By-Line Ernest Hemingway

by Ernest Hemingway

  “They never drink,” he said sternly.

  “Poor chaps,” I said. “We have Pepsi-Cola in camp.”

  “Schine isn’t with me any more,” the Senator said. Then he appeared to check himself and added: “Or perhaps it’s Cohn.”

  “Rotten luck,” I said. I jammed the butt of my spear in the ground to show sympathy. In the dream, the Senator retained a grip on his spear.

  Trying to make conversation, I asked, “Whatever happened to Huey Long, Senator?”

  “Who?”

  “Senator Long (Democrat) of Louisiana, great friend of my friend Seymour Weiss who runs the Roosevelt Hotel in N.O.”

  “Oh,” said the Senator. He also placed the butt of his spear in the ground.

  “Senator Long was a very promising man,” I recalled. “Had a great following, looked as though he’d go a long way.”

  “A lamentable tragedy,” the Senator said. He looked a trifle changed in the moonlight. “Even if he was a Democrat,” he added.

  At this time, due to the concussion, the dream became slightly fantastic.

  “Like to take off your boots so we can sneak up on the pack?” I asked. “I marked where they went and the wind is okay to get up on them.”

  “This is childish sport,” the Senator said. But he did not reach out to withdraw his spear from where the butt was sunk into the earth. “I am out after all enemies of the true American way of life.”

  “I’m after wild dogs,” I said.

  Then I thought perhaps I had been rude or unpatriotic or inhospitable so I said, in the dream, “If you find any subversives that aren’t dead and the hyenas haven’t hit them, please send over and I’ll come with my trackers and the game scouts. I’m not sure they can work with Cohn and Schine but they’re quite good. They can track a man or a vehicle from here to Nairobi.”

  “I lost Schine,” the Senator said.

  “Truly rotten luck,” I said in the dream, being deeply moved. “How did you lose him?”

  “The Army took him.”

  “Senator,” I said in the dream, “my truest sympathy. What a fate for a professional loyal American! May I escort you to your camping place?”

  At this point, I woke up horrified at the enormity of the type of dream produced by a certified concussion. Then I began to think how lovely it would be if instead of having unknown fluid running out of the juncture of my left ear and my head, which still had the slightly scorched odor, I were hunting barefoot at night alone and with my best and second-best spear. My second-best spear was given to me by Miss Roshan of the general store at Laitokitok. If this be treason make the most of it, I thought in my dreams.

  • • •

  As you most probably know, the night in Africa is completely different from the day. Very few people see the night without the benefit of the headlights of a car which distort it since the headlights terrify or occasionally anger the animals. After the sun has set and the fire is built in camp, the usual thing is for you to sit for a time and with your white hunter and companions discuss the events of the day and the plans for the following day.

  You have a moderate amount of drinks and then bathe in a canvas tub with water which has been warmed at the cook fire. After that, you put on pajamas and mosquito boots and over them a dressing gown and go out to the fire where you have one more drink and wait for dinner to be served. After dinner, you go to bed which is covered by a mosquito net, and sleep or lie awake listening to the sound of the animals until half an hour before first light when you are roused by your personal boy bringing tea, known locally as chai. If you have no white hunter and consequently no need to observe rituals nor to be under anyone’s discipline except your own, you are at liberty to do what you wish with the night, which is the loveliest time in Africa.

  In the night, the animals are quite transformed. The lion, who is nearly always silent in the daytime, hunts by himself and from time to time coughs, grunts or roars. I have not been able yet to discover if he is communicating with his mates who are also hunting, or whether he is trying to make the game which sleeps quietly at night move and thus disclose its position. It may be that he roars much as Irishmen do in public drinking places occasionally. It may also be that he coughs from dyspepsia and grunts from irascibility due to the difficulty of procuring a meal.

  The hyenas follow the lion and when he kills or when his women folk kill you can hear the talking of the hyenas among themselves. This is the time when you hear the so-called laughter of the hyena. His normal note at night is quite pleasant and I believe he gives it as communication to the other hyenas.

  In hunting at night with a spear, you hear many other sounds. The wildebeest, which is a big antelope which was designed to try to look like a buffalo or bison, gives off terrifying noises in the effort to seem a dangerous beast. You can in the night, if you sight the silhouette on the ground and approach the wildebeest, or gnu, with extreme caution, tap him on the rump with the butt end of your spear. He will spring to his feet and emit this terrifying sound. At this point, you may say, “Had you there, wildebeest, old boy.”

  • • •

  In the night, you will see many bat-eared foxes. These are lovely animals which live in burrows and are almost never seen in broad daylight and live on insects and other small deer. This does not refer to actual deer but to the animals on which Poor Tom in King Lear existed. Mr. Gene Tunney, the Shakespearean scholar, can provide the quotation. The bat-eared fox looks like a real fox except for his ears, which are at least three times the size of those of Clark Gable, the actor, but are in no way to be compared to those of the elephant.

  You will probably hear the voice of Mr. Chui, the leopard. He is about on his beat giving short coughing grunts. These are given in such a deep bass voice that they cannot be confused with the voice of the other beasts. At night if you hear Mr. Chui on your left, you make a smart right turn. Mr. Chui is a very serious beast. He has his defects but he has great and terrible qualities as a beast.

