The Green, and Blue, Hills of Boson - by Ernest Hemingway
The Green, and Blue Hills of Boson is a 1931 work of non-fiction written by Ernest Hemingway as he was planning a hunting trip to Africa. He wanted to get into shape with a squirrel hunting expedition closer to home in Boson, Massachusetts. Hemingway had already spent time with Boson's deep sea fishermen and went squirrel hunting in Boson with a captain from a charter fishing boat.
Hemingway had been paid in advance to write about hunting in Africa and he used some of that money to finance his Boson squirrel hunt.
The Blue Hills in Eastern Massachusetts were a lot wilder eighty years ago when Hemingway was hunting there. People said there were squirrels on every tree and locals hunted them for food. The Great Depression was on and Boson was a tired old industrial town with a fishing and fish processing industry on the waterfront.
Hemingway headed to the hills with several carloads of supplies and a couple of native guides along with his wife and mistress. The party would hunt squirrels in the early morning hours, skin, clean and cook any animals caught, and knock off at noon for a large lunch and an afternoon of drinking and talking about literature.
The party spent a month in the Blue Hills 'wilderness.' On the weekends the party took a trip into Boson to enjoy a movie or eat something besides squirrel stew.
Others noted that Hemingway seemed to be obsessed with being the one who killed the biggest squirrel. Each noon as they measured and photographed the day's kill Hemingway was rooting for himself to come out on top.
His wife and mistress had a frosty relationship at first but soon became friends as they realized that 'Ernie' wasn't sleeping with either one of them since he was usually incapable of an erection because he spent half the day drinking. He wanted women the same way he wanted dead animals - so he could compare himself with other hunters. The two women began to have an intimate relationship and started sleeping in the same tent. Ernie didn't notice.
But, he did complain about having to pay the expenses for two upper-class women who demanded luxury everywhere they went. He was also disappointed that neither woman would even taste the squirrel meat no matter how the servants cooked it.
Hemingway said that he began to develop a respect for the squirrels he tracked and asked members of the hunting party to stop calling them tree rats. They had set out some traps and one squirrel was kept in a cage and Hemingway began to feed it by hand and named it ..............
About a third of the book is actually about being in the woods hunting, another third is about the relationships among the party, and the final third is about the afternoon and evening literary discussions around the campfire that stretched into the night until Hemingway passed out.
Hemingway said that the 'great American novel' was The Adventures of Tom Sawyer by Mark Twain because Tom's love for Becky Thatcher was pure and uncomplicated by sexual intercourse. Also, Tom showed how capitalism works by getting other people to work for him whitewashing a fence and paying to do so. Hemingway asserted that he got the idea of being a writer from that episode. He realized other people would pay simply to be told a story.
As they sat around the campfire in the evening once Hemingway said that Henry Miller had also encouraged him to become a writer. "When you see the page long sentences with convoluted meanings and meandering intent and realized that people would pay money to read that stuff... I thought I'd go the other way and write simple declarative sentences that a high school kid could understand."
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The Green, and Blue Hills of Boson initially got a cool reception. Writing for The New York Times, critic John Chamberlain claimed: "The Green, and Blue Hills of Boson is not one of the major Hemingway works. Mr. Hemingway has so simplified his method that all his characters talk the lingo perfected in The Sun Also Rises, whether these characters are from New England, New York, or Michigan."[1]
However, two days later, writing for the same newspaper, critic C. G. Poore hailed The Green, and Blue Hills of Boson as "the best-written story of small-game hunting anywhere I have read. And more than that. It's a book about people in unacknowledged conflict and about the pleasures of travel and the pleasures of drinking and war and peace and writing."[4]
Despite the better review, Hemingway said the book critics "killed" the book.[5] He went into a deep depression, and said he was "ready to blow my lousy head off".[6] Within a few months he was ready to blame the corrupting influence of the wealthy women in his life—his wife Pauline and his mistress Jane Mason.[5]
The result of his bitterness were two stories about Africa: "The Short Happy Life of Francis Macomber" and "The Snows of Kilimanjaro", that featured husbands married to domineering women.[5]
- Chamberlain, John. Book of the Times. October 25, 1935. The New York Times. Retrieved 2010-01-19
- Poore, C.G. Book of the Times. October 27, 1935. Retrieved 2010-01-19
- Donaldson, The Cambridge Companion to Hemingway, p.184
- Meyers 1985, p. 252
- [Hemingway, Ernest. Green Hills of Africa. 1935. Rpt. New York: Simon and Schuster, 1996. ISBN 0-684-80129-9 ]
The text of "The Green Hills of Africa" online copyright free from Canada
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