'True At First Light:' Not a Hunting Classic

When we discuss American hunting literature, it is inevitable that the work of Ernest Hemingway is brought up. This is odd because his contributions to the genre are really quite few. A few novels and a handful of short stories. What distinguished Hemingway's contributions was the fact that he was writing for a general audience, unlike most outdoor writers who were aiming straight at other hunters.

Hemingway's 'Green Hills of Africa' is his best-known hunting book. Less discussed is the last of his works to be published, (posthumously), 'True at First Light.'

It isn't a great book, I am sorry to say. If you were to read 'True at First Light' before reading anything else by the author then you would be very disappointed. The book has no plot and an utterly confused narrative. The text bounces distantly from one vague idea to another and nothing much ever happens at all. This is, in my opinion, the worst book that the author was ever known to have written and I can understand why he never published it during his lifetime.

Yet the book is not without its moments. Wading through the entire book was almost worth the trouble just for the chapter in which Hemingway reproduces an entire letter from an angry reader from Guthrie Center, Iowa by the name of G. S. Held who hated everything of his that she had ever read. He riffs on it for a few pages and had me laughing out loud.

He describes hunts well. We find little vistas of prose describing a scene or the nuances of a character's behavior that are good and solid and satisfying. But these moments are rare and poorly connected to each other.

I think that the novel suffers from two problems. The first is the lack of a plot. At first it seems like perhaps the book is about his wife's effort to kill a particular lion as she works through her bad shooting under pressure. But then the lion is killed and the book keeps going.

The second problem is that Hemingway gets too clubby about Africa and the experience of being in a safari camp. 'Green Hills of Africa' was about the author's first trip to that continent. There was a sense of discovery and struggle in that book. Decades later when EH wrote 'True At First Light' he seems to have reveled too much in feeling that he was really in his element. He throws safari jargon around and uses Swahili words too freely. I kept having to look up Swahili words and often had no idea what was being said.

There's no doubt, no struggle, no conflict. It took me a month to finish reading this book because it was so boring that I couldn't manage to get through more than half a chapter in any one sitting. Finishing the book would compare with the sensation of finishing some of his other books thus:

For Whom the Bell Tolls: "Aw, shit."

The Old Man and the Sea: "Badass!"

The Sun Also Rises: "Wait -- what the hell?"

True At First Light: "Thank God this crap is finally over."

'True at First Light' does not deserve the same canonical place within hunting literature that 'Green Hills of Africa' does. There is little to be learned from it, either by a hunter or a non-hunting reader. I would sincerely like to know what Mrs. G. S. Held of Guthrie Center, Iowa thought of the book but the record is silent on this matter.


[Photo copyright 2012 by Jackson Landers. It depicts a pile of elephant poop, which seemed like the most appropriate photograph that I happened to have.]