Ernest Hemingway

The Snows Of Kilimanjaro (The SOK)
I don't remember much of Hemingway growing up. Something about his face being on a stamp, a picture of eyes that closed forever in a self-inflicted end. Hemingway's father was a physician who committed suicide. Apparently, it runs in the family. The eccentricity of the genius mind. Does it see all too clearly a picture of the world as it is? Or is the Mensa mind an anomaly with disastrous, inescapable extrapyramidal effects? Whatever the case, suicide, suicide.

The SOK packs punch. It is thoroughly exquisite. I am hackneyed in my reverence for Hemingway, I know, but leave me to my cliched esteem, for it's a cool pillow to throbbing temples. I'll take it like java I didn't know I wanted.

"For this, that now was coming, he had very little curiosity. For years it had obsessed him; but now it meant nothing in itself. It was strange how easy being tired enough made it."

And:

"So this is how you died, in whispers that you did not hear."

The intelligent understanding of the sharpness of things gravely real. Not only foreshadowing, but mere eerie clairvoyance, which explains why Hemingway is still found bouncing off our retinas today.

"Love is a dunghill... and I'm the cock that gets on it to crow."

I am certain this exists on an expensive ceramic coffee mug in a Barnes and Noble somewhere in the world.

"She shot very well this good, this rich bitch, this kindly caretaker and destroyer of his talent. Nonsense. He had destroyed his talent himself. Why should he blame this woman because she kept him well? He had destroyed his talent by not using it, by betrayals of himself and what he believed in..."

A sense of Hemingway's grappling with his father's death and his mother's perceived involvement? Similarities. Overtones. Subconscious or no. There. Something to roll around. Art imitating life.

"And just then it occurred to him that he was going to die.
It came with a rush; not as a rush of water nor of wind; but of a sudden evil-smelling emptiness and the odd thing was that the hyena slipped lightly along the edge of it."

I saw the hyena coming and Hemingway did not disappoint. It had to come; it could not not. Thus is the perfection of this piece. Things that should fit do. A cold Tommy sandwich, diagonally halved, with the crusts cut off.

"Later he had seen the things that he could never think of and later still he had seen much worse. So when he got back to Paris that time he could not talk about it or stand to have it mentioned."

War-related PTSD.

"The next year came the inflation and the money he had made the year before was not enough to buy supplies to open the hotel and he hanged himself."

Suicide always in the background, part of the fiber of Hemingway. Nature v. Nurture? I'd like to know which.

"What about the ranch and the silvered gray of the sage brush, the quick, clear water in the irrigation ditches, and the heavy green of the alfalfa... riding down along the trail in the moonlight, bright across the valley."

Reminiscent of Frost's snapshots with perhaps a jigger of intent for the wallop of The SOK.

"But that night he was caught in the wire, with a flare lighting him up and his bowels spilled out into the wire, so when they brought him in, alive, they had to cut him loose. Shoot me, Harry..."

Intensely absorbing. War is a terrible, fascinating horror.

"And then he knew that was where he was going."

After filling up the house with rich aroma, the timer pings and the cake is done. It is perfect, golden, level, springy. The period is there, a last inky tear, and you know it had to be this way or the oven door would have slammed and the cake would have fallen. Too many references would have been cheapened. But, Master Chef that he is, Hemingway is careful that the ingredients remain delicately balanced, the dish intact.

"Outside the tent the hyena made the same strange noise that had awakened her. But she did not hear him for the beating of her heart."

I forgive Hem for the slightly contrived convenience of the "human" voice of the hyena. The story ends perfectly... again, as it must. The drowning heartbeat is but icing on this wondrous baked good.

The SOK is a beautiful masterpiece, the trophy of Unit Four.

Visit Ernest's grave.