Hemingway Done Wrong

Fate brought me to Ernest Hemingway’s The Garden of Eden. We had gone to a new library in the metro area to fill up a Sunday afternoon. Even though the library looked impressive from the outside, it had the smallest spattering of fiction I’ve seen – only about 50 titles per alphabet letter. Thankfully, one of the heavy-hitting authors on my list, Ernest Hemingway, was there, represented by a title I had never heard before: The Garden of Eden.

Hemingway’s The Garden of Eden is an unfinished manuscript found after his death. It’s part one of a longer book, but his friends decided the story stood on its own and could be edited and published without the unfinished second half.

Hemingway’s friends got it wrong. This book needs a second half. Let me explain.

Losing Eden

David and Catherine have an idyllic start to their married life. Living in a small town in the south of France, eating delicious food at the café in their hotel, swimming for hours in the warm sea, admiring each other’s tans, and generally enjoying being together.

But Catherine has a bit of a kink and is not satisfied. I won’t go into it here; the mid-century descriptions of sexual frustration confused me, and I will probably label what she’s going through wrong. At first, it seems she just wants to explore a few things, but then she demands more and brings another woman, Marita, into their relationship. She behaves manically and unpredictably, manipulates David and Marita’s emotions, and moves fluidly between ecstasy, self-loathing, and jealousy.

In a heartbreaking turn of events, Catherine burns the manuscripts David has spent months writing (he wrote everything in notebooks—no hard drives to rescue or backups to access on the Cloud). Then, stricken by what she has done, she runs off to who-knows-where.

David is left with Marita, the woman Catherine brought into their lives against his will but whom he has since fallen in love with. She is very different than Catherine—Italian, not English, short, not tall, and very grounded, not insane. The couple feels sad for what seems like one day that Catherine is gone and then starts life anew with each other. Everything ends happily ever after. 

Not the ending the story needs

I don’t think this is how Hemingway wanted his story to end. There is more to say about the deterioration of the Garden of Eden. Is the lesson that if your love life goes sour, find someone new? Hemingway is smarter than that. What happens to Catherine?

Another unsolved mystery is David’s drinking problem. At the beginning of the book, he drinks socially. Then he starts drinking to take the edge off being with Catherine, and then he’s drinking all the time to get through each day.

Hemingway didn’t add a little paragraph about how David didn’t need a drink to be with Marita, letting us think the drinking problem was also a Catherine problem. Does he quit? Does he die an early death? Was the drinking problem not a critical part of the story and just for flavor? We will never know. 

This is a beautiful story, and I’m glad I got to read it. But it just isn’t finished.