In the Guardian, novelist Ewan Morrison — whose newest novel is called Ménage — tosses out a list of literary ménages à trois, leading off with the Hemingway erotic novel (some would call it an embarrassment that Hemingway never intended to publish) The Garden of Eden.
One of the most notable scenes left off Morrison’s list is the three-way between the fictionalized Henry Miller, his wife “Maude,” and a friend of hers named Elsie, in Sexus. For the curious, here’s how the scene starts — NSFW.
Readers, what other memorable threesomes can you recall?
2 responses
Important to remember that The Garden of Eden isn’t really a Hemingway novel but an invisibly edited/anthologized commercial bit of publishing hackery whereby a freelance editor reduced a gigantic unfinished draft to a product a very small fraction of the original lenght. By most accounts the original manuscript has more than a dozen major and minor characters; as published the book really only has three. The Garden of Eden, strictly speaking, HASN’T been published.
OK Guys, I know it wasn’t a completed Hemingway but still – It really does depend on how you designate what a novel is and whose name should be on it. There area lot of posthumous works out there that we should be very grateful the author did not consign to the flames. I’m sure we’d all rather have seen the pages that Ted Hughes tore out of Sylvia Plaths journals. And actually for all the hackery involved Garden of Eden is actually a fine novel. A lot of Hemingway fans might be offended by it, as if shows a Hemingway who is vulnerable, has a feminine side and even lets women do things to his ass that he probably wouldn’t mention in public. It’s a queer book and maybe Hemingway was bendier than we’d like to believe. Would you rather not have known this? Would you rather the text had been burned?
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