THE PENNSYLVANIA STATE UNIVERSITY SCHREYER HONORS COLLEGE DIVISION of ARTS and HUMANITIES REFLECTIONS of the FATHER Mirroring In

Home , A Moveable Feast, Hadley Richardson, Indian Camp, Mirror Image (novel), My Old Man (short story), The Nick Adams Stories

THE PENNSYLVANIA STATE UNIVERSITY SCHREYER HONORS COLLEGE

DIVISION OF ARTS AND HUMANITIES

REFLECTIONS OF THE FATHER Mirroring in Hemingway’s Garden of Eden

KRISTIN DANELLA Spring 2012

A thesis submitted in partial fulfillment of the requirements for a baccalaureate degree in English with honors in Letters, Arts, and Sciences

Reviewed and approved* by the following:

Dr. Linda Miller Professor of English Thesis Supervisor

Dr. Ellen Knodt Professor of English Honors Adviser

* Signatures are on file in the Schreyer Honors College Abstract

Garden of Eden, one of Ernest Hemingway’s posthumous novels, concentrates a tremendous amount of autobiographical material into one work. Hemingway always strived to

“get the actual feel of things” into his writing. In Garden of Eden, Hemingway uses both physical mirror scenes where his protagonists gaze into their own reflections, and mirrored stories, such as “African Story,” which parallels “Indian Camp,” and “My Old Man,” to analyze his artistic identity, his own family relations, and ultimately, his role as a son.

My thesis purports to discuss Garden of Eden in three distinct chapters. The first chapter looks at several of David and Catherine’s many scenes where they look into their own reflection in the mirror. These physical mirror scenes in Garden of Eden shed light on Catherine’s lack of artistic identity, and David’s newly found identity that he achieves through his writing. The second chapter discusses how Catherine’s struggle for power causes David to seek refuge in his short stories, which ultimately forces Catherine to destroy his manuscripts. Catherine’s actions and personality mirrors Mrs. Adams’s (a stand-in for Hemingway’s mother) actions in

Hemingway’s early Nick Adams stories. The second chapter looks at Hemingway’s relations with his own parents and how this is reflected in Garden of Eden. Finally, the third chapter is a close textual comparison of “African Story,” written into the text of this late novel, and two early

In Our Time short stories, “Indian Camp” and “My Old Man.”

Garden of Eden, although a controversial novel, is fascinating because it combines so many different aspects of Hemingway’s life as a writer, a husband, and a son into the story of

David and Catherine Bourne’s crumbling marriage. Ultimately, Garden of Eden is an affirmation of Hemingway’s vocation as a writer. Through writing, he not only discovers himself, but also redefines his relationship with his father.

Table of Contents

Introduction 1

Chapter 1: The Mirror and Artistic Identity 2

Chapter 2: Reflections of “The Doctor and The Doctor’s Wife” 13

Chapter 3: Discovering the Father through Short Stories 34

Works Cited 51

Acknowledgements

I would like to thank Dr. Linda Miller for all her guidance and astute criticism on this thesis, as well as for innumerable things from English 015 until now.

I would also like to thank Dr. Ellen Knodt for taking the time to meet with me throughout the year and for thoroughly reviewing this thesis.

iii

Introduction

For this project, I am using Garden of Eden as it was first published by Scribner in 1987.

I understand there is much controversy over the editing of this posthumous novel; however, I choose to discuss the novel in its published format rather than the manuscripts. Furthermore, all

Hemingway short stories that are discussed come from The Complete Short Stories of Ernest

Hemingway, Finca Vigia Edition, published by Scribner in 1987.

Chapter I

Hemingway’s preface to his memoir, A Moveable Feast, reads: “If the reader prefers, this book may be regarded as fiction. But there is always the chance that such a book of fiction may throw some light on what has been written as fact” (1). Hemingway often discussed his belief that writing fiction held more truth and value than did transcribing actual circumstances. Michael

Reynolds’s biography, Hemingway: The Paris Years, includes an excerpt in which Hemingway attests, “It is not un-natural that the best writers are liars” (18). Fiction freed Hemingway to write the truth as he felt it rather than the truth as he saw it with his eyes.

Writing became Hemingway’s ultimate method of discovering the truth about not only himself, and his craft, but also those whose lives helped shape his. Although we see Hemingway using autobiographical material in much, if not all, of his writing, his personal experiences are most crucial in the early Nick Adams stories and the final four narratives Hemingway worked on between the end of World War II and his suicide in 1961. These narratives, Garden of Eden, A

Moveable Feast, The African Book, and Islands in the Stream, all form what scholar Rose Marie

Burwell refers to as the “ur-text.” Her book, Hemingway: The Postwar Years and the

Posthumous Novels, argues that the four final narratives are best understood if read in entirety.

Burwell states, “In their totality, four narratives record Hemingway’s fifteen year search for a form and style that would express his reflexive vision of the artist” (1). Burwell sees “a discernible movement toward what we have come to call a postmodern narrative in these works” where “all of the writing is, at one level, about the cost of the creative process- to the artist and those whose lives are united with his” (2).

Burwell further discusses how these four works as a whole shed new light on

Hemingway’s “search for form” and together form a complete analysis of “the cost of the creative process.” However, one particular novel out of what Burwell refers to as Hemingway’s

“ur-text,” Garden of Eden, focuses most heavily on not only “the cost of the creative process- to the artist and those whose lives are united with his” but also on autobiographical materials that

Hemingway kept coming back to throughout his life: his relationships with his parents, particularly his father, the loss of his early manuscripts, and his struggle over balancing his personal relationships with the isolated life of a writer.

Similar to Hemingway’s belief that “a book of fiction may throw some light on what has been written as fact,” Hemingway explores truth and identity in Garden of Eden through mirroring scenes and parallel stories. Essentially, Garden of Eden is a novel of reflections.

Burwell argues that this novel is most valuable when placed in context with the other three parts of the ur-text, but I would argue that the novel as Tom Jenks edited it stands on its own.1 Garden of Eden, through the story of Catherine and David’s crumbling relationship, and the power that

David finds through writing “African Story,” a story with striking similarities to both “Indian

Camp” and “My Old Man,” comes full circle on reproducing recurring themes in Hemingway’s writing. 2 Garden of Eden essentially leads Hemingway into the African jungle where he finds an understanding of his father that the short stories of his entire career have led him towards.

Although Garden of Eden ultimately does culminate in David Bourne discovering his identity through the resurrection of his lost stories that center on his father, the novel also encompasses many recurrent themes in the Hemingway canon. Garden of Eden is an important analysis of Hemingway’s life as a writer, his family background, and his personal relationship with women. This novel, perhaps even more so than the memoir A Moveable Feast, projects a

1 In discussing the published version of Garden of Eden, Burwell writes, “In editing the manuscript for publication in 1986, Tom Jenks, working for Scribner’s, chose to end the novel with the rewriting of the African stories, suggesting that David Bourne has pulled affirmation out of ashes, and making his earlier quest for a fluid gender alignment that would cross-fertilize the creative imagination irrelevant. There is no manuscript evidence that Hemingway ever considered ending the novel at the point Jenks chose.” (98) 2 In the Preface to Hemingway, Burwell does note a chief similarity between “African Story” and “Indian Camp:” “David Bourne is a younger version of the writer in the longer work I discuss in this volume; and like Nick Adams in “Indian Camp,” he is coerced into a bloody ritual by a father whose approval he wants. (xii)

3 true reflection of these many different aspects of Hemingway’s life into one narrative. While A

Moveable Feast paints the story of Hemingway and Hadley Richardson living in Paris during

Hemingway’s early literary career, Garden of Eden almost seems to be a play on this same story, reflecting it backwards, similar to how our own mirror images are flipped. However, Garden of

Eden goes beyond the short time span of A Moveable Feast and manages to include the entirety of Hemingway’s personal and literary life.3

Because this novel does focus heavily on identity, it is first necessary to discuss, as

Burwell puts it, David’s struggle with “the cost of the creative process” before it is possible to argue that Garden of Eden allowed David to make peace with his father’s memory. In this novel,

Hemingway explores the cost of writing through repetitive mirror scenes which address artistic identity and how it ravages the Bourne’s marriage.

Garden of Eden includes over twenty scenes where David and Catherine Bourne look into mirrors or discuss mirrors. Scholar Robert Fleming argues in his book The Face in the

Mirror: Hemingway’s Writers that the mirrors in Garden of Eden symbolize “the cost of the creative process.” Fleming writes,

David seems to understand the price he is paying [for his art] when he repeatedly looks into the mirror as if attempting to detect signs of corruption in the glass….Hemingway’s repeated use of the face in the mirror as an objectification of the artist’s ethical dilemma is a powerful recurring symbol….Whatever Hemingway saw in the reflections of his own face, his fictional artists bear witness to the inadequacy of the mirror as accurate reflector of the inner nature of its subject” (11-12). In addition to relating the mirrors to David’s “artist’s ethical dilemma” Fleming further argues that Hemingway’s protagonists prove that the mirror can never truly reflect identity without causing disparity. This recurrent mirroring contrasts the characters’ actual reflected

3 Carl Eby acknowledges this broad focus of Garden of Eden in his article “Teaching Modernist Temporality in the Garden of Eden,” in which he writes, “Garden of Eden is a fascinating twelve-decker temporal sandwich- a sort of temporal palimpsest that reveals how a writer brings his entire life to his work. It reveals that multiple pasts and presents are ever in dialogue, each shaping and re-shaping the other” (120).

4 images opposed to what they wish was reflected. Both Catherine and David face different conflicts when they meet their own gaze in the mirror. David struggles to balance his artistic identity with his role as a husband, whereas Catherine confronts her lack of a defined creative self. 4 These identity crises are the primary cause for tension in the beginning of the novel and later lead to David’s eventual submersion into his short stories.

When Garden of Eden begins, the Bourne’s are newly married and have just begun their honeymoon. Although David is already a published novelist, Catherine is not an artist and her lack of creative ability plagues her. When discussing the Spanish landscape, she remarks to

David,

The whole way here I saw wonderful things to paint and I can’t paint at all and never could. But I know wonderful things to write and I can’t even write a letter that isn’t stupid. I never wanted to be a painter nor a writer until I came to this country. Now it’s just like being hungry all the time and there’s nothing you can ever do about it. (53)5 Catherine’s manipulation and struggle for power in the marriage stems from her frustration with her inability to express herself. Catherine’s statement that her thwarted artistic expression is “just like being hungry all the time and there’s nothing you can ever do about it” is similar to a

“hunger” recounted by Hemingway in A Moveable Feast (53). In the chapter “A False Spring,”

Hemingway describes “Standing there I wondered how much of what we had felt on the bridge was just hunger. I asked my wife and she said, ‘I don’t know Tatie. There are so many sorts of hunger....Memory is hunger’” (56-7). Later, Hemingway remarks,

It was a wonderful meal at Michaud’s after we got in; but when we had finished and there was no question of hunger any more the feeling that had been like hunger when we were on the bridge was still there when we caught the bus home. It was there when we came in

4 In The Face in the Mirror: Hemingway’s Writers, Robert Fleming writes of David’s struggle between his vocation and his role as a husband: “In Garden of Eden, Hemingway would return to explore more fully a theme he had employed before: the divided loyalty of the artist who is also a husband” (128). Fleming also writes, “Catherine’s habit of peering into mirrors complements David’s obsession with his reflected image. Not capable of producing art herself, Catherine nevertheless can emulate the self-absorption of the true artist” (139). 5 For this thesis, I am using the 1987 Scribner version of Garden of Eden.

the room and after we had gone to bed and made love in the dark, it was there. When I woke with the windows open and the moonlight on the roofs of the tall houses, it was there. (57)

In A Moveable Feast, this haunting hunger seems to be linked to Hemingway’s art for even after his physical and sexual appetites have been met, he still does not feel satisfied.

