It was very hot climbing back up the sandy ravine and I was glad to lean my back against the tree trunk and read in Tolstoy’s ‘Sevastopol’. It was a very young book and had one fine description of fighting in it, where the French take the redoubt, and I thought about Tolstoy and about what a great advantage an experience of war was to a writer. It was one of the major subjects and certainly one of the hardest to write truly of, and those writers who had not seen it were always very jealous and tried to make it seem unimportant, or abnormal, or a disease as a subject, while, really, it was just something quite irreplaceable that they had missed.
Then Sevastopol made me think of the Boulevard Sevastopol in Paris, about riding a bicycle down it in the rain on the way home from Strassburg and the slipperiness of the rails of the tram cars and the feeling of riding on greasy, slippery asphalt and cobble stones in traffic in the rain, and how we had nearly lived on the Boulevard du Temple that time, and I remembered the look of that apartment, how it was arranged, and the wall paper, and instead we had taken the upstairs of the pavilion in Notre Dame des Champs in the courtyard with the sawmill ‘(and the sudden whine of the saw, the smell of sawdust and the chestnut tree over the roof with a mad woman downstairs)’, and the year worrying about money ‘(all of the stories back in the post that came in through a slit in the saw-mill door, with notes of rejection that would never call them stories, but always anecdotes, sketches, conies, etc.
They did not want them, and we lived on poireaux and drank cahors and water)’, and how fine the fountains were at the Place de L’Observatoire (‘water sheen rippling on the bronze of horses’ manes, bronze breasts and shoulders, green under thin-flowing’ ‘water)’, and when they put up the bust of Flaubert in the Luxembourg on the short cut through the gardens on the way to the rue Soufflot ‘(one that we believed in, loved without criticism, heavy now in stone as an idol should be)’. He had not seen war but he had seen a revolution and the Commune, and a revolution is much the best if you do not become bigoted because every one speaks the same language. Just as civil war is the best war for a writer, the most complete. Stendhal had seen a war and Napoleon taught him to write.
He was teaching everybody then; but no one else learned. Dostoevski was made by being sent to Siberia. Writers are forged in injustice as a sword is forged. I wondered if it would make a writer of him, give him the necessary shock to cut the over-flow of words and give him a sense of proportion, if they sent Tom Wolfe to Siberia or to the Dry Tortugas. Maybe it would and maybe it wouldn’t. He seemed sad, really, like Camera. Tolstoy was a small man. Joyce was of medium height and he wore his eyes out. And that last night, drunk, with Joyce and the thing he kept quoting from Edgar Quinet, ‘Fraiche et rose comme au jour de la bataille’. I didn’t have it right I knew. And when you saw him he would take up a conversation interrupted three years before. It was nice to see a great writer in our time.
What I had to do was work. I did not care, particularly, how it all came out. I did not take my own life seriously any more, any one else’s life, yes, but not mine. They all wanted something that I did not want and I would get it without wanting it, if I worked. To work was the only thing, it was the one thing that always made you feel good, and in the meantime it was my own damned life and I would lead it where and how I pleased. And where I had led it now pleased me very much. This was a better sky than Italy. The hell it was. The best sky was in Italy and Spain and Northern Michigan in the fall and in the fall in the Gulf off Cuba. You could beat this sky; but not the country.
All I wanted to do now was get back to Africa. We had not left it, yet, but when I would wake in the night I would lie, listening, homesick for it already.
Now, looking out the tunnel of trees over the ravine at the sky with white clouds moving across in the wind, I loved the country so that I was happy as you are after you have been with a woman that you really love, when, empty, you feel it welling up again and there it is and you can never have it all and yet what there is, now, you can have, and you want more and more, to have, and be, and live in, to possess now again for always, for that long, sudden-ended always, making time stand still, sometime so very still that afterwards you wait to hear it move, and,< it is slow in starting. But you are not alone, because if you have ever really loved her happy and untragic, she loves you always, no matter whom she loves nor where she goes she loves you more. So if you have loved some woman and some country you are very fortunate and, if you die afterwards, it makes no difference. Now, being in Africa, I was hungry for more of it, the changes of the seasons, the rains with no need to travel, the discomforts that you paid to make it real, the names of the trees, of the small animals, and all the birds, to know the language and have time to be in it and to move slowly. I have loved country all my life, the country was always better than the people. I could only care about people a very few at a time.
P.O.M. was sleeping. She was always lovely to look at asleep, sleeping quietly, close curled like an animal, with nothing of the being dead look that Karl had asleep. Pop slept quietly too, you could see his soul was close in his body. His body no longer housed him fittingly. It had gone on and changed, thickening here, losing its lines, bloating a little there, but inside he was young and lean and tall and hard as when he galloped lion on the plain below Wami, and the pouches under his eyes were all outside, so that now I saw him asleep the way P.O.M. saw him always. M’Cola was an old man asleep, without history and without mystery. Droopy did not sleep. He sat on his heels and watched for the safari.
We saw them coming a long way off. At first the boxes just showed above the high grass, then a line of heads, then they were in a hollow, and there was only the point of a spear in the sun, then they came up a rise of ground and I could see the strung out line coming towards us. They had gone a little too far to the left and Droopy waved to signal them toward us. They made camp, Pop warning them to be quiet, and we sat under the dining tent and were comfortable in the chairs and talked.
That night we hunted and saw nothing. The next morning we hunted and saw nothing and the next evening the same. It was very interesting but there were no results. The wind blew hard from the east and the ground was broken in short ridges of hills coming down close ‘from’ the forest so you could not get above it without sending your scent on ahead of you on the wind to warn everything. You could not see into the sun in the evening, nor on the heavy shadowed hillsides to the west, beyond which the sun was setting at the time the rhino would be coming out of the forest, so all the country to the westward was a loss in the evening and in the country we could hunt we found nothing. Meat came in from Karl’s camp by some porters we sent back.
They came in carrying quarters of tommy, grant, and wildebeeste, dusty, the meat seared dry by the sun, and the porters were happy, crouched around their fires roasting the meat on sticks.
Pop was puzzled why the rhino were all gone. Each day we had seen less and we discussed whether it could be the full moon, that they fed out at night and were back in the forest in the
