True at First Light

by Ernest Hemingway

  “I love you more and I’ll love you more still when you come back from town.”

  “I wish you could come too.”

  “I don’t. I hate Nairobi.”

  “It’s all new to me and I like to learn about it and there are nice people too.”

  “You go to it and have fun and come back.”

  “Now I wish I didn’t have to go. But it will be fun flying with Willie and then I’ll have the fun of flying back and coming back to my big kitten and the fun of the presents. You’ll remember to get a leopard won’t you? You know you promised Bill you’d have a leopard before Christmas.”

  “I won’t forget but I’d rather do it and not worry about it.”

  “I just wanted to be sure you hadn’t forgotten.”

  “I hadn’t forgotten. Also I’ll brush my teeth and remember to turn off the stars at night and put the hyena out.”

  “Don’t make fun. I’m going away.”

  “I know it and it isn’t funny at all.”

  “But I’ll be back and I’ll have big surprises.”

  “The biggest and best surprise is always when I see my kitten.”

  “It’s even better when it’s in our own airplane. And I’ll have a wonderful and special surprise but it’s a secret.”

  “I think you ought to go to bed, kitten, because even though we are winning now with the stuff you ought to rest well.”

  “Carry me in to my bed the way I thought you would have to carry me when I thought I might start dying this morning.”

  So I carried her in and she weighed just what a woman that you loved should weigh when you lifted her in your arms and she was neither too long nor too short and did not have the long dangling crane legs of the tall American beauties. She carried easily and well and she slid into the bed as smoothly as a well-launched ship comes down the ways.

  “Isn’t bed a lovely place?”

  “Bed is our Fatherland.”

  “Who said that?”

  “Me,” I said rather proudly. “It’s more impressive in German.”

  “Isn’t it nice we don’t have to talk German?”

  “Yes,” I said. “Especially since we can’t.”

  “You were very impressive in German in Tanganyika and at Cortina.”

  “I fake it. That’s why it sounds impressive.”

  “I love you very much in English.”

  “I love you too and you sleep well and you’ll have a good trip tomorrow. We’ll both sleep like good kittens and be so happy that you’re going to be all right.”

  When Willie buzzed the camp we went out fast to where the wind sock hung dead against the skinned tree pole and watched his short delicate landing on the crushed flowers the lorry had flattened for him. We unloaded and loaded the hunting car and I ran through the mail and the cables while Mary and Willie talked in the front seat. I sorted Mary’s letters and mine and put the Mr. and Mrs. in Mary’s lot and opened the cables. There was nothing really bad and two were encouraging.

  In the mess tent Mary had her mail at the table and Willie and I shared a bottle of beer while I opened the worst-looking letters. There was nothing that non-answering would not help.

  “How’s the war, Willie?”

  “We still hold Government House, I believe.”

  “Torr’s?”

  “Definitely in our hands.”

  “The New Stanley?”

  “The dark and bloody ground? I heard G.C. put a patrol of airline hostesses as far as the Grill. Chap named Jack Block seems to be holding it. Very gallant effort.”

  “Who has the Game Department?”

  “I shouldn’t like to say really. From the last gen I had it was rather nip and tuck.”

  “I know Nip,” I said. “But who is this Tuck?”

  “A new man I presume. I hear Miss Mary shot a beautiful great lion. Will we be taking him back, Miss Mary?”

  “Of course, Willie.”

  In the afternoon it stopped raining just as Willie said it would and after they had gone in the plane I was very lonesome. I had not wanted to go into the town and I knew how happy I would be alone with the people and the problems and with the country that I loved but I was lonely for Mary.

  It was always lonely after rain but I was lucky to have the letters which had meant nothing when they came and I arranged them in an orderly manner again and put all the papers in order too. There were the East African Standard, the airmail editions of the Times and the Telegraph on their paper that was like thin onion skin, a Times Literary Supplement and an air-edition of Time. The letters opened fairly dull and made me glad I was in Africa.

