douglain - Kinky Texts: Hemingway’s Representation of Deviant Sexuality - by Michael Hemmingson

“I’d rather be a dark present than a dark future.”
–Marieta in The Garden of Eden

I.
From K-12 (and even today, now and then) my last name would be mistakenly written down or called out as “Hemingway.” — “You have the same last name as a famous writer,” I remember my second grade teacher, a smiling woman with big eyes, informing me.
I replied, “That is not my last name.”
She double-checked. “Oh. I see. Too bad.”
Too bad? She had no idea what she did to my fragile childhood ego. Why was it too bad? Was there something wrong with me now because I was not a Hemingway?
“Your name is close to a great writer,” an English teacher in ninth grade said to me. “Have you ever read…?”
“No.”
He gave me a copy of The Sun Also Rises. I liked the breezy dialogue but I did not fully grasp what was going on in the novel; I would not appreciate the story, and the writing, until a decade later.
I know that when editors and agents first see my manuscripts, they see “Hemingway” and think, “Oh no.” Several have told me this. My own books are shelved next to Papa, though, in libraries and bookstores. When I saw my first novel, in 1994, next to Hemingway in the Aztec Bookstore on San Diego State University, I have to admit my posture straightened with certain pride, and a smile slowly formed on my face. I was next to the master.
These days, I just wish I could sell as many copies as said maestro.
I am often asked if Hemingway and Carver influence me. I say of course. Many writers today are—it’s inevitable. Both are taught in high schools and colleges; teachers inform students that these men have written perfect short stories and they are gods of literature. As students, we believe this; as writers, we want to write just like these early heroes of the sentence.
The high school teacher who gave me The Sun Also Rises went on and on about how wonderful Hemingway was. So did an English professor in my freshman year of college—no writer was a greater writer than Hemingway, according to his mighty opinion; he was one of those community college pedagogues in his late 50s/early 60s with a chip on his shoulder, his voice booming and sardonic as if it were beneath him to teach this class—he should be at Stanford or Brown, goddmmit all. In fact, now that I remember, this professor sported a white beard just like Hemingway’s. Both of these teachers were writers; the former had poems in literary journals and the later had a collection of stories from a small press in the Midwest. Both, I realized, wished they were Hemingway—they wanted his life, his fame, his talent, his attention. It is not a bad thing for a writer to want, toss in a Pulitzer and a Noble and a bunch of wives, and you have made literary canon.
“In his 20s and 30s, Hemingway was virile and full of sperm,” said the college professor. Did he really say that? Yes he did. The dozen eighteen and nineteen year old young ladies in the class looked uncomfortable; some laughed; some scowled. “In Paris, he slept with many women, as many women as he could, because he was a man,” the prof claimed, “and he was looking for material. And it was all about stamina—he was out to prove he was a virile fellow, and he was.”
And I believed him. I had images of orgies and grandiose womanizing when I thought of Hemingway, on the scale of Bukowski’s Henry Chinaski in the novels Factotum and Women, the tough and sure author who could bed any gal of any age and background just because he was a genius of words and the birdies liked that.
Years later, I discovered the prof was exercising his fantasies. Hemingway was married while he was a Lost Generation guy in Europe; he may have strayed from the martial path once or twice but he wasn’t sleeping with half the women in Paris and Madrid as that prof had suggested. Did he have his facts wrong, did he make that up, or was that his deviant desire? Was he recreating a kinky Hemingway he wished himself to be? After all, in A Moveable Feast, Hemingway passes on the possibility of sex with a comely model, when the painter Pascin offers her to him. It is one of the more memorable of the vignettes, where the twenty-five-year old Hemingway has a drink with Pascin and “two models who were sisters” that Pascin calls “the good and bad sisters” and that Hemingway describes as

young and pretty. One was very dark, small, beautifully built with falsely fragile depravity. The other was childlike and dull but very pretty in a perishable childish way. She was not as well built as her sister, but neither was anyone else that spring. (102)

The drunk and wealthy old painter treats the destitute Hemingway to whiskey; within minutes the table talk turns to sex.

