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“The Snows of Kilimanjaro”: A Revaluation

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  02 December 2020

Oliver Evans
Oliver Evans*
Affiliation:
University of Illinois, Urbana
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Extract

When “The Snows of Kilimanjaro” first appeared in Esquire (August 1936), it attracted immediate attention. It was promptly reprinted (in Best American Short Stories of 1937) by Edward J. O'Brien, who, praising it in his preface, remarked: “Nothing is irrelevant. The artist's energy is rigidly controlled for his purpose.” Since then it has been anthologized many times, and now it is probably safe to say that, with the possible exception of “The Killers,” none of Hemingway's stories has enjoyed greater popularity than this one. Hemingway's own opinion was that it was “about as good as any” of his shorter works.

Type
Research Article
Information
PMLA , Volume 76 , Issue 5 , December 1961 , pp. 601 - 607
Copyright
Copyright © Modern Language Association of America, 1961

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References

Note 1 in page 601 See Carlos Baker, Hemingway, the Writer as Artist (Princeton, 1956), p. 191.

Note 2 in page 601 liii, No. 1 (January-March), 131.

Note 3 in page 601 Allen Tate and Caroline Gordon, The House of Fiction (New York, 1950), pp. 421–423.

Note 4 in page 601 William Van O'Connor, “Two Views of Kilimanjaro,” The History of Ideas News Letter, ii, No. 4, 76–80.

Note 5 in page 602 W. M. Frohock, The Novel of Violence in America, 1920–1950 (Dallas, 1950), p. 171.

Note 6 in page 603 Alfred G. Engstrom (“Dante, Flaubert, and ‘The Snows of Kilimanjaro’,” MLN, LXV, March 1950, 203), suggests that Hemingway may have got the idea of his symbolic peak from a passage in Flaubert's Correspondence in which the striving for artistic perfection is likened to the ascent of a snow-covered mountain. However, as Douglas Hall Orrok points out (MLN, LXVI, NOV. 1951, 441), there is as much —or as little—reason for believing that the source was a passage from Victor Hugo's William Shakespeare. Like Tate and Gordon, Engstrom believes the peak stands for death: “The Holy Hill for Dante is that of Righteouenss. For Flaubert, it is Art in its perfection. But for Hemingway, in ‘The Snows of Kilimanjaro,‘ it is death.”

Note 7 in page 603 C. C. Walcutt, The Explicator, vii (April 1949), Item 43.

Note 8 in page 604 Douglas Hall Orrok notes (p. 444) that “the African belief in the external soul, which supposes a blood kinship between the leopard and the man, would explain the death of the leopard as the Döppelganger of the man Harry near the west peak of Kilimanjaro.”

Note 9 in page 604 For this idea I am indebted to Robert A. Pratt, of the University of Illinois.

Note 10 in page 604 Op. cit., loe. cit.

Note 11 in page 604 The Explicator, viii (October 1949), Item 7.

Note 12 in page 604 Philip Y. Young, Ernest Hemingway (New York, 1952), pp. 46–48.

Note 13 in page 605 In The Wound and the Bow (Cambridge, Mass., 1949), p. 237. Perhaps the first specimen of what Wilson calls “American bitches of the most soul-destroying type” is Frances, in The Sun Also Rises: her dialogue with Robert Cohn anticipates that of Margot with her husband.

Note 14 in page 606 “Don't become in your old age what I have in mine,” Henry St. George, the novelist in James's story, says—“the depressing, the deplorable illustration of the worship of false gods … the idols of the market; money and luxury … everything that drives one to the short and easy way.” Baker also sees in “The Snows” another Jamesian theme, the confrontation (as in “The Jolly Corner”) of an ego by an alter ego.

Note 15 in page 607 “See, e.g., ”1st September, 1939“ in Collected Shorter Poems, 1930–44 (London, n.d.).

Note 16 in page 607 Twenty years ago, F. O. Matthiessen (cited by Baker, p. 178), pointed out certain correspondences between Thoreau and Hemingway. For a study of Hemingway's affinity with Emerson, see C. Hugh Holman's essay, “Hemingway and Emerson,” in Modern Fiction Studies, I (1955), No. 3, 12–16.

Note 17 in page 607 See Cowley's Introduction, Ernest Hemingway (New York, 1944). The opinion of Tate and Gordon (p. 421) that “the mantle of Flaubert's great disciple, Maupassant, has fallen on Hemingway's shoulders” has meaning only where technique is concerned: the sensibilities of Maupassant and Hemingway are poles apart.

Note 18 in page 607 Other romantic attitudes in Hemingway are his primitivism, which is similar to Thoreau's, and his intuitionism, his distrust of verbalization, which is strongly reminiscent of D. H. Lawrence's and which pervades the early stories as well as The Sun Also Rises, where Jake tells Brett, who wants to discuss her affair with Romero: “Don't talk about it or you'll lose it.” It is significant, too, that words are to blame, in “The Snows,” for the death of Harry's early love affairs; it is the “corrosion of the quarreling” that has killed them. For related aspects of Hemingway's romanticism, see the article previously referred to, by C. Hugh Holman; Tom Burnam, “Primitivism and Masculinity in the Work of Hemingway,” Modem Fiction Studies, I, No. 3, 20–24; and Lois Barnes, “The Helpless Hero of Ernest Hemingway,” Science and Society, xvii (1953), No. 1, 1–25.

Note 19 in page 607 Op. cit., loc. cit.