Green Hills of Africa by Ernest Hemingway — How a Safari Becomes a Story
Reading Note: Green Hills of Africa by Ernest Hemingway
This reading note discusses the book in full.
The pleasure of Green Hills of Africa is that a remembered journey still seems capable of going wrong. Hemingway knows how his safari ended.
While we read, he allows an obstructed view, an animal’s unexpected behavior or another hunter’s success to change our understanding of what is happening. The account has the development we enjoy in fiction, with its discoveries and changes of feeling, while keeping us occupied with the practical business of moving through a country and trying to make sense of it.
I like this literary quality in the book. It extends well beyond passages of beautiful description.
Hemingway arranges what we know, and when we know it, with enough care to make a hunting episode absorb readers who have little interest in trophies.
We become involved in a judgment before we possess everything needed to make it. Sometimes he is mistaken with us.
Following the wrong animal
Late in the book, the party approaches new hunting country across a discouraging plain. The grass is burned yellow; the trees are gray. Hemingway’s enthusiasm declines as the plain stretches out, and the expedition begins to seem founded on an attractive impossibility. Then they reach green grass and large trees, with shade and patches of sunlight beneath them. The change of landscape alters the prospects of the journey before any desired animal appears.
A warthog stands watching the car. Hemingway sights his rifle on it, then has the driver continue. The animal’s refusal to bolt excites the men because it differs from the behavior they know. Through that small delay, beauty acquires a practical implication: perhaps this ground has seen little hunting. We have been given a reason to hope.
His delight in what he calls virgin country needs to remain attached to this hunting perspective. A cattle track has brought them there; a village soon appears. People live in the landscape and supply information about the kudu. The scene itself gives us enough to distinguish his exhilaration from a description of empty land.
When a guide finally pulls him down and points out a bull, a bush obstructs the shot. Hemingway has to crawl clear of it. The animal may move while he improves his position; haste may spoil the shot. Remembering Pop’s advice to take his time, he gets onto one knee, aims and fires. These procedures make the wait tangible. We know what must happen between seeing the animal and being able to shoot it.
After the shot, the prose accelerates. Shouting, running, crossing water, finding blood, reloading and following tracks crowd into a long sentence. The guide briefly loses the trail, finds blood again and pulls Hemingway down. Ahead stands a kudu, looking back. The narration calls it “him.” We have been following a wounded animal, so the pronoun carries that identity forward without asking us to reconsider it. Hemingway thinks the bull looks badly hit and fires again.
Running on, the men almost fall over the first kudu, already dead. It lies only a few yards from where Hemingway has just shot at the other one.
That discovery rearranges the whole pursuit. The blood was real, the urgency was real, and the inference connecting the two sightings was wrong. The second bull is subsequently found dead as well. Hemingway could have identified the second bull when it appeared. Instead, he preserves the mistaken continuity until a body on the ground makes it impossible to maintain. We learn what happened by arriving at something he had failed to see.
The passage also allows the excitement to subside into close inspection. The animal has ears, a muzzle, a mane, a smell; the horns have a particular curve and color. The men touch it and congratulate one another. A reader need not share their pleasure in killing to follow the change from a difficult shot to bewilderment and then to the physical examination of what they have killed. Hemingway gives that response time and substance, including details that can make our feelings differ from his.
How the journey finds its order
This ability to develop an experience also governs the book’s departures from chronology. Near the end of the first part, Hemingway considers M’Cola’s changing opinion of him. The tracker’s loyalties and estimates have emerged through work together, through who shoots and who gets in the way. Something has happened between the two men, he concludes. The next part opens: “It dated back to the time of Droopy.”
A relationship has supplied a reason to go backward. We want the earlier experience because the present has raised a question about it. The opening of the new part introduces Droopy, another hunter and tracker, and places M’Cola beside him. Even M’Cola’s tunic had originally been brought for Droopy. In Hemingway’s account, their shared admiration for the better tracker changes their own footing: M’Cola ceases to be the old hand, and the two hunt together under Droopy’s direction. The backward step has begun to explain their companionship.
This is a modest but valuable kind of construction. Putting events in the order they occurred would have made the sequence easy to consult; putting the question first gives the past a task in our reading. We carry an interest in M’Cola into material that might otherwise enter as another stretch of the expedition. The book’s development can proceed through a growing relationship as readily as through approaching game.
Even the conspicuous talk about literature enters through the frustrations of the trip. At the beginning, a lorry’s noise interferes with the hunt. The encounter with Kandisky, the man beside the lorry, leads to a conversation about writers. He has read Hemingway in a German magazine, and Hemingway is pleased to be recognized. The author discussing literature is on his way back from an unsuccessful hunt.
The conversational license can be generous: Hemingway has plenty to say about other writers. Yet the encounter retains the slightly comic circumstance of a man who has come away to hunt finding someone who knows his work. An interruption has produced an acquaintance, and the acquaintance has produced a different sort of exchange. A safari can contain this without becoming an orderly series of hunting successes. Part of its interest lies in what happens while the intended business fails to happen.
What success does to the story
Hemingway’s own reactions are less manageable than the account he makes of them. After the kudu hunt, he has an experience worth telling: the country, the guides, the mistaken pursuit, the animals examined on the ground. Back in camp, Karl has a pair of horns measuring fifty-seven inches. Hemingway’s best measures about fifty-two. The comparison sickens him.
It is an abrupt reduction of everything we have followed. The admired animal has become the smaller trophy. Hemingway heaps superlatives on Karl’s horns, as though their superiority has expanded beyond measurement, then tries to congratulate his friend. His words sound like a croak. He tries again and hears himself improving without yet becoming convincing. The reader follows the effort to behave well while the feeling refuses to cooperate.
Karl helps him by withdrawing tactfully. This leaves Hemingway room to complain to Pop, who urges him to remember the hunt rather than the inches. We can understand the advice because the book has already given us what the measurement excludes. There was a particular pleasure in finding that country, and a particular sequence of fear, haste, error and discovery in taking those animals. Karl’s longer horns cannot alter any of it, though for the moment they alter Hemingway’s capacity to enjoy it.
By morning, he reports that the envy has passed; he also says it never returned. We can accept the relief within the account without treating a retrospective declaration as proof of a permanent cure. His attempts at congratulations are more persuasive than the completeness of that claim. They preserve the uncomfortable interval when he knows how a generous friend should speak and cannot quite manage the voice.
Such passages explain why Green Hills of Africa works so well for me as nonfiction. Its literary shaping keeps mistaken perception, practical impediments and unattractive responses available to us. We still have reason to distinguish what Hemingway witnesses from what he concludes about himself or others. Nothing in the elegance of the telling certifies every remembered exchange; equally, its art does not require us to regard the experience as invented.
The book has given us time to acquire a fuller interest in the hunt than its narrator can sustain in that disappointed evening at camp. We remember the bull before it was measured. That is an achievement of the telling, and it lets us remain attached to the journey even when Hemingway briefly loses his pleasure in it.
Sources and reading
Ernest Hemingway, Green Hills of Africa, Jonathan Cape, 1936. Passages discussed: Part I, Chapters 1–2; the opening of Part II, Chapter 1; and Part IV, Chapters 1–2.
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