“Do you want to bang her?” [Pascin] looked toward the dark sister and smiled. “She needs it.”
“You probably banged her enough today.”
She smiled at me with her lips open. “He’s wicked,” she said. “But he’s nice.”
“You can take her over to the studio.”
“Don’t make piggishness,” the blonde sister said. (102)

But does he accept the offer, the macho womanizer of lore, with a wife waiting for him back at their hotel room? No; he goes off to write and Pascin admonishes him not to “fall in love with typewriting paper.” (104)
After that, I heard and read how Hemingway hated women, was a misogynist, was a macho guy who used women for sex and tossed them away. A female friend of mine, a writer, once told me she refused to read Hemingway because of his treatment of the feminine. “He demeans,” she said. She had never read a single word of the man’s work, but she had heard enough negative criticism from feminist and lesbian friends to know that Hemingway was a writer who would deeply offend her sense of the womanly identity. She had heard Lady Brett Ashley in The Sun Also Rises was interpreted as “a heartless slut” (or so she heard) and Catherine Barkley in A Farewell to Arms “was killed off in childbirth for trapping the Hemingway hero into fatherhood, taking away his freedom.” I have heard similar sentiments from both women and men, whether or not they have read the books, from condemning the role of the female as “mere play thing” and “sex object” in For Whom the Bell Tolls (that college professor seemed titillated by “the nights on the hill”) to references of sex as a woman being “destroyed” in “The Snows of Kilimanjaro.”
If The Garden of Eden is as autobiographical as assumed, and seems to be (as we know the majority of his “fiction” is) then Hemingway did explore sex with other women in Europe in those salad days, and feminists—first, second, or third wave—certainly have something to take issue with the “macho” texts of ol’ Papa. When asked what are my favorite Hemingway books, I usually say, “The top three are Sun, Farewell, and Eden.” Hemingway purists will take umbrage, since Eden is viewed by some as a travesty of the editorial hand, although I personally consider it as one of his finest works about human interaction in another time and place, despite it’s awkward transitions and abrupt ending.1 This is why I am focusing on that particular novel, as well as the long story “The Strange Country” and Hemingway’s portrayal of deviant sexual interplay between the men and women found in both. I could discuss such in a number Hemingway works, perhaps—while Brett Ashley’s promiscuity could be considered “deviant,” it is rather understated and not as eyebrow-raising as what is represented in “The Strange Country” and The Garden of Eden.

II.
“The Strange Country” is the last work in The Finca Vigía Edition of collected stories. Almost a novella, it comprises the first four chapters of an abandoned novel and an early version of where Islands in the Stream may have looked like. The two main characters are Roger and Helena; they have a May-December relationship. Helena is twenty-two and fourteen years younger than Roger, who is obviously an alter ego of Hemingway’s, as all his protagonists and narrators are. Helena wants Roger to call him “daughter” in an endearing and romantic way; Roger seems to be reluctant to do this (in that understated Hemingway way we have all come to know and love2), but gives in to her request:

“I like it when you say daughter. Say it again.”
“It comes at the end of a sentence,” he said. “Daughter.”
“Maybe it’s because I’m younger,” she said. (609)

“Poor Helena.”
“Don’t call me Helena. Call me daughter.”
“My poor daughter. My darling.”
“That’s a nice word too. You must’ve mix it with daughter though. It’s no good that way.” (611)

She also asks him, more than a dozen times throughout the text, if he loves her “yet”—this relationship is at its beginning.

