The Sun Also Rises by Ernest Hemingway

I thought I had paid for everything. Not like the woman pays and pays and pays. No idea of retribution or punishment. Just exchange of values. You gave up something and got something else. Or you worked for something. You paid some way for everything that was any good. I paid my way into enough things that I liked, so that I had a good time. Either you paid by learning about them, or by experience, or taking chances, or by money. Enjoying living was learning to get your money's worth and knowing when you had it. You could get your money's worth. The world was a good place to buy in. It seemed like a fine philosophy. In five years, I thought, it will seem just as silly as all the other fine philosophies I've had.

Jake Barnes is an American, a Catholic, an expatriate living in Paris, a working man but a hard partier, living with a war injury that's left him unable to have sex. He's deeply in love with Lady Brett Ashley, a sexually emancipated, very droll "new woman" of the 1920s, but Jake's injury--maybe--has made their relationship an impossible one. Jake's friend Robert Cohn, a Jewish boxer, has also fallen in love with Brett--people tend to do that. When Jake, Brett, Robert, and Brett's fiancé Mike head down to Pamplona for the festival of San Fermin and the Running of the Bulls, the passions and resentments that they share boil over into conflict, especially when Brett goes off with a dashing young bullfighter.

The Sun Also Rises was the first Hemingway I ever read, way back in college, or maybe high school. I remember liking it, but I also remember feeling like I didn't get it, like there was something just beyond the page that I was missing. Reading it now, I think that my first impression was fairly dead on. There really is something subtle about The Sun Also Rises, even moreso when compared to the other Hemingways I've read, that seems inaccessible, just past the veil of the plainspoken language. You can see it emerge volcanically, when one of the characters--Mike, or Brett, or even Jake--blows up at poor pathetic Robert Cohn, the hanger-on that nobody really wants around, and who manages to puncture the smooth irony of their conversation and bring out the real anger and despair that's just beneath the surface.

I was just saying to Brent the other day that, to hear people on Twitter talk about Hemingway, I sometimes worry that we're at risk of losing or diminishing the real legacy of these novels. The objections you hear are rarely artistic ones, but moral ones: old Papa, nasty macho chauvinist. You know the ones. Without a doubt there's a ring of truth to them. There's a whiff of conservatism around the character of Brett, whose sexual emancipation seems to lead only to desperation. That conservatism is echoed by a sense that cultural revolution, like in Fitzgerald's novels, has not served the "Lost Generation" well, who spend their idle days in Pamplona pickling themselves and resenting each other. And Jake--and Hemingway--really do have an aficion, a passion, for the bloody, violent sport of bullfighting. You can call that machismo, if you like. And the antisemitism charges around the character of Cohn, an unwanted Jewish outsider called "k-ke" by Mike, certainly stick.

But I think the other side of each of those impressions is more powerful: First of all, it's not Brett's fault that men pounce on her like she's some kind of meal. There's a whiff of Daisy Buchanan in her, a woman who has learned to develop irony as armor to deal with the way that men attach themselves to her because of her physical attractiveness. (Though Brett is always in more control than Daisy, and never lets that irony curdle into put-on helplessness.) The bullfighting is violent, but the language that Hemingway uses to describe it rarely seems taken from the vocabulary of macho domination and power: the gifted matador Pedro Romero succeeds through self-control, precision, and even grace. Compare Pedro's skill to Robert, the boxer: when a jealous Robert socks Pedro in the face, Pedro defeats him just as he does the bull--not by hitting back with a powerful jab, but by outlasting the short-lived burst of masculine anger and violence--until Robert leaves the room crying. There's more to the antisemitism, maybe, but the way Mike, seizes on Robert's Jewishness to affirm his status as an unwanted outsider doesn't do Mike, a mean son of a bitch and a "bad drunk," any favors.

Frankly, Hemingway's best defense against the haters is just how talented he is. You could never reduce The Sun Also Rises to machismo because you can't reduce it to anything. The characters are simply too rich and too real, they contain multitudes, like real people do. I loved Brett's cleverness, and the way it conceals a deep vulnerability, and I really enjoyed the convivial wit of Bill Gorton, the final friend on the Pamplona trip. I even liked Robert Cohn, who's so persuasively pathetic. But the heart of the book is Jake Barnes. Unlike Mike, who lives on credit up and down the Mediterranean, or Brett, who lives off of what she's been able to get from the nobleman she's divorcing, and the other idle expatriates, Jake has a job. His sense that things must be "paid for" might be seen as the book's moral sense: the beauty of the bullfights are paid for by cruelty, and the freedom someone like Brett enjoys is paid for by loneliness. Hemingway thought it was a hopeful novel, and I think that's right; the lifestyle the friends enjoy really may be worth the price paid in money, labor, and loss. It really isn't The Great Gatsby, where you get fleeced and the world is a rotten bargain.

In the end, Brett runs off with the matador, but telegrams Jake at the last minute begging him to come to Madrid, where she's been abandoned: once again, the men in her life have wanted something she can't provide them. Except for Jake, that is--the only man, it seems, who Brett has wanted, and who hasn't been able to provide. Jake's impotency is a crushing blow to the Hemingway machismo theory, I think, because The Sun Also Rises doesn't really depict him as diminished by it. Rather, it enables him to be a friend to Brett when she needs it most, and novel's moral center. He pays dearly for the intimacy he enjoys, and the integrity he's developed, but perhaps that's worth it in the end, too.