Throughout A Moveable Feast, Hemingway experiences the most contentment when he has finished writing. Therefore, Catherine’s complaint that her lack of being able to paint or write is like “being hungry all the time and there’s nothing you can do about it” alludes to this same dissatisfaction Hemingway himself often felt. However, Hemingway was able to assuage this yearning through writing whereas Catherine drives herself crazy because she has no outlet for her artistic energies.

Since Catherine cannot paint or write, she constantly changes her appearance in a desperate effort to make herself into a work of art. Catherine sharply feels her own lack of talent compared to her husband’s tremendous skill, and her status as simply his wife adds to her growing unhappiness. We witness her discontent when a waiter at lunch, seeing David read his reviews, asks, “Is Madame also a writer?” to which she curtly replies, “No, Madame is a housewife” (24).

In Catherine’s mirror scenes in Garden of Eden, we palpably feel how desperate she is to change herself into someone of more artistic worth. In one important mirror scene, after

Catherine has just coerced David into having his hair cut identically to hers, she sees her new appearance and “looked into the mirror as though she had never seen the girl she was looking at”

(81).6 She gazes at her new haircut and passionately exclaims, “I like it so much….too much”

6 Fleming analyzes this scene in The Face in the Mirror, “At first, Catherine’s self-examination in mirrors coincide with the physical changes she makes in her appearance. However, her sense of otherness from her reflection signals the onset of her psychological breakdown” (139-40).

(81). Although redesigning her physical appearance gives Catherine some momentary happiness and satisfaction she still is never completely fulfilled.

In addition to experimenting with her hair and skin color, Catherine also seeks to find satisfaction through reassigning gender roles during sexual intercourse. In one of the first bedroom scenes in the novel, Catherine says to David, at first speaking of her breasts, “They’re just my dowry….the new is my surprise. Feel. No leave them. They’ll be there….Please love me

David the way I am. Please understand and love me” (17). After pleading with him to ignore every feminine part of her, Catherine then takes on a masculine role and David says, “He lay there and felt something and then her hand holding him and searching lower and he helped with his hands and then lay back in the dark….and only felt the weight and strangeness inside” (17).7

After Catherine has entered into David, she exclaims, “You are changing. Oh you are. You are.

Yes you are and you’re my girl Catherine. Will you change and be my girl and let me take you?”

(17).

Catherine briefly finds release from her frustrations through “changing” during sex; however, like her satisfaction with each haircut, the contentment is ephemeral. Similar to the rapid changes Catherine makes with her sexual and physical identities, her moods also swiftly change, preventing her from finding any real happiness. In one particular mirror scene that occurs after Catherine has slept with Marita, we feel her sense of loss and confusion as she stares at her reflection “with no expression at all” (115). The narrator states,

When she came back to the room David was not there and she stood a long time and looked at the bed and then went to the bathroom door and opened it and stood and looked in the long mirror. Her face had no expression and she looked at herself from her head down to her feet with no expression on her face at all. The light was nearly gone when she went into the bathroom and shut the door behind her. (115)

7 Fleming makes an interesting point that in switching her gender role during sex, “Catherine first attempts to mirror David by assuming his sexual role during lovemaking” (140).

Although Catherine manipulates and coerces David throughout Garden of Eden, her actions stem from her deep frustrations. Catherine is not satisfied with simply being a

“housewife” nor can she find lasting fulfillment in creating new physical appearances. Her sexual endeavors, too, ultimately disappoint. Catherine’s inability to discover her true identity causes her to not only ruin her marriage but also results in depression and emotional instability.

The previously mentioned mirror scene aptly captures this depression. Hemingway repeats that

Catherine “looked in the long mirror” and “her face had no expression and she looked at herself from her head down to her feet with no expression on her face at all” (115). The repetition of having “no expression” carries a double meaning; Catherine literally does not have a form of artistic expression and this causes her light to go out much the same way as “the light was nearly gone” when she came back from Marita’s room (115).

Catherine struggles to create a viable identity for herself, yet David faces different conflicts. David does not have to fight to find an artistic identity; he is already a writer who has been published and well-reviewed. David initially has trouble balancing his life as a writer and his role as a husband; however, as the story progresses, David moves deeper into himself and explores his identity as his father’s son. This change in priorities is captured in two crucial mirror scenes.

Before David discovers himself through writing about his father, he tries to give his wife a satisfactory amount of attention while still allowing himself enough of the isolation needed to write. Garden of Eden begins with Bourne on a reprieve from writing while on his honeymoon.

Catherine is not enthusiastic for him to start again, but David is anxious to get back to work. In the beginning of the novel, Bourne states, “It would be good to work again but that would come

8 soon enough as he well knew and he must remember to be unselfish about it and make it as clear as he could that the enforced loneliness was regrettable and he was not proud of it” (14).

Perhaps in an attempt to compromise with his wife over the “enforced loneliness [that] was regrettable,” David promises Catherine that he will write a narrative of their honeymoon together (14). However, soon after starting the narrative, David “left the ongoing narrative of their journey where it was to write a story that had come to him four or five days before” (93).

These short stories for which David abandons the narrative involve his boyhood in Africa with his father. Unsurprisingly, Catherine is not happy with this change and tells him that the switch is

“dirty. That was supposed to be my present and our project” (171).

As sympathetic as we can be to Catherine’s frustrations and depression, she does attempt to control David and block his writing. Catherine often forces David to become complicit in her search for self, such as when she discourages his short stories, or badgers him to cut his hair. In one of David’s most significant mirror scenes, he has just begrudgingly agreed to cut his hair in the same style as Catherine’s. After they arrive back at the maison, he looks at his reflection and thinks,

“So that’s how it is,” he said to himself. “You’ve done that to your hair and had it cut the same as your girl’s and how do you feel? Say it.” “You like it,” he said. He looked at the mirror and it was someone else he saw but it was less strange now. “All right. You like it,” he said. “Now go through with the rest of it whatever it is and don’t ever say anyone tempted you or that anyone bitched you.” He looked at the face that was no longer strange to him at all but was his face now and said, “You like it. Remember that. Keep that straight. You know exactly how you look now and how you are.” Of course he did not know exactly how he was. But he made an effort aided by what he had seen in the mirror. (84-5)

David tries to convince himself that he “likes” the haircut and admonishes himself to

“go through with the rest of it whatever it is and don’t ever say anyone tempted you or that anyone bitched you” (84). However, his careful convincing is not entirely genuine; Fleming refers to David’s reaction to his mirror image as “disapproving self-appraisal” (138). David’s feigned comfort with his new appearance is noted by the narrator when he states, “Of course he did not know exactly who he was. But he made an effort aided by what he had seen in the mirror” (85). As Catherine’s unrest increases, she fights harder to change and control David and his writing. As Garden of Eden progresses, the marriage begins to drain more of David’s energy.

When David acquiesces to Catherine’s whims, such as cutting his hair to match hers, he ends up

“not know[ing] exactly who he was” (85).

Catherine’s fight to keep David from his work has the exact opposite results of what she intends. As she puts more pressure on him to work on the narrative, he retreats further into his

African short stories. In these stories, a younger David goes into the jungle with his father to try and kill a large elephant. Writing this short story gives David time to reflect on his father, and allows him to find understanding of his role as a son. In Chapter II, I will discuss further how

Catherine’s manipulations force David deeper into his “inner room” and how in Garden of Eden, we see Hemingway make peace with his father’s suicide through revisiting memories of his childhood with the Doctor. However, in this chapter, it is important to note that the short stories ultimately allow David to re-claim his identity as a writer and a man.

After David’s completion of the “African Story,” there is an important mirror scene that describes him looking into the bar mirror and expecting to see his father:

He stood at the bar because that’s where he would have found his father at that hour, and having just come down from the high country, he missed him. The sky outside was very much the sky that he had left. It was high blue and the clouds white cumulus and he welcomed his father’s presence at the bar until he glanced in the mirror and saw he was alone. (147)

In this mirror scene, David is surprised when he “glanced in the mirror and saw he was alone” for he feels his father’s presence so strongly that he expects to see his father’s image reflected back next to his own. Fleming argues that this an injurious expectation,

“In this case, the mirror denies David a pleasant feeling, a passing fantasy, by providing a corrective image. This incident underscores the function of mirrors to provide a reflection of reality that is sometimes more accurate- if more cruel- than the unaided perceptions of the characters. (139)

However, I would argue that this scene brings David comfort despite his surprise when he notes his father’s actual absence. I argue this because directly following this scene, David reflects on his father and realizes, “He [David] was not a tragic character. Having his father and being a writer barred him from that, and as he finished the whiskey and Perrier he felt even less of one” (148). This moment serves as an epiphany for David. It reveals that, despite all the confusion Catherine and his marriage may have brought, ultimately, “having his father and being a writer” saves him from any “tragedy” (148). This mirror scene sharply juxtaposes the first mirror scene where David looks into the mirror after cutting his hair and “saw it was someone else” (84). In this scene, David has finished writing about his father and makes assertions about his identity. He is a son and a writer and no one can take this from him.

When Hemingway wrote Garden of Eden later in life, it seems that similar to David, perhaps it was a way for he himself to realize that “he was not a tragic character” (148). The mirror scenes highlight moments of personal reflection and, as we see in David’s last mirror scene, symbolize each character’s search for identity. Ultimately, in Garden of Eden, the writer finds his true identity through his craft. Catherine is never able to find satisfaction with herself

11 because she has no form of artistic expression. In the following chapter, I will discuss how

Catherine’s lack of artistic identity is what leads her to ultimately destroy David’s manuscripts.

Chapter II

The physical mirror scenes reinforce how Catherine will crack due to a lack of artistic expression and personal understanding, whereas David will succeed through finding his own self through his short stories. David’s final reflection in the mirror may be one of triumph, but his wife’s reflection will cause her to attempt to destroy herself, her husband, and her husband’s writing. This representation of the frustrated and manipulative wife is not endemic solely to

Garden of Eden. Rather, Catherine is in many ways a reflection of Mrs. Adams in “The Doctor and The Doctor’s Wife” and “Now I Lay Me.” Just as the physical mirror scenes are important in understanding David’s progression as a writer and a person, the mirrored characters and stories that exist within this novel are equally important in order to fully understand the scope of this novel. Much of what David reflects on as he creates “African Story” is shaped by

Hemingway’s early experiences with his parents, Dr. Clarence Hemingway and Grace Hall

Hemingway. In Garden of Eden, David fights to find the perfect depiction of his complicated relationship with his father, while shrinking away from Catherine, who like his mother, as Justice says, represents a “neurotic, intrusive female presence in his life” (71).8 Much of Garden of Eden mirrors Hemingway’s own family dynamics thus allowing us to read the novel autobiographically.