“I love you, daughter,” he said. He did not think it was true. But it sounded all right as he said it. “I love you very much and I’m going to try to be very good to you.” (608)

The two are driving from Miami to Los Angeles, using assumed names—why this is Hemingway never reveals, maybe just for the excitement of it. They are not on the run. Roger is a writer (what else would a Hemigway hero be?) and he is apparently selling some of his work to Hollywood, which he finds demeaning to literature but necessary to make money and take care of his sons and ex-wives and maybe his strange new young lover.
The “strange country” is Helena, her body, sex with her, and more directly: her vagina. Apparently the two have not yet consummated their love affair, as insinuated in this passage where, interestingly, she refers to his penis as “he” in the third person:

He felt the silk of her hair over his arm and their bodies hard and taut and he dropped his hand on her breasts to feel them rise, quick-budding under his fingers.
“Oh Roger,” she said. “Please. Oh please.”
“Don’t talk.”
“Is that him? Oh he’s lovely.”
“Don’t talk.”
“He’ll be good to me. Won’t he. And I’ll try to be good to him. But isn’t he awfully big?”
“No.”
“Oh I love you so and I love him so. Don’t you think we should try now so we’ll know? I can’t stand it very much longer. Not knowing. I haven’t been able to stand it all afternoon.”
“We can try.”
“Oh let’s. Let’s try. Let’s try now.” (615)3

Her saying “we should try now so we’ll know” and his replying “we can try” is a pretty good indication that they have not made love yet, perhaps they tried before but were unsuccessful because Roger is, in her words, “awfully big.” This may be something Roger is not used to, thus the “strange” nature of it all.

In the dark he went into the strange country and it was very strange indeed, hard to enter, suddenly perilously difficult, then blindingly, happily, safely, encompassed; free of all doubts, all perils and all dreads, held unholdingly, to hold, to hold increasingly, unholdingly still to hold, taking away all things before, and all to come, bringing the beginning of bright happiness in darkness, closer, closer, closer now closer and ever closer, to go on past all belief, longer, finer, further, finer higher and higher to drive toward happiness suddenly, scaldingly achieved. (615)

This may be the most curious, and poetic, description of penetration, coitus, and ejaculation in the history of American letters, for which he is grateful and thankful and she replies: “I’m dead […] Don’t thank me. I’m dead” (615).4
The deviance is her wanting to be called daughter, and the possibility of her calling him father, or to be kinky, “daddy.” She never says it during sex, but this is Hemingway and we know he leaves things out of the text (wanting us to exercise our imaginations after all) and she could have, as he is too involved with his own feelings and thoughts, and if she did not say it, calling his “father” or daddy” during sex, she was certainly thinking it. She is aroused when he refers to her as his daughter and she thinks of him as her father, either fulfilling a fantasy, kinky desire, or re-enacting something from her past. There are any number of reasons that can explain and psychoanalyze her motives. She mentions that she has known him most of her life, and that his youngest son is too young for him so she must love him; when, at a diner, a waitress asks if she is his daughter, he says yes (627) and this pleases her, she goes along with the lie, although later admits to guilt over the deception, and asks:

“Could you have been my father?”
“If I’d begot you at fourteen.”
“I’m glad you’re not,” she said. “God it would be complicated. It’s complicated enough I suppose until I simplify it.” (630)

Complicated indeed, but not appalling or perverse to either of them.
She is still insecure, however, constantly asking him if he loves her—now, and if he will tomorrow and later. She says, “Wouldn’t it be awful if we were the kind of people who grated on each other’s nerves and had to have fights to love each other?” (625) One reason behind her insecurity is that, we learn through their dialogues, that she was once married to a British man who turned out to be homosexual; he married her for social reasons and everyone, including her family, knew he was gay and thought she did too, but she did not,. So she questions her ability to read men correctly, and when Roger lies that he loves her, she has no idea if his words are true or not.5 Another reason for Helena’s insecurity is their previous inability to have sex. Now that it has finally happened, she is worried she has not satisfied his desires; this is not unusual for a woman who is younger than a man and she knows he has had more lovers than she. She compares herself to all the women he has had; she wonders if he compares her as well.

Then later she said, “Roger.”
“Yes, daughter.”
“Are you sure?”
“Yes, daughter.”
“And you’re not disappointed because of anything?”
“No, daughter.”
“Do you think you’ll get to love me?”
“I love you,” he lied. I love what we did he meant.
“Say it again.”
“I love you,” he said again.
“Say it once more.”
“I love you,” he lied again. (616)

He appears to be satisfied with her; there is no indication that he is not. Yet, when they make love a second time

it was a strange country again but at the end he was not lonely and later, waking, it was still strange and no one spoke at all but it was their country now, not his nor hers, but theirs, truly, and they both knew it. (617)

Even so, Roger knows that this love is a temporary one; it will never truly work, the age difference will be a problem. Like any true Hemingway hero, his one and only love is writing; no woman can ever come before that—he won’t allow it.

