How To Date A Screwed-Up Woman And Make Her Even Worse
The Garden Of Eden, Ernest Hemingway, Simon & Schuster, 1986.
Before I start I'd better admit to being a Hemingway fan, despite what the title of this review might make you think. I've read nearly everything he's written, and mostly enjoyed it. The Garden Of Eden is utterly different from all of his other books, however, and I enjoyed it in a different way.
Well, the style at least is the same. The clipped sentences, the spartan phrases showing us a startlingly clear picture of the sort of ephemeral pastoral utopian scenes that Hemmingway is so good at; these are still vintage Hemmingway. What's really different is the development of the characters. This book was, along with Islands In The Stream, published posthumously. It would be facile to think that the major departures in character development were an invention by the arrangers of the posthumous publication. It is clear from reading the book, however, that it is pure Hemingway through and through, although a Hemingway with an uncharacteristic inward gaze. Even in his many other books that seemed semi-autobiographical, it was easy to separate the fictional character from the author, generally by virtue of the fictional characters' weaknesses serving a large literary purpose that seems divergent with what we know of Hemmingway's own character. For instance, in his Seminal work of "The Sun Also Rises", the main character's biologically platonic attachment for his emotionally frustrated paramour is central to the book's character progression, and yet this seems to be unrelated to Hemingway's own attachments, except possibly as allegory. In The Garden Of Eden, it seems like, for the first time, we are meeting Hemingway as a man in his middle years, who is being somewhat honest about his character.
Part of that refreshing honesty comes out in his revealed hubris about his writing. Nothing like being a legend in your own time to swell your head I guess, but in its lack of modesty it reveals directly part of the way Hemingway saw himself. It seems impossible to know for sure, but one can picture this book being written as a self-portrait, on some days painfully honest and up-front, and on others employing considerable guile to whitewash the more unsavory parts of the author's character that he must have been barely able to admit in his own mind.
Okay, that's pretty sweeping - what's so unsavory about this guy? Well, think about it. Lots of effort is spent in the book explaining how the protagonist is neatly "trapped" into effectively accepting two wives at once. It isn't really even presented as a tragic character flaw, as one sometimes feels in his other books. Instead, it seems to be ruthless self-justification of an unsuccessful serial monogamist. The wonderful fallacy of Hemingway is that he writes about unadorned manhood; many would point to the "Hemingway Man" as an ideal to strive for. Not in my book - leaving aside the obvious immature obsession with bullfights and deep-sea fishing, in my lexicon, the real man couldn't be "trapped" by circumstances into the bizarrely unstable menage-a-trois that Hemingway postulates in this book. Real strength is of the mind, and not of the pen or sword.
Nonetheless, the prose is as stunning an example of minimalist Hemingway as you're likely to find. The scenes depicted are spare and bright, and efficiently delivered. The characters are complex and well-delivered, and the underlying pathos as serene and disturbing; a song in a minor chord.
Thomas K. Burkholder, October 21, 1998.