Word: lighting
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...comes the fifth and, its publisher promises, "last" of Papa's posthumous performances: True at First Light (Scribner; 320 pages; $26). This so-called fictional memoir will officially appear on July 21, the 100th anniversary of Hemingway's birth...
...than Hemingway to construe words as the manifest expression of personal honor," should have the only, and final, say on what among their work will appear in print. Oddly enough, after running Didion's vehement objections to the project, the New Yorker published an excerpt from True at First Light...
What Papa would have thought of all this is anyone's guess. But purists should remember that Hemingway was never shy about reaping the perks and rewards of his increasingly famous name. In fact, the 1953 East African safari that became the genesis of True at First Light began as a celebrity assignment for Look magazine. And the Kenyan government, worried that the Mau Mau uprisings would discourage tourism, welcomed Hemingway's visit and the publicity it would generate by naming him an honorary game warden...
That is how he appears in the opening pages of True at First Light, which his second son Patrick, in the introduction, says he whittled down from a 200,000-word manuscript to a book roughly half as long. Even after such radical surgery, the thing seems interminable...
...most standards, and certainly by Hemingway's, True at First Light is a pretty bad piece of work. But its publication will do no harm to his reputation. In fact, the appearance of this book underscores Hemingway's courage as a writer. By the time he began working on this manuscript, he had received all the honors--a Pulitzer Prize in 1953, the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1954--and all the fame that any author could desire. But his body had been battered by injuries and his brain by alcohol, and the "one true sentence" that he said would...