New release: The Sun Also Rises

The hard-boiled paradox: Stefania Ciocia looks into her soft spot for Hemingway’s The Sun Also Rises

“How did you go bankrupt?” Bill asked.

“Two ways,” Mike said. “Gradually and then suddenly.”

There is a little smiley face pencilled in next to this exchange in my old copy of The Sun Also Rises (1926), from twenty-odd years ago. I was, and remain, fond of a wisecrack – although the cost-of-living crisis has given these lines the ring of gallows humour. We could shrug off the flippant facetiousness of this kind of wit as ‘tough guy’ posturing, the sort of drollery that Raymond Chandler will incorporate in Philip Marlowe’s repertoire a decade later: a mixture of cynicism and street-wisdom bundled with the desire for one-upmanship and, in Mike Campbell’s case, buttressed by privilege and a sense of entitlement. The thing is, Mike can joke about insolvency because there’ll always be someone prepared to give him credit or left to pick up the pieces of his recklessness.[1]

Chandler recognizes the affinity between Ernest Hemingway and hard-boiled detective fiction; in ‘The Simple Art of Murder’ (1944), he writes: “Hammett was the ace performer [of the ‘tough guy’ school of crime writing], but there is nothing in his work that is not implicit in the early novels and short stories of Hemingway. Yet for all I know, Hemingway may have learned something from Hammett, as well as from writers like Dreiser, Ring Lardner, Carl Sandburg, Sherwood Anderson and himself. A rather revolutionary debunking of both the language and material of fiction had been going on for some time.” New release: The Sun Also Rises

Hemingway credited the economy of his prose and his sharp focus on action and dialogue, with their emotional undercurrent spilling over the surface even as it remains unsaid, on his journalistic background. His stint as a cub reporter for the Kansas City Star had been his writing apprenticeship, and the newspaper’s style-book the guide that would shape his creative practice. In 1926, he had several short stories and the collection In Our Time under his belt, but it was the publication of The Sun Also Rises, his first novel, that was his real breakthrough. It made his name as the chronicler of what Gertrude Stein had called “the lost generation”, memorialised in the community of American expatriates who, like him, had settled in Paris after the first world war, attracted by favourable exchange rates and the bohemian spirit of the ville lumière, an irresistible combination for aspiring artists.[2]

Francis Scott Fitzgerald, a friend of Hemingway’s and another bright literary star from the American Midwest who would find further inspiration on French soil, had captured the decadent, heedless mood of the Roaring Twenties in The Great Gatsby (1925), now surely the most iconic novel of the period. Over in West Egg, Gatsby’s lavish parties ostentatiously transgress the Prohibition laws; indeed, bootlegging is rumoured to be one of the mysterious sources of the host’s magnificent wealth. The protagonists of The Sun Also Rises, instead, consume copious amounts of alcohol as a way of fitting in and coming together, and as self-medication, drifting along from café to jazz club, in private celebrations and public festivals, but always against a culture where drinking is part of the social fabric of life, a ritual form of communion. New release: The Sun Also Rises

Ironically, The Great Gatsby did not match the commercial success of Fitzgerald’s previous two novels, The Side of Paradise (1920) and The Beautiful and the Damned (1922); the former in particular had turned him into literary royalty. Hemingway’s novelistic debut was to do the same for his author, heralded as a radical, original voice breathing new life into the medium through bold technical innovations. Consider the extraordinary opener of the review penned by Bruce Barton for the April 1927 issue of The Atlantic: “In writing this I am thinking not of confirmed fiction readers but of the great company of men like myself who are bored by current fiction, who find other people’s love affairs uninteresting, and the shadowy characters of novels much less exciting than the real figures of business life. Such men are hereby informed that a new thing has happened in the world. A writer named Hemingway has arisen, who writes as if he had never read anybody’s writing, as if he had fashioned the art of writing himself.”