One of the first connections that can be made between Garden of Eden and earlier

Hemingway fiction is the similarities between Hemingway’s Nick Adams stories and the story

David creates within the text of Eden, “African Story.”9 In her book, The Bones of the Others,

Hilary Justice categorizes “Hemingway’s early personal fiction” into the following themes:

8 This quote comes from Hilary Justice’s book, The Bones of the Others, where she discusses how David and Nick both shrink away from Catherine and Mrs. Adams’s overbearing presence. 9 Justice refers to the African jungle as “a cognate for Nick’s Michigan” further linking David’s “African Story” to a “Nick-Adams like story” (71).

13 women with men/women without men, creation/transformation, privacy/publication, intimacy/exposure, secrecy/exhibitionism, vocation/profession, and writer/author (56). Justice sees these themes presented in stories that she argues are paired sets. Justice argues that

Hemingway wrote each of what she refers to as his “marriage tales” at the same time as he was writing a “Nick Adams Story.” For example, according to dates on Hemingway’s manuscripts,

“Cat in the Rain” and “The Doctor and the Doctor’s Wife” were written simultaneously in April of 1924.10 Justice writes, “In Hemingway’s early personal fiction, the productive tension between these paired themes vitalized the writing of the paired stories” (56). Justice sees these paired stories united in Garden of Eden: “In Garden of Eden, Hemingway tells the story of a writer, David Bourne, discovering the productivity of this tension with his own creative process as he lives and writes of his honeymoon narrative (his marriage tale) while also writing stories of himself as a son (his own Nick Adams-like stories)” (56). Yet, despite initial benefits of this tension, Catherine’s lack of artistic identity ultimately obstructs the marriage tale and drives

David completely into his Nick Adams-like stories. Justice aptly summarizes the consequences of Catherine’s inner turmoil on David’s work:

Catherine, obsessed with the story of her transformation, which she represents publicly by wearing trousers and sporting a boy’s haircut, does not understand that what to her is an expression of her identity is, to David, playing a role. And although he comes to understand that Catherine’s roles are not roles at all but her identity, Catherine never comes to understand the opposite about David and his writing- that although his writing is his vocation, his identity, authorship is his professional role- and thus that she has not only risked his writing but threatens his career as well. In her self-absorbed obsession and her illness, she does not understand him at all. (87) Catherine’s lack of understanding mounts slowly throughout the novel. When Garden of

Eden begins, David and Catherine are happily immersed in their own private world. Initially,

David focuses solely on Catherine and pushes aside his work; he reflects, “He had many

10 These dates come from Table 1 in Justice’s The Bones of the Others.

14 problems when he married but he had thought of none of them here nor of writing nor of anything but being with this girl whom he loved and was married to and he did not have the sudden deadly clarity that had always come after intercourse” (13). During the honeymoon, the marriage acts almost as an opiate for David. David becomes numb to his work and problems, and most importantly, he does not experience “the sudden deadly clarity that always came after intercourse” (13). Although the personal world of the honeymoon allows David to momentarily escape his “many problems,” writing still remains in David’s mind throughout the trip. Soon after discussing this break from his regular routine, David thinks,

It would be good to work again but that would come soon enough as he well knew and he must remember to be unselfish about it and make it as clear as he could that the enforced loneliness was regrettable and that he was not proud of it. He was sure she would be fine about it and she had her own resources but he hated to think of it, the work, starting when they were as they were now. (14)

Although undeniably happy with his new wife, David still immediately recognizes that his writing could become a wedge in the marriage. Although he reassures himself that “she would be fine about it and she had her own resources,” subconsciously, David knows this is not true. As David acknowledges his eventual return to work, he thinks, “it could never start of course without the clarity and he wondered if she knew that and if that was why she drove beyond what they had for something new that nothing could break” (14).

“Sudden deadly clarity” is a phrase Hemingway often uses to signify a mental release that occurs after sex. Justice notes that “after making love, David like most of Hemingway’s characters, feels ‘happy’ but ‘hollow’ or ‘empty’” (80). In A Moveable Feast, Hemingway shares, “By then I knew that everything good and bad left an emptiness when it stopped. But if it was bad, the emptiness filled itself up by itself. If it was good you could only fill it by finding something better” (62). This emptiness corresponds with not only sexual activity but also

Hemingway’s writing. In the opening chapter of A Moveable Feast, Hemingway discusses successfully working and writes, “After writing a story I was always empty and both sad and happy, as though I had made love, and I was sure this was a very good story although I would not know truly how good until I read it over the next day” (6). The emptiness that comes with making love is always linked to his craft. Therefore, when David admits that “[writing] could never start of course without the clarity,” and then “wondered if she knew that and that was why she drove beyond what they had for something new that nothing could break,” his suspicions do not bode well for the marriage. If Catherine is constantly “driving beyond” a stable relationship with a steady sexual nature in order to prevent David from achieving his necessary emptiness, then she has clearly premeditated obstructing David’s work.

As discussed in the previous chapter, Catherine is obsessed with changing both herself and her relationship. She is fixated on changing her identity, both through her haircuts and her switching of gender roles during sexual intercourse. David is correct in suspecting that

Catherine’s transformations are an attempt to distract him from writing. Catherine immediately realizes that writing will be a threat to the attention she currently receives from her husband, as demonstrated by the jealousy David’s reviews spark in her. After the two battle over David reading his “clippings,” Catherine tells him, “Why don’t we keep on and travel now when it can never be more fun?” We’ll do everything you want….You can write afterwards” (27). David asks his wife, “What if I want to write? The minute you’re not going to do something it will probably make you want to do it,” to which she replies, “Then write, stupid. You didn’t say you wouldn’t write. Nobody said anything about worrying if you wrote. Did they?” (26).

Although Catherine taunts David over whether his writing was ever proposed to be a problem, she begins the conversation by trying to dissuade him from his work. She asserts, “You

16 can write afterwards” and later, after telling David that he can of course write if he wishes to, she asks, “I don’t have to leave you when you write do I?” (27). Despite her attempted bravado,

Catherine is not at all enthusiastic about her husband’s return to writing.

Perhaps in an attempt to command the majority of her husband’s attention, Catherine suggests that if David is to write then it should be a narrative of their honeymoon. Critic Robert

Fleming elaborates further on Catherine’s controlling nature in The Face in the Mirror: “David must resist the pressures of his wife, Catherine, whose mental instability grows more serious as

David increasingly shuts her out of his creative life. Jealous of his writing, Catherine first seeks to distract him from it, then tries to become his partner and directs him to the subject matter she chooses” (11). Catherine’s “direction of the subject matter” is seen specifically when David responds to Catherine’s plans for the following day by saying, “Don’t make any plans, Devil.

Tomorrow I’ll get up very early and work and you sleep as late as you can” (77). Catherine replies,

Then write for me too. No matter if it’s where I’ve been bad put in how much I love you….I’m so proud of it already and we won’t have any copies for sale and none for reviewers and then there’ll never be clippings and you’ll never be self conscious and we’ll always have it just for us. (77-8) Catherine only accepts David’s work if it involves her and does not result in reviews and

“clippings.” Not only does she try to manipulate his physical appearance, but she also attempts to sabotage David’s writing. Although David at first agrees to write the narrative, and seemingly almost enjoys it, he soon

left the ongoing narrative of their journey where it was to write a story that had come to him four or five days before and had been developing, probably, he thought, in the last two nights while he had slept. He knew it was bad to interrupt any work he was engaged in but he felt confident and sure of how well he was going and he thought he could leave the longer narrative and write the story which he believed he must write now or lose. (93)

David acknowledges that “he knew it was bad to interrupt any work he was engaged in” yet the transition from the narrative to the short story occurs naturally. As David hits his stride with the story that “he believed he must write now or lose,” he quickly pushes the narrative, and the marriage itself, aside. In the beginning portion of the novel, David fights between balancing his life as a writer and his role as a husband. However, as the story advances, David begins to dive deeper into his memory, and his own self, in order to create short stories.

The short story David begins once he strays away from the narrative will develop into

“African Story.” This story focuses on a hunting expedition David takes with his father. As he writes the story, he becomes increasingly aware of his father’s presence in his life. After his first morning writing the short story, David is described as “tired and happy from his work” (94).

Hemingway describing fatigue as a result of work signifies that the writing has gone well and the protagonist is pleased. David is content after he switches from “the marriage tale” to his “Nick

Adams- like story” yet Catherine will not allow him to sustain this post-writing clarity.

Immediately after David has finished writing, Catherine returns with Marita. David is at first wary when Catherine brings the girl back. Marita tells David, “I don’t think I’m staying,” and David happily replies, “Really? That’s too bad” as “the tension came to the table and drew taut as a hawser” (97). David does not initially want Marita to live with them; when Catherine suggests that she stay in the house, David thinks to himself, “The hell with her. Fuck her” (97).

Scenes in the novel where David has successfully worked are almost always followed by scenes where Catherine “drives beyond what they had for something new that nothing could break” (14). Catherine is unable to stand the exclusive stability that David’s work brings him and wages a continuous battle to shake up the relationship. Following the first scene in which David writes, during which he “forgot about Catherine,” Catherine announces “I’m going to bring you

18 back a surprise” (42, 44). Catherine arrives later with her newly shorn head, telling her husband,

“I’m your new girl now” (45). After David begins his short story, Catherine brings home Marita.

Catherine’s constant changes to the dynamics of the relationship are intended to distract David from the work that she wished he had never started. After David submits to letting Marita stay in the house, Catherine discusses which room she can stay in and hints, “Of course the best room besides our own is the one at the far end where you work” to which David replies, “And I’m going to keep it. I’m going damn well and I won’t change my work room for an imported bitch!”

(99).

Despite Catherine’s interference with his work, David remembers the abandoned narrative and tells himself, “Tomorrow I’ll pick up the narrative where I left it and keep right on until I finish it. And how are you going to finish it? How are you going to finish it now?” (108).

This haunting question refers not only to the narrative but also to the marriage. Neither the honeymoon story nor the relationship seems sustainable. As Catherine becomes more destructive, David concentrates more heavily on his short stories. After asking himself “how are you going to finish it now” David decides, “You’d better write another story. Write the hardest one that is to write that you know” (108).

The short stories become David’s refuge because they do not involve Catherine.

However, the problems that sexuality has the power to create are at the heart of David’s short story, much the same as it lies beneath his problems in his personal life. In “African Story”

David goes back into the African jungle of his youth and finds solace in the presence of his father who, as Burwell stated, transforms from a “god-damned friend killer” to “a complex man” by the end of Garden of Eden.

In “African Story” a younger David partakes in a hunting expedition with his father, and his father’s guide, Juma. In the story, David at first believes that he will be of assistance to his father; however, he soon realizes that “he should have been sent back to the shamba once he had put them on the trail” (546). As the story progresses, David feels guilty for telling his father where the elephant was hiding, and thinks to himself, “My father doesn’t need to kill elephants to live….Why didn’t you help the elephant when you could? All you had to do was not go on the second day…. You never should have told them” (550).

David is not only angry at himself for betraying the elephant but also resentful toward his father and Juma for being “goddamned friend killers” (551). At the end of the short story,

David’s father recognizes that his son is upset and tries to console him, saying, “Do you want to make peace, Davey?” to which David agrees, saying, “All right” but “only because he knew this was the start of never telling that he had decided on” (554).

