The Sun Also Rises at 100

The Hemingway style—terse, direct, formidable, in both prose and personal deportment—dominated American literature and the native ideal of manliness for much of the twentieth century. His suicide in 1961, at the age of sixty-one, took most of the luster off his reputation for courage; but subsequent biographers have restored some of that virile cachet by recording the almost unbelievable succession of serious injuries and illnesses that bedeviled him for most of his life. It is astonishing that he managed to hold fast as long as he did while suffering so intensely.

Hemingway conceived his signature prose style as a way to reckon with suffering. A man who knows his worth does not bare the painful underside of his soul; he keeps his agonies to himself. He is on familiar terms with death and has learned to contain his fear. And while he enjoys the good things in life more than most others do, he is laconic in even his most extravagant appreciations: He knows pleasures are not made to last. As Hemingway wrote to F. Scott Fitzgerald in 1926 of his failing marriage, “Our life is all gone to hell, which seems to be the one thing you can count on a good life to do.”  

While his flagrant adultery was destroying his first marriage, he was also writing The Sun Also Rises, whose centenary year this is. In this first novel of his (if you don’t count his Sherwood Anderson parody, The Torrents of Spring), the style serves a necessary new moral calculus one step removed from flaming nihilism—the desperate effort to avoid despair that was the hallmark of the Lost Generation, who never recovered from the ravages of the Great War. 

Hemingway himself, as a noncombatant ambulance attendant with the Italian army, took over two hundred pieces of shrapnel in his legs from trench mortar fire, yet carried a wounded soldier 150 yards to safety on his back. At the time he was intoxicated with the glory of war and the spectacle of his own courage. However, that would change. Here is one of the most famous passages in the literature of the First World War, from A Farewell to Arms:

I was always embarrassed by the words sacred, glorious, and sacrifice and the expression in vain. . . . I had seen nothing sacred, and the things that were glorious had no glory and the sacrifices were like the stockyards at Chicago if nothing was done with the meat except to bury it. . . . Abstract words such as glory, honor, courage, or hallow were obscene beside the concrete names of villages, the numbers of roads, the names of rivers, the numbers of regiments and the dates.

The legitimate words available to a veteran writing of his sorrows and joys were severely limited by his own sense of decency.  

The Sun Also Rises shows men and women trying to salvage a life they can call “good” from the wreckage of their own hopes, and the ruin of an entire civilization. Those aureate obscenities now proscribed had meant a great deal before Verdun and the Somme and Passchendaele. They had defined the things men owed to Caesar and to their comrades and to themselves, and decreed what was worth killing and dying for. After the war’s pointless carnage, the vocabulary of the moral life shrank to the bare essentials.  

Hemingway offers his own definition of the good under the new dispensation—the word that his narrator, Jake Barnes, uses dozens of times to connote the union of physical pleasure and moral rightness: You feel what is good, you know it without thinking about it, as though simple sensation were the only guide to right living. “It felt good to be warm and in bed”; “It was a good dinner. Food had an excellent place in the count’s values. So did wine. The count was in fine form during the meal. So was Brett. It was a good party”; “You paid some way for everything that was any good. I paid my way into enough things that I liked, so that I had a good time.” A good time, for this expatriate crowd attending the fiesta in the Spanish town of Pamplona, means good fishing, good bullfighting, a good hotel room, a good meal, lots of good drink, and good drinking companions.

What it emphatically doesn’t mean, at least for Jake, is good loving. The beautiful Brett, Lady Ashley, loves Jake, and Jake loves her; but Jake suffered a war wound that disqualifies him from sexual pleasure, so she takes up with several perfectly wrong men one after the other, including a superb matador fifteen years younger than she, who takes a bad beating from a previous lover of hers adept with his fists. (This jilted and jealous lover, once the middleweight boxing champion of Princeton, is an anti-Semite’s dream so odious that the poisonous caricature nearly spoils the novel.) Brett is feeling quite virtuous, between spasms of self-hatred, after she decides to leave the love-besotted torero for his own good. “You know it makes one feel rather good deciding not to be a bitch,” she says. “It’s sort of what we have instead of God.” “Some people have God,” Jake replies. “Quite a lot.”  

One suspects that Jake, and even Hemingway, wishes he could be one of those people. Jake has God just enough to complicate his barebones notion of the good. He enters the cathedral in Pamplona and prays “for everybody I thought of. . . . I prayed that the bull-fights would be good, and that it would be a fine fiesta, and that we would get some fishing.” Then his prayers gradually stumble among distracting reveries about money and a rich friend: 

I was a little ashamed, and regretted that I was such a rotten Catholic, but realized there was nothing I could do about it, at least for a while, and maybe never, but that anyway it was a grand religion, and I only wished I felt religious and maybe I would the next time; and then I was out in the hot sun on the steps of the cathedral, and the forefingers and the thumb of my right hand were still damp, and I felt them dry in the sun.

The clearly felt and sharply rendered sensation of the holy water drying on his fingers is more real to him than the shadowy deity to whom he addresses his desire for good bulls and good trout. He wishes it weren’t so, but understands how far he is from serious devotion. That distance measures the pathos of this sorrowful and splendid novel.