AT THE HEMINGWAY centennial dinner in Oak Park, Illinois, Patrick Hemingway told his audience that writers always feel the pressure of history as they write for the future. He listed several influences he noticed while editing True at First Light: A Fictional Memoir, among them Schreiner, Lessing and Dinesen, with whose African writings his father was familiar and whose presence, Mr. Hemingway continued, he was sure his father felt strongly while working on the unfinished True at First Light.

There are other implicit and explicit literary resonances in the work. As in Hemingway's earlier Green Hills of Africa, discussion of the Hemingway safari's voracious reading habits constitutes several pages of True at First Light, suggesting an experiential enactment of Theodore Roosevelt's African Game Trails and A Book-Lover's Holiday in the Open. But whereas Green Hills of Africa integrated Hemingway's then-characteristic meditations on writing, True at First Light includes among its almost dreamlike, easily shifting foci that of the writer not writing, a subject that for Hemingway achieved sharp definition as the problem of his own aging.

Both problem and thematic focus are implicit in the subtitle A Fictional Memoir, a conflicted genre of which True at First Light is an especially troubled example: Hemingway left the manuscript unfinished; Patrick Hemingway provides no indication of how he chose to apportion the manuscript to remain within Charles Scribner's Sons' allotted length (given such limits, an editorial apparatus might have left readers with even less of the original text). The questions the book raises and leaves unanswered thus range from the textual ("Who really wrote this sentence?") to the generic ("Did they really break the bed that way?"). Such questions may yield truth, but only at first light. If the writing meets Hemingway's standard of being "any good" (GHOA 109), his words should provide some indication of his overall authorial project.

The allusive nature of the book provides a means by which to track that project. Just beyond the midway point, Hemingway pauses to invoke Dante in a backhanded aside about Mary's unwritten Africa poem: "Dante only made crazy people feel they could write good poetry." He continues, "That was not...