The Brilliance and the Badness of “The Sun Also Rises”
The second sentence is “Do not think that I am very much impressed by that as a boxing title, but it meant a lot to Cohn.” Even to my teen-age self, this was a weird sentence. The “much” seemed unnecessary, there only to call attention to itself, to the fact that someone was speaking. But who was being addressed? And the two “that”s—the first one functioning as a way to pace the sentence, and the second a statement of fact—had a disconcerting effect. Even now, encountering these differing “that”s feels like having one foot safely planted while the other slips out from under me. From my current perspective, I’d add that the second sentence engages with certain issues that were fundamental to modernism in English-language fiction. This particular strain of modernism grappled with the difficulty of capturing in language the nonverbal aspects of subjective experience. With this strange second sentence, Hemingway asserted that “The Sun Also Rises” was a story being told, and thus side-stepped some of the issues that occupied James Joyce, Virginia Woolf, and Ford Madox Ford.
I kept reading. When I didn’t respond to a sentence, I tried to take it in more deeply by counting the number of words in it and circling the punctuation. By the end of the first chapter, I was beginning to experience Hemingway’s language in the way that I think it was intended to be experienced. And, by the end of the book, I was a different person. The difference felt physical, as if I had been picked up and relocated. It was like moving a refrigerator and being able to see clearly where it once stood. I now felt truly connected to language and therefore to a history of people who loved language. I felt less alone. I felt that art was important and moral.
After “The Sun Also Rises,” I read everything that Hemingway had written, and I read it in the same slow manner. When I read “A Moveable Feast,” I wondered how someone who could write so well could ever die by suicide. When I read “The Fifth Column,” it reminded me of the silliest parts of “For Whom the Bell Tolls.” When I read “The Old Man and the Sea” and then some critical assessments of the book, I thought about whether it really mattered that some of the details—such as a fisherman being able to lug miles of fishing line to his boat—made no sense.
When I had finished reading Hemingway, I started writing at a much higher level. Hemingway had taught me how to say one thing while suggesting something else, how to make the resulting tension serve as a substitute for plot. I loved the challenge of writing a scene without dialogue labels, and the marvellous effect of doing this: I felt as if I were floating inside the room with my characters.
By the time I was in my twenties, though, I had become irritated with Hemingway. The explanation I offered for my dislike was that the guy seemed to know nothing about human beings. So many of his characters were stoic and brave. Actual humans tend to be confused, vibrating, changing. They doubt themselves and then blame themselves and others for the doubt. I argued that Hemingway should be read as a life-style writer or a self-help guru. This was what I said to others, but the truth was that, when I first read Hemingway and fell in love with art, I believed that it would rescue me from my feelings of uselessness, from sexual envy, from worries about money. Because all these remained, I had to put my peevishness somewhere.
For decades, I didn’t reread any of Hemingway’s major novels. But, whenever a previously unpublished story was discovered, I read it. “I Guess Everything Reminds You of Something,” which was included in “The Complete Short Stories,” seemed so obviously great and in such a different way from Hemingway’s other stories that I felt immature for having thought I could judge him.
I recently decided to reread “The Sun Also Rises.” I read the first line but the sentence’s balance and the stillness this generates didn’t impress me. It felt like the sort of solution to a pacing problem that an M.F.A. student would come up with. And the second sentence with its “that”s seemed less clever and brave than so many other examples of the same device I now knew. For example, the opening of Dostoyevsky’s novel “The Gambler”: “I’ve finally come back from my two-week absence. Our people have already been in Roulettenburg for three days.” Here, the opening sentence is disconcerting because the speaker is coming back to a physical space, but is returning from an absence, which is not a physical space. Can one return from an absence? If one cannot return from an absence then one is not back.