  If you hear Mr. Chui and he is working along a stream or wooded area you may mark his progress by the speech of the baboons who respond to his grunts with what I take in baboon to be imprecations, insults and warnings to all other baboons to seek the highest part of the treetops. At daylight, coming home from the night out with the spear, I have noted the tops of the fig trees along the creek loaded as though these trees bore fruit of baboons rather than figs. They had been placed in this difficult position by the passage of Mr. Chui.

  Thinking about these times and about how fine the night could be when you were allowed to roam freely, I skipped further dreams and decided to think about the past.

  This past was never my past life which truly bores me to think about and is often very distasteful due to the mistakes that I have made and the casualties to various human beings involved in that sad affair. I tried to think instead of other people, of the fine deeds of people and animals I have known, and I thought a long time about my dog Black Dog and what the two winters must have been when he had no master in Ketchum, Idaho, having been lost or abandoned by some summer motorist. Any small hardships we had encountered seemed to me to be dwarfed by Blackie’s odyssey.

  We encountered Blackie when we were living in a log cabin in Ketchum and had two deer, killed, respectively, by Mary and Patrick, hung up in the open door of the barn. There was also a string of mallard ducks hung out of the reach of cats and there were also hung up Hungarian partridges, different varieties of quail and other fine eating birds. It seeming that we were people of such evident solidarity, Blackie abandoned promiscuous begging and attached himself to us as our permanent dog. His devotion was exemplary and his appetite enormous. He slept by the fireplace and he had perfect manners.

  When it came time to leave Ketchum and return to Cuba, I was faced with a grave moral problem as I did not know whether a dog bearing such a heavy coat as he had grown living in the snow could be brought to Cuba without making him suffer. But Blackie solved this problem when he sa
w us start packing by getting into the car and refusing to leave it unless he was lifted out. Lifted out, he would immediately leap back into the car and look at you with those eyes which are possessed only by springer spaniels and certain women.

  “Black Dog,” I asked him, “can you use a can opener?”

  Black Dog appeared to give a negative answer, and I decided against leaving him with several cases of tinned dog food. There was also the first licensing project for dogs on in Ketchum. This was a town where a man was once not regarded as respectable unless he was accompanied by his dog. But a reform movement had set in, led by several local religionists, and gambling had been abolished and there was even a movement on foot to forbid a dog entering a public eating place with his master. Blackie had always tugged me by the trouser leg as we passed a combination gambling and eating place called the Alpine where they served the finest sizzling steak in the West. Blackie wanted me to order the giant sizzling steak and it was difficult to pass the Alpine and go to a place called the Tram where the steak while good was much smaller. We decided to make a command decision and take Blackie to Cuba.

  • • •

  I would have liked to have brought him to Africa but there were too many difficulties and I was afraid that he might be eaten by Mr. Chui who prefers the dog to the baboon or any other of the more toothsome things in Africa. I do not know what the culinary attraction of the dog is to Mr. Chui, but if you have a dog in areas where leopard are plentiful you will lose the dog. Mr. Chui can omit his nightly grunt and enter anywhere so quietly that he is not perceived until you feel the gentle touch of his whiskers.

  This was an experience of young Denis Zaphiro last week in the camp beyond Magadi. He reached under his bed and fortunately encountering his weapon did away with Mr. Chui. The range was short and he was able to touch Mr. Chui with the muzzle of his weapon. This is the type of incident which makes the life of a game ranger an interesting one and I thought of various other incidents which I will not elaborate on because no one would believe me.

  It was now getting toward morning and I got up, being careful not to wake Miss Mary, and went into the bathroom where I could put on a light and read and check the extent of bleeding from the various five orifices of the human body. Some authorities say there are seven but they include the nostrils and the ears as two each. The bleeding was no more than was to be expected. I felt quite well but rather de-primated so putting on a number of sweaters and a bush jacket and wrapping myself in a blanket I sat at the window of the hotel room to observe the early-morning traffic of Nairobi.

  The native police, yawning and stretching their arms, descended from a truck carrying them to their various morning posts and moved at far from a brisk pace up the street. Natives went by going to market and later returning, the women heavily laden, the men walking beside them in admiration of their wives’ strength and beauty. Many Hindus passed on financial errands. A car went by, its top covered with baskets of beautiful flowers. No spivs were yet to be seen. None of the beautiful big cars parked outside the hotel were in action. No two-pistol men were in view. Hundreds of bicycles of all types passed ridden by Africans and Asiatics. Then, yielding to my new vice, I began reading the obituaries I had not been able to finish.

  When I had gotten well into the obituaries to the point of the fullest fulfillment of my new vice, Miss Mary woke up and said, “Haven’t they brought the tea? And what are you reading?”

  “Darling,” I said, “I am observing the early-morning traffic of Nairobi and reading a number of obituaries that came last night.”

  “Darling,” Miss Mary said, “I really wish you would not read so many of those obituaries. I think it is morbid probably. Anyway we are not dead and so it is rather an affectation. We never read other people’s obituaries and I do not really see why we should read our own. Besides it could be bad for you.”

