POPULAR PRESS REVIEWERS have done their work rather well, I think, most of them as glad to have this final posthumous book as we were to have the first, A Moveable Feast. Therefore I will address just four aspects of True as First Light: 1) Did Hemingway intend that it be published?; 2) What is Hemingway's intention in this strange hybrid work? 3) What is lost in the compacting that took place to create True at First Light from the longer manuscript of the African book? 4) What does this book add to the body of Hemingway's work?

1.

Joan Didion's New Yorker article (9 November 1998) ignited the complaint voiced by several critics--that publishing what Hemingway did not choose to publish in his lifetime is a betrayal. However we might feel about our own unfinished work, and even if we have forgotten that we would have less of Spencer, Chaucer, and Shakespeare, very little of Gerard Manley Hopkins, and almost none of Kafka if we followed this reasoning, Hemingway left a clear statement of his intentions about this book, which he told Adriana Ivancich he worked on to keep from going crazy with pain (after the back injuries of the second plane crash in Africa in 1954).

In an unusually confiding correspondence with Robert Morgan Brown, Hemingway discusses the inception of the work, writing in September 1954 of the African book which he had begun two months earlier:

I don't think it would ever be acceptable at Fordham and I think maybe it would be better to wait until I'm dead to publish it. But it is an awful good story and I was born to write stories not to please the authorities. The story is so rough and I...