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Ernest Hemingway’s Garden of Eden: nostalgia and xenalgia1

Barnard Turner

There is perhaps in English no word which would succinctly position what is possibly a

very common sentiment in the contemporary period, a feeling which is the counterpart to that

expressed by nostalgia in its first, etymological sense: such a counterpart would express not a

longing for the journey home, and its sense of accompanying loss, but a longing for the novelty,

danger and Joycean claritas of being "abroad," and the accompanying knowledge that nowhere

now is abroad enough. A word like xenalgia includes the basic elements, even if it looks rather

artificial (“the pain of the loss of the foreign”). With the loss of the "abroad," that other so

reviled a generation or so ago by Philip Larkin, we experience (by not experiencing it) the

accompanying loss of the definition of the "foreigner" as an experiential if not (yet?) as a legal

concept. In the Analects (IV.19), Confucius counsels the filial son not to travel far abroad while

his parents are alive, or—if such journeys are necessary—to go only to a fixed place from where

he can be summoned in need of performing such rites as are necessary by custom within twenty

four hours of a death. Today, one can be practically anywhere in the world and fulfill this

Confucian injunction.

To overcome this loss, the utopian fantasy of being at home everywhere just does not

suffice, even if it is a capability claimed by many guidebooks, particularly those which propose to

tell us "how to be locals" or help us overcome "culture shock." Indeed, the "shock of the new" is

what is, lamentably perhaps, very often missing, what we lack when nominally "abroad." It is

now perhaps belated to warn against "easy exoticism" in contemporary ethnopoetic writing, as

Shirley Geok-lin Lim has done in a famous phrase (52); in our period, the discovery of the foreign

is neither "easy" nor "exotic." Wherever we go, National Geographic and the Discovery channel

have been before us. The lack of a corresponding objective correlative (the “real” foreign, which

is more a relationship, a virtuality, than a reality anyway) cannot be explained by reference to

melancholia or mourning, as described in Freudian theory, for we never had it in the first place.

What we have lost perhaps is the taste for the foreign as that which is not under our control,

not partial to our desire not to understand it while thinking ourselves immune from it.

1 I gave a version of this paper at the 8th International Hemingway Conference (1998), Les Saintes-Maries-de-la-

Mer, France and have somewhat revised it..

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The after-image of the foreign continues in the dialectics of home and abroad, of

domestic/ rooted and expatriate lives as separable concepts, and in the possibility—as for

Conrad in Lord Jim—of distinguishing "us" and "them." Mikhail Bakhtin, in an almost euphoric

late passage, presents the cross-cultural relation as one of apocalypse, of mutual discovery: "It is

only in the eyes of another culture that foreign culture reveals itself fully and profoundly. . . we

seek answers to our own questions in it; and the foreign culture responds to us by revealing to

us its new aspects and new semantic depths" (7). That which is foreign, and that which is our

own, are for him however distinguishable: "Such a dialogic encounter of two cultures does not

result in merging or mixing. Each retains its own unity and open totality, but they are mutually

enriched" (7). For Bakhtin, you can go home again. Similarly, even such as a willing itinerant as

Jack Kerouac could claim, in his most famous novel, published coincidentally in the year in which

Hemingway seems to have resumed work on The Garden of Eden, that "everybody goes home in

October" (On the Road 103).

We know, and live, otherwise, and otherwhere. Such beliefs as those of Bakhtin and

Kerouac now appear increasingly archaic in a century characterised by Walter Benjamin as that

of "technical reproducibility," through which artworks lose that "unique appearance of a

distance" (“Work” 215) ("einmalige Erscheinung einer Ferne" [“Kunstwerk” 318]) which their

"aura" once gave them. What was true for artworks in 1936 is now a commonplace to which

Benjamin gestures when he goes on to discuss a fundamental feature of 20th-century life: "the

desire of contemporary masses [and here we can think also of mass-media, communications

and travel] to bring things ‘closer’ [näherzubringen] spatially and humanly, which is just as

ardent as their bent toward overcoming the uniqueness [des Einmaligen] of every reality by

accepting its reproduction" (216; 318). In the high-speed, fractured, IT Age, that updated but

always belated version of Barba’s "Country of Speed" (11) one is "at home in different cultures,

yet always a foreigner" (19), even perhaps when we associate ourselves with a native land. As

Frances Cairncross has it in the title of her 1997 Harvard Business School book, we are now

enduring (or should it be enjoying?) “the death of distance.” With the revolution of lifestyle

and self-perception ushered in by the jet engine (which she doesn’t discuss in her book), and

extended (only) by information technology, very few voyagers—Hemingway being questionably

one of them, in the initial years in Paris if not later (the period about which this chapter is

concerned)—can claim, with Baudelaire in the final poem of the Fleurs du mal, to be among

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"ceux-là seuls qui partent/ Pour partir"; there simply is no "inconnu" for our generation to lose

itself in and from which to dredge up the "nouveau."

