HEMINGWAY WENT TO KENYA in 1953 to explore and understand his tribal past. It was a brave and intellectually curious journey, but it ended in confusion and, in the telling, became subject to the fantasies and inventions that Hemingway was prone to throughout his career. In a letter to Robert M. Brown written three years after the safari, he described his initiation with the Wakamba tribe, boasting that the challenge he had set himself had been fully achieved: “I was the first and only white man or 1/8 Indian who was ever a Kamba,” he announced proudly, “and it is not like President Coolidge being given a war bonnet by a tame Blackfoot or Shoshone.” Hemingway talked a lot about his Indian blood, but without managing to prove that he knew how to trace the bloodline back to its source, or, indeed, that he was arithmetically correct in claiming for himself “a Cheyenne great-great-grandmother” (hardly one-eighth, more like one-sixteenth) and a Cheyenne son (Selected Letters, 695, 679).

Critics, nonetheless, remain intrigued by Hemingway’s claims and refer their readers to his “Indian-consciousness” and “lifelong interest” in the Indian tribes (Lewis, 200–201), from northern Michigan to the Wind River Range. They also note the multiple references in his letters to his Cheyenne background and the ancestral origin of his “complicated blood” (Selected Letters, 681). Hemingway’s interest in Indian affairs had a scholarly base and throughout his life he was fascinated by the work of anthropologists and writers who established themselves as pioneers in the field of primitive modernism: Ruth Benedict, Melville Herskovits, Sir James Frazer, and Sigmund Freud. Their work helped him understand the aspirations and syncretic beliefs of tribal people in the different parts of the world that he visited. But it was a curious legacy. Important as these writers were, the role they played was sometimes inconsistent, their influence leavened by the disparate agendas that tended to distract him and made him feel, as they did during the time he spent in Africa in the 1950s, “very mixed up” (Under Kilimanjaro, 132).

The complication of primitivism set in early in Hemingway’s life. In his attack on Sherwood Anderson in Torrents of Spring (1926), Hemingway showed himself to be deeply skeptical of the fashionable assumptions that underpinned the longing for the primitive.