Green Hills of Africa Page 2

'Sure. I don't mean anything when I curse him.'

  'What about staying in the blind all day?'

  'The damned wind started to go round in a circle. It blew our scent

  every direction. No use to sit there broadcasting it. If the damn wind would

  hold. Abdullah took an ash can to-day.'

  'I saw him starting off with it.'

  'There wasn't a bit of wind when we stalked the salt and there was just

  light to shoot. He tried the wind with the ashes all the way. I went alone

  with Abdullah and left the others behind and we went quietly. I had on these

  crepe-soled boots and it's soft cotton dirt. The bastard spooked at fifty

  yards.

  'Did you ever see their ears?'

  'Did I ever see their ears? If I can see his ears, the skinner can work

  on him.'

  'They're bastards,' Pop said. 'I hate this salt-lick business. They're

  not as smart as we think. The trouble is you're working on them where they

  are smart. They've been shot at there ever since there's been salt.'

  'That's what makes it fun,' I said. 'I'd be glad to do it for a month.

  I like to hunt sitting on my tail. No sweat. No nothing. Sit there and catch

  flies and feed them to the ant lions in the dust. I like it. But what about

  the time?'

  'That's it. The time.'

  'So,' Kandisky was saying to my wife. 'That is what you should see. The

  big {ngomas}. The big native dance festivals. The real ones.'

  'Listen,' I said to Pop. 'The other lick, the one I was at last night,

  is fool-proof except for being near that {bloody} road.'

  'The trackers say it is really the property of the lesser kudu. It's a

  long way too. It's eighty miles there and back.'

  'I know. But there were four {big} bull tracks. It's certain. If it

  wasn't for that lorry last night. What about staying there to-night! Then

  I'd get the night and the early morning and give this lick a rest. There's a

  big rhino there too. Big track, anyway.'

  'Good,' Pop said. 'Shoot the rhino too.' He hated to have anything

  killed except what we were after, no killing on the side, no ornamental

  killing, no killing to kill, only when you wanted it more than you wanted

  not to kill it, only when getting it was necessary to his being first in his

  trade, and I saw he was offering up the rhino to please me.

  'I won't kill him unless he's good,' I promised.

  'Shoot the bastard,' Pop said, making a gift of him.

  'Ah, Pop,' I said.

  'Shoot him,' said Pop. 'You'll enjoy it, being by yourself. You can

  sell the horn if you don't want it. You've still one on your licence. '

  'So,' said Kandisky. 'You have arranged a plan of campaign? You have

  decided on how to outwit the poor animals?'

  'Yes,' I said. 'How is the lorry?'

  'That lorry is finished,' the Austrian said. 'In a way I am glad. It

  was too much of a symbol. It was all that remained of my {shamba}. Now

  everything is gone and it is much simpler.'

  'What is a shamba?' asked P.O.M., my wife. 'I've been hearing about

  them for months. I'm afraid to ask about those words every one uses.'

  'A plantation,' he said. 'It is all gone except that lorry. With the

  lorry I carry labourers to the shamba of an Indian. It is a very rich Indian

  who raises sisal. I am a manager for this Indian. An Indian can make a

  profit from a sisal shamba.'

  'From anything,' Pop said.

  'Yes. Where we fail, where we would starve, he makes money. This Indian

  is very intelligent, however. He values me. I represent European

  organization. I come now from organizing recruitment of the natives. This

  takes time. It is impressive. I have been away from my family for three

  months. The organization is organized. You do it in a week as easily, but it

  is not so impressive.'

  'And your wife?' asked mine.

  'She waits at my house, the house of the manager, with my daughter.'

  'Does she love you very much?' my wife asked.

  'She must, or she would be gone long ago.'

  'How old is the daughter?'

  'She is thirteen now.'

  'It must be very nice to have a daughter.'

  'You cannot know how nice it is. It is like a second wife. My wife

  knows now all I think, all I say, all I believe, all I can do, all that I

  cannot do and cannot be. I know also about my wife -- completely. But now

  there is always someone you do not know, who does not know you, who loves

  you in ignorance and is strange to you both. Some one very attractive that

  is yours and not yours and that makes the conversation more -- how shall I

  say? Yes, it is like -- what do you call -- having here with you -- with the

  two of you -- yes there -- it is the Heinz Tomato Ketchup on the daily

  food.'

  'That's very good,' I said.

  'We have books,' he said. 'I cannot buy new books now but we can always

  talk. Ideas and conversation are very interesting. We discuss all things.

  Everything. We have a very interesting mental life. Formerly, with the

  shamba, we had the {Querschnitt}. That gave you a feeling of belonging, of

  being made a part of, to a very brilliant group of people. The people one

  would see if one saw whom one wished to see. You know all of those people?

  You must know them.'

  'Some of them.' I said. 'Some in Paris. Some in Berlin.'

  I did not wish to destroy anything this man had, and so I did not go

  into those brilliant people in detail.

  'They're marvellous,' I said, lying.

  'I envy you to know them,' he said. 'And tell me, who is the greatest

  writer in America?'

  'My husband,' said my wife.

