Green Hills Of Africa – Ernest Hemingway, 1935 ★★½

The Hangover Strikes

The 1920s gave us Hemingway’s legacy, the 1930s left us the legend. Green Hills Of Africa is how that legend is often remembered, opinionated, self-glorifying, often a mean drunk toting a loaded gun.

How much you enjoy this travel/hunting memoir depends on your tolerance for its brilliant but often solipsistic prose. Sure, there are quotes aplenty, but also a reason for seeing in it the beginning of serious decline.

For one thing, the man was beginning to let himself go:

Each day I sweated out whatever we drank sitting at the fire at night, and in the heat of the day, now, I lay in the shade with a breeze in the trees and read with no obligation and no compulsion to write, happy in knowing that at four o’clock we would be starting out to hunt again. I would not even write a letter.

Ernest Hemingway had been on a monster roll when he began work on this. His prior three books, published over five years, were The Sun Also Rises, A Farewell To Arms, and Death In The Afternoon. Never mind the many classic short stories he produced in tandem. Now, however, time had passed and a light had dimmed. It’s not that he was no longer a great writer; just that he suddenly didn’t have so much to say.

Hemingway (at far right) shows off freshly-slain trophies during his 1933-1934 safari in East Africa. Next to Hemingway is Philip Percival, called "Pop" in the narrative and a voice of reasonableness Hemingway often ignores.
Image from https://www.americanhunter.org/content/finding-the-green-hills-of-papa-s-africa/

For one thing, he was openly discouraged at the way his writing was received: “People do not want to do it any more because they will be out of fashion and the lice who crawl on literature will not praise them.”

This time he set out to write a book about going on a safari in Africa, something he had dreamt of since boyhood. The image of the great white hunter was on his mind, and in the pages of Green Hills Of Africa he works hard to present himself as serious in that field. So serious, in fact, that he winds up resenting any white hunter greater than he.

The book opens in media res, the author hiding behind cover near a salt lick, hunting antelope. Like many hunts in Green Hills Of Africa, this will prove unsuccessful. “This was the tenth day we had been hunting greater kudu and I had not seen a mature bull yet,” he explains. Hemingway is feeling pressure because February is coming and with it will come heavy rains. Also, he is running low on funds to pay for his guides and trackers.

His vigil is interrupted by a passing truck. The driver, an Austrian war veteran, can’t understand why Hemingway wants to kill kudu or anything else. But since he knows and profusely admires Hemingway as a writer, the man is invited to share Hemingway’s camp.

Lake Manyara, in Tanzania, becomes a focal point of Hemingway's narrative. "I loved this country and I felt at home," Hemingway writes, "and where a man feels at home, outside of where he's born, is where he's meant to be."
Image from https://www.goway.com/inspiration/travelling-hemingways-africa-on-an-east-african-safari

This is the part of the book which contains its most famous passage, something that has nothing to do with hunting or Africa. Instead Hemingway tells the Austrian, and through him the reader, about writing, writers, and what he calls “a fourth and fifth dimension” where truly great prose can carry a reader.

He calls out American writers who succeeded at this (the famous passage specifies Mark Twain, Henry James, and Stephen Crane), as well as others who came before but fell short:

“Emerson, Hawthorne, Whittier, and Company. All our early classics who did not know that a new classic does not bear any resemblance to the classics that have preceded it. It can steal from anything that it is better then, anything that is not a classic, all classics do that. Some writers are only born to help another writer to write one sentence.”

There is a sense Hemingway is using the moment to link the hunting of game with the kind of hunting he did as a writer, stalking greatness word by word. But the connection, as proves often the case here, is fleeting. Green Hills Of Africa is a book that jumps all over the place drawing connections that feel eloquent but turn out random.

A male Greater Kudu bull antelope like this is the objective of Hemingway's hunting much of the time, prized for their horns. "They were the biggest, widest, darkest, longest-curling, heaviest, most unbelievable pair of kudu horns in the world," he writes of one trophy.
Image from https://simple.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kudu

The book is in four parts. Part I, “Pursuit And Conversation,” is the opening described above. Part II, “Pursuit Remembered,” recalls earlier parts of the safari where Hemingway and his wife, Pauline, stalked rhinos and lions, while Hemingway grew jealous of a hunter who came with them. Part III, “Pursuit And Failure,” shows Hemingway feeling further eclipsed by the other hunter. Part IV, “Pursuit As Happiness,” shows Hemingway finding a measure of grace by appreciating his limitations (and killing a big bull, if not as big as the other guy’s.)

The story as it is basically details how the author processed the experience of seeking out the perfect kill and being continually disappointed. If you aren’t that involved in this aspect going in, there is little he does to bring you around.

Mostly he just details the moment-by-moment experience of hunting for big game, sometimes settling for birds:

As I jumped from the car and sprinted after them they rocketed up, their legs tucked close beneath them, heavy-bodied, short wings drumming, cackling, to go over the trees ahead. I dropped two that thumped hard when they fell and as they lay, wings beating, Abdullah cut their heads off so they would be legal eating. He put them in the car where M’Cola sat laughing; his old man’s healthy laugh, his making-fun-of-me laugh, his bird-shooting laugh that dated from a streak of raging misses one time that had delighted him. Now when I killed, it was a joke as when we shot a hyena, the funniest joke of all.

