Lust for Life

All these years later, his name, just one word, has come to suggest so much so vigorously, the very essence of what he sought: reducing language to express an experience, to convey an idea, punch-up the meaning and tell how the weather was.

Now 100 years after his birth, we are confronted again with the welter of sensibilities that Hemingway provokes. To begin, is “True at First Light,” this posthumous new novel, any good? Not very, but yes, in part it is. It is, moreover, altogether good that we are reminded of Hemingway. In this era of condensed and cliche-ridden Internet communication, no one has more to teach us about writing arrestingly. At a time of wilting routine, few people have so much to show us about living full.

“True at First Light” was whittled out of a yellowing manuscript that Hemingway wrote in Cuba following a nearly disastrous safari to East Africa in 1953 and 1954. He survived two bush-plane crashes, one of them just barely. His concussion was so severe that fluid leaked from his skull. He had begun his descent but wrote at a furious pace. Once through the draft, he apparently never returned to it. His son Patrick, who was along for some of that Africa trip, scissored the manuscript into half its original 200,000-word length for publication this centennial summer. He calls it a last look at the old man between hard covers. Until now, the only public viewing of this work was in a three-part excerpt in Sports Illustrated in 1971-72, 55,000 words only partly recognizable as coming from the same manuscript.

The story emerged out of Hemingway’s safari experience at the time when colonial Kenya faced a native uprising known as the Mau Mau, a precursor to independence. The British Administration, worried about the insurgency’s effect on tourism, opened a game reserve just for Hemingway in hopes of favorable press. In this “fictional memoir,” he is master of his own hunting camp. He assumes the paternal role of stand-in government game warden and carries on with a native woman. He is older now, and you can feel it weigh on him. His wife, Mary, hunts a black-maned lion that is killing domestic cattle.

This is an easy book to pan. Many have. Some admirers argue that Hemingway’s legacy should not be clouded--or capitalized upon--by publication of a loose-joined and much-edited draft, the fifth posthumous book to bear his name. Critics say never mind Hemingway, spare the rest of us. Another view, more charitable, is to regard this book as an artist’s pencil sketch and allow that there were tremors in the artist’s hand.

I suspect he wrote it entirely for personal reasons: wishing to cling to the experience of Africa at a time when his health was going bad and when he found himself looking back for pleasure, not ahead. That’s why the book lingers over everyday safari life, why it pursues idle conversations and why it zooms in to resolve banal matrimonial sparks between Hemingway and his wife--very much a consuming matter for him during the time he was writing.

If you assign “True at First Light” this place in the Hemingway oeuvre, the novel will be released of historical burden, and you can size it up for what it does instead of what it fails to do. At that, it does all right.

“First Light” is sprinkled with the prose high notes that made Hemingway famous. Many of these occur in the second half, when the author reminisces, foreshadowing the Paris memoir he would write next, “A Moveable Feast.”

For reasons of his own, Patrick pared many of these digressions from the original manuscript, making this book more hunting-camp and less meditative than it might otherwise have been. Readers will have a chance to judge for themselves the son’s editing choices later under an agreement that allows for subsequent publication of the unedited manuscript.

Hemingway’s descriptive power is also on display in this book--the marvelous intensity he brings to ordinary events, such as ordering a fried-egg sandwich for breakfast with a slice of raw onion and a bottle of beer, or sitting out an equatorial rainstorm. His acute observations like these, as much as any of the rough-and-tumble, fired our imaginations with the heightened possibilities of life.

Unfortunately, “First Light” also demonstrates during 320 pages just how hard it is to sustain the vividness and clarity we expect of Ernest Hemingway--even if you are Ernest Hemingway. Too much of the dialogue is pointless; too much of the narration sedentary--the weary pages between what we want from the writer and what he delivers too great. It’s not altogether enough to make the book uninteresting, though, or without a lesson worth pondering for our emerging Web generation. The archivist of Hemingway’s papers at the Kennedy Library says the old man hung on to every scrap he wrote and wanted it all available to the public. He was not ashamed of his lesser stuff. It proved only that real genius does not fly easily off the fingertips but comes with polish.

