protagonists claim to ‘love’ the animals, but it’s laudable, because in nearly every chapter they shoot something, whether for food, for sport, or for the Game Department.

The author’s preoccupation with the black girl is hard to fathom, given their obvious intellectual and cultural differences, unless it is based entirely on sexual interest - what other possible connection could there be between the two? There is barely any dialogue between him and the African woman, so the reader is left wonder what is going on.

Miss Mary, surprisingly, appears to accept the ‘relationship’, while the author doesn't seem to be quite sure what he wants, the reader even less so.

She asks her husband:
”…. Do you send her many presents?”
“No. Mafuta always for the family and sugar and things they need. Medicines and soap. I buy her good chocolate.”
“The same as you buy me?”
“I don’t know. Probably. There’s only about three kinds and they are all good.”
“Don’t you give her any big presents?”
“No. The dress.”
“It’s a pretty dress.”
“Do we have to do this, honey?”
“No,” she said. “I’ll stop it. But it interests me.”
“If you say so I’ll never see her.”
“I don’t want that,” she said. “I think it’s wonderful that you have a girl that can’t read nor write so you can’t get letters from her. … But you don’t love her do you?”
“I like her because she has such a lovely impudence.”
“I have too,” Miss Mary said. “Maybe you like her because she’s like me. It could be possible.”

All the characters, while “real” in the sense of existing (or having once existed) come across as 2D, like actors with often incomprehensible lines to read. The author frequently talks about things which appear to have no meaning. Take this conversation between the author and one of the Africans, for example:

Ngui asked me in Kamba how I would like to bang Mrs. Singh […]
“Kwisha maru,” I said to Ngui, which seemed sound (sic) double talk.
“Buona notte,” he said and we clinked bottles.
“Piga tu.”
“Piga tu.”
“Piga chui, tu,” Ngui explained a little beerily […]
“Never,” I said in Hungarian, “Nem, nem, soha.”
Mr. Singh said something in Unknown Tongue and I made signs that he give me the bill, which he proceeded to write out, and I said to Ngui, in Spanish, “Vámonos. Ya es tarde.”
“Avanti Savoia,” he said. “Nunaua.”
“You are a bastard,” I said.
“Hapana,” he said. “Blood brother.”

Not only are many of the dialogues equally meaningless to the average reader (who, admittedly can hunt in the “Glossary” for African terms as and when required), but they also appear to add nothing to the story itself. Dialogue is supposed to ‘move the story forward’, but as can be seen here, it bogs down whatever action or plot there is.

Conclusion
One has the feeling that the author, in a world of his own, has written this book solely for his pleasure and this is borne out by Hemingway himself in a remark to his third wife (taken from the “Cast of Characters” section mentioned above):

“We’re just sitting cross-legged in a bazaar and if people aren’t interested in what we’re saying they’ll go away.”

He’s right, they will.

The story is unlikely to hold a reader who has not experienced Africa in the way the author has, the characters are for the most part unfathomable and unbelievable (worse, dull), their motivations often incomprehensible and the outcome of their actions uninteresting, and whatever story line or plot there is remains fragmented and nebulous. While some of Hemingway’s descriptions and imagery are undoubtedly vivid, these do not compensate sufficiently for the remainder of the book’s dull narrative and treatment of its subject matter, and the plodding, rambling style.

True At First Light has been described both as “A major literary event” and a “revealing self-portrait and dramatic fictional chronicle of his final African safari”.

“Major literary event”? Maybe, but one which is extremely difficult to read. “Dramatic”? I don’t think so. I yawned through most of it, forcing myself to keep reading. Eventually, though, I finished the twentieth chapter and shall now lend the book to the person who recommended Hemingway to me…

And then I'm taking it to the Book Exchange.