The Sun Also Rises; or, How to Enjoy Ernest Hemingway
"Everyone behaves badly -- given the chance." -- Jake Barnes, The Sun Also Rises
A frequent knock on Ernest Hemingway is that he was a terrific, even masterful writer of short stories, but a boring novelist. After reading about fifty of his short stories, I tested this theory by tackling A FAREWELL TO ARMS, and discovered I half-agreed with the assessment. Everything to do with the war itself Hemingway captured brilliantly and memorably. Everything to do with the romance between the main characters I found painfully shallow, dull and silly. Nevertheless I read the book on the first attempt. I can't say the same for THE SUN ALSO RISES. Over the course of about 30 years I must have made a half-dozen attempts to read this book through and always gave up out of sheer boredom after a half-dozen chapters. At the tender age of 42, however, I have finally succeeded in finishing it, and came to a small epiphany about Hemingway, to wit: the key to enjoying him as a novelist is to possess some degree of life experience, because not only will that help you grasp what his books are are really about, it will also give you the patience to endure some of his more tedious passages.
THE SUN ALSO RISES begins in Paris during the early 1920s. The protagonist and narrator, Jake Barnes, is a writer who works for a cable news service. During the First World War Jake suffered a wound which left him unable to have sex yet fully capable of sexual desire, and this places him permenently and uncomfortably in the friendship zone with his great love, Lady Brett Ashley, a beautiful socialite who is just coming off an expensive divorce. Lady Ashley is rather a nasty piece of work: despite having already found herself a fiance of sorts, she frequently takes lovers, only to discard them as casually as cigarette butts, and then find new ones. This is the fate of Jake's friend Robert Cohn, a Jewish novelist on the cusp of fame who is naive about women and can't let go of the affair. Cohn's inability to do this creates increasing instability amongst the group of dissipate young exparriates with whom Jake runs: their unspoken code is to wallow in pleasure, take nothing seriously and above all, never admit to any genuine emotions. Jake must confront the damage Lady Ashely's selfish antics are doing to his own life and reputation while watching Cohn self-destruct. He must also come to grips with his own unresolved feelings for the woman he loves but can never have.
If this description sounds a little vague, that's because the book itself is vague. It has a simple plot, almost no character development, and a meandering structure which, I suppose, reflects its characters' somewhat meaningless lives. Much has been made of the quote at the beginning of the book, uttered by Gertrude Stein to Hemingway in conversation: "You are all a lost generation." She was referring, of course, to those who emerged from the terrible and utterly pointless slaughter of the First World War, alive but not necessarily physically or morally intact. They had no religious faith, no patriotism, no deep feelings or beliefs, not even much grasp of the actual nature of friendship, and THE SUN ALSO RISES seems to uses the group of Jake, Cohn, Lady Brett, Mike and Bill to serve as an analogy for that mentality. This is a book full of ennui, anomie and nihilism, masquerading as a good time.
The flaws of this novel and its strengths are very closely found up. Hemingway understood the expatriate crowd very well, being one of them in real life, and I'm guessing the book is quite accurate in depicting their facetious existentialism, their refusal -- at least publicly -- to take any aspect of life seriously. There are a number of subtle and not-so-subtle comments about the dark side of the human condition which make for great if tragic reading: like the Romans in Howard Fast's SPARTACUS, these are people so hollow they must contunually fill themselves with distraction -- with food, drink, sex, travel, and the simulacrum of excitement, just to feel even half-alive. Psychologically it's a fascinating picture of human dissipation, tinged with tragedy. It also paints a very interesting picture of Europe in the Jazz Age, something Hemingway did brilliantly and often subtly, by concentrating on small rather than large details -- how people amused themselves, what they talked about, what they spent their money on. On the other hand...well, who cares? The stakes of the novel are very low, because it's hard to give a damn about people this frivolous and blunted. Like the soap opera characters of my youth, those beautiful men and women whose tears were always trickling onto their money, the cast here is almost impossible sympathize with. Jake Barnes is a half-decent sort with some identifiable motives -- frustrated longing, jealousy, and a weak desire to do the right thing, whatever that is -- but Cohn is an awful, whiny snot, Lady Ashley is a psychopath, Bill and Mike are drunken, mean-spirited bullies, and to be honest, sometimes I wished someone would come along with a pistol and put the lot of them out of their misery. It's true that unlike, say, the characters in a novel by Bret Easton Ellis, these people actually have a reason to be jaded, but not having suffered through the mud, lice and poison gas of the Great War, I can't really relate.
Reading THE SUN ALSO RISES at 42, however, made a big difference to me. As a high-schooler or a twentysomething all I could see was the shallowness of the puddle that is this novel; I didn't grasp its potentially reflective aspects. If Hemingway was good at anything, it was making observations about life via his novels, and as we get older and become harder and more cynical, we often see resemblances between ourselves and those we despised when we were younger. Jake Barnes is not much of a protagonist, but in many ways I am not much of a man. On countless small points, and a few fairishly large ones, I have "sold out" -- which in practical terms never entails getting a paycheck, but rather precisely the opposite: a surrender of one's ideals to the dull, gray-faced gods of pragmatism. Somehow the ideals of or youth never survive contact with reality, and seen in that sense, THE SUN ALSO RISES is not simply entertainment. It is a warning. Exactly what you do with that warning is up to you.
