The Garden of Eden (novel)

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The Garden of Eden ( The Garden of Eden ) is a 1986 posthumously published, unfinished novel of 1961 late Ernest Hemingway , which he had begun in 1946 but never completed to his satisfaction. Tom Jenks, an editor at Hemingway's publisher Charles Scribner's Sons , developed the current version from various manuscripts of Hemingway. The semi-autobiographical novel is about the writing and relationship problems of a writer named David Bourne. The German translation of the edition first published in 1987 by Rowohlt Verlag comes from Werner Schmitz .

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Coast with palm trees (Côte d'Azur) by János Vaszary , late 1920s

In the 1920s, the newly wed Americans David and Catherine Bourne spend their honeymoon in the Camargue , on the Côte d'Azur and on the Spanish Atlantic coast. They are very similar in their appearance and are sometimes mistaken for siblings - for brother and sister, but Catherine is tempted to think of as David's brother. She likes playing with her sexual identity and the sensation that she creates with her specially made pants. In order to be more like each other, the two cut and dye their hair at Catherine's request, and David also notices that he likes it.

David is a writer , but Catherine is jealous of his work and cannot handle his success. The only thing worth writing about him is their life together and their honeymoon. Because David can write better when he's by himself, Catherine looks for entertainment outside of hotels. In Mandelieu-la-Napoule near Cannes , the couple met the young French woman Marita. Catherine brings her back from one of her trips and befriends her. In Nice , the two women kissing, and return when they jointly to David, Catherine also wants David and Marita, they kiss each other. Marita confesses to them that she has fallen in love with both of them, and a fragile love triangle develops that endangers the young marriage.

Without consulting David beforehand, Catherine shows Marita his story about their honeymoon. David thinks it's over, but Catherine wants him to write Marita into it too. Marita finds better access to David's work than Catherine does and especially to a story in which he processes the relationship with his father and a shared experience on the elephant hunt and which determines his thinking and work more and more. Catherine jealously burns all of David's work and leaves him in France. David stays with Marita and begins to rewrite the lost stories.

Classification in Hemingway's work

Hemingway began work on The Garden of Eden in 1946 at the latest after his return from Europe to Cuba and his marriage to his fourth wife, Mary Welsh . In letters to his friend Charles T. Lanham however, there is evidence that he had previously on a cloth on the sex or sexual: I wrote (ambiguous English "sexual") trial and error, he finally in the Garden of Eden and the Islands Processed electricity . Hemingway initially worked haphazardly, with the constant feeling that he was writing against his impending death. After a year the draft was a thousand pages long, and Hemingway put it aside for other work. In view of his suicidality , he ended the first version in 1950 with a provisional ending. He used material from this version in, among other things, Über den Fluss and into die Wald .

It wasn't until 1958 that Hemingway began writing The Garden of Eden again, at a time when he was suffering from headaches, depression and grief for the dead. At the end of his life he remembered his beginnings as a writer and husband. Hemingway once described the theme of the novel as "the bliss of the garden that man has to lose", a theme that he had worked on or would work on in Fiesta , In Another Country and In Whom the Hour Strikes . But unlike in his earlier works, his characters no longer try to deny this loss, but rather to accept its inevitability. In the new version, he worked the experiences from his marriage to Mary Welsh and his second safari into it and finally revised the story a third time.

After Hemingway's death, Mary Welsh gave the three manuscripts to Hemingway's publisher Charles Scribner's Sons . Various editors, including the then publishing director Charles Scribner IV , failed in an attempt to achieve a satisfactory result. 20 years later, Scribner editor Tom Jenks drew up the current version, shortened it to around a third of the original and highlighted a second couple, the painter Nick Sheldon and his wife Barbara, whose relationship was supposed to mirror that of the Bournes. The provisional end of the first version, which Hemingway himself had deleted, also included Catherine's return from a psychiatric hospital and a suicide pact . There is no evidence that Hemingway ever considered ending the story as in Jenks' version with David Bourne's intentions to rewrite his stories.

