Hemingway’s The Sun Also Rises - The Lost Generation

Book number 10 of 2024!

The last time I read Ernest Hemingway was in high school, when A Farewell To Arms was assigned in my 11th grade English class. I liked it, but not enough to read more of his stuff.

This past Christmas, I was given Lesley Blume’s Everybody Behaves Badly, which is an account of Hemingway and other American expats living in Europe in the mid 1920s. So, I figured before I tackled Blume’s book, I should read the novel Hemingway based his experiences on: The Sun Also Rises.

Published in 1926, it was Hemingway’s first novel and it made a big splash. In an earlier post, I wrote about William Faulkner’s The Sound and the Fury, which came out around the same time. The two works could not be more different stylistically. Where Faulkner is elusive and opaque, with sentences running to paragraph length, Hemingway is terse and to the point. It looks like it should be easy to write like him, but it isn’t. Every word counts.

The Sun Also Rises chronicles the adventures and misadventures of a group of dysfunctional Americans and Brits in France and Spain. Jake Barnes, the narrator, is a journalist who was injured in WWI and is impotent. Robert Cohn is an acquaintance of his, Bill Gorton is a childhood friend, and Lady Brett Ashley is the beautiful woman about whom they all orbit. She is engaged to Michael Campbell, a bankrupt Scotsman, but she flits from one man to another.

In Paris during the day, they go from one café to the next, bickering and carousing. At night, they hop from one bar to another. If there is one constant, it’s a high level of alcohol consumption. From the beginning, Hemingway sets an atmosphere of aimlessness and nihilism. At the front of the book, he quotes Gertrude Stein’s epigram, “You are all a lost generation.”

Barnes and Gorton plan to go fishing in Spain, and then meet everyone in Pamplona for the annual fiesta and bull-fights. The most pleasant passages in the book describe Jake and Bill in the Spanish countryside, fishing for trout. Hemingway has a way of creating perfectly clear visual images of scenes with few words.

I got my rod that was leaning against the tree, took the bait-can and landing-net, and walked out onto the dam. It was built to provide a head of water for driving logs. The gate was up, and I sat on one of the squared timbers and watched the smooth apron of water before the river tumbled into the falls. In the white water at the foot of the dam it was deep. As I baited up, a trout shot up out of the white water into the falls and was carried down. Before I could finish baiting, another trout jumped at the falls, making the same lovely arc and disappearing into the water that was thundering down. I put on a good-sized sinker and dropped into the white water close to the edge of the timbers of the dam.

I did not feel the first trout strike. When I started to pull up I felt that I had one and brought him, fighting and bending the rod almost double, out of the boiling water at the foot of the falls, and swung him up and onto the dam. He was a good trout, and I banged his head against the timber so that he quivered out straight, and then slipped him into my bag.

Bill Gorton and Jake Barnes have a relaxed time until they go to Pamplona and meet up with Brett, Robert, and Mike. By this time, Brett has spent a few days (and nights) with Robert, and there is understandable tension between the two men. There are also wonderful descriptions of the fiesta and the bull-fighting.

Bill provides some comic relief, but it only serves to reinforce the feeling of pointless ennui:

Bill was buying shoe-shines for Mike. Bootblacks opened the street door and each one Bill called over and started to work on Mike.

“This is the eleventh time my boots have been polished,” Mike said. “I say, Bill is an ass.”

The bootblacks had evidently spread the report. Another came in. “Limpia botas?” he said to Bill.

“No,” said Bill. “For this Señor.”

There’s also a memorable line when he talks with Mike about his bankruptcy:

“How did you go bankrupt?” Bill asked.

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

Jake, Robert, and Mike are all in love (or lust) with Brett, with the predictable results. I love how Hemingway describes her so succinctly here:

She had just been brushing her hair and held the brush in her hand. The room was in that disorder produced only by those who have always had servants.

Lesley Blume writes that F. Scott Fitzgerald was the last writer of the 19th century, the last Romantic, a Strauss. Hemingway, on the other hand was the first truly modern writer who ushered in the 20th century – a Stravinsky. I think it is hard for us in the 21st century to realize how revolutionary his writing style was in 1926, because we are so accustomed to it now. I suppose literature would still be written in the style of Henry James if not for Hemingway, and for that alone I am eternally grateful.

The Sun Also Rises is a moving depiction of a generation that was ruined by The Great War. Prewar European civilization and culture was the highest expression of humanity in history, and in a few years it was irrevocably shattered. There was no returning to innocence after the horrific slaughter of the war. As Brett and Jake discuss in one of their last conversations,

You know I feel rather damned good, Jake.”

“You should.”

“You know it makes one feel rather good deciding not to be a bitch.”

“Yes.”

“It’s sort of what we have instead of God.”

“Some people have God,” I said. “Quite a lot.”

“He never worked very well with me.”

“Should we have another Martini?”