A frequent knock on Ernest Hemingway is that he was a terrific, even masterful writer of short stories, but a boring novelist. After reading about fifty of his short stories, I tested this theory by tackling A FAREWELL TO ARMS, and discovered I half-agreed with the assessment. Everything to do with the war itself Hemingway captured brilliantly and memorably. Everything to do with the romance between the main characters I found painfully shallow, dull and silly. Nevertheless I read the book on the first attempt. I can't say the same for THE SUN ALSO RISES. Over the course of about 30 years I must have made a half-dozen attempts to read this book through and always gave up out of sheer boredom after a half-dozen chapters. At the tender age of 42, however, I have finally succeeded in finishing it, and came to a small epiphany about Hemingway, to wit: the key to enjoying him as a novelist is to possess some degree of life experience, because not only will that help you grasp what his books are are really about, it will also give you the patience to endure some of his more tedious passages.
THE SUN ALSO RISES begins in Paris during the early 1920s. The protagonist and narrator, Jake Barnes, is a writer who works for a cable news service. During the First World War Jake suffered a wound which left him unable to have sex yet fully capable of sexual desire, and this places him permenently and uncomfortably in the friendship zone with his great love, Lady Brett Ashley, a beautiful socialite who is just coming off an expensive divorce. Lady Ashley is rather a nasty piece of work: despite having already found herself a fiance of sorts, she frequently takes lovers, only to discard them as casually as cigarette butts, and then find new ones. This is the fate of Jake's friend Robert Cohn, a Jewish novelist on the cusp of fame who is naive about women and can't let go of the affair. Cohn's inability to do this creates increasing instability amongst the group of dissipate young exparriates with whom Jake runs: their unspoken code is to wallow in pleasure, take nothing seriously and above all, never admit to any genuine emotions. Jake must confront the damage Lady Ashely's selfish antics are doing to his own life and reputation while watching Cohn self-destruct. He must also come to grips with his own unresolved feelings for the woman he loves but can never have.
If this description sounds a little vague, that's because the book itself is vague. It has a simple plot, almost no character development, and a meandering structure which, I suppose, reflects its characters' somewhat meaningless lives. Much has been made of the quote at the beginning of the book, uttered by Gertrude Stein to Hemingway in conversation: "You are all a lost generation." She was referring, of course, to those who emerged from the terrible and utterly pointless slaughter of the First World War, alive but not necessarily physically or morally intact. They had no religious faith, no patriotism, no deep feelings or beliefs, not even much grasp of the actual nature of friendship, and THE SUN ALSO RISES seems to uses the group of Jake, Cohn, Lady Brett, Mike and Bill to serve as an analogy for that mentality. This is a book full of ennui, anomie and nihilism, masquerading as a good time.
The flaws of this novel and its strengths are very closely found up. Hemingway understood the expatriate crowd very well, being one of them in real life, and I'm guessing the book is quite accurate in depicting their facetious existentialism, their refusal -- at least publicly -- to take any aspect of life seriously. There are a number of subtle and not-so-subtle comments about the dark side of the human condition which make for great if tragic reading: like the Romans in Howard Fast's SPARTACUS, these are people so hollow they must contunually fill themselves with distraction -- with food, drink, sex, travel, and the simulacrum of excitement, just to feel even half-alive. Psychologically it's a fascinating picture of human dissipation, tinged with tragedy. It also paints a very interesting picture of Europe in the Jazz Age, something Hemingway did brilliantly and often subtly, by concentrating on small rather than large details -- how people amused themselves, what they talked about, what they spent their money on. On the other hand...well, who cares? The stakes of the novel are very low, because it's hard to give a damn about people this frivolous and blunted. Like the soap opera characters of my youth, those beautiful men and women whose tears were always trickling onto their money, the cast here is almost impossible sympathize with. Jake Barnes is a half-decent sort with some identifiable motives -- frustrated longing, jealousy, and a weak desire to do the right thing, whatever that is -- but Cohn is an awful, whiny snot, Lady Ashley is a psychopath, Bill and Mike are drunken, mean-spirited bullies, and to be honest, sometimes I wished someone would come along with a pistol and put the lot of them out of their misery. It's true that unlike, say, the characters in a novel by Bret Easton Ellis, these people actually have a reason to be jaded, but not having suffered through the mud, lice and poison gas of the Great War, I can't really relate.
Reading THE SUN ALSO RISES at 42, however, made a big difference to me. As a high-schooler or a twentysomething all I could see was the shallowness of the puddle that is this novel; I didn't grasp its potentially reflective aspects. If Hemingway was good at anything, it was making observations about life via his novels, and as we get older and become harder and more cynical, we often see resemblances between ourselves and those we despised when we were younger. Jake Barnes is not much of a protagonist, but in many ways I am not much of a man. On countless small points, and a few fairishly large ones, I have "sold out" -- which in practical terms never entails getting a paycheck, but rather precisely the opposite: a surrender of one's ideals to the dull, gray-faced gods of pragmatism. Somehow the ideals of or youth never survive contact with reality, and seen in that sense, THE SUN ALSO RISES is not simply entertainment. It is a warning. Exactly what you do with that warning is up to you.
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