READING ERNEST HEMINGWAY’S The Garden of Eden, we need to ask whether, or to what degree, it presents Africa as a cultural reality, or if Africa merely forms the backdrop for what is at heart an essentially Euro-American psychological narrative. In the manuscript version of the book, David and Catherine’s sexual experiments are referred to as “tribal things,” which, together with the darkening of their skin from exposure to the sun, suggests what we might call “Africanization” in both physical and psychological terms. On the other hand, while the elephant hunting story David writes has its background in East Africa, it clearly reflects American literary tradition in its depiction of a little boy’s initiation into manhood through the trial of gaining spiritual independence from his father. Since Tom Jenks, the editor of Hemingway’s manuscript, eliminated the phrase “tribal things” and its implications, and included David’s completion of the rather conventionally structured short story as a key element in the conclusion of the published novel in a way that is not apparent in the original manuscript, the edited novel could be seen to end by reemphasizing traditional white American values despite the protagonists’ desire within the tale to merge with what they perceive as African culture, to become tribal. There are significant disparities between the novel and manuscript, then, that need to be taken into account if we are to attempt, as I wish to do here, to examine the complex interaction between Hemingway’s American cultural background and the values he identified with the African landscape and a perceived African spirit.

My aim here is to clarify the Euro-American influences surrounding Hemingway, his works, and his readers, rather than to attempt to articulate reductively what Africa and its values meant to him. Africa is an other space for Hemingway, which is to say that it functions in part as a place in which the writer is able to achieve a distance from certain cultural constraints he may have felt as an American, and as a particularly famous one whose discourse and behavior were subject to intense scrutiny at home and in much of the Western world. In The Garden of Eden manuscript, we should be able to see how much he relates Africa to freedom from gender, familial, and other, broader cultural constraints.