"In the stream of life": teaching The Garden of Eden contextually.

Miller, Linda Patterson

THE GARDEN OF EDEN brings fundamental issues of authorship and the writing process into discussion. One question that dogged Hemingway from the time he began to write in Paris was: What does it mean to be a writer? The Garden of Eden takes on that question directly. No other Hemingway work concerns itself so fully with the actual mechanics of writing as the novel explores at all levels what the writer requires in order to create from a state of poise.

In the Garden of Eden, Hemingway's writer protagonist David Bourne recognizes from the beginning of the novel that what matters most to him is his ability to write so as to make it true. The novel's narrative structure and theme build around the complications of Bourne's daily life that impede his writing. As Bourne attempts to balance the physical and the emotional dimensions of his world that will unleash memory, he cautions himself to "be careful." "It is all very well for you to write simply and the simpler the better," he realizes. "But do not start to think so damned simply. Know how complicated it is and then state it simply" (GOE 37). Toward the end of the novel, as Bourne is "breaking through" on his stories, he recognizes that "what had made the last book good was the people who were in it and the accuracy of the detail which made it believable. He had, really, only to remember accurately and the form came by what he would choose to leave out?' When his new wife Catherine tries to undercut and disparage what she sees as his "pointless anecdotes" (he calls them "stories"), he girds himself against those who "did not understand and appreciate what you wrote." He assures himself: "You've worked well and nothing can touch you as long as you can work. Try to help her now and forget about yourself. Tomorrow you have the story to go over and to make perfect" (210-211).

The Garden of Eden holds its own in any literature class, but it works particularly well as the capstone to a Hemingway-focused seminar or as central to an advanced course on American Modernism that I call "Hemingway, Fitzgerald and the Lost Generation" This course focuses on the American expatriate writers whose experimental art emerged during the heyday of modernism in 1920s France, and integrates the biographical and cultural backgrounds pertinent to the formation of a particular group of artists that included Hemingway, E Scott Fitzgerald, John Dos Passos, Archibald MacLeish, Gerald and Sara Murphy, and others. The course highlights the confluence of the arts in 1920s France that generated the artistic renaissance associated with Hemingway and his artist friends. The course also explores the great degree to which they all drew upon their life experiences to make their art true. Students consider the different ways these artists used the material of their lives, often shared, in the shaping of their art.

To expose my students to the cultural and biographical contexts for Hemingway's writing and to explore how his works shed light on his writing process, I incorporate pertinent primary documents, particularly letters, into the course. Hemingway was an inveterate letter-writer all his life, and the back-and-forth correspondence between Hemingway and his friends enriches and illuminates the reading of the literature, particularly as the letters contribute documentary or primary evidence pertinent to the texts. By the time we read The Garden of Eden at the end of the course, we already have read Fitzgerald's Tender Is the Night and Hemingway's A Moveable Feast, among other works that draw on the same primary materials. Along with the artists' correspondence, these works allow students to consider the intricacy of Hemingway's Garden manuscript and the ways that he embedded and reconfigured real people and incidents in the text.

As we discuss issues related to characterization and the idea of composite characterization, we debate the biographical background for The Garden of Eden, including Hemingway's first reading of Fitzgerald's Tender Is the Night after its 1934 publication. Hemingway was disappointed in the work, as he explained it to Fitzgerald in his letter of 28 May 1934, feeling that Fitzgerald had modeled Dick and Nicole Diver after Gerald and Sara Murphy without knowing anything about their psychological complexities. Fitzgerald had romanticized them, Hemingway told him, so as to capture their charm but not their real character. To Hemingway's mind, Fitzgerald had created a "marvelous description of Sara and Gerald" but he had then "started fooling with them, making them come from things they didn't come from, changing them into other people" "You can take you or me or Zelda or Pauline or Hadley or Sara or Gerald but you have to keep them the same and you can only make them do what they would do. ... Invention is the finest thing but you cannot invent anything that would not actually happen" (SL 407). A few years later Hemingway reread Tender and changed his mind about it, particularly admiring the brilliance with which Fitzgerald had captured life with the Murphys on the French Riviera. As Hemingway wrote Maxwell Perkins on 25 March 1939, "much of it was so good it was frightening" (SL 483).

