Sol Luckman

Readers familiar with Ernest Hemingway’s fiction tend to be surprised and vaguely ill-at-ease when entering the lush textual vegetation of his posthumously published novel THE GARDEN OF EDEN. Begun in 1946 and left unfinished at the time of the author’s death in 1961, THE GARDEN OF EDEN has generated a healthy amount of scholarly debate since its sensational appearance in 1986. Bristling with a new challenge, critics have been drawn primarily to two topics that the text itself foregrounds: the gender-bending theme linking the young writer-protagonist David Bourne to his new wife Catherine in an incestuous love-hate relationship; and the formal characteristics of this oddly “postmodernist” novel which combines Hemingway’s signature realism with intense metafictional experimentation worthy of Italo Calvino or John Barth.

This is not to suggest, as some critics have done, that THE GARDEN OF EDEN represents a radically unprecedented departure from the standard Hemingway novel we all know and love. Gender-bending, particularly under its outward sign of the “crossing” haircut, threads conspicuously through THE SUN ALSO RISES (1926), A FAREWELL TO ARMS (1929) and FOR WHOM THE BELL TOLLS (1940), before reaching a kind of apotheosis in THE GARDEN OF EDEN.

As for metafiction, one need look no further than to the most anthologized of Hemingway’s stories, “The Snows of Kilimanjaro” (1936), to trouble our accepted notions of Hemingway as the past century’s arch-realist. In fact, the principal metafictional technique employed in THE GARDEN OF EDEN with such bewildering effect was already fully integrated into “The Snows of Kilimanjaro.” In both texts we find framed within the basetext a summarized meta-narrative which takes place inside the creative subject’s consciousness: just as we experience David writing his African stories, and at the same time somehow “read” the stories themselves, we follow Harry, who is dying of gangrene in Tanzania, through a series of “unwritten” narratives that he imagines in his delusion. And in both novel and story the dialogue between basetext and metatext is productive of meanings that a purely “linear” narrative would be hard-pressed to convey.

Reception of THE GARDEN OF EDEN has been spotty at best, with most reviewers agreeing that the novel as published by Scribners (following a controversial editing out of approximately a thousand pages of manuscript) ultimately fails to deliver the goods as a complete work of art. I disagree with this rather cavalier assessment, but as Kant warned us long ago, we have no business arguing tastes to begin with.

What interests me in this novel, editorially sanitized though it may be, is the leap Hemingway takes into a sustained (if not altogether new) dialogized universe in which a wide range of binarisms are collapsed and then all mixed up together like the bouillabaisse his characters so decadently consume. THE GARDEN OF EDEN, as its name implies, is a world apart, a textual universe where traditional distinctions—as between masculine and feminine, self and other, life and art—hold no sway, where straight lines become circular and end where they began, where the comfortable logic of either/or is replaced by the disconcerting possibility of both/and. Nowhere is this perplexing illogic more evident than in David and Catherine’s bizarre sex life, whose lack of description in the novel has, according to Comley and Scholes, led “one befuddled critic to suggest that ‘somehow, she sodomizes him.’”

Thankfully, reviewers agree that Hemingway, whether or not his tackle was sufficient to the task at hand, was after bigger fish than many have given him credit for. “Nowhere else in Hemingway’s work is the intricate relationship between reality and imagination, between self and art, so originally explored,” writes Allen Josephs, adding, “If William Faulkner had read [this] book, I doubt he would have remarked on Hemingway’s lack of ‘courage to get out on a limb of experimentation.’” Hemingway himself was clearly aware of the tangled, nonlinear implications of his novel, as well as of the problems of interpretation it might pose, for he was fond of pointing out to critics during the period he was composing THE GARDEN OF EDEN, “Gentlemen, you are criticizing my arithmetic when I am long ago into calculus.”

As this quip suggests, and as criticism has abundantly borne out, the tendency to read THE GARDEN OF EDEN as a symbolic algorithm—whether step-by-step back into the author’s biography, or more problematic still, as a self-evident example of the author’s famous “hero code”—has been strong. Nowhere has this tendency to pigeonhole the novel been more patent than in the readings given to David and Catherine Bourne. It has generally been acknowledged that both characters are, despite Hemingway’s cited distaste for “composite characters,” among the most synthetic creations in recent literature.

