Garden of Eden - Ernest Hemingway

Garden of Eden is supposed to be an uncompleted Hemingway novel. Which makes me wonder how much more he might have added or subtracted to it before he would have declared it completed.

What we have is a story of a recently married couple, Catherine and David. David's a writer, Catherine seems to come from a family of wealth, and has provided funding for David's works, which sell modestly (I assume a print run of 5,000 or so would be modest). The story follows them across several months as they travel from France to Spain and back, and things deteriorate. Catherine is, well, it's hard for me to say. It seems pretty clear she has some sort of mental disorder, maybe she's manic-depressive, but it could also be an identity issue. She likes to be a boy sometimes, gets her hair cut short, like she envisions a boy would have it, and tries to tan herself as dark as she can get. She meets a young woman, Marita, while out one day, and before you know it, she's encouraged her to come stay at the hotel/resort Catherine and David are staying at. Initially Catherine plays it off as her just wanting to experiment, but then she's encouraging David and Marita to sleep together as well. Then she starts to regret that, and tends to act in a more hostile fashion towards David.

Through all this, David has his misgivings, but tends to go along with Catherine's wishes. Part of it is a honest desire to make her happy, but part of it seems like a desire to avoid conflict, and that part only grows stronger as he starts avoiding Catherine and throwing himself deeper into writing stories about his childhood in Africa with his big-game hunting father. he starts out trying to avoid Marita, but ends up spending more time with her than Catherine. Marita seems to be what David thought Catherine was, and I'm left wondering if that's why Catherine encouraged her. She recognized that the person she wants to be isn't the person David liked, and so she finds a replacement for herself. She tries to be happy about it, because she loves David still, but part of her is angry or resentful that he can't love who she wants to be.

I really wish this was written from Catherine's perspective, frankly, because I am fascinated by what's going on inside her head. Like I said, I think she must have some sort of mental difficulty, but then there are times I feel more like she's a spoiled wealthy girl used to getting her way. So every time David indulges her, get his hair cut and died identically to hers, fools around with Marita, it just encourages Catherine to push further. Other times I think she's straining against what's expected of her. At one stage she asks if he likes her as a girl, and when he says yes, she responds it's good someone does, because it's a goddamned bore. So maybe she just hates being limited. If she feel she's a boy, then her frustration and anger would be understandable, and it isn't always going to manifest itself when or how I might expect.

David is almost passive in all this. Catherine and Marita make all the real decisions between themselves, David just goes along with it, while secretly resenting the situation. I figure it has something to do with the story he's writing about the time he regretted helping his father track down an elephant, but I'm not sure how. The story is the point where David learned the difference between the idealized version of how we see things and the truth. Sure, your dad being a ivory hunter sounds cool, but then you get a good look at the elephant he's going to kill, and suddenly it's a different perspective. So he found a beautiful, kind, curious woman willing to subsidize his writing. And look at that, she's encouraging him to sleep with another woman! It's a dream come true! But the reality is messier, when real emotions are tied up in it. The honeymoon's over.

I really would have like to have read a finished version. As it is, Garden of Eden is intriguing, but the writing lacks a certain something. The descriptions aren't quite as vivid as in his other works, and the ending sputters out. Things wrap up a little too neatly, given the personalities involved, and it feels like there were other things he was getting ready to expand on, but didn't get there.

'I can because I'm lion color and they can go dark. But I want every part of me dark and it's getting that way and you'll be darker than an Indian and that takes us further away from other people. You can see why that's important.'