No, I can recommend it, I take back saying I can't recommend it, I do recommend it. The first thing I wrote the first time I got up last night was THIS IS NOT A STORY. It transcends the story. Hemingway transcends human writing. What is Garden, then? It is a miracle. It is the work of the bravest writer I know, it is the most multi-layered, profound, best written, overall the greatest book ever written aside from the King James Bible. That is what it is. If I were to answer my question the way a professor answered a student's question, what is War & Peace about, It's about Russia, I would answer, The Garden of Eden is about Time. Not all. A lot. Time is a major theme. There are other major themes. But, Time would be my answer to what is Garden about. I finished the book hurriedly on Schadenfreude Saturday, re-read the underlined parts during five hours of down time at a car repair shop on Sunday, underlined more, wrote more in a yellow legal pad and when I got done as much of the book was underlined as not. It reminded me of reading a lengthy court opinion, dense with meaning, meaning nested in other meaning, meaning in the white spaces between words as well as in the black typed words. You can't skip a word in this book. During first reading I found myself, as I do with deep court opinions or with science texts, encountering speed bumps. I would slow down at certain words, underline, and read on.
Hemingway compresses time in Chapter One. He manipulates time throughout the book, time is malleable, it is not hard and fixed and in Chapter One he compresses time. It's over. The book is over after 15 pages of writing. The beginning is the end. Hemingway then elongates time in the rest of the book, loops it back on itself. Time is bendable, twistable--relative.
The first speed bump was "Catherine." Come on, man. Catherine Barkley, A Farewell to Arms. Come on, man, you should retire names like they do with destructive hurricanes. Hemingway gives the age of Catherine (Hill) Bourne precisely as twenty-one. That was the second speed bump. Hemingway does not give the age of either of the other protagonists, David Bourne and Marita, his immediate next wife. Marita does not even get a maiden surname. David is only a "young man," Marita a "young woman." Hemingway gives Catherine's age precisely once. I had to loop back after subsequent references to Catherine as "the girl," Didn't he give her age? Yes, here it is, twenty-one. Twenty-one? Too young, Hemingway. Too young for so worldly wise a woman, so sexually confident, as Catherine Hill Bourne. Demerit Hemingway. But maybe...It was deliberate. Hemingway did not just happen to give Catherine an impossibly young age, he made Catherine twenty-one deliberately. Why? He compressed time in Catherine. He gave Catherine all of the experiences of an older woman and compressed them into twenty-one years.
With "Catherine" I knew that there were intentional double entendres even in the names of the characters, in details like age. Last night in the dark I became so preoccupied with this book that I forgot how I sleep. Is it on the right side or the left side? I spent so much time awake, thinking, flat on my back that this morning the back of my heels were sore. I thought hard about the names and sprang out of bed again--Bourne. Bourne~Born~Borne~Burn.
Catherine Barkley, Farewell-- “goodbye Catherine [Hill Bourne] goodbye my lovely girl goodbye and good luck and goodbye,” fair well. Catherine Barkley died with her stillborn baby. The name Catherine is reborn in Garden. Catherine Hill takes her husband’s name, she bears his name, becomes a Bourne, is born again at age twenty-one as Catherine Bourne. Twenty-one is the traditional age of majority. One is born as an adult at twenty-one. Catherine is twenty-one throughout Garden. Everything happens when she is twenty-one.
David and Catherine do not move at the same speed. Catherine is behind David in “real” time, linear time, “Oh what a wonderful fish! Wait for me! Wait for me!. "Don’t wait for me. I’m sorry I made you wait so long for breakfast,” “I’m sorry to be late,” “don’t wait for lunch.” Linear time is slowed for the 232 pages after Chapter One; time as experienced is at a dazed speed. There is a lot of sleeping in Garden, more so by Catherine. Near the end of the book she is so tired that she sleeps for the better part of the day. But Catherine is always ahead of David in next moves. “Are we going to Africa?,” he asks. “What was it that she said about destruction?” “What did you say?” “What?” Catherine tells David that she had to do the “dark magic” because “It’s the only way to slow things.” David Bourne, “everything’s going too fast,” believes that the pace of change is so great that they will “burn out.” Five pages from the end of the book David tells Marita “We’ve been burned out. Crazy woman burned out the Bournes. Marita asks, “Are we the Bournes?” David answers, “Sure. We’re the Bournes.”