Hemingway’s Garden of Eden is instructive in this sense as it captures a sentiment of

nomadicity in its composition, in structure and themes, but always appears to long for the

movement to cease. Thus the novel exemplifies thematically and structurally that condition

Hemingway describes as his own in a letter of 23 July 1947 to William Faulkner (when work had

begun on the novel): that of being a "chickenshit dis-placed person since can remember"

(Letters 624). As Hemingway asserts over a decade later in a conversation with teenagers in

Hailey, Idaho, "I just go where my life takes me. There are things you do because you like to do

them, other things you do because you have to do them. In doing these things you find the

people you write about" (Bruccoli 147). In these two statements, Hemingway seems to an

inkling of what Samuel Weber, following Joshua Meyrowitz, calls the "delocalization" of the

contemporary media, but without what Weber considers indispensable to this movement: "an

accompanying relocalization" ("Displacing the Body"). In these fluid contexts, the shifting

personal relationships, the androgyny, conflict and dissatisfaction, all the themes which have

hitherto dominated commentary on the novel, can be read productively as aspects of this

sentiment of xenalgia, briefly sketched above, which also of course can be related to themes

and concerns loosely associated with theories of post-coloniality and hybridity.

Started in Cuba (1946 [Baker 386] and 1948 [Burwell 97] being the two termini for its

conception as a separable work), The Garden of Eden was continued intermittently through the

rest of his life, with a second major push in 1957-58 (Burwell 98). As James R. Mellow

comments, "for Hemingway," during this latter period, "writing was becoming a matter of false

starts and unreachable endings" (595). In such a context, the firm assurance of the Nobel Prize

acceptance speech—that, for a "true writer," each book should be a "new beginning"—can be

considered wishful thinking, and the following sentence—that the great writers of the past drive

contemporary ones "far out past where [they] can go, out to where no one can help [them]"—is

more apposite to Hemingway’s own geographical and creative position in the mid-50s. (It is,

incidentally, instructive that for his generation of writers—Fitzgerald and Lawrence

particularly—good writing was often tied to the quest for a good place for writing, as the 1938

Preface to the "First Forty-Nine Stories" makes clear, and that they were prepared and able to

scan the glober for it, Lawrence perhaps being the most adventurous of the three.) The question

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therefore of course, is why such closure was denied, and, more specifically, why with this

particular novel, which in a sense enacts the very problem its composition seeks to solve. Of

course, this "solution" is given only by Tom Jenks’ arrangement and conclusion of the "sprawling

manuscript" (Fleming 129) Hemingway left behind, through editorial choices made to produce

that "diminished" form of the massive collection of typescripts, as Rose Marie Burwell describes

it (105), and which Chris Nesmith estimates as the excision of some 130,000 words from the

originals (19), with much reformulation and realigning (24). The novel is by Jenks shaped, as

Debra Moddelmog (qtd. in Nesmith 23) and others have pointed out, in the image of

Hemingway as it has been retained by latter-day readers. Thus we have a tale told by an editor,

full of the Hemingway sound and fury, but signifying little if not nothing of the intention of the

typescripts.

While the novelist in the later stages of his career questioned those assumptions by and

for which he is best known in the non-specialist imagination, looking for new frontiers for his

composition, the novel as we have it places the narrative vision firmly with the accepted and the

true. But this does not mean that we cannot infer these other concerns, by perhpas

resurrecting the lost moral vision of the title’s Biblical reference and showing how the

Hemingway machine (publicity, reputation, corpus) which created this particular Garden cannot

retain its control over and above it. The novel which, through Jenks’ editorial decisions,

concentrates on a couple—the "Bournes"—aptly named after a word for a limit or boundary

position (and reminiscent also of course of Hamlet’s "undiscover’d country" from which "no

traveller returns"; dead people in Eden?) incarnates that liminality to which their name alludes.

Even when, towards the end of the novel (243), David assures Marita that she is now one half of

"the Bournes" (with or without the formely necessary paperwork of marriage, etc.), this change

does not alter the name’s intimations of knowing and testing one’s limits, whether this be in

swimming (a common motif throughout the novel, as in many of Hemingway’s texts) or in

conjugal relationships. (Incidentally, given that Catherine’s father’s name is "Hill," she could be

said to have been swept away by David, as another meaning of his family name is "stream").

