True at First Light: A Fictional Memoir [Hardcover]

Ernest Hemingway (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: July 6, 1999

Both revealing self-portrait and dramatic fictional chronicle of his final African safari, Ernest Hemingway's last unpublished work was written when he returned from Kenya in 1953. Edited by his son Patrick, who accompanied his father on the safari, True at First Light offers rare insights into the legendary American writer in the year of the hundredth anniversary of his birth.

A blend of autobiography and fiction, the book opens on the day his close friend Pop, a celebrated hunter, leaves Ernest in charge of the safari camp and news arrives of a potential attack from a hostile tribe. Drama continues to build as his wife, Mary, pursues the great black-maned lion that has become her obsession. Spicing his depictions of human longings with sharp humor, Hemingway captures the excitement of big-game hunting and the unparalleled beauty of the scenery -- the green plains covered with gray mist, zebra and gazelle traversing the horizon, cool dark nights broken by the sounds of the hyena's cry.

As the group at camp help Mary track her prize, she and Ernest suffer the "incalculable casualties of marriage," and their attempts to love each other well are marred by cruelty, competition and infidelity. Ernest has become involved with Debba, an African girl whom he supposedly plans to take as a second bride. Increasingly enchanted by the local African community, he struggles between the attraction of these two women and the wildly different cultures they represent.

In True at First Light, Hemingway also chronicles his exploits -- sometimes hilarious and sometimes poignant -- among the African men with whom he has become very close, reminisces about encounters with other writers and his days in Paris and Spain and satirizes, among other things, the role of organized religion in Africa. He also muses on the act of writing itself and the author's role in determining the truth. What is fact and what is fiction? This is a question that was posed by Hemingway's readers throughout his career and is one of his principal subjects here.

Equally adept at evoking the singular textures of the landscape, the thrill of the hunt and the complexities of married life, Hemingway weaves a tale that is rich in laughter, beauty and profound insight. True at First Light is an extraordinary publishing event -- a breathtaking final work from one of this nation's most beloved and important writers.

Editorial Reviews

Amazon.com Review

Ernest Hemingway's final posthumous work bears the rather awkward designation "a fictional memoir" and arrives under a cloud of controversial editing and patching--but all of that ends up being beside the point. Though this account of a 1953 safari in Kenya lacks the resolution and clarity of the best Hemingway (The Sun Also Rises, A Farewell to Arms) it is "real" Hemingway nonetheless. Let scholars work out where memoir leaves off and fiction begins: for the common reader, the prose alone casts an irresistible spell.

In True at First Light the glory days of the "great white hunters" are over and the Mau Mau rebellion is violently dislodging European farmers from Kenya's arable lands. But to the African gun bearers, drivers, and game scouts who run his safari in the shadow of Mount Kilimanjaro, Hemingway remains a lordly figure--almost a god. Two parallel quests propel the narrative: Mary, Hemingway's fourth and last wife, doggedly stalks an enormous black-maned lion that she is determined to kill by Christmas, while Hemingway becomes increasingly obsessed with Debba, a beautiful young African woman. What makes the novel especially strange and compelling is that Mary knows all about Debba and accepts her as a "supplementary wife," even as she loses no opportunity to rake her husband over the coals for his drinking, lack of discipline in camp, and condescending protectiveness.

As usual with Hemingway, atmosphere and attitude are far more important than plot. Mary at one point berates her husband as a "conscience-ridden murderer," but this is precisely the moral stance that gives the hunting scenes their tension and beauty. "I was happy that before he died he had lain on the high yellow rounded mound with his tail down," Hemingway writes of "Mary's lion," "and his great paws comfortable before him and looked off across his country to the blue forest and the high white snows of the big Mountain."

Passages like these--and there are many of them--redeem the book's rambling structure and occasional lapses into self-indulgent posturing. Joan Didion dismissed True at First Light in The New Yorker as "words set down but not yet written," but this fails to acknowledge the power of these words. The value of True at First Light lies in its candor, its nakedness: it provides a rare opportunity to watch a master working his way toward art. --David Laskin

From Publishers Weekly

More a curiosity than a major contribution to his oeuvre, this fictional memoir of a 1953 safari in Kenya, edited by Hemingway's son Patrick from a first-draft manuscript and published to celebrate the 100th anniversary of Papa's birth, is a sometimes entertaining, sometimes trying read. Hemingway narrates the rambling story in his own voice, and others, including his wife, Mary, are identified by name. More humorous than most of Hemingway's novels, the narrative also contains enough hunting scenes for Hemingway and others to show the requisite grace under pressure. The old Hemingway magic flashes sporadically, like lightning, but not often enough. There are a series of sentences intoning "I wished..." reminiscent of his earlier linguistic triumphs, and some dialogue, crisp and to the point, like the stichomythia of Greek tragedy. Lines like "So I carried her in and she weighed just what a woman that you love should weigh when you lifted her in your arms...." still resonate. The Kenyan setting is atmospheric, but the promising elements of the plotAa possible Mau Mau attack on the camp, Miss Mary's determination to kill a lionAtoo often stagnate for lack of action and dramatic tension. Some uneasiness occurs between Hemingway and Mary over Hemingway's attraction to an African woman, Debba, but even this is pretty tame. A supporting cast of African characters are not distinct individuals, and the prolific use of Swahili words is often confusing in spite of a glossary. Yet, as prose by Hemingway, no matter how distanced and imperfect, the book is still worth reading. Perhaps it will inspire new readers to delve into Hemingway's true legacy, the novels and stories like "Cat in the Rain," and "The Short Happy Life of Francis Macomber." BOMC main selection; first serial to the New Yorker; rights sold in Denmark, England, France, Germany, Iceland, Italy, Norway, Poland, Spain, Sweden and the Czech Republic.
Copyright 1999 Reed Business Information, Inc.