  One letter carefully forwarded by my publishers via airmail at considerable cost was from a woman in Iowa:

  Guthrie Center, Iowa

  July 27, 1953

  Mr. Ernest Hemingway

  Havana, Cuba

  Several years ago, I read your “Across the River and Into the Trees,” when it was serialized in the Cosmopolitan. After the beautiful opening description of Venice, I expected the book to go on, and have considerable stature, but was vastly disappointed. Certainly there was opportunity to disclose the rottenness that MAKES wars, as well as to point out hypocrisy of the military organization itself. Instead, your officer was mainly disgruntled because HE had the PERSONAL MISFORTUNE to lose two companies of men, and as a result, received no promotion. Little or NO grief was shown for the young men themselves. Largely it seemed the ineffectual efforts of an old man to try to convince himself and other old men that young, beautiful and even rich young women would love an old man for himself alone, not because he could give her wealth and a position of prominence.

  Later, “Old Man of the Sea” was published, and I asked my brother, who is mature, and spent four and a half years in the Army during War LL. if this book were any more emotionally mature than River and Trees, and he grimaced and said it wasn’t.

  It is amazing to me that a group of people could award you the Pulitzer Prize. At least everyone does not agree.

  This clipping was taken from Harlan Miller’s column of “Over the Coffee,” from The Des Moines Register and Tribune, and I have been meaning for some time to send it. Just add that Hemingway is EMOTIONALLY IMMATURE AND AN AWFUL BORE, and the review is complete. You have had four “wives,” and if you haven’t achieved morality, you should at least be getting a little common sense from your past mistakes. Why not write SOMETHING that is worthwhile, before you die?

  Mrs. G. S. Held

  This woman did not like the book in any way and that was her perfect right. If I had been in Iowa I would have refunded her the money she had spent on it as a reward for her eloquence and the reference to War LL. I took to mean two rather than Long and Lousy and I read where a clipping had been inserted:

  Maybe I’ve been slightly stuffy about Hemingway: the most over-rated writer of our time, but still a fine writer. His main faults: (1) scant sense of humor, (2) a juvenile brand of realism, (3) meager idealism, or none, (4) hairy chested bombast

  It was enjoyable to sit in the empty mess tent alone with my correspondence and imagine the emotionally mature brother grimacing perhaps in the kitchen over a snack from the Frigidaire, or seated in front of the TV set watching Mary Martin as Peter Pan and I thought how kind it was for this lady from Iowa to write me and how pleasant it would be to have her emotionally mature grimacing brother shaking his head here now at this moment.

  You cannot have everything, writer old man, I said to myself philosophically. What you win on the swings you lose on the roundabouts. You simply have to give up this emotionally mature brother. Give him up, I tell you. You must go it alone, boy. So I gave him up and continued to read Our Lady of Iowa. In Spanish I thought of her as Nuestra Senora de los Apple Knockers and at the surge of such a splendid name I felt a rush of piety and Whitman-like warmth. But keep it directed toward her, I cautioned myself. Don’t let it lead you toward the grimacer.

  It was exciting as well to read the tribute of the b
rilliant young columnist. It had that simple but instant catharsis that Edmund Wilson has called “The Shock of Recognition,” and recognizing the quality of this young columnist who indeed would have had a brilliant future on the East African Standard had he been born in the Empire and hence been able to secure a work permit I thought again, as one approaches the edge of a precipice, of the well-loved face of the grimacing brother of my correspondent but my feelings toward the grimacer had changed now and I was no longer attracted to him as I had been but, rather, saw him seated among the corn stalks, his hands uncontrollable in the night as he heard the growth of the stems of the mealies. In the Shamba we had mealies that grew as tall as corn grows in the Middle West. But nobody heard it grow in the night because the nights were cool and the corn grew in the afternoon and at night; even if it had grown at night, you could not have heard it for the talking of the hyenas and the jackals and the lions when they were hunting and the noise the leopards made.

