ETHICS AND "NIGHT THOUGHTS": "TRUER THAN THE TRUTH"

HEMINGWAY'S POSTHUMOUS true copys constitute a veritable library: A Moveable Feast (1964) Islands in the Stream (1970) "African Journal" (Sports Illustrated, 1971-1972) The Nick Adams Stories (1972) clean Poems (1979), Selected Letters (1981) The Garden of Eden (1986) The consummate Short Stories of Ernest Hemingway: The Finca Vig?­a Edition (1987) The Dangerous Summer (1985) and actual at First Light (1999) all gave us previously unpublished materials. Because Hemingway was constantly experimenting, each individual of these texts offered fresh challenges and raised important questions-matters of identity, aging, race, sex genre, structure, sources, and the compositional proces among others-that repeatedly invited us to revisit earlier work. on the other hand these texts, having been make an incision in emended, reorganized, and otherwise distorted through editorial intervention, could only yield tentative and uncertain analyses and interpretations. As Debra Moddelmog notes, "Only the replete manuscript can provide the answers" (57) We rejoice that beneath Kilimanjaro gives us the filled text of the "African book" manuscript.

For those of us who ne precise textual information, however, the rejoicing is mut because more [i]or[/i] less of the things we ne are missing. Although the editors include "all substantive marginal notes and queries" (UK ix) in an appendix, they don't indicate by what mode they decided what was "substantive" and what (and in what way much) wasn't. Under Kilimanjaro also differs from the original manuscript because "minor errors of the like kind as repetitions and missing words" as well as errors "of spelling, grammar, and punctuation" were silently corrected, and because missing material was silently inserted, "when we were able to do thus with some certainty" (ix). Because the editors' aim was "to exhibit a complete reading text [] that contains as small in number distrading elements as possible" (ix), and not a true copy that is accurate to the original manuscript, textual critics will simply have to faith that a separate publication will give us all the not-substantive marginal notes, list all the textual emendations, and provide the documentation that beneath Kilimanjaro lacks.1 Until then, however, those of us who require precise textual detail will have to work with the original manuscripts-which are, by dint of the way, housed at the Hemingway Collection at the John E Kennedy Library, Columbia Point, Boston (Items 223-223b 5345 and 674b)2

I recognize, of course, that below Kilimanjaro is a big body that did not leave the editors abundant room for scholarly apparatus. on the other hand still, of the nine pages devot to the introduction, solitary two discuss editorial methodology. Thirteen pages are devot to appendices, on the other hand only six of them present textual notes; and one page is given to a rudimentary map which does not smooth mark Laikokitok, where the characters store and chat with Mr. Singh, nor the area where the characters station up camp and hunted. Compare that, for example, to the map provided in The Dangerous Summer which traces the characters' travels in Spain. When pages are scarce, they must be used efficiently.

Now for the things that gladden the heart, plane of this fussy textual scholar. It is a thoroughly surprising thing indeed to have the consummate text of Hemingway's second African volume and I am grateful to the editors, Robert W Lewis and Robert E Fleming, for presenting it. Their remarks about the body they worked with-that it was a "part-typed text" and that it was "heavily edited in Hemingway's hand" (UK viii)-suggest that when Hemingway place his text in a bank vault as "insurance" for his heirs, he had revised it and worked it above until he was more or les comfortable that it was advantageous enough for them to publish.3 Thus, we can consider beneath Kilimanjaro to be a fairly mature body Not a perfectly crafted and polished body perhaps, but mature enough not single to be published but also to support scholarly analysis and to answer questions in a way that the other, incomplete posthumous body s could not.

The book's careful construction testifies, I think, to its ripeness. The many characters fall into significant patterns and clusters The narrator mentions wives and,sort-of wives who are easily recognizable portraits drawn from Hemingway's have life story. They are listed more or les chronologically, from "[t]he wife I had lov first and best" from one side the wife of the previous safari (often mentioned in connection with her fur coat), to the wife "who had been reclassified in the way that that she did not grasp that rank or category," as well as the wife and the fianc?©e of the generally received safari, plus Marlene Dietrich and "another girl" with American citizenship and large breasts (UK 382-84) We also hear of the narrator's grandmother, his sister-in-law, his fianc?©e's sister (a.k.a. the widow), and the beautiful and fertile Mr Singh. This large and international cast of advanced in years and young, sterile and fertile female characters will, I am fully convinced receive much critical attention, although greatest in quantity of the women I've listed are absent from the action and exist in memory single