The Garden of Eden

National Review, May 23, 1986 by Jeffrey Meyers

The Garden of Eden

HEMINGWAY'S WEAKER novels, based on recycled rather than recent experience, are more autobiographically revealing than his greatest fiction. The Garden of Eden is not nearly as good as Islands in the Stream, but it is worth reading for the light it casts on Hemingway's second marriage (to Pauline Pfeiffer), his hair fetishism, and his sexual fantasies--though anyone who picks up the novel for descriptions of kinky sex will be seriously disappointed.

Hemingway began to write the novel at the beginning of 1946--between For Whom the Bell Tolls and Across the River and into the Trees--completed eight hundred pages by June (the original manuscript was three times longer than the present version) and wisely decided it was not good enough to publish. The themes are strikingly similar to those of Fitzgerald's Tender Is the Night (1934): corruption, guilt, adultery, lesbianism, and madness among wealthy and idle American expatriates on the south coast of France in the 1920s.

Hemingway was always aroused by women's hair and considered it the quintessential erotic mark. He enjoyed watching women comb their long hair; he liked his wives to let their hair grow long and then cut it short, to change their hair styles and hair color. In A Farewell to Arms, For Whom the Bell Tolls, Islands in the Stream, and The Garden of Eden, the lovers experiment with dyeing their hair the same color and cutting it the same length in order to exchange sexual roles and merge their identities.

The Garden of Eden is based on Hemingway's honeymoon with Pauline in May 1927 at Le Grau-du-Roi, a colorful fishing village in the Camargue. David and Catherine Bourne at first lead an idyllic existence--tasting the pleasures of board, bottle, beach, and bed. The conversation between the adored husband and the compliant consort is reminiscent of A Farewell to Arms. They also engage in a perverse sexual practice that is never actually defined but is probably sodomy. Catherine has her hair cropped short like a boy's so she "can do anything,' and persuades her reluctant husband to dye his hair the same blond color as hers. In May 1947, while working on this novel, Hemingway dyed his own hair a bright copper color and then claimed he had mistaken the bottle for his wife's shampoo.

After the Bournes meet a beautiful and vaguely sketched young woman, Marita, Catherine sleeps with her, urges Marita to sleep with David, and then becomes jealous of David's passion for the blank and passive girl. The love triangle brings out the deep-rooted tensions in the Bournes' marriage: David's fear of corruption by Catherine's money and his growing fame as a writer, his conflict between idleness and work, her jealousy of his writing, the wife apparently deferring to but actually controlling the husband, and his guilt about their sexual perversions. He refuses an invitation to sleep with both women at the same time and compares Catherine's strange tastes to "getting tattooed or something.' The opposition of a bisexual Catholic and a heterosexual Puritan is never resolved.

As Catherine's bitchy conversation comes to resemble the emotional discord described in classic stories like "Cat in the Rain' and "Hills like White Elephants,' she begins to mock David's vain response to the reviews of his last book ("It's worse than carrying around obscene postcards really'), to interfere with his work, and to boast that she put up the money that made it possible for him to write. She then condemns, tears up, and finally burns his stories. Torn by her desire to be a lesbian ("Ever since I went to school all I ever had was chances to do it and people wanting to do it with me') and her wish to be a wife ("I did try and I broke myself in pieces in Madrid to be a girl and all it did was break me in pieces'), Catherine cracks up, goes away, and leaves David to Marita.

There is no real substance in this potentially interesting but actually trivial and repetitive plot. The material that Hemingway would once have condensed into a story, he now expands into a novel. He self-parodically writes, "The type of preserve that they chose and the manner in which the eggs were to be cooked was an excitement,' and the main event of the first hundred pages is a haircut. But he still shows his old power to evoke the natural world--"All the yellow country and the white hills and the chaff blowing and the long lines of poplars by the road'--and he makes some interesting observations about writing when David is working on the boys' adventure story of the elephant hunt in Africa that predictably ends with "a huge wrinkled pile.' Africa, where David grew up and where there are no complications with women, is the real lost Eden.

Hemingway states that the writer should "look at things and listen and feel . . . Know how complicated it is and then state it simply. . . . You must always remember the things you believed because if you know them they will be there in the writing and you won't betray them.' In The Garden of Eden, unfortunately, the practice did not match the principles.