Ethics and "night thoughts": "truer than the truth".

HEMINGWAY'S POSTHUMOUS TEXTS constitute a veritable library: A Moveable Feast (1964), Islands in the Stream (1970), "African Journal" (Sports Illustrated, 1971-1972), The Nick Adams Stories (1972), Complete Poems (1979), Selected Letters (1981), The Garden of Eden (1986), The Complete Short Stories of Ernest Hemingway: The Finca Vigia Edition (1987), The Dangerous Summer (1985), and True at First Light (1999) all gave us previously unpublished materials. Because Hemingway was constantly experimenting, each one of these texts offered new challenges and raised important questions--matters of identity, aging, race, gender, genre, structure, sources, and the compositional process, among others--that often invited us to revisit earlier work. But these texts, having been cut, emended, reorganized, and otherwise distorted by editorial intervention, could only yield tentative and Uncertain analyses and interpretations. As Debra Moddelmog notes, "Only the full manuscript can provide the answers" (57). We rejoice that Under Kilimanjaro gives us the full text of the "African book" manuscript.

For those of us who need precise textual information, however, the rejoicing is muted, because some of the things we need are missing. Although the editors include "all substantive marginal notes and queries" (UK ix) in an appendix, they don't indicate how they decided what was "substantive" and what (and how much) wasn't. Under Kilimanjaro also differs from the original manuscript because "minor errors such as repetitions and missing words" as well as errors "of spelling, grammar, and punctuation" were silently corrected, and because missing material was silently inserted, "when we were able to do so with some certainty" (ix). Because the editors' aim was "to produce a complete reading text [...] that contains as few distracting elements as possible" (ix), and not a text that is accurate to the original manuscript, textual critics will simply have to hope that a separate publication will give us all the not-substantive marginal notes, list all the textual emendations, and provide the documentation that Under Kilimanjaro lacks. (1) Until then, however, those of us who require precise textual detail will have to work with the original manuscripts--which are, by the way, housed at the Hemingway Collection at the John F. Kennedy Library, Columbia Point, Boston (Items 223-223b, 534.5, and 674b). (2)

I recognize, of course, that Under Kilimanjaro is a big text that did not leave the editors much room for scholarly apparatus. But still, of the nine pages devoted to the introduction, only two discuss editorial methodology. Thirteen pages are devoted to appendices, but only six of them offer textual notes; and one page is given to a rudimentary map which does not even mark Laikokitok, where the characters shop and chat with Mr. Singh, nor the area where the characters set up camp and hunted. Compare that, for example, to the map provided in The Dangerous Summer, which traces the characters' travels in Spain. When pages are scarce, they must be used efficiently.

Now for the things that gladden the heart, even of this fussy textual scholar. It is a thoroughly wonderful thing indeed to have the complete text of Hemingway's second African book, and I am grateful to the editors, Robert W. Lewis and Robert E. Fleming, for presenting it. Their remarks about the text they worked with--that it was a "part-typed text" and that it was "heavily edited in Hemingway's hand" (UK viii)--suggest that when Hemingway put his text in a bank vault as "insurance" for his heirs, he had revised it and worked it over until he was more or less comfortable that it was good enough for them to publish. (3) Thus, we can consider Under Kilimanjaro to be a fairly mature text. Not a perfectly crafted and polished text, perhaps, but mature enough not only to be published but also to support scholarly analysis and to answer questions in a way that the other, incomplete posthumous texts could not.

The book's careful structure testifies, I think, to its ripeness. The many characters fall into significant patterns and groups. The narrator mentions wives and sort-of wives who are easily recognizable portraits drawn from Hemingway's own life story. They are listed more or less chronologically, from "[t]he wife I had loved first and best" through the wife of the previous safari (often mentioned in connection with her fur coat), to the wife "who had been reclassified so that she did not hold that rank or category," as well as the wife and the fiancee of the current safari, plus Marlene Dietrich and "another girl" with American citizenship and large breasts (UK 382-84). We also hear of the narrator's grandmother, his sister-in-law, his fiancee's sister (a.k.a. the widow), and the beautiful and fertile Mrs. Singh. This large and international cast of old and young, sterile and fertile female characters will, I am sure, receive much critical attention, although most of the women I've listed are absent from the action and exist in memory only.

