The Sun Also Rises by Ernest Hemingway

Hemingway’s first novel, The Sun Also Rises, published in 1926, may be his best. I would have difficulty ranking his works, but certainly this is very good, and certainly it combines much of what we think is inherently Hemingway: 1920s ex-pat Paris, Spain, bullfights, fishing, men anxious about masculinity, and, of course, Hemingway’s distinctive writing style.

In the last few years I’ve read all of Hemingway’s major works and a collection of his short stories (A Farewell to Arms, For Whom the Bell Tolls, A Moveable Feast, Short Stories), all of which I enjoyed very much. Not on that list is The Old Man and the Sea because I read it in high school. I’ll probably read it again some day. The Sun Also Rises I read before, too, in college in a class called The Great American Novel, where we read ten novels in ten weeks, including The Great Gatsby, Lolita, As I Lay Dying, Huckleberry Finn, and others I don’t remember specifically.

The Sun Also Rises begins with an epigraph from Gertrude Stein: her famous summation of the young adults who had lived through the first World War and were now hanging out in Paris trying to make sense of the world and sense of themselves: “You are all a lost generation,” she said. Hemingway attributes the line to a “conversation.” There’s a second epigraph, a quote from Ecclesiastes, from where the book finds its title, about how everything comes and goes, each in its own time, including the sun which rises and sets (Ecclesiastes 1:5). Hemingway leaves off the opening words of that book of Holy Scripture that judges all the works of men as “Meaningless! Meaningless!” (“vanity” in the King James). “Utterly meaningless! Everything is meaningless.”

Hemingway is a member of that lost generation, and he writes about them. The characters in The Sun Also Rises are closely based on friends of his. Jake Barnes, the first-person narrator is Hemingway himself, an American from the midwest, working in Paris as a foreign correspondent for an American newspaper. The scenes of Barnes working are the only scenes of anyone working. The rest of the characters are living off an allowance, or borrowing, or bankrupt. (The novel contains Hemingway’s famous line about bankruptcy. “How did you go bankrupt?” Bill asked. “Two ways,” Mike said. “Gradually and then suddenly.” (p. 122). Mostly they drink, in cafes and bars, copious amounts of all kinds of alcohol in place after place. I didn’t bother to do it but someone could make an interesting list of all the different drinks consumed, there’s hardly a page without someone drinking something, from wine and beer to sherry, Pernod and Absinthe and local drinks with names I didn’t recognize, and finally martinis.

The novel is divided into three “books” which don’t exactly match three different main locations: Paris, an interlude for Jake and his friend Bill fishing in the Irati river outside Pamplona, and then Pamplona itself for bullfights and the festival of San Fermin, with a closing scene in Madrid, like an epilogue.

Book I begins with an introduction to Robert Cohn. He’s a Princeton graduate where be boxed, which we will remember later, A writer, with one novel published but unable to get a second one going. And a Jew, which we won’t be able to forget because the other characters speak of it all the time. It’s hard not to think of the other character’s disdain for Robert as based in anti-semitism; at one point Bill calls him a “kike”, which is kind of shocking, but, to be fair, the guy is annoying, socially oblivious and his unlikeability may be more of the cause of his outsider status than his race. He’s formerly married and a father of three, which makes no difference in the novel. He’s from a rich family but has limited resources of his own. After his divorce he tried his hand at running a literary magazine, ran it into the ground, but in the process picked up another woman, Frances, who worries her looks are going and is determined now to get Robert to marry her. Frances is with Robert and the rest in Paris, but Robert has no interest in marrying her.

That’s the short chapter one. Chapter two starts a long sequence in Paris. Robert comes to Jake’s office. He talks about his disillusionment with Paris and wanting to get away. Jake makes a promise to go away with him on a fishing trip, sometime. They have a drink together. Later that evening Jake picks up a prostitute, Georgette, at a cafe, just to have someone to eat with. Later, they are noticed by some friends of Jake and invited to a dance. They go to the dance. Here, at the dance they meet another of the central characters, a Lady Ashley whose name is Brett. Jake knows Brett because he met her in an English hospital when he was recovering from a war injury. The two loved each other, and still do, and will tell each other so several times throughout the novel, but the tragedy for both of them is that Jake’s war injury has emasculated him in some unspecified way. Brett won’t have him as a lover because he can’t make physical love to her so they settle for a kind of complicated, unsatisfying friendship.

This puts Jake in much the position of the “gay best friend” shepherding Brett through her affairs with other men, but not involved himself. Interestingly, Brett is first introduced to the reader as she comes into the dance party surrounded by gay men. Here’s the passage:

“Two taxis were coming down the steep street. They both stopped in front of the Bal. A crowd of young men, some in jerseys and some in their shirt-sleeves, got out. I could see their hands and newly washed, wavy hair in the light from the door. The policeman standing by the door looked at me and smiled. They came in. As they went in, under the light I saw white hands, wavy hair, white faces, grimacing, gesturing, talking. With them was Brett. She looked very lovely and she was very much with them.”

There’s a bit of dialogue, and then here’s Jake’s reaction to seeing the gay men with Brett. “I was very angry. Somehow they always made me angry. I know they are supposed to be amusing, and you should be tolerant, but I wanted to swing on one, any one, anything to shatter that superior, simpering composure. (p. 18).

At the dance we realize that Robert Cohn has become infatuated with Brett, and that Brett is put off by his attention. Later that evening, at yet a different bar, Jake and Brett meet a few more characters, including a Count Mippipolous, who also immediately falls for Brett.

