On top of this, running through the book is simply the deep sense of waste. The book's implicit notion that gunning down large and beautiful beasts from a great distance involves a test of courage -- the premise upon which all safari literature depends -- is preposterous. Hemingway's policy of slaughtering only the "bulls" rather than the "cows" of each species (kudu, rhino, and sable, all come in for the murder), as well as of claiming to shoot only when he is sure of a "clean kill," rather than a prolonged and painful death, fail to impart an element of chivalry to what is in essence a completely uneven struggle (one in which these inoffensive herbivores never asked to take part).
The flickers of conscience to which he admits are dismissed with the memory of his own past gunshot wound and the claim that now at least he is doing nothing to a "bull" that he has not experienced himself. The obvious superiority -- and immediate availability -- of the choice simply not to shoot or kill any of these creatures renders this argument unpersuasive.
Separately from all that, the book is full of creaky reactionary asides -- many of them rather astonishing in a man who a few short years later would write so sympathetically of the Spanish Republican cause. It seems Martha Gellhorn would prove -- politically at least -- a positive influence.
Here's Hemingway in 1935, by contrast, on the subject of the then-ravaging Great Depression. The economic catastrophe itself does not earn one mention; a local famine in Africa is similarly not paid much attention, being noted only twice, and without great interest. But Papa does opine, on the subject of the New Deal (to be fair, the identity of the speaker is slightly ambiguous here, but it's clear it met with the author's approval): It's all "[s]tarry eyed bastards spending money that someone will have to pay. Everybody in our town quit work to go on relief." What else would there be to say about it, in 1935, while you yourself are lounging on the veldt with a truck-load of servants bringing you beer -- the last swig of which you occasionally deign to share around?
Then there is of course the famous machismo. Hear Hemingway tell us yet again that those writers who have never been through war have missed something essential to the craft. Which is -- among other things -- rather a round-about way of putting down women writers -- one Hemingway used against Willa Cather, for instance, in a passage in The Torrents of Spring.
One of the various chauvinistic passages of the book happens to be of greater literary interest, however. The scene finds Papa looking for comfort, after a long day of grumbling about "bastards" and ejaculating "Go to hell" every other page, and reflecting on his insensate jealousy of the other hunters for bagging creatures who have slightly longer horns than the ones he caught (they literally measure these against each other down to the inch-- you don't have to take a semester in Vienna to grasp the symbolism). You can't blame him for being in a bad way. Fortunately his then-wife, a.k.a. P.O.M., a.k.a. Mama, is there to provide solace.
Papa gets onto the subject of "books written by some female he's tried to help get published saying how he's yellow."
Mama has become a Hemingway character, and is therefore made to say whatever he wants her to say on the page, so she plays a rather simpering role in the book. In this interchange, she replies to Hemingway, "She's just jealous and malicious. You never should have helped her. Some people never forgive that."
My curiosity for gossip overwhelmed me. I had to know who this was supposed to be -- and a blog post by Stan Trybulski helpfully filled in the blanks. The "female" in question is Gertrude Stein. Hemingway's contention is that he taught her most of what she knows about writing, so she had no right to go and criticize him in print (as she apparently did in The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas). Papa continues, in the Green Hills passage: "she never could write dialogue. It was terrible. She learned how to do it from my stuff and used it in that book."
Let's go back to that "You never should have helped her [...] Some people never forgive that" observation for a moment though...
The notion that doing someone a favor is to many people an unpardonable crime was not invented by P.O.M. Anthony Patch, in Fitzgerald's The Beautiful and the Damned, likewise notes that "You never like people who do things for you," for instance.
Later in history, Saul Alinsky would give us an explanation of this strange psychological phenomenon in his Rules for Radicals:
It is a human characteristic that someone who asks for help and gets it reacts not only with gratitude but with a subconscious hostility toward the one who helped him. It is a sort of psychic "original sin" because he feels that the one who helped him is always aware that if it hadn't been for his help, he would still be a defeated nothing.What's particularly interesting here, however, is the transparency with which Hemingway projects onto Gertrude Stein an apt analysis of his own behavior. I mean, who is really the one here who is smarting under a feeling of dependence?