Although the novel takes place mainly in the South of France and apparently some two

decades earlier than the time of composition, the temporal setting is as indefinite as much else

in the novel, and, even if Coolidge—President 1924-28, died 1933—is mentioned in the

Anglophone newspapers David reads in Madrid (59), E. L. Doctorow is astute in claiming that

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"there are moments here when we feel we are not in France or Spain but in the provisional state

of Yuppiedom" (Wagner 330). Valerie Hemingway noted that there are many correspondences

between specifics in the novel and those of the trip to Provence in the summer of 1959, even

down to a fondness for Tavel wine (111; cp. the novel 16), and these references transfigure the

temporal setting, even if their authority is based—as is frequently the case in contemporary

Hemingway studies—on the biographical. With other places in Hemingway’s life already

written into his consciousness (Cuba and Idaho) by the time he comes to resume the novel in

the late ’50s, and with a section about Africa, it is informed with the sense of a movement

between places, rather than with any one specific place. The novel therefore presents an

outopos in its presentation of the Southern European setting and with this related, interpolated

story of Africa which is more than a story-within-a-story, as it continually threatens to break out

of its frame, and to take its rightful place, in Rose Marie Burwell’s terms, as "the signifying

centre of the book" [106]). Yet it can only be seen so because of the arrangement through

Jenks’ editing, through which it takes on some of the qualities of a confession, a roman à clef of

attitudes Hemingway the man could not share with Hemingway the writer and media icon. It is

then possible to expand on Burwell’s comment that the "elephant story" is an attempt for both

real and fictional writers to remove "layers of memory that shielded them from what they have

both heretofore avoided writing about" (101), since it remains unclear what the symbolic,

allegorical relationship of "African" and "French" stories is. James Nagel showed clearly the

"essential thematic relationship" between the marriage plot and the African hunting story (337),

but this relationship needs a slightly more dialectical reading than that which he gives in his

article. If the main narrative—and, as Fleming notes (135), even more the manuscript version—

is one of many-sided, repeated and continual betrayal (Catherine with Marita, a betrayal first of

Nina and then David; Marita with David, of Catherine), David is in both victim and victimiser

positions sequentially. Yet, in the elephant story, this polarity is reversed, as he is the one to

point out the presence of the elephant (and this serves as his victimiser), and only later, in an act

of empathy concordant with Hemingway’s own later sentiments about safari-hunting, does he

relate to him as a fellow victim (181). One always kills that which one loves: a familiar motif,

whether it be Oscar Wilde saying it, or Pedro Romero in The Sun Also Rises, who says that he

kills his friends the bulls so that they don’t kill him (189-90), or the more self-destructive people

in the later novels. I would not however go as far as Robert Fleming does in tracing such a late

(unpublishable) "confession" as Garden to the (self-) "destructive power" of the writer (138), or

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as does Ryan Hediger who sees language “weak before the mystery of death” (93), since the

writer’s memory/mourning work—and, of course, from the very title on, this is a story about

loss—is, in typically Romantic terms, "destroyer and preserver both."

Such a dialectic presents itself therefore in various ways in Garden, first in David

Bourne’s problem—which is Wolfe’s George Webber’s also, and for comparable reasons—of

overcoming his difficulties in navigating to the new in the second novel (59), how to capture the

sentiment of the eternal recurrence of the same without being trite or repetitive. To borrow a

rocket science analogy, these writers need to use the gravity of the completed work to throw

themselves into another orbit, or—to rephrase the second sentence from the Nobel Prize

acceptance speech cited above in terms familiar to a later generation—to "boldly go where no

writer had gone before." Although of course much more experienced than these fictional

creations, Hemingway is in a way confronted with a similar quandary, of how to overlay new

attitudes to places and characters in the depiction of once—or previously—known settings.

Coping with this problem produces the noticeable wavering perspective of the novel, a product

perhaps of its depiction of those places to which Hemingway had returned during the process of

composition, after visiting them, in some case, much earlier: the South of France itself (1926 and

1927 of course, then 1949 and 1954) and Africa (1933 and 1953). No doubt however these

earlier French connections with Hadley and Pauline, or possibly with both (as at Juan-les-Pins in

1926), or the loss of his manuscripts in 1922, are dredged up for consideration as material, but

the novel is not directly about these distant episodes, as several critics have maintained.

Of more concern is that in the drive for the unknown, into the foreign and the mystic,

the narrative circles around the primacy of naming, of the new sight being circumscribed by the

sign, the word meant literally. In this late book, and in the contemporary sense of the term,

Hemingway invented tourism and all the baggage (in whatever sense) that goes with it: the

definition here of tourism is wonders taken as signs. At one point, David Bourne laments that

many places they would like to visit—Sevilla, San Isidro—are “over” and it is too “early” for

others, like the Basque country (30). Here one might suspect his second novel will be a

guidebook, or that his vision of the acceptable is informed by reading one of Hemingway’s

earlier novels (30). Names for things and places are yanked into scrutiny, granted a quasi-

mystical aura by the supplement of their non-Anglicity: the Bournes’ room is like that in a Van

Gogh painting, except that it has a much-used double bed (4); a sea bass is given its French

