Reading Hemingway's The Sun Also Rises

H. R. Stoneback

• Publisher: The Kent State University Press
• Year: 2014
• ISBN:
  9781631010668
• Topic: Literatura
• Subtopic: Crítica literaria norteamericana

The first volume in an important series of guides to the works of Ernest Hemingway

"The Reading Hemingway series of guides to Ernest Hemingway's major works of fiction, short stories, and novels are written for students, fellow teachers, and other readers who share an interest in the works of one of America's, and indeed the world's, outstanding writers…. The books in this series will gloss or annotate, page by page, word by word, if necessary, like a good guidebook to a city or country. These books will not tell Hemingway readers what to think and feel about an action, a character or a place. Rather, the guides point out features and details possibly overlooked or misunderstood by the 'visitor.' … These books, side by side with Hemingway's books, may enrich one's reading 'tours.'" - from the Foreword

Designed as an exercise in close reading, this first volume in the series is grounded in narrative and aesthetic concerns, addressing history, local knowledge, actual and symbolic landscape and inscape, and every aspect of the seven-eighths of the story that lies beneath the surface - the submerged iceberg of the fiction. Author H. R. Stoneback equips the reader to sound its depths and take full measure of the novel's allusiveness, indirection, and understatement. Navigating the labyrinthine text of The Sun Also Rises, Stoneback negotiates its intricate, complex, and interconnected passages and leads the reader ultimately to the center of Hemingway's vision.

Reading The Sun Also Rises

FRONT MATTER

Title: At various stages of its writing and revision, Hemingway considered different titles for his first novel: Fiesta, Rivers to the Sea, Two Lie Together, The Old Leaven, Perdu, Lost, and The Lost Generation. In late September 1925, he went to spend a few days alone in Chartres, the great cathedral city of France, eighty-three kilometers from Paris. He took with him the manuscript of his novel; it had been called Fiesta, but Hemingway rejected the use of “a foreign word” for his title and then considered The Lost Generation. While he was in Chartres he wrote in his notebook a foreword to “The Lost Generation: A Novel,” in which he told his first version of an anecdote about Gertrude Stein and a garage owner’s proclamation that the World War I generation was a “lost generation.” During his time in Chartres, in the shadow of the cathedral, with its multiple reverberations in sculpted stone and stained-glass iconography of Hemingway’s subtextual subject matter in his novel—resonances of Roland and Roncevaux, motifs of pilgrimage, biblical allusions, Catholic historicity, art, ritual, tradition, and authority—Hemingway decided to change his title. “The chief result of his trip to Chartres,” Carlos Baker notes, “was the decision to change the name of his first novel to The Sun Also Rises” (Life Story 155). It is a change of crucial import, accomplished in a symbolic landscape, sacred terrain that signifies—in the ancient and numinous Catholic Pilgrimage city of Chartres. Readers who are inclined to view the novel as pessimistic or despairing should pay close attention to Hemingway’s process of title selection: if the title had been “The Sun Also Sets” or “The Sun Also Goes Down” or “The Lost Generation,” it might seem a very different novel (see also Svoboda, Crafting of a Style 106–10).