There are also many male authority figures, among them Pop, M'Cola, Tony, G.C., Wilson Blake, Chungo, Charo, and even Mayito Menocal; many of them, too, are absent from the action for great stretches, some are never seen, and each has his own area of expertise. Other male characters--among them, M'Cola's son Ngui, the pilot Willie, Msembi (absent from Lewis and Fleming's list of Characters, though included in Patrick Hemingway's), Mthuka and, in particular, the Informer--are in various ways, parallels or "brothers" to the narrator. Younger, weaker men (Simeon, Harry, Nguili) and undifferentiated, nameless women (shoppers and hitchhikers) are necessary props in the patriarchal system the narrator seems to find necessary or natural (at least in Africa), as are the father-son combinations: M'Cola has two sons, Molo and Ngui; Keiti's son is Mthuka; and the narrator's son, physically absent from the narrative but present in Africa, is Bwana Mouse. The narrator himself pays homage to his father-in-law, supplying meat and other favors in payment for the daughter. We have here a male narrator who seeks the approval of many men (and of the two women he is involved with), who is interested in how the various men and cultures he knows handle religious, sexual, hunting, drinking, and eating matters, and who needs (desperately, it seems to me) to construct some universal, comprehensive ethical system in which "everything will be all right"--more about this later--no matter from what religious or cultural angle his own behavior is examined. This system must go beyond even patriarchy, which this narrative questions and examines and, I think, finds insufficient. Although the narrator seems to live comfortably in a patriarchal world, his patriarchal values seem to be (1) undercut by his attentive focus on Mary as she hunts her lion, (2) affirmed by his mocking of this hunting (UK 338 et passim), and (3) more seriously undercut by a seemingly minor, puzzling, but obviously significant incident: Mary's sighting and one-shot killing of the kongoni (433-34), which strikes tremendous unease in the narrator's heart in the last chapter of the book. Here is the tip of a sexual-politics iceberg, though in this complicated book many icebergs clutter the African landscape.

Having the complete text of the narrative also enables us, as we could not do in the earlier versions, to discern its structural force. The first half of the book is pretty physical and tense, dealing with the clear and obvious dangers inherent in hunting (Mary might get killed), love relationships (Mary and Debba might clash, or Mary might make a major and painful fuss), and local politics (the Mau Mau might attack and wipe out the camp). The narrator's mentor, Pop, has given some advice and instruction and then left him alone to face these important aspects of life. Soon enough, however, the Mau Maul threat evaporates (UK 109), Mary's lion is killed (213), and Mary takes herself off to Nairobi (306), leaving the coast clear for Debba. Even though Mary returns, the book itself does not revisit the earlier, quite specific and immediate adventure-worries. It adopts a more transgressive, suggestive, relaxed, and philosophically expansive tone as it considers the implications of matters like the night with Debba, the leopard hunt, the changes to hair and clothes, the hunting with spears, the problem of the white man hunting in Africa, and the rules and regulations the narrator invents, adopts, or disdains. This is, to me, the more interesting half, containing a wide range of philosophical remarks and statements like "I thought about the strange strictures of morality in different countries and who it was that could make a sin a sin" and remarking, probably more longingly than jokingly, "Ngui, Mthuka, and I could decide what was a sin and what was not" (382).

The narrator, an aging man who is taking and dispensing health- and strength-enhancing drugs, needs to resolve large questions. He is making his way in a country he knew when he was younger, but which is different now, as he is different. The narrator ponders large questions (the significance of animals, dreams, tribal and sexual things, magic and rituals); he is familiar with several prime movers (Gitche Manitou, Jesus, Allah) and a variety of languages and cultures (Spanish, Italian, English, North American, Masai, Wakamba, Lumbwa, Chagga). All attract him but none has been able to elicit his full commitment.

