106
PARTISAN REVIEW
he was trained as a physicist, and has a surreal comic imagination
-can breathe fictional life into technology, transfiguring scientific
know-how into the elaborate farce of
Gravity's Rainbow.
But in the
domestic realism of John Updike the juggling of science and fiction
doesn't work.
If
we need any proof that less is more in a novel's descriptions of
sex, it comes from an unexpected source: Ernest Hemingway's
The
Garden oj Eden,
published twenty-five years after the author's death.
Powerfully suggestive without being relentlessly explicit, this story
of a doomed marriage is charged with sexual urgency. The "devil
things" that the young husband and wife indulge in are not spelled
out, yet this is the most nakedly erotic book Hemingway wrote.
He apparently began
The Garden ojEden
around 1946 and worked
at it sporadically until his death in 1961. For some reason he was
unable to pare down the huge, unwieldy manuscript, couldn't find
the concrete shape of his original vision, and the book remained un–
finished at the end. Recently an editor at Scribner's took on the for–
midable pruning that Hemingway could neither confront nor carry
out, and the result, while certainly not seamless and painfully rough
in some places, has some luminous surprises.
The prose, much of the way through, has a lyrical tenderness
very different from the taut, compressed exactitude of the famous
Hemingway style. Though by now it is hardly news that the "truth–
telling" severity of this style hid a romantic heart, there is an unchar–
acteristically open, loose, relaxed sweetness in the prose of this "found"
novel as Hemingway recounts the youthful pleasure that David and
Catherine Bourne, newly married, take in each other before things
begin to go wrong.
The fishing boats were well out. They had gone out in the
dark with the first rising of the breeze and the young man and
the girl had wakened and heard them and then curled together
under the sheet of the bed and slept again. They had made love
when they were half awake with the bright light outside but the
room still shadowed and then had lain together and been happy
and tired and then made love again . Then they were so hungry
that they did not think they would live until breakfast and now
they were in the cafe eating and watching the sea and the sails
and it was a new day again.
The young couple has settled for a while in a fishing village in
