Shooting lions and lines

It’s not fair to blame a book for its subject — a book by a decent fellow who delights in Africa in the wild, a book of charm and perception, thoughtfully put together on fine paper with pictures in sepia which make you see and smell the African bundu where the author followed loyally in Hemingway’s footsteps or vehicle tracks or light aircraft hops. Moreover Christopher Ondaatje deserves honour for admitting that on safari even he would have ‘felt uncomfortable’ with one ‘who always needed to be the centre of attention’, and for quoting the fourth Mrs (Mary Welsh) Heming- way’s complaint about her husband’s ‘unseemly egotism’ in sitting up all night rereading laudatory obituaries of himself after his misreported death in a plane crash in Uganda on 24 January 1954, obits he then pasted, I recall, into two scrapbooks, one bound in lionskin, the other in zebra.

That said, may we now all agree that Hemingway the man was unbearable virtually anywhere, and most of all in Africa? He was twice there, in 1933-4 and 1953-4 — in East Africa, white man’s country in those days, the only Africa he ever knew.