Response to Hemingway's "The Garden of Eden"

May 3, 2011

I have had a chance to read a couple of wonderful modern American novels these past few weeks: DeLillo’s Underworld, and Hemingway’s The Garden of Eden. The latter is a posthumous publication but I believe it is generally considered to be pretty good work and worthy of scholarship. The editors apparently just took the unfinished manuscript and cut it off at a place they thought would make a good ending. This was the correct thing to do of course, and it leaves us with a delightful feeling of unfinishedness that suits the ambiguous nature of the novel.

The story involves a love-triangle and gender reversal, but the best part is the way Hemingway intermixes the main character David’s story writing into the course of the narrative. David on his honeymoon in Europe writes about David as a boy tracking an elephant in Africa with his father. This brings us to the title and, I think, the main idea of the novel. The Garden of Eden is nature in an innocent and uncorrupted form, which can only be corrupted. In the love triangle, David often calls his new wife Catherine “Devil,” and her desire to change her appearance (she is constantly dying her hair so that it is paler and tanning her skin to be as dark as possible) parallels the corruption of nature that occurs in Genesis when Adam and Eve feel ashamed and decide to put on their clothes. In the Africa story, a young David loses his innocence early and brutally when he must watch his father’s drunkenness and his cruelty against an elephant that would have ruled the jungle if humans did not have guns.

This novel features some staggering sentences that, because of the usual flatness and vagueness of his prose, pop out like dynamite on the page. David says, as he pours himself a drink (of course), “I do love her and you make a note of it, whiskey, and you witness it for me, Perrier old boy old Perrier, I have been faithful to you, Perrier, in my fucking fashion.”  Or the loving advice from his father that David remembers: “Never bet on anything that can talk, your father said and you said, Except yourself. And he said, Not me, Davey, but pile it on yourself sometime you iron-hearted little bastard.”

David’s surname is Bourne, and this is very much a story about birth and re-birth.  David, like many of us is raised to believe in some sort of perfection, some magic and perfect place, some Eden. He does not find it in Africa as a boy or in his marriage as a man. The optimistic ending seems to tell us that he might yet find it in his writing, but that is far from reassuring, especially because his best writing is about the most traumatic events of his life—where his innocence in childhood is drowned in so much elephant blood and overshadowed by the economics of the ivory trade. Still, this is a happy ending for Hemingway—far less cynical than anything else I have read from him. This is quite a novel and if you are interested in Hemingway at all I recommend it.