“African Story” ends with David resenting his father for killing the elephant out of sport, as well as his discomfort with what he sees as “the evil in the shamba” (94). Young David intentionally sets himself apart from his father at the end of the short story; however, adult David does not view his father in the same light. Rather, David often interrupts writing “African Story” to reflect on memories of his father and these moments of introspection allow him to feel his father’s presence.

As David invests more time into “African Story,” his other priorities dim in importance.

David is described as being “completely detached from everything except the story he was writing and he was living in it as he built it” (128). The reader too experiences this detachment and is sucked into the setting of the African jungle. As David begins to “live in it as he built it” he says of himself,

“It was not him, of course, who had stood there that morning; nor had he ever worn the patched corduroy jacket faded almost white now, the armpits rotted through by sweat, that he took off then and handed to his Kamba servant and brother who shared with him the guilt and knowledge of the delay, watching him sell the sour, vinegary smell and shake his head in disgust and then grin” (128-9).

It is David’s father that is standing there, handing his jacket to Juma, who “shared with him the guilt and knowledge of the delay” (128). When not on the hunt, David’s father and Juma spend their time back at the shamba, having affairs with numerous women and drinking. This is evidenced both in the description of “the guilt and knowledge of the delay,” “the evil in the shamba,” and Catherine’s later objection to “your drunken father staggering around smelling of sour beer and not knowing which ones of the little horrors he had fathered” (94, 189). This sleaziness upsets young David, and is part of the reason he decides to “never tell anyone anything.”11 However, the adult David who is writing this story does not seem angered by his father’s lechery. Following David’s description of his father sweaty and delayed by his activities in the shamba, David thinks,

All your father found he found for you too, he thought, the good, the wonderful, the bad, the very bad, the really very bad, the truly bad, and then the much worse. It was a shame that a man with such a talent for disaster and delight should have gone the way he went, he thought. It always made him happy to remember his father and he knew his father would have liked this story (129).

This paragraph is compressed with several important insights regarding David’s father.

First David realizes that what his father “found he found for [him] too.” This sympathetic allegiance with his father invokes a similar statement made by Nick Adams in the story “Fathers and Sons,” where he states, “He had died in a trap that he had helped only a little to set, and they had all betrayed him in various ways before he died” (370). In “African Story,” David, too

11 Rose Marie Burwell discusses the “dirty secrets” of the shamba in her article, “Hemingway’s Garden of Eden: Resisting Things Past and Protecting the Masculine Text.” She writes, “Referring to his father’s children, Catherine sees the dirty secret as sexual exploitation, analogous to David’s relegating sex to sensation. But David knows there are two dirty secrets: the bibis (married women) with whom he found his drunken father and Juma on returning from the moonlight hunt, and the skull of the elephant’s askari whom Juma shot years ago. (211)

21 reflects on his father’s death, thinking that “it was a shame that a man with such a talent for disaster and delight should have gone the way he went.” Both Nick and David speak of the father’s death as unfortunate and untimely. David laments that “a man with such a talent for disaster and delight should have gone the way he did” whereas Nick feels “his father had died in a trap that he had helped only a little to set” (370). While not blatantly stated, Hemingway is referring to his father’s suicide in both of these short stories. Dr. Hemingway’s suicide haunted his son throughout his entire literary career, and David, too, is preoccupied with his father’s memory. Most importantly in this paragraph, David claims “it always made him happy to remember his father and he knew his father would have liked this story” (129).

In his biography, The Young Hemingway, Michael Reynolds writes,

Hemingway, like many first sons, deeply needed his father’s approval. Ernest’s conception of how a man should behave, he had learned in school, church, library and home, but mostly it had come from his father, whose growing moodiness and reticence failed the young Hemingway when he most needed support. In many of his early stories we find a son determined to win his father’s approval through deeds of bravery. (51)

David Bourne initially is overjoyed with finding the elephant’s hiding spot because it will guarantee his father’s approval and allow him to be a part of the men’s hunt. However, as the story progresses, David begins to regret his actions which he comes to see as a betrayal.

Throughout Hemingway’s life, he often struggled between gaining his father’s approval and betraying himself. Justice says of David’s feelings of guilt and betrayal: “This is a coming-of-age story in which David learns to protect things- the elephant and his own feelings- through silence, through choosing not to publish. By committing to himself, he betrays his father” (70-1).

Although Justice makes this statement in the context of discussing David’s hesitation to publish the private narrative, she also analyzes how young David’s silence betrays his father. At the end

22 of “African Story,” David chooses “never to tell anyone anything again” rather than “make peace” as his father wishes he would (554).

David’s belief that “his father would have liked this story” mimics a letter Hemingway wrote to his own father from Paris in March of 1925. This letter followed Dr. Hemingway’s reading of “The Doctor and the Doctor’s Wife,” a story which involves Nick Adams’s parents locked in a battle for power. In Ernest Hemingway: Selected Letters 1917-1961, Carlos Baker includes the following letter in which Hemingway writes to his father: “I’m glad you liked the

Doctor story. I put in Dick Boulton and Billy Tabeshaw as real people with their real names….I’ve written a number of stories about the Michigan country- the country is always true- what happens in the stories is fiction” (153).

Reynolds writes about this letter in Hemingway: The Paris Years, and says, “Ernest could not believe his father read the story and missed the point of the fictional doctor’s cowardly behavior. Or did he see the point and not want to talk about it?” (278). Reynolds relates that Dr.

Hemingway was “impressed with Ernest’s accurate details” in the story and had referred to the story as an “article” (278). Reynolds writes Hemingway “could not believe” that his father had missed his depiction as a coward in the story; however, I argue there is no textual indication that

Hemingway “could not believe his father read the story and missed the point.” Rather it seems that Reynolds himself could not believe that Dr. Hemingway would like the story for anything more than its “accurate detail.” At the end of “The Doctor and the Doctor’s Wife,” we see Nick going off into the woods with his father, ignoring his mother’s commands to come see her.

Although the Doctor is submissive to his overbearing wife and to the aggressive baiting of Dick

Boulton, I believe a better “point” of this story is not the Doctor’s cowardly behavior, but rather

Nick’s alliance with his father at the end of the story, as they go off to find the black squirrels.

“The Doctor and the Doctor’s Wife,” is fraught with tension throughout most of the story; however, the story ends with a reinforcement of a strong father-son relationship as the two venture into the cool woods together. It is not unreasonable that the Doctor would “like this story.” Furthermore, Dr. Hemingway’s affirmation gives credence to David’s assertion that his father would have liked “African Story.”

Hemingway may have been pleased that his father enjoyed “The Doctor and the Doctor’s

Wife” but he was clearly nervous about his father’s future reactions to his writing. He writes in the same letter from March of 1925,

“You see I’m trying in all my stories to get the feeling of actual life- not to just depict life – or criticize it – but to actually make it alive. So that when you have read something by me you actually experience the thing. You can’t do this without putting in the bad and the ugly as well as what is beautiful….So when you see anything of mine that you don’t like remember that I’m sincere in doing it and that I’m working toward something. (153) Reynolds writes of this response, “Dr. Hemingway must have wondered what his son was talking about….There wasn’t anything ugly in the story. He could not know that his son was preparing him for the shock of In Our Time.” (278). Reynolds’s interpretation of Hemingway’s letter seems accurate and it reinforces Justice’s argument that in choosing himself, the son will eventually betray the father. For Hemingway, this meant writing “to get the feel of actual life,” even if a consequence would be his father’s disapproval. Yet despite this commitment,

Hemingway was still apprehensive over his father’s reaction. Hemingway’s fears were realized after his father received a copy of In Our Time. Reynolds includes an excerpt of Dr.

Hemingway’s review of his son’s work:

Many compliments every day viz In Our Time! Trust you will see and describe more of humanity of a different character in future Volumes. The brutal you have surely shown the world. Look for the joyous, uplifting, and optimistic and spiritual in character. It is present if found. Remember God holds us responsible to do our best. (342) This remark must have crushed Hemingway whose objective was to write directly and

24 honestly rather than color situations in order for them to be “joyous” or “uplifting.” Interestingly,

Dr. Hemingway’s response is similar to Krebs’s mother’s admonishment in the short story

“Soldier’s Home.” Krebs’s mother tells her veteran son, “God has some work for everyone to do.

There can be no idle hands in His Kingdom” (114). Hemingway’s father and his fictional mother both reinforce a Progressive mindset that life should be used to advance the Kingdom of Heaven on Earth. This outlook did not mesh with Hemingway’s experiences with the war or the new modern world. Ultimately, Hemingway had to choose between his own artistic integrity and pleasing his father; like David, Hemingway chose himself. However, unlike David, who earns his self-respect by “never tell[ing] anyone anything,” Hemingway finds self-approval through telling. Despite criticism from Oak Park, Hemingway remained committed to “getting the feel of actual life” into his writing throughout his entire career.

From excerpts from their letters, and from Hemingway’s own fiction, it is obvious that

Hemingway had a complicated relationship with his father. Although he seems to seek him out again and again in his writing, in his adult life, he only returned home to Oak Park twice. Yet we should not be quick to judge Hemingway’s absence from his aging parents’ lives. Dr.

Hemingway was not an easy man to deal with; as he aged his mental state rapidly deteriorated.12

The Doctor present in the Nick Adams stories, although temperamental and submissive, was still involved with his son’s life. However, after Hemingway returned from the war “he was not the same father Ernest remembered hunting or exploring with during the Agassiz days. His father no longer had time for anything that gave him much pleasure. Father and son, never ones to share

12 Reynolds describes Clarence Hemingway’s mental illness in Hemingway: The Paris Years. He writes, “As his perplexed children watched, Dr. Hemingway slipped gradually into deeper depressions accompanied by estranging paranoia and moodiness that could change directions with scary speed” (6). In the previous biography of Reynolds’s series, The Young Hemingway, he notes, “When Ernest Hemingway put the muzzle of his double-barreled shotgun to his forehead the morning of a much later July, he suffered from all of his father’s ills: erratic high blood pressure, insomnia, paranoia, severe depression” (86). Depression and anxiety both were present in the Hemingway genes and contributed to both the father and the son’s suicide.

25 much, had now even less common ground” (Reynolds 39). Perhaps Hemingway knew that going home would not mean he could go back to the father of his youth, and that is why he instead chose to feel his presence through writing about him.

Yet Hemingway’s guilt over not returning home is alluded to in Nick Adams’s son’s dialogue in “Fathers and Sons.” Nick Adams’s young son asks his father, “What was my grandfather like? I can’t remember him except that he gave me an air rifle and an American flag when I came over from France that time. What was he like?” (376). Nick then goes on to discuss his father’s talents at shooting and fishing, but his son pushes the conversation further. He asks,

“Why do we never pray at the tomb of my grandfather?” Nick brushes off the question, telling his son it is too far away, yet his son persists, “In France that wouldn’t make any difference. In

France, we’d go. I think I ought to go and pray at the tomb of my grandfather” (376). Nick’s son continues to pester him over whether he and his father might be buried near the grandfather, and

Nick tells the son, “You’re awfully practical” (377). But still, his son insists: “I don’t feel good never to have even visited the tomb of my grandfather” and finally Nick relents, “We’ll have to go. I can see we’ll have to go” (377).

Like “Indian Camp,” “Fathers and Sons” ends with a father and his son discussing death.

