Mr. Lynn, a former professor of English at Harvard and history at Johns Hopkins, is the author of Hemingway.

True at First Light, by Ernest Hemingway, edited by Patrick Hemingway (Scribners', 320 pp., $26)

Ernest Hemingway's name is on the cover, but the publication of True at First Light is an important event in celebrity culture, not in literary culture. For the grim fact is that this "fictional memoir" of the first phase of the 54-year-old Hemingway's final visit to East Africa in 1953-54 reflects a marvelous writer's disastrous loss of talent. His second son, Patrick, has extrapolated it from the untitled first draft of a manuscript that had swelled to more than 200,000 words before being abandoned forever.

The main drama of the book consists of vainglorious and largely predictable accounts of killing a lion, a leopard, and assorted other beasts, the cumulative effect being to make one yearn to reread "The Short Happy Life of Francis Macomber" (1936). In addition, we are offered a grab bag of disjointed if occasionally poignant memories of Wyoming, Michigan, northern Spain, and Paris; random comments-mostly hostile-about other writers; appalling notations of the author's intake of alcohol, beginning with beer at breakfast and extending to shots of gin in bed in the middle of the night (so as to ward off sweat-drenched nightmares); and unbearably kittenish conversations with "Miss Mary"- Hemingway's fourth wife, Mary Welsh-about how much they love each other and what fun they are having.

As for the veracity of the story, the author asserts in Chapter 4 that "I make the truth as I invent it...