Hunter's Credo

Eleven years have passed since Ernest Hemingway published In Our Time , a collection of remarkable short stories. Since then he has written two novels, a parody of Sherwood Anderson, a book on bull-fighting, two more volumes of short stories. In all these he revealed his distaste for literary affectations, his admiration for simple human courage and physical accomplishment, his preference for warm countries, his distrust of people who use big words and indulge in easy generalities. But he has never formulated a statement of the philosophy that has guided him in his writing. Consequently, Green Hills of Africa , which contains such a statement, marks a new stage in Hemingway's development, throws more direct light on his personality than any book he has yet published. Superficially the record of an African big-game hunting expedition, complete with sharp descriptions of wild and sunlit landscapes, childlike natives, killings exciting but not extremely hazardous, it is also packed with Hemingway's comments on literature, politics, revolution and man's fate.

The party, hunting in Tanganyika, included Hemingway and his wife, a professional English guide named Jackson Phillips, a friend and rival hunter called Karl who always triumphed over Hemingway. When Hemingway killed a rhinoceros at 300 yards, making a beautiful shot that filled him with elation, Karl casually brought down one twice as large. When Hemingway traveled without his guide into wilder country to bag a kudu, the real object of the hunt, Karl shot a much nobler specimen almost without effort. Since Green Hills of Africa is an attempt to write "an absolutely true book," Hemingway does not conceal his acute jealousy of Karl, or his bitter disappointment when each of his achievements was bettered. Since the book is also an experiment "to see whether the shape of a country and the pattern of a month's action can . . . compete with a work of the imagination," the author writes candidly and with delicacy of his love for his wife, of a minor family squabble, of his affection for the guide, pictures himself as a forthright man with a weakness for bragging, easily irritated and easily calmed.

In comparison with most contemporary works of the imagination," even in comparison with Hemingway's own fiction, Green Hills of Africa must be put down as a successful experiment. With its swift narrative and its human conflicts, it is as carefully organized as a good novel. The clearly visualized African landscapes, lovely in their panoramas, dense and difficult in detail, the remarkable variety of the hunting episodes, above all Ernest Hemingway's passionate absorption in the sport, combine to give the book the freshness and immediacy of a vivid personal experience. Moreover, the "idiotic abundance" of game, suddenly encountered after trying periods of inactivity, inspires Hunter Hemingway to some of the best descriptive writing he has done: "In the glasses it was a rhino, showing very clear and minute at the distance, red-colored in the sun, moving with a quick waterbuglike motion across the bill. Then there were three more of them that came out of the forest, dark in the shadow, and two that fought, tinily, in the glasses, pushing head-on, fighting in front of a clump of bushes while we watched them and the light failed. . . . Then there was a crashing further away and we could see the reeds swaying with the rush of something through them toward the opposite bank, but could not see what was making the movement. Then I saw the black back, the wide-swept, point-lifted horns and then the quick-moving climbing rush of a buffalo up the other bank. He went up, his neck up and out, his head horn-heavy, his withers rounded like a fighting bull, in fast strong-legged climb."