The Old Man and the Sea Change the Garden of Eden

By R.Z. Sheppard

Whoever said dead men tell no tales did not account for Ernest Hemingway. Since he was buried in 1961, ten books have been published with his name on them. They include memoirs, letters, sketches and two novels, Islands in the Stream and now The Garden of Eden, a kinky love triangle about a promising young writer and two women on the leading edge of fashion and sexual mechanics. The setting is the coast of southern France during the mid-1920s. The sun is strong, the water clean, the food good and true. Best of all, the hotel Grau du Roi is a fine place to be a writer named David Bourne, honeymooning and working on a story of a youth and his father tracking a killer elephant in the African bush.

The language and rhythms of the book belong unmistakably to the Marlboro Man of American letters. So too do the prose mannerisms that have become the stock of imitators and parodists. But there are also passages that recall Hemingway doing what nobody did better, focusing on the point where action and feeling become indistinguishable.

There is art in The Garden of Eden; there is also evidence of many artifacts. Hemingway began the book after World War II. In 1947 he wrote the critic Maxwell Geismar, "Getting very big but I cut the hell out of it periodically." Just how big became the concern of Scribners Editor Tom Jenks, 35, who got the job of salvaging a 247-page novel out of 1,500 pages of manuscript. "Editing Hemingway was like wrestling with a god," says the amiable Virginian. What Jenks does not say is that the rules of the game require that the god must look like the winner. The Garden of Eden is, after all, what publicity departments call a publishing event. Interviews and appearances are planned for Jenks. This is a rare career opportunity for a young editor, and a delicate matter as well. He has done an excellent job, yet he must repeatedly give assurances that all the words in the book are Hemingway's. He must also defend his cuts and rearrangements against purists and scholars. Hemingway left some helpful comments in the margins, but more often Jenks was on his own when he had to boil down dialogue, eliminate repetitions and remove characters and a subplot.

The result is a lean, sensuous narrative that suggests the existence of a place where affluent, middle-aged manuscripts can go for a rigorous diet and plastic surgery. The surface of The Garden of Eden is taut, chic and strangely contemporary. Newly married David and Catherine have pioneered their own Club Med on the Riviera. It is the perfect place for a sea change. The couple spend golden days brunching, mixing drinks with Perrier, wearing fisherman shirts and espadrilles, swimming and tanning in the buff. The rate of exchange is very favorable.

The trouble in paradise is that David is on the threshold of literary fame while the beautiful and rich Catherine is jealous of her husband's reviews. She is also sexually unsettled. In bed with David, she wants to be a boy. She then persuades her husband to join her in getting matching short haircuts and a platinum-blond dye job. (Hemingway fans may recall that the Catherine of A Farewell to Arms also suggests twin coiffures but without the bleach.) Eventually, Catherine comes out of the closet on the arm of the dark, lovely and rich Marita.

"All things truly wicked start from innocence," Hemingway once wrote. Adam and Eve got the message late, and so do David and Catherine. Her kittenish antics turn savage. She thrusts Marita and her husband together with predictable consequences and then strikes out at both of them. The situation is somewhat similar to the time Hemingway and his first wife Hadley spent a summer living with Pauline Pfeiffer, a Paris Vogue editor who was to become the second Mrs. Hemingway. Yet Catherine shares some of her most unbecoming characteristics with Zelda Fitzgerald, the envious and unbalanced wife of Hemingway's pal F. Scott.

If Hemingway had completed this romance, perhaps Catherine would have had more than two dimensions. The first is what Edmund Wilson called "the all- too-perfect felicity of a youthful erotic dream." The second hinges on the age-old view of woman as the cause of original sin. Catherine is a spoiler whose taste in forbidden fruit threatens the private Eden of David's art. It is the place where he struggles with his own lost innocence.

Despite some tender pillow talk and David's willingness to follow Catherine to the hairdresser, The Garden of Eden is not the work of a secret quiche eater. Catherine's urges do not come naturally to David. His women are part of the external world, like the baking Mediterranean sun and the bracing sea. As always in Hemingway, those externals are observed with a meticulous objectivity that conveys loneliness. There are also many self-conscious passages on the writer's solitary struggle. For example: "It is all very well for you to write simply and the simpler the better. But do not start to think so damned simply. Know how complicated it is and then state it simply." Since he did not finish this difficult task, Hemingway cannot be blamed if there is less than meets the eye in The Garden of Eden. What does meet the eye is often enough. There is always magic in discovering a "new" Hemingway. Not many posthumous writers can make that claim.