Yet Nick Adams’s son’s relentless insistence that he must go pray at the tomb of his grandfather shows Nick’s hesitancy to return to where his father lies. This story seems to almost convey a sense of guilt for Hemingway; his young son bluntly reminds him that he has only seen his grandfather once because his father never took him. The repetition of the young son’s insistence of going to “the tomb” also foreshadows Hemingway’s own future to go to the very same

“tomb:” the tomb of suicide.13 In “Fathers and Sons,” Hemingway paints a story of three generations of Adams men, each haunted by “a biological trap not entirely of [their] own making” (Reynolds 87).

Yet, however complicated Hemingway’s relationship with his father was, he never completely damned him. In Garden of Eden, after reading “African Story,” both Catherine and

Marita assume David has severed all ties with his father’s memory. Catherine exclaims, “It’s horrible. It’s bestial. So that’s what your father was like” (157). But David answers, “No. But that was one way he was. You didn’t finish it” (157). Right before this scene, Marita asked

David, “Was this when you stopped loving him?” (154). David replied, “No. I always loved him.

This was when I got to know him” (154).

Hemingway sincerely loved his father and wished to earn his father’s approval; yet, like

David, eventually Hemingway came to know his father. Dr. Hemingway, with his bouts of depression, anxiety, rapid mood changes, and paranoia, was a difficult companion for his son and furthermore, began to isolate himself as he grew older. David’s remark, “This was when I got to know him” explains that as time passed, he could no longer treat his father with the same simple admiration as Nick does in “The Doctor and the Doctor’s Wife.” Yet in spite of this realization,

Dr. Hemingway still loomed large in his son’s mind. In “African Story,” we see David come to terms with his father’s memory. Burwell argues that in rewriting “African Story,” David’s understanding of his father is transformed. Burwell writes, “In the rewriting his father is shriven:

No longer a ‘god damned friend killer’ his father is now a complex man” (200).

Writing “African Story” reaffirmed David’s admiration for his father despite having

“gotten to know him.” In addition to providing closure to a complicated father-son relationship,

13 In The Young Hemingway, Reynolds writes the following of Dr. Hemingway’s suicide and mental illness in the Hemingway family: “[Dr. Hemingway] fell back into a bed that he had been a long time making, a bed so wide and deep that it took three of his own children to fill it completely” (85).

27 writing about his father comforts David. This new confidence can be seen when David thinks to himself, “He was not a tragic character. Having his father and being a writer barred him from that, and as he finished the whiskey and Perrier he felt even less of one” (148). Yet as positive as the father-son relationship is, the relationships David has with his wife, and on a more subtle level, his mother, are destructive. Burwell argues in her article, “Hemingway’s Garden of Eden:

Resistance of Things Past and Protecting the Masculine Text,” that David struggles to “protect the masculine text” of “African Story” from the harmful feminine influence of his wife. Burwell states, “David Bourne writes two very different kinds of narratives in Eden: the first is an androgynously conceived narrative about the honeymoon he is currently taking with Catherine and is shared, for a time, by her. The second is a masculine narrative, the African stories about his unresolved relationship with his dead father, and Catherine is excluded from it” (199).

Catherine’s exclusion paired with the dismissal of her narrative blinds her with rage.

Once her narrative has been abandoned, Catherine feels cast off. She not only becomes furiously jealous, but she also acts increasingly condescending towards David. During one scene,

Catherine, in an attempt to emasculate her husband, tells Marita, “If he ever says no about anything, Marita, just keep right on. It doesn’t mean a thing…When he does [write the narrative up to date] you’ll find out” (188). One of Catherine’s greatest faults is her disrespect of David’s privacy. When David tells Marita he would rather she not see the narrative, he discovers that

Catherine has already let her read it. David responds, “God damn her,” and later tells Catherine that he is “through with the narrative” (184, 188). Catherine replies, “That’s dirty. That was my present and our project” as though she played a significant role in writing the narrative (188).

Catherine is upset by her lack of artistic ability but what angers her most is David’s preference for writing about his father. Yet despite the jabs she makes at Mr. Bourne, David is

28 not dissuaded from his stories. After one of many arguments with Catherine, David thinks,

“What Catherine had said about the stories when she was trying to hurt him had started him thinking about his father and all the things he had tried to do whatever he could about” (211).

Catherine’s insults have the opposite effect than what she intended. Instead of forcing David away from his father it “started him thinking about his father and all the things he had tried to do whatever he could about” (211).

Burwell aptly describes the relationship between Catherine’s anger and David’s stories in the previously mentioned article, “Hemingway’s Garden of Eden.” She writes, “The most critical causality of Jenks’s editing is the textual coherence linking David Bourne’s anxiety about the intrusion of Catherine into his writing with his reassessment of his father in rewriting the African stories Catherine has burned” (199). Burwell claims that in analyzing the relationship between

Catherine’s intrusion and David’s reassessment of his father we discover that “this is a novel about an unhappy childhood” (199).

When Catherine realizes that her insults and tantrums will not stop David from writing, she decides to halt the process herself. After fighting with Catherine, David sarcastically tells her, “You take the clippings and go burn them. That would be the soundest thing” (216).

Catherine “looked at him slyly” and asks, “How did you know I did it?....Burned the clippings”

(216). David returns to the hotel and hopelessly searches for his cahiers, thinking,

He had not believed that the stories could be gone. He had not believed that she could do it. At the beach he had known that she might have done it but it had seemed impossible and he had not really believed it….She couldn’t have really destroyed them. No one could do that to a fellow human being. He still could do not believe she had done it but he felt sick inside himself when he closed and locked the door. (219) David’s desperate search for any scrap left of his writing mirrors Hemingway’s reaction to Hadley’s loss of his manuscripts in A Moveable Feast. When Hadley dolefully tells her husband what has happened, he writes “I was sure she could not have brought the carbons too”

(74). Unfortunately, Hemingway found the apartment as Hadley had described and writes “It was true all right and I remember what I did in the night after I let myself into the flat and found out it was true” (74).

Many scholars argue that Catherine’s burning of the manuscripts represents Hadley’s loss of Hemingway’s first short stories. Although there is obviously a connection between the two incidents, I believe Catherine’s pyre represents more than Hadley’s carelessness. Rather, I argue that the fire that Catherine builds has roots in another fire from Hemingway’s “unhappy childhood.” David may come to terms with his “complex” father; however, he never reaches the same level of understanding with Catherine. Catherine serves as more than just a character in this novel; rather, she represents a destructive female influence on Hemingway’s “masculine text.”

Burwell proves this statement in her article:

Catherine too is a conflation but of the women whose impact on the male’s writing Hemingway mistrusted. She is Hadley, who lost his early stories in the famous suitcase incident. She is the sometimes mad Zelda Fitzgerald, whose demands on her husband’s creative energy prompted Hemingway’s famous ‘use the hurt’ letter…and she is also Jane Mason, the hard-drinking and slightly manic blond with whom Hemingway had a long affair while living in Key West, and she is Martha Gelhorn, whose insistence upon the importance of her own writing Hemingway called ‘insane’ (201-2). Burwell sees traces of many of Hemingway’s women in Catherine, but she never mentions the vast similarities between the tone and actions of Catherine’s character and those of

Nick Adam’s mother. In many ways, Catherine resembles Mrs. Adams in “The Doctor and the

Doctor’s Wife.” In this story, which Dr. Hemingway wrote of his approval to his son, Nick

Adam’s father comes back to the family’s summer cottage after getting into a heated argument with a local Indian, Dick Boulton. When the Doctor comes back into the house he is restless and irritable and his wife, rather than assuage his anger, goads him further. She condescendingly asks, “Was anything the matter….I hope you didn’t lose your temper, Henry” and then quotes the Bible, stating, “Remember, that he who ruleth his spirit is greater than he that taketh the city”

(75). In this short story, the Doctor’s wife lies in a separate room “with the blinds drawn” while the Doctor remains “on his bed” (75).

The couple never sees one another in the story, and Nick’s mother uses the same condescending tone that Catherine often takes on with David. For example, the wife’s mocking repetition of the phrase “dear,” “What was the trouble about, dear?” and “Dear, I don’t think, I really don’t think that anyone would really do a thing like that,” is used to belittle her husband.

Catherine employs the same tone to belittle David, such as when she tells Marita, “If he ever says no about anything Marita, just keep right on” (188). Catherine’s manipulative control of

David mirrors the mother’s behavior with Dr. Adams.

Although Burwell does not make any connection between Catherine and Mrs. Adams in her article, Justice makes an interesting comparison between the two characters in her book, The

Bones of the Others. “The Doctor and the Doctor’s Wife” ends with Nick eschewing his mother’s demand, “If you see Nick, dear, will you tell him his mother wants to see him,” by telling his father “I want to go with you….I know where there’s black squirrels, Daddy” (75-6).

Justice writes,

David and Nick are both using these animals [the black squirrels and the elephant of “African Story] as a way to avoid the neurotic, intrusive female presence in their lives. Nick is escaping his mother, who is represented in ‘The Doctor and the Doctor’s Wife’ as a passive-aggressive hypochondriac. David, in writing the stories, manages briefly to escape his wife, Catherine. (71) In “The Doctor and the Doctor’s Wife” Nick’s mother wants to take him away from his father and keep him in the dark house with her. In Garden of Eden, Catherine, too, wants to take

David away from his father. Catherine tells Marita:

“He traded everything he had in on those stories. He used to have so many things. I certainly hope you like stories, Heiress….Because that’s what you’re going to get. He used to do so many things too and he did them all so beautifully. He had a wonderful life and all he thinks about now is Africa and his drunken father and his press clippings” (214-5).

Like Mrs. Adams, Catherine wants to be the dominant presence in David’s life. When she loses him to “Africa and his drunken father” she vindictively decides to burn his work in an outdoor drum. Catherine’s burning scene is very similar to a scene in Hemingway’s short story

“Now I Lay Me.” In this story, Nick is at war, and lies awake at night because “I myself did not want to sleep because I had been living for a long time with the knowledge that if I ever shut my eyes in the dark and let myself go, my soul would go out of my body” (276). Nick is scared of losing himself, so he thinks back to various fishing trips and tries to “remember everything that had ever happened to me” (277). About a new house in Michigan that his family had lived in,

Nick remembers,

….My mother was always cleaning things out and making a good clearance. One time when my father was away on a hunting trip she made a good thorough cleaning out in the basement and burned everything that should not have been there. When my father came home and got down from his buggy and hitched the horse, the fire was still burning in the road besides the house. (278) When Nick’s father arrives home, he asks, “What’s this?” to which his “smiling” wife replies, “I’ve been cleaning out the basement, dear” (278). Nick’s father then looks at the charred mess on the ground and “raked out stone axes and stone shining knives and tools for making arrow-heads and pieces of pottery and many arrow-heads” (278). Dr. Adams is furious with his wife’s attempt to “clean things out.” Mrs. Adams describes this “cleaning” in the same nonchalant tone Catherine uses to tell David about his destroyed manuscripts. Similar to Mrs.

Adams, Catherine says, “It probably would have been enough to burn the clippings but I really thought I ought to make a clean sweep” (222). Dr. Adams hopelessly remarks, “The best arrow- heads went all to pieces” before going into the house and leaving the mess on the lawn (278).

Like Catherine, Mrs. Adams takes what is of utmost importance to the father, Indian artifacts and medicinal specimens, and burns them as if they were replaceable. Both Catherine and Mrs.

