I was reading some Hemingway stories the other day. I have a collection of Hemingway's stories, many good ones, the cover image and title of the collection, "The Snows of Kilimanjaro," maybe the only bad story in the book. This raises two questions: Why do I think it is a bad story? And why did the editors or publisher make it the cover story, in this sense singling it out as the best story?
The story is about a writer, in his avocation as a "white hunter," as they used to say, dying in his camp on the Serengeti or other East African plains, in the shadow of Mt. Kilimanjaro, Africa's tallest mountain, so tall it has snow year round on top. The "action" of the story is basically his recriminations with his wife and above all the internal flow of his regrets about his bad choices in his life resulting in the writing he has not done and now will not do, because he has been a wastrel and even a kind of prostitute (as he views himself) in terms of how he has lived off his reputation without fulfilling his promise. The main reason I think it is a bad story is that this theme is not enough to make a good story out of. I think it is popular because the reader can experience a kind of schadenfreude at the great writer's fall. (Of course this is not a self-portrait by Hemingway but a sort of projection of his worst irrational fears probably.) Beyond this there are some minor failings of the protagonist and of the story. The reason he is dying is twofold in his view, at the practical level. First, he carelessly did not properly treat a scratch from a thorn which has become gangrenous. This is cause for regret but hardly a tragic flaw we can get worked up about. However, it is a mere trickle from which a great river of his regrets now flows. Secondly, his Land Rover is out of commission and thus he cannot drive back to Nairobi or wherever to get treatment, and the blame for this is that his "stupid" Kikuyu driver did not check the oil and a "bearing" in the engine burned out. There are two things wrong with this second reason I don't like. Without oil more than a "bearing" has likely seized up, already suggesting a lack of understanding of the machine his lark on the plains has depended on, but far worse suggesting a feckless adventurer who has not made good his preparations and now blames his servant. A guy going out on the Serengeti in a Land Rover with his wife and a couple of servants who does not check the oil almost deserves what he has coming, but adding insult (not to himself) to injury is the blame ascribed to the black driver. It must be his fault. This is atrocious (and the way it is told more than verging on petty racism) and if I had any sympathy for this dying writer, I lose it at this point. However, he is in pain, is dying, the airplane with help is not coming, the hyenas and vultures are closing in, he's drinking too many whiskey and sodas, and the war stories he won't write that his regrets are about are elegantly and gauntly told and are the best part of the story, so we have that.
What pushes this story over the mountain top as a bad story to me is its evocation of Africa as the rich white man's playground, where he can indulge his heroic fantasies as well as his nontragic regrets. This is a very old story and sadly one we haven't begun to see the end of. At the very end of the story he dreams that the airplane has landed and an "old Africa hand," that is, a terse and charming Brit acquaintance, has come to rescue him. They take off and seem to fly toward the mountaintop of Kilimanjaro, where it is said the carcass of a leopard is frozen, nobody knowing how a leopard got that far up there. But this is a complete misreading of Kilimanjaro as a white hunter's peak fantasy involving his vague spiritual aspirations, when the mountain is actually where the God of the African tribes live. (This would be superstition to the white man not worth mentioning and indeed it is not recognized in the story.) His whole understanding of Africa is false.
Finally, why this story was chosen as the title and cover of the collection is the complete buy-in back in the day of the literary world to a sentimental exoticism that by now if not outgrown has been thoroughly exposed. If they publish a new collection, they will do well to leave out this dismal and corny story, or at least not put it on the cover. There are plenty of other great Hemingway stories to choose from. A quite bad movie of "Snows of Kilimanjaro" with Gregory Peck was made. It's been a long time since I saw it (and I can't possibly bear to sit through it again) but as I recall, it includes a scene of a hippopotamus stampede that is breathtakingly preposterous.