In her dissertation at the University of Massachusetts Amherst , Susan M. Seitz argues that the revisions to Hemingway's posthumously published novels had brought them into line with the well-known Hemingway canon, and that his later thematic and stylistic experiments found no expression. In Hemingway's late work, she noted a re-examination of the relationships between women and men and an interest in androgyny and reversed gender roles . Hemingway is moving away from its original, dark theme of expulsion from paradise towards an artistic resistance to classic gender roles, writes Mark Spilka in Hemingway's Quarrel with Androgyny . Editor Tom Jenks commented that the subject of bisexuality showed a tenderness and vulnerability of Hemingway that was usually hidden beneath the public image of him. EL Doctorow , however, criticizes the novel's naive assumption that Catherine Bourne's sexual fantasies are an expression of madness .

The Garden of Eden is inspired by the novel Tenderly is the Night by F. Scott Fitzgerald , a friend of Hemingway. Fitzgerald also describes an unfortunate love triangle between an American couple on the Côte d'Azur and a European. The semi-autobiographical plot of The Garden of Eden is based primarily on Hemingway's honeymoon with his second wife Pauline Pfeiffer in Le Grau-du-Roi in May 1927. Like Hemingway with Fiesta , the fictional character David Bourne had previously published a successful novel and then married. Hemingway biographer Carlos Baker describes The Garden of Eden as an experimental blend of the present and the past, with astonishing nuisance, based on Hemingway's memories of his first and second marriage. Hemingway had lived with two women in the summer of 1926, who - unlike in the novel - were both older than him. He wrote about this time in Paris - A Festival for Life :

“[...] we had already been infiltrated by another rich using the oldest trick there is. It is that an unmarried young woman becomes the temporary best friend of another young woman who is married, goes to live with the husband and wife and then unknowingly, innocently and unrelentingly sets out to marry the husband. [...] The husband has two attractive girls around when he has finished work. One is new and strange and if he has bad luck he gets to love them both. ”

“We had already been infiltrated by another empire with the oldest trick there is. That an unmarried young woman temporarily becomes the best friend of another young woman who is married, lives with her and her husband, and then, unconsciously, innocently and relentlessly, sets out to marry the husband. […] The husband now has two attractive girls in the house when he has finished work. One of them is new and strange, and if he's unlucky he has to love them both. "

Hemingway was 27 years old at the time. John Updike describes them as traumatic and writes that Hemingway would feel a regret and sadness about his infidelity like never again about something private. For him it was the autumn of the idyll that Hadley and he had created in Austria, Spain and Paris. Hemingway's innocence, which he retained into his fourth marriage, finally enabled him “to reach and unite from his study in Cuba through all the battles and gulps and the press and the mishaps into his youth on another continent to create mythical stuff from the knowledge that sex can be complicated ”. In The Garden of Eden and the also posthumously published Paris - A Festival for Life , to which The Garden of Eden can be read as a kind of sequel, Hemingway deals for the first time in his writing with the grief that the loss of a love means, what as Expression of his personal search for a way of conciliatory coping is understood. After Pauline Pfeiffer's death in 1951, Hemingway wrote to his publisher:

“The wave of remembering has finally risen so that it has broken over the jetty that I built to protext the open roadsted of my heart and I have the full sorrow of Pauline's death with all the harbor scum of what caused it. I loved her very much for many years and the hell with her faults. "

“The wave of memories has now soared that it broke over the breakwater that I built to protect the roadstead of my heart. And I still have the grief over Pauline's death with all the mud that caused it. I've loved her very much for many years and - damn it - with her mistakes too. "

reception

In the anthology Hemingways the Garden of Eden: Twenty-Five Years of Criticism , a collection of various essays and reviews on the book, The Garden of Eden is named as the most controversial literary work of Hemingway. John Updike, for example, writes that there are many reasons to mistrust the novel: its banal title, the devaluation by Hemingway's biographer Carlos Baker and the forty years of fishing in the dark since the first idea. Nevertheless, the book as it stands now is a miracle, a new look at the old magic that lags only a little behind the satisfaction that a finished book destined for printing brings.