Adams try to destroy the masculine parts of their husband’s lives: Dr. Hemingway’s scientific specimens, and David’s stories.

Both the fire scenes and Catherine and Mrs. Adams mirror one another. Although I agree with Burwell that Catherine is a “conflation” of characters, the shared traits between Catherine and Mrs. Hemingway are overwhelmingly strong. I also believe that Hemingway did not have a completely “unhappy childhood,” yet memories of his aggressive mother’s emasculation of his father caused him later to be overly “protective of the masculine text.” While some readers criticize Hemingway for writing weak or manipulative women, I would argue that it is only mothers that Hemingway portrays in this light. Although female protagonists such as Brett

Ashley and Catherine Barkley are not flawless, they do not try to emasculate their men nor do they seek control over them. However, Mrs. Adams-like characters, such as Catherine, pose a threat to the male writers because they seek to destroy their virility and hinder their ability to write.

In many ways, Garden of Eden is a continuation of the Nick Adams stories of In Our

Time. David, through writing “African Story,” remembers a journey he took with his father, and through the text of Eden, develops a new appreciation of his father. By mirroring elements of different early short stories, Hemingway reconstructs Nick’s childhood through the adult’s eyes.

Throughout all of Hemingway’s writing lies a search for the father. Like David, Hemingway came to understanding the complicated Dr. Hemingway through writing a series of short stories over the course of his career focusing on father-son relationships.

Chapter III

Autobiographical evidence will confirm that Dr. Hemingway was “a complex man.” His suicide haunted his son throughout his life, leaving him to seek closure through his writing.

David, like Hemingway himself, uses writing to mirror his father, and find understanding for himself. Interwoven into Garden of Eden is a short story, later pulled out and published as

“African Story,” which strongly mirrors “Indian Camp,” and to a lesser degree, “My Old Man.”14

At the heart of Garden of Eden is Hemingway’s search to not only understand how to live as a writer, but also how to reckon with his role as a son. The search for Hemingway’s father circles from “African Story,” written prior to Hemingway’s death, back to “Indian Camp” and “My Old

Man” which were first published in the early collection In Our Time. In closely comparing all three stories, we see various angles from which Hemingway tried to come to know his father.

Although all three fathers in the stories have their own vices, and all three sons react to confrontations in myriad ways, despite the messy complications, they never fail to affirm the love they have for their father.

“Indian Camp,” “African Story,” and “My Old Man,” all focus on a young son who goes on a mission with his father. The mission is both literal and symbolic. In the literal sense, each boy serves as an apprentice to his father on actual missions involving business affairs; however, during the course of these missions, each son, more importantly, makes an emotional journey when events surrounding the father’s work shatter part of his view of the world.

14 In his article, “Hemingway’s Beginnings and Endings” Bernard Oldsey notes “Had they been retained, [interior monologue from early manuscripts] the story would have emerged as a truncated Kunstlerroman, a portrait of the artist as a young fisherman, presenting us with a rather self-conscious Nick Adams who is aware of hundreds of tricks in writing invented by James Joyce, and who himself is represented, in dizzying mirror fashion, as the author of ‘My Old Man’ and ‘Indian Camp’ (221). Oldsey briefly notes the two stories are similar as Burwell quickly mentions a similarity between “African Story” and “Indian Camp” in her preface to Hemingway: The Postwar Years and Posthumous Novels (see footnote two). However, no scholar has focused a complete textual comparison of all three short stories in one paper.

This culminating loss of innocence resulting from exposure to the father’s work is the underlying theme to these short stories; however, “Indian Camp,” “African Story,” and “My Old

Man” not only share the same theme, but also several other important characteristics. Both

“Indian Camp” and “African Story” involve the father and son acting as outsiders in a foreign territory. All three stories call for the son to reassess his father’s character, exhibit the boys’ discomfort with their naiveté surrounding the father’s work, hint at an underlying sordidness to the father’s work, and finally, insist on a necessary reevaluation of the world each son lives in.

These shared characteristics indicate mirroring, and their differences shed light on the various angles from which Hemingway tried to understand the Doctor. Although all three stories share common elements, ‘Indian Camp” and “African Story” have more similarities than does “My

Old Man.” Therefore, I will compare these two first before approaching “My Old Man,” one of the earliest Hemingway stories, and one that differs in both tone and structure.15

Both “Indian Camp” and “My Old Man” center on a father and son entering into a foreign territory. In “Indian Camp” Nick Adams and his father are led by local Indians to a camp where “there is an Indian lady very sick” (67). In “The African Story” David and his father are elephant hunting in an African jungle with a native, Juma. Part of each boy’s later sense of confusion stems from his initial sense of being an “outsider.”

“Indian Camp” is the first story in which Hemingway introduces us to the character of

Nick Adams. In this story, Nick is probably around seven given the diction he uses with his father, such as calling him “Daddy.” The story opens with, “Nick and his father [getting] in to

15In his book, Modernism and Tradition in Hemingway’s “In Our Time,” Matthew Stewart writes, “‘My Old Man,’ more directly than any other story in the volume, shows the influence of Sherwood Anderson who had already published his famous ‘I Want to Know Why,’ which also treats a boy who loves horse racing and culminates in a boy’s disillusionment with a man” (83). Although Stewart later argues that Hemingway does distance himself from Anderson through surpassing his techniques of vernacular in “My Old Man,” the influence of Anderson gives a brief explanation as to why the story is so much different in structure and tone from the rest of the In Our Time short stories.

35 the stern of the boat” to tend to a Indian woman in labor (67). The boat is positioned “at the lake shore” where “there was another rowboat drawn up” and “two Indians stood waiting” (67). From the start of the story Hemingway stresses an emphasis on placement. Nick and his father head down to the nearby shore where the Indians wait. Once they reach the shore, there is “another rowboat” drawn up, one that has arrived with the Indians and Uncle George. The two Indians and

Uncle George stand by the shore, waiting for Nick and his father to step into their boat, so they can take the Doctor and his son back to their settlement. As they travel across the lake, Nick and his father follow behind the other Indian boat, and despite “the Indian who was rowing them working very hard the other boat moved further ahead in the mist all the time” (67). In the opening of “Indian Camp,” Hemingway establishes that Nick and his father will be following the lead of the Indians throughout the short story.

When Nick and his father arrive at the camp, Nick’s Uncle George is on the shore,

“smoking a cigar in the dark” (67). Uncle George then “gave both the Indians cigars” which suggests he is familiar with them. Later, when the young Indian woman is in the throes of labor, she bites Uncle George and he exclaims, “Damn squaw bitch!” which causes the other young

Indian to “laugh at him” (68).

Throughout “Indian Camp,” Nick and Dr. Adams converse, as do Dr. Adams and George, but there is no recorded or suggested interaction between the Indians and Nick and his father that is not strictly clinical. The seeming level of comfort that exists between Uncle George and the

Indians, as seen by the shared cigars and glib laughter, intensifies the obvious lack of relationship between the Indians and the Adams. As readers, we sense that Nick and his father are outsiders in the camp, and this feeling of separation intensifies Nick’s later confusion over the woman’s bloody birth and the violence of the Indian man’s suicide. These new situations

36 startle Nick, but are also even more discomforting because Nick is the outsider in this situation.

Although Nick is not yet old enough to grasp all the complications of suicide and birth, his separation from the Indian camp, and his and his father’s distance from the situation, opposed to

Uncle George’s immersion, magnifies Nick’s later bewilderment.

Standing on the outside is also a theme of “African Story” but not to the same degree as

“Indian Camp.” As previously noted, “African Story” is interspersed throughout the plot of

Garden of Eden. While the short story separated from the novel is complete and makes sense, background information on the young David in the short story is provided in Garden of Eden itself.

In “African Story,” a younger David Bourne goes elephant hunting with his father in the

African jungle. In Garden of Eden, Marita asks of David, “I thought he came from East Africa” to which Catherine replies, “No. Some of his ancestors escaped from Oklahoma and took him to

East Africa when he was very young” (111). David was evidently not totally foreign to Africa, yet he also was not by birth a part of the society. David’s father is a poacher who stays at a local

Swahili settlement. David’s father goes elephant hunting with a local native named Juma, with whom he also spends his nights carousing.

Juma serves as a guide to David and his father, much like the Indians guided Dr. Adams and Nick into their camp. David’s father often relates Juma’s instructions on where they will go next in the hunt, such as when he says, “Juma knows where he’s going now” (548). Juma directs their movement and has also previously killed the elephant’s friend. Juma is evidently more experienced with elephant hunting than David’s father is. Although David remarks, “he [Juma] had always been David’s best friend and had taught him to hunt,” David does not speak the same language as Juma and his father. When David’s father recounts to him the story of Juma killing

37 the elephant’s askari, David asks, “How long do you suppose he and his friend had been together?” (550). His father then asks Juma for David, and “[he] and Juma spoke together” (55).

David’s father then interprets Juma’s answer for his son. Although David’s father can interact with Juma, David cannot, despite previously stating that Juma is his “best friend.”

Unlike Nick, who at seven, presumably only visits the Indian Camp with his father,

David does live within the African settlement. However, although David may be less of an outsider than Nick is, he is still not completely a part of the village. David and his father follow the lead of Juma, and although David’s father has a relationship with Juma similar to that of

Uncle George with the Indians, David is kept apart. Both boys have trouble understanding the actions of adults in the stories, not only because of their age and inexperience, but because they are both, although to different degrees, outsiders standing on the periphery. This confusion begins with the sense of being an outsider but grows as each boy realizes the lack of knowledge they possess regarding the situations they are thrust into. A main focus in these two stories is

Nick and David coming to understand that they do not fully comprehend their father’s business.

When “Indian Camp” begins, Dr. Adams and Nick follow the Indians in their boat to help a woman who “had been trying to have her baby for two days” (68). Nick goes along under the premise of acting as “an intern” for his father, yet, realistically, Nick is too young to be of any real help (68). Dr. Adams tells his son, “This lady is going to have a baby Nick” to which Nick replies, “I know” (68). His father sharply responds, “You don’t know. Listen to me…” and goes on to describe labor (68).

Nick’s offhanded remarks that “he knows” what is going on hints at his discomfort and resistance to any more information. Dr. Adams later tries to explain labor to Nick, stating, “The baby wants to be born, and she wants it to be born. All her muscles are trying to get the baby

38 born” (68). Nick dejectedly replies, “I see” (68). As the story progresses, it becomes clear that

Nick is anything but enamored of his father’s work. When his father later asks him, “How do you like being an interne?” he replies “All right” but is all the while “looking away so as not to see what his father was doing” (68). Nick is disgusted by the birth and “did not watch. His curiosity had been gone for a long time now” (69).

In the early Nick Adams stories, Nick frequently accompanies his father. As discussed in the previous chapter, “The Doctor and the Doctor’s Wife” ends with Nick going off into the woods with his father. The Doctor’s presence is much preferable to returning to his mother; therefore, Nick tags along to the Indian Camp. After already getting into the boat, Nick asks,

“Where are we going, Dad?” (67). Nick loves to assist his father; however, he did not anticipate the messiness of childbirth.

