Ernest Hemingway and the Mirror of Manhood: Fetishism, Transvestism, Homeovestism, and Perverse Méconnaissance

CARL P. EBY Ernest Hemingway and the Mirror of Manhood: Fetishism, Transvestism, Homeovestism, and Perverse Méconnaissance I: READING THE RIFT "Anybody may crack." Catherine Barkley in A Farewell to Arms He could feel himselfstart to be whole again. He had not known just how greatly he had been divided and separated because once he started to work he wrote from an inner core which could not be split nor even marked nor scratched. He knew about this and it was his strength since all the rest of him could be riven. David Bourne in TL· Garden of Eden "There's two of me and there are the two of you. You and Nicky. Nicky makes three because I made him two. ... At first I thought it would be nicer if you could be two. . . . But now I know better." Barbara Sheldon to Andrew Murray, TL· Garden of Eden Manuscript kF the three memoirs overtly alluded t? in Hemingway 's posthumous novel The Garden of Eden, Marcel Proust's A Remembrance of Things Past, W. H. Hudson's Far Away and Long Ago, and David Bourne's The Rift, the significance of the latter is surely the most difficult to assess. The barely mentioned product ofan entirely ficArizona Quarterly Volume 54, Number 3, Autumn iç Copyright © 1998 by Arizona Board ofRegents ISSN 0004-1610 28Carl P. Eby tional author, David's first novel is a remembrance of things past, recalling his boyhood long ago and far away in East Africa. Other than the fact that David's father figures in the sad novel, we have little more than the title to work with; yet this is suggestive enough. Most obviously , the title fuses East Africa's Great Rift Valley with the rift between David and his father (likewise the subject of the elephant story within The Garden ofEden), but it may as well allude to the rift separating David from his "African girl," the narcissistically-invested "first love," or "fiancée," ofthe Eden manuscript whom Catherine and Marita strive to replicate by transforming themselves into David's "M'Bulu girls" or "Somali wives."1 More importantly, I would argue that it invokes an even more profound rift—a rift at David's point of origin, a primary rift in his sense of gender identity and in the basic structure of his ego, a rift shared by each of the novel's characters and by Hemingway himself, and one fundamental to any interpretation of The Garden of Eden and to any understanding of the figure emerging from the recent reconsiderations of Hemingway's sexuality.2 On some level David Bourne clearly functions as a proxy for his creator, thus it is no coincidence that the discussion of The Rift is prompted by confusion about David's place of birth, a site symbolically riven between Oklahoma and East Africa. Hemingway's fictional menage à trois, Catherine, Marita, and David, are lunching one afternoon in the south of France when Catherine jokingly complains that Marita "spends money like a drunken oil-lease Indian." "Are they nice?" Marita asks in her childlike manner. "David will tell you about them," Catherine explains. "He comes from Oklahoma." But this information surprises Marita: "I thought he came from East Africa." "No. Some of his ancestors escaped from Oklahoma and took him to East Africa when he was very young." "It must have been very exciting." "He wrote a novel about being in East Africa when he was a boy." "I know." "You read it?" David asked her. "I did," she said. ["It's called The Rift."]3 "Do you want to ask me about it?" Ernest Hemingway and the Mirror ofManhood29 "No," he said. "I'm familiar with it." "It made me cry," the girl said. "Was that your father in it?" "Some ways." "You must have loved him vety much." "I did." (in) This division between Africa and Oklahoma reflects a real genderinflected split in Hemingway's childhood between winters spent in his native domestic, suburban, Oak Park—where his now famous pseudotwinship with his older sister Marcelline was characterized by matching dtesses and frilly hats—and summers spent in the "manly," Indianinhabited , wilds of Michigan—where...