The Snows of Kilimanjaro by Ernest Hemingway
- 13 hours ago
- 4 min read
I’m a latecomer to The White Lotus, but I’ve now devoured the first two seasons. It’s cleverly plotted, smartly written and the locales (Hawaii in Season 1, and Sicily in Season 2) are gorgeous.
This TV series has also sent me back, unexpectedly, to thinking about Ernest Hemingway.
Each season of The White Lotus follows a group of wealthy guests at a luxury resort who both lose and reveal themselves while on vacation. By the end of the trip, someone also ends up dead. I'm wary of drawing outlandish literary parallels, but I don't think it’s far-fetched to view “The Snows of Kilimanjaro,” Hemingway’s short story about a dying writer on an African safari, as a forerunner of these themes.
This 1936 story, which grew out of Hemingway’s own travels to East Africa, has a lot to say about wealth, privilege, resentment and death. It's also a tale of regret. Hemingway paints a devastating portrait of a man who realizes, just as his life is slipping away, that he has squandered it.
The story's protagonist is Harry, who has joined the ranks of the idle rich through his marriage to Helen, a wealthy widow. Harry has contracted gangrene during their expedition, and the story opens with him lying listlessly on a cot as vultures circle above. As they wait for help to arrive and Helen tries to comfort him, Harry lashes out at her viciously. It’s painful reading, and these scenes do little to counter Hemingway’s reputation for misogyny, especially since Harry can clearly be seen as a stand-in for Hemingway himself.
Above all, though, Harry is infuriated with himself. Through flashbacks and interior monologue, we learn that he has become something of a trophy husband after taking up with Helen. He has grown lazy, drinks too much and has abandoned his typewriter. As he begins to accept that death is near, he absolves Helen and wallows in self-loathing for setting aside his literary aspirations.
Why should he blame this woman because she kept him well? He had destroyed his talent by not using it, by betrayals of himself and what he believed in.
Hemingway was drawn to stories of brave men who lived by a moral code — on the battlefield, in the bullfighting ring or alone in the African wilderness. But Harry's impending death isn't tied to anything noble or courageous. It's the result of negligence. He scratched his knee on a thorn while trying to photograph a herd of waterbuck and then let the wound fester by failing to treat it with iodine. Underscoring the pointlessness, Harry didn't even manage to take the photograph. The animals bolted into the bush before he could do so.
It's not unusual for people facing death to be filled with regret about what they wished they had achieved in life. For the fictional Harry and the actual Hemingway, there are two equally horrifying possibilities for a writer: lacking the courage to live a creative life, and not being good enough to accomplish what you thought you could in the first place.
As he grows increasingly delirious, Harry concludes:
Now he would never write the things that he had saved to write until he knew enough to write them well. Well, he would not have to fail at trying to write them either. Maybe you could never write them, and that was why you put them off and delayed the starting. Well he would never know, now.
I read this paragraph several times, trying to figure out what Hemingway was attempting to do here. He certainly tosses aside the rules of what good writing is supposed to be. He repeats the word “write” five times, including three times in the first sentence, and uses “well” three times. He ends one sentence with “well” and then starts the next one with the same word. Through this repetition, Hemingway may be subtly showing that any remaining creative energy that Harry had has now been depleted, and that his mind is going in circles. There's also a certain symmetry to Harry's thoughts. If you put the two words together as “write well,” this signifies the skill Harry wished he had. If you invert that to “well, write,” this is the discipline Harry lacked, which is perhaps an even more devastating indictment.
Like the characters in The White Lotus, Harry and Helen are immensely privileged. I was thinking about what it must have taken for an American couple to travel to East Africa in the 1930s in terms of both financial resources and logistics. Their trip feels especially extravagant because it's happening during the Great Depression, though that backdrop is never mentioned.
The comparison between "The Snows of Kilimanjaro" and The White Lotus only goes so far. One thing that struck me while watching the show is how thoroughly boring most of the resort guests are. They are comically incurious about the place they are visiting, and they rarely venture beyond the hotel pool. I’m fairly certain Hemingway would have despised them. Yet both works hit at the same idea: you can travel to the most exotic places on Earth, but there is still no escape from yourself.
