WE SEVERAL CRITICS, brought to pronounce blindly on a late much-edited Hemingway work, will unquestionably re-enact the parable of the blind men and the elephant. Lacking the critical models which should in time both discipline and limit speculation, our suggestive readings and misreadings should certainly define a most wondrous beast.

I think that True at First Light will be everyone's book, if not everyone's cup of tea. Hemingway has brought together in a remarkable assemblage a complex number of themes and concerns which resonate together, and their severally developed fascinations and interests will select their readers. There are surely dominant currents running through the stream. The book has a limited cast of characters whose problematic inter-relations supply much of the drama--the rivalry between Debba and Miss Mary for the love of Hemingway, and the torturous and creative effect of his ambivalence upon them--and figures whose nature acts like a dye or a cacaphonic chord to color and dominate where they come upon the canvas or into the scene--i.e. The Informer. Pop is a compelling leitmotif, suggesting an absent yet present past and a nexus of values; their memory of him effects present action.

Two worlds in rivalry for control are massively active: the real unreal world of Africa and the unreal real presence of the intruding white colonial world. Both Christian and Mohammedan values (as welt as tribal variations on belief) structure and influence action, while the process of building the "new" religion goes on against these implied rituals and laws and forms. Coevally, the inherited cultural capitalist "European" dispositions, in Mary and Hemingway and in some of the influenced natives, help interpret Hemingway's final powerful alternative drift towards atavistic regression. Christianity is a symbolic structuring force. The native assumptions about what is happening and why, and about acts seen as mysterious Christian rituals implying Christian roles for Mary or Hemingway, are phrased against the imminent birth of the baby Jesus and the pursuit of the Christmas tree for the celebration of that birth. Presents and gifts that should go with that occasion contrast with multiple gifts silently given to Mary and Debba and others throughout the...