Green Hills of Africa

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First edition cover^[1]

Green Hills of Africa is a 1935 work of nonfiction written by Ernest Hemingway. Hemingway's second work of nonfiction, Green Hills of Africa is basically a journal of a month on safari he and his wife, Pauline Marie Pfeiffer, took in East Africa during December 1933. Green Hills of Africa is divided into four parts: Pursuit and Conversation, Pursuit Remembered, Pursuit and Failure, and Pursuit as Happiness, each of which plays a different role in the story.

Background

The majority of the journal describes his actual hunting in the East African landscape, but Hemingway also comments repeatedly on his reading and writing - giving his opinions freely on authors such as Tolstoy, Flaubert, Stendhal, and Dostoevsky. Much of the East African landscape Hemingway describes takes places in the region of Lake Manyara in Tanzania.

The Green Hills of Africa safari was the first of two African safaris Hemingway took in his life. The second safari was in 1953-1954, and was fictionalized in True at First Light. In addition to inspiring Green Hills of Africa, the first safari also was the impetus for the two short stories "The Short Happy Life of Francis Macomber" and "The Snows of Kilimanjaro". It was originally serialized in Scribner's Magazine, from May to November 1935.

Part I:Pursuit and Conversation

The book starts with Pursuit and Conversation, where Hemingway meets a European sociologist, with whom he starts a conversation on American writers and literature. The next day he goes hunting and gets angry at one of his trackers for laughing at him even though he had successfully shot the animal he was aiming at. This part ends with the thrill of his life killing a lion.

Part II: Pursuit Remembered

The second part of this book is called Pursuit Remembered. In this part he tells how he killed a rhino and a bull, yet is unable to beat Karl, another European hunter with whom he is in competition.

Part III: Pursuit and Failure

Hemingway tells of how he becomes very unlucky and does not even see a kudu, the animal he was hunting. Eventually a Masai tells Hemingway of a place where nature was almost untouched.

Part IV: Pursuit as Happiness

In the fourth and final part of the book Hemingway and some of his trackers are lead to a magical place where the nature seems untouched. There he kills a kudu bull with huge horns (52 inches), the biggest one he has ever seen. Back in the camp, he discovers that Karl (another hunter) had killed a kudu with even bigger horns. After his discovery, he complains about how Karl was a terrible hunter yet had an infinite luck. On the last day he learns that many of the guides consider him a brother.

Literary analysis

The foreword of Green Hills of Africa immediately identifies this as a work of nonfiction that should be compared with similar works of fiction:

"Unlike many novels, none of the characters or incidents in this book is imaginary. Any one not finding sufficient love interest is at liberty, while reading it, to insert whatever love interest he or she may have at the time. The writer has attempted to write an absolutely true book to see whether the shape of a country and the pattern of a month's action can, if truly presented, compete with a work of the imagination." ^[2]

The book is well known today for a line that has nearly nothing to do with its subject. This quote is frequently used as evidence that The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn is The Great American Novel:^[3]

"The good writers are Henry James, Stephen Crane, and Mark Twain. That's not the order they're good in. There is no order for good writers.... All modern American literature comes from one book by Mark Twain called Huckleberry Finn. If you read it you must stop where the Nigger Jim is stolen from the boys. That is the real end. The rest is just cheating. But it's the best book we've had. All American writing comes from that. There was nothing before. There has been nothing as good since." ^[2]

One of the key themes in Green Hills of Africa are Hemingway's conversations with an Austrian named Kandisky, who Hemingway stops to help when Kandisky's truck breaks down. After initially trading opinions on German writers like Rilke and Heinrich Mann, Hemingway and the Austrian later discuss American literature over dinner (pages 19-24), and it turns out that one of the few American writers Hemingway approves of is Henry James, whom he mentions twice.^[3]

Specifically, Hemingway says that

“The good American writers are Henry James, Stephen Crane, and Mark Twain” and adds later that “Henry James wanted to make money. He never did, of course” (page 24). Intermixed with these comments on James, Crane, and Twain are Hemingway’s views of American writers in general, most of whom, he says, came to a bad end. When Kandisky asks,

“And you?”,

Hemingway replies:

"I am interested in other things. I have a good life but I must write because if I do not write a certain amount I do not enjoy the rest of my life.”

“And what do you want?”

“To write as well as I can and learn as I go along. At the same time I have my life which I enjoy and which is a damned good life." ^[2]

Popular culture

• In the MMORPG World of Warcraft, there is a book called The Green Hills of Stranglethorn, written by the dwarf Hemet Nesingwary (his name is an anagram of Hemingway's), who leads a hunting expedition in Stranglethorn Vale. The pages of the book can be found everywhere in the jungle.^[4]

• Jack Kerouac's On the Road On page 58, Roland Major says, "Have you ever read Green Hills of Africa? It's Hemingway's best." ^[5]

References