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 âa foreign wordâ for his title and then considered The Lost Generation. While he was in Chartres he wrote in his notebook a foreword to âThe Lost Generation: A Novel,â in which he told his first version of an anecdote about Gertrude Stein and a garage ownerâs proclamation that the World War I generation was a âlost generation.â During his time in Chartres, in the shadow of the cathedral, with its multiple reverberations in sculpted stone and stained-glass iconography of Hemingwayâs subtextual subject matter in his novelâresonances of Roland and Roncevaux, motifs of pilgrimage, biblical allusions, Catholic historicity, art, ritual, tradition, and authorityâHemingway decided to change his title. âThe chief result of his trip to Chartres,â Carlos Baker notes, âwas the decision to change the name of his first novel to The Sun Also Risesâ (Life Story 155). It is a change of crucial import, accomplished in a symbolic landscape, sacred terrain that signifiesâin 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 Hemingwayâs process of title selection: if the title had been âThe Sun Also Setsâ or âThe Sun Also Goes Downâ or âThe Lost Generation,â it might seem a very different novel (see also Svoboda, Crafting of a Style 106â10).
In his Chartres notebook foreword, Hemingway pondered what redemption was available to his generation: âThere will be many new salvations brought forward. My generation in France for example in two years sought salvation in First the Catholic Church, 2nd DaDaismââhere he had first written âCommunismâ before crossing it outââthird The Movies Fourth Royalism Fifth The Catholic Church againâ (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 novelâs submerged thesis, the âsalvationsâ it âbrought forwardâ: 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 ârise.â Hemingwayâs 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 novelâs title in French: Le soleil se lĂšve aussi. Fortunately, his excellent ear selected the best biblical titleâThe Sun Also Risesâand his time in Chartres would have confirmed the wisdom of that choice, given the cathedralâs traditional orientation to the rising sun, symbol of the risen Christ. Any guidebook he might have consulted regarding the cathedral would have drawn Hemingwayâs 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 Touristâs Practical Guide Book (1924) by Ătienne Houvet, Hemingway would have learned many things about the cathedralâranging from structural matters (âwithout heaviness,â âperfect in its proportionsâ), to religious mysteries everywhere depicted in the âmystic cityâ of the cathedral, to the importance of âtwo of the most beautiful windows in the church ⊠that of Charlemagne and Roland,â and, next to it, âthat of Saint James the Greatâ (Houvet 3, 23). These matters would all be important in the months after Hemingwayâs 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 andâfor many readersâhis best novel. In an unpublished essay entitled âOn Cathedrals,â 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 âseeing 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 writtenâ (emphasis added; as quoted in Reynolds, Paris Years 326). And for seeing the ânot trueâ in The Sun Also Rises, for âseeing the trueâ not yet put in, and beginning the process of rewritingâChartres was the place.
Epigraphs: Just as Hemingwayâs 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 Steinâs âlost generationâ 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 âthe Gertrude Stein thing very seriously,â that he intended to âplay off against that splendid bombastâ (Selected Letters 229). Steinâs âassumption of prophetic rolesâ is mocked just as much by the juxtaposed epigraph as it is by the larger motions of the novel: âNobody,â Hemingway said, âknows about the generation that follows them and certainly has no right to judgeâ (229). All generations were âlost,â Hemingway would maintain, but at least his generation was conscious of how they were lost and how they might be âfound.â After the first printing of the novel, which carried a longer version of the epigraph from Ecclesiastes, Hemingway urged his editor, Maxwell Perkins, to âlop off the Vanity of vanities, saith the preacher, vanity of vanities; all is vanityâWhat profit hath a man of all his labour which he taketh under the sun?âdelete all thatâ (229). Such precision regarding the content of the epigraph should lead the reader to recognize both Hemingwayâs exactitude and his skill as homilist, pointing to his actual message even before the novel begins. He does not presume to be the âPreacherâ of Ecclesiastes, but he preaches obliquely nevertheless. The revised epigraph, he tells Perkins, âmakes it much clearer. The point of the book to me was that the earth abideth foreverâhaving 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.â His novel, he insists, is not âa hollow or bitter satire but a damn tragedy with the earth abiding for ever as the heroâ (229). The second epigraph, as printed in the shorter version since the second printing of the novel, consists of Ecclesiastes 1.4â7. (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 âvanity,â for that might seem to diminish the cyclical sense of renewal that he wishes to emphasizeâthe 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: âFor in much wisdom is much grief; and he that increases [i.e., increaseth] knowledge increaseth sorrowâ (Facsimile 2:629). This slight misquotation of Ecclesiastes 1.18 is a telling signpost for the progress of Jakeâs pilgrimage, his movement over the âabiding earth,â 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 Steinâs declaration that all the young men who served in the war were a lost generation: ââDonât argue with me, Hemingway,â Miss Stein said. âIt does no good at all. Youâre all a lost generation, exactly as the garage keeper said.