‘If there were twenty-four contestants, he’d come twenty-fifth.’
When I see his act I’m not really surprised. He skips up on stage to a raucous but generally friendly welcome and, wielding his cigar like George Burns on acid, goes into a suicidal routine, berating Shine - ‘that prick’ - for not having turned up to fight and roundly abusing every one in sight before ending with the observation that now JFK Junior is dead he, Kevin, is the sexiest man in the USA. The packed crowd boo and hiss him like they might a pantomime villain.
He comes off-stage, wild-eyed, hyped up and delighted.
Most of the other acts confine themselves to anodyne statements of admiration and respect, though I quite like the middle-aged man who does a strip-tease, peeling off his safari shirt to reveal a firm if ample belly over which he proudly rubs his hand. ‘A vote for me is a vote for Hemingway in his prime.’
Predictably, Kevin the cop fails to win again. Equally predictably, he is already making plans to come back next year. Devin, doubtless adept by now at consoling his friend, wonders why nearly all the contestants want to look like Hemingway when he shot himself. Which is a fair point. The image of Hemingway sanctioned by the Hemingway Look-Alike Society and Sloppy Joe’s Bar, joint organisers of the event, is the bearded, poloneck-sweatered likeness, complete with tired eyes and thinning hair, captured on camera by Karsh of Ottawa four years before his death.
There is no place here for a young, fit Hemingway, a Hemingway who looks like the way Hemingway did when he lived in Key West.
We’re about to leave the sauna-like climate here at the end of America. Sixty-six summers ago Hemingway too was planning to escape the sub-tropical summer.
Over a farewell margarita or three made for me by Joan, the barwoman at La Concha, I reflect that what motivated Hemingway to travel, apart from natural curiosity, was a mixture of boredom and boastfulness. Having sought new places and new experiences, he used all his old reporter’s wiles to make it seem that he was the first to discover them. So, whether it was ambulance-driving in World War One, or marlin-fishing, or bull-running at Pamplona, Ernest Hemingway had the canny knack of being the first to tell the world about it.
In the sticky heat of July 1933 he was putting final touches to what was to be another world exclusive. And, for him, a new continent.
AFRICA
‘I like to shoot a rifle and I like to kill and Africa is where you do that.’
So wrote Hemingway to Janet Flanner, in April 1933. Hemingway had taken to life in the United States with enthusiasm. He had produced a second bestseller, A Farewell to Arms; Death in the Afternoon, an authoritative work on bullfighting; and a short-story collection, Winner Take Nothing
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There were rumblings of criticism - Max Eastman’s review of Death in the Afternoon was headed ‘Bull in the Afternoon’ - but on the whole his reputation was high, and he was enjoying the attentions of Hollywood, which had just made A Farewell to Arms, the first picture from his work. Yet none of his plans for 1933, outlined in a letter to Arnold Gingrich, publisher of a new magazine called Esquire, seemed to include his native land:
‘I go across to Cuba in a small boat April 12 to fish that coast for two months in case go to Spain to make a picture, if not, for four months then to Spain. Go from Spain to Tanganyika and then to Abyssinia to shoot. Will be back next January or February.’
His wanderlust had returned. Though he never made the picture in Spain, he did, thanks to a generous loan from Pauline’s Uncle Gus, make his first visit to Africa, disembarking at Mombasa, Kenya, on 8 December 1933
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Early January 1999 and I’m standing, drinking my Tusker beer, in an open porch at the front of my tent at the Tortilis camp, on the edge of the Amboseli National Park in south-eastern Kenya.
My guidebook notes that ‘Mount Kilimanjaro, at 19,340 feet (5896 metres) the highest mountain in Africa and the highest free-standing mountain in the world, dominates the landscape.’
I can’t see it anywhere.
I’m told that you have to be up very early to catch sight of the mountain, as her vast bulk generates an almost impenetrable layer of cloud for much of the day.
To be able, even theoretically, to see the snows of Kilimanjaro less than twelve hours after leaving Europe adds an edge of guilt to my exhilaration. I feel I should have done a little more work to get here. Hemingway’s first sight of Kilimanjaro came after a three-week boat journey from Marseilles, an overnight train ride to Nairobi and two days’ driving. And then he fell ill almost immediately, and was forced to return to Nairobi, where, from his hospital bed, he reported back to Esquire readers as ‘Your amebic dysentery correspondent’.
Symptoms of a.d. run from weakly insidious through spectacular to phenomenal. I believe the record is held by a Mr. McDonald with 232 movements in the twenty-four hours although many old a.d.men claim the McDonald record was never properly audited.
His illness didn’t put him off. He was captivated by Africa.
A brown land like Wyoming and Montana but with greater roll and distance … Nothing that I have ever read has given any idea of the beauty of the country.
What land I can see, beyond the fence of the camp, is studded with thorn trees and a light carpet of grass. The local Masai, unmissable in brightly patterned red cloaks, pass by on their way between the villages.
The abrupt transition from a small crowded country to a big empty one lends an air of unreality which I know will, like altitude sickness, take a day or two to clear.
‘In Africa a thing is true at first light and a lie by noon.’ Hemingway noted this on his second, longer trip to Africa in the 1950s and for everyone, from pampered tourist to native goat-herder, the hour of dawn is the best time.
It’s prime time for Kilimanjaro spotters too. At 6.30, having been woken by the traditional on-safari cup of tea, I stick my head out of the tent and there, so close and so high that I think it must be a cloud formation, is the rim of the great mountain, peeking out above a cornice of dark cloud.
By the time I’ve found my notebook and pen it’s disappeared again. Hemingway complained that on his second trip the mountain didn’t show itself for three weeks and I become despondent, but by the time I’ve dressed and walked up the hill to the spreading timbered and thatch-roofed space where we eat breakfast, the cloud has rolled back to reveal the whole long crest of the mountain, ‘as wide as all the world’, as Hemingway described it in ‘The Snows of Kilimanjaro’. It is an unbelievably powerful sight. On the eastern tip of this great ridge a glacier catches the sun.
Hemingway would probably have been out by now and bagged a gazelle or two, but things have changed. Most people who come to Africa nowadays shoot the animals with Leica and Pentax rather than Mannlicher and Browning. National Parks have been created to protect the animals (Amboseli opened soon after Hemingway’s last visit) and white hunters have largely been superseded by black rangers and game wardens.
Hemingway, obsessive hunter though he was, was not the kind of sportsman to shoot from cars or hides or after dark when the animals were blinded by powerful lights. For him tracking on foot, using the knowledge of animals inculcated in him by his father and grandfather, was the best and fairest way for a man to hunt.
Today I’m going out into the bush in that spirit, in the company of my two guides, Jackson, a Masai, and Ali, a Kenyan Moslem.
It is the day to christen my Hemingway Jacket, which I spotted in a magazine at the Chicago gun range and which I find is still produced by Willis and Geiger to his original design.