True At First Light - Ernest Hemingway

I think it's a good time to take a break from Hemingway. True At First Light was a well-written book, but I struggled to get through it at times. It details part of a stint Hemingway and Mary, his last wife, spent in Kenya in a safari camp. At the start of it a local hunter who is a longtime friend of Hemingway's, departs, leaving the writer as the local game warden to an extent. Meaning that if there's troublesome wildlife - elephants destroying homes, lions eating livestock - it's his responsibility to deal with it. Mary's determined to kill a particular lion before Christmas, and in the early chapters, there's the threat of an insurgency by the local farmers against the European farmers, who presumably were granted more power and influence. And Hemingway is also courting a young local girl from a nearby village, even considering making her a second wife, with the apparent full knowledge and consent of Mary.

Then again, this is at least partly fictional, though which parts are true and which aren't, I couldn't tell you (a quick online search suggests the whole subplot with Debba isn't real). It seems unlikely Mary would be OK with his fooling around with Debba, but Mary does frequently ask for reassurance that he loves her best, that he's not leaving her for Debba, and Hemingway doesn't spend much time with both of them simultaneously. He may simply be oblivious (or unconcerned) with her doubts and fears. Everything is from his perspective, we don't get either of the ladies' opinions beyond what they tell him (and of that, only what he saw fit to include in the narrative).

Debba's even more of a puzzle to me. Does she really love him, or is this a matter of convenience? She lives with the Widow, her aunt near as I can tell, who doesn't seem to have much (other than potential suitors), and Hemingway doesn't think much of Debba's father, so I wonder if she's trying to help her family. Hemingway certainly favors them with gifts, food, and such. If so, I don't think he picks up on it, but there's a sequence where she grows distant, and I wasn't sure what to make of that. Mary was away, and he'd invited Debba and the Widow to stay at the camp for dinner, and for the night. The implication being he and Debba were going to have sex, but I was pretty Keiti cut that off. But there's a later mention of Miss Mary's cot being broken, and I'm left wondering if Debba did that out of jealousy, or if she and Hemingway did that from fooling around. Which would be pretty sleazy to my eyes, but hardly out of character for him. Like, I said, that relationship appears to have been fictional, a metaphor for Hemingway's concerns about his writing skill fading with age (which reminds me of his idea that mediocre writers live forever, and thus have the largest library from Across the River and Into the Trees).

One thing I've noticed in his fiction over these last few weeks is how the main characters all shift abruptly between cruelty and reconciliation. Things will be going smoothly, then someone makes a snippy remark, or an outright cruel one, there's some more hostility, but by the end of the page, they're apologizing and asking that all be forgotten and let's just have a good time. I wouldn't say this an unheard of characteristic in people - I am frequently hostile or impatient with people initially, only to regret it shortly after - but it's pervasive in Hemingway's characters. Some of the things I've read about Hemingway suggest he was much like that - writing letters that insulted friends in one paragraph, only to apologize at the bottom of the page - so it makes a certain amount of sense that some characters would speak that way. I wonder if a lot of his conversations devolved into that because his attitude brought out a similar one in the people he talked with.