ââ Hemingway then notes how he tried to balance Steinâs quotation with the Ecclesiastes epigraph, and he implicitly charges her with âegotism and mental laziness versus discipline,â and he thinks: âWho is calling who a lost generation?â He concludes: âBut the hell with her lost-generation talk and all the dirty, easy labelsâ (Moveable Feast 29â31). Readers of The Sun Also Rises would do well to exercise caution with regard to the âeasy labelsâ 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 âcon,â but in the same manner as Cohen, or âcone.â Thus there is no hint of the âcon manâ in Robertâs 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, Hemingwayâs friend who accompanied him to the 1925 fiesta at Pamplona. Loeb was of distinguished lineageâhis 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 11â12). Loeb certainly served as a partial model in the early stages of the novelâs composition, but given Hemingwayâs axiom, embraced years before The Sun Also Rises, that the writer must invent from what he knows, that âwriting about anything actual was bad,â and that âeverything good heâd ever written heâd made up,â Loebâs role as initial character-model tells us nothing substantial about the created character of Cohn (âOn Writingâ 237). Long after The Sun Also Rises appeared, Loeb published his memoir The Way It Was (1959) and, after Hemingwayâs death, an article entitled âHemingwayâs Bitternessâ that was included (with memoirs by other presumed prototypes for Hemingwayâs characters) in Bertram Sarasonâs Hemingway and âThe Sunâ Set (1972), a study of the novel as roman Ă 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 Hemingwayâs last-minute revisions that made âRobert Cohnâ 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: âThis 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 storyâ (Svoboda, Crafting of a Style 99). The radical changes suggested in Scott Fitzgeraldâs 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 âcareless + ineffectualâ prose, the âcondescending casualnessâ of the tone (Svoboda, Crafting of a Style 137â40). 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 Brettâs 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 ânovel about a lady.â 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 Jakeâs story âabout a lady,â 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 âvaluesâ (see the crucial scene with the count, 57â61) that are the foundation of exemplary behavior.
3:1â6 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 Robertâs championship title is that there was no intercollegiate boxingâonly student boxing clubsâat Princeton from 1880 to 1919. At best, Robertâs âtitleâ would have been intramural. Another reason Jake is not impressed is implicit in Robertâs 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, 213â15).
In fact, the reason given for Robertâs pursuit of excellence in boxingââto counteract the feeling of inferiorityâ he experienced as âa Jew at Princetonââsheds historically precise light on anti-Semitism at Princeton in the early 1900s, and athleticism as the primary path to undergraduate success. In Robertâs freshman year, 1909, Princeton admitted the largest number of Jewish students in its historyâthirteenâ 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 institutionâin 1918, for example, Princetonâs total was 30, Harvardâs 385, Pennâs 596, and Columbiaâs 1,475 (Synnott 16, 96, 181). Edwin Slossonâs 1910 volume, Great American Universities, reported that anti-Semitism was âmore dominant at Princeton than at any of the otherâ major universities he studied; it was commonly said that âif the Jews once got in,â they would âruin Princeton as they have Columbia and Pennsylvaniaâ (105â6). Clearly, Jake is aware of Princetonâs reputation for anti-Semitism. The important question to ask is what does Jake feel about Robertâs experience as outsider, as the despised âother,â 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 Jakeâs meditation on Robertâs experience of anti-Semitism at Princeton may indicate one important reason that Jake is, at the beginning of the novel, Robertâs friend. Jake is empathetic because he knows that as a Catholic he, too, would have experienced Robertâs sense of âoutsidernessâ 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 âsuccess was measured principally by athletic accomplishment.â Even if you were Catholic (but not if you were Jewish), âathletic honorâ might well result in an invitation to join one of the prestigious, otherwise-closed, all-WASP eating clubs, such as the Tiger Inn, âwhich prided itself on the athletic prowess of its membersâ (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 âBig Threeâ American Universities, the Yale man, known for âconformity,â had to be âathletic, hearty, extroverted,â and the Harvardian, known for âindividualism,â was associated with âintellectualismâ and âeccentricityâ; but the Princetonian had to be âneither a strong individualist ⊠nor a conformist,â and what mattered most was to be ââsmoothââthat is, socially adroit and gracefulâ (Synnott 4). Why indeed did Robert go to Princeton? He is anything but smooth, socially adroit, and graceful, and the progress of Jakeâs 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 Jakeâs focus remains fixed on Robertâs conduct, the particularity of his behavior as an individu...