The Garden Of Eden Essay Research Paper

The Garden Of Eden Essay, Research Paper

THE GARDEN OF EDEN BY EARNEST HEMINGWAY:

A sensational bestseller when it appeared in 1986, The Garden of Eden is the last uncompleted novel of Ernest Hemingway, which he worked on intermittently from 1946 until his death in 1961. It is a highly readable story,if not possibly

the book he envisioned. As published it is composed of 30 short chapters running to about 70,000 words. A publisher’s note advises that ‘’some cuts” have been made in the manuscript, but according to Mr. Baker’s biography, at one point a revised manuscript of the work ran to 48 chapters and 200,000 words, so the publisher’s note is disingenuous. In an interview with The New York Times last December, a Scribners editor admitted to taking out a subplot in rough draft that he felt had not been integrated into the ”main body” of the text, but this cut reduced the book’s length by two-thirds.

Set on the C te d’Azur in the 1920s, it is the story of a young American writer, David Bourne, his glamorous wife, Catherine, and the dangerous, erotic game they play when they fall in love with the same woman.

Set in the 1920’s on the Cote d’Azur, it chronicles the honeymoon of David Bourne, a writer, and his lovely, impulsive wife Catherine. As her strange compulsions take her on a slide toward either freedom or insanity, David struggles to follow her and still practice his chosen craft. Soon after another woman enters their relationship, the struggle becomes one for control of David’s art through his love for both Catherine & Marita, the newcomer. This is a love-triangle with three complete sides (as they pair & repair), and how each of these characters chooses to resolve their struggle belies the more prurient aspects of the book: this is less erotica than a story of how the dark & bright

sides of desire inform lives, how they empower & weaken us, and how love may not be enough — even ‘true’ love. Newly married David and Catherine have pioneered their own Club Med. on the Riviera. It is the perfect place for a sea

change. The couple spends golden days brunching, mixing drinks with Perrier, wearing fisherman shirts and espadrilles, swimming and tanning in the buff.

The rate of exchange is very favorable.

The trouble in paradise is that David is on the threshold of literary fame while the beautiful and rich Catherine is jealous of her husband’s reviews. She is also sexually unsettled. In bed with David, she wants to be a boy. She then persuades her husband to join her in getting matching short haircuts and a platinum – blond dye job. (Hemingway fans may recall that the Catherine of A Farewell to Arms also suggests twin coiffures but without the bleach.) Eventually, Catherine comes out of the closet on the arm of the dark,lovely and rich Marita. ”All things truly wicked start from innocence,” Hemingway once wrote. Adam and Eve got the message late, and so do David and Catherine. Her kittenish antics turn savage. She thrusts Marita and her husband together with predictable consequences and then strikes out at both of them. The situation is somewhat similar to the time Hemingway and his first wife Hadley spent a summer

living with Pauline Pfeiffer, a Paris Vogue editor who was to become the second Mrs. Hemingway.Yet Catherine shares some of her most unbecoming characteristics with Zelda Fitzgerald, the envious and unbalanced wife of Hemingway’s pal F. Scott. If Hemingway had completed this romance, perhaps Catherine would have had more than two dimensions. The first is what Edmund Wilson called ”the all-

too-perfect felicity of a youthful erotic dream.’ The second hinges on the age-old view of woman as the cause of original sin. Catherine is a spoiler whose taste in forbidden fruit threatens the private Eden of David’s art. It is the place where he struggles with his own lost innocence. Despite some tender pillow talk and David’s willingness to follow Catherine to the hairdresser, The Garden of Eden is not the work of a secret quiche eater. Catherine’s urges do not come naturally to David.

His women are part of the external world, like the baking Mediterranean sun and the bracing sea. As always in Hemingway, those externals are observed with a meticulous objectivity that conveys loneliness. There are also many

self-conscious passages on the writer’s solitary struggle. For example: it is all very well for you to write simply and the simpler the better. But do not start to think so damned simply. Know how complicated it is and then state it

simply.” Since he did not finish this difficult task, Hemingway cannot be blamed if there is less than meets the eye in The Garden of Eden. What does meet the eye is often enough. The novel, presents a “new, sensitive Hemingway,”

writing with “tenderness and vulnerability” about “strange and disturbing” sexual gamesmanship, including male-female role reversals and a menage a trois. It also contains a short story — “written” in the course of the book by its

protagonist — with a negative view of elephant hunting. (”It may come as a surprise, but Hemingway never shot an elephant,” says Patrick Hemingway, Ernest’s second son. “He thought it wrong — he felt that elephants are our equals.”)

In short, the macho man of letters celebrated hunter and frequent husband, used this late novel “to take on everythin