The Garden of Eden

This amazing novel looks at the period of Ernest Hemingway’s breakup with his first wife Hadley in Paris. In terms of biographical history, it overlaps with A Moveable Feast and goes beyond it in fiction to his marriage to his second wife, Pauline. It’s the story of a man who is in love with two women, one is his wife and the other is a woman set on destroying a marriage and claiming the man for her husband. The book is strangely erotic and offers up various interpretations of gender issues.  Hemingway said the book’s theme was “the [ideal] happiness of the Garden that a man must lose.”

 

My take on this book is that it is an essential key in the understanding of Hemingway’s struggle to absorb the pivotal events of his early life and marriage. I believe he never reconciled the events around his love of two women at the same time.

  The tragedy of The Garden of Eden is the Truth that everything is doomed to be lost: Life itself is a two sided sword: a potential ideal that is destined to be lost — nothing last, and it’s a true tragedy in everyone’s life.

  Such themes are not overtly dwelled upon by Hemingway and the dictum : “What you leave out of a story is as important as what you leave in” applies here.

Hemingway leaves readers with a mesmerizing look at the perils of love and the challenges of living a life without tragedy.

A Moveable Feast

This was my third or fourth reading of Hemingway’s A Moveable Feast. Anyone who criticizes any of Hemingway’s books is confronted with the need to tell it like it is: One side of Hemingway’s character was fatally flawed. He would be a hell of a handful to put up with. Many people tried and failed. On the other hand,  the man was a genius of style and deserves all the plaudits that can be bestowed on him for his courage in dealing with a life where he was blessed with genius and burdened with immaturity, fear and some DNA that is still be analyzed to determine what made him who he was. The story of his rise to mythological standing is of itself a one-of-its-kind tale.

  This memoir of his early life in Paris contains numerous cringe-worthy stories that underscore the nasty asides and venom that besmirch the many beautiful passages that make for a touching but tragic love story that haunted Hemingway for the rest of his life. The book reveals the problem Hemingway had: He was chronically unable to give other writers breathing space. If they were dead they could be exempted. If they were alive and competitors, they must be cut down to at least one grade below Hemingway and stained with some unsightly flaw.

One amazing fact: Hemingway acknowledged his character flaws but could never rise above them.

Islands in the Stream

  For my taste and interest at this stage of my life, Ernest Hemingway’s Islands in the Stream is of much greater interest to me than his fiction.  Hemingway’s non- fiction, while he labeled it [my words] a fictionalization of Truth, carries the weight of his trademark esthetic style combined with an adroit juxtaposition of the biographical elements of his life, all embedded in three novelas called Bimini, Cuba, and At Sea.

Bimini was Hemingway’s first home in the Gulf Stream, which for decades played an important role in his search for worldclass sport.

   Bimini and Cuba became his long-term homes. At Sea is a rollicking, action packed tale of World War II sub-chasing. Bimini is a revealing picture of the inner life of Thomas Hudson, a painter, whose three sons are visiting him for the summer. Cuba follows Hudson on his move to Cuba and includes a vivid portrait of Hudson’s lifestyle and escapades with a cast of Hemingway-type characters. I have to say the portrait of Hudson in Cuba is replete with sketches of Hudson as an unadmirable soul who survives on alcohol. On the other hand, this book counts as another of Hemingway’s nonfiction books that is loaded with gems of literary and esthetic criticism. For someone who constantly put down critics throughout his life, Hemingway himself never stopped criticizing and dispensing corrective wisdom. 

This is me practicing…..

This Burmese lady is a dance member of the famous Mustache Brothers comedy troup in Myanmar.

Hello, I will restart this journal in the coming days.

After a break of several years, I plan to restart this journal. My time has been split with other pressing duties. The most time consuming was the writing and publishing of four books.

The most recent book is titled Zen Poetry. All four books are available at Amazon books or by clicking on one of the four images at the top of this journal (see Above).

Chief among my new duties is to relearn how to use the WordPress tools to make the new journal appear the same as the older version, or as seamless, at least, as I am capable of at this stage. To say that I am “rusty” doesn’t remotely catch how intimidating the WordPress process appears to me at this stage. But this inaugural post (if completed successfully) is a heartening first step.

One thing I have committed to is to use shorter versions of many stories. The stories in the old journal will remain as they are, too many stories are ridiculously long, but the new writing will be more in line with common sense in terms of the time most readers have to give to a journal such as this.

I will be deleting many outdated addresses. Please email me if your address or other information needs updating or you wish to delete other information.