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Gender, Sexuality, and Race
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Hemingway’s Barbershop Quintet: The Garden of Eden Manuscript
MARK SPILKA
Spilka (1987) uses biography, manuscript study, and intertextual work (most particularly with F. Scott Fitzgerald’s Tender Is the Night but also with Kipling) to address Hemingway’s association of hair and haircutting with sexual experimentation and sexuality. He argues that the full plot of The Garden of Eden (with the Sheldon narrative intact) not only sublimates Hemingway’s experiences with his four wives but also reveals him to be a man deeply dependent on women. Subsequently, Spilka reads the focus on writing and particularly the creation of the African stories as attempts to transcend his own “dependencies and passivities.” This essay was revised and included in Mark Spilka’s Hemingway’s Quarrel with Androgyny (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1989).
I
In 1946, when Ernest Hemingway began writing The Garden of Eden, Scott Fitzgerald had been dead for nine years, Rudyard Kipling for ten.1 Both writers were much on Hemingway’s mind as he fashioned what now seems to be his most experimental and easily his most ambitious novel. Fitzgerald’s life and work, particularly Tender is the Night, would offer precedents for the troubled triangles in Paris and on the Riviera which dominate the main narrative; Kipling’s Jungle Books would inspire the African tale of an elephant hunt, the composition of which becomes a dynamic counterpoint to that narrative. Hemingway would measure himself, as always, against expired and admired competitors and try to beat them at their own games; but it would be his game, as always, that mattered.
As early as May 28, 1934, Hemingway had written Fitzgerald a predictive letter, complaining about his tragic stance in Tender is the Night, his failure in that novel to use rather than abuse his personal dilemma in caring for his mad wife Zelda:
Forget your personal tragedy. We are all bitched from the start and you especially have to be hurt like hell before you can write seriously. But when you get the damned hurt use it—don’t cheat with it.… You see, Bo, you’re not a tragic character. Neither am I. All we are is writers and what we should do is write. Of all people on earth you needed discipline in your work and instead you marry someone who is jealous of your work, wants to compete with you and ruins you. It’s not as simple as that and I thought Zelda was crazy the first time I met her and you complicated it even more by being in love with her and, of course you’re a rummy. But you’re no more of a rummy than Joyce is and most good writers are.… All you need to do is write truly and not care about what the fate of it is. (Emphasis mine)2
By 1946 the Fitzgerald dilemma, as Hemingway saw it, became the basis for his own novel about artists with mad wives who must learn to stick to their jobs in the face of “tragic” circumstances. But it was the curious late sequence from Tender is the Night—the “lesbian lark” and the “barbershop showdown”—that seems to have set him off.
There were, of course, still other and much more private urgencies. According to Jeffrey Meyers, Hemingway’s second wife, Pauline Pfeiffer, had become disillusioned with men in the years following their divorce in 1940, and “about 1946 … [had] turned to her own sex” for love.3 By this time Hemingway had been divorced by his third wife, Martha Gellhorn, for whom he had left Pauline, and had just married his fourth wife, Mary Welsh. His sympathies with Pauline had been reawakened by his rueful experience with the fiercely independent Martha, and perhaps also by his new marriage to a better caretaker, a petite, devoted, and rather boyish woman like Pauline. By 1947 Pauline herself was in Cuba, helping him to cure their ailing son Patrick in Mary’s absence, and on such good terms with Mary when she returned as to become her nurse and host in Florida, later that same year, while Mary was recuperating from the flu. The good relations between these wives, as colored by Pauline’s emergent lesbianism, and perhaps also by the resumption of androgynous sexual practices with Mary that recalled Pauline, seem to have confirmed and perhaps even shaped his decision to create fictional versions of his first and second marriages with Hadley Richardson and Pauline: for in those marriages two good relations with lesbian shadings had seemed to obtain between paired wives, and the hair fetishisms from childhood (which Pauline especially had exploited) had similarly led to or been bound up with androgynous experiments.
His first awareness of such connections seems evident in the fiction written during the early years with Pauline. Thus, late in A Farewell to Arms (1929), ex-Lieutenant Henry describes in oddly suggestive terms his visit to the hairdresser’s in Switzerland where his common-law wife Catherine is having her hair waved:
It was exciting to watch and Catherine smiled and talked to me and my voice was a little thick from being excited. The tongs made a pleasant clicking sound and I could see Catherine in three mirrors and it was pleasant and warm in the booth. Then the woman put up Catherine’s hair, and Catherine looked in the mirror and changed it a little, taking out and putting in pins; then stood up. “I’m sorry to have taken such a long time.”
