Hemingway's Gender Trouble

D URING his last years, Ernest Hemingway worked on two book-length manuscripts recalling expatriate life in France.1 In A Moveable Feast (published posthumously in I964), he produced a self-portrait calculated for popular consumption, narrating the transformation of an obscure journalist into a renowned author. The hard-working, fun-loving hero-alternately Hem or Tatie-displays orthodox heterosexual inclinations; he fantasizes about a very pretty girl he sees in a cafe, celebrates lovemaking with his wife Hadley, and approves of Pascin's machismo. Conversely, he ridicules an effeminate homosexual named Hal, satirizes Fitzgerald's sexual uncertainties, and professes disgust at the lesbian practices of Stein and Toklas. Only as he rationalizes the affair which ended his first marriage does Hemingway allude to truly wicked activities connected with loving two women at the same time. You lie and hate it and it destroys you and every day is more dangerous, he concedes of the triangular intrigue which unfolded in 1926. In the other work, an unfinished novel called The Garden of Eden (edited by Tom Jenks and published in I986), a different transformation occurs: the epicene American novelist David Bourne engages in curious private escapades; he plays a submissive role in intercourse as his wife Catherine assumes the name Peter, mounts him, and calls him my girl Catherine.2 He elsewhere calls her brother and submits to her scheme of effacing gender differences; the two dress alike and sport identical coiffures of short hair bleached pale blond. Subsequently

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