  I thought the hell with this stupid Iowa bitch writing letters to people she does not know about things she knows nothing about and I wished her the grace of a happy death as soon as possible, but I remembered her last sentence: “Why not write SOMETHING that is worthwhile, before you die?” and I thought, you ignorant Iowa bitch, I have already done this and I will do it again many times.

  Berenson was well, which made me happy, and was in Sicily, which worried me unnecessarily since he knew much more about what he was doing than I did. Marlene had problems but had been triumphant in Las Vegas and enclosed the clippings. Both the letter and clippings were very moving. The place in Cuba was OK but there were many expenses. All the beasts were well. There was still money in the N.Y. bank. Ditto the Paris bank but on the feeble side. Everyone in Venice was well except those who had been confined to nursing homes or were dying of various incurable diseases. One of my friends had been badly injured in a motor accident and I remembered the sudden dips into fog no lights could pierce when driving down the coast in the early mornings. From the description of the various fractures I doubted if he, who had loved shooting better than anything, would ever be able to shoot again. A woman I knew, admired and loved had cancer and was not given three months to live. Another girl I had known for eighteen years, knowing her first when she was eighteen, and loving her and being friends with her and loving her while she had married two husbands and made four fortunes from her own intelligence and kept them, I hoped, and gained all the tangible and countable and wearable and storable and pawnable things in life and lost all the others wrote a letter full of news, gossip and heartbreak. It had genuine news and the heartbreak was not feigned and it had the complaints that all women are entitled to. It made me the saddest of all the letters because she could not come out to Africa now where she would have had a good life even if it were only for two weeks. I knew now since she was not coming that I would never see her anymore ever unless her husband sent her on a business mission to me. She would go to all the places that I had always promised to take her but I would not go. She could go with the husband and they could be nervous together. He would always have the long-distance telephone which was as necessary to him as seeing the sunrise was to me or seeing the stars at night was to Mary. She would be able to spend money and buy things and accumulate possessions and eat in very expensive restaurants and Conrad Hilton was opening, or finishing or planning hotels for her and her husband in all the cities we had once planned to see together. She had no problem now. She could with the aid of Conrad Hilton take her lost looks to be comfortably bedded, never an arm’s reach away from the long-distance telephone, and when she woke in the night she could truly know what nothing was and what it’s worth tonight and practice counting her money to put herself to sleep so she would wake late and not meet another day too soon. Maybe Conrad Hilton would open a hotel in Laitokitok, I thought. Then she would be able to come out here and see the Mountain and there would be guides from the hotel to take her to meet Mr. Singh and Brown and Benji and there would be a plaque, perhaps, to mark the site of the Old Police Boma and they could buy souvenir spears from the Anglo-Masai Stores Ltd. There would be hot and cold running White Hunters with every room all wearing leopard-skin bands around their hats and instead of Gideon Bibles by every bedside along with the long-distance telephone there would be copies of White Hunter, Black Heart and Something of Value autographed by their authors and printed on a special all-purpose paper with portraits of their authors done on the back of the dust jackets so that they glowed in the dark.

  Thinking of this hotel and the project of how it might be decorated and run featuring the twenty-four-hour safari, all beasts guaranteed, you sleep in your own room each night with piped in coaxial TV, and the menus and the desk staff all anti–Mau Mau commandos and the better White Hunters, and the little courtesies to guests such as each guest finding by his plate the first night at dinner his commission as an Honorary Game Warden and on his second, and for most the last night, his Honorary Membership in the East African Professional Hunters Association delighted me but I did not want to work it out too completely until we should have Mary and G.C. and Willie together. Miss Mary, having been a journalist, had splendid powers of invention. I had never heard her tell a story in the same way twice and always had the feeling she was remolding it for the later editions. We needed Pop too because I wanted his permission to have him mounted full length and placed in the lobby in the event that he should ever die. There might be some opposition from his family but we would have to talk the entire project over and reach the soundest decision. Pop had never expressed any great love for Laitokitok which he regarded more or less as a sin trap and I believe he wanted to be buried up in the high hills of his own country. But we could, at least, discuss it.

