Hemingway in Africa: The Last Safari
( 2003-10-13 17:04) (Agencies)
 Ernest Hemingway made only a couple of short trips to
Africa, the first in 1933-34 and the second two decades later, but the continent
brought forth two of his greatest pieces of fiction.
If “The Snows of Kilimanjaro”—inspired by the story of the mysterious leopard
found dead, encased in ice, far above the snowline of Africa's highest
mountain—allowed Hemingway to use words as paint and give rein to his immense
talent for writing about place, it was man's deepest fears and sense of
cowardice that he explored in “The Short Happy Life of Francis Macomber”.
A young American couple are accompanied on their first African safari by a
professional hunter. Lying at night in his tent, next to his wife who does not
love him, the husband hears a lion roar, but he has “no one to tell he was
afraid, nor to be afraid with him”. Within days he is dead, of a gunshot wound
to the head.
Sir Christopher Ondaatje, too, knows about fear and the atavistic draw of a
landscape. A former Olympic bobsledder, who gave up playing the markets just
before the 1987 crash to go trekking, Sir Christopher has here retraced
Hemingway's African safaris in an effort to tease out the inspiration that the
continent offered his writing.
By carefully researching Hemingway's published and unpublished work, as well
as the journals kept by his wives, and by consolidating both of Hemingway's
African journeys into one, Sir Christopher also seeks to understand how it was
that the alpha male of the 1933-34 safari could have gone on to produce the
incoherent “True at First Light” that emerged from a second trip that so nearly
cost Hemingway his life.
Beautifully illustrated and eminently readable, “Hemingway in Africa” is
neither judgmental about the laureate's failings nor sycophantic; rather it
combines a deep love for Hemingway's finest writing with a genuine feel for the
continent that inspired him.
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