Ernest Hemingway: The Sun Also Rises

During the 1920s and 1930s, Dos Passos aligned himself politically with the left. He became disillusioned with communism, however, and broke completely with his leftwing friends and allies at the time of the Spanish Civil War. His later fiction, such as the trilogy District of Columbia (1939–1949) and the novel Midcentury (1961), continue his stylistic innovations but show an increasingly conservative political stance. He was always, first and last, an individualist: concerned with the threat to the individual posed first, as he saw it, by capitalism and then, in his later work, by communism. To that extent, he belonged in the American Adamic tradition, with its commitment to the primacy of the individual, the supreme importance of the single, separate self. Consistently, Ernest Hemingway (1899–1961) belonged to that tradition too. For Hemingway, as for many earlier American writers, the essential condition of life is solitary, and the interesting, only really serious business, is the management of that solitude. In this respect, the first story, “Indian Camp,” in his first book, In Our Time (1925), is exemplary. Young Nick Adams, the protagonist, witnesses a birth and a death. The birth is exceptionally agonizing, with the mother, an Indian woman, being cut open by Nick’s father and sewn up with a fishing line. And the death too is peculiarly awful, the husband in the bunk above, listening to the woman in her agony, and responding by cutting his throat. “Why did he kill himself, Daddy?” Nick asks. “I don’t know, Nick,” comes the reply. “He couldn’t stand things, I guess.” Although this is the only significant, foreground suicide in Hemingway’s fiction, the terms have been set. “Things” will remain to the last hurtful and horrible, to be stood with as much dignity and courage as possible. For the moment, though, these things of horror are too much Making It New: 1900–1945 201 for Nick to dwell on. He must bury them far down in his mind and rest secure in the shelter of the father. “In the early morning on the lake sitting in the stern of the boat with his father rowing,” the story concludes, “he felt quite sure that he would never die.” Such are the good times of boyhood in Hemingway: not mother and home, but out in the open with father, recreating a frontier idyll. So, in the second story in In Our Time, to escape his wife’s nervous chatter, Nick’s father goes out for a walk. “I want to go with you,” Nick declares; “all right,” his father responds, “come on, then.” Soon, when Nick is older, in the later stories “The End of Something” and “The Three-Day Blow,” father will be replaced as companion by his friend Bill. But only the counters have altered, not the game. As the title of his second collection of stories, Men Without Women (1927), indicates, the best times of all for Hemingway, because the least complicated and most inwardly peaceful, are had by men or boys together, preferably in some wide space of land or sea, away from the noise, pace, and excitement of cities: Jake Barnes, the hero of The Sun Also Rises (1926), fishing with his companions Bill Gorton and Harris; Thomas Hudson and his three sons in Islands in the Stream (1970); and from In Our Time, in “Cross-Country Snow,” Nick and his friend George skiing in Switzerland one last time before Nick commits himself to the trap of marriage and fatherhood. “Once a man’s married, he’s absolutely bitched,” is Bill’s drunken wisdom in “The Three-Day Blow”: bitched by responsibilities, domesticity, but above all by the pain locked in with a love that may easily be broken or lost. And a man’s world, although safer from certain kinds of anxiety or threat, is for Hemingway only relatively so. A man will lose his wife but he will also lose his father, not just in death but in disillusionment. Near the end of In Our Time, an exemplary father dies; not Nick’s but the jockey, “My Old Man,” with whom, around the race-courses of France and Italy, the young narrator has had a perfect time out, with no mother or woman in sight. When his father falls in a steeplechase and is killed, the son is left to bear not just his grief but also the discovery that his father had been crooked. It is more than a life that has been lost. As he overhears the name of his father being besmirched, it seems to the boy “like when they get started, they don’t leave a guy nothing.” “It was all a nothing,” observes the lonely protagonist of “A Clean Well-Lighted Place” (Winner Take Nothing (1933)), “and man was a nothing too.” In the face of palpable nothing, meaninglessness, there are, finally, only the imperatives of conduct and communion with one’s own solitariness. “I did not care what it was all about,” Jake confides in The Sun Also Rises. “All I wanted to know was how to live in it.” One way to “live in it,” in some of Hemingway’s