Lions and Hem

About halfway through "Under Kilimanjaro" (the complete version of the manuscript that was published as "True At First Light" by Mr. Hemingway. Beside the little sexy subplot of the African girl that has the hots for our hero, most of the book is about helping Mary kill her lion.  Why do we care about her shooting her lion cleanly and with style? Perhaps we really don't. Perhaps we care because of the thinly veiled emotions of our narrator. In "Old School" by Tobias Wolf

there is a long discussion about the raw under current of emotion in a few of the Michigan stories that our guide in this book thinks is the real reason for Hem's force. I'm beginning to come around to that opinion myself. "The Sun Also Rises" is a silly premise for what was probably a young man's infatuation with a woman that didn't want him. "Islands In The Stream" is just Hem killing off his son(s?) and ex-wife. "A Farewell To Arms" is just him killing off Hadley. Maybe that's really what it- nothing to do with the actuality of the situation he is writing about, but rather the 'fuse that drives the green machine' The willingness to expose one's flow of soul. Of course, it doesn't hurt if you are technically a prose genius, which he could be.

Blixen in "Out Of Africa" gets her lion with Denis under similar circumstances. It's a lion that is killing the native livestock. Just as romantically drawn- our, of course, beautiful man and woman out on the plain with rifles and they are pure and full of honor (like something out of a Ayn Rand book).

Hem goes on about how they had to make sure that this lion they wanted to hunt was a bad lion and they were then duty bound to kill it.

The world has changed. There's a little article in the New York Review of Books this month about a homicidal serial rapist lion which the game preserve folks are allowing to continue on his way in Africa.