Main character David Bourne as an internally vulnerable man is a curiosity. This time, instead of writing about a man of action or an injured man of feelings, Hemingway is writing about a weakling, a frustrated writer, passive in his dealings with women, notes Michiko Kakutani . He was a pitifully weak man whose attention-grabbing aphorisms about work and art served only as a defense of his mistakes. EL Doctorow finds this passivity interesting, but regrets that Hemingway does not examine it in detail except for its possible significance for the literary work. Writing does not rehabilitate David either. The story of the elephant was said to be poor Hemingway style, a hackneyed adaptation of the initiation rites theme, which, to its own disadvantage, was reminiscent of William Faulkner's short story The Bear . Kakutani also calls it "a weak imitation of Hemingway's best African stories".

Doctorow sees David Bourne as the younger literary brother of the impotent journalist Jake Barnes from Fiesta . However, David's passivity is not physical and therefore more difficult to recognize. He recalled the character of Robert Cohn, who suffered his public degradation by women in silence and was despised for it by Jake Barnes. The reason for the lifelessness of the novel lies in David's character, who rejects big game hunts, is completely subject to the power of the two women, faints from temptation and is unable to act when necessary. His inability to deal with the crisis in his own relationship does not match the self-confidence with which he deals with European waiters, housekeeping and hoteliers. Doctorow speculates that Hemingway may not have intended David Bourne to be the main character.

While Kakutani writes that Catherine looks like a boisterous, castrating man-hater and as if she were on the verge of losing her mind, Doctorow finds that Hemingway never wrote more profoundly and sensitively about a woman. Catherine is possibly the most impressive woman in Hemingway's work, more vivid and vivid than Pilar in Whom the Hour or Brett Ashley in Fiesta . A brilliant woman caught up in her vicarious participation in someone else's creativity. Doctorow describes it as the greatest achievement in the novel. Never before has there been a female character who dominates such a story from Hemingway. She alone is reason enough to read the book enthusiastically. Updike also writes that Catherine's transformation from a sexually docile Eva into a "biting destructive bitch" makes her Hemingway's most interesting heroine and, unlike the tortured Catherine Barkley in In Another Land, she does things instead of being done to her. Similar to Saul Bellow's untamed female figures, it is only the antagonism that makes them passionate and intoxicating.

Doctorow sees clear indications here that something very interesting is happening in the novel: an opening in Hemingway's awareness to compassion and a less defensive perspective on reality. This preparation of his own early material with less romance and literary bigotry and instead more truthfulness is proof that Hemingway was still developing. That he failed with The Garden of Eden does not matter in view of this. Catherine Bourne is the key to this development, a direct descendant of Margot Macomber and Frances Clyne (Fiesta) , a kind of woman Hemingway had previously only detested and condemned. But in Eden it had grown in order to encourage approaches to a feminist perspective in Hemingway. Perhaps Hemingway is now making his judgments more thoughtful.

Marita, however, does not get enough attention from the author, Doctorow also writes. There is no explanation for their willingness to force their way into a strange marriage and to offer their breakup. It remains colorless and mostly unclear. Updike also thinks that Marita's change from a hardened lesbian to the ideal companion who adores David's texts and his sex and only wants what he wants is incredible. Kakutani writes that Marita herself remains so insignificant as a sex object that she constantly seems to be on the verge of complete disappearance.

For them, Hemingway's familiar style of writing dwindles to mere mannerism. It is artificial and posed, the characters only sketchily outlined and the plot alternately static and abruptly melodramatic. Sometimes Hemingway sounds like he's parodying himself and sometimes like he's parodying Norman Mailer . Doctorow, on the other hand, writes that some passages show the strength of Hemingway's early work: the descriptions of when David Bourne catches a perch or when they swim out to sea in La Napoule. Catherine's progressive mental disorder, with its sudden relapses in affection and docility, brings out some of Hemingway's most biting dialogues, according to Updike, and some of The Garden of Eden are its best sides: how the elephant tramples into death, how Catherine falls in and out of madness, how David says his farewells in his heart.

