A highlight of this year's centennial conference in Oak Park was the opportunity to hear Patrick Hemingway speak after a celebratory dinner about the experience of editing True at First Light, his father's just published fictional memoir of the 1953-54 African safari. Equally exciting was the chance for Hemingway scholars and enthusiasts in the audience to ask Patrick questions about the book. We are deeply grateful to him for allowing us to reproduce his extemporaneous remarks here, and to the Ernest Hemingway Foundation of Oak Park for sharing their distinguished guest with readers of The Hemingway Review. Michael Seefeldt, director of the Oak Park centennial conference, introduces Patrick Hemingway, and moderates this special occasion, taking place on the evening of Monday, 19 July 1999.

Michael Seefeldt: We're going to talk tonight about the African book, True at First Light. Patrick is going to talk for about twenty minutes, and then we will go to the floor for questions.

I have often felt that scholars, the critics among us, have used the specificities and the standard of Ernest Hemingway's early work for analyzing and judging the later work. But people change. Shakespeare's early plays should not be a touchstone for Shakespeare's A Winter's Tale. We know in the cases of Melville, Hardy, and most of the great authors who lived more than forty or fifty years that there were great changes in their work, and I don't think we've yet learned how to come to Hemingway's work after World War II. I am afraid it will be a long time before we get a lot of intelligent approaches to that work, although Mike Reynolds, in Sunday's panel discussion for WBEZ (Chicago Public Radio), certainly started us on that way.

I'd like to touch on a few things about True at First Light:. the culture of Africa, the culture of Muslim Africa, the tribal interrelations. The pressures caused by colonialism and imperialist onslaught on the various tribes, on their different technologies, and on different animal groups. The background of the Mau-Mau, the very sensitive personal relations between a man and a woman, married, about fifty years old. The spiritual reflection, the musings on religion, reminiscences, telling us what life is. The recurrence of Scott Fitzgerald's "It's always three o' clock in the morning in the dark night of the soul" As Mike Reynolds said the other day, there's lot more to this book than just hunting. The psychology of individuals, the individual Africans in the party. It's a very complex book and I hope that Patrick's remarks and our questions can help us understand how complex the book is.

In introducing Patrick Hemingway, I hardly need mention his well-qualified background for editing this particular book--years spent in Africa as an honorary game warden, and as a forestry officer for a branch of the United Nations during the last twelve years he spent in Africa. He has spent most of his life in the tropics, whether in Africa, Key West, or Cuba.

And...