As a rather scantily disguised rewriting of F. Scott Fitzgerald’ TENDER IS THE NIGHT, a subject to which I will return, THE GARDEN OF EDEN positions David and Catherine as surrogates for, respectively, Scott/Dick Diver/Gerald Murphy and Zelda/Nicole Diver/Sara Murphy. At the same time David is clearly a projection of Hemingway, similar in a myriad of respects to the narrator of A MOVEABLE FEAST, just as Catherine represents, variously, at least three of the author’s wives. To complicate matters further, Marita, the “dark girl” brought in by Catherine to be her “Heiress” when she leaves, suggestively recalls two of these same wives, Pauline Pfeiffer and Mary Welsh, both of whom were bisexual and entered Hemingway’s life as the third term in adulterous love triangles which prefigure THE GARDEN OF EDEN.

Where critics have typically struggled has been in the interpretation of David and Catherine, a process which has often resulted in an elaborate form of choosing sides between the two. According to this either/or logic—which the text itself resolutely seeks to deconstruct—the novel must have a protagonist and an antagonist, a good guy and a bad guy (or a good guy and a bad gal, or vice versa).

The traditional approach, followed by Josephs, for example, is to read David as the hero and Catherine as the transgressive she-devil who, to culminate her long list of sins against the artist-hero, burns David’s African stories, an act which Josephs calls “one of the most shattering acts of cruelty anywhere in Hemingway’s fiction.” At the opposite end of the critical spectrum, Steven C. Roe, basing his study (“Opening Bluebeard’s Closet”) on the manuscript, has taken it upon himself to thoroughly demonize David as a monstrously egomaniacal Bluebeard figure who sacrifices his wives to his art and represents what Hemingway “feared most about himself.”

Hemingway does at times make David out to be a Bluebeardesque “monster,” even in the expurgated published version, as Catherine at one points makes explicit. Nevertheless, although Roe admits that “Catherine, to a lesser degree, becomes ‘monstrous’ herself,” his reading of the novel—in addition to ignoring the evidence that David represents to some extent a critical parody of Fitzgerald—tends to polarize David and Catherine in a way I’m arguing against in this essay.

Attempting to establish a middle ground between these extreme interpretations, Kathy Willingham, in “Hemingway’s THE GARDEN OF EDEN: Writing with the Body,” has argued for a feminist reading of Catherine which would place her alongside David as the text’s “other” artist. “GARDEN unequivocally constitutes a unique and moreover, dual, Künstlerroman,” she writes.

That it traces the development of David’s artistic life is an idea which most critics enthusiastically embrace. However, GARDEN also portrays Catherine’s artistic odyssey, and this becomes evident by analyzing the components of the novel which Hemingway suppresses. By submerging Catherine’s artistic quest beneath aspects of the narrative foregrounding David’s development, Hemingway mirrors a central thematic concern, namely the suppression of female creativity. To focus only on David’s narrative and point of view not only neglects Catherine’s artistic evolution, but constitutes a failure to acknowledge the text’s “Other” where free play and creativity exist.

Willingham persuasively demonstrates how Catherine subverts David’s “patriarchal” moratorium on her creativity by not only scripting the novel which David in effect transcribes, but also by creating her own text using her body as prima materia. Recognition of Catherine’s status as (oppressed) writer is vital to a healthy understanding of THE GARDEN OF EDEN. Nancy Comley and Robert Scholes, whose rereading of Hemingway’s novel focuses precisely on those moments of ambiguity where “normative” notions of gender and identity are elided, unfortunately tend to overpsycholanalyze the author, interpreting Catherine less as an artist-figure than as “the puritanical castrating mother who destroys her boy-man’s connection to the primitive.”

Similarly, Willingham’s strict essentializing of the feminine and the masculine, her insistence on reading Catherine solely in terms of David’s “Other,” runs the risk of once again forcing a choice between the two as creative (or for that matter, destructive) models. But the text repeatedly stresses the paradox that David and Catherine not only represent opposing versions of the artist, locked in war-like struggle, but that they also are the same artist.

“Why do we have to go by everyone else’s rules?” Catherine asks David early in the novel. “We’re us.” “Maybe I’d better go back into our world,” she tells him a bit later, “your and my world that I made up; we made up I mean.” Finally, toward the end of the novel, we read from David’s perspective: “Catherine was not his enemy except as she was himself in the unfinding unrealizable quest that is love and so was her own  enemy ... She turns my flank so skillfully then finds it is her own and the last fighting is always in a swirl and the dust that rises is our own dust” (emphasis mine; Faulkneresque verbiage Hemingway’s).

