The Garden of Eden by Ernest Hemingway — When Pleasure Becomes Hard to Read
Reading Note: The Garden of Eden by Ernest Hemingway
This essay discusses the novel in full, including its ending.
At the beginning of The Garden of Eden, the newly married David and Catherine Bourne have made love and are hungry for breakfast. The café has brioche, raspberry preserve, coffee, and boiled eggs; the fishing boats are already out at sea. Hemingway gives the couple a morning we can inhabit before asking us to judge it. Hunger has a perfectly good physical cause, and the food is good.
Then a detail slips into the abundance: Catherine's eggs have been boiled a little less than David's. She takes her coffee without sugar, and he is learning to remember. David can be happy with the eggs on his own plate while knowing exactly how hers should be cooked. The difference is small enough to disappear in a plot summary, though the prose has stopped to give it to us. Their shared breakfast makes room for two separate preferences.
The Bournes eat, swim, make love, look at the sea, and plan the next meal. As those actions return, they begin to carry information that the first morning could not give us. Their recurrence is part of how Hemingway writes time: a day can feel as though it is starting again, while the people living it have changed.
Two appetites at the same table
“They were always hungry but they ate very well.” Appetite and satisfaction sit together in that sentence. In the next sentences the couple's choice of preserve and of how to cook the eggs is itself an excitement; Catherine's headache goes away when the coffee comes. The breakfast makes the body present through relief as well as taste, while the details of the order distinguish the two eaters.
The attention within the scene is uneven in a revealing way. Catherine's softer egg is named in a single comparison, while the narration stays with David as he dices his own, tastes the butter and feels the bite of coarse pepper.
We know that he remembers what she prefers, and we spend more time inside his sensations than hers. That difference in narrative access is easy to miss amid the impression of a morning entirely shared.
The prose moves easily from eating to the boats, back to the bed they have left, and again to the café. Its many joined actions let the day feel open. They can make love and become hungry, eat and already think of lunch, fish and swim. The rhythm is easy to enter because each action seems to invite the next. When Catherine asks David what he is thinking, he answers that he was “just feeling.” That reply suits the scene; the breakfast has given us enough to feel along with him.
We also hear Catherine joke that she is the “destructive type” and will destroy him. At this table the remark belongs to their play, with lunch still on their minds. When she later destroys David's pages, the word gains a harsher sound; the scene still holds the playfulness of their exchange. Hemingway allows both experiences of the sentence to remain available.
David later worries about the ease with which he has written of their days at Le Grau-du-Roi. He fears that simple writing may tempt him to think the experience itself was simple: “Know how complicated it is and then state it simply.” The thought occurs to a character working on his own prose, and it sharpens what we have already encountered in the novel's breakfast. A writer can state an egg preference plainly without telling us in advance every use the detail will acquire. We have to stay with the people long enough to hear the change.
In Chapter 5 Catherine asks David to order her an egg with ham, then takes so long to arrive that he eats her plate before it gets cold. The waiter offers to bring another for her. David's action is mildly funny, and the waiter solves a practical problem; soon Catherine says she means to drive to Biarritz alone. Breakfast can be replaced easily, in the same time, their mornings no longer line up quite as neatly as they did at Le Grau-du-Roi.
The same drink, a changed taste
Early in their travels, David proposes Armagnac with Perrier. Catherine finds the drink fresh, clean, healthy, and ugly; the cold mineral water makes the brandy feel alive. “For heroes,” David says. A few moments later she presses him to keep traveling, perhaps for many months, while his new book and his writing enter the conversation. She initially says he can write afterward, then says he can write if he wants. As he objects, her proposal changes shape, though the length of the journey they are deciding upon remains open.
David agrees to go. When he drinks again, the “hero drink” no longer tastes so good. He orders more Perrier and makes himself a short drink without ice. The changed taste sits beside the decision; Catherine's delight at his answer and David's diminished pleasure in the glass give us two experiences of the same agreement.
Later, at La Napoule, their days settle into another pleasing pattern. Chapter 9 condenses more than a month: David works early, then the couple may swim or lie in the sun; Catherine sometimes drives to Cannes or Nice while he waits on the terrace after work. He has taken to whiskey with Perrier. She brings back food, drink, books, and magazines. The beaches and the sea remain attractive, while the account of a repeated day now contains two schedules, with David's waiting quietly built into one of them.
The early breakfast moves between a shared bed, shared appetite, and the tiny difference David remembers. The later account follows what he does while Catherine is away and what she finds beyond the hotel. Hemingway's compressed account of their habits makes the altered arrangement perceptible within the very pleasures the couple continues to enjoy.
When taste contradicts David
Chapter 12 gives this method its clearest test. David has worked through breakfast on a story and comes out to the terrace for whiskey and Perrier. The young waiter offers him food. David asks for tinned mackerel in white wine, and the waiter warns that it will not be cold. “It makes no difference.” Immediately after he begins to eat, the narration answers: “It did make a difference that they were not cold.”
The correction is almost bare. David's thoughts soon reach back to the fresh fish they ate at Le Grau-du-Roi; he calls that time long ago. The sound of a car interrupts the memory: Catherine is returning with Marita, the young woman she has brought into their life, and the taste of the fish is still in his mouth as he drinks from the bottle of Perrier. The unchilled food, the older meal, and the arriving voices occupy the same short stretch of prose. David has stated his indifference; the narration stays with what he actually feels.
Breakfast once followed lovemaking and drew the couple to the same table. Now David has missed it because he is writing, the waiter notices his absence, and Catherine returns from a separate excursion with Marita as he has his plate taken away. The contrast lies in the timing of the actions as much as in the difference between fresh and tinned fish. The terrace brings them together after hours in which his writing and their excursion have taken them apart.
The contrast from the first breakfast is exact. There, he remembers the way Catherine likes her eggs and enjoys his own. Here, he dismisses the temperature of his food and immediately feels its importance. These two meals give us different measures of his attention: the preference he could hold in mind for someone else, and the sensation he now tries to put aside in himself. The opening hunger remains real, though its confident rhythm can no longer account for everything that follows.
Late in the novel, after Catherine has destroyed his pages and left, Madame Aurol, their hostess, prepares an omelette. She begins to cry while turning it, and David embraces her; he opens champagne, and they share a toast whose words he has to find. When the omelette is served, Marita urges him to eat. He does so slowly. Madame tells him that going without food will help nothing. Their attention stays close to his immediate need, through the food they prepare, the wine he pours, and the encouragement they give him to finish his meal. The opening breakfast had shown David learning another person's preferences; here other people are attentive to the need he has trouble meeting for himself.
Return, then, to the first eggs. Catherine's are boiled less than David's, and he remembers. The knowledge belongs to a happy morning, including the way he eats his own breakfast with pleasure. Later meals do not take that morning away, but they do show how much of a shared life can pass through similarly modest acts: noticing a preference, tasting a decision, waiting for someone, accepting a plate when eating has become difficult.
Hemingway states each action simply enough for us to miss the change between them on a first reading. Staying with those changes is where the breakfast grows complicated.
Sources
Ernest Hemingway, The Garden of Eden (Scribner). Passages discussed: Chapters 1, 2, 4, 5, 9, 12, and 28.
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