Is Catherine crazy? Yes. Hemingway mentions Van Gogh twice in the first nine pages and then never again. She gets certifiably loony on absinthe, as Van Gogh did, twice early in the book. Charles Scribner, Jr. wrote in his preface that Catherine was "incurably envious" of David's writing. She turns destructive of everything David wrote. That's near enough to crazy. E. L. Doctorow wrote in his review in 1986 that Catherine was the major accomplishment of Hemingway in the book. I don't think Hemingway intended to write Catherine as 100% nuts. For one thing David goes along with everything Catherine suggests except the burning of his stories. "You like it," he has David say of the "dark magic" and of his changed appearance. She is deliberate and always a step or two ahead of David in her calculating but he approves of all her moves, even offers to drive her to Paris after she has destroyed his stories to make sure she gets there safe. Catherine seems viciously envious of the reviews of David's stories and of the money they make but David, as Hemingway did in "real" life, already believed that reviews and money from writing are corrupting and he tells Marita that Catherine's offer to pay him double what the stories are "appraised" at is more than fair.
Doctorow also wrote that David Bourne is a strangely passive male lead for Ernest Hemingway. The immediately preceding is compelling support for Doctorow. However, Doctorow and Scribner miss the point, I think. Hemingway's major purpose in effecting the physical transfiguration of Catherine and David is, I think, to render meaningless talk about them as separate beings, and as separate from him, Hemingway; that if Catherine is crazy or incurably envious or the Alpha in a Female Led Relationship then David is crazy and envious and also the Alpha, and Hemingway is. Let's not forget who the creator is here! Hemingway made these characters, made them in His image. Three into one. I think therefore that it is a mistake to read this book as one would a normal story with a set of atomized characters written in by a separate and distinct uber author. It was the author's intent to fuse the three into one, to make each undefinable, meaningless, without the others. To me, these two halves, or three thirds, deal with time differently. David/Hemingway consults his watch on whether to wake Catherine from getting too much sun. David/Hemmingway does not oversleep. David/Hemingway is not late for meals. Both David and Hemingway get up and write. Catherine oversleeps, keeps her better half waiting but is ahead of David in planning moves in the future to experience time. Sixteen pages from the end of the book Marita says,
“I didn’t know it was a battle when I came.”
David replies, “Neither did I.”
Marita: “With you it’s really only you against time.”
David: “Not the time that’s Catherine’s.”
Marita: “Only because her time is different. She’s panicked by it. You said tonight that all of today was only hurry. That wasn’t true but it was perceptive. And you won so well over time for so long.”
The 20th century in which Hemingway lived all but one year of his life was the century of Einstein. The Theory of Relativity. Time doing strange things. Slowing down the faster we go, looping back on itself, an eternal loop; Catherine’s letter to David, “I’ll be back;” wormholes to time past, recovered time, David’s ability to remember precisely the sentences he wrote in the stories Catherine Bourne burned, the stories burned by Bourne reborn by Bourne; time inverted. Remembrance of Things Past. Proust. Much on Hemingway’s mind while writing Garden. “Inversion,” Proust’s archaic word for another archaic word,“perversion,” the homosexual sex, Proust was gay, Hemingway? No evidence he ever had gay sex, the inverted sexuality in Garden role-playing by David Bourne, the Hemingway character, by Catherine, also the Hemingway character, they are one, David and Catherine are one, David and Catherine and Hemingway are one; sexual fantasy, a dream by the “real” Hemingway. Fantasy. The Garden of Earthly Delights. Bosch. Also a major influence on Hemingway’s writing in The Garden of Eden. Fantastical “perverted” sex in Bosch. Interracial sex in Bosch. Racial transference of Catherine, “your African girl,” sexual transference of David and Catherine. Strange things happen in a world where Time does strange things, that is, in the “real” world. David and Catherine are the double helix, the strands looping away from each other, looping back, colliding, fusing, splitting again. They are the atom, releasing tremendous heat and light when split, releasing even more when fused together under unbearable pressure. Unbearable—not able to be borne. “I am become Death, destroyer of Worlds.” Catherine, “I will destroy you.” Destruction and creation, destruction in creation, Let there be Light and heat and a tremendous explosion; death in birth, death and rebirth, explosion and collapse, expansion and contraction, an endless loop a book without end world without end amen.
