The Garden of Eden by “Ernest Hemingway”

April 11, 2025 10:38 AM

The manuscript of The Garden of Eden exists in three irreconcilable drafts of varying lengths. To get the story into publishable shape, Tom Jenks, a Scribner’s editor, did a cut-and-paste job on the longest of these manuscripts (a version of some twelve hundred pages)—deleting a great deal, changing around much else—thus producing the version that we now have. The result bears a suspicious resemblance to Thomas Wolfe’s last two novels, which by common consent are now to be seen as the “compositions” of his Harper’s editor, Edward Aswell. In any case, so altered and manipulated were the Hemingway manuscripts that… Barbara Probst Solomon pronounced the Scribner’s version of The Garden of Eden a “travesty” and even worse: “I can report that Hemingway’s publisher has committed a literary crime.”
posted by Lemkin (13 comments total)

John Updike:

The Garden of Eden adds to the canon not merely another volume but a new reading of Hemingway’s sensibility. Except in some of the short stories and that strange novel To Have and Have Not, he avoided describing the life that most men and women mostly lead, domestic life. The Garden of Eden confronts sexual intimacy, marriage, and human androgyny with a wary but searching tenderness that amounts, for a man so wrapped up in masculine values and public gestures, to courage. What stymied him, while he was still in his mid-forties, from completing and publishing the novel must be idly conjectured. One possibility is that the material embarrassed as well as possessed him, and another is that he knew he was in over his head. His head was not quite right; his behavior in World War II had been strange, and in his work methods he was developing (and had just barely rescued For Whom the Bell Tolls from) the Papaesque logorrhea, the fatal dependency upon free-form spillage, of which The Dangerous Summer was to be the disastrous climax—Life’s request in 1959 for ten thousand words producing a dizzying twelve times that amount.

posted by Lemkin at 10:48 AM on April 11

The literary Cult of the Author does not want you to know how essential editors are. They can hold enormous power, for good or for ill.
posted by rikschell at 11:30 AM on April 11 [3 favorites]

Hemingway would have punched you in the mouth, Lemkin, for comparing him to Thomas Wolfe, to whom he refers contemptuously a number of times in his letters as a "glandual giant" for the near-unspeakable offense of being an author a few inches taller than Papa.
posted by jamjam at 11:52 AM on April 11 [3 favorites]

I read The Garden of Eden when it came out in the mid-eighties, I was still in high school and in the sway of The Sun Also Rises and the other clean, well-lighted prose novels of EH's middle period. A serious stan. If I recall correctly, Eden was touted as sexy, androgynous, edgy, maybe lesbian, maybe gay, maybe bi, ooh lá lá what was old Mr. Masculine on about, and what about that picture his mother took of him in a dress?

I read it, it was terrible; turgid, overwritten, poorly edited, criminally dull. I never looked at it again or thought of it. Remain a fan of the good stuff: problematic, maybe; certainly eternal.
posted by chavenet at 12:05 PM on April 11 [2 favorites]

A glandular giant “with the brains and the guts of three mice”, I believe.
posted by Lemkin at 12:07 PM on April 11 [1 favorite]

I read it. lots of The and These and And's with lots of what's.

Hemingway called Wolfe "the over-bloated Li'l Abner of literature".

dunno, The Right Stuff was great. I can see Gordo Cooper as a Lil Abner type. but I'm thinking Marryin Sam. Wolfe captured that era better then Hemingway could but that was not Hemingway's generational thing for which, in his time, he had a fine lttle roll.
posted by clavdivs at 2:00 PM on April 11

A comparable literary crime was committed against Robert Penn Warren when a professor who got access to the first draft of All the King's Men worked with a publisher to put out a "restored" edition in which he made selective changes on the counterfactual theory that Warren, a very successful writer in his lifetime and not a shy man, had been cowed by his editor into making the novel worse... I get hopping mad about it to this day.
posted by prefpara at 3:20 PM on April 11 [2 favorites]

clavdivs: Unless you're joking, the Thomas Wolfe being referred to here is the author of "Look Homeward Angel", not "The Right Stuff". He was tall, he was from North Carolina, and he was ten times the writer Hemingway ever was. Died young of some kind of brain disease in 1937.
posted by Modest House at 3:53 PM on April 11 [1 favorite]

ten times the writer Hemingway ever was

[throws yellow flag]

False start. 5 yard penalty. It’s now second down.
posted by Lemkin at 4:13 PM on April 11 [3 favorites]

While I think it’s true that Garden of Eden, as published in the 80s, isn’t all that fun to read (I gave up, certainly, but then I’ve given up on all of Hemingway’s novels other than Old Man and the Sea, which I only finished through inertia) it probably has done more to safeguard Hemingway’s relevance in the academy than anything he published in his lifetime. As far as I can tell, the only academics that care about Hemingway anymore are people interested in queerness and gender expression.

Anyway, Tuttleton’s essay is, uh, old fashioned in its attitudes to gender, caught up as it is in the masculine posturing that was de rigueur in so much of cultural commentary in the 20th Century. Though, given that it was Hemingway that did so much to create that style, it’s grimly appropriate. We all create the conditions of our own afterlife.
posted by Kattullus at 11:32 PM on April 11 [2 favorites]

Reminds me, I need to finally read For Whom The Bell Tolls.

Timely.
posted by aiq at 7:37 AM on April 12 [1 favorite]

Anyway, Tuttleton’s essay is, uh, old fashioned in its attitudes to gender, caught up as it is in the masculine posturing that was de rigueur in so much of cultural commentary in the 20th Century.

1987 was another country, for sure.
posted by Lemkin at 7:46 AM on April 12 [1 favorite]

I went back to read Val Rohy’s Hemingway, Literalism, and Transgender Reading, a brilliant essay from 2011, and speaking of the past as another country, from today’s perspective it’s striking that Rohy felt the need to make the case to readers of academic journals that transphobia was a distinct phenomenon from misogyny and hatred for queer people.

Anyway, it’s absolutely worth reading if you’re at all interesting in Hemingway and/or trans issues.
posted by Kattullus at 2:30 PM on April 13