MOUNT KILIMANJARO REVISTED: AFRICA, THE LION’S ROAR AND ERNEST HEMINGWAY - Somdatta Mandal “There are always mystical countries that are part of one’s childhood. Those we remember and visit sometimes when we are asleep and dreaming. They are as lovely at night as they were when we were children. If you ever go back to see them they are not there. But they are as fine in the night as they ever were if you have the luck to dream of them….In Africa when we lived on the small plain in the shade of the big thorn trees near the river at the edge of the swamp at the foot of the great mountain we had such countries. We were no longer, technically children although in many ways I am quite sure that we were.” - True at First Light After completing Winner Take Nothing, Ernest Hemingway fulfilled his ambition expressed in The Sun Also Rises of “going to British East Africa to shoot.” Having received $25,000 for a safari paid by Uncle Gus, Hemingway and his second wife Pauline travelled to Africa for big game hunting in the winter of 1933. Africa had always fascinated Hemingway. His son Patrick opines that probably the impression that Teddy Roosevelt’s writing about Africa made on his father as a young fellow drew him to his first safari. According to his biographer, Jeffrey Meyers, (261-262) the Hemingways set sail from Marseilles and arrived at Mombasa on December 8th. From there they travelled inland to Nairobi, spent a few days hunting near Philip Percival’s farm at Machakos (twenty miles from Nairobi), and on December 20 started south to the Serengeti plain in Tanganyika. The campsite was in eastern Tanganyika, off the road to Handeni. It was near the cone-shaped, snow- covered Mount Kilimanjaro, a very nice place to camp, and filled with thousands of wild animals. They were also accompanied by Hemingway’s Key West friend, Charles Thompson and their trips had a way of turning into contests. The safari was interrupted in mid-January 1934 when Hemingway suffered a serious attack of amoebic dysentery, which he had contracted on the voyage to Africa. Before he was flown back to Nairobi in a private plane, Hemingway shot three lions, a buffalo and twenty-seven other beasts until hunting stopped, after seventy-two days in Africa, when 2 the rains came. In mid-February, they returned to the coast at Malindi, north of Mombasa, and after a week sailed back to France. The events of this real life safari were quite obviously detailed in Green Hills of Africa once Hemingway returned to Key West. He had read extensively about big game hunting, but the book tried to capture the initial enthusiasm rather than synthesize his expertise on the subject. In the Foreword he somewhat defensively states: “ The writer has attempted to write an absolutely true book to see whether the shape of a country and the pattern of a month’s action can, if truly presented, compete with a work of the imagination.” But his competitive attempt does not match either novels like Conrad’s Heart of Darkness (1899) or nonfiction like Greene’s Journey Without Maps (1936). (Meyers,264) It is interesting to note that Hemingway’s first African safari would have almost as great an impact on his life and writing as the discovery of Spain and bullfighting had ten years earlier. As in Death in the Afternoon, the focus is on Hemingway’s literary persona, autobiographical reflections and incidental opinions as well as on the ostensible subject matter. Hemingway was interested in the African landscape and animals, but not in the customs and people; his account of hunting in Africa conveys the excitement of getting close to wild beasts in their natural element, but lacks the artistic and cultural context of bullfighting in Spain. In this non-fictional work, Hemingway seems to have exaggerated his egoism in a perverse response to the critics’ judgement of his last two books. He recounts his own exploits, patronizes the Africans but is greatly admired by them (“ ‘Shut up, you,’M’Cola told him. ‘The Bwana can shoot after you cannot see.’”), criticizes many classic and contemporary writers, and denies any feelings of guilt about killing the beautiful animals. He behaves boorishly with Karl ( as Thompson is so called in the book), transfers his own negative qualities to his friend and characterizes him as competitive, edgy, nasty and bitter. When the book opens, near the end of the safari, Karl has outshone the protagonist consistently in the size and quality of his big-game trophies. The latter is attempting to even up the score somewhat by killing a better kudu than Karl’s. More or less on the 3 sidelines are the other members of the party: Pauline ( P.O.M. or Poor Old Mama), the white hunter Philip Percival ( Jackson Phillips or Pop), and his assistant Ben Fourie (Dan). The