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name, a “loup,” also known as a “bar” (10); half a paragraph is devoted to the names and

provenance of the precise foodstuffs the Bournes eat near the Prado (50); and even the hotels

they stay at in Nîmes and Madrid are given their by-now recognizable names: the Imperator in

the former (13) and the Palace in the latter (67). (Where else would one stay?) Another

Hemingway invention: the “Leading Hotels of the World.” Yet in all this, what is meant to give

the allure of the foreign sounds like so much packaging, posing, just as the novel itself is

presented in the manner of Hemingway according to a preprogrammed sense of its audience:

Let’s do this. On the other hand, let’s not and say we did. The Bournes have traveled to the

Camargue before mass tourism had made it fashionable, in the true sense of the word, what it is

the fashion (i.e. habitual) to do, not what the fashionable set, people in fashion, do. Theirs is an

experience which cannot be transcribed three decades or so later with any degree of

authenticity as might be granted by the palimpsests of memory.

Loss of that which made the original experience recordable is matched by an equivalent

desolation in the present, which was to have provided the novelist with an experiential field to

bring memory into the service of the imagined new. Such a circumstance is Hemingway’s

relationship with Adriana Ivancich, particularly as it is expressed in a letter to her of 9 May 1954

from Nice, in which he mentions his not being such a good companion to Hotchner because of

his "death lonesomeness" for her (Letters 831); this rather ungainly word is also used in his

correspondence with Pauline in late 1926 (for example in the letter of November 12th [Letters

221]), and thus provides a visual bond between the two periods, circumstances, and women.

Given such longing, and the consequences of the African plane crashes from which he was still

recuperating while in the South of France, the description of the place (at least in the

composition in the late 1950s) could well superimpose upon the inevitable nostalgia different,

more powerful and more recent emotions.

"Clarity" with no "sadness" or "worry"—Stevens’ "clear day and no memories"—is a

consummation devoutly to be wished both by Robert Jordan in For Whom the Bell Tolls (161,

370) and David Bourne (13, 204), but one which remains impossible under these circumstances,

where contrastive images occasion irreconcilable emotions, and where the writer can never

break through to the really new experience or material. Claritas, as Joyce’s Stephen Dedalus

reminds us, is a matter of linguistic confidence, and this quality is untenable if one is unsure of

the tense in which an utterance should be voiced, when, that is, as for David and Hemingway,

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what is and what might have been, the present and the past conditional, are confused. If then,

as Hemingway asserts in the 1958 Plimpton Paris Review interview, "the best writing is certainly

when you are in love" (Bruccoli 114), clarity can come only with the certainty of whom the

writer loves, and Hemingway’s reluctance to give details of his point ("If it is all the same to you I

would rather not expound on that") at this critical juncture in the composing of Garden leave

open an inference of his attraction to Adriana, even if, again, this be a nod to the limited

heuristics of the biographical. Maybe, in this regard, he had done better with Across the River.

If then, most famously, for Hemingway "there is never any ending to Paris" (A Moveable

Feast 207), a similar view can be taken of these other materials and memories, which never fix

themselves in a definite writerly (scriptible) gaze. Perversion, as Catherine Bourne contends, is

"only really interesting the first time one does it" (Garden 120), in which case the contours and

abrogation of normalcy implicit in it are never delineated through repetition. On the other hand,

the palimpsestic vision of the foreign does not grant that narrative perspective which permits its

description as it appears to the imagination with the immediacy of the first time. To write in the

1950s about Stein, Fitzgerald and company as they appeared in the 1920s is one thing; to make

such distant experiences move through and in the parallel dimensions of fiction is completely

different. The two views of Africa and those of Southern France are mapped and refracted onto

one another obliquely, and the presentation of the burgeoning ménage à trois, with its dubious

roots in Hemingway’s biography (Burwell 211 ff.), finds its more prominent text-internal echo in

the consequences of a double- (or even triple-)perspective on the novel’s locales. Far from

acting as Kierkegaardian "certifications," these descriptions, merging topography and sexuality

in a manner reminiscent in some ways of that discussed in Annette Kolodny’s Lay of the Land,

question more than they valorise reality.

Garden is a novel which, for many readers, is anomalous in Hemingway’s works for its

concentration on interiors in general and bedrooms in particular, and presents sexuality but

does not thematise it, since its thematic underpinnings are more squarely in the dialectical

tensions between home and abroad, the given and the new, the colonising and the

cosmopolitan gaze. In this novel, and without knowing it, Hemingway comes close to the spirit

of Godard’s À bout de souffle or Fellini’s La dolce vita (both 1960): could Belmondo or

Mastroianni exist without Hemingway? Like the cinematographic perspective and the main

characters, Hemingway’s view here travels, relishes, composes itself into the text, but it can

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never return to a place it has been or to an attitude it has forsaken, for this would be to accept

the domination of that which is seen over that which sees, and therefore would limit the

response to the unanticipated.