David, too, is already in the boat to assist his father before he knows what he will be doing. David’s father is hunting down an elephant with particularly long tusks in order to harvest the ivory. Striving to impress his father, David sets out on his own to track the elephant prior to the hunt. David remarks, “He had found the elephant at night and followed him to see that he had both of his tusks and then returned to find the two men and put them on the trail” (549). David’s courage has the desired results; his father agrees to take him on the hunt. Yet as quickly as the first day on the trail, “[David] knew he should have been sent back to the shamba once he had put them on the trail. Juma had known it for a long time. His father knew it now and there was nothing to be done” (546).

Despite his initial enthusiasm, David fails at keeping pace with the men, and later fails to believe that their actions are ethical. He is embarrassed by his shortcomings and apologizes to his father, stating, “I’m sorry I was so sleepy.” Mr. Bourne tries to comfort him, justifying his

39 fatigue by reminding him how late he and Kibo had been out the previous night (547). But despite David’s father’s reassurances, David is greatly disturbed by his inferiority. He reflects later to himself,

“He was sure they were not proud of him except for his dexterity in killing the two birds….Once the deadly following started he was useless to them and a danger to their success….he knew they must have hated themselves for not sending him back when there still was time.” (549) Although David is troubled by his inability to physically keep up, he is more upset by his growing misgivings regarding elephant hunting. Like Nick, David quickly realizes that his father’s work does not hold any interest or meaning for him. Unlike Nick; however, David soon finds that his father’s work does not only disinterest him, but he also doubts the integrity of it.

On the first night of the trail, David thinks “that the hollow way he felt as he remembered him

[the elephant] was from waking hungry. But it was not and he found that out in the next three days” (547). The hollow feeling David experiences is, as he later realizes, “the beginning of the knowledge of loneliness” (553).

Both Nick and David are uncomfortable with the situations they follow their fathers into.

David is furious that he has betrayed the elephant that his father and Juma are attempting to kill;

Nick is horrified at the bloodiness of the birth. Yet it is not just the acts of violence that upsets the boys. In both short stories, hints of illicit sexual affairs play a major part in the plot of the story, and although the boys do not completely understand what they are witnessing, they recognize a feeling of secretiveness. Nick’s casual lie that “he knows” what is happening with the birth is ironic because he really is not at all aware of what is going on in the background of the shanty.

In the beginning of “Indian Camp,” Uncle George and the Indians lead Dr. Adams and

Nick to the settlement. Uncle George is described as “[sitting] in the stern of the camp rowboat”

(67). This detail seems to suggest that Uncle George himself is from the Indian camp (67).

Previously, when I analyzed Nick and Dr. Adam’s separation from the Indians compared to

Uncle George’s seemingly intimate relationship with them, I noted how the Indian woman, when in the midst of the surgery, “bit Uncle George on the arm” and Uncle George exclaimed, ‘Damn squaw bitch!’ to which “the young Indian who had rowed Uncle George over had laughed at him” (68). Uncle George’s familiarity with the Indians, along with the young woman’s rage which is directed towards Uncle George, rather than any of the other Indian men, raises suspicion. In the opening of the story, Uncle George gives the other Indians in the boats “cigars” seeming to hint at the custom of a father passing out cigars at his child’s birth. When Dr. Adams is celebrating his operative success, he says to Uncle George, “Ought to have a look at the proud father. They’re usually the worst sufferers in these little affairs….I must say he took it pretty quietly” (69). Hemingway’s interesting use of the word “affairs” seems to hint at perhaps a double meaning, as if perhaps the Indian woman was involved in an affair. The details in this story, culminating with the suicide of the supposed Indian father, seem to allude that perhaps it was Uncle George who had impregnated the young Indian woman, and that is why it seems as if he himself had brought the doctor over to the camp.

Although this can only be inferred and is not explicitly stated, the evidence in the otherwise sparse story seems to make it probable that George is the father.16 While the Doctor may know this, or if not at least suspects what is really occurring, Nick is oblivious to the

16 Over the last sixty years, many critics have debated the paternity of the squaw’s child and why the Indian man chooses to kill himself. In his article, “Hemingway’s Primitivism and ‘Indian Camp,’” Jeffrey Meyers provides a litany of scholars and their varied interpretations of the text. Meyers writes, “Thomas Tanselle (1962) whose short but influential note opened a can of worms by mentioning and then dismissing the theory that Uncle George is the father of the baby, stresses the guilt the Indian feels for engendering the child” (212). Meyers then goes on to list critics who have written articles supporting the theory that Uncle George is the father of the child (Kenneth Bernard, Peter Hays, Larry Grimes, Gerry Brenner) although he himself argues, “there is no evidence in the story that George ever slept with the squaw” (213). Meyers instead argues that “Indian Camp” expresses “Hemingway’s lifelong attraction to primitive people” and is based on Hemingway’s deep anthropological understanding of the Indian culture (215).

41 interactions among the adults. However, although he may not be aware of the facts, he picks up on the emotional realities within the shanty. Later, in the middle of Nick’s questions about death, he abruptly asks his father, “Where did Uncle George go?” (70). Nick may not understand every fact surrounding the birth and suicide he witnessed, but he does grasp the messiness of what occurred within the shanty, and perceptively notes his uncle’s absence.

In “African Story,” David seems to be slightly older than Nick and is more astutely aware of what is occurring in his environment. In the beginning of “African Story,” David is out late at night with his dog, Kibo. David’s father and Juma are back at the shamba, where the men drink and are entertained by women. Although David is probably only about ten, he is not as naive as

Nick. When David returns to the camp after hunting, he thinks, “The moon was high now and he wondered why there was no drumming in the shamba. Something was strange if his father was there and there was no drumming” (546).

At the end of each day’s hunt, Juma and David’s father return to the shamba. Nick knows the men spend their nights with the local women, and later when the men are on the elephant’s trail, he states, “They looked as though they had a dirty secret, just as they had looked when he had found them that night at the shamba” (549). This line implies that David had caught the men with the women and that he immediately found it “dirty.” Later in Garden of Eden, Catherine shows her contempt at what she believes to be this story’s “dirtiness” and states, “It’s certainly much more interesting and instructive than a lot of natives in a kraal….with your drunken father staggering around smelling of sour beer and not knowing which ones of the little horrors he had fathered” (189). Catherine’s disgust with the father almost mimics David’s feeling of betrayal in the story. As the story progresses, David becomes horrified with his father for killing the elephant, which in his mind seems to be equated with the activities in the shamba. In Garden of

Eden, when David is beginning to write the short story, he tells himself, “It started now with the evil in the shamba and he had to write it and he was very well into it” (94).

Both Dr. Adams’s work in the shanty, and David’s father’s work in the jungle take on a sordid feel by the end of each story. At the end of “Indian Camp,” the young Indian husband has killed himself out of what seems to be disgrace, and by the end of “African Story,” David realizes that his father kills the elephant partially out of sport (189). Prior to accompanying their fathers on their missions, both David and Nick were unaware of the nature of their father’s work.

David and Nick are both idealists at the beginning of each story; however, on these journeys, they lose their innocence. When Marita reads this short story and asks David if this “was when you stopped loving him” David replies, “No. I always loved him. This was when I got to know him” (154). Nick and David both “get to know their fathers” by the end of each of these stories.

When the son, whether Nick or David, accompanies their father on their mission, they are forced to see their father as person rather than as the usual paternal figure of authority. In “Indian

Camp,” Nick listens to the woman’s tortured screams and pleads with his father, “Oh Daddy, can’t you give her something to make her stop screaming?” to which Dr. Adams indifferently replies, “No. I haven’t any anesthetic….But her screams are not important. I don’t hear them because they are not important” (68). Dr. Adams’s attitude throughout the short story is strictly clinical. He is not upset, as Nick is, by the woman’s pain. Later, he jokes to Uncle George,

“That’s one for the medical journal, George. Doing a Caesarian with a jack-knife and sewing it up with nine-foot, tapered gut leaders” (69). Dr. Adams is so conditioned to perform surgery that it debilitates him from empathizing with the woman whom he has just cut open with a “jack- knife” and “sewed up with nine-foot, tapered gut leaders.” He is described in this scene as

“feeling exalted and talkative as football players are in the dressing room after a game” (69).

Like Juma and David’s father on the hunt, Dr. Adams is filled with a very masculine sense of power after he has operated on the woman. Nick; however, is plagued with insecurity when faced with his father’s control and nonchalance in the confrontational situation.

We see Nick’s insecurity at the end of the short story when he asks his father, “Do ladies always have such a hard time having babies?” to which his father answered, “No, that was very, very exceptional” (69). Although Nick sees a new aspect of his father in his role as a doctor, and witnesses his control as he ignores the woman’s cries and brags to Uncle George, Dr. Adams does change his tone towards the end of the story when he recognizes his son’s need for explanation. Dr. Adams apologizes to his son for his initial vigor and hastiness to drag Nick into the situation; he tells Nick, “‘I’m terribly sorry I brought you along, Nickie’ all his post- operative exhilaration gone. ‘It was a horrible mess to put you through’” (69). When Nick then directs a series of questions towards his father, “Do many men kill themselves, Daddy?....do many women?….don’t they ever?….is dying hard?” his father patiently answers each question and reassures his son that he believes “[dying] is pretty easy, Nick. It all depends” (69-70).

Nick sees his father as a man rather than his father in “Indian Camp,” yet the ending is overall positive. Nick feels secure as his father rows the boat home; the story ends with the line,

“In the early morning on the lake sitting in the stern of the boat with his father rowing, he felt quite sure that he would never die” (70). In “African Story;” however, David also comes to see a new side to his father, yet the realization is harsher and the ending nowhere near as positive.

David’s father, similar to Dr. Adams, sees his work strictly in a clinical manner. David is impressed by what he seems to see as the sacredness of the elephant, and when the elephant is finally killed, he thinks, “All the dignity and majesty and all the beauty were gone from the elephant and he was a huge wrinkled pile” (552). David may be in awe of the animal, but his

44 father and Juma see it strictly in terms of monetary gain. When David’s father tells David they are following the elephant to his dead friend’s grave, David asks, “How long do you suppose he and his friend had been together?” Similar to Dr. Adam’s indifference to the Indian woman’s cries, David’s father replies, “I haven’t the faintest idea” (550). When his father asks Juma for

David, David is told, “Probably four or five times your life….he doesn’t know or care really”

(550).

David is horrified by the men’s disregard for the elephant and his dead friend. He quickly comes to see that “the bull wasn’t doing any harm and now we’ve tracked him to where he came to see his dead friend and now we’re going to kill him. It’s my fault. I betrayed him” (550). Once

David begins to realize that killing the elephant is a grave injustice, he also starts to change his opinion of his father. In a sudden epiphany, he thinks to himself, “My father doesn’t need to kill elephants to live….If they kill him Juma will drink his share of the ivory or just buy himself another goddamn wife” (550).

As David loses faith in the mission, he simultaneously loses faith in his father. He later angrily refers to his father and Juma as “the goddamned friend killers” and unlike Nick, David is not just confused by his father’s work, but he is also rebellious. Nick may not enjoy watching his father operate on the Indian woman, but he never directly tells his father how he feels. David; however, does not hesitate to make his father aware of how angry he is. Right before David and his father are about to reach the elephant on the trail, David says to his father, “Fuck elephant hunting” (551). His father answers, “What’s that?” and David restates, “Fuck elephant hunting”

(551). Rather than asking his son what’s wrong, David’s father tells him plainly, “Be careful you don’t fuck it up” (551).