  'No. I do not mean for you to speak from family pride. I mean who

  really? Certainly not Upton Sinclair. Certainly not Sinclair Lewis. Who is

  your Thomas Mann? Who is your Valery?'

  'We do not have great writers,' I said. 'Something happens to our good

  writers at a certain age. I can explain but it is quite long and may bore

  you.'

  'Please explain,' he said. 'This is what I enjoy. This is the best part

  of life. The life of the mind. This is not killing kudu.'

  'You haven't heard it yet,' I said.

  'Ah, but I can see it coming. You must take more beer to loosen your

  tongue.'

  'It's loose,' I told him. 'It's always too loose. But {you} don't drink

  anything.'

  'No, I never drink. It is not good for the mind. It is unnecessary. But

  tell me. Please tell me.'

  'Well,' I said, 'we have had, in America, skilful writers. Poe is a

  skilful writer. It is skilful, marvellously constructed, and it is dead. We

  have had writers of rhetoric who had the good fortune to find a little, in a

  chronicle of another man and from voyaging, of how things, actual things,

  can be, whales for instance, and this knowledge is wrapped in the rhetoric

  like plums in a pudding. Occasionally it is there, alone, unwrapped in
<
br />   pudding, and it is good. This is Melville. But the people who praise it,

  praise it for the rhetoric which is not important. They put a mystery in

  which is not there.'

  'Yes,' he said. 'I see. But it is the mind working, its ability to

  work, which makes the rhetoric. Rhetoric is the blue sparks from the

  dynamo.'

  'Sometimes. And sometimes it is only blue sparks, and what is the

  dynamo driving?'

  'So. Go on.'

  'I've forgotten.'

  'No. Go on. Do not pretend to be stupid.'

  'Did you ever get up before daylight...'

  'Every morning,' he said. 'Go on.'

  'All right. There were others who wrote like exiled English colonials

  from an England of which they were never a part to a newer England that they

  were making. Very good men with the small, dried, and excellent wisdom of

  Unitarians; men of letters, Quakers with a sense of humour.'

  'Who were these?'

  'Emerson, Hawthorne, Whittier, and Company. All our early classics who

  did not know that a new classic does not bear any resemblance to the

  classics that have preceded it. It can steal from anything that it is better

  than, anything that is not a classic, all classics do that. Some writers are

  only born to help another writer to write one sentence. But it cannot derive

  from or resemble a previous classic. Also all these men were gentlemen, or

  wished to be. They were all very respectable. They did not use the words

  that people always have used in speech, the words that survive in language.

  Nor would you gather that they had bodies. They had minds, yes. Nice,

  dry, clean minds. This is all very dull, I would not state it except that

  you ask for it.'

  'Go on.'

  'There is one at that time that is supposed to be really good. Thoreau.

  I cannot tell you about it because I have not yet been able to read it. But

  that means nothing because I cannot read other naturalists unless they are

  being extremely accurate and not literary. Naturalists should all work alone

  and some one else should correlate their findings for them. Writers should

  work alone. They should see each other only after their work is done, and

  not too often then. Otherwise they become like writers in New York. All

  angleworms in a bottle, trying to derive knowledge and nourishment from

  their own contact and from the bottle. Sometimes the bottle is shaped art,

  sometimes economics, sometimes economic-religion. But once they are in the

  bottle they stay there. They are lonesome outside of the bottle. They do not

  want to be lonesome. They are afraid to be alone in their beliefs and no

  woman would love any of them enough so that they could kill their

  lonesomeness in that woman, or pool it with hers, or make something with her

  that makes the rest unimportant.'

  'But what about Thoreau?'

  'You'll have to read him. Maybe I'll be able to later. I can do nearly

  everything later.'

  'Better have some more beer, Papa.'

  'All right.'

  'What about the good writers?'

  'The good writers are Henry James, Stephen Crane, and Mark Twain.

  That's not the order they're good in. There is no order for good writers.'

  'Mark Twain is a humorist. The others I do not know.'

  'All modern American literature comes from one book by Mark Twain

  called {Huckleberry Finn}. If you read it you must stop where the Nigger Jim

  is stolen from the boys. That is the real end. The rest is just cheating.

  But it's the best book we've had. All American writing comes from that.

  There was nothing before. There has been nothing as good since.'

  'What about the others?'

  'Crane wrote two fine stories. {The Open Boat} and {The --Blue Hotel}.

  The last one is the better.'

  'And what happened to him?'

  'He died. That's simple. He was dying from the start.'

  'But the other two?'

  'They both lived to be old men but they did not get any wiser as they

  got older. I don't know what they really wanted. You see we make our writers

  into something very strange.'

  'I do not understand.'

  'We destroy them in many ways. First, economically. They make money. It

  is only by hazard that a writer makes money although good books always make

  money eventually. Then our writers when they have made some money increase

  their standard of living and they are caught. They have to write to keep up

  their establishments, their wives, and so on, and they write slop. It is

  slop not on purpose but because it is hurried. Because they write when there

  is nothing to say or no water in the well. Because they are ambitious. Then,

  once they have betrayed themselves, they justify it and you get more slop.

