Once again, I could not locate the full text of this one online anywhere (which means the Hemingway’s-Estate People are either really good at such location and having it removed, or I just don’t look hard enough).  So go read it — somewhere, anywhere — then come on back for my take on it.

Hemingway himself said this was one of his better short stories, and, wouldn’t you know it, he was right.  Most other people who’ve read it since have said the same thing, so I guess I’m merely adding my own small voice to the choir, but hey, you can’t argue with everyone all the time, especially when they’re so damn right.  Basically, the reason it’s so good is because it’s almost like a ‘Hemingway’s Greatest Hits;’ you get everything you know and love about Hem — immersion story-telling, paramour-related bickering, war stories, Paris stories, Africa — all in one shot.

We begin, typically, not knowing what’s going on.  There’s a guy on a cot in a tent whom we know is dying because there are buzzards lying in wait for him, but we don’t know why he’s dying or why he suddenly gets all pissed off with the missus (who’s not really his missus, but that’s not important — they might as well be married).  He complains about her money, inferring that it’s ruined him in some way.  What we eventually discover is that her money is just a symbol of his own self-destruction, although it’s not the type of self-destruction we might expect (booze, or something).  It’s the destruction of his life through complacency and contentment, laziness and lack of willpower.

For, you see, this man is a writer who does not write; usually the worst type of character to read about, as it’s so self-masturbatory for a writer to do (“I’m having trouble figuring out what to write, so I’ll write about a writer who can’t figure out what to write — brilliant!”), but in this case it works because the story is not about mere writer’s block.  It’s about how he has lived his entire life, the choices he’s made both personally and professionally over decades; the horrors he witnessed in the war and how he wanted to tell those stories to the world but never did, and the women and other things he sought afterwards simply to get by in the shadow of those horrors; the years in Paris and both the lovely and ridiculous people there; the mountains and the sheer, stark beauty of the snow (the descriptions of which — all these things, I mean — are extremely well-wrought and a pleasure to read).  However, it is the comfort which he finds with this final woman, the one sitting with him in the tent in Africa as gangrene eats up his leg, which he says makes him unable to tell those stories, for it took away his drive to create.  Which is how he comes to resent the woman.

He blames her for making his life so good that he has no reason to write; sounds silly, but I completely understand what he’s talking about.  She is crafted as a woman who is extremely intelligent, but only in a learned way — none of her knowledge is instinctual.  She only knows what she has read in books or had shown to her by him or someone else.  This is perfectly summed up in these two exchanges, the first when he thinks he may be able to actually write something in this dying moments and asks her to jot it down for him:

“You can’t take dictation, can you?”

“I never learned.”

I mean, how hard is it to take dictation?  And the second:

“You know the only thing I’ve never lost is curiosity,” he said to her.

“You’ve never lost anything.  You’re the most complete man I’ve ever known.”

“Christ,” he said.  “How little a woman knows.  What is that?  You intuition?”

What this all boils down to is that she can’t challenge him.  Writers need to be challenged; but — and this is his failing, not hers — those who rely on others to challenge them never, or, at least, rarely, accomplish anything.  That challenge, that will to act, must come from within.  It is this that he realizes, finally, at the end, once he’s done blaming her for it and concedes it’s his fault; he let himself fall into comfortable complacency with her and now he’s going to die and there’s no way he can fix it.

So, what’s left for him to do, in the end?  Die peacefully.  Which is what he does, in a dream, with his friend flying him up off the hot, arid plain, through the clouds, through the rain, high, high up until he sees the snows of Kilimanjaro, white and beckoning ahead of him.  It’s a truly gorgeous ending, and one that is certainly more sympathetic then what we see in something like Francis Macomber.

The description of the actual moment of death which precedes the dream is interesting in and of itself; the way Hemingway details death approaching is of a shuffling, invisible creature which steals into the tent and slowly crawls on top of and along the man’s body, eventually coming to settle as an immovable weight upon his chest.  The point of this is that it’s slow, and lucid in the first moments; basically, it sounds horrible.  And, given how much death Hemingway witnessed in his life — that which he courted in the bull-rings of Spain and that which he did not court on the various battlefields he moved across in his military career — you’d have to believe that he knew exactly what he was talking about and could write it perfectly.  Which is scary, but strong.

That strength, however, is contrasted with something I see as a glaring weakness: a poor decision to use, as well, a hyena scavenging around the outside of the camp as an external symbol of death approaching.  I don’t think it was needed, and the way it’s done . . .

Just then the hyena stopped whimpering in the night and started to make a strange, human, almost crying sound . . . then the noise the hyena made was so loud she woke and for a moment she did not know where she was and she was very afraid . . . outside the tent the hyena made the same strange noise that had awakened her.  But she did not hear him for the beating of her heart.

. . . is unnecessary, really, and again, way too obvious.

Guess nobody and nothing’s perfect, not even one of the all-time greats.

Or maybe I’m off on this one; I’m sure I know what the scholars would think.