Portrait of the artist as a dying man

It's not the story I would pick as Hemingway's best, as I have a thing against writers writing about being writers. particularly about writers not being able to write. But this is a particularly good one in that self-absorbed genre, and it has turned out to be the Hemingway story that continues to be most celebrated.

Much of the appeal of "The Snows of Kilimanjaro" has got to be the strangely moving ending as the writer dying of an infected leg on an African hunting safari has one final fantasy that I won't spoil here. But even on repeated readings, the story holds up. The writer's regrets and his yearning for earlier days as he rambles mentally through his famous career and adventures reveal Hemingway more vulnerably than most of his other stories.

The story is usually found in a collection to which it gives the title: The Snows of Kilimanjaro and Other Stories. Also included is another safari-set tale, "The Short Happy life of Francis Macomber" (both likely inspired by a 1932 trip that also yielded the non-fiction book, Green Hills of Africa). This story about a cowardly European and his mocking wife who takes up with a real hunter seems at first ironic, as its title implies, but takes a different turn partway through and ends with an unexpected bang.

Other stand-out stories in this collection include the very short, simple and classic Hemingway piece "A Clean Well-Lighted Place" in which nothing much happens apart from two waiters watching a drunk while waiting to close a restaurant, and "The Killers" which in ten pages hints at an entire novel of events behind the story of a wealthy man awaiting assassins he knows are coming.

For some reason, filmmakers have been drawn to try to film these seemingly non-cinematic stories. "The Killers" was stretched into a film starring Burt Lancaster in 1946 and again with Lee Marvin and Ronald Reagan in 1964. "The Short Happy Life of Frances Macomber" became The Macomber Affair in 1947 with Gregory Peck as the hunter and Robert Preston as the ill-fated Macomber. "The Snows of Kilimanjaro" was made into a 1952 movie starring Peck again and changing not only much of the dying writer's memories but the marvellous ending. Even the very short "A Clean Well-Lighted Place" was somehow filmed in 2002.

— Eric

© Copyright 2002–2010 Eric McMillan. All rights reserved.