Consequently it is possible to enjoy this story and appreciate Hemingway anew without relishing the book. Big game hunting is not just out of fashion but forever lost--never mind, here, that Hemingway no longer shoots with the wantonness of his youth. Tests of oneself have been redefined, and shouldering a big-bore rifle is not part of the exam. The relationship between whites and blacks in Africa has been forever altered. Robert Ruark wrote more authoritatively and less self-consciously about 1950s safari Africa, anyway. “True at First Light” shares a characteristic of many of Hemingway’s works. The story is less enduring than the telling of it. Or, as his third ex-wife, Martha Gellhorn, put it: It wasn’t what he wrote but how he wrote.

His contributions to literature and to everyday writing were not on the scale of saga or panorama. That’s why his stories never made grand cinema. As writers go, he was a miniaturist. What lay at the core of Hemingway’s gift was his mastery of the sentence. And, beyond that, stringing sentences together into a passage. From this sprang what we call his style. “Write one true sentence--” Hemingway would tell himself.

With it, he could touch the senses: The arrangement of syntax and rhythm drew attention to the simplest of words and magnified their meaning. He wrote for the eye. He controlled our pace, forcing us to slow down and to listen to the sounds of words. He pared away all but simple qualifiers, inviting us to provide our own emotional embellishments according to our experience and imagination. He reached into the heart.

Here, in this campfire description from “True at First Light,” Hemingway’s sentence brings a pause to a scene and shifts its mood from a tired man’s melancholy to his end-of-the-day gratitude for living: “We were happy at least a good part of each day and nearly always at night and this night, in bed together, under the mosquito netting with the flaps of the tent open so that we could see the long burned through logs of the big fire and the wonderful darkness that receded jaggedly as the night wind struck the fire and then closed in quickly as the wind dropped, we were very happy.”

Sometimes Hemingway achieved perfect pitch--his narratives as clean and arresting as his prose. These became his classics. Other works, like “True at First Light,” draw us along by the alchemy--his word--of the sentences alone.

To understand this talent, biographer Michael Reynolds suggests you select a descriptive passage and substitute your own experience using Hemingway’s vocabulary and construction. The effect? You’ll glimpse, says Reynolds, how the writer’s brush strokes brought color to the canvas, just like the Impressionist painters he emulated with words.

Reynolds should know. Twenty-three years is a long time to pursue a subject, but that’s how long he has been after Hemingway. In this centennial year, Reynolds provides one of the publishing highlights with the concluding installment of a five-part biography, a book that is both passionate and astute.

“The Final Years” begins in the summer of 1940, when he was at the top of his game and ends with his suicide in Idaho in 1961. These years were among Hemingway’s most rewarding and most painful. He produced memorable works and then abated, as his oversized persona eclipsed the stories he wrote, feeding myths that remain with us still.

Because Hemingway did not age or depart gracefully, these are difficult years to recount without the biographer’s veering off into speculative psychology, which inevitably leads to a morass of fault-finding and, often, to righteousness. What distinguishes Reynolds is his discipline in holding focus. He accepts contradictions as part of character, so Hemingway the man of action is also the writer who sustained himself with contemplation. He was a man of intense personal magnetism who could be generous or cruel, almost randomly. His emotions leaped off the scale at both ends. He was foremost a literary artist and one of the century’s originals. He stayed devoted to his craft for the whole journey and rarely sold short. He was both extraordinary and altogether human. He partook of life and absorbed others in everything he did.

For Hemingway sleuths, Reynolds sheds light on the writer’s often misconstrued years of World War II, when he stayed home and went hunting for Nazi subs in the Caribbean and then ventured to Europe as a reluctant journalist who wanted to command his own irregular troops. Reynolds does not shirk from the more difficult part of his task: illuminating Hemingway’s oversized flaws. Contrary to stereotype, the writer was not misogynous. He was utterly dependent on women, accepted and included them in everything in his life. But he could be shockingly shabby and childish about it. Reynolds also follows Hemingway’s repetitive cycles of “black ass” moods and his creeping paranoia, worsened by booze and self-administered pharmaceuticals. But Reynolds does not omit the better days, either--the proud old lion at his sun-kissed Finca Vigia in Cuba and the bravura traveler who gathered up friends and hunted down fun wherever he went.

It is a faithful portrait of one of the most interesting men of the century, one of the few American writers to achieve greatness and popularity. He was a rare sport who did not hoard his luck but spent it freely and down to the last drop. He earned all the hoopla he gets.