The new experience is therefore tinctured with the old, with the borrowed, and thus the

Jamesian perspective of an American abroad slides into those provided intertextually by other

narratives, other positions, such that it is unclear what is giving rise to what, whether the new

situation is recalling the old or the old being repositioned to understand the new. As with

David’s book, we can easily imagine that the novel Hemingway is here composing would be

better served the second time around, “Now in Its Second Printing” (23). As occurs often in

colonialist rhetoric (and the clubbish American expatriate community is coloniser and colonised

both in its relation to European culture), mimicry and bricolage dominate the telling of the tale.

Intertextuality removes the absolute otherness of the foreign by merging it with recollections

and borrowings, such that the new can never overcome us with its absolute strangeness, or

what the Russian Formalists would have known as ostranenie; it therefore occasions that

sentiment which I have above called xenalgia, as it protects us from the foreign but makes us

long for it the more.

Garden then constantly reinvents its focus, not only that provided, obliquely, by its

antecedents in both Hemingway’s travels and life, or—as Robert Fleming (137) and Mark Spilka

(Hemingway’s Quarrel 280) argue—in Fitzgerald’s Tender Is the Night, but also by its indirect

revisions of Hemingway’s earlier fictions, among them For Whom the Bell Tolls, such that the

David-Catherine-Marita triangle develops that of Jordan-Pilar-Maria, in highlighting the earlier

novel’s androgynous/lesbian undercurrents, about which Mark Spilka’s reading (esp. 246) is

insightful. Hemingway’s preoccupation with haircuts similarly positions Garden in relation to his

earlier work, most pertinently illustrated by a conversation between Frederic Henry and

Catherine Barkley towards the end of A Farewell to Arms, where the English nurse tells her

American lover during their “fine life” in Switzerland that she “want[s]” him “so much” that she

“want[s] to be [him] too” (299). Within the limitations of a novel published in 1940, the limits of

prescribed sexuality are tested in For Whom the Bell Tolls, and this sets the groundwork for

Garden, in which such currents are integral.

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Echoes of The Sun Also Rises can also be heard at significant moments. David reads W.H.

Hudson (194), much as does Robert Cohn in the earlier novel (17), except that David has learnt

enough not to get carried away by it. David is manoeuvred by Catherine/Marita into a

relationship with the latter, who is kind about his work, much like Robert Cohn is "married by

the first girl who was nice to him." A conversation between David and Catherine near the end of

the printed text reads somewhat like a distant step-cousin to the final exchange between Brett

and Jake that ends the earlier novel, since both concern the vanity of human wishes and, at the

same time, the necessity for the construction of such desires. In the Garden passage (223),

divorce and marriage are presented as leading to the same psychic outcome; in the passage

from Sun (247), a future happiness can be projected but not realized, and thus in both we are

left with the “pretty” (desirable but pointless) sense of vacancy and despair.

Yet this can only be actualized once the future has been entered; at the time of

narration, such pointlessness is but a narrative possibility like any other, and its projection a

limitation of the possible outcomes of the narrative process. The passages from Garden and Sun,

and other archteypal ones throughout Hemingway, such as the opening paragraph of A Farewell

to Arms, create an experience for the reader and at the same time produce an awareness that

this has already been lost, is hopeless, or cannot possibly be conveyed. Thus the unheimlich

propensity in Hemingway’s writing, that which contributes most to the vibrancy and movement

of the style, is produced in the double vision inherent in both narration and reading, of novelty

and nostalgia summoned together, or rather of nostalgia summoned for something which has

not yet been produced and its significance weighed in the narrative. This is not elegy, for that

which gives rise to the elegiac is already in the past; that which inspires the emotion here is in

the present or even perhaps in the future, with regard to the specific moment of the narration.

Another version of this sentiment is given earlier by David, when he tells Catherine, in

phrases prophetic (for him) and nostalgic (for Hemingway) of Rick’s famous words to Ilsa in the

closing scene of Casablanca, that "You know what you saw and what you felt and it’s yours.

Don’t you have le Grau du Roi and Aigues Mortes and all the Camargue that we rode through on

our bikes? This will be the same" (53). “We’ll always have” le Grau du Roi, perhaps? Yet the

point is that it should not comparable, for this would be to become stuck in time, to desire to

restore the past while living in the present, and thus to deny the space between. Hemingway’s

novel augments the underlying irony of memory’s dialectic of loss and retrieval, as it gives

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always a different nuance to the past: one almost expects David at this point to assert that "of

course you can repeat the past," a statement that would be as fraught with irony and despair as

when Gatsby makes his more famous claim.

