I don't remember, or if I ever knew, what years Ernest Hemingway was working on The Garden of Eden. It was posthumously published but that doesn't mean anything. According to Charles Scribner, Jr. Hemingway "was working on a number of writing projects" when he blew his brains out. Three of them, Islands In The Stream, True At First Light and this one were published as full-length books after his death. He had titled The Garden of Eden. Scribner writes that "only the second part was incomplete". There are four Books. Book One is only 31 pages long. Book Two, 40 pages. Three is 130 and Four, 38. What the "second part" consists of, I don't know. Beside the point, this is all beside the point.

Since I do not know when he last wrote the last sentence of The Garden of Eden I don't know if it was proximate to his suicide. I do know that it is the darkest book he ever wrote. Book One in particular shows Hemingway's writing ability at its most exquisitely precise. I have written previously that I had to get a second copy because I had so heavily underlined, etc. my original copy (that and I couldn't find the first one). In my opinion, at least "the first part" has no equal in Hemingway's oeuvre. It is impossible that "the first part", Book One and whatever else, was written after Hemingway concluded he could not write any longer. On first reading years ago I thought that Hemingway didn't want the manuscript published. The sexual reversal is so at odds with his man's-man image that I imagined it was experimental and embarrassed him. If that is anywhere near the truth then Charles Scribner, Jr. deserves his own Nobel Prize for publishing this bravest of Hemingway's writing known to me.