“Isn’t it pretty to think so?” The Sun Also Rises, by Ernest Hemingway
I[image error]In the fall of 1988, I took a class in my freshman year at Wagner College that changed my life for a variety of reasons.
For one thing, I met a shy young lady in a Richard Marx t-shirt, who would eventually become one of the dearest friends of my life. (Or was until she kills me for announcing she was wearing a Richard Marx t-shirt). #Donlan
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But also, before that creative class at Wagner, I really hated school – up until I graduated from high school. I was that bad combo of both shy but a wise ass. So I was self-conscious and quiet while being misunderstood and in some cases blatantly disliked by my teachers. My high school was science and math driven. Me, not so much. I started this class and met my teacher, Binnie Kirshenbaum, who also changed my life in so many ways. We bonded immediately. She encouraged and actually liked me. She was quirky and wore crazy clothes and wrote amazing fiction that included some topics, suffice to say, I’d not read much of in 12 years of Catholic school.
Check her out. Read her stuff.
She went on from Wagner to serve as the chairman of Columbia University’s writing program.
In her class I found an outlet for many emotions and feelings and a drive to create. I sat down in the first week and I wrote this – it was the first full length poem I think I had ever written. In one shot, no pun intended:
I haven’t stopped writing poetry since. It is no exaggeration to say I have hundreds, many of which haven’t seen the light of day. Some are in boxes in the back of my closet. Some are discovered when I find an old notebook in the bottom of a purse. Some I publish on this site.
So what does this have to do with Hemingway, Susan? I thought writers and especially journalists get to the point directly vs. the long way, you say?. You are right, dear reader. Here it is. That class also changed my life because toward the end of the semester, Ms. Kirshenbaum gave us a list of books we should all read if we are to be serious about writing.
I hate to say I don’t remember most of them — but I’m sure, knowing her, I’ve read most by now. One in particular that stuck out to me was “The Sun Also Rises,” by Ernest Hemingway.
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This is painful. A stake to the heart of my book. Thanks, one of my children!
I read it because she suggested it — and that book also changed my life. I haven’t stopped reading it since. I have a variety of copies of it and in just chatting with another wonderful benefit from my time at Wagner, Kathy Dempsey, we started talking about it again. We decided to read it again. And I did so this weekend. Unfortunately I discovered that my lovely old copy of the book had some pages as destroyed as some of the steers in Pamplona.
I won’t say I’ve devoured everything every written by Hemingway in the same way. I can live without some of it. This one is different.
In looking at my book this time I noticed for the first time the intro quotes included.
“You are all a lost generation,” Gertrude Stein in conversation.
I love how he can just quote her from chatting with her.
But enough of that.
SPOILER ALERT. Yes, I know I need to post a spoiler alert on a novel that is nearly a century old. But I will anyway. The Sun Also Rises is a novel about people doing a lot of drinking and eating. And living life in excess in Europe. That’s the stage. The players are Jake, the narrator. Jake is a newspaperman (I can relate). He says:
“It is very important to discover graceful exits like that in the newspaper business, where it is such an important part of the ethics that you should never seem to be working.”
He was “injured” in the war. And when I put that in quotes, I mean he was definitely injured. But he was injured in a way I’m guessing a dude doesn’t want to be injured, if you get me.
That is a key plot point, in my opinion.
Then we have Robert Cohn, friend of Jake’s, tennis player, writer, not much depth. Not a great guy all around. The kind of guy you’d like to punch in the face if he wasn’t a skilled boxer, which he unfortunately appears to be.
Then we have Bill, who is one of my favorite characters. Bill is also Jake’s friend. He wants to have fun. He and Jake go fishing before they go to Pamplona for the running of the bulls. He has made money off a recent published novel and he’s ready to buy a lot of stuffed dogs.
“Here’s a taxidermist’s,” Bill said. “Want to buy anything? Nice stuffed dog?”
“Come on,” I said. “You’re pie-eyed.”
“Pretty nice stuffed dogs,” Bill said. “Certainly brighten up your flat.”
“Come on.”
“Just one stuffed dog. I can take ’em or leave ’em alone. But listen Jake. Just one stuffed dog.”
“Come on.”
“Mean everything in the world to you after you bought it. Simple exchange of values. You give them money. They give you a stuffed dog.”
“We’ll get one on the way back.”
“All right. Have it your own way. Road to hell paved with unbought stuffed dogs. Not my fault.”
And of course, we have Brett, Lady Ashley. Oh Brett. How to describe you. Brett is lovely. She’s “built with the curves like the hull of a racing yacht.” I guess that is probably the highest compliment in the Hemingway galaxy. Everyone falls in love with Brett, but to be quite honest, Brett sounds like a self-centered woman with a loose grasp on her moral compass which you just know is attached to a flask.
Jake loves Brett. There’s no question.
“She was looking into my eyes with that way she had of looking that made you wonder whether she really saw out of her own eyes. They would look on and on after everyone else’s eyes stopped looking. She looked as though there was nothing on earth she would not look at like that, and really she was afraid of so many things.”
She is engaged to Mike Campbell, who also seems like a nice fella, other than being broke and having to spend most of the time we spend with him watching one guy get over Brett hooking with him and then watching Brett get over being in love with another guy. All while being engaged. Are we to deny Mike’s drunk hostility? I think not.
