True At First Light

A deeply personal and candid diary of Hemingway's time hunting in Africa with his wife Mary. The style is vintage Hemingway ... clean, simple prose that carries the reader as if they were sitting between Mary and Papa beneath the canvas of the tent before first light and planning the day's hunt or at night sharing a single cot in a tent in the insect noisy dark and the heat when the air is still, though neither ever complains. They enjoy the days made easier with good liquor, freshly killed meat, trusted friends and the ever-present characters dropping in and out of their lives, some distrusted and hated by Mary but apparently all admired in astonishingly kind ways by Hemingway and both appreciate the cleanness of light through the African grass and leaves while thinking of the restless nights they are kept awake by the heart-shrinking depth of sound in the cough of a lion hunting somewhere out in the dark. It is a sprawling book, hammered together quite coherently by Ernest's son after his father died. The characters are made real under Hemingway's pencil, the limits and luxuries they managed in places unlikely to be found even by a spying satellite, and often Hemingway's dry friendly humor draws the reader into his intimate circle. I had the feeling I was welcome, not just casually sitting in, not having dropped in and sorry to go on the next day. True At First Light is what Hemingway might have observed, "It was a good book and a true book that was the kind I if I'd been on safari with my wife, she my best friend, I'd want to keep reading for a long time not because the story was strange or impossible but because it was told in such a way that I felt comfortable holding the book and quite frankly didn't want to put it down and would have been quite happy if it had never had an ending." Mary gracefully accepts Hemingway's second wife as just another of her husband's useful hangers-on, defending her as a comrade might have approved of another, perhaps as one serving girl tolerating another and perhaps that has something to do with the lion she hunts for so long and with such respect but with the absolute knowledge that she will kill it. Hemingway never talks down to his reader. He is never condescending.