III.
A similar “strange” feeling towards sex, the insecurities of a relationship, and a fascination with deviance is the basis for The Garden of Eden, Hemingway’s most erotic work. David and Catherine are honeymooning in France, “living at the Grau du Roi […] the hotel was in a canal that ran from the walled city of Aigues Mortes straight down to the sea” (3). David is a writer at the beginning of a promising career; he has published a novel about his experiences as a boy in East Africa6 and many stories; is receiving favorable reviews that his publishers mails to him overseas, and is working on several new stories as he deals with his wife’s gradual uncertainty of her sexual identity and her role in their marriage. She comes from a wealthy family and there is mention of a sizable dowry that is funding their trip.7
Eden is about a threesome. A young European woman, Marieta (or “girl,” as Hemingway refers to her8), enters their lives; they are attracted to her allure and she is attracted to the this handsome American couple with a sensual ex-patriot Lost Generation appeal. Indeed, as Eden was not published until 1986 and the Lost Generation has been romanticized by scholars, Hollywood, and history, David and Catherine appear to be parodies—caricatures—of the clichéd Lost Generation actor. They are smooth, oblique, unaffected, wandering from city to city, addicted to Pernod, talk, and casual liaisons.

“What are you thinking?” the girl asked.
“Nothing.”
“You have to think something.”
“I was just feeling.”
“How?”
“Happy.”
“But I get so hungry,” she said. “Is it normal do you think? Do you always get so hungry when you make love?”
“When you love somebody.”
“Oh, you know too much about it,” she said. (5)

It is questionable whether David actually does feel anything, because like Roger, he never shows any overt or sincere emotion, he seems to be going with the flow, saying what the women want to hear from him–words of love and happiness–while he is really preoccupied with what to write next, the next drink, the next sex act. But this is typical of all Hemingway heroes, is it not? Even when the other woman shares their bed, it is never clear if he truly enjoys this or if he could care less—this is simply another experience he will one day write about. He is rather cocky about it too, when considering a story he writes in four days and is “afraid that it could not possibly be as good as he believed it to be. The cold hard part knew it was better” (153).
Like Helena, Catherine is worried about pleasing David; she sees him looking at other women at the beach and around town; she believes that adding another woman to their sex life will make him happy. Marieta has a deep tan, she is “a dark present” that Catherine has given to her husband. “She’s your girl and I’m your girl,” Catherine says, and asks, “Don’t you like your present?” to which re replies,

“I like my present very much.”
“How do you like your future?”
“I don’t know about my future.”
“It isn’t a dark future is it?” the girl [Marieta] asked.
“Very good,” Catherine said. “She’s not only beautiful and rich and healthy and affectionate. She can make jokes. Aren’t you please with what I brought you?”
“I’d rather be a dark present than a dark future,” the girl said. (103)

Foreshadow! It is evitable Marieta will become a dark element of the future, What seems casual at first turns into a complication.9 Catherine is confused: she does not know if she is straight, bi, or lesbian. She questions her marriage to a man, his true interest in Marieta, and how it could be possible that she is falling in love with a woman while being in love with her husband. She admits to Marieta, “I don’t go in for girls” (105) yet she finds she enjoying the sex.