African gun-bearers, drivers, and trackers appear with their own names or nicknames. The whole adventure lasted not more than ten weeks, but Hemingway’s consciousness was so stimulated by his enthusiasm and curiosity that every event seemed to have been indelibly etched in his memory. The wealth of their detail created the impression of a much longer time in Africa that the writer actually spent. Thus, although factual and autobiographical, Green Hills of Africa was designed to have the same psychological effect on his readers as a work of the imagination. Hemingway rearranged the sequence of the events accordingly, constructing the scenes of each part with that purpose in mind. It is worth commenting on his honesty as a writer: he revealed with the utmost candour his feelings of envy and frustration, however much he may have tried not to show those emotions during the action itself. It is, of course, this underlying contest between him and Karl that gives the story its suspense. Hemingway’s artistic intention ruled first and last. Writers are sometimes criticised for being self-centered. What else can they be if they are to take advantage of the material provided by their own emotions? But Hemingway saved the best of his African experience for his fiction. He had a psychological need to write well and truly, and maintained his artistic integrity. When he wrote directly about himself in Green Hills of Africa he pretended to - though he did not - confront the writer’s problem of drink, women, ambition for money and fame. He had composed “an absolutely true book” in the first person immediately after the safari, but failed to capture and recreate the essence of his African experience. By 1936, however, he had achieved the necessary objectivity, irony and self-scrutiny, and transmuted his hunting expedition into two undisputed masterpieces: “ The Short Happy Life of Francis Macomber” and “The Snows of Kilimanjaro”. (Meyers, 267) During the expedition Hemingway often talked with Philip Percival about the latter’s experiences as a white hunter. He was gathering as much information as possible about the sport. A hunter of dangerous game sometimes faced formidable risks, especially if he abided by the rules of the sport: to shoot only on foot and to hunt down a wounded animal in order to dispatch it 4 humanely. Situations could arise on a safari that called for courage, and as we know, Hemingway was profoundly interested in that particular trait, in itself and in relation to pride and fear. Hemingway based “The Short Life of Francis Macomber” on a scandalous case of adultery and suicide that had been suppressed in the newspapers and whitewashed by the British government. Like everyone else in Kenya, he was fascinated by the story of a beautiful wife who had a love affair with a hunter and was involved in the death of her husband. He heard this story from Percival while drinking around the evening campfire. (Interestingly, Percival later told the same story to Patrick Hemingway in the 1950s ) and believing that fiction must be based on actual experience, he began with reality but produced something more significant than the original facts. “The Snows of Kilimanjaro”, like “The Short Happy Life of Francis Macomber”, successfully blends historical and literary material with personal experience to produce fictional characters that are much more subtle and substantial than the complacent, one- dimensional self-portrait of Green Hills of Africa. Tolstoy and Scott Fitzgerald contributed to the genesis of “The Snows of Kilimanjaro” as Patteson and Wallace Stevens did to “Francis Macomber.” Also, Hemingway matched his own short story against Tolstoy’s finest work in that genre when he consciously imitated and transformed “The Death of Ivan Ilych” (1886) in “The Snows of Kilimanjaro” (1936). In both stories the heroes are dying in early middle age of a smelly disease, which has trivial origins and symbolizes the corruption of their personal and professional lives. Hemingway said that the idea of “The Snows of Kilimanjaro” - for the theme of corruption by drink, women and money - came after a rich woman ( possibly Jane Mason) had offered to pay for another safari to Africa. He refused the offer but started “to think what would happen to a character like me whose defects I know, if I had accepted that offer”. Though he wrote directly about himself in this short story, he also made a cruel attack, in the Esquire version of the story, on Scott Fitzgerald. He was, for Hemingway, a frightening example of a good writer who had betrayed his talent and been destroyed by literary success. Pauline was also attacked in the story and transformed from the sympathetic companion of Green Hills of Africa to the repulsive woman of the story.