FROM THE 'AFRICAN BOOK' TO UNDER KILIMANJARO: AN INTRODUCTION

UNDER KILIMANJARO has an unusual publishing history that relates integrally the couple to the establishment of the Ernest Hemingway Foundation and Society and the Hemingway Papers housed at the John F Kennedy Presidential Library in Boston. Hemingway's widow and executrix Mary Hemingway established the Ernest Hemingway Foundation in 1965 "for the final causes of awakening, sustaining an interest in, promoting, fostering, stimulating, improving and developing literature and all forms of literary composition and expression." She had also decided, through the following decade, to donate Hemingway materials to the JFK Library, which she designated in 1978 as the official repository for the Hemingway Papers. In 1980 a clump of Hemingway scholars gathered at Thompson Island in Boston Harbor, offshore from the JFK Library, to assess the significance of this gift. From that gathering came the establishment of the Hemingway Society, committed to supporting and fostering Hemingway scholarship. Recognizing the compatibility of the Society's and the Foundation's goals in emphasizing "the promotion, assistance and coordination of scholarship and studies relating to the works and life of the late Ernest Hemingway," Hemingway's son Patrick and John invited the Society to assume the duties, resources, and functions of the Foundation on the death of Mary Hemingway in 1986

An important aspect of these responsibilities involves managing stipulated Hemingway copyrights in the United States as related to previously unpublished alphabetic characters and manuscripts. That charge included the manuscript that Hemingway started in late 1954 following his and Mary's African safari that began in September 1953 and extremityed abruptly with two back-to-back plane crashes upon 23 and 24 January 1954 Hemingway worked steadily quite through 1955 on the manuscript that he had begun to commit to as his "African book" He had nearly complet it when he became diverted, in early 1956 by dint of the filming of The elderly Man and the Sea, coupl with the unexpect recuperation in Paris of some of his earliest manuscripts (an incident that no doubt triggered his thinking about Paris and helped to inspire what would become A Moveable Feast). Although Hemingway neither finished nor titled his "African book" Robert VV Lewis and Robert E Fleming, the editors of the below Kilimanjaro edition, argue that the manuscript does not strike one as being "incomplete or flawed." Instead, with the work ending "as it began, in media re omitting the anticlimax of the sum of two units nearly fatal airplane crashes, its major conflicts are resolv its themes full explored." As Lewis and Fleming finish we are lucky to have "perhaps the last gift left to us through a literary master."

In 1987 the newly reconfigured board of the Ernest Hemingway Foundation conven in fresh York City. It was comprised of those, including myself, who had already been chooseed as officers and representatives of The Hemingway Society, and a beneficial portion of our first deliberations related to Hemingway's "African book" which scholars had been referring to more generally as Hemingway's "African journal." Asked to review the manuscript with equal reason as to make recommendations regarding its potential for posthumous publication, we each read the roughly 850-page body The manuscript defied my expectations. Rather than the scattershot randomness I would have wait fored of a "journal," the sustained narrative with its structural and thematic unity, including its consistent voice (wry and understated) and its carefully delineated characters, caught me not on guard (in all the ways that Hemingway's writing, at its best, makes us catch our breath). I could not deposit it down. But then the Foundation's discussion regarding the manuscript's subsequent time got put on hold until courts could determine more specifically the Foundation's obligations in relation to Hemingway's manuscripts and the Hemingway Estate.

Hoping to bring on the outside an abridged version of Hemingway's "African book" Patrick Hemingway and the Hemingway Estate, as well as the Hemingway Foundation, agreed in 1997 to a two-part publishing plan. Following the 1999 trade publication with Scribner's of veritable at First Light, as edited by dint of Patrick Hemingway, the Foundation would overlook the publication in the United States of a full-text edition (with an academic pres and in hardcover only) The Foundation's board solicited proposals from Hemingway Society members and the academy at large for the editing of this work. After careful deliberation, the Foundation Board chose the approach and plan outlined by the agency of Lewis and Fleming, believing that their intent "to show a complete reading text of Ernest Hemingway's manuscript" with "as hardly any distracting elements as possible" (which also meant minimal footnoting and supportive appendixes and explanatory matter single as necessary) was in the best interests of Hemingway scholarship and the publishing agreement. As Lewis and Fleming aptly say of their editorial character in bringing Under Kilimanjaro to pres "this work deserves as complete and faithful a publication as possible without editorial distortion, speculation, or textually unsupported attempts at improvement" similar that "readers of this remarkable work will experience the mingled pleasure of revisiting the familiar and discovering the new"