WHAT'S FUNNY ABOUT TRUE AT FIRST LIGHT?

MILLER, LINDA

AS A MEMBER of the board of the Ernest Hemingway Foundation over a decade ago, I had an opportunity to read the manuscript then referred to as the "African Journal" I recall that its substance and narrative integrity surprised me, for it lacked the random flow that One might expect of a "journal." Indeed, because the manuscript already had a structural and thematic unity, including a consistent voice and delineated characters, I felt it would require scant editorial manipulation should it be published. I believed, however, that the themes related to Hemingway's hunting big game animals and cavorting with the African woman Debba, along with its powerful first-person voice of Hemingway as self-designated Chief, would refuel the Hemingway stereotyping that has too often deflected readers from the text.

The truth of this text (as pared down by Hemingway's son Patrick) is that True at First Light is a rollicking good read. I say this recognizing that reviewers have almost uniformly panned this book and what they see as the marketing of Ernest Hemingway. To be sure, any posthumous publication not approved by the author raises legitimate issues of authorship and integrity that reviewers have debated in the months surrounding True at First Light's publication. Yet the condemnation of the book has related more to misperceptions about how to classify it than with any philosophical debate regarding authorial rights. It is that aspect of this book, and indeed of Hemingway's writing generally, I will use my limited space here to address.

Looking for a lyrical tragedy or some hard-bitten prose in every Hemingway work, many readers have overlooked the sophisticated interplay of humor and mythology in this one. Hemingway experimented with humor in his earliest newspaper essays, and he crafted his first full-scale parody, The Torrents of Spring, just prior to publishing The Sun Also Rises, a work with its own share of irony and pungent wit (as first pointed out by Hemingway scholar James Hinkle). Most of Hemingway's writing incorporates a complex weave of insider joking, wordplay, and ironic juxtaposition, along with a deadpan stance wherein words or appearances belie the less tangible truths. True at First Light, with its wry, sardonic, and even wistful tone, is no exception. It provides insight into man's ongoing quest for life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness in the midst of what Hemingway calls "the stupidities of daffy life with its unflagging erosion that was not worth what it cost" (271). As parody, it also evokes the dream-like-quality of children at play in a mythical and primordial kingdom, and it punctures pomposity and pretension, including Hemingway's own, so as to embrace life's primitive joys.

Hemingway's works, including this one, often carve out clearly defined (and contained) spaces into which the reader must step and then be caught off guard. Here, the camp and its peripheral terrain of Hemingway and Mary and their African retinue create a sense of disorientation and timelessness. Hemingway draws upon the "mystical" qualities of "countries that are a part of one's childhood" in delineating the physical and emotional landscape. The countries "we remember" Hemingway says, we can 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. (25)

They work hard at their child's play so as to "all play the game together" as the young police officer with the "unpromising face" says to Hemingway. They must "play it up to the hilt" (53). They invent a world separate from the real world, creating their own language (a jumble of Swahili and Spanish and American vernacular that begins to sound like pig Latin). Increasingly, their child's play becomes more primitive and fanciful. Hemingway ingratiates himself with the nearby shamba (village) and his African "fiancee" Debba, and the villagers come to regard him as the great white Father and prophet of a new religion in which Mary plays a key but mysterious role as tree-gatherer and icon. Hemingway warms to the role, feeling a tad silly but also delighting in his private mockery of institutionalized role-playing and self-aggrandizement. He has taught Debba how to wave to the crowds (with "the lift of the wrist and undulation of the fingers with which the Princess Aspasia of Greece" had greeted him "across the smoke-filled clamor of Harry's Bar in Venice), a they ride primly and ceremoniously through the village. Debba gives and receives salutes while Hemingway, sitting next to her, maintains "a rigid amiability" (277).

