Everything that Rises Must Converge: Hemingway’s “The Sun Also Rises”

When I heard the shocking news of Ernest Hemingway’s suicide on July 2, 1961, I was sipping a Pernod in a Paris bar/café named Storyville, named after the famous “red light district” in New Orleans where I could hear jazz on LPs. I could not have imagined a more suitable place to take-in the details that “Papa,” as he was known, “blew his brains out and much of his face with a W. C. Scott long-barreled side-by-side shotgun.” (Those are the words of the American novelist, Clancy Sigal, the author of Going Away, who co-wrote the screenplay for the feature film Frida which features fictionalized versions of Diego Rivera, Frida Kahlo and Leon Trotsky.)

Hemingway was 61-years old in 1961; he had won the Nobel Prize in Literature seven years earlier, and he was the world famous author of The Sun Also Rises, his debut novel, which is prefaced by a quotation from Gertrude Stein who told Hemingway, “You are all a lost generation.”

The Sun also includes a quotation from Ecclesiastes which provided the novel with a title that reads, “the earth abideth forever…the sun also ariseth and the sun goes down and hasteth to the place where he arose.” The author had converted to Catholicism and perhaps wanted to advertise his new found religion.

I read The Sun Also Rises as a sophomore in Lionel Trilling comparative literature class at Columbia alongside T. S. Eliot’s The Waste Land, James Joyce’s Ulysses, Kafka’s short stories, Thomas Mann’s The Magic Mountain and Marcel Proust’s In Search of Lost Time.

In Paris, in the summer of 1961, living on $5 a day or less and traveling across the City of Light on foot I felt like I belonged to the Lost Generation of the 1920s, and that I might catch a glimpse of Hemingway drinking in a cafe on the Left Bank, wandering along the Seine, or observing the gravestones in the Montparnasse cemetery where Charles Baudelaire was buried and later where Samuel Beckett and others would join him.

On the 100^th anniversary of the publication of The Sun Also Rises in 2026— a year after the 100^th anniversary of the publication of The Great Gatsby —I reread Hemingway’s novel and also reread Clancy Signal’s spirited Hemingway Lives (2013) a vigorous defense of the author know as “Papa,” despite all his many flaws. Clancy died of congestive heart failure in Los Angeles at the age of 90. Born in 1926, the same year that The Sun Also Rises first appeared in print, Clancy writes, in Hemingway Lives that he was in a London, where he lived much of his life, and in a pub of course when he heard the news of Hemingway’s suicide.

I met Clancy in San Rafael, California and later corresponded with him for a couple of years when he grumbled about IRA bombings in London, especially after explosive devices went off at the Tower of London and the Houses of Parliament. The novelist Doris Lessing, one of his lovers, connected me to Clancy and Clancy to me because, as she explained, we shared a commitment to radical politics, including an anti-fascist, anti-Yankee agenda which also bound us to Hemingway who gave his Nobel Prize to Fidel Castro. Doris and Clancy were role models I had in mind in the Sixties when I wrote about my romantic relationship to Marge Piercy who was also a writer and a feminist.

Clancy appears as the American, Saul Green, in Lessing’s big postmodern novel The Golden Notebook. Lessing appears in Sigal’s memoir The Secret Defector. He behaved more civilly and more respectful toward Doris than Hemingway behaved toward the four women he married: Hadley Richardson, Pauline Pfeiffer, Mary Welsh and the British born writer, Martha Gellhorn, the author of novels, short stories and nonfiction books including The Face of War and Vietnam: A New Face of War. Gellhorn and Hemingway traveled to Spain together during the civil war there and later to China after they married in 1941. They were nearly as famous as Sartre and de Beauvoir were as a couple.

I don’t remember precisely how and what I thought and felt when I first read The Sun Also Rises in 1961 except that I loved the dialogue which propels the narrative. Also, I saw myself in the company of Hemingway’s fictional characters: the wounded World War I veteran, Jake Barnes, his friend, Robert Cohn, a Princeton boxer and Jewish, plus Mike Campbell, Bill Gorton and “the count” who boasts “I have been in seven wars and four revolutions.”

