New Books by the Dead
ALLEN, BROOKE
Writers & Writing NEW BOOKS BY THE DEAD By Brooke Allen This summer two "new" books by dead authors are being issued with great fanfare. One is Juneteenth (Random, 350 pp., $25.00), carved...
...The imminent appearance of True at First Light caused some debate at the Kennedy Library's recent Hemingway Centennial Conference, where a number of distinguished authors weighed in on the ethics and taste of publishing in defiance of the author's probable wishes...
...But that seems the only possible reason for issuing True at First Light, a formless and sentimental piece of dreck that Hemingway had no intention of putting into print...
...The 100th anniversary of Hemingway's birth falls on July 21, and his publisher is urging its sales reps to "Celebrate the Hemingway Century...
...It has now been nearly 40 years since the great man's death, and his four other unfinished manuscripts have long ago made their appearance: A Moveable Feast (1964), Islands in the Stream (1970), The Dangerous Summer (1985), and The Garden of Eden (1986...
...True at First Light is the narrative of a safari to East Africa by Hemingway and Mary Welsh, his fourth and last wife...
...The two situations have nothing in common at all...
...A few days after he died in 1994, his widow showed Professor John F. Callahan, his literary executor, into the writer's study...
...Having engaged the services of professional hunter Philip Percival ("Pop"), who took Hemingway on a similar trip 20 years earlier, they spend the winter of 1953-54 in the Kajiado district south of Nairobi...
...Ellison mentioned his new project to friends as early as 1951...
...As it turned out, Ellison continued to write for nearly another quarter-century...
...The first third of the book, for instance, is overloaded with so many pages of high-flown rhetoric as to make the text nearly unreadable...
...By contrast it is considered quite all right to rearrange and revise—or not revise where needed—an unfinished Hemingway or Ellison, until the author's work and the editor's are indistinguishable to many thousands of casual readers...
...Any American today who sits down to write a novel, story or even just an e-mail, has been affected by Hemingway whether he knows it or not...
...Creating something worthy of following his 1952 triumph, Invisible Man, seems to have been a fatally daunting challenge to Ellison, causing not so much writer's block as an inability to stop writing and pull his manuscript into publishable shape...
...More to the point, it will not be "finished" by a descendant or disciple of the artist...
...The young game warden of the area makes the enthusiastic novelist an honorary game ranger, with a right to shoot the cattle-killing lions that were harassing local tribes...
...One is Juneteenth (Random, 350 pp., $25.00), carved from the sprawling, ambitious workin-progress that occupied the last 40 years of Ralph Ellison's life...
...The other is True at First Light (Scribner, 320 pp., $26.00), a "fictional memoir" that constitutes the fifth and last posthumous volume from Ernest Hemingway...
...He does not want to publish three separate books, but then he does not want to compromise on anything essential...
...And his distinctive, almost incantatory rhythms become at times so mannered as to amount to self-parody...
...A lack of real growth or development over his 40-year career is one source of disenchantment...
...For example, what is one to make of the following passage—supposedly a character's actual thought: "To imaginate is to integrate negatives and positives into a viable program supporting one's own sense of value...
...The book has him and Mary alone in the camp with a large cast of African guides and retainers...
...Touchingly, Hemingway's old magic reappears for a few brief moments toward the end when he communicates with nuanced subtlety the narrator's sadness at leaving the camp...
...Almost caricaturing male self-importance, Hemingway portrays both women as gratifyrngly adoring, and himself as more than man enough to satisfy them...
...It could be argued that since we have so little of his fiction, any addition to the oeuvre is of interest...
...The bold and broad use of metaphor, the subversive humor, the religious and historical links, are all recognizably akin to those of Invisible Man, yet different and distinctive enough to indicate important developments...
...It is hard to imagine that she ever uttered dialogue like "I am a warrior...
...Would Ellison really have let this sentence, and many others like it, get into print...
...I put the shotgun under my leg again and started to go to sleep feeling proud of Miss Mary and loving her and being proud of Debba and caring about her very much...
...Everybody has something they want truly and my lion means everything to me...
...In a nearby village resides a beautiful young Kamba girl, Debba, whom Hemingway solemnly courts in the approved style of her tribe, supposedly with the intention of taking her as a supplementary bride...
...He's wonderful and he is intelligent and I don't have to tell you why I have to kill him," she says...
