19

A SNAKE NAMED CATHERINE

My attention to the discrepancy between the published 250-or-so page The Garden of Eden and Hemingway’s original 2400-page manuscript was drawn by the New York writer Barbara Probst Solomon, who had the bright idea of going up to the Kennedy Library in Boston to check the original against Scribner’s slash-and-burn version. So what follows is based on the (very shortened) book as heavily edited without Hemingway being alive to protest or, more doubtfully, to agree.

Much has been made of the “androgynous sexual activity” of the three main characters: writer David Bourne, his unstable blonde wife Catherine, and dark-haired exotic Marita, who all have sex together. It gets a little confusing as to who’s on top, on the bottom or sideways.

If Clarence Hemingway thought his son’s early novels were “dirty,” what he would have made of where Ernest’s writing was leading him now. Remember, father and son grew up with a middle-class ideal of the “English gentleman,” gallant and loyal with only the most antiseptic relationships with women. But at the same time in the early 20th century sex was being more openly discussed in Oak Park’s more progressive circles … sex found in banned but much-read instruction manuals by Marie Stopes and gender-bending Havelock Ellis. Ernest’s generation, when he was eighteen, was fascinated by Stopes’s graphic descriptions in Married Love, and later Van de Velde’s Ideal Marriage. In other words, for much of his life Ernest was a conventionally repressed Victorian but also ravenous for freer, more experimental “modern” sex.

Later, after the war, when the whole idea of a traditional, dominant male was smashed to pieces, two contradictory forces worked on Hemingway. He, like many men, embraced a brutal attitude to homosexuals, who were seen as yet another threat, like an incoming Minenwerfer shell, to their masculinity; and Hemingway became intrigued by Havelock Ellis’s Erotic Symbolism, with its vivid descriptions of “impolite” sexual practices. He insisted that friends including his “Paris wife” Hadley read Erotic Symbolism, and he intensely grilled Gertrude Stein on her female-on-female orgasm with Alice Toklas. Hadley felt that Ernest was falling victim to the bohemian atmosphere of Paris, where his mentor Ezra Pound had a wife and mistress. “For years we’d been surrounded by triangles,” Hadley recalled, “… freethinking, free-living lovers, willing to bend every convention to find something right or risky or liberating enough.” Such a bohemian sexual atmosphere, with its openness to “strange vices,” registered on Hemingway’s writing despite his self-protective shell of jeering at fairies.

From this 1920s postwar period, we can see Hemingway more or less openly playing—that is, having his characters engage in—reversed sex roles, lesbianism and the much-feared but always tempting homosexuality. One of his most extraordinary stories, the usually ignored “The Sea Change,” is so artistically subtle it needs more than one reading to “get it,” and even then the “it” remains elusive.

In form, it’s similar to “Hills Like White Elephants.” A tanned young American man and his girlfriend talk in a Paris bar.

“All right,” said the man. “What about it?”

“No,” said the girl. “I can’t.”

“You mean you won’t …”

“All right,” said the girl. “You have it your own way.”

“I don’t have it my own way. I wish to God I did.”

“You did for a long time,” the girl said.

What are they talking about? She’s leaving him for a woman. As the story develops it’s clear she has strong sexual feelings for this woman, strong beyond her control. She had also enjoyed sex with the man, including—it’s implied—taking the male-dominant role in bed. The action is described almost entirely in dialogue.

He is very angry, pleading:

“If it was a man.”

“Don’t say that. It wouldn’t be a man. You know that.”

“Don’t you trust me?”

“That’s funny,” he said. “Trust you. That’s really funny.”

She insists she loves him.

“Why don’t you prove it?”

“… You’re a fine man and it breaks my heart to go off and leave you” …

“Go on, then.”

“Really?” She could not believe him, but her voice was happy …

Toward the end of their argument two homosexuals stroll into the bar and chat with their favorite bartender James. As voices are raised between the man and woman, with words like “vice” and “perversion,” the homosexuals move away from them.

“I’m a different man, James,” he said to the barman.

“You see in me quite a different man.”

“Yes, sir?” said James.

“Vice,” said the brown young man, “is a very strange thing, James.” … He looked out the door. He saw her going down the street. As he looked in the glass, he saw he was really quite a different-looking man …

What has the woman’s desertion of the man done to him? What about the hint at the end that the two gay men make room for him at the bar in more ways than one when he announces that he is now a different man? “He was settled into something,” may be the most important sentence.

