Now that publishing is more about business than literature, the growing secondary industry known as "last" or "lost" works inspires more caution than excitement. To date, for instance, we have had five "last" books from Primo Levi. While the discovery of a "lost" Beethoven sonata is a cause of celebration, previously unpublished works, particularly by writers surrounded by controversy, often prove little more than a cynical and unfair exercise. "Unfinished at the time of death" means one thing, but "abandoned by the author en route" suggests something entirely different. Anything by Hemingway is a case in point. Here is a writer whose life in death - as much as in life - continues to overshadow his lumbering oeuvre. The publication of True at First Light, 38 years after his suicide in July 1961 and 11 years after the appearance of The Garden of Eden, his previous "lost/last" book, not surprisingly inspires mixed feelings.
However much one reads True at First Light as the novel it is presented as, it is a journal. And much of the writing reflects the entire gamut of Hemingway's flaws - sentimental, over-ripe, self-absorbed, with the usual unconvincing female characters, the hunting, the swaggering, the rituals, the often stilted dialogue. A sense of Africa does emerge, but as often with him, it is an Africa filtered through his consciousness. Discovered by his second son, Patrick, a former professional big-game hunter and safari guide in East Africa, the narrative is straightforward, almost slight. The narrator, an undisguised Hemingway, is on safari with his wife, Mary, and is largely concerned with reporting her determined pursuit of a lion. Her new obsession is unconvincingly handled and the reader is left suspecting the entire project is a ploy in attention-seeking intended to deflect her husband's interest away from a young native girl with whom he is conducting a coy courtship. Miss Mary's baby talk is very irritating, as are her strange comments about the lion. "He doesn't care about me at all. I care about him and that's why I kill him. You ought to understand." The reader is left wondering if the lion is really a metaphor for Hemingway himself. The narrator refers to Mary as "a loving and belated killer" and much of his comments have an uncomfortable artificiality, deferring more to ritual than reality. The narrator frequently removes himself from the action and observes the players about him. When he is teased about not writing, one feels he is worried about his inactivity. "Churchill drank twice what I did . . . and he had just been awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature. I was simply trying to step up my drinking to a reasonable amount when I might win the prize myself."
There is a lightness of tone to the book which leaves one feeling how much of this is Hemingway and how much has been added by the son who knew him. Not surprisingly, his granddaughter, writer Lorian Hemingway, is appalled at the opportunism. Hemingway wrote a lot, but writing seldom came easily to him. Passages from A Farewell to Arms or, indeed, even from For Whom the Bell Tolls are laughable when read in isolation. Sentimentality and macho swaggering always work hand-in-hand in his prose, as does the sense of someone taken with the idea of being a writer.
The importance of The Garden of Eden lies in its openly addressing the sexual confusions and insecurity which probably destroyed Hemingway's sense of self and ultimately caused his death. In that daring, compromising book, he explores androgyny. It almost makes sense that such a male writer should not have published it in his life. But for all its self-consciousness, it also aspires to art. This new "last" book, however, is different. All the familiar themes are present, but filtered through a milder voice. There is also the comedy, the self-effacing exchanges. On a second reading, an average, somewhat ragged, novel takes the form of a reflective diary. Hemingway, or at least his narrator, is dismantling his own myth. Early in the narrative the narrator describes the writer of fiction as "a congenital liar who invents from his own knowledge or that of other men. I am a writer of fiction and so I am a liar too and invent from what I know and that I've heard. I'm a liar."
We are left with an interesting sketch-pad from a writer worried about not writing. Patrick Hemingway's labour of love does not enhance his father's literary stature. The place of this most influential and also most overrated of writers remains in flux. This rambling book is an account of an experience in the process of being transformed into fiction. It offers an insight into the layers of bedrock upon which a fictionalised narrative may eventually be laid. In this case the construction was obstructed by Hemingway's more pressing doubts.
Eileen Battersby is a critic and an Irish Times journalist