Hemingway’s signature style is easy to take to extremes, and in his later production he would often sail too close to the wind, almost a parody of himself. However, as far as The Sun Also Rises is concerned, I am a huge fan. I feel slightly guilty about my enthusiasm, though. And that’s even without reckoning with the instances of racism and homophobia represented in the text, which can’t be swept away with the facile comment that Hemingway and his characters are a reflection of their time and shouldn’t be held to today’s standards. The question I’ve been mulling over in preparation for this piece is: why am I so invested in this story of needlessly impossible love, male camaraderie, bullfighting, hero worship, and riotous drunkenness? (Admittedly, it doesn’t sound half bad, put in this way. The drama’s guaranteed.) New release: The Sun Also Rises

It all comes back to the sentence from The Sun Also Rises that I have been carrying around since I first read it all those years ago, Jake Barnes’s observation about his own predicament, at the end of Chapter 4: “It is awfully easy to be hard-boiled about everything in the daytime, but at night it is another thing.” I don’t care how borderline naff this (and my reaction) may sound to some – the exposing of one’s vulnerability, with a tinge of self-pity, which becomes a proclamation of toughness yet again – but every time I think of this pronouncement I want to go: “Jake Barnes, c’est moi.”

Hemingway’s protagonist and first-person narrator, in a novel that borrows heavily from autobiographical details, is an American war veteran and a bullfighting aficionado working as a journalist in Paris, where his circle of friends includes fellow Princeton graduate Robert Cohn. A man of independent means and literary ambitions, Cohn gets the spotlight in the introductory chapter, where we learn – through Jake’s highly subjective perspective – that he was once the university middleweight boxing champion, and that he had taken up and excelled in a sport he otherwise disliked to “counteract the feeling of inferiority and shyness he had felt on being treated as a Jew at Princeton.”

Although he professes to like Cohn, Jake introduces him to us with great ambivalence; there are barbs about his vanity, his talent as a writer and his weakness with women: his wife has left him before he could leave her, and with Frances – his present mistress – he “never had a chance of not being taken in hand.” In the end, Cohn’s current relationship is summed up with a pointed “evidently she led him quite a life.” Really. New release: The Sun Also Rises

Jake is one to talk. He is in love with Lady Brett Ashley, an English socialite soon to be divorced from her second husband (from whom she gets her title), and engaged to marry Mike Campbell. Both in hardboiled terms and common parlance, Brett presents as a kind of femme fatale, possessed with an irresistible and destructive sex appeal, and with the physique to match her dazzling personality: “She was built with curves like the hull of a racing yacht, and you missed none of it with that wool jersey.” Like Cohn, who’s instantly smitten, we make her acquaintance at a dancing-club where she arrives surrounded by a group of gay men, another marker of her transgressiveness. New release: The Sun Also Rises

In the course of the narrative, she’ll be propositioned by Count Mippipopolous (turned down jokingly on the grounds that she knows too many people in the various resorts where he suggests she should accompany him), has a meaningless (to her) fling with Robert Cohn, and a more significant liaison with the young bullfighter Pedro Romero. There is the intimation that she might have had an affair with the African American drummer who plays at Zelli’s. And we understand that Brett’s “own true love” had just died with dysentery when she met Jake during the war. She was working as a V.A.D. nurse in the same hospital where Jake had been admitted after being wounded on the Italian front. This fatal wound – alluded to as a sacrifice greater than one’s life at one point – is the reason why Brett can’t countenance a future with Jake, although she reciprocates his feelings:

“I’d just tromper you with everybody. You couldn’t stand it.”

“I stand it now.”[3]

Jake’s stoical answer is all of a piece with the ‘Hemingway code’, rooted in the traditionally masculine values of bravery, honour and resilience, and encapsulated in the famous formula that “courage is grace under pressure”. Sentimentality constitutes a serious infringement of these standards and is what sets Cohn apart from the free-wheeling mores and the jaded attitude of Jake’s and Brett’s in-crowd. Against them, Cohn is conventional and, worse than that, earnestly uncomplicated.[4] He buys into a chivalrous notion of love, predicated on old-fashioned gender roles. A romantic, he cannot conceive that Brett thinks nothing of their little escapade, and despises Mike for not being possessive towards her, especially when his own insistent attraction for her becomes impossible to ignore. For Cohn, it is a small step to slip into the role of the jealous, wronged partner, and get into a fight with Romero, Brett’s latest conquest, presumably to defend her modesty (?), and reclaim her for himself. New release: The Sun Also Rises