Other palimpsestic interleafings of other writers are placed strategically (by design or

Jenks’ editorial serendipity) throughout Garden, among them Balzac, in that Rastignac’s closing

words in Le père Goriot—"À nous deux maintenant"—echo in Marita’s equally defiant "We’ll

really do it. Toi et moi" at the end of chapter 27 (232). Just before this, her "There’s nothing to

do but we’ll do it" is hauntingly familiar to readers of Beckett’s work; its locus classicus is

Estragon’s opening words in En attendant Godot (1952; trans. 1953): "Rien à faire." The opening

lines of Chapter 22—"He did not think that he could go on with the story that morning and for a

long time he could not. But he knew that he must" (178)—echo another memorable Beckettian

phrase, seen most clearly in the ending of L’innommable (1949; trans. 1958): "il faut continuer,

je ne peux pas continuer, je vais continuer." With such phrases in mind, even the bicycle

incident mentioned above might be related to Beckett’s Sedan story in Endgame (first

performed 1957), in which Nell and Nagg reminisce about how they lost their legs. Given such

close comparisons, then, we might well consider that this was a “twice told tale” written with a

conscious (editorial) plotting of classic and contemporary French literature and composed

somewhat belatedly (as it was edited, posthumously) with regard to parallel worlds of late

existentialist writing.

Jenks’ ending—and here perhaps we can detect a conscious design (cp. Silbergleid

114)—gives that paradoxical closure present also at the ending of that text which starts it all for

Hemingway, The Great Gatsby. "Hemingway’s" (or rather Jenks’) final sentence ("He wrote on a

while longer and there was no sign that any of it would ever cease returning to him intact"

[247]) recasts in significant ways Fitzgerald/Nick’s " So we beat on, boats against the current,

borne back ceaselessly into the past." Yet is this conclusion as "optimistic" as Fleming (129)

contends, even if it appears more so than that provided in the "Provisional Ending" he

summarises later in his chapter, or that swimming episode with Marita and David which, slightly

prematurely, Ellen Andrews Knodt has discussed as the ending of the novel (33)? It must be

remembered that one hardly says there is "no sign" of something unless one is looking for one

(cp. Clov’s view of the “without” in Endgame: “there’s no….”), almost perhaps anticipating it.

The echoes of Fitzgerald’s equivalent passage might make us think that while Nick is safely back

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in the "lost Swede towns" of his childhood, David’s "boat," like Rimbaud’s, is both "drunk" and

"à la dérive," not against the current ("à rebours") but drifting on any current that flows. He

writes well, palimpsestically again, committing to paper many sentences "that he put down as

they were returned to him without changing them" the destroyed story and new aspects

coincide, so that what is autobiographical and what legendary (in the true etymological sense as

"repeated speech") have no clear distinction.

David has no anchors, no points de repère in his material, and it is ambiguous whether

this is new material (which of course logically it is), as with the granting of "more dimensions" to

his father, or memory-work, a kind of Trauerarbeit for the loss of father, manuscripts and

perhaps even Catherine, a repetition compulsion ("the prefix "re-" appears three times in six

lines) of a lost origin which never existed in the first place. By repetition, perhaps, David wishes

to make the new sight, the new world-view imposed upon the expected, into a habit, a lived

environment. As Walter Benjamin in the “Work of Art” essay claims, at certain turning points in

history (of the individual as of a culture or a nation) contemplation, cognition and theory (all of

which are contingent on pure seeing of "optical reception, " or "optische Rezeption" [233; 344])

are not equal to the new experience, and only "habit," the repetitions of "tactile reception"

("taktische Rezeption") will suffice. That the novel is so repetitive (drink/bed/swim/write) is

therefore, from this vantage point at least, not a weakness (as it would be accounted in "The

Snows of Kilimanjaro," a sign that the rich are "dull" and "repetitious" [Stories 72]), but a

strength, as it is the counterpart to this gradual process of accommodation to the new. The

conviction then that the material is "intact" glosses over the recognition of these acts of

separation (différance?), and that there has been throughout constant interference of textual

and actual worlds in the earlier drafts. David writes about an Ersatz homeland in another

adopted (but rented) home, and is still/already uncertain of his new relationship. Marita has

already begun to worry—or is it ‘still worries’?—about David having younger, more vibrant

women friends (244)—much perhaps as Mary was to strive to negotiate Ernest’s relationship

with Adriana—and he has already described their relationship as a "gamble" (238). If Fitzgerald’s

Nick Carraway makes the return journey at summer’s end, as Kerouac’s Sal Paradise would do,

David has no such possibility this fall.

