Did any personal experience inspire the erotic novel, The Garden of Eden?
Some critics and scholars have suggested that the eccentric gender and sexual experiments portrayed in this novel are based in part on experiments Hemingway and first wife Hadley conducted amongst themselves in the early 1920’s. Catherine Bourne, however, would seem to be more modeled after Hemingway’s second wife Pauline than first wife Hadley. For further information on these sexual experiments, particularly as they tie into The Garden of Eden, see Aaron Latham’s “A Farewell to Machismo” in The New York Times Magazine, 16 October 1977, 51-55, 80-82, 94-99.