He needs a new culture, or a new religion; his pronouncements indicate that he has thought seriously about what constitutes religion and about the relationship between fact and faith: "certain lies were truer than the truth and they were a necessity to any form of religion. [...] if you did not have the necessary dreams you must invent them" (UK 282). He also knows that religions must demand and forbid, must have laws: the founders must deliver "the highly necessary Tablets of the new religion such as it is always necessary to produce" (269). All this is not easy--"Any really good religion has it a little rough at the start" (202)--or straightforward, but he is quite willing to resort to the necessary chicanery in order to found "our new and definitive religion" (269, 279-82), one that will bring him peace of mind, conscience, and heart. This is difficult for the narrator who longs to be "better" and "friendly" and "good," who loves laws and rituals, who wants to live within a well-defined system and thus become an insider, but who paradoxically also loves to break the law, or to be above the law or in rebellion to it (and thus be an independent outsider), and who when all is said and done doesn't really want to change any of his ways. He knows that any attempt to start a new religion, let alone one that will satisfy all these contradictory needs, will be met with scorn, but he insists to Mary that "It's not a joke" (420).

And it's not. It's a seemingly unsolvable problem that needs to be solved. He needs an ethical system that will enable him to be himself, as his grandmother enabled him to be himself. He recalls another time, long ago, when he was also in pain (quite appropriately, from a blow to the groin) and his grandmother comforted and reassured him, advising him to disregard conventions and try everything: "Remember this now. The only things in life that I regret are the things I did not do" (UK 368). Not only does she criticize monogamous fidelity, she actively encourages him to "do what you truly want to do" and promises him with all her authority that "everything will be all right." And therefore, the narrator says, "I loved my grandmother more than anyone in the world and more than I could love anyone ever again" (368).

More than anything, this narrator needs an ethical system he can live with. Following his grandmother's wisdom, he wants to be everything: a good husband in the monogamous tradition, a polygamous Wakamba, a barefoot hunting Masai, a mosquito-boot-shod white law-enforcer, a good though absent father to unborn children, and many other contradictory things. Not surprisingly, he is having a hard time constructing a system that will encompass all of these desires and thus produce the spiritual peace he needs in order to love others and, perhaps most importantly, himself. He is having, as his grandmother had and as another dying man was able to recognize, "night thoughts" (Reynolds 58). Theyy are serious thoughts, as complicated for us to come to terms with as the problems that poked through the surface of earlier Hemingway books: the problems of how to break into the fifth dimension, or change from one sex or race to another, or write "an absolutely true book" or found a new ethical or religious system.

I am very glad indeed that we now have before us all of the challenges offered by Under Kilimanjaro.

WORKS CITED

Hemingway, Ernest. Under Kilimanjaro. Ed. Robert W. Lewis and Robert Fleming. Kent, OH: Kent State UP, 1995.

Moddelmog, Debra A. "Reading Between the Lions." The Hemingway Review 19.1 (Fall 1999): 53-57.

Reynolds, Michael. "Night Thoughts." The Hemingway Review 19.1 (Fall 1999): 58-59.

NOTES

(1.) A discussion of the provenance of the title, and of other decisions and problems the editors faced, would also be of great interest to Hemingway scholars.

(2.) Susan Wrynn, Hemingway curator at the John F. Kennedy Library, supplied the finding aid (e-mail, 23 February 2006). Under Kilimanjaro does not identify the original manuscript that was used in its preparation, but e-mail communication with Linda Miller, 15-16 February 2006, and with Robert W. Lewis, 17 February 2006, established it as the JFK ms.

(3.) There seems to be no indication here, as there was with A Moveable Feast and Selected Letters, that the author was so uneasy about his text he would prefer to suppress it.

MIRIAM B. MANDEL

Tel Aviv University (Retired)