In his Chartres notebook foreword, Hemingway pondered what redemption was available to his generation: “There will be many new salvations brought forward. My generation in France for example in two years sought salvation in First the Catholic Church, 2nd DaDaism”—here he had first written “Communism” before crossing it out—“third The Movies Fourth Royalism Fifth The Catholic Church again” (Facsimile 2:628). After his foreword he wrote a list of titles, with The Sun Also Rises at the top of the list, and The Old Leaven (the only other title underlined) at the end of the list. He must have known, with his superb eye and ear for titles, that The Old Leaven was not a good title, even if it did point toward his novel’s submerged thesis, the “salvations” it “brought forward”: the old rituals and traditions, such as those of the bullfight and the Catholic Church, the old values that had been neglected and must be relearned, the old joys and delights, such as fishing and wine, that had been forgotten or prohibited. These old things would be the leaven, the agents that would lighten or enliven life and cause it to “rise.” Hemingway’s ear, already well attuned to French, may have heard in leaven the French levain (yeast), or lever and se lever (to raise, to rise), and maybe he already envisioned what would be his novel’s title in French: Le soleil se lève aussi. Fortunately, his excellent ear selected the best biblical title—The Sun Also Rises—and his time in Chartres would have confirmed the wisdom of that choice, given the cathedral’s traditional orientation to the rising sun, symbol of the risen Christ. Any guidebook he might have consulted regarding the cathedral would have drawn Hemingway’s attention to the many depictions in stone and glass of the conflict between the Virtues and the Vices, to the famous maze on the floor of the nave, which symbolized the penitential path of the pilgrim, to the Vierge au Pilier (the Virgin of the Pillar, iconographical cognate to the Virgen del Pilar in Zaragoza, Spain), and to many other subjects that would become recurrent motifs in his work. And if he bought, as any curious traveler or even the casual tourist would, the standard guidebook then available at Chartres, The Tourist’s Practical Guide Book (1924) by Étienne Houvet, Hemingway would have learned many things about the cathedral—ranging from structural matters (“without heaviness,” “perfect in its proportions”), to religious mysteries everywhere depicted in the “mystic city” of the cathedral, to the importance of “two of the most beautiful windows in the church … that of Charlemagne and Roland,” and, next to it, “that of Saint James the Great” (Houvet 3, 23). These matters would all be important in the months after Hemingway’s stay at Chartres, when he faced months of difficult revision, tightening (and lightening) the structure, perfecting the proportions, crafting the iconography, and intensifying the Catholic themes and subtexts of his first and—for many readers—his best novel. In an unpublished essay entitled “On Cathedrals,” in which Hemingway discussed cathedrals and different kinds of literary and Catholic conversions, he noted that certain places were not good for writing but were very good for rewriting, for “seeing what is not true and seeing the true that you have not put in and it is always much clearer and easier to re-write something in one of these places than where it was first written” (emphasis added; as quoted in Reynolds, Paris Years 326). And for seeing the “not true” in The Sun Also Rises, for “seeing the true” not yet put in, and beginning the process of rewriting—Chartres was the place.

Epigraphs: Just as Hemingway’s titles are crucial clues to theme and emphases, so too are his epigraphs. It has not always been obvious to readers and commentators that Hemingway does not present Gertrude Stein’s “lost generation” proclamation as a slogan to be endorsed, but as fatuous grandiloquence to be undercut, not only by the wisdom reflected in the second epigraph, from Ecclesiastes, but also by the action and design of the novel. Hemingway was pleased when reviewers recognized that he did not take “the Gertrude Stein thing very seriously,” that he intended to “play off against that splendid bombast” (Selected Letters 229). Stein’s “assumption of prophetic roles” is mocked just as much by the juxtaposed epigraph as it is by the larger motions of the novel: “Nobody,” Hemingway said, “knows about the generation that follows them and certainly has no right to judge” (229). All generations were “lost,” Hemingway would maintain, but at least his generation was conscious of how they were lost and how they might be “found.” After the first printing of the novel, which carried a longer version of the epigraph from Ecclesiastes, Hemingway urged his editor, Maxwell Perkins, to “lop off the Vanity of vanities, saith the preacher, vanity of vanities; all is vanity—What profit hath a man of all his labour which he taketh under the sun?—delete all that” (229). Such precision regarding the content of the epigraph should lead the reader to recognize both Hemingway’s exactitude and his skill as homilist, pointing to his actual message even before the novel begins. He does not presume to be the “Preacher” of Ecclesiastes, but he preaches obliquely nevertheless. The revised epigraph, he tells Perkins, “makes it much clearer. The point of the book to me was that the earth abideth forever—having a great deal of fondness and admiration for the earth and not a hell of a lot for my generation and caring little about Vanities.” His novel, he insists, is not “a hollow or bitter satire but a damn tragedy with the earth abiding for ever as the hero” (229). The second epigraph, as printed in the shorter version since the second printing of the novel, consists of Ecclesiastes 1.4–7. (It should be noted that the ellipses do not indicate omitted words, but verse breaks.) Hemingway is astute in his insistence on the deletion of the “vanity,” for that might seem to diminish the cyclical sense of renewal that he wishes to emphasize—the sun rising on the abiding earth. Nevertheless, it is useful for all readers to consult the entire book of Ecclesiastes as a kind of submerged subtext for The Sun Also Rises. In the manuscript pages where he lists tentative titles for the novel, Hemingway writes: “For in much wisdom is much grief; and he that increases [i.e., increaseth] knowledge increaseth sorrow” (Facsimile 2:629). This slight misquotation of Ecclesiastes 1.18 is a telling signpost for the progress of Jake’s pilgrimage, his movement over the “abiding earth,” his wisdom and grief, his knowledge and sorrow.

