In my parent’s house, buried under weathered editions of Kipling, Wharton, and Carol, I found a copy of Hemingway's first novel, The Sun Also Rises. It was the same edition used in middle school. I took it, put it on my bookshelf, and read it this weekend. I'm glad I did.
Hemingway's first work is a solid example of his hard-boiled stripped-down style. Though laid in plain language his story sacrifices little delicacy or nuance, creating an outrageous and believable stage on which to work through his own battlefield demons.
The Sun Also Rises, like many great works emerging in the years following great wars, tugs at the dark end of humanity, the end that leads to a place no one wants to admit they've visited. The story targets the anchor-less wanderings of a generation left to pick up the pieces and draws attention to the jabbering schizophrenia spreading across Europe in the giddy post war atmosphere.
If Hemingway's genius is in his subtlety, than his timeless appeal incubates in his hyper-flawed characters; their grit and barbarity balanced by bucolic and relaxing surroundings, and catalyzed by loose living.
The main characters, all expatriates from the US and England, are living in Paris. The 1920's are good there. Money is everywhere and nowhere. Everyone has enough to continue on, even when they're cold bust.
These were fast times for Hemingway and his artist-writer friends. If you could stay drunk, you could bake in the sun for another 15 years or so; and even if credit and the taps at one pub ran dry, others would flow. There were plenty of rich Barons willing to pay for the company, asking for little in return.
The future is not a character in The Sun Also Rises, which betrays the title to some extent. Jake, Mike, Bob, Bill, and Brett spend most of their energies avoiding the tragedies of their lives by staying on the move, sleeping with each other, and feasting on the noise and brutality of the Festival of San Fermins in Pamplona, famous for the running of the bulls.
They are lonely, insecure, unfriendly at times, anything but stand-offish. It occurred to me, at several points, that these so-called friends, do not very much prefer each others' company at all. Instead, their tensioned relationships, remind me of meeting fellow Americans abroad and the resulting strange brew of fast friendships that would not ordinarily occur back home. Despite their distaste for each other, Hemingway’s protagonists still fit more in their environment than the tourists who begin arriving in busloads to catch the festival at it’s exciting crescendo.
A common denominator between the characters in The Sun Also Rises, is their membership in a generation devoured by WWI. For Jake and Brett, there is a deeper past, beginning and ending badly it lends back story to the trauma unfolding into the climax of book. Jake sustained an injury in the war which makes it impossible for him to provide the physical intimacy Brett requires. She is a new woman, free, believes wild affairs will ease an infinite ache, and woefully confused by it all - as are the men she sleeps with.
Together the larger group decides to holiday in Spain, but first with a bit of fly fishing in the cool waters of the Irati high in northern Basque country. Only Jake and Bill end up fishing. The sequences are beautiful. The river and local wine have transcendent effects on Jake and Bill, briefly elevating their experiences into spiritual communion with natural solitude.
The six coalesce again in Pamplona where Jake, a well known figure with the town's business owners has arranged everything. Jake is an “aficionado” of the bull fights. He comes every year. This is the first time he's invited a large group of uninitiated to join along. It will be the last.
The friends arrive for the commencement of the week-long Fiesta. In short time, they find the town erupting into a mass of energy as peasants, dignitaries, celebrity matadors, and tourists heed the gravity of both religion and tradition. As the party grows so does the tension between friends until finally the levee breaks and inner conflict permeates the surface splintering the group and even threatens the continuity of the festival at large.
Through brisk sentences, little more than the visible portion of our characters’s motivations are available. They are private and they are in pain. They try desperately to maintain a western sense of civility and propriety, but the war has stripped all remaining hints of gentility. All that remains is pain and life. Remorse is for the weak.
The period language is charming. The characters and the landscape are authentic. I enjoyed The Sun Also Rises. For a treat, follow the plot on Google maps where, thanks to modern geo-tagging, the roads, hills, and red-roofed houses that dotted Hemingway's Spain still stand today, nearly a century on.
The real story much like the mysterious Irati river was suitably hidden for my tastes. It can be heard, but not seen from the quaint center of Pomplona. The Sun Also Rises could be read as a comedy of incivility between expatriates living in Western Europe. It could also be read as a careful examination of the struggle to reweave the psychological tapestry of a lost generation. Either way, reading The Sun Also Rises it is impossible to ignore that war makes much of man; of Ernest Hemingway it made a writer.