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Product Details

• Hardcover: 320 pages
• Publisher: Scribner; 1 edition (July 6, 1999)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0684849216
• ISBN-13: 978-0684849218
• Product Dimensions: 9.1 x 6.3 x 1.1 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1 pounds
• Average Customer Review: 3.3 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (69 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #1,037,614 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

More About the Author

Ernest Hemingway ranks as the most famous of twentieth-century American writers; like Mark Twain, Hemingway is one of those rare authors most people know about, whether they have read him or not. The difference is that Twain, with his white suit, ubiquitous cigar, and easy wit, survives in the public imagination as a basically, lovable figure, while the deeply imprinted image of Hemingway as rugged and macho has been much less universally admired, for all his fame. Hemingway has been regarded less as a writer dedicated to his craft than as a man of action who happened to be afflicted with genius. When he won the Nobel Prize in 1954, Time magazine reported the news under Heroes rather than Books and went on to describe the author as "a globe-trotting expert on bullfights, booze, women, wars, big game hunting, deep sea fishing, and courage." Hemingway did in fact address all those subjects in his books, and he acquired his expertise through well-reported acts of participation as well as of observation; by going to all the wars of his time, hunting and fishing for great beasts, marrying four times, occasionally getting into fistfights, drinking too much, and becoming, in the end, a worldwide celebrity recognizable for his signature beard and challenging physical pursuits.

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

12 of 12 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Well, I'll be damned ... it's really good!, August 6, 1999

By A Customer

This review is from: True at First Light: A Fictional Memoir (Hardcover)

As a longtime Hemingway fan, I approached this unfinished work with both hesitation and skepticism: like "The Garden of Eden," the whole idea of this book seems wrong -- it smacks of disturbing the dead. If Hemingway had wanted this published, he would have finished it, right? The poor guy was in deep artistic decline when he wrote it, right?

Well, after reading this "fictional memoir," I'm no longer quite sure.

Perhaps I read too much of the lukewarm, pre-publication hype -- my expectations were very low. But upon reading it, "True At First Light" struck me as astonishingly strong. I didn't find it very rambling, or half-baked as some have charged. Nor did it seem racist: It is certainly a book of it's time -- the mid-50's -- but its treatment of Africa and Africans seems eminently respectful and somewhat sad. He compares the faded glory of these post-Colonial peoples to that of the Native Americans in the wake of the settling of the U.S. -- a mortally wounded people, struggling to preserve a history and tradition mostly destroyed by European warriors, profiteers and missionaries.

The writing is clearly an early draft -- but what a fine early draft it is! There are flashes of brilliance that only the greatest living writers could hope to match in their most "finished" works. And I personally like the less-guarded qualities of late Hemingway. His early work is clearly more innovative, and carries more historical and cultural importance. But that's not really the point, I'd argue.

For too long, Hemingway has been either lionized or condemned as a larger-than-life celebrity icon -- and of course, in many ways that's what he was. But let's not forget that under all the dated, off-putting bombast, he was also a skilled and sensitive artist -- and this work is well worth the time and close attention of anyone who loves that oft-forgotten, oft-obscured soul: Hemingway, the writer.

7 of 8 people found the following review helpful:

2.0 out of 5 stars Nice to hear from Papa again, but..., January 28, 2000

By A Customer

This review is from: True at First Light: A Fictional Memoir (Hardcover)

You should have seen how excited I was to hear that a new Ernest Hemingway book was being released posthumously. Many people before me have summarized the content of this book, so to make a long story short, True At First Life is a cut down version of the journal he kept while on safari in Africa in 1952-53. Although the book is worth reading for biographical content, it often is very disjointed at times. This is most pronounced in the first five chapters of the book. This book was edited by his son, Patrick Hemingway. I would like to believe that Papa himself would have provided us with a more cohesive tale had he been alive to edit the book himself. In any case, the book suffers from a lack of climax. For instance, there is threat of invasion from a warring tribe in the first five chapters that is never realized. Even the killing of Mary's (his 4th wife) lion lacks punch. The only thing that made me want to continue reading this book was the great Hemingway style that shines through despite choppy editing and anticlimactic sequences. As a big Hemingway fan, I felt that this book was worth reading just to hear him speak to us again in his simple, direct style of writing. As a novel, it suffers from a lack of substance, plot, and progression. This however, will never detract from the beauty of his earlier works such as The Sun Also Rises and Farewell to Arms.

4 of 4 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars I Bought it off a Homeless Guy for a Dollar, July 24, 2000

By 

rebecca swanson - See all my reviews

This review is from: True at First Light: A Fictional Memoir (Hardcover)

... and it's worth its weight in shillingi. Kudos to E. Hemingway and his son, Patrick, for being such a (semi-posthumously) talented pair. If you haven't read much (or any) Hemingway, this book makes for a beautiful foray into his works. True at First Light is a gorgeous, tantalizing description of his time as a game warden, with phrasing so rich and narrative so taut, one can barely refrain from booking a one-way flight to Kenya. Hemingway deftly transforms what one American reader may consider the somewhat mundane business of hunting, washing and drinking into an extraordinarily attractive life; the allure is in the escape from this complicated and hectic society. Perhaps his connection with the reader is best explained in Hemingway's own words: "Everything had been taken out of my control and I welcomed, as always, the lack of responsibility and the splendid inactivity with no obligation to kill, pursue, protect, intrigue, defend or participate and I welcomed the chance to read."