If, for some reason, you held a gun to my head at any point during the last 18 years, and asked what my favourite book is, I’d have said Earnest Hemingway’s 1926 novel The Sun Also Rises. It's the ideal book to read in your 20s when you're discovering Literature. Like lots of great rite-of-passage-type books, it gets all tangled up in your identity (for some reason). It's funny. I used to think I could have literally one drink and read Hemingway in a bar. I must have thought I was sophisticated or erudite or highly cultured. I no longer think that.
When I first read The Sun Also Rises, I was a 24-year-old sports reporter working for a couple of newspapers in Canmore and Banff in Alberta. It was my first job out of J-school. I got my first car, a Pontiac Wave. And I was starting to read like Don Quixote but instead of books of chivalry, I was losing my sanity to the novels of F. Scott Fitzgerald, Earnest Hemingway and the American counterculture. I really couldn’t have more cliched if I tried.
I ate up lines like this one when the narrator and obvious Hemingway surrogate Jake Barnes tries to ditch his supposed friend, another main character, the almost universally reviled Robert Cohn.
It is very important to discover graceful exits like that in the newspaper business, where it is such an important part of the ethics that you should never seem to be working.
I liked lines like that one so much I took them quite literally. I did absolutely nothing almost every day.
Instead, I’d take The Sun Also Rises to a pub on 8th Street in Canmore, usually on a Wednesday (my Saturday), and drink and read until I was drunk enough to talk to strangers. Badger them with my illusions. The Bow Valley is transient enough that most people are pretty good at sitting around bars talking shit on weekday afternoons. They all seemed like journalists. Plus, you could drunkenly pretend you were in cafes with the Lost Generation and the surrounding Rocky Mountains doubled nicely for the mountains in northern Spain. In that way the book required almost no imagination.
This was obviously long before these types of illusions became just super sad. About five years ago, I was like, I'm going to have a drink and read The Sun Also Rises in La Palette, like the good old days, get back to the things I really love, and woke up like three days later after a bender, leaves and shit in my hair.
The Sun Also Rises is the ideal novel to uphold certain illusions. It’s kind of what the book’s about, more or less. That and drinking.
The Sun Also Rises: plot
The plot of The Sun Also Rises is famous enough but it’s essentially this: a group of expatriate Americans and Brits wander around Paris in the 1920s, drunk and rudderless after the First World War, and then go to the bullfights in Pamplona in northern Spain to get even drunker. The main characters are basically Jake Barnes, Robert Cohn, and Lady Brett Ashley. Love triangles and crumbling illusions abound.
For more on the who's who and what actually happened, you should check out the A&E Biography of Hemingway, entitled Wrestling With Life. I once owned the DVD and watched it maybe 250 times:
Apparently, there's also a book by Lesley M.M. Bloom called Everybody Behaves Badly: The True Story Behind Hemingway's Masterpiece The Sun Also Rises, that may be worth checking out.
Anyway, the book's plot.
Jake Barnes was injured in the First World War in such a way that he can’t consummate his love for Brett, so they spend the novel hopelessly pining after one another. Readers tend to get in the weeds about the specifics of Jake’s injury. I guess it’s lurid or something. In his Paris Review interview in the 1950s, Hemingway says it’s more of a mental wound. But then, it’s difficult to trust literally anything Hemingway says about writing, especially about his own writing.
The book opens with a full biographical chapter on Robert Cohn, his minor literary successes, and his uninspired relationship with a hard-looking woman named Frances. Cohn suffers wanderlust. Another line that always stuck with me is from this part of the book, which I would promptly ignore about a year after reading it. Robert is trying to convince Jake to travel to South America with him:
“Listen, Robert, going to another country doesn’t make any difference. I’ve tried all that. You can’t get away from yourself by moving from one place to another.”
Lady Brett Ashley is really the engine of the book. She’s funny, outgoing, sad, attractive, lost, charming, possibly tragic. We learn early on, in Paris, she and Jake want to be together but can’t (“Isn’t it pretty to think so?”). We also learn Robert Cohn is obsessed with her, and that she’s engaged to Mike Campbell, who arrives later. Michael gets the most visibly drunk in the book. He’s a bankrupted Scottish war veteran who ends up being a cuckhold by Brett.
There is a scene early in the book that I hadn't noticed in any of my half-dozen readings of the novel which I think provides a glimpse into Brett's true character. It's about her been her being messy and thoughtless until she's seen, then she relies on her easy charm to clean it up. It also is one of the many subtle ways Hemingway delivers you information which made me think he's probably an actual genius.
In the scene, Brett, Jake, and Count Mippipopolous are drinking in Jake’s room in Paris.
The count was looking at Brett across the table under the gas-light. She was smoking a cigarette and flicking the ashes on the rug. She saw me notice it. “I say, Jake, I don’t want to ruin your rugs. Can’t you give a chap an ashtray?”
