Hemingway's latest not 'true' to form

The latest release from a man whose literary style and personal charisma made him an American icon is a parody of what was once pure and revolutionary. This past summer, Scribner released True at First Light, a "fictional memoir" salvaged from a 200,000 word, untitled Ernest Hemingway manuscript. Hem-ingway retired this African Epic—he decided that the book, sculpted while he was recovering from injuries sustained in two plane crashes, was simply unfit to bear his name. However, his son Patrick attempted to edit the crude manuscript even though, as he admits, "only Hemingway himself could have licked his unfinished draft into the Ursus horribilis it might have been." True at First Light should have stayed where Hemingway intended—in a dark vault.

The book chronicles a 1953 safari in Kenya that Hemingway took with his fourth wife, Mary, focusing on her pursuit of a lion and the narrator's involvement with a young Wakaban woman, whom he reportedly married. The subject is mediocre—while earlier Hemingway works are fascinating in their ability to externalize clashing elements of his personality through underlying self-criticism, his desire to reinforce the machismo of the Hemingway legend dilutes the potency of the novel's themes to a near-lampoon of the archetype. Though he intends to ironically question the process of writing within the novel, Hemingway only succeeds in weaving a tale overly abundant in masculinity with an innate desire to avoid analysis and thought.

The book's failure is not in its fascination with sex, drinking, and hunting, but in its inability to explain this preoccupation. While The Sun Also Rises made the drifting, amoral lifestyle of its characters a fulcrum of its commentary in his novel, Hemingway and his wife live within a belief system that has neither meaning, nor interest in explaining itself. Although the novel focuses on the interplay of human relationships, age and enlightenment, spirituality, and even on the power of Africa itself, in the end it simply has no meritable substance.

Although earlier Hemingway writing helped reshape the face of English prose, over the course of time this book grew predictable and flaccid. Its voice seems to be more a pretender to the throne than the remains of a majestic king; bland sentences carry on as if they were pearls of wisdom. From comments like "revelation stands in the same relation to human reason as heavenly water does to earthly water" to "Then I thanked him and went out to the fire to sit by the fire in an old pair of pajamas from Idaho, tucked into a pair of warm mosquito boots made in Hong Kong wearing a warm wool robe from Pendleton, Ore., and drank a whisky and soda made from a bottle of whisky Mr. Singh had given me as a Christmas present and boiled water from the stream that ran down from the Mountain animated by a siphon cartridge made in Nairobi," the famed style of Hemingway past moves without direction toward nothingness. Hemingway had once attempted to revitalize words, but True at First Light is merely a forced spewing of useless observations. Hemingway was plagued with a self-conscious fear of losing his Midas touch, encumbered by self-doubt in the face of past greatness. Thus, he sought to imitate himself instead of redefining the frontiers of his writing voice. Although he is once again successful in mimicking the motions of thought—turning them outward onto description itself—the novel stifles feeling and suppresses thought in the attempt to bolster masculinity.

From Garden of Eden, to The Dangerous Summer, to True at First Light, the later works of Hemingway are burdened with the weight of the Hemingway mystique, just as Hemingway himself became a victim of the Legend he tried to maintain. He had once claimed that there is no worse sin than for a writer's work be "rewritten and altered to be published, without his be permission, as his own." Hemingway recognized the weaknesses inherent within 800 pages of forced ramblings that aspire to the ground-breaking technique and insight of classics past. The manuscript was weak, its final cut even weaker, and its publication a grave mistake.

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