Hollywood Safari

WHITE HUNTER, BLACK HEART (344 pp.) --Pefer Viertel--Doubleday ($3.95).

The problem of this novel is: How are you going to keep them down on the sound stage after they've read Ernest Hemingway? Ever since he thrilled to The Short Happy Life of Francis Macomber, the famous Hollywood director, John Wilson, had been burning in his soul to look down the sight of a .475 into the little blue-black eyes of a charging elephant.

"Kid," he told his sidekick, Screenwriter Peter Verrill, "it's not a crime to kill an elephant. It's bigger than that . . . It's a sin . . . The only sin you can buy a license for and then go out and commit. And that's why I want to do it before I do anything else. You understand?"

Pete did not understand, and thereby hangs the tale. For Scripter Pete Verrill is not many changes of underwear away from Peter Viertel, the author of White Hunter, Black Heart, who in 1951 spent some months in the Congo as scriptwriter with the company of The African Queen, which was directed by John Huston. Viertel invited Huston to read the manuscript. Said Huston: "You can write anything you want about me."

To Live a Little. Wilson, as Viertel introduces him, is an extreme type of the Hemingway generation. Liquor all day, women all night, and then off to Kenya to get straight with God by horn-wrestling a buffalo. In Wilson's case, it's off to the Congo to shoot a few elephants before making a movie in the middle of the jungle.

Scriptwriter Pete goes with him, and they fight every step of the way through an underbrush of moralization about the evils of wanton slaughter. In the end Wilson gets tired of the safari to self-understanding and snarls: "What the hell, a man's responsibility is really limited to himself. If you found out, through me, that you're not as brave as you think you are, well, that's not my fault. You would have found out ultimately anyway.

"Oh, I admit, it's nasty of me to have helped that discovery find the light of day in your soul, but God damn it ... I'm not running as a moral guy. You are ... I'm just going along, trying to live a little before I die."

Judgment Drums. The rest of the animal kingdom, of course, has to die a little so that Wilson can live, including not only an elephant, but, as bad luck would have it, a native hunter too. As he drives away from the scene of his sin, the African drums drub out a judgment: "White hunter, black heart."

Hunter Viertel himself can scarcely have a white heart in the matter. He brought his own game crashing down with what must seem a little like a shot in the back. Yet perhaps the larger denizens of Hollywood are fair game; certainly a great deal can be excused in a jungle book as fast and exciting as Viertel's. It would probably make a good movie, like The African Queen.

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