First Draft

This week I finished a first draft of “The Pastor’s Kids”. It feels rather pedestrian at the moment, quite far from what I hope it will be. But I will wait until September to read it and see what it looks like as a whole. I do feel I have gotten into it most of what I hoped. The editing process will involve paring away the inessential, making it more “visible” to others and sharpening the characters and events.

This means that my musings here will be less about the times and places of the novel, perhaps, and more about narrative prose and writing. I picked up my old friend Hemingway this week, a book which came out recently, his “Africa book” which was cut in half, edited and published by his son Patrick as True at First Light. I loved it! I’m not sure he was always so funny, but reading this book I often found myself laughing!

Hemingway chose a two month period, November and December 1953, a time when his wife Mary was hunting a particular black-maned lion in Kenya. The ceremony of the safari had changed a great deal from his experience of twenty years before in 1933. Much of his amusement comes from looking at these changes in both Africa and himself. Hemingway relished his relationships to the Wakamba, who worked on this safari, and felt as though he were becoming one of them. Though some of them kept up the forms and ceremonies established earlier, when the term “Bwana” was used in 1953, he realized it was sarcastic, a form of abuse! Another source of comedy was his banter with the Brit in charge of Game Control (otherwise known as G.C., or Gin Crazed), who came out from Nairobi to help.

The relationship of fiction to non-fiction in Hemingway’s memoirs was always complex. I’ve heard he regarded A Moveable Feast, which many people take as gospel truth about his years in Paris, as fiction! Neither A Moveable Feast nor True at First Light had been published when he died. But, as he says, “there is always the chance that such a book of fiction may throw some light on what has been written as fact.” In both of these books, Hemingway’s narrative precision is inspiring, as is his reproduction of dialogue with all of the flavor and spice of life.

The Life magazines I pored over in the late 1950’s were full of stories of Hemingway’s life and his writing. I doubt if I read the full text of his essay “The Dangerous Summer” about bull fighting, but his powerful persona as a living writer certainly influenced me.