Hemingway himself animadverts on this very topic in True at First Light. “My excuse is that I make the truth as I invent it truer than it would be. That is what makes good writers or bad. If I write in the first person, stating it as fiction, critics now will still try to prove these things never happened to me.” This sounds like an attempt to form the artistic credo behind the African manuscript. It is so palpably Hemingway himself at the centre of the stage — he reminisces about his past, he quotes a hostile letter to him from a woman reader in Iowa, for instance — and the touchstones with his life are so vividly present that it is as if he is deliberately trying to pre-empt this tendency, as he perceives it, of critics’ efforts to fit the fiction to the creator. So, quite blatantly, he calls the narrator Ernest Hemingway; he calls his wife Mary; he fills the book with verifiable facts and persons and attempts no artful disguise. Everything about this endeavour stresses the documentary and the real.
Paul Fussell has written (in The Great War and Modern Memory) of “the necessity of fiction in any memorable testimony about fact.” True at First Light is in no way memorable testimony but one can see how this modus operandi would appeal to Hemingway as it makes it all the easier subtly to embellish, to foster the mythic tendancy: Papa Hemingway out on the veldt at dawn, gun in hand, hunting his prey — wife, booze and Kamba bride waiting for him back at home. And for the reader too, this notional autobiographical candour has the effect of making the aggregate of meandering anecdotage relatively more interesting in that, as is usual in this sort of writing, it is easier to fillet out the fictive decoration from the facts than the other way round — the whole sorry business of the “affair” with Debba being a fine example. However, Patrick Hemingway — for sound marketing reasons, doubtless — would have us read this book as a novel, which proves a frustrating and impossible task in the end: the book remains studiedly grounded in the biography and in its particular place and time. True at First Light has to be read in this spirit, as non-fiction, with all the usual caveats that apply.
And what it tells us is old news indeed: namely that by the mid 1950s, the Nobel Prize in his pocket, Hemingway was subsisting on “Hemingway,” that the writer had become more important than the work itself. Chronologically, the African manuscript follows the critical disaster of Across the River and into the Trees (which Delmore Schwartz described as “extremely bad in an ominous way”) and the huge commercial success of the novella The Old Man and the Sea. This last had won the Pulitzer for Hemingway in 1952 and in 1954 he had won the Nobel. Across the River had been Hemingway’s first published novel for ten years. Now, in the mid 1950s, he was, in terms of public recognition, at the very apogee of his career as a writer. Yet by the time Hemingway sat down to write up the account of his African safari the ominous decline that Schwartz had spotted was clearly in freefall. And, indeed, it must be admitted, everything that is bad in True at First Light is also present in Across the River. What the publication of True at First Light actually achieves — this “novel” hacked out of a disorganized work in progress — is to confirm beyond all reasonable doubt that the death of Hemingway the novelist had occurred some time at the end of the 1940s. All efforts to revive the corpse proved to be vain.
And nobody tried harder than Hemingway himself, as the publication of the posthumous novels reveals. Two hundred thousand words of unusable manuscript is no small price to pay. It is, in a backhanded way, a tribute to Hemingway’s own vanishing instinct as a writer that, even as he created them, he recognized that his fictional efforts were truly moribund and he kept them locked away from public view until his death and the family intervened. And yet, despite all the damaging evidence of the late work and the posthumous novels, Hemingway remains, in my opinion, one of the most important writers of the twentieth century, but his greatness resides almost entirely in his short fiction. His revolutionary short stories, written in the 1920s and 30s, blending tremendous complexity with radically new expression, rank him along with Chekhov, Joyce and Kipling as one of the great masters of the form. Paradoxically, the one service that publication of True at First Light might render is to furnish a metaphor or lasting image for the awful spectre of Hemingway’s decline as a writer. He writes that, “In Africa a thing is true at first light and a lie by noon, and you have no more respect for it than for the lovely perfect weed fringed lake you see across the sun-baked salt plain. You have walked across that plain in the morning and you know that no such lake is there.” Hemingway’s real gift — his genius — was true at the first light of his writing career but by noon he was living a lie.
1999
Evelyn Waugh (3) (Review of Collected Travel Writing)
It is 1959, you are a retired brigadier living in Dar es Salaam, Tanganyika. A friend of yours, a colonial officer, has offered to drive you up country to Morogoro. But when your friend arrives he is already accompanied by a stranger: a stout, elderly man named Evelyn Waugh. You have a long day’s journey ahead of you. In his book, published a year later, A Tourist in Africa, Waugh describes you as a man of “imperturbable geniality” and adds of his two travelling companions, “I don’t know if they enjoyed my company. I certainly enjoyed theirs.” I wonder… How one would love to know what the retired brigadier really thought.
I mention this tiny incident because one of the experiences of reading Waugh’s travel writing is that I constantly speculate what it must have been like actually to meet him while he was on the road, as it were. It strikes me that a day in a hot car driving through the African bush with Evelyn Waugh could well qualify as a minor circle of hell. He was not a tolerant or easy man, that much is clear, but he also had a weak grasp of how he himself was perceived. He was genuinely traumatized after a visit to the Caribbean to discover that his hosts thought him “a bore.” I remember once meeting Fitzroy Maclean — and there was little love lost between him and Waugh — and asking him what Waugh had been like when they knew each other during the war. Maclean said, with candour — and no axe to grind, as far as I could tell — that he had never, in his entire military career, met an officer so loathed by the men who served under him.
One of the reasons why one tries to imagine an encounter with Waugh on his trips abroad is that he seemed always to be travelling under duress of one sort or another. And such duress is not conducive to congeniality: there never appears to be any real enthusiasm for the journey or curiosity about the places and people he will discover. You are left with the impression that he was more or less permanently disgruntled, quick to complain, a moan always on his lips, the spectre of terrible boredom forever hovering at his shoulder.
As Nicholas Shakespeare makes clear in his excellent introduction to this omnibus, Waugh’s travel writing was, in the pure sense, hack work. Waugh wrote travel books for the money and, later in life, also undertook assignments to escape the severities of the English winter. Waugh was completely open about this: even in his first volume, Labels, he advertised the ulterior motives of the enterprise, and it is not surprising that his travel writing is redolent of the dutiful task and the looming deadline. It rarely shines.