“That’s why I came here,” the girl said. “I thought that was what you wanted.”
“I’ve never had a girl,” Catherine said.
“I’m so stupid,” the girl said. “I didn’t know. Is it true? You’re not making fun of me?” (105)
Catherine wonders if she is a man trapped in a woman’s body—she does not say that, but it is implied and it is what she is thinking. She envies David’s penis (oh the Freudian!) and wishes to have one herself, so she can make love to Marieta with it the same way David does. She begins a transformation, wearing his clothes, cutting her hair very short, and trying to look like a “boy.” Of course, we are never clued in to what David truly feels about this—he is fascinated, yes, but does this turn him on or repulse him or is he just as stoic and disaffected as Hemingway’s prose suggests? Just as Helena mused that things would be complicated if Roger was her biological father, David and Catherine soon discover that all the liberal sexual experimenting and deviant behavior gets twisted by typical love and jealousy. “How can you lose with two girls,” Catherine says at the beginning (103), but later changes her tune; when she tells David to kiss Marieta and “make her a fair present” (103) she is not ready for the emotions she feels when actually seeing them together, as David “put his arm around the girl and kissed her and she started to kiss him and turned her head away” (103). It seems to be too much for Marieta as well because she starts to cry during the kiss. Marieta is not as relaxed about the threesome as she wants them to believe. She is having feelings for David; the two start to see each other without Catherine joining in.

…David and Marieta sat at the bar with two martinis. They looked at each other in the mirror, They watched each other very carefully and then David passed his finger under his nose while he looked at her and she blushed.
“I want to have more things like that,” she said. “Things that only we have so I won’t be jealous.”
“I wouldn’t put out too many anchors,” he said. “You might foul the cables.”
“No. I will find things to do that will hold you.” (141)

Deviant? Certainly. Kinky? Perhaps not physically, but internally; Catherine is not only trying to change her outward appearance, but her values and views of socially accepted relationships.

“I told [Marieta] everything about my new leaf,” Catherine said. “The one I just turned over and how I want you to love her too and can marry her too if she’ll have you.”
“We could in Africa is I was registered Mohammedan. You’re allowed three wives.”
“I think it would be much nicer if we were all married,” Catherine said. “Then no one cold criticize us” (144).

The situation, as much as the parties may or may not wish, does not end in bliss, despite Marieta’s observation that Catherine is “very happy and gay” (183).10 Emotions erupt; protectiveness and fear take over. David just wants peace and to finish the next short story, as Roger wants peace and money that Hollywood will provide for his writing. David and Catherine’s marriage is nearly destroyed; people are hurt; the experiment is a failure. Catherine says, “You can spend the rest of your lives together […] I have no further need of any of you” (191).

“All I want to do is kill you,” David said. “And the only reason I don’t do it is because you’re crazy.”
“You can’t talk to me like that, David […] You can’t say such thing. I won’t stand it. I’ll divorce you.”
“That would be very welcome.”
“Then I’ll stay married to you and never give you a divorce.”
“That would be pretty.”
“I’ll do anything I want to you.”
“You have.”
“I’ll kill you.”
“I wouldn’t give a shit,” David said. (223)

Catherine is the one who instigated the situation, who wanted it because she thought David wanted it, to please what she believes is his amorous cravings. Yet David, if I am reading between the lines correctly, knows the threesome will never work, he warns Marieta about “anchors” but never discusses the possible danger and pitfalls with his wife, just as Roger lies to Helena that he loves her and knows, from experience and in his heart, that the relationship with a younger woman is fated for doom.
In the end, David is left with Marieta and Catherine returns to the states; he has traded one woman for the other but knows things will never work for the best. All he really wants to do is write, and the last chapter finds David finding peace and bliss and he revises a short story he has been working on for five days. The biggest pain, the worst deviance, would be to lose his identity as a writer, to forsake his work as he did his wife. Roger has the same fear, and has lived through that pain—at the end of “The Strange Country” he finally tells Helena of an old wound, something she has been trying to pry out of him, how his first wife lost a travel case that contained his early work, originals and carbons all, “eleven stories, a novel, and poems” (648). This is a loss that has haunted him all his life, a deep scar.11 “I was in despair,” Roger says. “I have never been in despair before, true despair, nor have I ever had it since” (648). Likewise, David has never experienced “true despair,” but one might think he will, eventually, when he loses both Catherine and Marieta for good, when they become the scars of memory and when he sits down to write about them and that time in his life he will realize what an unusual gift he had, something many men would envy him for, and what he truly lost, just for a few moments of kinky sex.

Originally published at Diet Soap. Please leave any comments there.