Brett is Lady Ashley by marriage but is getting a divorce. When the divorce is final she has plans to marry the bankrupt, Mike Campbell, who is due to arrive in Paris, soon.

Book Two. We’re still in Paris but Brett has gone off to San Sebastián, she says to get away from the impossible romantic situation with Jake until Mike makes it to Paris. Cohn has gone off somewhere, too. Francis, seeing the writing on the wall has left Robert and gone to England. And then a new character shows up, Bill Gorton. He’s an old friend of Jake’s. An American. A writer. They have plans to do a little fishing in Spain and then go to Pamplona for the festival of San Fermin and the bullfights. Robert will come, too, because Jake promised to take him several months ago. Mike shows up and he invites himself and Brett to go along as well, which Brett immediately confesses to Jake will be awkward because she had secretly been with Robert Cohn in San Sebastian.

Jake and Bill go down to Bayonne, pick up Robert Cohn and the three drive to Pamplona. Mike and Brett are coming down separately. The next day Jake and Bill take a bus out to Burguete for the fishing, Robert decides to stay in Pamplona and wait for Mike and Brett, who didn’t arrive as expected the night before. The confusion, obviously, has to do with Robert and Brett’s mini-affair.

Here there’s a nice interlude of the two American friends going off on their fishing trip. They’re clearly fond of each other. They kid. Bill says, “Listen. You’re a hell of a good guy, and I’m fonder of you than anybody on earth. I couldn’t tell you that in New York. It’d mean I was a faggot” (p. 104). It’s shocking to see that word, but it’s clearly meant in the nicest of ways. After a few days fishing they get a telegram from Pamplona that Mike and Brett have arrived and Jake and Bill leave Burguete to meet up with the rest of the group.

In Pamplona, the gang meets up. The town is preparing for a week-long festival. The bulls are brought in from the country. The energy is very high and seems about to explode, exactly matching the tension of Robert Cohn and Michael finally meeting around the same table with Brett. By now everyone knows what’s going on. Michael teases and insults Robert. He calls him a steer, among the bulls. He tells him he’s not wanted. But Cohn is stubborn. He stays and he moons around after Brett.

And then, Chapter 15: “At noon of Sunday, the 6th of July, the fiesta exploded” (p. 137). The rest of the novel takes place against a backdrop of noise and violence: dancing in the streets, music, fireworks, the bulls are run through the street, the fights in the stadium. The gang continues to drink in cafes and bars, as in Paris, but now they also go to the bullfights together. And Brett gets involved with yet another guy: the beautiful, nineteen year-old, bullfighter, Pedro Romero. Jake says when they meet, “He was the best-looking boy I have ever seen” (p. 147). And the boy is a true artist in the ring. “My God! he’s a lovely boy,” Brett said. “And how I would like to see him get into those clothes. He must use a shoehorn” (p. 159).

Of course, Mike, notices and gets jealous. Brett asks Jake to help her ditch Mike and introduce Pedro to her, which he does. While she’s off with Pedro, the others meet up and there’s a fight. Cohn punches Jake cold, and knocks down Mike, too. Jake goes home to bed and makes up with Cohn fairly quickly, if not entirely sincerely. But later, Jake learns that after Cohn hit him and Mike, Cohn went on to severely beat up the bullfighter in the room with Brett. Because the story is told in first person we get the story thirdhand, from Bill and Mike who heard it from Brett.

That’s enough for Cohn, who finally leaves. There’s a lovely, extended scene at the bullfights with a lot of extra tension because we know that Romero was so badly beat up earlier, but he performs magnificently. It’s really beautiful. The tension is attenuated somewhat because there’s a section before the fight that tells us that after the fight Romero presents the cut off bull’s ear to Brett as a trophy, which she ends up leaving in a hotel drawer. After the fight Brett goes off with Romero. Book II ends with Mike and Bill and Jake together. Jake narrates, “The three of us sat at the table, and it seemed as though about six people were missing.

The short Book III picks up the next morning. The fiesta is over. The three men rent a car and go off together. Bill and Jake drop Mike at St. Jean de Luz. Jake drops Bill at Bayonne to catch the train to Paris. Jake takes a train to San Sebastian. After a few days alone he gets a telegram from Brett saying she’s in trouble and asking him to come to Madrid. He goes immediately. She’s alone. Pedro has left her. He wanted her to grow out her hair. Brett wasn’t woman enough for Pedro the way that Jake isn’t man enough for Brett. They drink together and then get in a taxi to tour Madrid, Brett pressing up against Jake and saying how great they could have been together and Jake saying only it would have been, in the last words of the novel, “pretty to think so” (p. 223).

Hemingway had published only a book of short stories prior to this novel, the collection titled In Our Time (1925). That book included six vignettes on bull-fighting, as well as several Nick Adams stories including Big Two-Hearted River, which is about fishing. Not included but written about the same time is Hemingway’s great story The Undefeated about a bullfighter past his prime but unable to quit the ring. It’s almost as though Hemingway gathered all that material and added the scenes in Paris and the love-drama about Brett and made a novel. Not a bad way to write a novel, actually.

Next, after another short story collection (Men Without Women, 1927) Hemingway writes A Farewell to Arms (1929) which reaches back further in time to tell a story, still autobiographical, from the first World War.

I can’t remember why I was thinking of this book, although I knew I wanted to read it again at some point, and I knew I wanted to take a break from Saul Bellow after reading The Adventures of Augie March before I started on Herzog. I bought a lovely Penguin paperback edition from 2022 with an Introduction by Amor Towles at a book store in Asheville knowing that I would soon finish A History of the World in 6 Glasses and would need something for the plane ride home. I finished it at home, earlier this week.