Restoring the Hemingway Image
BENDIXEN, ALFRED
Restoring the Hemingway Image The Garden of Eden By Ernest Hemingway Scribners. 247pp. $18.95. Reviewed by Alfred Bendixen Assistant Professor of English, Barnard College The publication of...
...Catherine enjoys playing the boy, and David seems willing enough to go along with this inversion...
...Shunning direct statement, Hemingway embedded emotional meaning in the precise rendering of physical detail and characterization in the description of landscape...
...The finest and most intriguing passages, however, discuss the process of producing a story...
...What we have here, then, is a masterful work...
...In addition, it provides some of his most revealing portraits of the creative process...
...The result is a literary technique that, for all its apparent simplicity, actually requires a great deal of sensitivity and perceptiveness from the reader...
...Jenks was the first to succeed—perhaps because he had the courage to discard two-thirds ofit...
...David and Catherine Bourne spend much time drinking, but David is acutely aware of the potential damage of alcohol to a writer...
...Thus David's moving tale about an African elephant hunt is beautifully integrated into the novel's unifying concern with innocence and the development and destruction of identity...
...The loss of innocence is, of course, central to many of his best works, but nowhere else has he offered so daring and detailed a treatment of sexuality...
...Ultimately, therefore, the importance of The Garden of Eden may be its capacity to stimulate a re-examination of Hemingway's fiction that will lead us to a fuller, more accurate understanding of one of the great masters of American fiction...
...She brings another young woman, Marita, into their household, with the expectation that both will share her intimacy...
...Others at Scribners had tried to pull a novel out of the long manuscript...
...Similarly, the preoccupation of some critics with their own ideas of the "Hemingway hero" has reduced the rich diversity of Hemingway's art to shallow theory...
...It is fair to ask whether or not the restoration of such characters and scenes might endow the novel with added dimensions...
...There is a hunting story, but it emphasizes the horror of killing instead of the pleasure of sportsmanship...
...Moreover, the inadequacy of the publisher's note is mitigated by Jenks' forthright explanation of his extensive editorial work in several published interviews...
...Hemingway uses hunger and nourishment to limn the dynamics of the Bournes' relationship: Drink replaces conversation as deterioration sets in, and Catherine turns from food to metaphorically feed on others...
...The crisis comes when Catherine insists that David surrender his life as a writer to her increasingly insane needs...
...The novel focuses on a writer, David Bourne, and his wife, Catherine, who are honeymooning in Europe in the 1920s...
...Can it confidently be called Hemingway's...
...The absurd presumption that Hemingway's narrators speak for the author has led to some basic misunderstandings, especially about his view of sexuality and love...
...In depicting David's struggle to preserve his integrity, Hemingway engages in a close examination of the intricate relationship between art and daily existence that dwarfs most recent novels purporting to be about writers...
...David is one of Hemingway's most sophisticated heroes, but he is also tender and vulnerable...
...Much of the credit for the published version of the novel belongs to the brilliant editing of Tom Jenks...
...This explanation is sadly inadequate...
...It contains moments of dialogue and action that are pure Hemingway—the splendid work of a writer who has often been imitated and parodied, but rarely rivaled and never surpassed...
...In fact, this fine novel would appear to give the lie to several long-standing assumptions about Hemingway and his talent...
...At night, the two switch sexual roles...
...The Garden of Eden both illustrates and affirms an art that marries a simplicity of statement to a complexity of purpose...
...One nevertheless feels he would have been proud of this novel...
...A publisher's note at the beginning of the book says that "this novel was not in finished form," and that the publisher has "made some cuts in the manuscript and some routine copy-editing corrections...
...Many seem incapable of grasping even so straightforward a concept as the "unreliable narrator...
...The autobiographical foundation of fiction is acknowledged, but not in any easy, journalistic way...
...Catherine is a destructive manipulator, but she is also treated with surprising sympathy...
...At his death, he left three separate manuscript versions of the book, the longest totaling 1,500 pages...
...Reviewed by Alfred Bendixen Assistant Professor of English, Barnard College The publication of The Garden of Eden brings us not only a new Hemingway novel but also a new Hemingway...
...The character of Marita never fully comes alive...
...Then it becomes clear that she will be satisfied with nothing less than his destruction...
...The Garden of Eden will receive a great deal of attention because of its daring exploration of sexual games, lesbianism, and the menage a trois...
...He knew that a small gesture could signify more than a large word, and that what was omitted in dialogue was frequently more important than what was stated...
...Since Hemingway based his art on a relentless cutting away of the inessential, Jenks' willingness to make drastic excisions seems in keeping with the spirit of the author...
...The note goes on to assure us that only "a very small number of minor interpolations for clarity and consistency" have been added, and that "In every significant respect the work is all the author's...
...For it does much to explode the notion that he was only capable of celebrating a sim-pleminded masculinity...
...The continual references to food and drink may annoy some readers, too...
...David finds that to establish her identity Catherine mustabsorbhis.Firstshe has her hair cut to match her husband's...
...One hopes that Hemingway's heirs and Scribners will encourage scholars to examine the original—not merely to evaluate Jenks' method but to investigate the qualities in the original that did not survive redaction...
...William Carlos Baker in his 1969 biography describes The Garden of Eden as a "long and emptily hedonistic novel" that "ran to 48 chapters and more than 200,000 words" and "was so repetitious that it seemed interminable...
...The Garden of Eden includes some familiar motifs, yet no discerning reader will be able to reconcile this novel with the critical stereotypes of Hemingway...
...To be sure, the book does have faults...
...she seems passive and limp compared with the demanding and vibrant Catherine Bourne...
...soon she adopts a radically new hairstyle and seduces him into cutting and dying his hair to match hers...
...For instance, Jenks eliminated a substantial subplot about two lovers (Nick Sheldon, a painter, and his wife, Barbara) whose marriage was apparently meant to reflect light on the bizarre relationship of David and Catherine...
...Here is an author more compassionate, more sensitive, more complicated than his public image has suggested...
...In any case, overall The Garden of Eden is superior Hemingway, and it makes several heretofore common critical strictures untenable...
...They are among Hemingway's most fascinating characters...
...What we now have, a crisp book of 30 chapters and roughly 70,000 words, is much better than Baker's description would allow anyone to hope for...
...Unfortunately, Hemingway's critics have not always been perceptive...
...Indeed, it would be foolish to assert that The Garden of Eden as published is exactly the book Hemingway would have constructed...
...Among these, the contention that Hemingway's carefully honed style limited his range will finally have to give way to a recognition that, quite the contrary, it enabled him to cover an incredibly broad spectrum...
...Hemingway described the book's theme as "the happiness of the Garden that a man must lose...
...Hemingway began the novel in 1946 and returned to it at various points until his suicide in 1961...
Vol. 69 • April 1986 • No. 7
