A review by davidwright
True at First Light by Ernest Hemingway

3.0

Two works bracketing Hemingway’s life were both published after his death: A Moveable Feast, which chronicles his youthful days in Paris at that time of creative fervor, and this ‘fictional memoir’ culled by his son Patrick from a massive draft that the author gave up on after the two plane crashes that cut into his vigor and may well have been the beginning of the end for Hemingway. The story tells of the Hemingway’s last safari in Africa on the eve of Kenyan independence. First there is the star power of this remarkable couple living the adventure, Mary intent upon bagging a large rogue lion before Christmas, and her selection of a ‘Christmas tree’ with hallucinogenic properties; Papa playing the last of the great white hunters, acting as high priest and shaman to his crew, enjoying the beguiling insolence of his Kamba mistress, and steering through some rough passages during the Mau Mau uprising. Even Hepburn and Tracy would have a hard time pulling this off. There is a great understated melancholy underneath it all, a tragic sense of what might be mid-life for most, but was too near the end for Hemingway. It is a time of waning light, of seasoned pleasures, when what is true of the hunt, of the prey, of the hunter, and of love – that they all must end – seems inescapable. ‘No hay remedio,’ as Papa says in one of a handful of polyglot saws that make the rounds – ‘Nothing to be done.’ It may owe to the author’s never got a second pass at these words, but I think the writing here may be a nice surprise for readers who find Hemingway’s style mannered or stilted; there is a great grace and simplicity here. Mary bags here lion, and Hemingway bags one last lingering story of the autumn of his years.