From the 'African book' to Under Kilimanjaro: an introduction.

Miller, Linda Patterson

UNDER KILIMANJARO has an unusual publishing history that relates integrally both to the establishment of the Ernest Hemingway Foundation and Society and the Hemingway Papers housed at the John E Kennedy Presidential Library in Boston. Hemingway's widow and executrix Mary Hemingway established the Ernest Hemingway Foundation in 1965 "for the purposes of awakening, sustaining an interest in, promoting, fostering, stimulating, improving and developing literature and all forms of literary composition and expression." She had also decided, by the following decade, to donate Hemingway materials to the JFK Library, which she designated in 1978 as the official repository for the Hemingway Papers. In 1980 a group of Hemingway scholars gathered at Thompson Island in Boston Harbor, offshore from the JFK Library, to assess the significance of this gift. From that gathering came the establishment of the Hemingway Society, committed to supporting and fostering Hemingway scholarship. Recognizing the compatibility of the Society's and the Foundation's goals in emphasizing "the promotion, assistance and coordination of scholarship and studies relating to the works and life of the late Ernest Hemingway," Hemingway's sons Patrick and John invited the Society to assume the duties, resources, and functions of the Foundation upon the death of Mary Hemingway in 1986.

An important aspect of these responsibilities involves managing stipulated Hemingway copyrights in the United States as related to previously unpublished letters and manuscripts. That charge included the manuscript that Hemingway started in late 1954 following his and Mary's African safari that began in September 1953, and ended abruptly with two back-to-back plane crashes on 23 and 24 January 1954. Hemingway worked steadily throughout 1955 on the manuscript that he had begun to refer to as his "African book." He had nearly completed it when he became diverted, in early 1956, by the filming of The Old Man and the Sea, coupled with the unexpected recovery in Paris of some of his earliest manuscripts (an event that no doubt triggered his thinking about Paris and helped to inspire what would become A Moveable Feast). Although Hemingway neither finished nor titled his "African book," Robert W. Lewis and Robert E. Fleming, the editors of the Under Kilimanjaro edition, argue that the manuscript does not seem "incomplete or flawed." Instead, with the book ending "as it began, in media res, omitting the anticlimax of the two nearly fatal airplane crashes, its major conflicts are resolved, its themes fully explored." As Lewis and Fleming conclude, we are lucky to have "perhaps the last gift left to us by a literary master."

In 1987 the newly reconfigured board of the Ernest Hemingway Foundation convened in New York City. It was comprised of those, including myself, who had already been elected as officers and representatives of The Hemingway Society, and a good portion of our first deliberations related to Hemingway's "African book," which scholars had been referring to more generally as Hemingway's "African journal." Asked to review the manuscript so as to make recommendations regarding its potential for posthumous publication, we each read the roughly 850-page text. The manuscript defied my expectations. Rather than the scattershot randomness I would have expected of a "journal," the sustained narrative with its structural and thematic unity, including its consistent voice (wry and understated) and its carefully delineated characters, caught me off guard (in all the ways that Hemingway's writing, at its best, makes us catch our breath). I could not put it down. But then the Foundation's discussion regarding the manuscript's future got put on hold until courts could determine more specifically the Foundation's obligations in relation to Hemingway's manuscripts and the Hemingway Estate.

Hoping to bring out an abridged version of Hemingway's "African book," Patrick Hemingway and the Hemingway Estate, as well as the Hemingway Foundation, agreed in 1997 to a two-part publishing plan. Following the 1999 trade publication with Scribner's of True at First Light, as edited by Patrick Hemingway, the Foundation would oversee the publication in the United States of a full-text edition (with an academic press and in hardcover only). The Foundation's board solicited proposals from Hemingway Society members and the academy at large for the editing of this work. After careful deliberation, the Foundation Board chose the approach and plan outlined by Lewis and Fleming, believing that their intent "to produce a complete reading text of Ernest Hemingway's manuscript" with "as few distracting elements as possible" (which also meant minimal footnoting and supportive appendixes and explanatory matter only as necessary) was in the best interests of Hemingway scholarship and the publishing agreement. As Lewis and Fleming aptly say of their editorial role in bringing Under Kilimanjaro to press, "this book deserves as complete and faithful a publication as possible without editorial distortion, speculation, or textually unsupported attempts at improvement" such that "readers of this remarkable work will experience the mingled pleasure of revisiting the familiar and discovering the new."

Under Kilimanjaro sets forth the full text as Hemingway had shaped it prior to putting the manuscript aside in 1956. To be sure, in 1971-72 Sports Illustrated had published three excerpts from the manuscript, as edited by Ray Cave, and Patrick Hemingway in True at First Light incorporated approximately one-half to three-quarters of the text, but with the publication of Under Kilimanjaro scholars will now be able to assess more meaningfully to what extent and how the texts differ. This publication will no doubt provoke a healthy and ongoing scholarly debate about the nuances of this text and its significance to the literary, biographical, and cultural contexts of Hemingway's work and times. To the great extent that Under Kilimanjaro illuminates Hemingway's ongoing love affair with writing, even to the end, it reconfirms what Hemingway himself said of great literature, that it changes you as you read it. Under Kilimanjaro transports its readers to a place and a time--Africa during the early 1950s--and brings it to life as only Hemingway can. At once evocative, mesmerizing, humorous, and surprisingly tender, this book gives us all Hemingway had as a writer. Thanks to the ongoing cooperation of the Hemingway Estate, working in conjunction with the goals of the Ernest Hemingway Foundation to foster and promote Hemingway scholarship, and thanks also to the passionate commitment of The Kent State University Press to publishing--with both style and integrity--the best in Hemingway studies, Hemingway's "African book" comes to us whole--the complete manuscript as Hemingway wrote it during his final years.

Following the opening of the Hemingway Papers at the Kennedy Library, Mike Reynolds, then working on the first volume of his five-part Hemingway biography, talked about the discovery process and about how no one knew from day to day what would emerge from the shopping bags Mary Hemingway would bring in filled with Hemingway manuscripts. The excitement was palpable, and of course all those manuscript materials led to the surge of Hemingway scholarship during the 1980s and 1990s that culminated in multiple biographies and critical books and national and international conferences devoted to Hemingway's life and works. The publication now of Under Kilimanjaro, along with the projected and long-term Hemingway Letters project, should challenge stale assumptions and quicken renewed inquiry into Hemingway's life and art for decades to come.

LINDA PATTERSON MILLER

Pennsylvania State University at Abington

Chair, Editions Committee, Ernest Hemingway Foundation and Society