The one major woman character, Lady Brett Ashley, sleeps with all the men in her life, except Jake, and thereby provides the erotic drive that fuses the guys to one another. Sex is a subtext that never really emerges full blown, though as an undergraduate at Columbia I sensed its presence as did my classmates who made bawdy remarks about the male genitalia that “rises” while fucking.

The collective “you” that Stein described as a lost generation, converge in Paris, which was still in the 1920s the cultural and artistic capital of the Western world. A literary novel, the characters in The Sun play with word, slang and with language itself. They read books and talk about writers from around the world such as Thomas Hardy, Anatole France, Ivan Turgenev and A. E. W. Mason, the British author of popular murder mysteries populated by a French detective.

In The Sun, Hemingway democratizes the American expat experience in the capitals of Europe. For Jakes and his circle, living in Paris and traveling across the continent isn’t what it was for the wealthy characters one finds in Henry James’s novels. Rather it’s for  fellows with jobs and without money to throw around.

If I pictured myself with Jake and his companions as they roam around Paris, I also pictured them with me as I strolled at night on the Boulevard St.-Michel and the Boulevard St.-Germain, which were thronged with men and women my age and generation, all of us looking for excitement.

In 1961 we were still in the 1950s, though the Sixties were about to explode; the crowds of young people in the streets were a sign of the cultural revolution that loomed ahead and that treated Hemingway as a heroic figure. After all, as Sigal points out he loved “romantic rebels” and “hated dictators.” He would have been comfortable in the company of Che.

In Hemingway Lives, Sigal goes out on a literary limb and insists that Brett Ashley, and not Jake is the main character, though she vanishes for much of the narrative only to reappear in Spain, where she seduces and is seduced by the young  beautiful bullfighter Pedro Romero. Sigal also insists that The Sun is first and foremost an anti-war novel.

Jake, and by extension Hemingway himself, seem to be attracted to Pedro in part because he’s young and beautiful, but also because he’s an aficionado: someone who is passionate about what he does. Jake has aficion, which endears him to the Spanish men who are all aficionados and devoted to bullfighting. The words aficion and aficionado and the compelling concept behind them perform much the same work that the word and the concept “mad” plays in Kerouac’s novel, On The Road.

Sal Paradise, the narrator, exclaims, “the only people for me are the mad ones, the ones who are mad to live, mad to talk, mad to be saved, desirous of everything at the same time.” He adds, “the ones who never yawn or say a commonplace thing, but burn, burn, burn like fabulous yellow roman candles exploding like spiders across the stars and in the middle you see the blue center light pop and everybody goes ‘Awww!’”

Sigal writes that “to be like Hemingway is to escape from a normal, dull life into one of adventure and risk, without complaining.” He might have said much of the same thing about Kerouac. Going on the road meant, for the members of the Lost Generation and for the Beat Generation, too, rejecting home, family, a job, conformity.

For Jake, the only people who matter have aficion. Without it life isn’t worth  “damn,” as Brett would say, no matter how much good food one eats and how many glasses of wine one drinks at Closerie, Rotonde and Zelli. (An American tourist in Paris in the late 1920s might have used The Sun as a guide book for the best places to see and to be seen, to dance and to flirt.)

Sigal goes through The Sun chapter by chapter and points out the ways that the text could be described as politically incorrect: the anti-Semitism, racism, homophobia and sexism. Jake uses the word “nigger” and so do the characters. Cohn is called a “kike.” Hemingway seems to enjoy putting into print racial epithets shunned by liberals and radicals like Gellhorn.

Sigal also repeats many of the remarks critical of Hemingway uttered by American writers. Steinbeck apparently called him “that shit.” Faulkner wrote that he “has never been known to use a word that might send a reader to the dictionary.” That’s mostly true, though one might have to turn to a Spanish dictionary for a definition of aficion and aficionado. At times, Hemingway shows off his knowledge or Spanish culture as well as his expertise about French food and wine. He’s the outsider who becomes an insider.