Another main character, Bill Gorton, a relatively successful writer and friend of Jake’s, shows up in Paris so drunk you can actually feel his drunken energy when he’s not speaking. He and Jake go to Bayonne in Spain to go trout fishing before meeting everyone, meaning Brett, Michael, and Robert Cohn in Pamplona. Brett and Michael are unreliable, and everyone knows they’ll spin their tires in San Sebastian for a few days and Robert Cohn’s being all weird about making sure he’s in Pamplona to meet them, so decides to bail on the brief fishing trip with Jake and Bill and remain in Pamplona waiting.
At this point in the novel, Cohn has already suffered a humiliating tirade at the hands of Frances, in front of Jake, and just about every character says something snide and awful about him behind his back. I didn’t realize it before, but he’s the most bullied character in literature, but I digress. This is a key to the book and part of the underlying tension throughout.
Jake and Bill’s bus ride between Pamplona and Bayonne with the Basques is particularly exciting for a drunk reading this in a bar. In fact, a lot of the next few references are. These scenes appeal to the drunk in you. In the first scene, they’re all tightly packed in this bus riding over the Spanish mountains and a Basque man offers Bill a drink from a leather wine skin (bag). When Bill kind of fails and wine drops drip down his chin, a Basque kid shows him what’s up:
He was a young fellow and he held the wine-bottle a full arms’ length and raised it high up, squeezing the leather bag in his hand so the stream of wine hissed into his mouth.
And this part, when Bill and Jake go on their fishing trip and Hemingway describes cooling two bottles of white wine in the cold river while he and Bill go trout fishing.
There was a board over the spring and I lifted it and, knocking the corks firmly into the bottles, lowered them down into the water. It was so cold my hand and wrist felt numbed.
And later, when Jake retrieves the bottles:
They were cold. Moisture beaded on the bottles as I walked back to the trees…the wine was icy cold and tasted faintly rusty.
When they return to Pamplona, the novel really picks up, as does the drinking. In a way, the book doesn’t really start until Chapter 15, when,
At noon of Sunday, the 6th of July, the fiesta exploded. There is no other way to describe it.
The Sun Also Rises: 18 years of re-readings
When I just re-read The Sun Also Rises, I was struck by how little happens for large stretches of the book, particularly in the first 70 or so pages. There’s some lore that one of the novels first readers, and Hemingway friend, F. Scott Fitzgerald, complained that so little happens and likely told him so in an immaculately written letter that's in a frame somewhere.
Hemingway relies to a large degree on an unfussy style for these stretches. In other words, while there’s little drama, or whatever it is that involves readers in characters, you really do feel like you’re hanging out in these Paris bars and rooms and Spanish cafes and inns, for better or worse. Plus, you gain tiny insights into the characters based on their behaviours. And I think you’re either interested in being another seedy hanger-on during these stretches or you’re not, like any drunken night where you’re out with a random group of people.
In that way, drinking far less than I was when I first read it, I think the novel is somewhat masterful. It’s clear tensions are building which will then explode, like the fiesta, in Pamplona.
This is due in part to Hemingway's "Iceberg Theory," which has been written about more expertly elsewhere, but it's difficult to talk about nothing happening for stretches, and what's bubbling underneath, without referencing it once.
Not least because a major part of what's bubbling underneath is the stifled memory of the First World War. Michael, you feel, has genuine shellshock. Same with a brief character named Harris that Jake and Bill meet in Bayonne. The book is about what the characters won't, or can't, say. It's a difficult proposition, because you think, well, what do they say? If not that much happens, what actually happens? For me, Hemingway's handling of this in particular is what makes the book an enduring masterpiece, or at the very least, the best book Hemingway ever wrote.
The Sun Also Rises: the character of Lady Brett Ashley
Another reason the novel holds up is because of Lady Brett Ashely, who still feels like a modern character (female or otherwise), not necessarily because she’s free sexually, we’ll call it, but by the way she talks to those around her and the mistakes she makes, which is another way of saying her humanity.
Another window into Brett comes in Pamplona, after they’d all been drunk for days:
The beer came. Brett started to lift the glass mug and her hand shook. She saw it and smiled, and leaned forward and took a long sip. “Good beer.”
She really remains the only female character Hemingway wrote competently.
I know that’s a low bar. I’ve read feminist critiques that Lady Brett is another illusion, that she’s not really a modern woman at all, and that in truth she acts as a pivot point for like four different men. In other words, her only value is in her sexuality and she only really exists in relation to men. I’m not qualified to get too much deeper into this aspect of the Sun Also Rises, but it’s worth acknowledging.
In my reading, I simply see Lady Brett Ashley as a singular human being and a very clearly drawn character. As a character in a novel in the 1920s, she seems utterly believable. I might even argue that of all the characters in the novel, including the narrator, she’s the most three-dimensional partially because her humanity is the most on display.
The Sun Also Rises: should you read (and read, and read)?
The Sun Also Rises is the perfect re-read because of its subtlety. Most of what I responded to viscerally in my 20s without really knowing why became quite clear. And it’s fun to know a little bit more about something you once glorified.
Is it still my favourite novel?
I don’t believe so, anymore. I don’t give a shit about bullfighting, I realized in my 30s. Took me that long to realize that.
But I do know I will likely read it again, probably sitting outside in summer, thinking vaguely about those afternoons in Canmore when my illusions were wholly intact.
"Isn't it pretty to think so?"