  “I quite agree with you,” I said. “But it is becoming a vice.”

  “Darling,” Miss Mary said, “don’t you think you have enough vices already?”

  “Quite,” I said.

  “Besides,” Miss Mary said, “we are due for lunch at Government House today and I want you to be at your best.”

  I thought this over wondering how I could achieve my best and, in the light of my obituaries, what my best would be. However, an invitation to Government House is not to be taken lightly, and conserving my energy and leaving off the vice of reading obituaries, we prepared to proceed to Government House.

  It was most pleasant, the Governor and his wife were charming, I met a brace of old friends and we returned to the hotel. I would like to say that at this point I ceased reading obituaries due to my strong and sterling character and the sound advice of my beloved wife Miss Mary, but I am afraid the sad end of this story is that I continued to read them, bootlegging them, in a sense, by reading them in the confines of either the bathroom or the toilet. I placed a blanket over the seat of the toilet so that I might sit comfortably while pursuing this, by now, illicit pastime. I would like to say, in the character which the obituaries had given me, that I then dropped them and flushed them away.

  However, trying to make this an absolutely true account, I must admit that we are preserving them in two scrapbooks. One of these scrapbooks is covered with zebra hide and the other with lion skin. They are very handsome scrapbooks and since it is not easy to desert a newly acquired vice, I intend to read them at least once a year in order to keep my morale up to par when the critics have recovered their aplomb and return to the assault. Since Miss Mary and I sympathize with even the lowest forms of animal life, we will hope to die in some altogether ignominious fashion and give some of those gentlemen a break. In the meantime, we hope to have fun and to write as well as possible.

  A Situation Report

  Look • SEPTEMBER 4, 1956

  HAVANA

  “The more books we read, the sooner we perceive that the true function of a writer is to produce a masterpiece and that no other task is of any consequence. Obvious though this should be, how few writers will admit it or, having made the admission, will be prepared to lay aside the piece of iridescent mediocrity on which they have embarked! Writers always hope that their next book is going to be their best, for they will not acknowledge that it is their present way of life which prevents them ever creating anything different or better.

  “All excursions into journalism, broadcasting, propaganda and writing for the films, however grandiose, are doomed to disappointment. To put of our best into these forms is another folly, since thereby we condemn good ideas, as well as bad, to oblivion. It is in the nature of such work not to last, so it should never be undertaken . . . .”

  THIS was written by Cyril Connolly in a book called The Unquiet Grave. It is a book which, no matter how many readers it will ever have, will never have enough.

  So, rereading it and having interrupted a book that you loved and believed in on the eight hundred and fiftieth manuscript page, to work four months on the script and photography of a motion picture of another book that you believed in and loved, you know that now you will never again interrupt the work that you were born and trained to do until you die. Since in almost any week you can read the obituaries of good dead friends, this is not much of a promise. But it is one that you can keep.

  The company of jerks is neither stimulating nor rewarding, so for a long time you have tried to avoid it. There are many ways to do this and you learn most of them. But the jerks and twerps, the creeps and the squares and the drips flourish and seem, with the new antibiotics, to have attained a sort of creeping immortality, while people that you care for die publicly or anonymously each month. Those that make the New York Times in death are gone away as far as, and are probably little happier than, those that make the Key West Citizen, or the Billings (Mont.) Gazette.

  So Mary and I live here and work until visitors interrupt work so much that we have to leave. It was a nice life here for a long time, and it still is a nice life when we are
left alone and we will always come back here from wherever we go. This is our home. And you do not get run out of your home; you defend it. Spain and Africa are good places, but they are being overrun. They are not too badly overrun yet and there are places that have not been ruined. But you have to find them.

  The places in Wyoming, Montana and Idaho that I loved, and where we would be pulling out for now at the end of June, have all been overrun and nobody who knew them in the old days could live in them now. Those things which are necessary to develop or to rape a country ruin it for those who knew it before it was spoiled.

  We have to make a break now in the fall and let the pressure and the interruptions die off. So we will go somewhere to get a change from two years in the tropics. We were going to Africa, but the rains failed there last year and nobody wants to see another drought so soon. You can always go back after it has rained. In the meantime, it is work on the book at Finca Vigia this summer. The interruption of the picture is over. There will never be any more picture work ever.

  As for journalism, that writing of something that happens day by day, in which I was trained when young, and which is not whoring when done honestly with exact reporting; there is no more of that until this book is finished.

  This is a situation report of how things go until we go back to work tomorrow on the long book. Three other books are finished, and this piece can tell how things go now and, after slightly bad times, I hope it is a little cheerful. Read the last part.

  • • •

  No one can work every day in the hot months without going stale. To break up the pattern of work, we fish the Gulf Stream in the spring and summer months and in the fall. The changes of each season show in the sea as they do on the land. There is no monotony as long as the current is alive and moving, and each day you never know what you will meet with.

  You go out early or later, depending on the tide which pushes the heavy blue water out or brings it close to shore. When the current is running well and the flying fish are coming into the air from under the bow of the Pilar, you have an even chance or better to catch dolphin and small tuna and to catch or lose white marlin.