In discussing Garden, students examine the intricate and controversial questions: how did Hemingway draw upon life experience and to what extent did he transpose material and "fiddle" with his characters, despite what he told Fitzgerald? In this context, it is impossible to ignore the biographical background that feeds into Garden. This is especially so as it relates to Hemingway's life change in 1926, when he separated from his first wife, Hadley Richardson, in order to marry Pauline Pfeiffer. Garden clearly telescopes Hemingway's early months of marriage to Pauline in 1927, particularly their honeymoon in Provence, France. But it is not so simple. Scholars have argued over the models for the female characters in Garden, and most see them as composite characters drawn from the significant women in Hemingway's life. Rose Marie Burwell regards both Marita and Catherine as conflated characters, with Marita a combination of Pauline Pfeiffer and Mary Hemingway and Catherine a conglomeration of Hadley, Jane Mason, Martha Gellhorn, and Zelda Fitzgerald, "the women whose impact on the male's writing Hemingway mistrusted" (109-110).

While on its surface the text would seem to draw extensively on both Pauline and Hadley, I would argue that Hadley has been transposed into Catherine in many ways. The newly published section called "Secret Pleasures" associated with A Moveable Feast (The Restored Edition) implies this, describing the implications of Hadley and Ernest Hemingway's sexual intimacy as related to their fixations with hair. At the same time, source materials embedded in Hemingway's personal correspondence help to illuminate the text's unexpected relationship to Hadley and Ernest's marriage. In particular, a letter that Gerald Murphy wrote to Hemingway in early fall 1926, when Hemingway was questioning his separation from Hadley, emerges as a crucial primary document for understanding not only Garden but all of Hemingway's work from 1926 on. I incorporate an assessment of this letter into the advanced-level classroom discussion of The Garden of Eden to point to the novel's primary concerns with the difficulties of being a woman in the early 20th century and maintaining viable relationships in marriage, particularly when the creative identity of either partner unsettles the other's emotional and artistic balance.

In August 1926, when Hemingway and Hadley surprised their friends at Gerald and Sara Murphy's Villa America with the announcement that they planned to separate, everyone reacted differently. Most accounts confirm that both Gerald and Sara encouraged the separation that would lead to a divorce by the end of the year. Gerald Murphy felt so strongly that he wrote Hemingway about it in the fall lest Hemingway waiver in his resolve. Hemingway should cut "cleanly and sharply" from Hadley (who was "miscast" in her role as Hemingway's wife) in order to salvage his future happiness and artistic promise. "For years;' Murphy wrote, "conditions have allowed of Hadley's drawing upon your personal energy to face the efforts of the day. It's true that 3/4 of the race lives upon the energy of the other 1/4--but when a man finds himself replacing a woman in her own departments of life,--then it's a kind of death" (Miller 21-23). At the center of this letter, Murphy establishes a classification system that illustrates the crucial balance required for husbands and wives to find happiness and creative liberation in marriage, and it is here that his letter seems most integral to Garden:

Hadley and you, I feel, are out after two different kinds of truth in life. All this is outside of the fact that you care for each other. After we question the validity of the relation of two people as man and wife, there remains to question the one as man and woman. I suppose what we all are is

[ILLUSTRATION OMITTED]

Hadley is saving herself for some personal truth,--you are destined to enrich and remain where you are--in the stream of life (Miller 21-23)

Here Murphy implies that when the woman in a marriage does not embrace her role as wife/mother and lacks an artistic identity of her own, she so infringes upon her husband's artistic energy as to consume and destroy him as an artist.

This theme regarding productive and destructive marital roles becomes central to Garden. Catherine wrecks havoc when she fails to have, yet desires to have, her own creative identity apart from David. When a waiter sees David Bourne reading the clippings he has just received about his latest work, he notices a photo of David and asks, "C'est Monsieur?" The waiter then questions why there is no picture of Madame also, assuming the clippings are about their recent marriage. The clippings are "not about the marriage" Catherine says. They're "criticisms of a book by Monsieur." "Magnificent," says the waiter, who is "deeply moved." "Is Madame also a writer?" "No" the girl says "not looking up from the clippings." "Madame is a housewife" (GOE 24). This interchange sets in place Catherine's hell-bent determination to define her own creative identity within constricted options.

