Hemingway in Africa

 

A review of True at First Light by Ernest Hemingway, Scriber, NY, 1999.

Everything you wanted to know about a hunting camp on the slopes of Mt. Kilimanjaro in 1953.  This fictional memoir as it is described is drawn from the journals of Ernest Hemingway. The material was edited down posthumously by his son Patrick, himself a big game hunter in East Africa. The book was published in 1999 long after Hemingway’s death in 1961.  Yet the work harks back accurately to the fifties. It is full of description, dialogue and anecdotes.

There is essentially no plot. The first half of the book revolves around securing a lion for Mary to kill and the second half about preparations for Christmas.  There is ongoing dialogue, way too much of it I thought, between Ernest and Mary and amongst others. But that is how the story, such as it is, progresses.  You learn that Hemingway drank, slept, ruminated, hunted, bickered with Mary and had eyes for a Kamba girl. You learn that he had – for the era – surprisingly positive relationships with his employees. He treated everyone with dignity and evidently enjoyed real friendships with several.  However, he was still the Bwana, the proprietor of the camp and the employer. So, he was apparently loved and respected, but always with a bit of caution. Nonetheless Hemingway sought to ingratiate himself with those around him. He appeared to enjoy the status of being the Bwana without the burden of being a famous writer.

When the journal turns to hunting, it is spot on, obviously based on real encounters and legitimate understanding of the process.  Hemingway’s portrayals of the Kamba and Maasai people indicates astute observation and grasp of their respective cultures.   The material is occasionally humorous in some overblown descriptions of characters or actions but also in the ongoing joke of Hemingway being central to his own fictitious religion

I happened to be reading this book – that I found in searching a library website – when the PBS series on Hemingway was broadcast. In reality, Hemingway did spend months in Kenya in 1953 running the hunting camp he so ably describes.  During this period, his marriage to Mary was in trouble, but there is only a glimmer of that in the book. As part of an effort to salvage it, the two took a small aircraft to see Murchison Falls in Uganda.  The plane crashed there as did their rescue plane upon taking off.  Hemingway suffered brain injuries that would only manifest themselves over time. To recuperate he installed himself in a fishing lodge at Shimoni on the Kenyan coast where he drank copiously for months. Mary left him.

I doubt if True at First Light adds much to Hemingway’s literary reputation. It is in fact what it purports to be - a fictional memoir.  It is kind of interesting, but not gripping. Parts are boring. Only African or Hemingway aficionados will enjoy it.  

A tramp across Africa

 

A review of Walking the Nile by Levison Wood, Grove Atlantic, NY, 2015

 

As the title indicates this book is a travelogue. Intrepid walker Lev Wood undertook to trudge alongside the Nile, as close as paths and roads permitted, from its initial spring in the hills of Rwanda to its delta on the Mediterranean Sea. All told it was a trip of 4800 miles and took eight months. Along the way, Wood met many friendly folks, some unfriendly ones, and a host of suspicious government officials. He was feted, praised, and welcomed in some communities and viewed cautiously or even hostilely in others. All asked, why would anyone, especially a white man, walk such a distance? It was puzzling.  Wood himself had no clear answer, except that was what he was doing. It was his adventure and quest.

Wood was in Rwanda twenty years after the genocide, yet the vestiges of it lingered. He trekked through miserable heat in northern Uganda and lost a companion to heat stroke. He found an ongoing civil war in South Sudan and had to skip a most dangerous section. He crossed the deserts of Sudan and Egypt. In Egypt especially he was frustrated by excessive suspicion and bureaucracy. Finally, he made it to the sea.

All told it was indeed an epic journey and Wood recounts it well – the trials, tribulations, inner worries, interactions with those who accompanied him and with people he met along the way. I know five of the six nations he traversed so I pulled out my maps and vicariously enjoyed the journey.    

Not all who wander are lost

 

A review of The Explorers by Martin Dugard, Simon & Schuster, NY, 2014.

 

Author Dugard uses the conflict between 19^th century searchers for the source of the Nile Richard Burton and John Hanning Specke as the vehicle to delve into the exploits and psyches of explorers writ large. He covers personalities including St. Brennan, Columbus, Cook, Livingstone, Scott, Shackleford, Hillary and Lindbergh.  He is interested not just in what they did and the often-awful trials and hardships they endured, but what made them tic? What made them - self-selected for the most part – devote themselves to exploration?  What motivated them?  To answer these questions, Dugard dipped into both physical and psychological explanations. How did their brains work and function differently from others?  What truly motivated them? He concluded it was not riches or fame, but the completion of the quest itself.  This is aptly demonstrated in the saga of Burton and Specke, two men of decidedly different temperament who yet united in the quest to unravel a great mystery of their age – the source of the Nile. Dugard keeps the Specke/Burton theme ongoing throughout the book even as he illustrates characteristics exemplified by them in other notable explorers.

I thought the book wandered around too much. It is not chronological. Additionally, I thought Dugard over-analyzed the psyches and motivations of people long dead on flimsy evidence.  That being said, I enjoyed the various thumbnail sketches of famous explorers, where they went, what they endured and what they accomplished.