...There were, Callahan remembers, "stacks of printouts, scraps of notes, jottings on old newspapers and magazine subscription cards, and several neat boxes of computer disks...
...Still, Juneteenth, for all its faults, contains much that is valuable...
...So long, though, as the legal issues over ownership of literary and intellectual properties remain what they are, greedy heirs and publishers—or even well-meaning scholars—will continue to do what they choose...
...Ellison persuaded Professor Callahan to take on the monumental task of turning the chaotic jumble into something publishable...
...He is also a writer many women love to hate— with good reason...
...The fatuousness of all this is hard to stomach, even for a reader tolerant of Hemingway's pipe dreams about the nature of women and about himself as a crusty old Africa hand (in truth, he had spent only three months there during his earlier trip with Percival...
...Miss Mary has for some months been hunting down a particularly ornery lion, and over time it has taken on the significance, to her, of Moby Dick, presumably because by killing it she can become one with the wild, like her husband and Debba...
...At her direction I removed several thick black binders of typescript going back to the early 1970s from the first of two long, rectangular black steel filing cabinets next to his desk...
...Yet for all of the radical changes he brought about in our understanding of what language can do and how its powers can be harnessed, Hemingway isn't universally esteemed and his reputation has proved surprisingly vulnerable...
...by 1955, when he was a Fellow at the American Academy in Rome, the book was in full swing...
...A 1967 fire at his summer house that destroyed 360 pages of manuscript caused merely a momentary setback...
...I love him...
...Indeed, True at First Light will give plenty of ammunition to those who despise its author as being macho, chest-thumping, misogynistic, vain, and eco-unfriendly, without adding anything significant to the literary riches he left behind...
...An unfinished Gauguin might end up in a private collection or a minor museum, where those who are truly interested will be able to track it down and see it for themselves...
...It says something about the poor quality of this one, edited by his son Patrick, that it was allowed to languish among the writer's papers in Boston's John F. Kennedy Library for so long...
...As with Hemingway, though, the text's weaknesses give rise to questions about the wisdom of publishing posthumous work...
...In short, here is a departed author whose reputation ought to be protected by his heirs and literary executors, not milked for every last nickel's worth of profit...
...Those details adhere pretty closely to the actual trip, though the author eliminated the various friends who in fact accompanied them...
...The author had left no instructions about what was to be done, but Mrs...
...The other cabinet, I was to discover, contained folder after folder of earlier drafts painstakingly labeled according to character or episode...
...Hemingway—at least in the manuscript—saw himself as spiritually a member of the Wakamba tribe he admired, even referring to himself as one of the "hunting Wakamba...
...and no doubt the Africans, always polite to a fault, indulged him in these fantasies...
...It might be insufferable if it weren't so funny...
...I'm your wife and your love and your small warrior brother"—and if she did, then her husband should have had the gallantry not to transcribe it...
...Her husband comments approvingly, if with little heed to syntax, that "She had set herself this task and being guided and trained and indoctrinated into absolute purity and virtue of killing a lion by Pop...' The extreme infantilism of "Miss Mary" should not be attributed to the real Mary Hemingway, who apparently was both competent and intelligent...
...This is perfectly correct...
...If he was not the greatest writer of the epoch, certainly he was the most influential...
...But isn't that what libraries and archives are for...
...Much of True at First Light is taken up by the contrast between the citified American bride, Mary, and the "primitive" one, Debba, and the different effects the two women have on the narrator...
...Callahan's labors have proved more valid than those of Patrick Hemingway, and almost certainly more disinterested...
...Derek Walcott made what was perhaps the most provocative point: "Anybody truly great, we're all interested in the relics...
...But Juneteenth is terribly flawed...
...If you found an unfinished Gauguin, you'd still want to see it...
...The case of Ralph Ellison is quite different...
...In 1970 Ellison's friend James Alan McPherson reported that the author "has enough typed manuscripts to publish three novels, but is worried over how the work will hold up as a total structure...
...Callahan's wise solution was to concentrate on the saga's central, and most self-contained, episode: the story of a rural black minister, Alonzo Hickman, and of Adam Sunraider, a race-baiting Senator whose ancient connection with Hickman is slowly revealed to the reader as Sunraider lies dying, gunned down by a young black man on the Senate floor...
...But one could go on ad nauseam mocking everything there is to mock in this book...
Vol. 82 • June 1999 • No. 7