The "round fragment" leaves the reader with a better sense of the author's humanity and basic - albeit complicated - mind than anything else published after his death. Updike, however, emphasizes the questionable nature of the posthumous publication of works that the author did not want to publish during his lifetime. With Hemingway in particular, these publications would tend to draw attention to his psychopathology rather than his talent. Between the editor's note that "some cuts" had been made and the large size of the original manuscripts and the small size of the publication, Updike noted a discrepancy that Doctorow calls dishonest. Updike quotes from a letter from Hemingway:

“Writing that I do not wish to publish, you have no right to publish. I would no more do a thing like that to you than I would cheat a man at cards or rifle his desk or wastebasket or read his personal letters. "

“You have no right to publish anything that I write that I don't want to publish. I wouldn't do that to you any more than I would cheat a man at card games, search his table or wastebasket, or read his letters. "

Doctorow criticizes the published version as a sparse, if not scanty novel. But he also defends the work of the lecturer, who was only able to highlight Hemingway's known strengths, while Hemingway himself perhaps wanted to overcome them. Updike argues similarly: The solution that the editors had chosen and that confirmed Hemingway's old machinations is a pitiful solution compared with the dark, gentle force at the beginning of the novel, but perhaps the only one available to them. Updike praises Tom Jenks' work, this “leftover” never gives the reader the feeling - unlike Hemingway in his work on it - that he is lost in the story.

Conversely, with a view to the genesis of the published version, Kakutani doubts to what extent Hemingway is responsible for the poor quality. Doctorow writes that the Garden of Eden could not be what Hemingway envisioned at its most ambitious moments, given his fifteen year struggle with this book. He recognizes a very legible story, which, however, probably does not correspond to Hemingway's ideas.

For Kakutani, The Garden of Eden is a weak, expendable book. She observes Hemingway's failure to turn his characters into sympathetic or recognizable complex human beings. They are all careless narcissists and it is impossible to care about them. Doctorow scoffs that the disappointed reader must wonder whether the real achievement of Hemingway's early works might not have been that of a traveler teaching provincial American readers what foods to order, what drinks to like, and how to deal with European servants. The reader must assume that this most astute of all writers made an atypical mistake in finding no war that would destroy the lovers and no other fight besides their sex that could threaten their survival. The tone of solemn, solemn self-indulgence increases to an enormity that the 70,000 words cannot justify.

Updike, however, writes that The Garden of Eden would not just add another volume to the canon, but would allow a new understanding of Hemingway's sensibility. He confronts sexual intimacy, marriage and human andrognyia with a cautious but thorough tenderness that means courage for a man who is so content with masculine values ​​and public gestures. He regrets, however, that Hemingway's inhibitions or those of the post-war period would have prevented more accuracy regarding Catherine's and David's play with their gender and sexual identity. He writes about Hemingway: “He is able to express sexual ambivalence, to touch his feminine side, the seductiveness from which only his writing was safe for so long and a free will from him, who was hiding himself behind assertiveness and expertise To conjure up women - if only to then banish him. "

filming

In 2008, a Spanish-American film adaptation by director John Irvin and screenwriter James Scott Linville premiered at the Rome International Film Festival. Since then it has only appeared in a few countries. The film is characterized as a drama and thriller, with Jack Huston as David Bourne, Mena Suvari as Catherine and Caterina Murino as Marita. He was panned by critics.

literature

expenditure

  • Ernest Hemingway: The Garden of Eden . Translated from the English by Werner Schmitz. Rowohlt, Reinbek near Hamburg 1987, ISBN 3-498-02878-2 .
  • Ernest Hemingway: The Garden of Eden . Translated from the English by Werner Schmitz. Aufbau-Verlag, Berlin, Weimar 1989, ISBN 3-351-01746-4 .
  • Ernest Hemingway: The Garden of Eden . Translated from the English by Werner Schmitz. rororo, Reinbek near Hamburg 1999, ISBN 3-499-22606-5 .