“Monsieur was very interested. Were you not, Monsieur?” the woman smiled.
“Yes,” I said.
We went out and up the street. It was cold and wintry and the wind was blowing. “Oh darling, I love you so,” I said.4
The sexual excitement recorded here seems to have been based on Pauline’s early efforts to distinguish herself from Ernest’s first wife, Hadley, through tonsorial stylings and seductions. She had apparently sensed a similar excitement in Ernest, a kind of secret identification with her own three-mirrored stylings that she might appropriate for herself, even as Catherine appropriates it, a few pages later in the novel, when she asks Henry to let his hair grow longer while she shortens hers:
“Then we’d both be alike. Oh, darling, I want you so much I want to be you too.”
“You are. We’re the same one.”
“I know it. At night we are.”
“The nights are grand.”
“I want us to be all mixed up.…” (299–300)
The androgynous direction of these early romantic scenes—even their latent threat of male unmanning and female manning—now seems clear. What Hemingway had brought to Fitzgerald’s novel, what he had pieced together for himself over the years with Pauline and Martha and in the new life with Mary, was his own understanding of why Fitzgerald had put lesbian and tonsorial fiascos in zany sequence and what he himself might make of such conjunctions out of his own long-nurtured hunches.
II
Among Fitzgerald scholars the connection between his homosexual anxieties and his writing problems has become a critical commonplace. In a recent contribution to this view Angus Collins speculates that certain homosexual sequences in “The World’s Fair,” an early version of Tender is the Night, are “projection[s] of vocational insecurity.” Fitzgerald’s paralyzing fear of “vocational emasculation” had become identified in his mind with gay and lesbian sexuality; he had in effect chosen a homosexual vocation whereby his notoriously “insecure masculinity” had become “related to matters of craft”; and only when he “had mastered any suspicions of himself as emasculate artist” could he make significant progress on Tender is the Night:
Homosexuality therefore defines the circle of his creative difficulties in that he is homosexual both in his moral and artistic commitment and in his proneness to moral collapse: homosexuality can convey to him both his own much greater emasculation (the attenuations of art) and his own capacities for self-abandonment (the perils of self-indulgence). The novel is completed only when the sense of apostasy begins to predominate, when Fitzgerald learns that his choice of career is far less reprehensible than his failure to practice it.5
Here Collins argues that, in writing Tender is the Night (1934), Fitzgerald would break the homosexual circle, resolve his creative difficulties, and so exercise the very discipline that Hemingway had denied him. But as Arthur Mizener notes in The Far Side of Paradise, Hemingway would soon modify his original harsh judgment, and in 1935 would tell Maxwell Perkins of how strange it was that “in retrospect” the novel “gets better and better.”6 Meanwhile he had correctly identified Fitzgerald’s “dangerous self-indulgence,” his importation of “feelings about his own decline” into the character of Dick Diver, as a problem he would himself have to face in his own version of the writer’s struggle with “tragic” circumstances (238). Thus David Bourne, his chief persona in The Garden of Eden, would make of the act of writing a stoic buffer against such circumstances and would stubbornly resist their debilitating power. He would confront the hazards of androgyny that Fitzgerald (though he had oddly caught their form) had only dimly understood, and would overcome them through courageous masculine artistry.
The interesting point in this standoff with Fitzgerald is that Hemingway sensed how lesbianism connects with soldier Tommy Barban’s barbarian triumph over the Divers’ barbershop androgyny—their oddly tonsorial harmony, their symbiotic alliance as Riviera prima donnas. He would give Barban’s healthy claims a far less cynical twist in his own view of masculine artistry, and would exploit the Divers’ civilized shavings far more deviously than Fitzgerald had imagined. Whether he understood that Abe and Mary North were based upon his boyhood hero, Ring Lardner, and his wife Ellis, or that Fitzgerald’s barbershop scene was surely influenced by Lardner’s “Haircut” (that famous early narrative model for his own juvenile style), or that Abe and Mary together offer fictional analogues for the Divers’ decline and fall—whether or not he understood all this, he decidedly sensed that Mary North’s emergent lesbianism after her husband’s death was like Pauline’s after her divorce, that it reflected upon Nicole Diver’s man-hating propensities, and Pauline’s too, and upon Nicole’s previous madness, and Zelda’s too, and that of his mistress Jane Mason during the troubled years with Pauline: for this would be the pith and point of his own adventures into barbershop disharmonies in The Garden of Eden with the fictional likes of Pauline, Zelda, Hadley, Jane, even of later loves and wives like Adriana and Miss Mary, perhaps Miss Martha too. More interesting still, he seems to have understood that in all this biographical scramble, androgyny, and not homosexuality per se, was Fitzgerald’s underlying problem as well as his own, many critics of both writers and much patriarchal and even feminist sentiment to the contrary notwithstanding.