Hemingway's 1933-34 East Africa safari took him first by ship to Kenya, and from there to Tanzania (then known as Tanganyika). Green Hills Of Africa largely covers the second half of this ten-week period, hopping around chronologically and omitting periods of serious gastrointestinal illness.
Image from https://www.micato.com/luxury-african-safari/the-hemingway-wing-safari/

The brutality of hunting is not something Hemingway shies away from, as readers of Death In The Afternoon will expect. He frankly enjoys the death and the bloodshed, at times pushing it into the reader’s face. The more he goes on about it, the more kill-happy he seems to become.

In Death In The Afternoon, of course, Hemingway was a spectator, enjoying the action without actively participating. This time, he is an initiator of the killing, proud when it happens, ashamed when it doesn’t:

I felt a son of a bitch to have hit him and not killed him. I did not mind killing anything, any animal, if I killed it cleanly, they all had to die and my interference with the nightly and the seasonal killing that went on all the time was very minute and I had no guilty feeling at all. We ate the meat and kept the hide and horns. But I felt rotten sick over this sable bull. Besides, I wanted him. I wanted him damned badly, I wanted him more than I would admit.

One of several original illustrations included with the first edition of Green Hills Of Africa, by Edward Shenton, reproduced in the Hemingway Library Edition. Hemingway was disappointed with the book's initial reception, saying he was "ready to blow my lousy head off." Not all critics were negative, though.
Image from https://thecarycollection.com/products/green-hills-of-africa

The action in Green Hills Of Africa is constant but fairly perfunctory in explanation. As in the opening, he brings you into the action while it happens and expects you to catch up. Death In The Afternoon laid out such details as the techniques of specific matadors and even included a glossary. This time the only focus on technique is its lack, Hemingway telling us about his shame at “excited shooting” at a pivotal moment.

His emotions seem on edge throughout the book. His jealousy at the success of the other hunter, Karl, is the one running narrative across the four sections. “It’s no fun to hunt if we get that way about it,” Hemingway recalls saying, yet he can’t help himself.

At the outset of Green Hills Of Africa, Hemingway states his goal was to “write an absolutely true book” and see if it could match a work of fiction. Given his success with Death In The Afternoon, and much later on, A Moveable Feast, this certainly seems in his grasp. Yet this time around, too much of the sentiment, and all the drama, comes off forced.

Hemingway was generally impressed with the Maasai people he met on safari, and who guided him on his hunts. "They had that attitude that makes brothers...It is an ignorant attitude and the people who have it do not survive, but very few pleasanter things ever happen to you than the encountering of it."
Photo from https://megawildsafaris.com/the-maasai-tribe/.

He crabs and gripes about M’Cola, his Maasai gun-bearer, and seems always about to blow up at him. At one point, after catching out M’Cola for not cleaning a rifle, he writes about it as if it were an ultimate betrayal, “we were no longer partners, no longer good friends.” But M’Cola is still around to the end of the book, by which time Hemingway’s enmity has transferred itself to “Garrick,” another native guide so nicknamed for his theatrical style.

“He called for corporal punishment the way a showing-off child does for a spanking,” Hemingway writes of Garrick.

At one point, he goes on an extended reverie about writing, explaining how it is “a serious occupation.” He concludes with this passage linking his safari with the Gulf Stream back home in Key West:

…the stream, with no visible flow, takes five loads of this a day when things are going well in La Habana and in ten miles along the coast it is clear and blue and unimpressed as it was ever before the tug hauled out the scow; and the palm fronds of our victories, the worn light bulbs of our discoveries and the empty condoms of our great loves float with no significance against one single, lasting thing – the stream.

Hemingway with his second wife, Pauline Pfeiffer Hemingway, a companion on the East Africa safari of 1933-34. Her uncle put up the funds that made this trip possible. Hemingway records her being affectionate and supportive, if not as enthusiastic about hunting.
Image from https://www.ualrpublicradio.org/local-regional-news/2021-04-05/reflecting-on-ernest-hemingways-time-in-arkansas-as-pbs-documentary-debuts

It is vibrant writing, though completely divorced from anything else in the book. Though given how rambling the narrative becomes, I didn’t mind it too much. Hemingway wants to tell you about a book he read, a sunset he enjoyed, a person he resented, a gentle ribbing from Pauline, his second wife, affectionately dubbed “P. O. M” for reasons unstated. [“Poor Old Mama,” according to their grandson, Seán.]

There is a lot of personality here, albeit Hemingway the legend, the character he became as he began to lose his focus and fire. He always wrote well, at times superbly, but Green Hills Of Africa shows him too caught up with himself, pontificating at length even while letting other characters call him out for being a bore.

Hemingway fans will enjoy Green Hills Of Africa for its many moments of candor and self-reflection. There is enough descriptive color to engage, if not quite enough to immerse you in what being there was like. Hemingway is more of a mood writer here, capturing the highs and lows of his safari experiences. What the book lacks is cohesion.