After one of their increasingly frequent quarrels, Catherine apologizes to David for "talking so much." "I'm sorry if I talked stupidly" she says. "I usually do." She then asserts that she is changing her ways. "I've started on my good new life and I'm reading now and looking outward and trying not to think about myself so much and I'm going to keep it up" She acknowledges that she has seen "wonderful things to paint and I can't paint at all and never could. But I know wonderful things to write and I can't even write a letter that isn't stupid. I never wanted to be a painter nor a writer until I came to this country. Now it's just like being hungry all the time and there's nothing you can ever do about it.... There's nothing except through yourself." When David responds that she has all the country and the experiences they have shared and that she should "look at things and listen and feel," she acknowledges the vital role that memory and its transience plays in the creative process. "What if I can't remember?" she states, as she "drank the wine and looked at the thick stone walls in which there were only small windows with bars high up that gave onto a narrow street where the sun did not shine." Feeling imprisoned within her own narrowly defined world as a woman and wife to a productive artist, she allows that "when you start to live outside yourself, ... it's all dangerous .... I was thinking so much about myself that I was getting impossible again, like a painter and I was my own picture." Later in the afternoon following this quarrel, David and Catherine make love, after which "they lay quiet for a long time" prior to Catherine stating simply: "I love you so much and you're such a good husband" She then asks, "Was I what you wanted [in terms of being a wife and performing accordingly].... I hope I was." "You were,' David replies (GOE 53-55).

This concern over what makes a good husband or wife as defined within Gerald Murphy's schemata of Husband/Wife/Artist resonates throughout the novel, and it seems that Hemingway thought hard about Murphy's admonitions even as he felt deep remorse and blame for following Murphy's advice and separating from Hadley. Hemingway openly blamed the Murphys (and also by implication Pauline) in A Moveable Feast as the "understanding rich" who had led him astray from Hadley and their supposed marital bliss. Sean Hemingway argues in his introduction to the Restored Edition that Hemingway was unsure of his chapter called "The Pilot Fish and the Rich" because "he thought of his relationship with Pauline as a beginning, not an ending," and this chapter leaves the wrong impression (3). Whether or not one agrees with Sean Hemingway, it does seem certain that Hemingway regarded Garden as a kind of sequel to Feast, in that the novel illuminates the losses of a man whose innocence has been betrayed. Gerald's 1926 letter provides documentary evidence that Hemingway was not unwarranted in blaming Gerald, if not Sara, as the "understanding rich" who urged him to do something he later regretted. Gerald's letter looms large in the historiography of Hemingway and his literary canon.

One of Murphy's final letters, written shortly before his death in fall 1964, was to Archibald MacLeish. Murphy had just finished reading the 1964 posthumous publication of A Moveable Feast, and he wrote MacLeish on 30 May that he was "contre coeur,' reluctantly, "in Ernest's book. What a strange kind of bitterness--or rather accusitoriness. Aren't the rich (whoever they are) rather poor prey? What shocking ethics! How well written, of course. What an indictment. Poor Hadley!" (Miller 334). Murphy may have forgotten his strong-armed letter to Hemingway and the role that he played in undoing Hemingway's marriage, but Hemingway clearly had not forgotten Gerald's proscribed definitions of marital roles as he was writing Feast and then Garden. Although no letter from Hemingway in response to Gerald Murphy's 1926 letter has emerged, both Feast and Garden together comprise the "letter" that Hemingway might well have written to Gerald Murphy some thirty years later to confirm that Murphy was right in his understanding of the precarious alignments between husbands and wives and artists. When the female partner feels consumed or erased by her male counterpart's artistic power, destruction ensues for all involved. Catherine regards David's clippings as "terrible?' "Even in an envelope it's awful to have them with us" she says. "It's like bringing along someone's ashes in a jar" (GOE 24).

Garden's expose of the Bournes' marital relationship, as understood by students in light of the correspondence of Hemingway and his friends, works to advance the novel's larger concern with writing and the writer's dilemma: How to get at and record artistically the heart of truth. Throughout the novel, Hemingway reinforces this theme by interweaving a parallel narrative, one that initially confuses my student readers. They find the story of the young David Bourne who searches in Africa for an elephant and his own father to be a distraction from the larger, more compelling tale of marital discord and sexual experimentation. At first, they argue that the hunting story is best published separately from the narrative, as Scribner's did by publishing it in The Complete Short Stories of Ernest Hemingway: The Finca Vigia Edition as "An African Story." However, most come to recognize that bifurcating the novel into two separate works--an African narrative and a marital narrative---destroys its structural integrity as a quest comprising David Bourne's inner journey toward memory and artistic truthfulness.

