Re-reading Hemingway’s The Sun Also Rises (1926)

Hemingway rose like a comet with his early stories and his debut novel, The Sun Also Rises (1926).  The novel takes its title from the book of Ecclesiastes in the Bible, specifically a famous passage about how things recur unceasingly and “the earth abideth forever… all the rivers run into the sea; yet the sea is not full.”  It is a curious passage in the biblical context, ungodly and resigned to a world without progress or any movement but the circular.  Nothing ever really changes.  This passage suited Hemingway’s purpose because the line “One generation passeth away, and another generation cometh” expressed a fatalistic, even cynical, worldview and introduced the idea of a generation. Hemingway, by including this epigraph and another from Gertrude Stein stating “You are all a lost generation”, was laying claim to be a spokesperson for the generation comprising the youth who had come through World War I.

Perhaps documentarian of a generation is more accurate because Hemingway’s lost generation protagonists seem to have no manifesto and no explicit beef with the older generations.  Instead, we get a picture of how American thirtysomething expatriates in Europe, mostly men, lived and what their interests were.  They – almost – appear to live without financial worries.  It is not clear where most of them get their money from, but they have enough to live and travel comfortably.  They do run out of money toward the end of the novel:

“What’s the matter?”

“I’ve no money,” Mike said. “I’m stony. I’ve just twenty francs. Here, take twenty francs.”

Bill’s face sort of changed.

“I just had enough to pay Montoya. Damned lucky to have it, too.” (The Sun Also Rises, Scribners, 1956, p. 229)

The lack of consideration given to this, the failure to have anticipated running out of money, paints these characters as thoughtless, self-indulgent and hedonistic.  Through the course of the novel they have travelled through France and Spain, starting in Paris and crossing the Basque Country to get to the bull run at Pamplona, merrily eating and drinking their way, without until now coming up against the brute facts of economics.  That is a form of privilege few of us enjoy but always an essential condition of the lifestyle Hemingway dramatised. 

Hemingway was a writer of leisure activities: eating and drinking as well as hunting, fishing and, of course, bull fighting.  Hunting and fishing can be for food, but in Hemingway they are generally about the joy and relaxation of the thing.  Bull fighting is more unequivocally a leisure spectacle, and here, as elsewhere, Hemingway waxes lyrical about this ballet of violence and his awestruck admiration of the character and looks of the young bull fighter is striking in an otherwise unsentimental book.

While in certain respects Hemingway’s leisured young people recall his contemporary Fitzgerald, the style could not be more different.  Fitzgerald was an expert crafter of resonant sentences. His descriptions aim high and, when they score big, are unforgettable. To give a famous example:

‘Her voice is full of money,’ he said suddenly.
That was it. I’d never understood before. It was full of money – that was the inexhaustible charm that rose and fell in it, the jingle of it, the cymbals’ song of it. (The Great Gatsby, 1925, Chapter 7)

Hemingway’s work at a sentence level is often almost comical in its blunt simplicity, and therein lay its innovation.  How about this for a pair of sentences: 

I could not find the bathroom.  After a while I found it.  (Sun, 195)

As well as being strikingly short, Hemingway’s sentences tend to focus on the most obvious and banal detail and deliberately eschew Fitzgeraldian creative description.  Here is his introduction of Michael/Mike, who turns out to be one of the central characters:

Michael came toward us from the tables.  He was tanned and healthy-looking. (78)

That is all the physical description we get of Mike. Even when his conflict with Robert Cohn becomes central to narrative development, he remains a shadowy figure, very hard to picture or differentiate from the other male characters.  Brett, the only female character in the novel and the linchpin around which all the male characters revolve, is given slightly more detail, but not much:

Brett was damned good-looking. She wore a slip-over jersey sweater and a tweed skirt, and her hair was brushed back like a boy’s. She started all that. She was built with curves like the hull of a racing yacht, and you missed none of it with that wool jersey. (22)

There’s a simile in there, unusually for this novel, and a hint of gender ambiguity that plays into the intense homosocial-homerotic atmosphere that permeates Hemingway’s work, but there is no face – just clothes, hair and curves.  In that physical vagueness, it is characteristic.

Indeed, the only character built up in detail and given a relatively full background is Robert Cohn.  We find out in a couple of terse pages at the beginning of the book that he was boxing champion at Princeton, is Jewish, from a rich New York family and – mentioned several times – is shy.  There is an element of malice in the portrait, the narrator noting “I never met any one of his class who remembered him.  They did not even remember that he was middleweight boxing champion.” (3-4) Cohn is a curious presence in the book.  The opening suggests he is to be the protagonist, but he is an outsider in the central group and, by the end, has disappeared.  While we can make little of Mike, we feel there is something to be made of Cohn but are not sure what it is.  The narrator notes later:

Somehow I feel I have not shown Robert Cohn clearly.  The reason is that until he fell in love with Brett, I never heard him make one remark that would, in any way, detach him from other people.  He was nice to watch on the tennis-court, he had a good body, and he kept it in shape; he handled his cards well at bridge, and he had a funny sort of undergraduate quality about him.  If he were in a crowd nothing he said stood out. (45)

One again there is a level of detail about Cohn that is not present for any other character, as well as a malicious note, harping again on his unmemorable qualities.  Yet, unmemorable or not, Jake is careful to present him in detail and worries he has not shown him clearly.  In this worry, Jake may speak for Hemingway.  If he does, he is correct.  Cohn never quite comes into focus.  The reader feels he must be important but, ultimately, it is not clear what his importance is.  By the close of the book, the jeering he endures has led him into using his fists on his so-called friends and he is ejected from the group and from the novel.  Is his depiction anti-Semitic? Certainly, Hemingway’s characters adopt anti-Semitic language and sentiments in their treatment of him and, given the lack of any other sufficiently clear reason for their antipathy, anti-Semitism is an obvious interpretation, whether that is a result of Hemingway’s own attitude or his failure to – as Jake notes – show Robert Cohn clearly. Still, Cohn is as close to a memorable character as the book gets. 

For all its initial influence, it seems clear Sun does not now resonate with readers in the way Fitzgerald’s contemporaneous Gatsby does. It’s hard to imagine it getting the lavish big screen treatment Gatsby got in the 1970s and again in the 2000s. Indeed, Hemingway’s novel has not been filmed since 1957, a revealing fact in itself.  Being heavy on dialogue and externals and light on internal consciousness, it in some ways lends itself to filmization but it no longer captures the reader’s imagination like Fitzgerald does.

There was a 2014 appreciation of Sun in The New Yorker Hemingway’s Hidden Metafictions in “The Sun Also Rises” | The New Yorker. Its writer, Robert Crouch, sees the essence of the novel like this:

the novel’s central dark, repeated joke [is] that everything awful in life, in all of its sadness and melancholy, is better laughed at.

An intriguing reflection on Hemingway, who was rarely been cited for his humour.  In truth, though, his characters in Sun rarely laugh and the central point of the novel is not a joke but an observation that life is purposeless and goalless.  That is right there in the title and the excerpt from Ecclesiastes it comes from.  Hemingway’s characters are always trying to fill a gap in meaning and in their existence; the problem for the reader is there is too much gap in our understanding of the characters, and too little substance.