Hemingway compresses time in Chapter One. He manipulates time throughout the book, time is malleable, it is not hard and fixed and in Chapter One he compresses time. It's over. The book is over after 15 pages of writing. The beginning is the end. Hemingway then elongates time in the rest of the book, loops it back on itself. Time is bendable, twistable--relative.
The first speed bump was "Catherine." Come on, man. Catherine Barkley, A Farewell to Arms. Come on, man, you should retire names like they do with destructive hurricanes. Hemingway gives the age of Catherine (Hill) Bourne precisely as twenty-one. That was the second speed bump. Hemingway does not give the age of either of the other protagonists, David Bourne and Marita, his immediate next wife. Marita does not even get a maiden surname. David is only a "young man," Marita a "young woman." Hemingway gives Catherine's age precisely once. I had to loop back after subsequent references to Catherine as "the girl," Didn't he give her age? Yes, here it is, twenty-one. Twenty-one? Too young, Hemingway. Too young for so worldly wise a woman, so sexually confident, as Catherine Hill Bourne. Demerit Hemingway. But maybe...It was deliberate. Hemingway did not just happen to give Catherine an impossibly young age, he made Catherine twenty-one deliberately. Why? He compressed time in Catherine. He gave Catherine all of the experiences of an older woman and compressed them into twenty-one years.
With "Catherine" I knew that there were intentional double entendres even in the names of the characters, in details like age. Last night in the dark I became so preoccupied with this book that I forgot how I sleep. Is it on the right side or the left side? I spent so much time awake, thinking, flat on my back that this morning the back of my heels were sore. I thought hard about the names and sprang out of bed again--Bourne. Bourne~Born~Borne~Burn.
Catherine Barkley, Farewell-- “goodbye Catherine [Hill Bourne] goodbye my lovely girl goodbye and good luck and goodbye,” fair well. Catherine Barkley died with her stillborn baby. The name Catherine is reborn in Garden. Catherine Hill takes her husband’s name, she bears his name, becomes a Bourne, is born again at age twenty-one as Catherine Bourne. Twenty-one is the traditional age of majority. One is born as an adult at twenty-one. Catherine is twenty-one throughout Garden. Everything happens when she is twenty-one.
David and Catherine do not move at the same speed. Catherine is behind David in “real” time, linear time, “Oh what a wonderful fish! Wait for me! Wait for me!. "Don’t wait for me. I’m sorry I made you wait so long for breakfast,” “I’m sorry to be late,” “don’t wait for lunch.” Linear time is slowed for the 232 pages after Chapter One; time as experienced is at a dazed speed. There is a lot of sleeping in Garden, more so by Catherine. Near the end of the book she is so tired that she sleeps for the better part of the day. But Catherine is always ahead of David in next moves. “Are we going to Africa?,” he asks. “What was it that she said about destruction?” “What did you say?” “What?” Catherine tells David that she had to do the “dark magic” because “It’s the only way to slow things.” David Bourne, “everything’s going too fast,” believes that the pace of change is so great that they will “burn out.” Five pages from the end of the book David tells Marita “We’ve been burned out. Crazy woman burned out the Bournes. Marita asks, “Are we the Bournes?” David answers, “Sure. We’re the Bournes.”
