5 - Tracking the Elephant: David’s African Childhood in Hemingway’s The Garden of Eden

Summary

Africa, being as old as it is, makes all people … into children.

— Ernest Hemingway, Under Kilimanjaro

IN THE WAKE OF THE PUBLICATION of The Garden of Eden, Patrick Hemingway pointedly noted: “it may come as a surprise, but Hemingway never shot an elephant.” He goes on to explain that his father “thought it was wrong — he felt that elephants were our equals” (Pooley, 1). Patrick was likely responding to readers’ interest in the poignant elephant hunting episode in Garden that James Nagel and many other scholars have argued is the heart of the novel (330), but his statement also begins to revise the image of his father as the rugged trophy hunter, one of the many iconic images of Hemingway that Garden would complicate. The assumption that Hemingway might have killed an elephant, however, is far from outlandish. The elephant is one of the “Big Five” trophies that serious hunters venture to Africa to pursue, and many of the hunters Hemingway most admired, including Theodore Roosevelt, Baron Bror von Blixen, and Philip Percival, were accomplished elephant hunters. Nonetheless, the elephant appears to have occupied a particular space in Hemingway’s imagination, which may account for his decision to use a traumatic elephant hunt as the centerpiece of what is arguably his most complex and challenging novel.

Many critics have explored the question of why David writes the elephant hunt story against the wishes of his wife, Catherine, who would prefer he work on their “honeymoon narrative,” and how this embedded story can be read in relation to that larger narrative, but I am curious about the details of the story itself. Why does Hemingway set David’s childhood in Africa? And why does he choose an elephant hunt as the formative event in David’s bumpy transition into adulthood? In what follows, I will attempt to answer these questions by examining Hemingway’s attitudes toward elephants doing a little tracking of my own — scholarly tracking. I will begin by exploring possible sources for the elephant hunt in The Garden of Eden in an attempt to account not only for the selection of the elephant as the object of the hunt but also for the particular confluence of themes in the story.