Sporting identical haircuts and suntans, sharing the same lover, swapping sexual roles back and forth, both ravenously hungry and fearful of time, David and Catherine’s individual boundaries are blurred over and over again in THE GARDEN OF EDEN. Mark Spilka makes a strong case for reading these characters in virtually Jungian terms, as simultaneously animus and anima of the author’s androgynous creative psyche. Although such psychological readings usually give me goosebumps, there’s a lot to chew on in Spilka’s model—not because it provides a vision of some kind of transcendental “truth,” but because Hemingway himself obviously thought in these “mirroring” terms.

Viewed from this perspective, Catherine’s mention of “the world we made up” shouldn’t be taken lightly: THE GARDEN OF EDEN is very much a dual creation, a product of the literal and figurative marriage between David, who transcribes the travel narrative that makes up the novel, and Catherine, who directs the narrative’s plot and stars in its pages. The novel which ends with David and Catherine’s impending divorce paradoxically represents their most complete union—if not the child they were unable to have—thus concluding on a thematic level a logic-defying loop which in every way parallels the type of illogic inherent in the self-begetting text.

I will return to the relationship between form and content in THE GARDEN OF EDEN, but first I would like briefly to address the notion of the Garden evoked in the title. In 1948, after finishing the greater part of a first draft, Hemingway remarked to a friend that the novel was about “the happiness of the Garden that a man must lose.” This statement has tempted more than one critic into the problematic assumption that there’s a garden in this text to begin with, one which is lost over the course of the narrative to be replaced by the bitter fruit of wisdom. “Rather than a coincidentia oppositorum or the homo totus of Jungian psychology, which are metaphors for fulfillment and integration,” writes Josephs, “David and Catherine’s experiments expose the disintegration that comes with the loss of the garden and the curse of human sexuality. It is no coincidence that David comes to call her Devil.”

While admitting this to be one possible interpretation of the Garden as a symbol, with such a contradictory, polyvalent narrative we should always be wary of oversimplifying. Another way of reading the Garden, and one I think is suggested by the very possibility of a reading like the one sketched above in this novel structured on the mirror image, is its exact opposite: that there is no foundational Garden in this text. The hunger pangs that lead David and Catherine into the moral wilderness of androgyny, instead of suddenly disrupting paradise, are, as the first chapter makes abundantly clear, present as evil seeds from the beginning.

In this interpretation David, who shares Catherine’s hunger, is as much a Satan/Eve figure as Catherine herself—yet again inviting us to consider the two as a single character. Speaking to himself in the mirror following his first haircut and bleaching with Catherine, David says, “All right. You like it ... Now go through with the rest of it whatever it is and don’t ever say anyone tempted you or that anyone bitched you.” Perhaps we hear an echo in this passage of Hemingway’s letter to Fitzgerald in which he criticized TENDER IS THE NIGHT: “We’re all bitched from the start.” In any case it doesn’t require much imagination to see how David and Catherine are indeed bitched from the start.

Consistent with the project of rewriting Fitzgerald’s novel, Hemingway subtly implies that Catherine, like Nicole/Zelda, has spent time in a Swiss psychiatric hospital; David’s past is similarly traumatic, as his African stories leave little room to doubt. I’m suggesting that David and Catherine enter the world of THE GARDEN OF EDEN already in a state of fragmentation, and that the only integration or fulfillment in this text—belated though it may be—results from the fulfillment of the narrative premise itself: the only garden in this novel, in other words, is THE GARDEN OF EDEN.

From this perspective it might be helpful to interpret Marita not simply as a submissive nurse figure, as most critics have done, but also as the textual embodiment of the dark, shadowy (because unseen) Reader au sens large of the David/Catherine text. After all, Marita spends the majority of her spare time (if we can use the phrase for the idle rich) reading what David has written and Catherine scripted.

If this sounds like an example of overzealous criticism, perhaps it is. One thing is certain: THE GARDEN OF EDEN, by consciously and conspicuously foregrounding its formal characteristics, seems almost to require us to interpret its thematic content in formal or artistic terms. The opposite is equally true: the novel’s formal structuration lends itself easily to a reflexive meditation on its own content.

