We think of Hemingway as the writer who celebrated war and hunting and fishing. We think of him as the writer who wrote short declarative sentences that hit us with the power of a telegram. And we think of him as the sad, sick man who put a shotgun in his mouth and blew his brains out.
But there's another Hemingway --- at least in one book, that is. He intended that book, "The Garden of Eden ," to be one of his masterpieces . And so he worked on it for more than15 years, writing some 200,000 words in the process.
The book that has, decades after his death, been culled from that bulky manuscript is not the book he intended. It's 256 pages long, a quick read (and quicker if you skip the stuff about hunting in Africa, which is pure padding and wouldn't be missed if it had been cut). Obviously, most of his book is missing --- but what remains is a revelation.
Consider: In the 1920s, a young American writer named David Bourne publishes his first novel. He marries Catherine, a beautiful and rich young woman. They travel to the South of France for their honeymoon. There, in a small hotel in a coastal town, David begins to work on his next book while Catherine works on her suntan.
There are terrific scenes that put you into the action: David catching a fish in the canal, the ordering of drinks and meals. The meals are enough to make you run to the fish market. Like this: "They were hungry for lunch and the bottle of white wine was cold and they drank it as they ate the celery remoulade and the small radishes and the home pickled mushrooms from the big glass jar. The bass was grilled and the grill marks showed on the silver skin and the butter melted on the hot plate. There was sliced lemon to press on the bass and fresh bread from the bakery and the wine cooled their tongues of the heat of the fried potatoes...."
So there they are, in a zone of unimpeded happiness, when Catherine starts to go funny in the head. First she cuts her hair. Then she proposes a seemingly harmless variation in their sexual relationship. And then she brings another woman into the relationship.
The fantasy of two woman for one man is, surveys tell us, the favorite fantasy of American men. If that's true, men who feel this way should rush to this book, for in addition to some highly charged, very erotic writing, there is also a stark account of the psychological cost of such arrangements.
Butler won't spoil the plot --- though it's obvious that the mathematical formula of three divided by two doesn't work out well. But the plot's not the attraction here. It's Hemingway, really getting inside the character of a woman. It's romantic writing from a man whose prior efforts in that form were chilly and male. And it's the pleasure of the South of France in the 1920s, a paradise that was cheap and uncrowded.
Love. The South of France . Complications and kinks. As a combination, the elements are unbeatable. This novel has been ignored long enough --- it deserves to be one of Hemingway's better-known books. Read it with a cold drink, and it will make for a memorable evening.
