A young writer, two women, and the summer that unmade a marriage — Hemingway's strangest and most vulnerable novel.
David Bourne has just published his first novel and is honeymooning on the Côte d'Azur with Catherine when she begins an experiment in identity and desire that gradually draws in a third person — Marita — and slowly destroys what David has built, including the new book he is writing each morning. Cut from Hemingway's 200,000-word manuscript by editor Tom Jenks, it is the book that made critics re-read everything: nobody suspected the author of The Sun Also Rises of being this absorbed by ambiguity of gender, identity, and artistic possession. Controversial, incomplete, and genuinely surprising.
He started it in 1946 and never stopped — and never finished. Over fifteen years the manuscript swelled past two hundred thousand words: a honeymoon novel set on the Côte d'Azur and the Spanish coast in the twenties, in which a young writer named David Bourne and his wife Catherine begin a private game with haircuts, sunburn, and exchanged roles that gets less like a game with every chapter. It sat in the vault beside the other unfinished projects when he died in 1961.
Scribner published it in 1986, a quarter-century later, in a version editor Tom Jenks had cut by roughly two-thirds — an entire second couple and a painting subplot removed to free the central triangle of David, Catherine, and Marita. The editing remains genuinely controversial; scholars who have read the manuscript argue about whether the published book is a rescue or an amputation.
Either way, it detonated the received idea of Hemingway. The writer whose brand was hairy-chested certainty had spent his last decades circling androgyny, exchanged identities, and the danger of a marriage becoming an experiment — and an entire generation of Hemingway criticism was rebuilt around this book. The safari story David writes inside the novel is late Hemingway at full power; the rest is the most interesting argument on his shelf.
David Bourne, a young American novelist with two well-reviewed books, honeymoons with his new wife Catherine along the Mediterranean — the fishing port of Le Grau-du-Roi, then Spain, then the Côte d'Azur. Catherine, rich, brilliant, and increasingly unmoored, initiates the games that give the novel its scandal and its subject: matching haircuts, deepening identical tans, exchanged roles in the dark — experiments in erasing the line between husband and wife that begin as play and stop being play. At an Riviera café they meet Marita, a young woman who falls in love with both of them; Catherine, half deliberately, installs her in their lives.
The triangle tightens around David's writing. Catherine wants him working on the 'narrative' — the chronicle of their honeymoon, which is to say of her — and burns with jealousy of the other thing he keeps returning to: a story of his boyhood in Africa, an elephant hunt with his father, the best writing of his life. The tug-of-war between the two women, and between the two kinds of writing, carries the book to its crisis.
Catherine Bourne commits the novel's unforgivable act: while David is away from the hotel, she burns his African stories — the manuscripts, and the press clippings of his career with them — then, lucid and lost at once, departs for Paris promising to pay for what she destroyed. David remains with Marita, convinced the stories are gone the way an amputated hand is gone. The published version ends on a grace note scholars still argue over: sitting down to try, David finds the elephant story returning to him sentence by sentence, intact and even improved — an Eden, the ending suggests, that can be re-entered only through the work.
The man who wrote Jake Barnes's stoic restraint also wrote a novel whose central subject is gender fluidity and erotic obsession. The Garden of Eden is the most important correction to received Hemingway.
David's struggle to protect his African stories from what is happening in his marriage — the manuscript as the thing that cannot be sacrificed even as everything else is — is the most directly Hemingway has written about the cost of the work.
The café tables, the haircutting scene, the beach — the Mediterranean setting is rendered with the same sensory precision as his Paris or Spain, and feels like a genuinely different country from either.
Depicts
The JFK Library's account has aspects of Mary's personality and appearance reflected in the novel's composite characters and in some of its details. Composite is the operative word: no character in the book is Mary Welsh Hemingway, and the library says the same of her presence in Hemingway's other postwar work, which it calls more subtle than her direct appearance as Miss Mary.
Depicts
The JFK Library names Catherine and Marita as later composite characters through which facets of the Hemingway–Pfeiffer marriage are refracted; it says the same of Helen in "The Snows of Kilimanjaro". What the source puts in the novel is the marriage, not Pauline herself. A second thread runs alongside it: the friendship Pauline formed with Mary Welsh at the Finca Vigía, where Pauline had come to nurse her son Patrick through an illness, which the library also counts among the material behind the composites.
1946
Hemingway begins the honeymoon novel and works at it for fifteen years, the manuscript swelling past two hundred thousand words, without ever finishing.
1961
He dies with the manuscript in the vault beside his other unfinished projects.
1986
Scribner publishes a version that editor Tom Jenks has cut by roughly two-thirds to free the central triangle; the editing remains controversial.
The memoir of the same apprentice years David inhabits here — fact and fiction of the same young writer.
Read our take
The novel David might have written — and whose hero couldn't be further from Garden's David Bourne.
Read our take
The African stories David is writing within the novel point back to Nick Adams and where the method began.
Read our take
The other late posthumous work — Africa as the place that escapes the damage elsewhere.
Read our takeErnest Hemingway. He worked on it from 1946 until his death in 1961 and never finished it; Scribner published a version in 1986.
David Bourne, a young writer, honeymoons on the Côte d'Azur with Catherine, whose experiment in identity and desire gradually draws in a third person, Marita, and unsettles the marriage and the book David is writing each morning.
Nobody suspected the author of The Sun Also Rises of being this absorbed by the ambiguity of gender, identity, and artistic possession. It is the most radical correction to the received portrait of Hemingway.
Yes, heavily. Editor Tom Jenks cut a manuscript of roughly 200,000 words to about 70,000 for the 1986 edition — a decision scholars still argue over.
No. It is a posthumous novel, published in 1986, twenty-five years after his death.