  Now, realizing that loneliness is best taken away by jokes, derision and contempt for the worst possible outcome of anything and that gallows humor is the most valid if not the most durable since it is of necessity momentary and often ill reported, I laughed reading the sad letter and thinking about the new Laitokitok Hilton. The sun was almost down and I knew Mary would be in the New Stanley by now and probably in her bath. I liked to think of her in her bath and I hoped she would have fun in the town tonight. She did not like the bad dives I frequented and I thought she would probably be at the Travelers Club or some such place and I was glad that it was she who was having that sort of fun and not me.

  I stopped thinking about her and thought about Debba and that we had promised to take her and the Widow to buy cloth for dresses that they would have for the celebration of the Birthday of the Baby Jesus. This official buying of dresses with my fiancée present and choosing the cloth which I would pay for while forty to sixty Masai women and warriors watched was as formal and definitive an occasion as Laitokitok would offer in this social season or probably any other. Being a writer which is a disgrace but also sometimes a comfort I wondered, being unable to sleep, how Henry James would have handled this situation. I remembered him standing on the balcony of his hotel in Venice smoking a good cigar and wondering what must go on in that town where it is so much harder to keep out of trouble than to get into it and when, in the nights I could not sleep, I always had great comfort thinking of Henry James standing on the balcony of his hotel looking down at the town and people passing, all of them with their needs and their duties and their problems, their small economies and village happinesses and the sound well-organized life of the canal, and think of James, who knew not one of the places to go, and stayed on his balcony with his cigar. Happy now in the night where I could sleep or not as I wished I liked to think of both Debba and James and I wondered how it would be if I plucked the consolatory cigar from James’s lips and handed it to Debba who might put it behind her ear or perhaps hand it to Ngui, who had learned to smoke cigars in Abyssinia where as a rifleman in the K.A.R. opposing, sometimes, white troops and their camp followers and overcoming them he had learned many other things. Then I stopped thinking about Henry James and his consolatory cig
ar and about the lovely canal which I had been imagining with a fair wind coming to help all my friends and brothers who had to work against the tide and I no longer cared to think of the thick, squat figure with the bald head and the ambulatory dignity and line of departure problems and I thought of Debba and the big skin-covered, smoky, clean-smelling, hand-rubbed wood bed of the big house and the four bottles of sacramental beer I had paid for the use of it, my intentions being honorable, and the beer having its proper tribal custom name; I think it was, among the many ritual beers, known as The Beer For Sleeping In The Bed Of The Mother-in-Law and it was equivalent to the possession of a Cadillac in John O’Hara circles if there be any such circles left. I hoped piously that there were such circles left and I thought of O’Hara, fat as a boa constrictor that had swallowed an entire shipment of a magazine called Collier’s and surly as a mule that had been bitten by tsetse flies plodding along dead without recognizing it, and I wished him luck and all happiness remembering fairly joyously the white-edged evening tie he had worn at his coming out party in New York and his hostess’s nervousness at presenting him and her gallant hope that he would not disintegrate. No matter how bad things go any human being can be cheered remembering O’Hara at his most brilliant epoch.

  I thought about our plans for Christmas which I always loved and could remember in so many countries. I knew this Christmas was going to be either wonderful or truly awful since we had decided to invite all of the Masai and all of the Wakamba and this was the sort of Ngoma which could end Ngomas if it were not carried out properly. There would be the magic tree of Miss Mary which the Masai would recognize for what it truly was if Miss Mary did not. I did not know whether we should tell Miss Mary that her tree was really an extra-potent type of marijuana-effect tree because there were so many angles to the problem. First, Miss Mary was absolutely determined to have this particular type of tree and it had been accepted by the Wakamba as a part of her unknown or Thief River Falls tribal customs along with her necessity to have killed the lion. Arap Meina had confided to me that he and I could be drunk on this tree for months and that if an elephant ate this tree that Miss Mary had selected he, the elephant, would be drunk for a matter of days.