Iceberg Turned Upside-down
Like for many others, my Ernest Hemingway studies began with a teacher in front of a blackboard with an iceberg drawn on it.“Notice with the water level we only see the tip of the iceberg,” he said. “That’s what Hemingway did with his writing. There is so much underneath he doesn’t explain, but you know it’s there. All you get is the basic plot and some character dialogue. The reader does the work.”
With Under Kilimanjaro, that concept is literally turned upside down. In its 445 pages, what you get is pretty much everything Hemingway experienced on his second safari in Africa except a plot. There are multiple story arcs, but no clear single throughline. It’s kind of a mess, yet more fun than several of Papa’s more disciplined works.
Known for years as “the African book,” a sprawling manuscript long tucked away in a Havana strongbox and then rescued by Hemingway’s widow Mary after the Cuban Revolution, it has seen the light of day three times. This, its third incarnation, is a straightforward memoir. In 1970 it was cut into a multi-part magazine exclusive, then became a non-fiction novel in 1999. Hemingway himself left it unfinished.
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| Ernest Hemingway, with his wife Mary, during their Kenya safari: "She could forget in the loveliest and most complete way of anyone I ever knew," he wrote of her. "She had a built-in selective memory and it was not built entirely in her favor." Image from https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Ernest_and_Mary_Hemingway_on_safari,_1953-54.jpg |
This version, edited by Robert W. Lewis and Robert E. Fleming, reveals an author fixated on age, death and the vanquishing passage of time, yet cheery company all the same:
I said that I had decided to run on a platform of true rummyhood and deceive none of my constituents. Churchill drank twice what I did if you could believe the accounts and had just been awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature. I was simply trying to step up my drinking to a reasonable amount where I might win the Prize myself; who knows?
Hemingway is playing coy here; in the fall of 1954, the same season he started writing his manuscript, he was named that year’s winner of the Nobel Prize in Literature. But while he was on safari in Kenya, that event hadn’t happened yet, so he was anticipating it after the fact.
This safari was a celebration of a recent literary success, The Old Man And The Sea, and also an assignment from Look magazine to get text and photos of a hunt. While in the then-British protectorate of East Africa, he took on an unusual side job as an Acting Game Ranger, assigned to shoot predators endangering cattle and settlers in the colony.
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| An extinct volcano and the tallest mountain in Africa, Mount Kilimanjaro looms large in Under Kilimanjaro, though always from a distance, its snowy peak often contrasting with the dry landscape beneath it. Image from https://www.climbing-kilimanjaro.com/kilimanjaro-meaning/ |
It is this duty that gives Under Kilimanjaro much of its form, though Hemingway is also clearly on vacation, enjoying nights out on the plains listening to the cry of the hyena and the cough of the lion. There is copious drinking, both with and without his wife Mary, and plenty of banter with those accompanying him.
The conversation is typically terse for Hemingway, but playful, too:
“He trusts you very much but he thinks you are a little bit bad.”
“So is he.”
“Of course he is. But that’s how he can recognize it.”
“What should I do?”
“Try and not be bad.”
“What’s bad?”
“You know.”
The best thing about the book is the same thing that can make it frustrating. It takes a long time to go basically nowhere.
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| Originally, before it was tucked away, Hemingway's safari notes were incorporated into a multi-part exclusive for Look magazine. Hemingway in Under Kilimanjaro is concerned about killing a leopard as he was photographed with one for Look he did not kill himself and wanted the image to be "true" by the time it is published. Image from https://www.jfklibrary.org/hemingway/mary-welsh-hemingway/the-african-safari |
Hemingway’s second East African safari would be a big deal for him. It was there he survived not one but two plane crashes on two consecutive days. He also paid a visit to his adult son Patrick, who lived in Tanzania. None of this shows up in Under Kilimanjaro, though, as the visit happened before and the crashes after events contained here.
Instead the book reads like a sequel to Green Hills Of Africa, his account of a 1933 safari. Except this time the author is not so easily distracted by his literary ambitions or his need to expound on life as a whole. He’s more engaged with the function of being in Africa, talking to the people living there. The result makes a more satisfying read.
He still loves to hunt, though he’s not such a bore about it now. Some reviewers have suggested Hemingway was more concerned with letting live this time; it’s true his function as a game warden makes him more circumspect. “The time of shooting beasts for trophies was long past with me,” he wrote. Yet still he kills many animals, if mostly for food.
