Where's Papa?

In the 38 years since his suicide on July 2, 1961, Ernest Hemingway has had more books come out under his name than he managed to turn out during the last two decades of his life. Over that latter span, he published only Across the River and Into the Trees (1950) and The Old Man and the Sea (1952). Thanks to the piles of manuscripts, in varying stages of completion, that he left behind for his estate to ponder, four new Hemingways appeared after his death: A Moveable Feast (1964), Islands in the Stream (1970), The Dangerous Summer (1985) and The Garden of Eden (1986).

Now comes the fifth and, its publisher promises, "last" of Papa's posthumous performances: True at First Light (Scribner; 320 pages; $26). This so-called fictional memoir will officially appear on July 21, the 100th anniversary of Hemingway's birth.

When it was announced, the book stirred a small literary tempest. In the New Yorker last November, Joan Didion argued at length that all writers, even those "less inclined than Hemingway to construe words as the manifest expression of personal honor," should have the only, and final, say on what among their work will appear in print. Oddly enough, after running Didion's vehement objections to the project, the New Yorker published an excerpt from True at First Light in May.

Hemingway purists have also bristled at the commercialism that has swelled during Papa's centennial year. Credit--or blame--for much of this activity goes to the author's three sons, who some years ago signed with a licensing agent to control the use of the Hemingway name. The latest venture to win the sons' approval is the Ernest Hemingway Collection from the Thomasville furniture company. Among the offerings: the Pamplona Sofa and the Kilimanjaro Bed.

What Papa would have thought of all this is anyone's guess. But purists should remember that Hemingway was never shy about reaping the perks and rewards of his increasingly famous name. In fact, the 1953 East African safari that became the genesis of True at First Light began as a celebrity assignment for Look magazine. And the Kenyan government, worried that the Mau Mau uprisings would discourage tourism, welcomed Hemingway's visit and the publicity it would generate by naming him an honorary game warden.

That is how he appears in the opening pages of True at First Light, which his second son Patrick, in the introduction, says he whittled down from a 200,000-word manuscript to a book roughly half as long. Even after such radical surgery, the thing seems interminable.

Part of the problem stems from Hemingway's apparent uncertainty about where he wanted his story to go. Early on, some Mau Mau rebels who have escaped from jail pose a potential threat to the Hemingway encampment, but they abruptly vanish from the narrative. Another plot line involves Hemingway's fourth wife, Mary, and her fierce determination to shoot a particular lion before Christmas Day. "He's my lion," she says, sounding uncomfortably like a contestant in a Bad Hemingway writing contest, "and I love him and respect him and I have to kill him." She does so about halfway through the book.

And then there is Hemingway's infatuation with Debba, a young Wakamba woman whom he seems inclined to take, in accordance with local customs, as a second wife. Mary notes, "I think it's wonderful that you have a girl that can't read nor write so you can't get letters from her." Such comments do not deflect Hemingway's attention from Debba's charms: "When we rode together in the front seat she liked to feel the embossing on the old leather holster of my pistol. It was a flowered design and very worn and old and she would trace the design very carefully with her fingers and then take her hand away and press the pistol and its holster close against her thigh."

There are plenty of such painful and embarrassing passages to be found here, along with some scattered bursts of the magic that Hemingway could consistently command earlier in his career: "White flowers had blossomed in the night so that with the first daylight before the sun had risen all the meadows looked as though a full moon was shining on new snow through a mist."

The book also contains intriguing evidence that Hemingway, in his mid-50s, was entertaining second thoughts about the swaggering macho ethos that his writings and well-publicized exploits had so widely disseminated. Although he is on an African safari, he is weary with hunting: "The time of shooting beasts for trophies was long past with me." He recalls the treatment meted out to the Africans who had accompanied him on a previous safari. "Once they had been the boys... Twenty years ago I had called them boys too and neither they nor I had any thought that I had no right to. Now no one would have minded if I had used the word. But the way things were now you did not do it. Everyone had his duties and everyone had a name." Near the end, Hemingway reports that among his prayers is the plea, "Africa for Africans."

By most standards, and certainly by Hemingway's, True at First Light is a pretty bad piece of work. But its publication will do no harm to his reputation. In fact, the appearance of this book underscores Hemingway's courage as a writer. By the time he began working on this manuscript, he had received all the honors--a Pulitzer Prize in 1953, the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1954--and all the fame that any author could desire. But his body had been battered by injuries and his brain by alcohol, and the "one true sentence" that he said would get his writing humming became harder and harder to find. Still, he persisted on a project he must have known, at some point, had become hopeless.

Happy Birthday, Papa.