We see this reciprocal process at work most plainly in the relationship between gender economies and genre. Just as the plot dynamics hinge on the interplay between the masculine and the feminine, on a generic level the novel assumes the form of a complex dialogue between mimetic and metafictional modes. Moreover, in strikingly similar fashion to the blurring of gender and identity boundaries discussed above, the contours between the mimetic and the metafictional gradually run together until there’s no longer any distinguishing between the travel narrative and the African stories which enter that narrative in meta-form. The ultimate result of this mind- (and gender-) bending process is, of course, the self-begotten novel, in which basetext and metatext(s) are revealed as one and the same; but long before the final page mimesis and metafiction have ceased to exist as discrete categories. In Chapter Sixteen, for example, we find David at work on the second of his African stories:

But the half past ten was on the watch on his wrist as he looked at it in the room where he sat at a table feeling the breeze from the sea now and the real time was evening and he was sitting against the yellow gray base of a tree with a glass of whiskey and water in his hand and the rolled figs swept away watching the porters butchering out the Kongoni he had shot in the first grassy swale they passed before they came to the river.

This passage adds reality and fiction to the long list of binaries Hemingway throws out the window. Later, in conversation with Catherine, David is described as “[listening] in the unreality that reality had become.”

To return to the relationship between gender and genre, let us once again consider David and Catherine—this time, however, from a more strictly “literary” perspective. The point has been made that both characters, in their own manner, are writer-figures. In David’s case this is more self-evident than in Catherine’s, but the question remains: what kind of writers are they? Depending on whether we ask this question of the characters as they appear in the novel, or with respect to the novel as it is “written” by the character we’ve called David/Catherine, we get two very different answers.

In the first instance, David and Catherine represent contrasting conceptions of the artist. Despite the metafictional function which David’s African stories perform in the novel, it should be noted that the stories themselves, as related by Hemingway’s narrator, are essentially straightforward and mimetic, following a linear progression through a series of described events. Corresponding to David’s “realism” is its generic antithesis in the narcissistic body-text produced by Catherine: her masculine haircuts foreground for the viewer the fact that her “maleness” is merely the product of artifice, much as metafiction serves as a reminder that what we’re reading isn’t really “real.”

Catherine’s connection with metafiction comes tantalizingly close to being made explicit at least twice in the text. In Chapter Six she imagines herself in mise en abîme: “I was thinking so much about myself that I was getting impossible again, like a painter and I was my own picture.” Later, describing to David how she plans to have their hair cut, her terminology is suggestive of other meanings: “It’s sort of bevelled back from the natural line” (italics  mine).

We might even go so far as to read David’s African stories—which probe his past and culminate in “the beginning of the knowledge of loneliness”—as embodying the epistemological approach typically associated with a kind of modernism, whereas Catherine’s self-creating, cosmetic “fictions” would appear to have more in common with the ontological focus of postmodernist aesthetics. Without couching his argument precisely in these terms, Robert Jones hits upon the notion that THE GARDEN OF EDEN “constitutes an important link between Modernism and Post-Modernism.”

As co-creators of THE GARDEN OF EDEN, David/Catherine represents a third kind of writer, neither realist nor metafictionalist, but an androgynous synthesis of the two combining an awareness of epistemology with a fascination for ontology. By making the figure of androgyny thus resonate on both thematic and formal levels, Hemingway not only blurs the boundaries between masculine and feminine, self and other, art and life—he virtually collapses distinctions between content and form.

Even stylistics enters into play at this point: Hemingway’s trademark dialogue, which at first seems to be chiefly an aesthetic device, begins to take on added significance when we consider how dialogue functions as a trope for the interplay between the various binarisms we’ve been discussing. The role that mirrors play should be more closely examined as well. Throughout the novel mirroring serves as an appropriate metaphor for the paradoxical coexistence of sameness and difference, the virtual equivalence of reality and fiction, self and other, male and female, meta and mimetic, that make up the very quicksandy substance of THE GARDEN OF EDEN

The conflation of racial characteristics, as in the combination of dark skin and light hair, should also be considered in this context. According to Comley and Scholes, the Scribners text of the novel “does its author a serious disservice” by all but eliminating an important African subplot: “The obsession with tanning is connected with the desire to reach a primal level of experience, some heart of darkness, from which Euro-Americans have been cut off by their heritage of enlightenment.” This quest for “something powerfully irrational” is quite in keeping with the novel’s project of going beyond the limits imposed by Cartesian thinking.

