In “The Green Hills of Africa,” Hemingway takes us deep into the back country of Kenya and Tanzania in pursuit of big game, “pursuit and conversation,” “pursuit remembered,” “pursuit and failure,” and “pursuit as happiness.” The book fluctuates between in-the-moment hunting scenes and philosophical sidebars given in conversational pursuit, like the play-by-play and analyst format of the coverage of a modern sporting event.
Hemingway never uses the phrase or describes the backcountry as green hills, although he once mentions that he saw nothing on the green hillsides when looking to kill a kudu. He does mention the blue hills three times, hence the recast of the title, not the most vivid imagery I’ve ever read, but he is a writer, not a landscape artist.
To improve my writing, I once bought a tool called Hemingway, which rated the complexity of your sentences to simplify and shorten them. That is to make them more Hemingway-esque. Hemingway wouldn’t have scored well with his eponymous tool, at least not with this book, with sentences like:
“Passing the skinner’s tent he showed me the head which looked, body-less and neck-less, the cape of hide hanging loose, wet and heavy from where the base of the skull had been severed from the vertebral column, a very strange and unfortunate kudu.”
The tool would have shortened that to two sentences. That is not even a particularly long sentence compared to many others in the book, but I chose it as a sample because it does strike me as a very Hemingway-esque sentence for another reason. It’s not necessarily short but very raw and visceral.
He lives the hunter’s ethic, killing in one shot so the animal doesn’t suffer (why shoot in the first place?). He loves to hunt as long as he kills cleanly, but as he demonstrably writes, it doesn’t always work out that way. Or, to use more Hemingway-esque language from a passage where he gut-shot a kudu, the worst thing a hunter could do because the animal escaped but would not live,
“…they (hyenas) would get him before he died, hamstringing him and pulling his guts out while he was alive.”
Nothing goes to waste if the animal drops dead and the hunting team finds it. The animals are skinned, beheaded, and chopped up for meat. They ate the meat and kept the hides and horns. Hemingway doesn’t kill female animals (does*), either, at least not on purpose. (*Grammarly needs help distinguishing between the noun plural of doe and the verb does.)
Hemingway competes with another member of his hunting party for the trophy head of the largest bull, fill in the blank of the species, rhino, sable, kudu, and so on. Killing the fittest animal contradicts everything Darwin had to say on the subject. It’s hard to read how beautiful and extraordinary the animal is in one sentence and how proud he is to have killed it in the next, rationalizing it all away with, “…they all had to die and my interference with the nightly and the seasonal killing that went on all the time was very minute, and I had no guilty feeling at all.” Of course, we stand at a point in history where all those minute killings add up to one global genocide of just about anything more significant than a coyote.
Before throwing all this behavior on the bin heap of macho, it is worth noting that his wife accompanied him on this expedition and hunted on several of the forays he describes. But I can’t imagine a woman writing this scene where he fights with one of the members of his support team, M’Cola, who forgot to clean the rusty bore of Hemingway’s rifle as promised. We pick up the action where M’Cola sees the rusty gun and realizes he forgot to do his job.
“His face had not changed and I had said nothing but I was full of contempt and there had been indictment, evidence, and condemnation without a word being spoken.”** (**According to Grammarly, Hemingway has as many problems with commas as I do.)
Nothing visibly happened, but the tension between the two men is there because of the silence. It’s a nice piece of emotional minimalism.
The most disturbing sentence in the book is a bacterial shot to the gut:
“Already I had had one of the diseases and had experienced the necessity of washing a three-inch bit of my large intestine with soap and water and tucking it back where it belonged an unnumbered amount of times a day.”
I think I would have just fed myself to the hyenas.
On one point, I can agree with Hemingway, “Beer is food.” On another, I hope he is wrong, “…what a great advantage an experience of war was to a writer…Writers are forged in injustice as a sword is forged.” I’d prefer not to survive a war to become a decent writer, although I understand you can’t get that kind of experience in a writing class.
If you are going to read a Hemingway book, this hunting memoir is probably not his best. It’s a dated piece that I read for particular motivations:
- Descriptions of Africa to help me visualize the country for a book idea set in Africa.
- Examine work by a premiere author.
- Get into the mindset of a hunter.
It met all my goals. Happy hunting for whatever yours are.
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