The novel, as Jenks told reporters, presents a “new, sensitive Hemingway,” writing with “tenderness and vulnerability” about “strange and disturbing” sexual gamesmanship, including male-female role reversals and a menage à trois. The Garden of Eden, only the second posthumous novel (the first, Islands in the Stream, was on the New York Times bestseller list for 23 weeks in 19), just might be Hemingway’s most surprising book of all. But one thing Jenks won’t have to do is manufacture interest. ![]() He’ll make a promotional trip to the Midwest, pitching the product on radio and television and fielding questions from reporters and critics who wonder about the ethics of trotting out still more Hemingway-this is the writer’s tenth posthumous book, and some don’t believe it’s the last. Jenks will do a lot more talking when The Garden of Eden is published, next month. I cut and rearranged, but added nothing, rewrote nothing.” “The book is full of tremendous writing, and a damned good story, and everything in here is his. “I did only what I thought Hemingway would have done,” says Jenks, eager to talk but afraid the book will be seen as his rather than Hemingway’s. The year is 1986, and Jenks, surrounded by stacks of beloved new novels and short stories, is also talking about The Garden of Eden, which he’s just edited down from Hemingway’s bloated original to a tight-and highly salable-247-page novel. “Here’s the big one,” says Tom Jenks, dropping a 1, 500-page typescript onto his desk in the Charles Scribner’s Sons offices. “I cut the hell out of it periodically,” he claims, but over the next twelve years he edits far less than he adds: Hemingway’s last novel grows to 1,500 pages, his instinct for omission fails, he runs out of time, and in the end, 25 years after his death, someone else has to do the cutting for him. The year is 1947, and Hemingway, surrounded by packs of beloved old cats and sycophants, isn’t referring to his belly or his ego, but to The Garden of Eden-a 1,000 page novel that’s nowhere near finished after a full year’s work. ![]() “Getting very big,” writes Ernest Hemingway from his Cuban estate.
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