There’s a case to be made that this “new” kind of novel—which Hemingway actually thought of at one point as forming a monumental tetralogy—should be read as the author’s treatise on the art of the novelist, especially when we compare David’s thoughts on writing with Hemingway’s own artistic theories. The most obvious similarity between character and author on the subject of aesthetics (there are many) is their shared “iceberg theory,” which gets translated by David into an image better suited to the equatorial climate he grew up in: “He wrote [the story] exactly and the sinister part only showed as the light feathering of a smooth swell on a calm day marking the reef beneath.”

On the other hand, there’s also a case to be made—and here we’re back to the absurd logic of both/and—that THE GARDEN OF EDEN betrays elements of self-parody in addition to its parody/critique of TENDER IS THE NIGHT. Concerning overt self-parody, we run into the problem of the manuscript versus the published novel. Josephs puts it euphemistically when he writes that “at times the book almost seems an anthology of Hemingway’s favorite topics and places.” It would be more to the point if he had asked, “Just how many martinis and Perrier whiskeys do the characters drink?” Is the novel intentionally self-parodic, or did Scribners and its editor intentionally find the “Hemingway novel” they went looking for in the manuscript?

That THE GARDEN OF EDEN represents a rewriting of Fitzgerald’s novel has been generally acknowledged by critics. Spilka, following Arthur Mizener’s insightful biography of Fitzgerald (THE FAR SIDE OF PARADISE), refers to TENDER IS THE NIGHT, along with Kipling’s JUNGLE BOOK, as among the novel’s “immediate sources,” on a par with its direct biographical inspiration: Ernest and Pauline’s honeymoon at Le Grau-du-Roi in 1927. Spilka traces Hemingway’s anxiety of influence to two specific scenes in Fitzgerald’s novel: the “barbershop showdown” where Tommy Barban confronts a half-shaven Dick Diver for Nicole’s hand, and the “lesbian lark” in which a vaguely repulsed Dick rescues his friend Mary North and Lady Caroline Sibley-Biers from jail after they have disguised themselves as sailors and picked up two unsuspecting girls. This seems as good a place as any to look for the original impetus for THE GARDEN OF EDEN, although as Spilka also points out, there’s more than enough documentation of transsexual haircuts, hair bleaching and lesbianism in Hemingway’s biography to account for his fascination with these subjects.

Obviously, many pieces of evidence support the claim that Hemingway was writing in response to TENDER IS THE NIGHT, not least of which is the fact that Hemingway was clearly obsessed by Fitzgerald’s novel, as he was by Fitzgerald himself. Their entangled relationship—based on admiration for each other’s work, a sense of competition out of proportion to the circumstances, and quite possibly repressed homosexual desire for one other—is reminiscent of the similar connection between Melville and Hawthorne a century earlier. If anything, Ernest and Scott’s “friendship” (I use the term loosely) has generated more myths, wholly or in part, than that of their nineteenth-century precursors, including such literary “myths” as Tennessee Williams’ CLOTHES FOR A SUMMER HOTEL, Kaye McDonough’s ZELDA and Hemingway’s own A MOVEABLE FEAST.

The barely submerged rewriting of the psychodrama between Scott and Zelda in THE GARDEN OF EDEN is one of the novel’s most salient features: a young writer’s career is threatened by his insane wife, whose jealousy of his writing, combined with his suppression of her creativity, pushes her to a series of vindictive acts against her husband, including tempting him to drink so that his writing will suffer. Bruccoli quotes Hemingway as telling Max Perkins shortly after the publication of TENDER IS THE NIGHT:

Scott can’t invent true characters because he doesn’t know anything about people ... he has so lousy much talent and he has suffered so without knowing why, has destroyed himself and destroyed Zelda, though never as much as she has tried to destroy him, that out of this little children’s, immature, misunderstood, whining for lost youth death-dance that they have been dragging into and out of insanity to the tune of, the guy all but makes a fine book, all but makes a splendid book.

Hemingway follows a similar narrative line in his depiction of Scott and Zelda’s relationship in A MOVEABLE FEAST. Specific references to Dick and Nicole of TENDER IS THE NIGHT abound in THE GARDEN OF EDEN, the most blatant of which being Diver David’s repeated plunges into the Mediterranean which resonate simultaneously on two very different levels. Depending on how we interpret David’s diving, it’s possible to read the novel in contradictory ways. Is diving here a metaphor for the artistic enterprise as it should be undertaken, a heroic probing of the depths of reality? or does it symbolize a narcissistic submersion in one’s own particular fantasy? In other words, is David the courageous artist-hero that some have claimed him to be, or is he an unsympathetic victim of Hemingway’s irony?