Not only did Hemingway owe far more to Stein than the other way around; it was also precisely his own ingratitude toward and betrayal of a former benefactor that aroused Stein's disapproval in the first place. Trybulski informs us that it was Hemingway's abuse of Sherwood Anderson, who first introduced him into literary circles (only to be rewarded with the contemptuous parody of his work in The Torrents of Spring) that led to the rift with Stein. (In Torrents, a character even reads a book by Anderson, and it furnishes Hemingway with an opportunity to harp on one of his favorite themes -- the superiority of writers with genuine war experience over those without.)
It would seem that Hemingway is the one who cannot forgive a favor, whether granted by Stein or Anderson, or whoever else.
(Another -- related -- unforgivable sin Stein committed was that of puncturing Hemingway's masculine pride. Apparently Stein accuses Hemingway in the Toklas book (which I have not yet read) of training someone to box who ultimately knocked him out. Perhaps this is a reference to the famous episode in which Morley Callaghan "punched out Papa," thereby scoring a victory, in Mordecai Richler's telling, for all Canadian manhood?)
It would seem what Papa truly dreads is any reminder of his own frailty and dependence on other humans. He cannot bear to be in anyone's moral debt, because he cannot bear to remember that he ever relied on the help of another. "If you serve time for society, democracy, and the other things quite young, and declining any further enlistment make yourself responsible only to yourself," he writes, "you exchange the pleasant, comfortable stench of comrades for something you can never feel in any other way than by yourself." This is the romantic notion of total moral and masculine independence to which Hemingway's Africa book caters.
Throughout the book, however, he is of course entirely dependent. His career was made possible by the nurturance of other writers. The economic substructure of his intrepid pointing and shooting is provided by an army of African trackers, skinners, and hunters with actual skills, as well as his wife, a.k.a, "poor little Mama," a.k.a. the "little Memsahib," a.k.a. "the little terrier," and other endearments. The book is partly about Hemingway's occasional confrontations with his own limitations of prowess and excellence, and the rage it kindles within him to discover them, making this book surely a classic of the "male fragility" genre, to use the phrase of the day.
What are we to make, though, of the fact that Hemingway would, just a few years later, "enlist" once again? He would once more "serve time for democracy" -- and this time in a better cause, frankly, than the futile First World War, which Hemingway treats with a kind of disdainful superiority, but which also furnished him with that limited "war experience" that he so evidently treasured as a plank of his ego.
I find a clue in Fitzgerald. His The Beautiful and Damned is -- like the present book -- another monument to an interwar epoch of swaggering Nietzscheanism, of romantic self-concern. In a speech by the intellectual mentor figure of the book Maury, however, in which he articulates and defends the era's core thesis of amoral individualism, he also notes that "for all we know, fifty years may see a complete reversal of this abnegation [of morality] that's absorbing the intellectuals to-day, the triumph of Christ over Anatole France—"
In truth, he didn't have to wait that long. In a few short years, the world that made possible the Anthonys and the Glorias, the Scotts and the Zeldas, and the Mamas and the Papas lounging on the African savannah, was in a state of total collapse; and suddenly, the intellectuals were re-discovering the need for the old virtues. The struggle against fascism -- for those with character enough to join it -- demanded that writers and thinkers find a way to talk again about self-sacrifice, about heroism.
If there was ever a worthy outlet for chivalry and the cultivation of physical courage in the face of danger, this was it. It was wasted on the savannah, hunting creatures with neither the will nor the capacity to defend themselves. But perhaps Hemingway did find a way to make himself, his brand of machismo -- with all its limitations -- ultimately useful to human society. And not so many years after this book came out.
Which is perhaps why that hiatus from Hemingway may not be so long after all. Why perhaps it is still worth reading him, in 2018.
We are facing our own collapse, our own struggle against fascism, our own temptations of cowardice, with a president who is currently following the playbook of populist demagogues the world over, taking aim at the most vulnerable -- refugees, racial and religious minorities, asylum seekers, transgender people -- and seeing just how far he can go and still get away with it.
In the years ahead, we will all have to "serve time for democracy," in one form or another, or else be complicit. In this struggle, "masculine" narcissism and Nietzschean individualism of the kind displayed in this book are the enemy, not our friend. But the "masculine" virtues that Hemingway claimed to be cultivating on the veldt, and that had to be summoned by so many in the fights against Franco and Hitler -- these might prove all too necessary.
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