It’s a slow news day so let’s argue about Hemingway

For thirty or forty years, Hemingway was viewed as must reading, a giant of modern lit and a major influence on practically everyone but then, in the ‘60s and ‘70s, with the rise of feminism and the anti-Vietnam-war protests, he ran into a firestorm of debunking. Part of it was his very out-of-fashion public persona, cartoonishly macho and pugnacious. But the books themselves helped. Hemingway was arguably sexist, or at least one-dimensional in his portrayal of women and deemed a romanticizer of such distasteful pursuits as war, hunting, bull fighting, drinking, boxing, smoking and fishing sans catch-and-release.

Even his distinctive writing style, once venerated as ingeniously original, spare yet poetically evocative, became an inspiration for jokey contests in which mimics parodied what now seemed mannered and monotonous.

Good thing Hemingway was dead by then or he’d have been bellowing like one of his bloodied toros, frantic to puncture his tormentors. Maybe he sensed what was coming when he put a shotgun to his forehead in his house in Idaho in 1961.

In the ‘80s, his rep made something of a comeback but the critics seemed to like his short stories more than his novels. These days, the books still sell, the writing still may influence some young writers—especially those who go for sharp, understated dialogue–but there is sometimes eye rolling when the name Hemingway comes up.

So, The Sun Also Rises. Should you read it if you’ve never read it? My advice is yeah but skip the first 100 pages. Or do a lot of skimming and get to the good stuff.

The book concerns a loose-knit group of friends—mostly American males and one British femme fatale. It starts with them hanging around Paris, drifting from one café to another, drinking prodigiously and making endless small talk. These people are your basic alienated youth (thirtyish variety), a new and thrilling demographic in Hemingway’s time but one we’re all too familiar with now. You may well ask, “Why am I supposed to be interested in these people again?”

I went to the office in the elevator. Robert Cohn was waiting for me. “Hello, Jake,” he said. “Going out to lunch?”

“Yes. Let me see if there is anything new.”

“Where will we eat?”

“Anywhere.”

I was looking over my desk. “Where do you want to eat?”

“How about Wetzel’s? They’ve got good hors d’oeuvres.”

Well, if you’re aware of the background, you may be more forgiving. These angst-ridden expatriates were the so-called “lost generation” that had fought World War I, a conflict, so bloody and pointless it left even the winning nations stunned for years and drove the losers insane. Hemingway doesn’t explain any of this; he just alludes to it in his elliptical, sketchy way. You’re supposed to know. Check Wikipedia.

The narrator, Jake Barnes, is in a particularly unfortunate state, having had his balls shot off in combat. In a contemporary novel or movie, that bloody trauma would be smack in our face. There’d be battlefield-surgery flashbacks, flinch-inducing nude scenes, screaming nightmares, agonized psychologizing, hideous close-ups. Not here. It’s all rather sketchy and undetailed. Writers then weren’t supposed to linger on such squeamish matters; it was probably daring of Hemingway to even go there. (Maybe he wasn’t such a war lover after all.) As for the victim, fictional or factual, stoic silence—or grace under pressure, as Hemingway put it–was also de rigueur. One’s hair was not let down. The acceptable modes of emotional expression for males were getting drunk or punching someone in the face. Though, occasionally, you could cry yourself to sleep when alone in your room.

Jake & pals eventually hit the road and ramble down to Spain. This doesn’t help much at first. What probably seemed speedy and succinct in 1926 now reads like a much too leisurely travelogue. Hemingway was a great one for describing scenery. He did it well, eschewing fancy metaphor, relying his journalist’s eye (he started as a newspaper reporter) and piling up simple, smartly observed detail, but there’s just too much of it here. Especially the damn fishing scene.

We started up the road and then went across a meadow and found a path that crossed the fields and went toward the woods on the slope of the first hill. We walked across the fields on the sandy path. The fields were rolling and grassy and the grass was short from the sheep grazing. The cattle were up in the hills. We heard their bells in the woods.

The path crossed a stream on a foot-log. The log was surfaced off, and there was a sapling bent across for a rail. In the flat pool beside the stream tadpoles spotted the sand. We went up a steep bank and across the rolling fields. Looking back we saw
Burguete, white houses and red roofs, and the white road with a track going along it and the dust rising.

This sort of thing goes on for another ten paragraphs before we get to the fishing stream.

Jake, like almost everyone else in the book, is in love with the beautiful, insouciant Lady Brett Ashley (who, when the bad Hollywood version was made, turned out to look exactly like Ava Gardner), but unlike everyone else, he can’t have sex with her, so he is miserable. Still, he’s less miserable than Mike Campbell or Robert Cohn, who have to sit by watching when Brett abandons them for a star bullfighter. Cohn is the most miserable. Nobody likes Cohn because 1. He’s a Jew and 2. He’s no good at disguising how miserable he is, which goes against the generational code.

Was Hemingway being anti-Semitic with the Robert Cohn business or just being a good reporter? The consensus judgment seems to be that he wasn’t deeply anti-Semitic or, for that matter anti-black, just casually bigoted in the thoughtless manner that prevailed in many circles at the time. But this is something you can still have a pretty good argument about.

Finally, the boys and girl arrive in Pamplona, where the fiesta—the one with the famous running of the bulls—is about to start. (Fiesta was Hemingway’s original title, but his publisher came up with the more literary-sounding one and prevailed) Here the novel at last takes off. Interesting things happen. Conflict escalates. Action occurs and Hemingway is very, very good with action. When you come down to it, the old son of a bitch can still write. His descriptions of the raucous revelry in the town and the raging-bull stuff alone are worth the price of admission. A tragic and poignant edge creeps into the proceedings. Everything starts to resonate. You worry that something really bad is going to happen to somebody.

And then it’s over. And you’ve read Hemingway. You feel a sense of pride and achievement and you want to pour yourself a tall glass of Fundador, whatever that is. But you’re still not ready for War and Peace.