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| British East Africa as it was when Hemingway was there. In Under Kilimanjaro, Mary is eager to visit the Belgian Congo, though Ernest wants to stay put. Eventually, after the events of Under Kilimanjaro, she prevails, and the result are two near-fatal air crashes on successive days. Image from https://www.sciencephoto.com/media/1247281/view/map-of-british-east-africa |
Much of his hunting passion seems to have been transferred to Mary, who at the start of the memoir is passionately hunting a black-maned lion, quite vociferous as she explains her determination:
“Everybody has something that they want truly and my lion means everything to me. I know how patient you’ve been about him and how patient everyone has been. But now I’m sure after this rain I’ll meet him. I can’t wait until the first night that I hear him roar.”
After that first roar she becomes even more enflamed, declaring: “He’s my lion and I love him and respect him and I have to kill him.” Even Ernest wonders about her: “Honey, you are a little lion-whacky.”
Mary may not be the most developed character, but she gives the book needed focus. She forces Hemingway out of himself and challenges his more overblown attitudes. Compared to Hemingway’s presentation of his second wife Pauline in Green Hills Of Africa, Mary has real vitality about her, acting both as foil and sparring partner. There is also a clear and at times tactile intimacy between them.
In its second half, Mary leaves the safari for an extended period. Ernest uses the time to fool around with Debba, a teenage Wakamba girl with whom he coos and exchanges caresses.
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| Hemingway writes appreciatively of the people he encounters in Africa, speaking their language when he can and enjoying real camaraderie with them. "Africans are not supposed to ever feel bad about anything," he writes. "This is an invention of the whites who are temporarily occupying the country." Image from https://www.vintag.es/2022/07/hemingway-in-africa.html |
How much of this is serious, and how much playful, is hard to say. Clearly a sexual element is present when the girl plays with the handle of Hemingway’s holstered pistol as they ride around. Later Hemingway has a serious discussion with one of the safari crew, Keiti, regarding his intentions. Much is left vague. The iceberg is back in force.
He winds up happily reunited with Mary when she returns. Mary as described by Ernest had never seemed that bothered by the flirtations:
The hell with it, I thought. I have complicated my life too much and the complications are extending. Now I’ll read whichever Time Miss Mary doesn’t want and I have her back and I will enjoy the fire and we’ll enjoy our drink and the dinner afterwards.
There are several plot strands that come and go. At the book’s beginning, we learn the territory is at war with Kenya in the early stages of what is known as the Mau-Mau uprising. In the first chapter, and sporadically through the rest of the book, Hemingway gets updates on the situation, ominous for him as massacres of whites are described. But this never gels into anything serious.
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| The Mau-Mau Rebellion officially lasted until 1960, though Hemingway suggests it was already beginning to wind down as his book concludes. Hemingway openly appreciates the grievances of the colonized Africans, yet he is wary of the Mau Maus and the danger they bring to himself and his fellow whites. Image from https://www.thecollector.com/what-was-colonialism/ |
Mostly it’s just Papa in Africa, which works quite well:
A large part of time in Africa is spent in talk. Where people are illiterate this is always true. Once you start the hunt hardly a word is spoken. You all understand each other and in hot weather your tongue is stuck dry in your mouth.
Hemingway’s engagement with African people, including Maasai, Wakamba, and others, is hardly a cogent storyline but gives this book its most profound takeaway. Other reviewers see Hemingway wishing to be African himself, culturally at least, possibly racially as well. But Under Kilimanjaro is not an easy book to pigeonhole; authorial intent seems always to be shifting. He comes across at times as emotionally adrift and needy; at other times defiant.
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| Hemingway's Honorary Game Warden license, a credential he takes quite seriously in Under Kilimanjaro. Chapters of the book center on his taking on lions and leopards who threaten local farms and villages. "It was like being deputized to form a posse in the West in the old days," he writes. Image from https://www.jfklibrary.org/hemingway/mary-welsh-hemingway/the-african-safari |
He takes some time to read letters from home, particularly an infuriating one from a woman in Iowa which reads: “Why not write SOMETHING that is worthwhile, before you die?” This not only peeves him but awakens a sense of not belonging back home , where Senator Joseph McCarthy called out Communists and their sympathizers as un-American. Hemingway, a leftist and sometimes a Red one, resents this.
Even Mary chides her husband for not writing more. Hemingway seems at times a bit henpecked in Under Kilimanjaro, though we only have his version of events as a dutiful husband with a wayward eye Mary allows. “I never asked you to be faithful to me in your dreams,” she tells him.
A fuller account of Hemingway’s second safari, including the plane crashes, that is both edited and polished by the original author is beyond our grasp. But Under Kilimanjaro is a satisfying reading experience in its own right, perhaps because it is a sort of Hemingway unfiltered even by Hemingway himself.
In other words, an iceberg without its top part turns out compelling reading by itself.
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