Years later in his memoir of Paris in the 1920s, A Moveable Feast, Hemingway tells another version of Stein’s declaration that all the young men who served in the war were a lost generation: “‘Don’t argue with me, Hemingway,’ Miss Stein said. ‘It does no good at all. You’re all a lost generation, exactly as the garage keeper said.’” Hemingway then notes how he tried to balance Stein’s quotation with the Ecclesiastes epigraph, and he implicitly charges her with “egotism and mental laziness versus discipline,” and he thinks: “Who is calling who a lost generation?” He concludes: “But the hell with her lost-generation talk and all the dirty, easy labels” (Moveable Feast 29–31). Readers of The Sun Also Rises would do well to exercise caution with regard to the “easy labels” that have been affixed to the novel in the course of eight decades of literary criticism.

CHAPTER 1

3:1 Robert Cohn: Cohn is a common variant spelling of Cohen (census records indicate a total of 39,772 occurrences, 3,730 in the 1920 census), a surname said to be of Hebrew origin, signifying rabbi, bishop, or priest. In general practice the name Cohn is not pronounced “con,” but in the same manner as Cohen, or “cone.” Thus there is no hint of the “con man” in Robert’s character; nor would there seem to be any rabbinical or priestly wisdom or authority. It is well known that Robert Cohn was based, to some degree, on Harold Loeb, Hemingway’s friend who accompanied him to the 1925 fiesta at Pamplona. Loeb was of distinguished lineage—his mother was a Guggenheim, his father a member of Kuhn, Loeb and Company. Hemingway may have echoed the latter fact in the roughly homophonic naming (Cohn/Kuhn) of his character. It is interesting to note that the Loebs had strong, and far longer, associations with Harvard than with Princeton; they were major Harvard alumni benefactors from the 1880s to the 1930s (Synnott 11–12). Loeb certainly served as a partial model in the early stages of the novel’s composition, but given Hemingway’s axiom, embraced years before The Sun Also Rises, that the writer must invent from what he knows, that “writing about anything actual was bad,” and that “everything good he’d ever written he’d made up,” Loeb’s role as initial character-model tells us nothing substantial about the created character of Cohn (“On Writing” 237). Long after The Sun Also Rises appeared, Loeb published his memoir The Way It Was (1959) and, after Hemingway’s death, an article entitled “Hemingway’s Bitterness” that was included (with memoirs by other presumed prototypes for Hemingway’s characters) in Bertram Sarason’s Hemingway and “The Sun” Set (1972), a study of the novel as roman à clef. All such reminiscences belong to the terrain of memoir, a very different country from the terroir of fiction.

It is far more important to give careful consideration to Hemingway’s last-minute revisions that made “Robert Cohn” the first words of the novel and the primary subject of character presentation and analysis in the opening chapters. As late as the galleys, the novel began: “This is a novel about a lady. Her name is Lady Ashley and when the story begins she is living in Paris and it is Spring. That should be a good setting for a romantic but highly moral story” (Svoboda, Crafting of a Style 99). The radical changes suggested in Scott Fitzgerald’s critique (after publication-ready copy had been sent to Scribners) convinced Hemingway to cut his first chapter, with its focus on Brett Ashley as the central subject of the novel, and much of his second chapter. Fitzgerald was surely right in urging Hemingway to get rid of the “careless + ineffectual” prose, the “condescending casualness” of the tone (Svoboda, Crafting of a Style 137–40). Rather than revision, Hemingway chose radical excision, and in the process he sacrificed some valuable background information about Brett and Jake. More important, by delaying Brett’s appearance in the novel until more than midway through chapter 3, and beginning instead with Robert, he risked altering the focus, the deep structure, and the very rhythms of his “novel about a lady.” Put another way, it could be argued that this revision radically and unduly foregrounds Robert Cohn as the principal subject of the novel. Indeed, after the opening chapters, and especially after chapter 6, Cohn is increasingly absent from the narrative, from the rendered action of the novel. He remains present, primarily as a touchstone of bad behavior, as it becomes clear that this is Jake’s story “about a lady,” and thus ultimately a story about himself. The revised beginning does have the effect of clarifying for the reader that this is, in one sense, a novel of manners, one concerned with conduct and character. And if Robert Cohn is a principal antiexemplar (as opposed to such exemplars as Count Mippipopolous, Montoya, and Pedro Romero), it may be a very effective strategy to begin with a definition of antiexemplary behavior before attempting to articulate, or codify, the “values” (see the crucial scene with the count, 57–61) that are the foundation of exemplary behavior.