Is Catherine crazy? Yes. Hemingway mentions Van Gogh twice in the first nine pages and then never again. She gets certifiably loony on absinthe, as Van Gogh did, twice early in the book. Charles Scribner, Jr. wrote in his preface that Catherine was "incurably envious" of David's writing. She turns destructive of everything David wrote. That's near enough to crazy. E. L. Doctorow wrote in his review in 1986 that Catherine was the major accomplishment of Hemingway in the book. I don't think Hemingway intended to write Catherine as 100% nuts. For one thing David goes along with everything Catherine suggests except the burning of his stories. "You like it," he has David say of the "dark magic" and of his changed appearance. She is deliberate and always a step or two ahead of David in her calculating but he approves of all her moves, even offers to drive her to Paris after she has destroyed his stories to make sure she gets there safe. Catherine seems viciously envious of the reviews of David's stories and of the money they make but David, as Hemingway did in "real" life, already believed that reviews and money from writing are corrupting and he tells Marita that Catherine's offer to pay him double what the stories are "appraised" at is more than fair.
Doctorow also wrote that David Bourne is a strangely passive male lead for Ernest Hemingway. The immediately preceding is compelling support for Doctorow. However, Doctorow and Scribner miss the point, I think. Hemingway's major purpose in effecting the physical transfiguration of Catherine and David is, I think, to render meaningless talk about them as separate beings, and as separate from him, Hemingway; that if Catherine is crazy or incurably envious or the Alpha in a Female Led Relationship then David is crazy and envious and also the Alpha, and Hemingway is. Let's not forget who the creator is here! Hemingway made these characters, made them in His image. Three into one. I think therefore that it is a mistake to read this book as one would a normal story with a set of atomized characters written in by a separate and distinct uber author. It was the author's intent to fuse the three into one, to make each undefinable, meaningless, without the others. To me, these two halves, or three thirds, deal with time differently. David/Hemingway consults his watch on whether to wake Catherine from getting too much sun. David/Hemmingway does not oversleep. David/Hemingway is not late for meals. Both David and Hemingway get up and write. Catherine oversleeps, keeps her better half waiting but is ahead of David in planning moves in the future to experience time. Sixteen pages from the end of the book Marita says,
“I didn’t know it was a battle when I came.”
David replies, “Neither did I.”
Marita: “With you it’s really only you against time.”
David: “Not the time that’s Catherine’s.”
Marita: “Only because her time is different. She’s panicked by it. You said tonight that all of today was only hurry. That wasn’t true but it was perceptive. And you won so well over time for so long.”
The 20th century in which Hemingway lived all but one year of his life was the century of Einstein. The Theory of Relativity. Time doing strange things. Slowing down the faster we go, looping back on itself, an eternal loop; Catherine’s letter to David, “I’ll be back;” wormholes to time past, recovered time, David’s ability to remember precisely the sentences he wrote in the stories Catherine Bourne burned, the stories burned by Bourne reborn by Bourne; time inverted. Remembrance of Things Past. Proust. Much on Hemingway’s mind while writing Garden. “Inversion,” Proust’s archaic word for another archaic word,“perversion,” the homosexual sex, Proust was gay, Hemingway? No evidence he ever had gay sex, the inverted sexuality in Garden role-playing by David Bourne, the Hemingway character, by Catherine, also the Hemingway character, they are one, David and Catherine are one, David and Catherine and Hemingway are one; sexual fantasy, a dream by the “real” Hemingway. Fantasy. The Garden of Earthly Delights. Bosch. Also a major influence on Hemingway’s writing in The Garden of Eden. Fantastical “perverted” sex in Bosch. Interracial sex in Bosch. Racial transference of Catherine, “your African girl,” sexual transference of David and Catherine. Strange things happen in a world where Time does strange things, that is, in the “real” world. David and Catherine are the double helix, the strands looping away from each other, looping back, colliding, fusing, splitting again. They are the atom, releasing tremendous heat and light when split, releasing even more when fused together under unbearable pressure. Unbearable—not able to be borne. “I am become Death, destroyer of Worlds.” Catherine, “I will destroy you.” Destruction and creation, destruction in creation, Let there be Light and heat and a tremendous explosion; death in birth, death and rebirth, explosion and collapse, expansion and contraction, an endless loop a book without end world without end amen.
