“The Short Happy Life of Francis Macomber” (1936)

This story by Ernest Hemingway takes place on an African safari, which is not promising. Then it gets into Hemingway’s moralizing about courage and integrity, which is even less so. It doesn’t help, reading the story nowadays, that big game hunting has become something much more painfully perverse, especially if the game is animals in dwindling populations. But this story somehow still works with its shocking scenes and revelations. It’s a hunting party of three: a rich fool, his wife, and their guide. The guide is the obvious Hemingway hero and/or stand-in, stoic and judgmental and above it all by right of his own excellence. The rich fool, who is paying for all this, has already committed the act that brands him a coward before the story begins, earlier that day. He turned and ran from an approaching lion. The guide had to bring it down and it turned into a messy kill. Some of us might be more inclined to call turning around and running away prudent, and a lot of us think they shouldn’t even have been there in the first place, even in 1936. Take the coward thing as given, it leads to severe humiliations for the rich guy. He and his wife are not getting along. She takes the opportunity of his shame to sneak into the guide’s tent for a few hours that night. The infidelity is so blatant I’m not sure you can even call it deception. These two events may (or may not) seem unlikely if you think about them but they work in the story, casting an awful pall. The story finishes on a third terrible event, just as extreme and unlikely, as the rich guy is charged by an African buffalo the next day. There has been an incident that morning in which his cowardice was redeemed. But, apparently, it’s just some illusion, as ultimately true nature cannot forgive him, or something. Or his wife, who gets him in the head trying for the buffalo (or was she?). I don’t know. It worked for me at the same time I was moaning and groaning about all these hypermasculine rites and rules and all the immutability of it. It does get tiresome. But this story is done pretty well and worked for me in spite of all that. It’s moving in a number of ways. And I don’t mind the arrogant contempt the guide has for the rich couple, who remind me of Tom and Daisy Buchanan from The Great Gatsby. No doubt unconscious on Hemingway’s part.

The Complete Short Stories of Ernest Hemingway
Read story online (scroll to p. 15)
Listen to story online.