It should be clear by now that the answer to both these questions is yes. On the one hand, Spilka is surely accurate when he writes that Hemingway

correctly identified Fitzgerald’s “dangerous self-indulgence,” his importation of “feelings about his own decline” into the character of Dick Diver, as a problem Hemingway would himself have to face in his own version of the writer’s struggle with “tragic” circumstances. Thus, David Bourne, his chief persona in THE GARDEN OF EDEN, would make of the act of writing a stoic buffer against such circumstances and would stubbornly resist their debilitating power. He would confront the hazards of androgyny that Fitzgerald had only dimly understood ... and would overcome them through courageous masculine artistry.

According to this account, David/Ernest manages to triumph over “corrupting” feminine influence where Dick/Scott succumbs to an emotional and artistic “crack-up.”  But we also know that Hemingway doesn’t exactly pull his punches when it comes to David, who under the continual ironic blows of his author emerges with a black eye or two himself.

Parody isn’t a word one encounters much in Hemingway criticism, but it seems oddly appropriate in this novel. David’s complicity in his own “tragedy”—his blindness not only to Catherine’s personal and artistic needs, but to his own desires and needs as well, as paralleled by the story of his betrayal of the elephant—is a trenchant replaying of chapters out of both Fitzgerald’s and Hemingway’s lives. Thus by taking aim at Dick Diver—whose overestimation of his ability to “heal” Nicole is matched only by his underestimation of his emotional dependence on her—Hemingway writes a novel that defies attempts at categorization. Faced with an internally condradicted text which represents at once ars poetica, critique and self-aggrandizement, parody and self-parody, it’s hardly surprising that readers expecting a more or less “straightforward” story feel perplexed and giddy-headed when they turn the last page and replace the book on the shelf.

Fitzgerald once wrote that “the test of a first-rate intelligence is the ability to hold two opposed ideas in the mind at the same time, and still retain the ability to function.” In composing his most ambitious novel, Hemingway clearly took Fitzgerald at his word. By collapsing a host of distinctions—from masculine and feminine to form and content to parody and self-parody—THE GARDEN OF EDEN moves beyond the limits of Cartesian logic into a complex, non-Euclidean universe where opposites attract and fuse together. The painful “change” that takes place with and between David and Catherine leaves them paradoxically more united in the aftermath of their separation—out of which THE GARDEN OF EDEN is “born”—than they ever were in the precarious balance of their “Edenic” honeymoon.

Nevertheless, the novel is far from ending on a happy note. We last hear from Catherine in a letter to David that sums up, poetically and lucidly, the madness that has driven her away and which threatens to recur at any moment. As for David, who finishes the novel by rewriting the African stories that Catherine has burned, it’s difficult not to see in his heroic “recovery” a relapse into the kind of self-obsessed, masturbatory blindness that led to Catherine’s exile from the garden in the first place. “Are we the Bournes?” Marita asks him shortly after Catherine has taken the train to Paris. The dialogue which follows her question speaks worlds to the attentive ear:

“Sure. We’re the Bournes. It may take a while to have the papers. But that’s what we are. Do you want me to write it out?  I think I could write that.”

“You don’t need to write it.”

“I’ll write it in the sand,” David said.

Consistent with its internal illogic, THE GARDEN OF EDEN ends in a sense exactly where it began, with David and Marita’s marriage—exactly like David and Catherine’s—ready to be washed away like writing in the sand. In the final analysis we are left to contemplate the dangerous isolation and selfishness inherent in the writerly enterprise. For David, who “[cares] about the writing more than about anything else,” remains sadly the same little Davey whom his father described as the “iron-hearted little bastard. He meant to say cold-hearted but he turned it kindly with his gently lying mouth. Or maybe he meant it.”

Copyright (c) 2008 by Sol Luckman. All Rights Reserved.

[Sol Luckman is author of the internationally acclaimed nonfiction Conscious Healing: Book One on the Regenetics Method and the Beginner's Luke Series of novels. Luke's signature obsessions with self, sex, satire and slapdash highlight a serious, and life-changing, point: consciousness creates. The point is there is a point to living in the imagination–for only through it can we reinvent our ourselves and our world. Currently, the author is giving away FREE copies of Beginner's Luke. To take advantage of this special offer, click here.]