# I have broken this post into parts.
*Updated. First posted Dec. 12, 11:36 pm.
The last two novels of his that I read were The Garden of Eden* and A Farewell to Arms. Very similar size books, Eden 247 pages, Farewell 332. Compact like his signature style. I have only my second copy of Eden, I date my books, and I began re-reading Eden November 30, 2024; Farewell, also my second copy, October 14, 2025. Before starting this second copy of Eden I had been studying medicine with my daughter-in-law for about five months. The first note in my Moleskine, for USMLE, December 3, '24, was not on medicine. It reads "Garden of Eden" and the date--"mirrors". The second entry in Moleskine, Dec. 8, '24: "Haya: the modest one, the one who blushes." The third, Dec. 13 "Please let's be slow and slow and slow (169)", the page. Then my USMLE notes from then on.
Earnest was the son of a physician; he was then a reporter for the Toronto Star. Spare style, newspaper reporters; spare style (don't I know!) doctors. Both strive to be detached from the subjects they cover. Earnest clearly absorbed medicine, and the medical style of communication via osmosis from his father. Unemotional, doctors; newspaper reporters, too. Don't get involved emotionally with your patients or your subjects. There is a cruelty in emotional detachment, a lack of empathy, maybe a suppression of emotion and empathy.
Both medicine and news reporting are fact-based. Just the facts, related as unemotionally as possible, colorful modifying adjectives and adverbs "not professional". Fact-obsessed writing bowdlerizes horror. It's "realistic."
Hemingway was a brave man, a brave writer. "Braver Than We Thought" was E.L. Doctorow's review title of Garden. His novels are based on his experience, so we know quite a bit about the scenes and the characters he writes, We know Catherine Barkley (Farewell) was based on Agnes von Kurowsky. I don't know who Catherine Bourne (Eden) (en passant: two women characters, the male protagonists' lovers, written sixteen years apart, both named Catherine, both with the same initials) was based on.
But there are limits to Hem's Way of realism. AvK was American, not English and the liberties taken in Farewell are extensive. AvK wrote Hem a Dear John letter, she did not die in child birth with their baby boy in Italy. Hem was not at Caporetto, He wrote about Caporetto and that writing is called "one of the greatest moments in literary history." I did not find it so. It was nothing like Tolstoy's description of the Battle of Borodino, which on my first reading I recognized as nonpareil. I would not term Farewell a "beautiful" book as the New York Times reviewer did in 1929. The ending is the most painful that I have ever read in any novel and it is not a beautiful pain. It was an empty pain without meaning. It also never happened, nothing close to the ending happened to Hemingway in Italy in World War I.
Farewell was written in the first person by Hemingway when he was thirty, based on his experiences when he was 19. Eden is written in the omniscient third person observer and was begun in 1946 when Hemingway was 47. Only "Book One" was complete when the manuscript was delivered to his editor by Mary in 1961 after Earnest's suicide. As I said, I don't know who Garden is based on.
The first sentence in Farewell: "In the late summer of that year we lived in a house in a village..." emphasis added. The first sentence in Eden: "They were living at the Grau du Roi then..."
There were limits to Hemingway's bravery. Eden is decadent, its sexual themes conflicted jarringly with Hemingway's reputation. Hemingway evidently wanted some distance from Eden's David Bourne. Bourne: Born? Born again as a man made a woman by his woman?
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*Charles Scribner, Jr, Hemingway's editor, put Eden together as published according to his long work with Hemingway and his own literary tendencies. His efforts have been criticized.