At the end of “African Story” David’s father attempts to have a debriefing with his son as

Dr. Adams does with Nick at the end of “Indian Camp.” David’s father says to him, “He was a murderer you know Davey” which his son argues is impossible given the fact humans were constantly hunting the elephant himself (553). His father then half-heartedly apologizes, saying,

“I’m sorry you got so mixed up about him” to which David angrily replies, “I wish he’d killed

Juma” (553). Unlike Dr. Adams, David’s father does not seem to genuinely listen to his son’s reactions. He does not address his comment about “fuck elephant hunting” and later when he apologizes, “I’m sorry you got so mixed up about him,” it is not sincere like Dr. Adams’s apology, “I’m terribly sorry I brought you along Nickie.” David’s father still places the blame on his son, telling him, “I’m sorry you got so mixed up” whereas Dr. Adams feels guilty at the violence his son has witnessed, and takes responsibility, stating, “I’m sorry I brought you along.”

At the end of “Indian Camp” Nick has worked through his confusion and rows back home with his father feeling that despite death, he cannot be harmed. However, by the time

David has returned to the shamba, he has experienced a profound change in his perspective of relationships with others. When his father asks him, “Do you want to make peace, Davey?” he responds “All right” but only because “he knew this was the start of the never telling he had decided on” (554). As David’s disgust at his betrayal of the elephant builds, he starts to realize that he should “Never tell anyone anything ever. Never tell anyone anything again” (550). When

“African Story” ends, David has decided to become emotionally guarded. He does not have the sense of trust that Nick has, rather he is angry, and has learned to depend only on himself.

While “Indian Camp” and “African Story” seem to be the two stories that most closely mirror each other, “My Old Man” also shares similarities with the two. Hemingway writes about this story in A Moveable Feast, and says, “It was one of the two stories I had left when

46 everything I had written was stolen in Hadley’s suitcase that time at the Gare de Lyon” (73). As previously noted, this story differs in tone and style, yet “My Old Man” also stands out because the young boy in the story, Joe, is exuberant compared to Nick and David, who are more reticent.

Joe excitedly rambles on throughout the short story, such as when he discusses his father’s position as a jockey or his own love of horses. For example, Joe at one point states, “I was nuts about horses, too. There’s something about it, when they come out and go up the track to the post. Sort of dancy and tight looking with the jock keeping a tight hold on them and maybe easing off a little and letting them run a little going up” (152). Joe’s garrulous nature is a sharp change from the compressed style of the other In Our Time short stories.

Scholars continuously debate over what exactly Hadley lost when she left the suitcase unattended, and although we will never know what the original short stories focused on, we do know that one of these earliest stories, the one not lost, was undoubtedly focused on a father-son relationship. “My Old Man” attests that Hemingway had been trying to capture the essence of his father from the time he first began to write.

In many ways, “My Old Man” is very similar to “African Story.” For one, both fathers disappoint their sons when the boys recognize dishonesty in their fathers. For example, when Joe realizes his father has been fixing the races, he states, “Of course I knew it was funny all the time. But my old man saying that right out like that sure took the kick all out of it for me and I didn’t get the real kick back again ever” (157). This loss of innocence is very similar to David’s reaction to elephant hunting, as seen when he realized, “My father didn’t need to kill elephants to live” (550). David’s conviction that he has betrayed the elephant is best understood when he decides to “never ever tell him or anybody anything again, never anything again” (551). David

47 and Joe both have profound respect for the animals they feel have been slighted and this causes them to lose enjoyment in the sporting activities their fathers enjoy.

In addition to respecting the animals, Joe and David also treat the elephant and horse with great reverence and admiration. As Joe watched Kzar race around the track, he thinks, “This

Kzar is a great big yellow horse that looks like just nothing but run. I never saw such a horse. He was being led around the paddocks with his head down and when he went by me I felt all hollow inside he was so beautiful. There never was such a wonderful, lean, running built horse” (155).

David too, experiences this “hollow” feeling when he first gazes up at the elephant in the clearing. He describes the experience as,

Then he woke once with the moonlight on his face and he thought of the elephant with his great ears moving as he stood in the forest, his head hung down with the weight of his tusks. David thought then in the night that the hollow way he felt as he remembered him was from waking hungry. But it was not and he found that out in the next three days (547). Both boys are awed by the grace and beauty of these creatures, which in turn causes them to feel even more enraged when their fathers show a lack of respect for the animals’ magnificence. After Kzar loses the race as a result of George Gardener’s dishonesty, Joe thinks,

I felt all trembly and funny inside, and then we were all jammed in with the people going downstairs to stand in front of the board where they’d post what Kircubbin paid. Honest, watching the race I’d forgot how much my old man had bet on Kircubbin. I’d wanted Kzar to win so damned bad. But now it was all over it was swell to know we had the winner” (157). Later, after Joe’s father “looked at [Joe] sort of funny” and said, “George Gardner’s a swell jockey, all right….it sure took a great jock to keep that Kzar horse from winning” Nick thinks to himself, “I wish I were a jockey and could have rode him instead of that son of a bitch.

And that was funny, thinking of George Gardener as a son of a bitch because I’d always liked him and besides he’d given us the winner, but I guess that’s what he is, all right” (157).

In addition to Joe’s indignation at the injustice of Kzar being cheated out of the race, his newly formed opinion that Gardener is a “son of a bitch” mirrors David’s reaction to Juma’s role in elephant hunting. As previously stated, David tells his father, “I wish [the elephant] killed

Juma” to which his father admonishes, “I think that’s carrying it a little far….Juma’s your friend, you know” (553). David replies, “Not any more” (553). Both boys recognize that their fathers and their friends do not see the same integral worth in the creatures that they are taking advantage of. This disappointment angers the boys and causes them to separate from their fathers by the end of the story.

While “African Story” ends with David deciding to “make peace” but only “because he knew this was the start of the never telling that he had decided on,” “My Old Man” ends with

Joe, too, losing his father but because of death. At the end of “My Old Man,” Joe watches his father being carried off on a stretcher looking “so white and gone and so awfully dead” (160). As

Joe watches his father being carried off, he hears men standing nearby talking about his father, saying, “Well Butler got his, all right” and “I don’t give a good goddam if he did, the crook. He had it coming to him on the stuff he’s pulled” (160). George Gardener tries to comfort Joe, who in turn rather despondently says to the reader, “But I don’t know. Seems when they get started they don’t leave a guy nothing” (160).

Although both David and Joe lose their fathers in a sense, the latter is left literally alone at the end of the short story. All three father-son stories vary on the condition of the relationship at the end of each story. Nick and Dr. Adams find a common understanding, David and his father make peace on the surface level, and Joe and his father are physically separated by death.

Although Joe knows his father is a criminal, and admits that it took “the kick” out of it for him,

49 throughout the story he still repeats, “I loved my old man so much” (160). Despite conflicts, losses of faith, and breaches of trust, Hemingway’s sons never deny that they love their fathers.

Many critics write how complicated the text of Garden of Eden is, and how sifting through the manuscripts often cause one to wonder if Hemingway himself knew what to do with this text. However, despite complications in the plot of Catherine and David, one part of Garden of Eden seems to reign pure and complete: the text of “African Story.” In Garden of Eden, we see David struggle not to lose himself as he first looks into the mirror during that crucial post- haircut scene. Yet ultimately, David, and Hemingway, answer the question that burdens them throughout their lives as both writers and men: what to do with the memory of the father. The father is often complicated: he does not react to the young woman’s cries during labor, he kills the grand old elephant for sport and pleasure, and he is not always honest in his business. These details may not have always been factual when lined up with the characteristics of the actual Dr.

Hemingway, a man who for most of his life was staid and remained near to home, yet the “actual feeling of life” thoroughly bleeds into the character of the father. Dr. Hemingway was complicated, he was not always honest with his family, and ultimately, like Joe’s father, he left his son too soon. Yet despite, all the messy complications, In Garden of Eden, Hemingway finds his own father through the last father-son story he writes: “African Story.” Garden of Eden stands as a collage of various pieces of the father-son stories Hemingway kept trying to get back to throughout his career, and finally, through the bar mirror, Hemingway sees his father in himself, finally realizing that “he was not a tragic character” and his father’s life was ultimately not a tragedy.

WORKS CITED

Baker, Carlos. Ernest Hemingway: Selected Letters, 1917-1961. New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1981.

Burwell, Rose Marie. Hemingway: The Postwar Years and the Posthumous Novels. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996.

______.“Hemingway’s Garden of Eden: Resistance of Things Past and Protecting the Masculine Text.” Texas Studies in Literature and Language 35.2 (1993): 198-225. JSTOR. Web. 18 March 2012.

Eby, Carl. “Teaching Modernist Temporality with Garden of Eden.” The Hemingway Review 30.1 (2010): 116-121. Project Muse. Web. 18 March 2012.

Fleming, Robert E. The Face in the Mirror: Hemingway’s Writers. Tuscaloosa: The University of Alabama Press, 1994.

Hemingway, Ernest. The Complete Short Stories of Ernest Hemingway. Finca Vigia Edition. New York: Scribner, 2003. “An African Story” pgs. 545-554. “The Doctor and the Doctor’s Wife” pgs. 73-76. “Fathers and Sons” pgs. 369-377. “Indian Camp” pgs. 67-70. “My Old Man” pgs 151-160. “Now I Lay Me” pgs. 276-282. “Soldier’s Home” pgs. 111-116.

______.Garden of Eden. New York: Scribner, 1986.

______.A Moveable Feast. New York: Scribner, 1964.

Justice, Hilary K. The Bones of the Others. Kent: The Kent State University Press, 2006.

Oldsey, Bernard. “Hemingway’s Beginnings and Endings.” College Literature 7.3 (1980): 213- 238. JSTOR. Web. 18 March 2012.

Meyers, Jeffrey. “Hemingway’s Primitivism and ‘Indian Camp.’” Twentieth Century Literature 34.2 (1988): 211-222. JSTOR. 18 March 2012.

Reynolds, Michael. Hemingway: The Paris Years. Cambridge: Basil Blackwell, Inc, 1989. ______. The Young Hemingway. New York: W. W. Norton & Company, Inc, 1986.

Stewart, Matthew. Modernism and Tradition in Hemingway’s “In Our Time.” Rochester: Camden House, 2001.

Academic Vita of Kristin T. Danella

Kristin Danella 8230 Rockwell Ave Philadelphia, PA 19111 [email protected]

EDUCATION:

Bachelor of Arts of English, Pennsylvania State University, Spring 2012 Honors in Letters, Arts, and Sciences Thesis Title: Reflections of the Father: Mirroring in Hemingway’s Garden of Eden Thesis Supervisor: Dr. Linda Miller

AWARDS: Dean’s List- All Semesters Evan Pugh Scholar Award- Senior Beverly Wright McHugh Award- Senior Joan and Joel Bachman Award- Senior Faculty Senate Scholarship- Senior Evan Pugh Scholar Award- Junior Joan and Joel Bachman Award- Junior

ACTIVITIES: The Honor Society of Sigma Tau Delta- President Penn State Abington Career Ambassadors- President Penn State Abington Lion Ambassadors- Campus Ambassador Penn State Abington Freshman Year Experience Program- Peer Mentor Abington College of Undergraduate Research Activities Editorial Assistant of Intercultural Education: Media, Technology, and Intercultural Education, vol. 24, 3, 2013