Secondary literature

  • Carlos Baker: Ernest Hemingway. The writer and his work . Translated from the English by Helmut Hirsch. Rowohlt 1967.
  • Rose Marie Burwell: Hemingway: The Postwar Years and the Posthumous Novels . Cambridge University Press 2008, ISBN 978-0-521-56563-9 .
  • Ernest Hemingway: Paris, a festival for life . Translated from the English by Werner Schmitz. rororo 2012, ISBN 978-3-499-22702-8 .
  • Mark Spilka: Hemingway's Quarrel with Androgyny . University of Nebraska Press 1990, ISBN 0-8032-4127-5 .

See also

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ a b c d e f g The Garden of Eden Analysis at eNotes.com (English). Retrieved March 16, 2016.
  2. ↑ The Garden of Eden on DNB .de . Retrieved March 24, 2016.
  3. ^ Rose Marie Burwell: Hemingway: The Postwar Years and the Posthumous Novels . Cambridge University Press 1996, pp. 95 f. ( On Google Books .)
  4. ^ A b Rose Marie Burwell: Hemingway: The Postwar Years and the Posthumous Novels . Cambridge University Press 1996, p. 98.
  5. ↑ a b c d e Edwin McDowell: New Hemingway Novel To Be Published in May on NYTimes .com (English). Retrieved March 17, 2016.
  6. ↑ Megan Floyd Desnoyers: Ernest Hemingway: A Storyteller's Legacy on jfklibrary .org (English). Retrieved March 17, 2016.
  7. ^ A b David Wyatt: Hemingway, Style, and the Art of Emotion . Cambridge University Press 2015, p. 197. ( On Google Books .)
  8. ↑ a b c d e f g h Michiko Kakutani : Books of the Times on NYTimes.com (English). Retrieved March 17, 2016.
  9. ↑ Pamela A. Boker, Paul Robinson: Grief Taboo in American Literature . New York University Press 1997, p. 256. ( On Google Books .)
  10. ↑ Susan M. Seitz: The posthumous editing of Ernest Hemingway's fiction (abstract) on UMass .edu (English). Retrieved March 17, 2016.
  11. ↑ Mark Spilka: Hemingway's Quarrel with Androgyny . University of Nebraska Press 1990, p. 3. ( On Google Books .)
  12. ↑ a b c d e f g h i j k E. L. Doctorow : Braver Than We Thought on NYTimes.com (English). Retrieved March 17, 2016.
  13. ↑ The Garden of Eden in the Literary Encyclopedia (English). Retrieved March 16, 2016.
  14. ^ Carlos Baker : Hemingway, the Writer as Artist . Princeton University Press 1972, footnote 15, p. 386. ( On Google Books .)
  15. ↑ a b c d e f g h i j k John Updike : A Review - originally for the New Yorker - on tomjenks.com (English). Retrieved March 19, 2016.
  16. ↑ Pamela A. Boker, Paul Robinson: Grief Taboo in American Literature. New York University Press 1997, p. 214.
  17. ↑ Pamela A. Boker, Paul Robinson: Grief Taboo in American Literature . New York University Press 1997, p. 266.
  18. ↑ David Wyatt: Hemingway, Style, and the Art of Emotion . Cambridge University Press 2015, p. 181.
  19. ↑ Suzanne Del Gizzo, Frederic J. Svoboda: Hemingway's The Garden of Eden (Abstract) on ResearchGate .net (English). Retrieved March 19, 2016.
  20. ↑ Film adaptation The Garden of Eden (2008) , Release Info on IMDb .com (English). Retrieved March 20, 2016.
  21. ↑ Film adaptation The Garden of Eden (2008) on IMDb.com (English). Retrieved March 20, 2016.
  22. ↑ Film adaptation The Garden of Eden (2010) on RottenTomatoes .com (English). Retrieved March 20, 2016.