Under Kilimanjaro --Truthiness at Late Light: Or, Would Oprah Kick Hemingway Out of Her Book Club

Abstract

Under Kilimanjaro—Truthiness at Late Light:Or Would Oprah Kick Hemingway Out of Her Book Club H. R. Stoneback For several months now, I have been reading and rereading Hemingway's African narrative Under Kilimanjaro (admirably edited by Robert W. Lewis and Robert E. Fleming "to produce a complete reading text" of Hemingway's manuscript), and reassessing True at First Light (the radically truncated 1999 commercial version of the same manuscript, skillfully edited by Patrick Hemingway), hoping to say something perspicacious or at least useful in these brief remarks I agreed to write. Because I will be teaching Under Kilimanjaro in a graduate seminar this semester, and I taught True at First Light immediately after its release in 1999, I thought I would list here some of the reasons why we should read and teach Under Kilimanjaro (not its earlier half-brother-text True at First Light: a) aesthetic reasons having to do with language, style, character development; b) thematic reasons having to do with the more complete presentation of major themes such as the "new religion" that drives so much of the narrative; c) scholarly reasons having to do with the need to assess the real thing. For the same reasons that I send all graduate students with strong interest in The Garden of Eden to the Kennedy Library to read the manuscript, I would send all readers to Under Kilimanjaro. Whatever sense we finally make of this African narrative, we must make it from the real thing, the whole thing. [End Page 123] One example of textual variation must suffice here. On the first page of Under Kilimanjaro Hemingway describes Keiti, the old man who is the "head man of this outfit": "His religion was absolute but I never knew how much of it was snobbishness and a desire for a special ritual and how much was true belief. There were very many things I did not know. There were more every day" (1). Because the book is centrally concerned with religion and ritual, truth and belief, things that are known and unknown, one may well wonder why this opening passage did not appear in True at First Light. Aside from its telling characterization of the old "head man," the passage establishes the narrator's truth-seeking character, the fundamental humility of Hemingway's stance as a deracinated outsider who yearns to understand, to observe accurately, and finally to merge with the Deus Loci of his corner of Africa, where he knows the people and the animals individually, where he will practice the special rituals of place to support his candidacy for tribal membership, and where he will try to sort out "how much was true belief." But this key passage, and scores of others, disappear from the brief and much diminished first published version of Hemingway's narrative. All during the month of January 2006 my meditations on the two versions of Hemingway's 1953–54 safari "memoir" were invaded on a daily basis by the media brouhaha over the fictionalization of events in James Frey's best-selling "memoir"—A Million Little Pieces. Was there a single day in January 2006 that the print and broadcast media did not make some pronouncement on truth and fiction, on fictionalized memoirs? I started to keep a file on all this, many clippings, many scrawled notes, thinking it might be instructive to place Hemingway's "fictional memoir" of Africa in this contemporary context. I took careful notes on memoir-related media occurrences of the word "truthiness," which the American Dialect Society had voted the "2005 Word of the Year." I kept trying to fit Patrick Hemingway's observation, in his introduction to True at First Light, about how "ambiguous counterpoint between fiction and truth" (9) was at the heart of his father's African "memoir" into the contexts of the season's literary sensation. I did the same with the careful statements about truth and "fictional elements" made by Lewis and Fleming in their introduction; and I took copious notes regarding what Hemingway had to say in this narrative about truth, lies, and writing, and how these statements related to earlier observations he had made on the subject, going...