  Or else they read the critics. If they believe the critics when they say

  they are great then they must believe them when they say they are rotten and

  they lose confidence. At present we have two good writers who cannot write

  because they have lost confidence through reading critics. If they wrote,

  sometimes it would be good and sometimes not so good and sometimes it would

  be quite bad, but the good would get out. But they have read the critics and

  they must write masterpieces. The masterpieces the critics said they wrote.

  They weren't masterpieces, of course. They were just quite good books. So

  now they cannot write at all. The critics have made them impotent.'

  'Who are these writers?'

  'Their names would mean nothing to you and by now they may have

  written, become frightened, and be impotent again.'

  'But what is it that happens to American writers? Be definite.'

  'I was not here in the old days so I cannot tell you about them, but

  now there are various things. At a certain age the men writers change into

  Old Mother Hubbard. The women writers become Joan of Arc without the

  fighting. They become leaders. It doesn't matter who they lead. If they do

  not have followers they invent them. It is useless for those selected as

  followers to protest. They are accused of disloyalty. Oh, hell. There are

  too many things happen to them. That is one thing. The others try to save

  their souls with what they write. That is an easy way out. Others are ruined

  by the first money, the first praise, the first attack, the first time they

  find they cannot write, or the first time they cannot do anything else, or

  else they get frightened and join organizations that do their thinking for

  them. Or they do not know what they want. Henry James wanted to make money.

  He never did, of course.'

  'And you?'

  'I am interested in other things. I have a good life but I must write

  because if I do not write a certain amount I do not enjoy the rest of my

  life.'

  'And what do you want?'

  'To write as well as I can and learn as I go along. At the same time I

  have my life which I enjoy and which is a damned
good life.'

  'Hunting kudu?'

  'Yes. Hunting kudu and many other things.'

  'What other things?'

  'Plenty of other things.'

  'And you know what you want?'

  'Yes.'

  'You really like to do this, what you do now, this silliness of kudu?'

  'Just as much as I like to be in the Prado.'

  'One is not better than the other?'

  'One is as necessary as the other. There are other things, too.'

  'Naturally. There must be. But this sort of thing means something to

  you, really?'

  'Truly.'

  'And you know what you want?'

  'Absolutely, and I get it all the time.'

  'But it takes money.'

  'I could always make money, and besides I have been very lucky.'

  'Then you are happy?'

  'Except when I think of other people.'

  'Then you think of other people?'

  'Oh, yes.'

  'But you do nothing for them?'

  'No.'

  'Nothing?'

  'Maybe a little.'

  'Do you think your writing is worth doing -- as an end in itself?'

  'Oh, yes.'

  'You are sure?'

  'Very sure.'

  'That must be very pleasant.'

  'It is,' I said. 'It is the one altogether pleasant thing about it.'

  'This is getting awfully serious,' my wife said.

  'It's a damned serious subject.'

  'You see, he is really serious about something,'

  Kandisky said. 'I knew he must be serious on something besides kudu.'

  'The reason everyone now tries to avoid it, to deny that it is

  important, to make it seem. vain to try to do it, is because it is so

  difficult. Too many factors must combine to make it possible.'

  'What is this now?'

  'The kind of writing that can be done. How far prose can be carried if

  anyone is serious enough and has luck. There is a fourth and fifth dimension

  that can be gotten.'

  'You believe it?'

  'I know it.'

  'And if a writer can get this?'

  'Then nothing else matters. It is more important than anything he can

  do. The chances are, of course, that he will fail. But there is a chance

  that he succeeds.'

  'But that is poetry you are talking about.'

  'No. It is much more difficult than poetry. It is a prose that has

  never been written. But it can be written, without tricks and without

  cheating. With nothing that will go bad afterwards.'

  'And why has it not been written?'

  'Because there are too many factors. First, there must be talent, much

  talent. Talent such as Kipling had. Then there must be discipline. The

  discipline of Flaubert. Then there must be the conception of what it can be

  and an absolute conscience as unchanging as the standard meter in Paris, to

  prevent faking. Then the writer must be intelligent and disinterested and

  above all he must survive. Try to get all these in one person and have him

  come through all the influences that press on a writer. The hardest thing,

  because time is so short, is for him to survive and get his work done. But I

  would like us to have such a writer and to read what he would write. What do

  you say? Should we talk about something else?'

  'It is interesting what you say. Naturally I do not agree with

  everything.'

  'Naturally.'

  'What about a gimlet?' Pop asked. 'Don't you think a gimlet might

  help?'

  'Tell me first what are the things, the actual, concrete things that

  harm a writer?'

  I was tired of the conversation which was becoming an interview. So I

  would make it an interview and finish it. The necessity to put a thousand

  intangibles into a sentence, now, before lunch, was too bloody.

  'Politics, women, drink, money, ambition. And the lack of politics,

  women, drink, money and ambition,' I said profoundly.

  'He's getting much too easy now,' Pop said.

  'But drink. I do not understand about that. That has always seemed

  silly to me. I understand it as a weakness.'

  'It is a way of ending a day. It has great benefits. Don't you ever

  want to change your ideas?'

  'Let's have one,' Pop said. 'M'Wendi!'

  Pop never drank before lunch except as a mistake and I knew he was