In a parallel fashion, Catherine incarnates—but cannot psychologically achieve—that

longing for the exotic, the "au-delà," about which David writes: never the here and now, always

13

the over there and then, the liminal, in a word. At the beginning of chapter 3, she expresses a

wish to be his "African girl" (28), and then that she had some "Indian blood" (31). With her acid-

blond dyed hair and fair complexion, Catherine wishes for no fixed identity, no provenance or

ethnicity; she has become a member of that "special dark race of [their] own" of which David

muses in a manuscript passage (qtd. in Burwell 104): hybridized, African and Northern European

at once, a composite of her own imagination and choice, a nomadic, gypsy, wayfarer, as she

becomes literally at last at the end of the published version, with the signs of mental instability

becoming more evident. (Here correspondence with both Zelda Fitzgerald, and D. H. Lawrence’s

“Woman,” could be made.) Suffice here a few lines from Hemingway’s letter of April 3, 1933 to

Arnold Gingrich of Esquire magazine: “Learned from D. H. Lawrence about how to say what you

felt about country. What the hell is this, confession, benedeteme parde porque ha aprendido”

[Letters 385]; the Italo-Spanish showing a proficiency in some language, and characteristically

cross-pollinating the grammar. Similarly, the two girls who introduce themselves to the Bournes

in Cannes—Nina and Marita (although one is tempted to think of them as Afdera and Adriana)—

are neither Italian nor sisters, as they first appear (89). Labels are powerless to transfix the

marginal, the peripatetic, the wandering rich. It is not therefore accidental that Catherine has

recently been placed on critical borderlines: creative-destructive (Eby); even transgender (Long).

Hemingway also of course invented these lifestyles of the rich and should be famous.

Garden is then truly a "homeless" narrative, difficult to navigate (or even, because of

the state of the material, to paginate), one in which there can be no nostalgia because there is

no one home to which to return. Of course, we should have known this from the title: a

"garden" is a plot, distinguished from its surroundings by the degree of its cultivation. That of

Eden however took no such labour, as long as the injunctions were kept, and failing which—and

with the accompanying appearance of "shame," which recurs almost as the Leitmotiv of the

novel (121; 224)—there would be no hope of repossession. Thus the specifics of emplacement

granted through the Biblical context, which would contain the narrative “back then,” are

fragmented by the implied reference to the present “over there” (from an American

perspective); containment and that which would escape it are contrasted. For Catherine,

indeed, the myth of home evaporates into irony, as is of course appropriate for one cast—by

David at least—as the "devil" of the piece (45, etc.), the Mephistopheles to David’s Faust, as she

brings him Marita, not Helen of Troy or Briseis perhaps but yet also "a dark girl as a present"

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(103). Catherine is also the self-confessed destroyer (5), but one who is increasingly self-

destructive, with no safety valve in creative work; she then, finally, becomes the Cain to David’s

Abel (his "brother" [15; 21]), who destroys not ‘her’ sibling but his creative work. For her, then, a

Swiss sanatorium—a psychological pandemonium—might be more gemütlich than her point of

origin. And yet one is never quite "abroad" even here, as money and available transport breed

an easy familiarity, which, as Catherine points out, glosses over David’s "fake" (215) French and

his inability to "write like a gentleman" or "speak like one in any language" (216; cp.

Hemingway’s mixed language in the letter cited above). In any case, David is, as Catherine

reminds him later, not a "gentleman" (223).

Such an inability to relate to the surroundings through language can also be seen in a

wider sense in the novel, since, as a perlocutionary performative act, the text—including the

draft materials—could be called an attempt to reconfigure the lost language of Hemingway, the

Hemingway sentence. He was awarded the Nobel Prize, of course, for his style, and must

continually prove that he is worthy of this accolade, to himself if to nobody else Therefore

perhaps he found himself late in his career in a position analogous to that of Henry James, with

whom, as Adeline R. Tintner states (172), Hemingway had a "love-hate relationship" throughout

much of his life: both writers had difficulties coping with the apparent stylistic differences

between their early and late work. Hemingway however distinguished himself from his

predecessor in that he looked forward in his writing to a renewed ability to compose those

sentences which had given the impetus to his innovative style, an effort perhaps doomed to

failure, since their origin cannot be recreated, only fashioned anew through the prism of the

new experience. In the end, and it came to that eventually, Hemingway was too much himself,

and not enough Dos Passos or Joyce to write a book like this, to bring its continual deferment of

closure to a point of composition; like David (224), he "disliked rhetoric" too much to take non-

sense and the lack of denotative meaning as suitable themes for his work.

Writing itself then, both in and of the novel, slips, as David’s mind itself does at strategic

points in his composition, into other places, times and concerns. The novel itself, in the state

left by the author, is too far out there, and needs to be brought, as David’s work also does,

within the confines or cordon sanitaire of the publishable book. Being abroad, for David as for

Hemingway, makes hungry where most it satisfies; yet one is never quite "abroad" enough for

another main reason, as memory ties one indelibly to the past. Thus Hemingway’s "most

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experimental and easily…most ambitious novel," as Mark Spilka called Garden (280), presages

also those intersections, now generally familiar to us, between the postmodern and the

postcolonial in its borderless, shifting narrative gaze and concerns, its desire for certainty of self

and identity, its contradictory longing for the other and for a sublimation which could dispense

with alterity and its inability to find either. In a way, then, it is perhaps quite apt that the story

was left unfinished, and that there would be great difficulty in collating the manuscripts, since

these facts reinforce the status of the text in its interstitial, hybrid moment, between desire and

re-cognition, truth and perversity, sight and memory. Reading this novel, then, reminds us that

"writer’s blocks" not only occasion frustration and silence, but can also be that out of which the

new can be built.

