1 - Hemingway’s Reading in Natural History, Hunting, Fishing, and Africa

Summary

He was always reading, reading. Carried soft covers and papers and magazines in his pockets all the time. He read whenever the pace slowed.

— Denis Zaphiro, describing Hemingway on safari (Meyers, Hemingway: A Biography)

THIS BIBLIOGRAPHY BEGAN with Jeremiah Kitunda’s tracking down of the “twenty-three rare volumes on African hunting” (Reynolds, The 1930s, 168) that Hemingway ordered from Brentano’s in Paris as he returned from his first safari. The Brentano list is interesting on a number of counts. It is historically oriented, almost half of it consisting of books published in the nineteenth century, with the earliest (Harris) being published almost a century before Hemingway undertook his own first safari. Clearly, at this time Hemingway was not looking for practical up-to-date advice or technical information, but rather, as he prepared to write about his experiences, for historical depth (e.g., Greener’s 1881 book on the history of weapons). This is an attitude we recognize in his fiction, in which details like the names of characters or places are historically resonant. The past was always relevant to Hemingway.

It is also interesting that the Brentano list, although short, has room for personal accounts of individual explorers and adventurers (e.g., Baldwin, Selous, Stanley), for books about animals that he did not intend to hunt, like the chamois (Boner) and the elephant (Stigand’s Hunting the Elephant in Africa and Neumann’s Elephant-hunting in East Equatorial Africa), and also for a surprisingly large number of volumes about hunting in countries other than the ones he had visited in East Africa (Harris), and even in continents other than Africa (e.g., Aflalo, Dane, Darrah, Highton, Kinloch, Leveson, Niedieck). This suggests that although Hemingway had, by this time, hunted specific animals in a particular area of Africa, he was interested in something wider: not merely the experience of hunting, but the genre of writing about exploration and hunting. Just as the protagonist of Green Hills of Africa is a competitive hunter, so the author of that book is a competitive writer, one who jealously keeps track of the competition and announces, in his epigraph, his intention to overtake and surpass it, by taking the genre onto a different level.