Ethics and "Night Thoughts": "Truer Than the Truth"

Abstract

Ethics and "Night Thoughts":"Truer Than the Truth" Miriam B. Mandel Hemingway's posthumous texts constitute a veritable library: A Moveable Feast (1964), Islands in the Stream (1970), "African Journal" (Sports Illustrated, 1971-1972), The Nick Adams Stories (1972), Complete Poems (1979), Selected Letters (1981), The Garden of Eden (1986), The Complete Short Stories of Ernest Hemingway: The Finca Vigía Edition (1987), The Dangerous Summer (1985), and True at First Light (1999) all gave us previously unpublished materials. Because Hemingway was constantly experimenting, each one of these texts offered new challenges and raised important questions—matters of identity, aging, race, gender, genre, structure, sources, and the compositional process, among others—that often invited us to revisit earlier work. But these texts, having been cut, emended, reorganized, and otherwise distorted by editorial intervention, could only yield tentative and uncertain analyses and interpretations. As Debra Moddelmog notes, "Only the full manuscript can provide the answers" (57). We rejoice that Under Kilimanjaro gives us the full text of the "African book" manuscript. For those of us who need precise textual information, however, the rejoicing is muted, because some of the things we need are missing. Although the editors include "all substantive marginal notes and queries" (UK ix) in an appendix, they don't indicate how they decided what was "substantive" and what (and how much) wasn't. Under Kilimanjaro also differs from the original manuscript because "minor errors such as repetitions and missing words" as well as errors "of spelling, grammar, and punctuation" were silently corrected, and because missing material was silently inserted, "when we were able to do so with some certainty" (ix). Because the editors' aim was "to produce a complete reading text […] that contains as few distracting [End Page 95] elements as possible" (ix), and not a text that is accurate to the original manuscript, textual critics will simply have to hope that a separate publication will give us all the not-substantive marginal notes, list all the textual emendations, and provide the documentation that Under Kilimanjaro lacks.1 Until then, however, those of us who require precise textual detail will have to work with the original manuscripts—which are, by the way, housed at the Hemingway Collection at the John F. Kennedy Library, Columbia Point, Boston (Items 223–223b, 534.5, and 674b).2 I recognize, of course, that Under Kilimanjaro is a big text that did not leave the editors much room for scholarly apparatus. But still, of the nine pages devoted to the introduction, only two discuss editorial methodology. Thirteen pages are devoted to appendices, but only six of them offer textual notes; and one page is given to a rudimentary map which does not even mark Laikokitok, where the characters shop and chat with Mr. Singh, nor the area where the characters set up camp and hunted. Compare that, for example, to the map provided in The Dangerous Summer, which traces the characters' travels in Spain. When pages are scarce, they must be used efficiently. Now for the things that gladden the heart, even of this fussy textual scholar. It is a thoroughly wonderful thing indeed to have the complete text of Hemingway's second African book, and I am grateful to the editors, Robert W. Lewis and Robert E. Fleming, for presenting it. Their remarks about the text they worked with—that it was a "part-typed text" and that it was "heavily edited in Hemingway's hand" (UK viii)—suggest that when Hemingway put his text in a bank vault as "insurance" for his heirs, he had revised it and worked it over until he was more or less comfortable that it was good enough for them to publish.3 Thus, we can consider Under Kilimanjaro to be a fairly mature text. Not a perfectly crafted and polished text, perhaps, but mature enough not only to be published but also to support scholarly analysis and to answer questions in a way that the other, incomplete posthumous texts could not. The book's careful structure testifies, I think, to its ripeness. The many characters fall into significant patterns and groups. The narrator mentions wives and sort-of wives who are easily recognizable portraits drawn...