Works Cited

Baker, Carlos. Hemingway: The Writer as Artist. 1952. 4th ed. Princeton: Princeton UP, 1972. Bakhtin, M. M. Speech Genres and Other Late Essays. Trans. Vern W. McGee. Eds. Caryl Emerson and Michael Holquist. Austin: U of Texas P, 1986. Benjamin, Walter. "The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction." Illuminations. 211-

44 ("Das Kunstwerk im Zeitalter seiner technischen Reproduzierbarkeit [2. Fassung]." Walter Benjamin: Ein Lesebuch. 313-47).

Bruccoli, Matthew J., ed. Conversations with Ernest Hemingway. Jackson: UP of Mississippi, 1986.

Burwell, Rose Marie. Hemingway: The Postwar Years and the Posthumous Novels. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1996. Cairncross, Frances. The Death of Distance: How the Communications Revolution Will

Change Our Lives. Boston: Harvard Business School P, 1997. Doctorow, E.L. "Braver than we thought." New York Times Book Review 18 May 1986: 44-45.

Rpt. in Ernest Hemingway: Six Decades of Criticism. Ed. Linda W. Wagner. East Lansing: Michigan State UP, 1987. 325-31.

Eby, Carl P. “Who is “the Destructive Type”? Re-reading Literary Jealousy and Destruction in The Garden of Eden.” The Hemingway Review 33.2 (Spring 2014): 99-106.

Fleming, Robert E. The Face in the Mirror: Hemingway’s Writers. 1990. Tuscaloosa: U of Alabama P, 1996. Hemingway, Ernest. For Whom the Bell Tolls. 1940. New York: Scribner Paperback

Fiction, 1995. ---. The Garden of Eden. New York: Scribner’s, 1986 [composed c. 1947 on]. ---. A Moveable Feast. 1964. New York: Scribner Classsics, 1996. ---. Selected Letters 1917-1961. Ed. Carlos Baker. New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1981. ---. The Short Stories. The First Forty-Nine Stories with a Brief Preface by the Author. New York: Scribner Paperback Fiction, 1995. ---. The Sun Also Rises. 1926. New York: Scribner’s, 1954.

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Hemingway, Valerie. “The Garden of Eden Revisited: With Hemingway in Provence in the Summer of ’59.” The Hemingway Review 18.2 (Spring 1999): 103-113. Hediger, Ryan. “The Elephant in the Writing Room: Sympathy and Weakness in Hemingway’s ‘Masculine Text,’ The Garden of Eden.” The Hemingway Review 31.1 (Fall 2011): 79-95. Josephs, F. Allen. "Hemingway’s Poor Spanish: Chauvinism and Loss of Credibility in For Whom the Bell Tolls." Hemingway: A Revaluation. Ed. Donald R. Noble. Troy, New York: Whitston, 1983. 205-23. Knodt, Ellen Andrews. "Diving Deep: Jake’s Moment of Truth at San Sebastian." The Hemingway Review 17.1 (1997): 28-37. Lim, Shirley Geok-lin. "Reconstructing Asian-American Poetry: A Case for

Ethnopoetics." MELUS 14.2 (1987): 51-63. Long, Samantha. “Catherine as Transgender: Dreaming Identity in The Garden of Eden.” The Hemingway Review 32.2 (Spring 2013): 42-57. Nagel, James. "The Hunting Story in The Garden of Eden." Hemingway’s Neglected

Short Fiction: New Perspectives. Ed. Susan F. Beegel. Tuscaloosa: The U of Alabama P, 1989. 329-338.

Nesmith, Chris L. “‘The Law of an Ancient God’ and the Editing of Hemingway’s The Garden of Eden: The Final Corrected Typescript and Galleys.” The Hemingway Review 20.2 (Spring 2001): 16-36.

Silbergleid, Robin. “Narrative and Authority in Hemingway’s The Garden of Eden.” The Hemingway Review 27.2 (Spring 2005): 96-117.

Spilka, Mark. Hemingway’s Quarrel with Androgyny. 1990. Lincoln: U of Nebraska P, 1995. Tintner, Adeline R. "Ernest and Henry: Hemingway’s Lover’s Quarrel with James." Ernest Hemingway: The Writer in Context. Ed. James Nagel. Madison: U of Wisconsin P, 1984. 165-78. Wagner, Linda W., ed. Ernest Hemingway: Six Decades of Criticism. East Lansing: Michigan State UP, 1987.