The Garden of Eden by Ernest Hemingway
File under: Queer Summer Beach Read
Everyone knows A Farewell to Arms. Many of us had to read Old Man and the Sea. Any of us who have taken on writing as a personal craft have studied Hills Like White Elephants. But, have you heard of The Garden of Eden?
Catherine’s act of absconding to a village coiffeur during her honeymoon to have her hair closely shorn captured my imagination back in the 1990’s when I first read it, though, deeply closeted myself at the time, I didn’t quite know why. The Perrier-Jouet and sun soaked novel has, on each read, asked more questions than it answers.
In multiple episodes initiated by his bride, the ostensibly auto-fictitious main character David Bourne explores his sexual fluidity. Looking into the mirror alone later, he reflects that yes, it was she who insisted, but it was he who enjoyed it. Was Hemingway The Lost Generation’s most-closeted girly boy? Rafael Frumkin, the grand-nibbling of Hemingway’s special friend sure makes a case for his queerness. If you saw the Ken Burns biography you know that there were occurrences of gender bending in the family, and with the author specifically. It was a surprise/not-surprise to learn that the man who performed masculinity to the nth degree was doing so… for (capital R) Reasons.
I must fight cynicism about the art of writing and the politics of publishing. Its publisher, Scribner’s, is part of Simon and Schuster, one of the “Big Five” deciders of what gets published and what does not. Other people have already critiqued the deep posthumous redactions enacted on this work that reduced over 200,000 words in 48 chapters into a slim volume of 30 chapters in 70,000 words. What didn’t they want us to read, I wonder?
Is the full manuscript intact somewhere? Is it written in ordinary cahiers in pencil? Can a person see the pages? Do you have to travel to a far away library and offer credentials to be able to sit in a privileged reading room for a reserved amount of time under surveillance to have the experience?
I’m wondering what literature classes would have been like if we could have acknowledged that it was social norms and the arbiters of the written word that flattened Hemingway’s multiple dimensions containing fluidity, desire, and shame into the “man’s man” conqueror and symbol of virility. But of course, we could not. Can we now? Can we know The Garden of Eden for its queerness? Written by a queer man in a time that would not affirm him?
The events of TGOE seem to track to some later-in-life biography of the man himself, and while I don’t care to reify the “bad behavior” such that it was, I do report the soreness in my heart in knowing that even Ernest Fucking Hemingway, who died by suicide, was not immune to the suffering caused by the violence of cisgender-heteronormativity.
if you don’t know this one, to pick it up as a beautiful queer summer beach read. Even in its questionable brevity, there is love, there is jealousy, there is skinny dipping in The Med with bottles of vermouth. There are tins of mackerel (marinated in wine) and beers for breakfast. There is a menage a trois (sort of), and there are those magnificent spaces between the lines. There are fishermen’s sweaters, pants on AFABs, and convincing barbers to cut so-called women’s hair short, well before their time. These are the people who leveled the ground for us to place the stones of our paths today. Let’s offer gratitude. Let’s ask questions. Let’s read.