If Cohn is the novel’s villain, Romero is its hero. Romero embodies a pristine masculinity, composed, assured and self-sufficient. This is partly because of his youth (he is only nineteen), partly because of his cultural background (his native Spain is configured as natural and primitive as opposed to sophisticated, cosmopolitan Paris), but most of all because of his identity as a bullfighter. To Romero, bullfighting is not a performance, nor a profession, nor a vocation. It is what he is, not what he does. I love this description of Romero’s effortless poise, which reads like Hemingway’s artistic and stylistic manifesto too:

Romero never made any contortions, always it was straight and pure and natural in line. The others twisted themselves like corkscrews, their elbows raised, and leaned against the flanks of the bull after his horns had passed, to give a faked look of danger. Afterward, all that was faked turned bad and gave an unpleasant feeling. Romero’s bull-fighting gave real emotion, because he kept the absolute purity of line in his movements and always quietly and calmly let the horns pass him close each time. He did not have to emphasize their closeness. […] Romero had the old thing, the holding of his purity of line through the maximum of exposure, while he dominated the bull by making him realize he was unattainable, while he prepared him for the killing.[5]

What Jake sees in Romero is authenticity, a way of being that belongs to past (“the old thing”), more innocent (the multiple references to purity) times, and that is forever inaccessible to the likes of him. That Romero’s integrity is showcased in connection with death and with the threat of annihilation is a further reason to admire the young man. He is the definition of “grace under pressure”. I am not blind to the blatant mythologizing at play here, and I am sympathetic to the legitimate frustrations that accompany less starry-eyed approaches to the text, like Harold Bloom’s: “Rereading The Sun Also Rises provides a few annoyances, particularly if one is a Jewish literary critic and somewhat sceptical of Hemingway’s vision of the matador as messiah.” Of course, Cohn and Romero are stereotypes. And Jake’s antisemitism can hardly be justified by his growing antipathy for Cohn as a successful rival in love. But Cohn and Romero are more than stereotypes too, in the sense that there is an epic grandeur about them both. They are monumental, archetypal figures, for good and for bad, and for precisely this reason they loom large in Jake’s line of vision. He wants to be like them, and can’t, and knows that he can’t.

One important thing that Cohn has in common with Romero is that he is unselfconsciously himself. It is Jake who speculates about the reason why Cohn has taken up boxing. It is Jake who projects on Cohn the status of the outsider. Meanwhile, the much-maligned Cohn goes his own way, makes his own mistakes and, in so doing, stands up for what he believes in. Like Romero, he has firm convictions and adheres to them unquestioningly and without wavering. This is not true of Jake: he betrays his loyalty to bullfighting – and loses the respect of the Spanish aficionados who had taken him into their fold – when he stands by while Brett and Romero come together. New release: The Sun Also Rises

As for his sentimentality, at least Cohn is openly temperamental and hot-blooded, not like Jake, whose disavowal of emotions is frail and contingent (“…but at night it is another thing”). In fact, Jake’s, and Brett’s, rejection of sentimentality is evidence of a surfeit of feelings in and of itself. Jake and Brett are sentimental in a philosophical as well as in an emotional sense. I am thinking here of the distinction that Friedrich Schiller outlines between the two opposite categories in his treatise ‘On Naïve and Sentimental Poetry’ (1795-1796): naïvety is direct, at one with the world and, in the case of art, with the represented subject; sentimentality is self-reflective and self-conscious, estranged and at one remove from the world, and therefore, as art, offering a mediated relationship with reality.