Hemingway's demonstration through Bourne of the actual process of writing reinforces Garden's primary concern with what it means to be a writer, and students better appreciate this when they have read and discussed the novel in conjunction with pertinent correspondence. Even as the physical world sustains David Bourne and his art, it also smothers him. This is the artist's paradox: how to live in the world while not being of the world. After 1926, when Hemingway had become a recognized writer, Gerald Murphy seemed to understand this paradox as related to his friend. In another letter to Archibald MacLeish, written on 8 September 1932, Murphy described how Hemingway had begun to slight him. Murphy seemed to understand, however, that Hemingway, as a writer, had to take on "the protective qualities which are necessary to a working artist,--and he is of the race." In order to write, Hemingway had created "the Sanctum to which he has admitted a few. This has grown on him,--he is indifferent to a great many more people than formerly,--to the point of open inattention, which is no longer as hurting as it used to be.... But the line has been drawn very definitely between the people whom he admits to his life and those he does not" (Miller 64-65).

Garden's narrative structure recreates the dueling forces of the artist's inner sanctum at odds with an outer world that threatens to intrude and destroy. This conflict comprises the novel's structural tension and its thematic brilliance. Fitzgerald's earlier exploration in The Great Gatsby (1925) of what it requires for a writer to arrive at truth helps illuminate The Garden of Eden. As Gatsby's writer/narrator Nick Carraway sits in Myrtle Wilson's New York City apartment during a gathering that has escalated into violence, he feels trapped in the happenings of the moment. "I wanted to get out and walk eastward toward the park through the soft twilight" he thinks, "but each time I tried to go I became entangled in some wild, strident argument which pulled me back, as if with ropes, into my chair." He considers how their "line of yellow windows must have contributed their share of human secrecy to the casual watcher in the darkening streets, and I was him too" he reflects, "looking up and wondering. I was within and without, simultaneously enchanted and repelled by the inexhaustible variety of life" (Fitzgerald 36). This passage defines Gatsby's narrative structure, which jockeys in and out of time in sync with Nick's mental and emotional shifts between involvement and detachment, or between inside and outside worlds. The passage also defines a similar narrative pattern in Garden--except that Garden more consistently and aggressively shows the creative process in action.

In The Garden of Eden, scenes of Bourne's retreat into his inner room are counterpoised with scenes of the outer world that streams past his windows. This juxtaposition illuminates the creative process required for prose to assume its own life, so as "not to mean but be" as MacLeish stated it well in "Ars Poetica." Bourne works to resist the countervailing forces of the outer world (primarily embodied in Catherine's attempts to keep him from his writing or to dictate the shape of his writing) while embracing the irony that to remain "in the stream of life" he must balance the interior and the exterior, the objective and the subjective, the actual physical world and the intangible emotional world of memory. Only by zigzagging between both realms does the writer arrive at the inner sanctum where artistic truthfulness resides:

The story started with no difficulty as a story does when it is ready to be written and he got past the middle of it and knew he should break off and leave it until the next day. If he could not keep away from it after he had taken a break he would drive through and finish it. But he hoped he could keep away from it and hit it fresh the next day. It was a good story and now he remembered how long he had intended to write it. The story had not come to him in the past few days. His memory had been inaccurate in that. It was the necessity to write it that had come to him. He knew how the story ended now. He had always known the wind and sand-scoured bones but they were gone now and he was inventing all of it. It was all true now because it happened to him as he wrote and only its bones were dead and scattered and behind him (GOE 93-94).

This process of discovery--watching and feeling it happen "as he wrote" it--speaks powerfully to students who assay The Garden of Eden and then think about their own creative process. Reading Garden at the end of the course--after considering its authorship, posthumous publication, relation to Hemingway's biography, and place in the history of "modernism"--leaves the course purposefully unfinished, like the novel and like modern art. Students then realize that they must risk becoming writers themselves.

WORKS CITED

Burwell, Rose Marie. Hemingway: The Postwar Years and the Posthumous Novels. New York: Cam bridge UP, 1996.

Fitzgerald, F. Scott. The Great Gatsby. New York: Scribner's, 1925.

Hemingway, Ernest. Ernest Hemingway: Selected Letters 1917-1961. Ed. Carlos Baker. New York: Scribner's, 1981.

--. A Moveable Feast: The Restored Edition. New York: Scribner's, 2009.

--. The Garden of Eden. New York: Scribner's, 1986.

Macleish, Archibald. "Ars Poetica" New and Collected Poems, 1917-1976. Boston, MA: Houghton Mifflin, 1976.106-107.

Miller, Linda Patterson, ed. Letters from the Lost Generation: Gerald and Sara Murphy and Friends--. Expanded Edition. Gainesville: UP of Florida, 2002.

LINDA PATTERSON MILLER

Penn State University, Abington