Hemingway was interrupted in his first and only draft of the manuscript by Leland Hayward, then married to the lady who has therefore to live by the long-distance telephone in this story, and the other movie people filming The Old Man and the Sea to go and help them fish for a picture marlin in Peru. The Suez Crisis, which closed the canal and ended his plans for another trip to East Africa, could have been one reason he never returned to his unfinished work. We know he was thinking of Paris “in the old days” from what we read in this story and perhaps another reason he left it was he found he could write more felicitously of Paris than East Africa, which for all its photogenic beauty and excitement had lasted but a few months and mauled him badly, the first time with amebic dysentery and the second with the plane crashes.

Were he still alive, I would have asked Ralph Ellison to do this introductory note because of what he wrote in Shadow and Act:

“Do you still ask why Hemingway was more important to me than Wright? Not because he was white, or more ‘accepted.’ But because he appreciated the things of this earth which I love and which Wright was too driven or deprived or inexperienced to know: weather, guns, dogs, horses, love and hate and impossible circumstances which to the courageous and dedicated could be turned into benefits and victories. Because he wrote with such precision about the processes and techniques of daily living that I could keep myself and my brother alive during the 1937 Recession by following his descriptions of wing-shooting; because he knew the difference between politics and art and something of their true relationship for the writer. Because all he wrote—and this is very important—was imbued with a spirit beyond the tragic with which I could feel at home, for it is very close to the feeling of the blues, which are, perhaps, as close as Americans can come to expressing the spirit of tragedy.”

I am pretty sure Hemingway had read Invisible Man and that it helped him pull himself together after the two plane crashes that came so close to killing both Mary and himself, when he started to write again with his African manuscript in the mid-fifties, at least a year after the events that inspired this return to creative work. He may have had Ellison in mind in his remarks in the draft manuscript about writers stealing from each other, for the scene in Ellison’s novel of the lunatics from the asylum is very much like that of the vets in the bar in Key West from To Have and Have Not.

Ellison wrote his essay piece in the early 1960s, not so long after Hemingway’s death in the summer of 1961, and Ellison, of course, had not read the unfinished African manuscript, which I have licked here into what I hope is not the worst of all possible shapes: True at First Light, taking what my father wrote in the morning and doing with it what Suetonius describes in his Lives of Illustrious Men:

“When Virgil was writing the ‘Georgics,’ it is said to have been his custom to dictate each day a large number of verses which he composed in the morning, and then to spend the rest of the day in reducing them to a very small number, wittily remarking that he fashioned his poem after the manner of a she-bear, and gradually licked it into shape.”

Only Hemingway himself could have licked his unfinished draft into the Ursus horribilis it might have been. What I offer in True at First Light is a child’s teddy bear. I will take it to bed now always and having laid myself down to sleep and prayed the Lord my soul to keep, if I die before I wake, I will pray the Lord my soul to take and God bless you, Papa.

THINGS WERE not too simple in this safari because things had changed very much in East Africa. The white hunter had been a close friend of mine for many years. I respected him as I had never respected my father and he trusted me, which was more than I deserved. It was, however, something to try to merit. He had taught me by putting me on my own and correcting me when I made mistakes. When I made a mistake he would explain it. Then if I did not make the same mistake again he would explain a little more. But he was nomadic and he was finally leaving us because it was necessary for him to be at his farm, which is what they call a twenty-thousand-acre cattle ranch in Kenya. He was a very complicated man compounded of absolute courage, all the good human weaknesses and a strangely subtle and very critical understanding of people. He was completely dedicated to his family and his home and he loved much more to live away from them. He loved his home and his wife and his children.

“Do you have any problems?”

“I don’t want to make a fool of myself with elephants.”

“You’ll learn.”

“Anything else?”

“Know everybody knows more than you but you have to make the decisions and make them stick. Leave the camp and all that to Keiti. Be as good as you can.”

There are people who love command and in their eagerness to assume it they are impatient at the formalities of taking over from someone else. I love command since it is the ideal welding of freedom and slavery. You can be happy with your freedom and when it becomes too dangerous you take refuge in your duty. For several years I had exercised no command except over myself and I was bored with this since I knew myself and my defects and strengths too well and they permitted me little freedom and much duty. Lately I had read with distaste various books written about myself by people who knew all about my inner life, aims and motives. Reading them was like reading an account of a battle where you had fought written by someone who had not only not been present but, in some cases, had not even been born when the battle had taken place. All these people who wrote of my life both inner and outer wrote with an absolute assurance that I had never felt.

On this morning I wished that my great friend and teacher Philip Percival did not have to communicate in that odd shorthand of understatement which was our legal tongue. I wished that there were things that I could ask him that it was impossible to ask. I wished more than anything that I could be instructed fully and competently as the British instruct their airmen. But I knew that the customary law which prevailed between Philip Percival and myself was as rigid as the customary law of the Kamba. My ignorance, it had been decided long ago, was to be lessened only through learning by myself. But I knew that from now on I had no one to correct my mistakes and, with all the happiness one has in assuming command, it made the morning a very lonely one.

For a long time we had called each other Pop. At first, more than twenty years before, when I had called him Pop, Mr. Percival had not minded as long as this violation of good manners was not made in public. But after I had reached the age of fifty, which made me an elder or Mzee, he had taken, happily, to calling me Pop, which was in a way a compliment, lightly bestowed and deadly if it were withdrawn. I cannot imagine a situation, or, rather, I would not wish to survive a situation in which I called him, in private, Mr. Percival or he addressed me by my proper name.

So on this morning there were many questions I wished to ask and many things I had wondered about. But we were, by custom, mute on these subjects. I felt very lonely and he knew it of course.