Green Hills of Africa
(1935) is set in Kenya, on game safari. I’ve read this book several times, and
I appreciate it more with every reading.
For most, this is
about hunting. But it is so much more than that. Apart from the fine writing,
it is about pursuit. Look at the section headings: Pursuit and Conversation,
Pursuit Remembered, Pursuit and Failure, and Pursuit as Happiness. It is about
the chase, not the hunt, in everything in life, not just game safari.
This is a true story: Hemingway’s
first true story of four of his works. Hemingway is on a one-month trip in 1933
– part of a 10-week trip, hunting kudu (an antelope) with his wife P.O.M. (Poor
Old Mama). P.O.M. is journalist, Pauline Marie Pfeiffer, his second wife (married
in 1927 and divorced in 1940 – the second longest of his four marriages). They
had two children: Patrick and Gregory.
It is a revealing
account of the hunt – his exhileration, his patience, his relief, his mistakes:
‘Finally I found blood on a grass blade… and I plucked it and held it up. That
was a mistake … Growing there with blood on it, it was evidence. Plucked, it
meant nothing …’ And ‘I had no business
taking him where I could not call the shot and it was a profound personal
relief to turn back.’
Hemingway also
discusses Paris, books and authors he admires, but also about his emotions – as
he looks at the animals he is about to hunt, and as he looks at his wife who
hunts by his side – both tenderly. When Pauline asks, ‘We have fun though,
don’t we? Without all those people,’ he answers in his inimitable style, ‘God
damn it if we don‘t. I’ve had a better time every year since I can remember.’
When they are
frustrated that the box camera doesn’t work, he is gruff with Pauline, but
writes, ‘Killing is not a feeling that you share and I took a drink of water
and told P.O.M. I was sorry I was such a bastard about the camera. She said it
was all right and we were all right again … standing close together and feeling
fond of each other and understanding everything, camera and all.’
His treatment of women
is legendary, and controversial, but here in Green Hills of Africa, Pauline is his
equal. She is intelligent, and emotionally stronger than Ernest: ‘Her courage
was so automatic,’ he wrote.
But his real love is
his writing and his adventures: ‘That [shooting and fishing], and writing, and
reading, and seeing pictures was all I cared about doing … That and ski-ing.’ Hemingway
equates hunting with writing: ‘The way to hunt is for as long as you live
against as long as there is you and colors and canvas, and to write as long as
you can live and there is pencil and paper or ink or any machine to do it with,
or anything you care to write about, and you are a fool, to do it any other
way.’
And, importantly, it
is about the green hills of Africa – the green hills of Kenya: a land Hemingway
clearly loves: ‘the glades … some heavy brush that soaked us all … the smooth
green of the turf … [and] the dry stream bed overgrown with vines and brush, so
that, climbing, you walked, stooping, in a steep tunnel of vines and foliage.’ Kenya:
‘this was the finest country I had seen.’
MARTINA NICOLLS is an international
aid and development consultant, and the author of:- Similar But Different
in the Animal Kingdom (2017), The Shortness of Life: A Mongolian Lament
(2015), Liberia’s Deadest Ends (2012), Bardot’s Comet (2011), Kashmir on a
Knife-Edge (2010) and The Sudan Curse (2009).
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