As the natives bring their problems to Hemingway's camp, he assumes the various roles of philosopher, prophet, and medical doctor, often sitting in a chair outside his tent. He makes "intelligent and dignified grunts" to indicate his understanding or lack thereof, while recognizing that his grunts "in the purest Masai" sounded "a little like Marlene Dietrich when she is expressing sexual pleasure, understanding or affection" (273-74). Hemingway and his African colleagues often don the appropriate costumes for their roles (like children playing dress-up), as when they play doctor to the villagers. "Mwindi, who had entered into the spirit of it all, wears "his green robe and green skullcap, whereas Mthuka, "long and loose and deaf and scarred beautifully to please a girl a long time ago "wears" his checked shirt and his hat that had once belonged to Tommy Shevlin" (275-76). Often Mthuka carries himself"rather like a crane in cold weather with his,shoulders hunched" (13 o). As for the despised and self-designated Informer, he usually arrives in camp, a la Dr. Suess, "closely muffled in his shawl" and wearing a "porkpie hat" (6 9). The young and officious police officer storms into camp "cowboy style" raising dust (55), as Mary, trying to assume her role as huntress of lions, sits in the hunting car "with great dignity" but nonetheless "chewing gum" (120). When Mary tells Hemingway her dream about how her lion spoke With an English accent before "suddenly" eating her, Hemingway responds, deadpan, "We live in very difficult times" (72). In most of these depictions, the characters seem outlandish--either dwarfed or flattened-in contrast to the sweep of the land and time's ceremonial drift. And in this play land where the characters both talk about and live their dreams, and where the animals gallop in staccato bursts, everything carries a surreal tinge and seems out of sync.

A hint of impending danger looms as the humor takes on a sharper edge. Mary refers to Hemingway and the others as the "private joke people," and she sometimes tires of their "playing at mysteries and dangers" (8 6). She recognizes that "there's death in every joke" and she alerts Hemingway to the dangers associated with fantasy when it becomes real and hurts people (75). "`You and G.C. joke so very rough and Pop jokes quite rough too. I joke rough too I know. But not as bad as all of you.'" Hemingway' responds, "`Some jokes are all right in Africa but they don't travel because people' don't realize what the country and the animals are like where it is all the world of the animals and they have predators. People who have never known predators don't know what you are talking about'" (94).

By the time Hemingway was working on this manuscript during the 1950s, he felt that he knew too much about predators, whether the predatory rich (as he would depict them in A Moveable Feast) or such self-styled literary critics as the lady from Iowa. Her 27 July 1953 letter forwarded to Africa asks Hemingway, "Why not write SOMETHING that is worthwhile, before you die?" She includes a dipping from her Iowa newspaper that blasts Hemingway as an "over-rated writer" whose main faults include "a scant sense of humor." Hemingway broods over the letter but feels a "rush of piety and Whitman-like warmth" when he invents "a splendid name" for her as "Nuestra Senora de los Apple Knockers" (228-29).

She did not get the humor of Hemingway's writing, nor do the sober-faced critics of True at First Light who risk becoming the very people Hemingway skewers: those who take themselves and life too seriously, and those who fail to listen well or to see. Readers of Hemingway must find the pitch and timbre of his prose as each work dictates, avoiding the danger of anticipating or calculating the work ahead of time. Coming to any work of Hemingway's with eyes wide open, childlike, the reader discovers something new and unexpected and in the end provocative. As Hemingway talks about Mary watching the birds in Africa, he recognizes that he has not seen them because he has looked "past them." "This looking and not seeing things was a great sin, I thought, and one that was easy to fall into" (176).

Neither a silly nor an embarrassing book, as some critics have stated, True at First Light has artistic integrity complete with the evocative tug and pull of Hemingway's good prose. The book's overarching insouciance stands in counterpoint to its ongoing subtext: Hemingway's Waldenesque musings on the life and art of his times. True at First Light creates the sweep of the land, the way the animals move, the shifting light, and it carries the physical and emotional movement out and around and then in to the interior spaces, where Hemingway's best art resides. His telescopic lens distorts so as to probe the interiors of the camp (we were like "a family," he says) and of the marriage tent. He captures the marital banter, squabbles, compromises and intimacies, and he illuminates with wry humor what the priest had said in A Farewell to Arms. Love is the desire "to do things for the desire "to serve." With tender indulgence, Hemingway and the safari crew pull for Mary in her quest for the lion and then celebrate with her in the planting of the Christmas tree (a species of thorny shrub that can "make an elephant drunk for two days if he ever ate it" 296). Hemingway reveals that the best times in camp come when they are alone together against the other world to which they fear returning, They both recognize that their "African world of unreality" was "defended and fortified by reality past any reality there is. It was not an escape world or a daydreaming world. It was a ruthless real world made of the unreality of the real" (127). And for a time anyway, they are "happy at least a good part of each day and nearly always at night and this night, in bed together, under the mosquito netting with the flaps of the tent open so that we could see the long burned-through logs of the big fire and the wonderful darkness that receded jaggedly as the night wind struck the fire and then dosed in quickly as the wind dropped, we were very happy" (39). Happy Birthday, Papa.3