3:1–6 boxing … Princeton: Since Robert Cohn is thirty-four years old in 1925 (see 9:9), it is likely that he entered Princeton in 1909 and graduated in 1913 (as did Harold Loeb, who was a wrestler, not a boxer, at Princeton). One reason that Jake is not impressed by Robert’s championship title is that there was no intercollegiate boxing—only student boxing clubs—at Princeton from 1880 to 1919. At best, Robert’s “title” would have been intramural. Another reason Jake is not impressed is implicit in Robert’s dislike of the very sport at which he excels; his lack of passion suggests for Jake (and Hemingway) a certain inauthenticity, a betrayal of the spirit of sportsmanship. If boxers figure importantly in the novel as adumbration of the role of bullfighters, Cohn may be seen as a precursor to the bullfighter gone bad, the bullfighter without passion (e.g., the later out-of-retirement Belmonte, as compared to Romero, 213–15).

In fact, the reason given for Robert’s pursuit of excellence in boxing—“to counteract the feeling of inferiority” he experienced as “a Jew at Princeton”—sheds historically precise light on anti-Semitism at Princeton in the early 1900s, and athleticism as the primary path to undergraduate success. In Robert’s freshman year, 1909, Princeton admitted the largest number of Jewish students in its history—thirteen— a number not surpassed until the 1920s. (In comparison, Harvard admitted seventy-one Jewish students in 1909.) Princeton long had the lowest Jewish student enrollment of any Ivy League institution—in 1918, for example, Princeton’s total was 30, Harvard’s 385, Penn’s 596, and Columbia’s 1,475 (Synnott 16, 96, 181). Edwin Slosson’s 1910 volume, Great American Universities, reported that anti-Semitism was “more dominant at Princeton than at any of the other” major universities he studied; it was commonly said that “if the Jews once got in,” they would “ruin Princeton as they have Columbia and Pennsylvania” (105–6). Clearly, Jake is aware of Princeton’s reputation for anti-Semitism. The important question to ask is what does Jake feel about Robert’s experience as outsider, as the despised “other,” at Princeton? Since Jake is Catholic, he surely knows that Princeton also had a reputation for anti-Catholicism; indeed, in 1909, when thirteen Jewish students matriculated, only fifteen Catholic students matriculated at Princeton, and both groups were treated with equal scorn (Synnott 179).

Thus Jake’s meditation on Robert’s experience of anti-Semitism at Princeton may indicate one important reason that Jake is, at the beginning of the novel, Robert’s friend. Jake is empathetic because he knows that as a Catholic he, too, would have experienced Robert’s sense of “outsiderness” at Princeton. In this Cohn-at-Princeton sketch that opens the book, then, it can be seen that Jake identifies with Robert, not with Princeton. He likes Robert at the outset; he thinks they share a love of sports, and they are tennis friends. At Princeton, undergraduate “success was measured principally by athletic accomplishment.” Even if you were Catholic (but not if you were Jewish), “athletic honor” might well result in an invitation to join one of the prestigious, otherwise-closed, all-WASP eating clubs, such as the Tiger Inn, “which prided itself on the athletic prowess of its members” (Synnott 178). Given all these historical facts, one wonders why Robert went to Princeton. In the characteristic early twentieth-century view of the typical student at the “Big Three” American Universities, the Yale man, known for “conformity,” had to be “athletic, hearty, extroverted,” and the Harvardian, known for “individualism,” was associated with “intellectualism” and “eccentricity”; but the Princetonian had to be “neither a strong individualist … nor a conformist,” and what mattered most was to be “‘smooth’—that is, socially adroit and graceful” (Synnott 4). Why indeed did Robert go to Princeton? He is anything but smooth, socially adroit, and graceful, and the progress of Jake’s disenchantment with Robert is more an index of his social clumsiness and gracelessness than it is a mark of anti-Semitism. The fabric of the novel has threads of the widespread cultural anti-Semitism of its time woven throughout, yet Jake’s focus remains fixed on Robert’s conduct, the particularity of his behavior as an individu...