It’s in the ‘messiness’ (not Schiller’s word) intrinsic in this sentimentality – and in the stubborn quest for some sort of redemption, or consolation – that Jake and Brett are part of my tribe, and of yours too. Like them or not, Cohn and Romero are whole. Jake and Brett are broken; they are flawed, and they are aware of it. Directionless, they hanker for something, anything, to hold on to. It doesn’t get much more human than that. If we look beyond all the testosterone and the macho nonsense or, to be more precise, beyond the idealization of a particular kind of masculinity impossibly outside one’s reach, Hemingway’s fundamental concern boils down to the modernist search for signification, for a purposeful way of being in the world notwithstanding the dizziness induced by our lack of coordinates. New release: The Sun Also Rises

Readers of my previous blogs will know that this is my regular hunting ground. Or, perhaps a better metaphor, that I worship at Virginia Woolf’s altar. Let me tell you, when it comes to confronting this existential conundrum, Woolf is much tougher and more fearless than Hemingway. She looks at the void straight in the face. There is no God. There are no certainties. Clarissa Dalloway clings on to the appreciation of immanence to keep her precarious footing against despair: “[this] was what she loved: life; London; this moment in June.”[6]

The yearning for signification and the ensuing terror about the absence thereof run deeper for Hemingway’s characters, which is why The Sun Also Rises has clear epic connotations, starting from the very title.[7] It’s got T. S. Eliot’s mythical method written all over it. And so, indulge me, we return to the affinity between Hemingway and hard-boiled fiction. Chandler’s private eye is a descendant of the knight errant, on a mission to restore order where there is none: “Down these mean streets a man must go who is not himself mean, who is neither tarnished nor afraid. He is the hero; he is everything. He must be a complete man and a common man and yet an unusual man.” But heroes no longer come untarnished these days: enter Marlowe, “the shop-soiled Galahad”, a reference to the character in the Arthurian legend intent on finding the Holy Grail.

Jake Barnes is on a quest when he leaves Paris to go to Pamplona, where the running of the bulls and the bullfighting are part of the fiesta of San Fermín. The epic, sacred dimension of Jake’s journey is reiterated by his itinerary, along the Camino de Santiago de Compostela, and by his encounter with the pilgrims on the train to Bayonne on the first leg of his journey. During the interlude of the fishing trip in Burguete, Jake and his companions spot in the distance the monastery of Ronceavaux, on the site of the battle between Charlemagne and the Basque forces celebrated in the Chanson de Roland and in Ludovico Ariosto’s Orlando Furioso. Jake’s wound also reads as a mythical allusion, again to the Arthurian cycle, and the legendary guardian of the Holy Grail: the Fisher King, whose mysterious injury renders him impotent and, by extension, makes his land barren. In The Waste Land (1922), the story of the Fisher King underpins Eliot’s modernist project: “These fragments I have shored against my ruins.”

And Brett? Is she on the same search for meaning, or do men have a monopoly on these epic quests, even when they are doomed to fail? Admittedly, Brett’s grand gesture is an act of renunciation. She acknowledges that it would never work with Romero because they belong to different worlds; she lets him go before she taints (or enlightens) him, and before he taints (or tames) her.[8] In relaying her decision to Jake, she explains: “You know it makes one feel rather good deciding not to be a bitch. […] It’s sort of what we have instead of God.” Who is this “we”? Women? That’s not much compared to the options available to men. Then again, these are not Brett’s societal rules – rules she doesn’t conform to anyway. Ultimately, Brett’s sacrifice, if we can call it that, has nothing to do with gender politics, with notions of sexual purity or with corruption in a moral sense but rather, as already mentioned, with the recognition of two incompatible ways of being: the sentimental and the naïve, the self-conscious and the unhesitating, the yearning and the complete. New release: The Sun Also Rises

I think I understand what Jake and Brett are after. I think I understand what bullfighting, or fishing trips, or sharing a drink from a stranger’s wine-bag, or even the mindless partying, and the string of lovers mean to them; they are diminutive surrogates for ‘God’ in the absence of something bigger. And, when these surrogates fail, don’t be fooled: the search for meaning is not over, despite protestations to the contrary. In the dark night of the soul, Jake stakes his allegiance to a simple pragmatism: “I did not care what it was all about. All I wanted to know was how to live in it.” As he concedes that, the ensuing thought flashes by, and with it the prospect of getting the fundamental answer: “Maybe if you found out how to live in it you learned from that what it was all about.” Isn’t it pretty to think so?

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New release: The Sun Also Rises