Ernest Hemingway was one of the great innovators in literary form. His apparent renunciation of stylistic flourishes—the absence of lyrical rhetoric, the spare sketching of context, the paring of narrative voice to short, stark strokes—was the style of no style, an aesthetic obsession so fanatical and so closely linked to Hemingway’s sense of personal bearing and way of life that it comes off, in retrospect, as an inverse dandyism. Hemingway’s way of writing was also inseparable from his physically vigorous subjects, such as war, hunting, fishing, and bullfighting—and, early on, his notion of literary achievement was agonistic. In Lillian Ross’s majestic Profile of Hemingway, published in The New Yorker, in 1950, he likened his fiction-writing to boxing—with Turgenev, Maupassant, and Stendhal.
Hemingway’s 1935 book “Green Hills of Africa,” which has just been republished by Scribner in a new and augmented edition, is a work of nonfiction. It’s not his first; his encyclopedic account of the world of bullfighting, “Death in the Afternoon,” was published in 1932. But that book is about bullfighting overall, occasionally adorned with references to Hemingway’s own experience. It’s not a narrative; it’s a history and an analysis sprinkled with anecdotes. In “Green Hills of Africa,” by contrast, Hemingway states his ambitions clearly in a brief foreword:
Hemingway began his writing career during a time of innovation in literary form, and had spent much time in Paris in the company of one of the great innovators, Gertrude Stein. He himself was, from the start, a master formalist, and the declaration of intent in “Green Hills of Africa” deserves to be taken literally. It is, in the purest sense, an experimental work of writing, composed on the subject of adventure and in the spirit of adventure, to put himself—and writing as such—to the test.
The writing is Hemingway’s account of a trip to East Africa that he undertook in late 1933 with his wife at the time, Pauline Pfeiffer, for the purpose of hunting big game, including rhinoceroses, kudu, and lions. The couple are accompanied by a friend (identified as Karl in the book); a professional hunter (or “white hunter”) called, in the book, both Pop and Mr. J. P.; and a changing group of native guides, trackers, and bearers, including men called M’Cola, Droopy, the Wanderobo-Masai, and one whom Hemingway nicknamed Garrick in deprecation of the man’s theatrical mannerisms, which irritated the author. (As for Pfeiffer, Hemingway identifies her, in the book, as P.O.M.—Poor Old Mama.)
There’s also another character who turns up by chance early on in the hunt, an Austrian named Kandisky, who joins the party briefly when his truck breaks down. Kandisky has a literary bent. He recognizes Hemingway’s name from poems that the author had published in the German review Der Querschnitt about a decade earlier (one of them was a crudely sarcastic attack on six "lady poets”), and he engages Hemingway in literary conversation, bringing up a name that will come back twice more in the course of the book: “Tell me what is Joyce like? I have not the money to buy it.” Kandisky means “Ulysses,” of course, which was published in 1922, in Paris, by Sylvia Beach, the founder of Shakespeare and Company, and which was banned on the grounds of obscenity both in the United States and Great Britain.
Joyce is the spirit that haunts “Green Hills of Africa,” both by name and by implication. In effect, the account of the hunt is also a manifesto of sorts, as when Kandisky further engages Hemingway in exactly the sort of literary theorizing that the author both distrusts and enjoys. Hemingway tears through the history of American literature and leaves only three survivors—Henry James, Stephen Crane, and Mark Twain. (This section is the source of Hemingway’s famous remark, “All modern American literature comes from one book by Mark Twain called Huckleberry Finn.”) The two men engage in a sharp page of stichomythia regarding Hemingway’s pleasure in writing, which Hemingway expands into a frank, visionary statement of ambition:
“Green Hills of Africa” points toward those fourth and fifth dimensions. Hemingway’s aesthetic is also a matter of morality, based in the truth of first-person experience, tested by one’s own unsparingly high, self-critical standards. Throughout the book, Hemingway submits his hunting ability, his consideration toward others (the term that he reserves for himself at his most insensitive is a “four-letter man”—presumably, a shit), his modesty, his bravery, and his powers of perception to the test (which doesn't prevent him from flinging around some ugly racial epithets). That test comes in literary terms, in effect stopping the action with a grand series of asides and analyses which aren’t a matter of the narration of the hunt but a narration of what happens to be passing through Hemingway’s mind at a given moment. These asides are the very heart of the book.
In “Green Hills of Africa,” Hemingway is seeking to out-Joyce Joyce regarding streams of consciousness, and he even tips his hand regarding that sense of competition. In the beginning of the Chapter Four, the author, P.O.M., Pop, M’Cola, and Droopy head off for a morning hunt. When they take a break from their hike, Hemingway pulls out a book—Tolstoy’s “Sevastopol”—and then muses about Tolstoy’s depiction of war and the importance of war as a subject of fiction overall. Then there is this passage:
This heroic sentence is followed by more meditations on war and literature and another pair of references to Joyce, followed by another passage on Hemingway’s own literary ambitions. Hemingway’s divagations here are continued throughout the book. In a passage in Chapter Five, he imagines himself into works of literature that he loves. In Chapter Eight, he speculates on the moral value of his writing and calls his inner life “this Gulf Stream you are living with” and—with a twist of historical speculation—describes the heterogeneous matter that it carries. In Chapter Thirteen, his handling of a bottle of beer brings to mind his beer-drinking on country jaunt in France, followed by a mighty three pages of imaginings, running through subjects including business and family, disease and history, geopolitical speculations and literary aspirations, a bitter look at America and his reasons for having left, and a tribute to the country where he was now hunting. A few pages later, the book ends—with a dry, quick sting of reflexive humor that explains his intention to write the book that the reader has just finished reading.
Hemingway never wrote the comprehensive novel. He may have been too busy having the experiences of the century to devote himself, over a sufficiently long period of time, to the one great work that would stand, like “Ulysses” (mentioned explicitly in Chapter Ten), as one of the century’s monuments. Joyce lived through revolutionary times and, in order to create that monument, stayed away from those revolutions, left them out, and instead, accomplished a revolution in literary form. Precisely because of what it left out, Hemingway seems to have considered that literary revolution to have been incomplete and unresolved. In “Green Hills of Africa,” Hemingway put in what Joyce left out—the presence of physical danger and the sense of memory arising in real time. The stream of consciousness that Hemingway aspired to capture in writing was the one in which he was living in the present tense, which is why the higher dimensions of prose that he envisioned were built from nonfiction—from the existential reclamation of his own thoughts and actions at a given moment. Unlike Joyce’s innovations, Hemingway’s experimental fusion of fiction and nonfiction remained largely at the level of theory—but it has proven to be even more enduringly influential. Hemingway’s stream has become hard to recognize and to distinguish, because it has become the mainstream.
