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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¡±¡ªinspired by the story of the mysterious leopard found dead, encased in ice, far above the snowline of Africa's highest mountain¡ªallowed 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By carefully researching Hemingway's published and unpublished work, as well as the journals kept by his wives, and by consolidating both of Hemingway's African journeys into one, Sir Christopher also seeks to understand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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