The Garden of Eden

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

The Garden of Eden is a novel written by Ernest Hemingway. It was published posthumously in 1986.

Contents 1 Context 2 Summary 3 Theme 4 Reaction

[edit] Context

The circumstances of The Garden of Eden, its creation and its subsequent treatment by Hemingway's publisher, Scribner, are curious. Even up until his suicide in 1961, Hemingway was producing works of literature. Mary Welsh Hemingway, his widow, was responsible for retrieving his unpublished material and presenting it to his publisher. Of this collection, the notable novel Islands in the Stream, Hemingway's bullfighting journal The Dangerous Summer, and various other short stories, have since been published. The third major posthumous work that was a book The Garden of Eden.

Hemingway began writing the novel shortly after World War II. In a few years he had written over one thousand pages of it; the manuscript was about fifteen hundred pages long when he died.

The dilemma his publisher faced was that, though the novel "was filled with so many remarkable riches," according to Charles Scribner, Jr. in his 1987 preface, it was incomplete. Scribner continues, however, suggesting that "[o]nly the second part was incomplete, and the first half taken by itself, with only a modest amount of pruning, provided a wholly harmonious and coherent narrative."

Thus the novel, in the form deemed suitable by Scribner, was published in 1986. This fragmented version discarded some two-thirds of the original manuscript, removing existing major characters, subplots, settings—and, presumably, an intended thematic consistency.

The novel's characters and plot stay close to those of F. Scott Fitzgerald's Tender Is the Night, which should not come as a great surprise since the two authors spent a good deal of time together on the French Riviera with the famous circle of American expatriates which came to be known as the Lost Generation, including Gerald Murphy and his wife Sara Murphy. Nicole and Dick Diver of Tender Is the Night are widely recognized as based on the Murphys. Hemingway's couple in The Garden of Eden is not explicitly based on this pair, but given the similarities and the setting (Nice), there is clearly some basis for such an assumption. Interestingly, guests of the Murphys would often swim at Eden Roc, an event emulated in The Garden of Eden.

[edit] Summary

The novel is fundamentally the story of five months in the lives of David Bourne, an American writer, and his wife, Catherine. It is set mainly in the French Riviera, specifically in the Côte d'Azur, and in Spain. The story begins with their honeymoon in The Camargue. The Bournes meet a young woman named Marita, with whom they both fall in love, but only one can ultimately have her. The story continues until the apparent separation of David and Catherine.

[edit] Theme

Due to his death, certainty in determining Hemingway's intent, particularly in issues related to the novel's form, is significantly diminished.

The novel has received much attention for its sexual content, especially in the context of Hemingway's canon. Some scholars have suggested that the novel effects a more tender, effeminate, "new Hemingway." In this vein, it has been interpreted as an exuberant celebration of free sexuality.

Yet while these notions are central to the novel's apparent plot, major analysis rests in noting that the story is a much more somber evocation of the modern condition. Here it depicts the lonely, fluctuating modern hero—one deeply dependent on exterior reification—in David, and his inevitable entrance into an understanding of betrayal, fragmentation, and destruction. A critical image in this respect is the story of the elephant, which poignantly draws a parallel between the loss of innocence that came in his youth and the present degeneration of his shortly blissful marriage. Such imagery is also symbiotically strengthened in the context of the novel's title.

Another motif that is played out dramatically throughout the novel is the portrait of the artist—particularly, the artist that is Hemingway. Hemingway often slips into passages that attempt to convey the process of writing or creating powerful works of art. And at one point, he has David telling himself, "[b]e careful [. . .], 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." Any reader even vaguely familiar with Hemingway's literary style will recognize how reflective this line is of his own doctrine of writing.

[edit] Reaction

How the literary community embraced this last work written by Hemingway—not including True at First Light (1999), which was edited heavily by his son Patrick—was varied. Scribner points to "success all over the world" and "many positive responses of leading critics." This is somewhat true. Many readers flocked to buy Hemingway's latest, catapulting it to bestseller lists upon its initial appearance in 1986.

But The Garden of Eden remains one of the most controversial works ever put forth bearing Hemingway's name. Part of the problem is the fact that so much of the apparent manuscript is not included in the published edition. Dialogue that Hemingway had attributed to one character appears to be attributed to another in this version. Facts like these distress serious scholars of Hemingway's literature and make Scribner's "Publisher's Note", that the work is all the author's "[b]eyond a very small number of minor interpolations for clarity and consistency," disingenuous but technically true. Adherents of this view would suggest that the novel in its published form is useless; students can find value only in the original, unedited manuscript.