A Quarter-Century Later,

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Hemingway was mourned mostly as a great celebrity, his worst side, and not as a great writer, which he was. The Louisville Courier-Journal wrote in an editorial: "It is almost as though the Twentieth Century itself has come to a sudden, violent, and premature end." He was a genius of self-proclamation. He made himself a representative hero. The adjectives he used did not so much describe as evaluate and tell the reader how to react: things were fine and good and true or lovely or wonderful, or else bad, in varying degrees. As the scholar Harry Levin has suggested, Hemingway sent postcards back home: "Having a wonderful time, wish you were here." He worked hard at his writing, and yet the interval between Fossalta and Ketchum was also a kind of permanent vacation: Paris, Pamplona, Africa, Key West, Havana, Wyoming. Readers chained to their jobs and mortgages and hometowns and responsibilities could pick up Hemingway and taste the wine and see the fish jump, and become Hemingway for a little while.

For a time during the late '60s and early '70s, when the air in America was full of rage and Viet Nam, Hemingway came to seem an atavistic character who loved the wrong things: violence and war. But Hemingway's reputation as a writer has survived, and grown. Public interest in the man and his work persists in an age that might be expected to forget the long-vanished ghost of the grandfather of Margaux and Mariel Hemingway. His publisher, Charles Scribner's Sons, estimates that 1 million Hemingway books are sold each year in the U.S. alone. In the past year, a major new biography by Jeffrey Meyers has appeared, as well as a memoir by his son Jack Hemingway. Jack and some other relatives have lately formed Hemingway Ltd., which will market the family name for use on such items as fishing rods and safari clothes. Jack has also lent Papa's name, grotesquely, to a line of shotguns.

The Garden of Eden, published this spring, is an odd, interesting ingredient in the Hemingway psychomyth. Hemingway began the novel in early 1946, but it ran away from him, swelling to hundreds of thousands of words. He tried over the years to cut it down and make it manageable, but it was still a mess when he died. An editor at Scribner's pruned the manuscript to a tight and coherent 65,000 words.

Perhaps Hemingway had trouble with the prospect of publishing the fantasies he was entertaining. His hero, David Bourne, is a young writer whose wife cuts her hair as short as a man's and dyes it ash-white, and persuades him to exchange sex roles in a way whose mechanics are not explained. The man is to be the woman and the woman is to act the man. In bed, they do "devil things," also unexplained, and the wife brings a lesbian lover into their menage.

Into the age of Rambo comes an ambivalent Hemingway that he had more or less suppressed. Perhaps it should not be surprising that a man who spent so much of his life being aggressively masculine might (in mid-life, after going through several marriages and two World Wars) wonder what it would be like to take a vacation from his attack hormones. At the end of The Garden of Eden, in any case, the usual Hemingway order is restored: the rich, perverted bitch- wife goes crazy and departs, and the girl lover, lately lesbian, turns into one of Papa's adoring, delicious, perfect girls of one dimension.