All of which helps to explain why The Garden of Eden, in its roughly completed manuscript form, is chiefly a novel about haircuts—or about haircuts and the narratives and counter-narratives they inspire. Ring Lardner’s talkative barber has in this respect little or nothing upon Hemingway’s talkative heroines and their emotional investments in hair styles. Indeed, the first chapter of the 1500-page manuscript swings upon newlywed Catherine Bourne’s account of her “dangerous” surprise for her husband David, her trip to the barber shop for a boy’s haircut like his—an account excised like so much else from the 247 pages of the printed version of the novel issued by Scribner’s in May 1986.7
One can understand the excision. The account is not on the surface the “dangerous” adventure that Catherine makes of it as she tells of her fright when the barber holds “everything out to one side” and goes “snip-snip-snip,” then does the back and the other side, and explains that she felt confident nonetheless about going on because she had seen him cut David’s hair the week before and had now told him “to cut mine just the same as yours” (Ms. 1/1/insert 18). But the excision of this “little drama” is in fact a violation of the novel’s manuscript style, its attempts to get at unsuspected depths through selective descriptions of supposedly insignificant (even silly) actions, its claustrophobic concentration upon the surface details of eating, drinking, swimming, diving, tanning, barbering, bantering, bickering, but above all talking, and below all, writing and making love—a violation, then, of the novel’s narrative status as an expansive account of an inner journey, a “sea change” as seen from inside the iceberg, and therefore not an ordinary novel at all, like his early icebergs, or his recent war epic, For Whom the Bell Tolls, or for that matter, Fitzgerald’s Tender is the Night, with its solidly realized social context and wide cast of characters—as Hemingway’s persona almost explains (“It’s not a novel … It’s an account. Travels and Voyages,” (Ms. 3/16/27) in one of many excised implications of the author’s conscious intent.
One of the nicer signposts of that inner journey, the Rodin statue from “The Gates of Hell,” based on Ovid’s Metamorphoses and Baudelaire’s Les fleurs du mal, has also been removed from the opening chapter, quite possibly because it ties in directly with the Paris couple, Nick and Barbara Sheldon, whom Scribner’s editor, Tom Jenks, decided he must remove along with the subplot they enliven starting with Book Two in the manuscript. Thus, on the evening after her barbershop story, when the newly shorn Catherine asks David to make love to her as she is, she also asks him in an excised passage if he remembers “the sculpture in the Rodin museum,” and with that in mind, if he will now “try and be good and not think—only feel.” A moment later she asks, “Are you changing like in the sculpture? … Are you trying to?” Then, as his resistance slackens until they cannot tell “who is who,” she becomes even more insistent:
“Now will you please be that way now? … Will you change and be my girl and let me take you? Will you be like you were in the statue? Will you change?”
He knew now and it was like the statue. The one there are no photographs of and of which no reproductions are sold. (Ms. 1/1/170)
The statue in question, from a group sometimes called “The Damned Women,” consists of two lesbians making love, the more active of whom looks (in the bronze version in the museum) like a naked man with a woman’s breast plainly visible on his chest as he enfolds a naked woman, but who proves on closer inspection to be a naked woman with a short haircut like Catherine’s. About the lack of photographs and reproductions in the 1920s David may be right; but in 1939 and again in 1953, while Hemingway was writing the novel, a reproduction did appear in a German edition of Rodin’s work and others have since become available.8 Still, whatever its accessibility, the important point is that Hemingway chose not to describe it, even as he chose not to describe with any exactness the lovemaking between his sexual seekers after dangerous knowledge. For them as for us, it is the edenic invitation to forbidden mysteries and disturbing ambiguities that matters. As Catherine tells David, she has thought about the statue “Ever since.… that day in the Rodin,” and though she doesn’t understand why “it works,” she knows that it does; and David too not only feels its metamorphic powers but admits them to himself while struggling w...
