True at First Light - Themes

Themes

Hemingway is "most definitely on vacation" in True at First Light writes Fleming; and Burwell sees an author who is willingly and happily enjoying a vacation, behaving childishly, blissfully unaware of the effect his behavior has on the members of camp. The impression is of a man seeking to delve into cultural conflicts in Africa, which takes a fictional turn in the Debba storyline. Mary is characterized as a nag whereas the character of the writer is presented as "placid, mature, and loving", immersing himself in native culture.

Burwell and Fleming says the book's subtext is about aging, as symbolized by the writer's attraction to the younger fertile woman, and Hemingway used fertility imagery to symbolize "the aging writer's anxiety about his ability to write". The images of the old elephant symbolize the aging and unproductive writer, and Burwell approves Patrick Hemingway's decision to retain those pieces of the manuscript. Hemingway scholar Hilary Justice writes the work shows an emphasis on "the writer not writing", which for Hemingway would have been a fate worse than aging. Thus, she says, True at First Light invokes a paradox with "an aging writer for whom writing is becoming increasingly difficult in the moment of writing about the not-writing author". Writing, for Hemingway, had always been difficult. He revised his work endlessly and stuck to the practice of writing "one true sentence" and stopping each writing session when he still had more to write. Tom Jenks, editor of an earlier posthumously published book The Garden of Eden, says Hemingway shows the worst of his writing in True at First Light: presenting himself as a "self-pitying, self-indulgent, self-aggrandizing" persona in a book that is no more than a mass of fragmentary material. Jenks thinks Hemingway is simply aimlessly writing and the plot lacks the tension notable in his earliest works such as The Sun Also Rises. However, he thinks Hemingway had good material to work with and some skeletal thematic structures show promise.

True at First Light shows the nature of mid-20th century conflict in Africa. Colonialism and imperialism pressured African tribes and wildlife. Hemingway shows an awareness of the political future and turmoil in Africa according to Patrick Heminway who, although he lived in Tanzania (formerly Tanganyika) for decades, was surprised at the degree of perception apparent in his father's mid-century writing about Africa. Hemingway scholar Anders Hallengren notes the thematic similarities in Hemingway's posthumous fiction, particularly in the final books. The genesis of True at First Light was an African insurrection, also symbolically depicted in The Garden of Eden: "The conviction and purposefulness of the Maji-Maji in The Garden of Eden, corresponds to the Kenyan Mau-Mau context of the novel True at First Light ". Writing for The Hemingway Review, Robert Gadjusek says the clash of cultures is "massively active" in the book with Hemingway exploring tribal practices; Christianity and Islam are juxtaposed against native religions; and the Mary/Debba triangle is symbolic of the white "Memsahib and the native girl".

Similar to his first African book, Green Hills of Africa, Hemingway embeds in True at First Light digressions and ruminations about the nature of writing, with particular attention to James Joyce and D.H. Lawrence. Patrick Hemingway explains his father was interested in D.H. Lawrence's belief that each region of the world "should have its own religion"—apparent when the male character invents his own religion. Mary's intent to decorate a tree for Christmas mystified the native camp members, and Hemingway seemed to realize that Africa was a place without an influential and established religion—a place where religion could be redefined.