Nadine Gordimer - Telling Times - Writing and Living, 1950-2008

Ernest Hemingway was in love with Africa. And as with others in such a state of emotion, in love with a woman or a man, he constructed for himself according to his own needs and desires something that had little relation to the reality of its object. I hope I won’t offend with heresy when I say that Hemingway never had both feet down on Africa. Never really was in Africa. For a country is its people; Africa is its people. Never really was there, if we are to read the novels and stories for which he chose Africa as one of those panoramic three-dimensional postcards where at first light the animals seem to leap out of the thorn bush. I am interested in how this illuminates the expatriate persona, in fiction as a way of looking at the world — something beyond an individual writer’s life and personal satisfactions.

The stunning, ruthlessly ironic story ‘The Short Happy Life of Francis Macomber’ does not take place in Africa but in marital hell; the expatriate persona, male and female, carries this hell with him or her wherever they go, the venue only brings it out like sweat. That’s what ‘Africa’ is there for.

I would not go so far as to quote from a Hemingway text, as some have done, that it is a place to ‘work the fat off’, a gym for the soul, for in that process there could be implied some sort of commitment to what those onlookers, the people, the Africans — nameless most of the time under the generic of nigger or native — are engaged in striving for: their liberation from the status of onlookers to the world of foreign power which determines their lives; some sort of commitment to the people’s freedom like Robert Jordan’s commitment to the Spanish people against fascism.

But the expatriates in the Africa narratives are not aware of the rising sense of counter-identity in the impassive face of the gun-bearer as he hands over the white hunter’s weapon, the subservience veneering the certainty that it will not be long before the power of the gun will be in black hands.

‘The Snows of Kilimanjaro’, one of the greatest short stories ever written, paradoxically has nothing to do with Africa; it is about death. It is the creative apogee of the painful, fearful exploration of the meaning of death that is the reverse side of Hemingway’s two love affairs, the preoccupation with death — one of his major themes — that has been so often projected, in his fiction, upon the Other: the agony of the bull, the matador gored in the belly, the big fish struggling on the hook, the wounded Spanish partisan shot in mercy, the peasant Anselmo left behind at his own request, to die, the splendid lion — like the bull, man’s innocent adversary — with half its head blasted away. The expatriate experiences death through these projections: now, at last, it comes to him — and it is a chosen death because it is an expatriate death, it happens elsewhere . ‘I would rather have been born here.’ I would rather die here.

I find it distasteful, to say the least, that one could think of approaching the unfinished novel Truth at First Light , as some seem eager to do, with the motive of ‘finding out’, deciding whether or not the experience of the particular expatriate hero in this novel that Ernest Hemingway so much wanted to write is intimately Hemingway’s own. It does not matter a damn in the achievements of Hemingway as one of those who has written our century , whether or not he slept with a Wakamba girl. It is an insult to his lifelong integrity to his art to regard his work in this shabby, prurient way.

Again, what matters to literature is to find whether, in the persona of the expatriate character, sleeping with the girl was just another service, part of the package deal the white client buys, another kill along with so many heads of this beast, so many skins of that, or whether it is the beginning of something new to him, some late-come realisation that all the gun-bearers and room boys, campfire cooks, and all those women and children viewed as a frieze among their huts, are, like this single girl, part of himself, of the human family, in which there are none who can opt out by expatriatism and leave behind the black men and women and children of home — America — while taking into his arms just one of those whose ancestors were shipped on the Middle Passage.

Toni Morrison has written with ominous measuredness: ‘My interest in Ernest Hemingway becomes heightened when I consider how much apart his work is from African-Americans.’ 101

Mine becomes heightened when I consider how far it is from Africans, and when I consider the revelation of the expatriate persona that can come only in the long reach of fiction. How there, the intuitions of imaginative power overcome self-protective inhibitions and justifications; how that persona assumes in a symbolic embrace of acceptance what he has evaded in his own country, his own society — that portion of the world primary to his being. The white hunter-writer did not have to go to Africa to recognise the existence of blacks as integral to his own existence, they were there where he came from, back in America. He did not have to wait to become aware — and only as a possibly bothersome interruption, by a straggling Mau-Mau raid, of the pleasant round of hunting and drinking and reading Simenon — of the revolt of blacks against racist domination gloved as patronage. The revolt was rising back in his natal United States of America. Hemingway’s titles were always brilliant, and in this case, what belonged to one novel is strangely apposite to the situation in another. To Have And Have Not : this perfectly expresses the embrace of the black girl by the expatriate persona.

‘The author is not personally accountable for the acts of his fictive creatures, although he is responsible for them .’ 102(My italics.) Toni Morrison again: I take it she means the author has chosen to create these creatures rather than others, or his life experience has chosen him to make those choices. In each writer, the achievement is how far his/her imaginative discoveries of the mysteries of our existence has gone. This is how I see Hemingway’s creation of the expatriate persona in all its complexity, as part not only of the essential literature of but also a model produced by the twentieth century, the violent and bloody assembly line of our time during which we have invented so much, learned so much without learning how to live together and find that place in ourselves which would make this possible. On Ernest Hemingway’s centennial too much will be speculated about him, too much spoken about him, too much written about him, including my own part in this. When we go home, let us leave his life alone, it belongs to him, as he lived it. Let us read his books.

1999

There are two ways in which great literature impacts upon society. The one is cultural, in narrow definition of culture as practice of the arts: the writer breaks the traditional seals of the Word, takes off into exploration of new modes of expression, challenges and changes what fiction is. After Proust, after Joyce, yes, the novel could never be the same.

The other impact of great literature is its power of changing the consciousness of the reader — even if that lay reader were to have no awareness of how it has been done, the literary techniques and devices the writer has taken up, reinvented or invented. As a fiction writer I have been alertly privy to and no doubt learned from the literary innovations of Marcel Proust. But a writer finds her/his own voice or is not a writer. What has remained with me for a lifetime is the influence of Proust’s emotional and aesthetic perceptions. So what I want to talk about is this other impact. The Proust who influences the persona. The Proust after reading whom the reader can never be the same.