Giants Are People Too
Okay, I know what you’re thinking, “What could you possibly have to say about Ernest Hemingway that hasn’t been said countless times by countless writers infinitely more intelligent than you.” My reply, “The way to keep legends alive is to keep talking about them.” And I believe Hemingway is one writing legend we’ll be talking about as long as novels are read and loved and remembered.
It’s probably fair to say that Ernest Hemingway is America’s most famous writer. Living or dead. I realize that some living writers seem dead, but that’s another story. Hemingway is always likened to the man’s man that all men wanted to be and all women wanted to bed. Journalist. Soldier. Boxer. Trophy fisherman. Big game hunter. If it was testosterone-filled sport, he was part of it. That was/is his American appeal, I think. The outdoorsman who just happened to be as smart and intellectual as anyone in the room. But one to whom sitting in the room, seemed boring and wasteful. Unless one were writing. Or drinking. Hemingway once said of drink, “An intelligent man is sometimes forced to be drunk to spend time with his fools.” Perhaps that was part of what was going on when Hemingway himself was spending time with friends (fools?) and drinking (one assumes to excess) through the afternoons and evenings of Fiesta, in Pamplona, Spain in the mid 1920’s. Whether it was or not, it’s fortunate for us that he was there enjoying the bullfights and the sangria and the soft Spanish nights, because it lead to his first, and I believe, his best novel, The Sun Also Rises.
Published in 1926 and sold for $2 a copy, it’s still read and debated and studied today in literature classes all over the world. The title comes from Ecclesiastes, and says in part, “One generation passeth away, and another generation cometh; but the earth abideth forever…The sun also ariseth…” Praised by many as the ultimate reflection of what Gertrude Stein is said to have labeled, the lost generation, it’s a novel about the generation still young in years after World War I, but made old by the recognition that so many lives could be snuffed out long before they had time to flower and grow. Hemingway seemed to grasp that permanence had little to do with people. He often reflected that all men’s lives have the same ending, and it is only the details of their lives that make them different, individual.
The Sun Also Rises traces the wanderings of a group of friends who travel and drink, squabble and fight, embarrass themselves and each other, run with the bulls in the streets of Pamplona, thrill to the bullfights and the matadors, and eventually go their separate ways. The plot, what little there is of it, concerns itself to some degree with which male will eventually wind up with Lady Brett Ashley. Will it be the narrator, Jake Barnes, a wounded war veteran, incapable of being the whole man he once was. Mike Campbell, the hearty fellow who gets mean when he gets drunk, Robert Cohn, the Jewish ex-boxing champ of Princeton who takes everything and everyone too seriously, Bill Gorton the writer, or the Matador, or the Count. It doesn’t really matter, actually, as Lady Brett pretty much sleeps with every male she comes in contact with anyway. Her character became the archetypical “liberated female”. A woman who does whatever pleases her, but actually finds little pleasure in doing any of it.
To this reader, The Sun Also Rises is a novel about the impermanence of all things human. It ends, like most lives do, I suspect, with reflections on regret.
If you’re a reader, you have to read Hemingway. If you read any Hemingway, you have to read The Sun Also Rises. It’s the book that made him famous and ignited the legendary literary light he was to become. If, like The Fiction Fortune Hunter, you’re a fan of good writing and great novels, you’ll find it unforgettable. Like one finds many of Hemingway’s quotes. I particularly like this one. “All good books have one thing in common, they are truer than if they had really happened.”
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