Remember, in Hemingway all is not what it seems. As he told a friend (Owen Wister, author of The Virginian), “I try always to do the thing by three cushion shots rather than by words or direct statement.” The cliché used about Hemingway is the “iceberg principle” with a story’s meaning 7/8ths concealed. “The Sea Change” predicts what will happen in the real lives of many married couples twenty years hence. I have several men friends whose wives or female companions left them for women, and women whose men left them for other men, particularly in the “liberated” Sixties and Seventies. (See the movies Kramer vs. Kramer, and Far From Heaven.)

“The Sea Change” is the best of a number of Hemingway’s stories where he plays with homosexual/lesbian possibilities without being explicit. (Again, American censorship may have something to do with his off-center “three cushion shot.”) He’ll play with it again in “Mr. and Mrs. Elliot” and more distantly in “A Soldier’s Home.” It’s a terrifying possibility he begins to admit into his writing while his public self continues to act out his super-machismo.

“The Sea Change,” like the uncompleted novel Islands in the Stream, came out posthumously. In Islands he spells it out more explicitly, where Thomas Hudson indulges in reverse sex with his wife, that is where the man plays the supposed woman’s role, she the aggressor and he passively submissive or kinky in some undefined way, but then Hemingway omitted this section.

My reading of The Garden of Eden, on which he worked for fifteen years almost to his life’s end, is that it’s a fascinating summing up and a daring exploration of unknown territory, and a strange apology to his dead father, who for so long he never forgave for committing suicide. It can also be read as a companion piece, a rival or a response to F. Scott Fitzgerald’s Tender is the Night set in the same Riviera locale of southern France in the Jazz Age 1920s.

David Bourne, a highly functional fiction writer, is on honeymoon with his non-writing non-artistic and deeply unfulfilled wife Catherine who financially supports him (like Hadley and Pauline with Hemingway). She takes the initiative in bed, including the use of a bottle to sodomize David. She asks David to pretend to be her and she him. We find hints of such doubleness, of dissolving yourself in another person, scattered all through Hemingway’s earlier work like A Farewell to Arms. (Catherine Barkley: “There isn’t any me. I’m you. Don’t make up a separate me.”) David is busy writing an autobiographical novel including an African section where he is his eight-year-old self who feels responsible for the death of a beautiful elephant because he revealed its location to his hunter father who killed it.

The story of The Garden of Eden takes five sunny, glorious, complicated months for the sexual net to tighten around David, Catherine, and Marita. David is a pretty passive guy when faced with two sexually determined women. He goes along to get along, in and out of bed as long as Catherine leaves him alone to do his writing—which alas she doesn’t, since she sets fire to his African manuscript. Poor Catherine. Anyone in her right mind would go crazy living with David, a monument to passive-aggression. She yearns to be creative in her own right, not just as David’s handmaiden. That is what makes Catherine the most interesting Hemingway “bitch-heroine” since … well, since Martha Gellhorn, whose DNA, as well as a little of Hadley, more of Pauline and a lot of Hemingway’s former mistress in Cuba, Jane Mason, may be found in the remarkable character of this very modern woman.

It’s generally believed this story is about sex when it’s really about a creatively blocked woman dying almost literally to steal the Promethean fire of her writer lover. Aside from her sensual kicks, that’s why Catherine insists on being a boy, and David numbly, or dumbly, accepts her gender reversal, submitting to her desires as long as she leaves him alone in his room to finish his book. She convinces him to copy her hair-style (a point thunderously made in a lurid John Irvin movie version) while she cuts hers. “You see,” she said. “That’s the surprise. I’m a girl. But now I’m a boy too and I can do anything and anything and anything.”

I’m not too interested in the character of Marita (nor was Hemingway, I suspect) who is merely on hand to keep the plot boiling in Catherine and David’s sex games. It’s Catherine I pull for, as I pulled for Dick Diver’s messed-up wife Nicole in Tender is the Night. Stop reading The Garden of Eden where his editors have inserted a “happy” ending. Make up your own conclusion to this amazing, convoluted story about the man Hemingway grappling, struggling, to come to terms with his, and perhaps everyone else’s, split sexuality.