3 - “Love is a dunghill. … And I’m the cock that gets on it to crow”: Hemingway’s Farcical Adoration of Africa

Summary

All I wanted to do now was to get back to Africa. … I loved the country so that I was happy as you are after you have been with a woman that you really love, when, empty, you feel it welling up again and there it is and you can never have it all. … Now being in Africa, I was hungry for more of it.

— Ernest Hemingway, Green Hills of Africa

WHEREAS ERNEST HEMINGWAY’S CONTRIBUTION to Africa’s image is indisputable, his debt to Africa as a contributor to his life and career remains unexplored. In the 1930s and 1950s, the renowned American writer made two major well-documented excursions to Eastern Africa. These two African excursions, both centered at the foot of Kilimanjaro (Africa’s highest and most massive mountain), inspired an important body of texts that includes essays in magazines (Esquire, Look, and Sports Illustrated), a good-sized correspondence, two very fine short stories (“Snows of Kilimanjaro” and “The Short Happy Life of Francis Macomber”), another two short stories embedded in a novel (the African stories in The Garden of Eden), and two (or three, depending on how one counts) full-length books (Green Hills of Africa, True at First Light, and Under Kilimanjaro). My title and epigraph, taken from “The Snows of Kilimanjaro” and Green Hills of Africa, respectively, encapsulate the centrality of Kilimanjaro and Africa in Ernest Hemingway’s African writings.

This large body of work not only attests to the centrality of Africa to Hemingway’s biography and bibliography, but it also helped shape the image of Africa in the minds of a very large public. It is important, therefore, to examine the bases of these African texts, or, more precisely, the intersection of Hemingway’s intellectual background and the African lore he acquired on safari. What were the sources of his inspiration as a writer and how are those inspirational sources connected to Africa?

In Fame Became of Him: Hemingway as Public Writer, John Raeburn argues that Hemingway’s rise to “personal fame” in the 1930s (as opposed to the “literary eminence” he achieved in the 1920s) was buttressed by his nonfiction work: Death in the Afternoon in 1932 and Green Hills of Africa in 1935.