“Did you get rid of the flat?” she asked.
“Yes, that’s all settled.”
It’s not exactly a lie but the reader knows (as the reader knew earlier when Brenda committed her sin of omission) that Tony is going to find the flat very useful indeed. The last line reads: “And the train sped through the darkness towards Hetton.”
The changes of emphasis are hugely significant: in the novel Tony’s fate is as a helpless victim; Mr Todd’s torture a symbol of the malign indifference of the universe. In the magazine version he is instead actively responsible for his own unpleasant transformation. Given the bitterness and contempt that inform the novel this alternative ending seems to me to be truer to the novel’s potent undercurrents than the short story Waugh recycled to finish off his sombre, disturbing tale of adultery, betrayal and the death of hope. Waugh republished the ending in 1963 as an appendix to the uniform edition of A Handful of Dust, describing it as a “curiosity.” We have to take it that he wanted it preserved. So why didn’t he use the ending that was specifically written for his novel? Perhaps because it would have seemed too brutally, too unsparingly cynical. Tony Last has become like everyone else in A Handful of Dust—corrupt, selfish, venal and heartless. He still has Hetton — he still has Brenda (with another child on the way) — but he now speeds through darkness to reach his home.
2003
Ernest Hemingway (Review of True at First Light)
“Honey are you bored? I’m perfectly happy reading and not being wet in the rain. You have to write letters too.”
“No. I love for us to talk together. It’s the thing I miss when there’s so much excitement and work and we’re never alone except in bed. We have a wonderful time in bed and you say lovely things to me. I remember them and the fun. But this is a different kind of talking.”
It certainly is: it is mawkish, badly composed, embarrassing and toecurlingly cute and is written, not by Danielle Steele, but by Ernest Hemingway. This passage is lifted, almost at random, from one of the interminable dialogues in what purports to be the latest and final posthumous Hemingway novel, edited — if that is the correct word — by Hemingway’s son, Patrick. The work was done, so Patrick Hemingway tells us in an introduction, along the following principles: “[the] untitled manuscript is about two hundred thousand words long and is certainly not a journal. What you will read here is a fiction half that length… which I have licked here into what I hope is not the worst of all possible shapes.” And that is all, apparently, that we need to know.
The existence of this African journal is well known. It was written in the mid 1950s and extracts were published after Hemingway’s death by his widow in Sports Illustrated in 1971 and 72. The text emerged from the disastrous hunting trip Hemingway made to Africa in 1953-4 with his fourth wife, Mary. During the trip Hemingway was involved in two light-aeroplane crashes, one of which injured him severely. In the second crash Hemingway fractured his skull, dislocated his shoulder, ruptured his liver, right kidney and spleen and his face and head were badly burned. It could be argued that the health problems he suffered thereafter precipitated his notorious decline into terminal alcoholism and depression.
But not a word of this appears in True at First Light. Instead the book concentrates on the few weeks of the hunting trip that took place before Xmas 1953. Most of the action in the book — narrated by Ernest Hemingway — revolves around two significant events: first, the need to protect the camp against a possible raid by escaped Mau-Mau insurgents (this threat suddenly disappears) and second, the efforts made to help Hemingway’s wife, Mary, shoot a large lion which prowls around the vicinity. Added to these concerns are various hunting and camp-related activities — shooting game for the bearers, going into town for supplies, nattering round the campfire, relations with the African staff and so on. Most curious, though, is a kind of semi-covert “affair” going on between Hemingway and an African girl called Debba — whom Mary refers to as “your fiancée”—who lives in a nearby village. There are many visits to Debba and a certain amount of harmless physical contact ensues: “Debba said nothing. She had lost her lovely Kamba impudence and I stroked her bowed head, which felt lovely, and touched the secret places behind her ears and she put her hand up, stealthily, and touched my worst scars.”
Mary finally shoots her lion, Ernest shoots a leopard, there are long conversations around the campfire, Mary goes to Nairobi, Ernest visits Debba, the African landscape is regularly described, more animals are shot and, fundamentally, that is about it. One is left at the end with a feeling of saddened bafflement, rather than gratitude, wondering why this book would ever have been thought worth publishing.
The answer, of course, is that these are the final sweepings from the great vide grenier that has been the story of Hemingway’s posthumous publication. It began with A Moveable Feast and continued with the novels entitled Islands in the Stream and The Garden of Eden, a collection of bullfighting articles which became The Dangerous Summer, various short stories and the African safari excerpts published in Sports Illustrated. A Moveable Feast apart, which Hemingway had, at least, actually submitted to his publishers before he died (and then withdrawn), all this work was deemed by the author to be unpublishable: his family has thought and chosen to do otherwise.
The ethics of this enterprise may be dubious but critically and artistically they have been close to ruinous as far as Hemingway’s reputation is concerned. True at First Light, the case in point, is a particularly lethal blow. The book is, frankly, often hilariously bad and embarrassing. Apart from the desperate archness and tedium of much of the dialogue, it has no organization, it rambles and repeats itself and it contributes nothing to the Hemingway oeuvre that was not already, more resplen-dently, there. There are, to be fair, some better moments. The account of Mary shooting her lion is tensely and effectively done; there are some lyrical passages of description of landscape (one of which gives the book its title) and, for biographers, the odd insight may be afforded — into Hemingway’s prodigious drinking, for example, and also some light may be thrown on his brag to have been married to a Wakamba girl and her sister.
A further miscalculation — on Patrick Hemingway’s part, I suppose — was pointedly to call this book a “novel.” Biographers have always referred to the manuscript as a “journal” and even Mary Hemingway classified it as a “semi-fictional account of our African safari.” Some sort of fudge of this order might have been advisable, especially in this day and age, when we readily accept that memoirs, travel writing and reportage will have a hefty dose of the fictive in the mix, but for Patrick Hemingway to carve out 50 percent of the text, “lick it into shape” and categorize it as a novel seems not only misguided but absurd as well.