Poor Jake.
“Of all the ways to be wounded. I suppose it was funny.”
Luck would have it he ran into Brett while recovering from his injury in the war, a war nurse.
“I try to play it along and just not make any trouble for people. Probably I never would have had any trouble if I hadn’t run into Brett when they shipped me to England. I suppose she only wanted what she couldn’t have. Well, people are that way. To hell with people.”
As Jake ponders these thoughts during the night, of course Brett shows up with a count ready to buy a limo load of champagne. She again comes and goes out of his life. And Jake can’t sleep. For anyone who has stared at the ceiling at night, this is one of my favorite parts of the book.
“This was Brett, that I had felt like crying about. Then I thought of her walking up the street and stepping into the car, as I had last seen her, and of course in a little while I felt like hell again. It is awfully easy to be hard-boiled about everything during the day time, but at night is another thing.”
Preach, Jake Barnes.
Jake pondering watching Brett use the men in the novel like chess pieces. He wonders about paying for life’s value.
“Enjoying living was learning to get your money’s worth and knowing when you had it. You could get your money’s worth. The world was a good place to buy in.”
What’s fascinating about this whole novel is that there’s an underlying theme of Brett and Jake being the one true love story here. And it is why that makes it fascinating. In my non-professional English teacher opinion, the reason that Jake and Brett are the only relationship that seems to survive all the self-induced catastrophes of booze and food and betrayal is because of Jake’s war injury.
They can’t seal the deal. Much like a black widow, Brett seems to demolish men or be demolished when they have sex. It takes the fun out of the chase for her or it makes it too real for her when it becomes a relationship.
So she simply tortures Jake throughout the novel. She comes back to him over and over again. When the men in her life get exasperated or emotional about her shallowness or her disdain or her blatant disrespect, she tells them to go away and goes back to Jake. Always. And he takes her back.
The climax of the novel is when Brett falls in love with a young bullfighter, leaving the rest of her posse, as it were, to fight among themselves. Robert Cohn follows her around throughout the group’s visit to Pamplona despite being seriously irritating to everyone. (Even me, not that he realizes.)
But Jake must again endure watching the woman he loves passionately pursue a young, succesful man to both of their own detriments. In fact, he basically begs her not to.
“I’m a goner. I’m mad about the Romero boy. I’m in love with him, I think.”
“I wouldn’t be, if I were you.”
“I can’t help it. I’m a goner. It’s tearing me all up inside.
“Don’t do it.”
“I can’t help it. I’ve never been able to help anything.”
Ain’t that the truth. If she could, there wouldn’t be a The Sun Also Rises.
Needless to say, Brett and the bullfighter made as much sense and went as well as anyone would have expected them too. Reality means he is a Spanish traditionalist who wasn’t into Brett’s independence and her short trendy hair cut. Who could have foreseen that? #OtherThanEveryone.
What’s worse is that Jake had total matador cred with the bullfighting authority and Brett basically went in and ruined the new dream matador guy. She dragged him into a Lifetime movie drama in which the night before his big triumph, good old Robert Cohn, former boxer, beat the crap out of him. So he could barely stand for the fight. And Jake is off the list of “aficionados” after that.
Sidenote: I would like also to take a moment to point out that because of the various places of travel there are certainly some inappropriate cultural and racial terms in this book. Not a lot, but there are. I certainly don’t use them or approve of them, but this was the picture of the world in the mid-1920’s. This is our history. This is how people talked. Banning books isn’t going to change that, and it’s going to rob this generation of some truly incredible literature as well as an accurate picture of our country’s history. Pretending something doesn’t exist doesn’t make it go away. It is a travesty to ban To Kill a Mockingbird. A travesty.
Jake’s advice to Robert Cohn, trying to escape from his unhappiness, applies here. You can’t change reality.
“Going to another country doesn’t make any difference. I’ve tried all that. You can’t get away from yourself by moving from one place to another. There’s nothing to that.”
But still, we return to the running them of the novel by the end, making true the Bible quote that I didn’t realize inspired the novel’s name, in the intro.
“One generation passeth away, and another generation cometh, but the earth shall abideth forever. The sun also ariseth, and the sun goeth down, and hasteth to the place where he arose…” – Eccelesiastes
There’s no one left in Brett’s world but Jake. There will always be Jake, and he will always come running when she needs him.
We join the two of them in wondering if things were different, would this be the great love story that Brett pretends to believe? Maybe. Or maybe Jake is the realist who speaks for all of us. He loves Brett, despite everything (and every one. And I do mean EVERY one. I mean, lady, Robert Cohn? Come on.)
If there’s any doubt, we have the final scene, the last rescue of the book. Driving along in their hired car, looking at the world from the safe distance of a window.
“Oh Jake,” Brett said, “we could have had such a damned good time together.”
“Ahead was a mounted policeman in khaki directing traffic. He raised his baton. The car slowed, pressing Brett against me.”
“Yes,” I said. “Isn’t it pretty to think so?”
If you get a chance, read this book. Don’t read it if you are hungry or thirsty however. The food and drink is a whole other side (and blog post). Now I’ll be excusing myself to get a Pernod, some chilled champagne, and a side of absinthe along with some fresh fish and fried potatoes.
Don’t forget to stop at the taxidermist on the way home.