Sigal also explores the “amity” and “enmity,” as Trilling would call it, between Hemingway and F. Scott Fitzgerald. According to legend, Scott said to Ernest, “the rich are different than us,” and Ernest replied, “Yes, they have more money than we do.” Sigal writes that Hemingway trashed Fitzgerald as “soft, vaguely queer, alcoholic…[and] pussy-whipped by his wife Zelda.” He adds that Hemingway’s novel, The Garden of Eden is “a rival or response to F. Scott Fitzgerald’s Tender is the Night.”

In a recent essay that divagates back and forth between The Sun andThe Great Gatsby, editor and writer, David Samuels, leans heavily in favor of Gatsby which he calls “the first great American Jewish novel.” He also describes what he calls “Gatsby’s inherent Jewishness.” That sounds like a stretch. You don’t have to invoke Judaism to love Gatsby.

At the end of his essay, Samuels offers the hope that “our schools continue to teach their books together.” It’s a lovely idea, but unlikely. For good reasons, aesthetic as well as cultural, Trilling didn’t teach them together. With his eyes on Europe and not on Long Island and Manhattan, he assigned The Sun but not Gatsby. The Sun was, as he explained, cosmopolitan while Gatsby was local and provincial.

For most of the last 50 years, teaching together the work of two dead white men might have been regarded as academic blasphemy. But perhaps the pendulum has swung in the opposite direction. Today, Hemingway and Fitzgerald might appear together on the same curriculum as exemplars of two almost diametrically opposing ways of writing and expression in America in the 1920s: the Jazz Age for Scott and the post-World War I era for Ernest.

Sigal argues that Hemingway created “a new kind of prose” and that he offered “a syntax without adjectives and adverbs.” Indeed, his dialogue is crisp and unadorned, especially in wonderful short stories like “A Clean, Well-Lighted Place,” though the descriptions of the European landscape and fishing in the wilds can be poetic as when Jake describes himself with rod, hook and bait sitting on “squared timbers,” and watching “the smooth apron of water before the river tumbled into the falls.” The fish he captures are “beautifully colored and firm and hard for the cold water.”

In The Sun, Hemingway offers no ending as powerful as the ending of Gatsby in which Nick Carraway muses on time past and time future: “I sat there, brooding on the old unknown world, [and] I thought of Gatsby’s wonder when he first picked out the green light at the end of Daisy’s dock.” Nick adds of Gatsby, “He had come a long way to this blue lawn and his dream must have seemed so close that he could hardly fail to grasp it. He did not know that it was already behind him, somewhere back in that vast obscurity beyond the city, where the dark fields of the republic rolled on under the night.”

Nor is there anywhere in The Sun, prose as hard hitting as Fitzgerald’s comment about Daisy and Tom Buchanan: “they smashed up things and creatures and then retreated back into their money or their vast carelessness, or whatever it was that kept them together, and let other people clean up the mess they had made.” That passage has been repeated again and again and has been used to describe American abuse of power and reliance on wealth.

Still, Fitzgerald had a tendency to romanticize the wealthy and the powerful and to glamorize characters like Daisy and her friend Jordan Baker, a cheat, and Gatsby, too, the gangster who embodies a chunk of the best about the American character— its capacity for wonder – and some of the worst: its penchant for self-mythologizing and fabricating.

In chapter one, Nick Carraway watches in awe the rather magical spectacle of Daisy and Jordan “both in white…[their] dresses …rippling and fluttering as if they had just been blown back in after a short flight around the house.”

For all his bluster and bravado, Hemingway, the tough guy, could edge toward the sentimental and perhaps never more so than in the ending of The Sun in which Jake and Brett sit “close against each other” and he puts his “arm around her.” Brett tells him, “Oh, Jake, we could have had such a damned good time together.” He replies, “Yes. Isn’t it pretty to think so.” Of course, as an anti-romantic he knows, as does the reader that they never could have had a good time together, that there’s no way to backtrack and start over again with a clean slate.

I will always love Gatsby in part because I grew up on Long Island, where much of the novel is set. And yet and yet, The Sun will always occupy a place in my heart not only because it introduced me to the lost generation but also because it bound me to Paris when I was a teenager. It has kept me in that orbit ever since then.

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