novels, has a political slant. To Have and Have Not (1937) is an emphatic protest against corruption, political hypocrisy, and the immorality of gross inequality. For Whom the Bell Tolls (1941) commemorates three days of a guerrilla action in the Spanish Civil War and celebrates the republican fight against fascism. “I suppose I am an anarchist,” Hemingway had written to Dos Passos in 1932; and the novel, like To Have and Have Not, shows a lonely individualist fighting while he can, not for a political program, but for the simple humanist principles of justice and liberty. But a more fundamental way to “live in it” is to live alone. In “Big Two-Hearted River,” the story that concludes In Our Time, Nick starts out from the site of a burnedout town inMichigan. The disaster that has annihilated the town aptly crowns the world of violence revealed in the vignettes that have interleaved the stories of In Our Time. For 202 Making It New: 1900–1945 Hemingway, wounded in World War I, life was war, nasty, brutal, and arbitrary; and that is a lesson Nick has now learned. Putting this stuff of nightmares behind him, Nick heads away from the road for the woods and the river. Far from other human sound, he fishes, pitches a tent, builds a fire, prepares himself food and drink. “He was there, in the good place,” the reader is told. “He was in his home where he had made it.” It is a familiar American moment, this sealing of a solitary compact with nature. It is also a familiar concluding moment in Hemingway’s work: a man alone, trying to come to terms with the stark facts of life, and of death – sometimes the death of a loved one, as in A Farewell to Arms (1929), other times, as in “The Snows of Kilimanjaro” (1938), his own inevitable and imminent dying. And what seals the compact, and confirms the starkness is, always, the pellucid clarity of expression, the stark, simple economy of the terms in which Hemingway’s lonely heroes are rendered to us. “A writer’s job is to tell the truth,” Hemingway observed. And he told that truth in a style that was a verbal equivalent of the grace under pressure shown by his finest protagonists: concrete, contained, cleaving to the hard facts of life, only disclosing its deeper urgencies in its repetitions and repressions – in what its rhythms implied and what it did not say. Hemingway called this verbal art the art of omission. “You could omit anything if you knew that you omitted,” Hemingway reflected in A Movable Feast (1964), his memoir of his years in Paris after World War I; “and the omitted part would strengthen the story and make people feel something more than they understood.” He had begun to develop this art as a newspaperman on the Kansas City Star, where he worked before World War I. The “real thing,” Hemingway remembered, was “something I was working very hard to try to get”: first, in Kansas, and then in Paris, where he received encouragement in his pursuit of concrete fact, and an example of how to do it, from Ezra Pound and, even more, Gertrude Stein. The experience of war was also vital here. Like so many of his generation, Hemingway learned from war not just a distrust but a hatred of abstraction, the high-sounding generalizations used as an excuse, or justification, for mass slaughter. “I was always embarrassed by the words sacred, glorious, and sacrifice and the expression, in vain,” says the protagonist Frederic Henry in A Farewell to Arms, set, of course, in the Great War: “the things that were glorious had no glory and the sacrifices were like the stockyards of Chicago.” “There were many words that you could not stand to hear and finally only the names of places had dignity.” Like Frederic Henry, Hemingway came to feel that “abstract words such as glory, honor, courage, or hallow were obscene”; the simple words, those that carried the smallest burden of stock attitudes, were the safest ones. What the individual, and the writer, had to respond to were things and experiences themselves, not ideas about them; and the closer he stuck to them, the less risk there would be of losing what was truly felt under a mass of evasions and abstractions. The real thing the person or writer must pursue, Hemingway felt, is the truth of the individual, immediate experience and emotion. That truth is discovered by the Hemingway hero in seeing and responding to things for himself. And it is expressed by Hemingway in describing things for oneself, things as they are, not mediated by convention or abstraction. The style, in fact, is a measure of a commitment; it is the proper reaction to the world translated into words. 

Preview questions:

1. Hemingway is regarded as the spokesman for the Lost Generation. In what way does the novel The Sun Also Rises illustrate it?

2. What are Ernest Hemingway's contributions to American literature?

3. Explain“iceberg theory”.