Hemingway's lost generation novel argues that nobody in it is lost
Gertrude Stein's phrase about a lost generation sits at the front of The Sun Also Rises, yet Hemingway told his editor the book was really about the earth enduring. His battered expatriates drink their way from Paris to the Pamplona bulls, and a wounded journalist who cannot make love becomes its moral centre.
Scribner's published the novel in October 1926, and Jonathan Cape brought it out in London a year later as Fiesta, which had been Hemingway's working title. Reviews were mixed at first. Biographer Jeffrey Meyers now ranks it as Hemingway's greatest work. It is a roman a clef built from his Paris circle and a 1925 trip to the San Fermin festival and the trout streams of the Pyrenees. He was converting to Catholicism as he wrote, and Jeffrey Herlihy-Mera sees the Catholic narrator Jake Barnes as a rehearsal for that step.
Jake, an American reporter, loves Lady Brett Ashley, a twice-divorced Englishwoman with bobbed hair, but a war wound has left him impotent. In Pamplona the men around her unravel. Robert Cohn, a former college boxing champion, is taunted with antisemitic jibes and fights Jake, Mike Campbell and the 19-year-old matador Romero, whom Brett seduces. Romero, bruised, still performs superbly. The book closes with Jake and Brett in a Madrid taxi, imagining what they might have had.
Linda Wagner-Martin reads it either as a portrait of bored exiles or as a morality tale about a man seeking integrity. Michael S. Reynolds finds Midwestern values underneath: Hemingway respects people who work, matadors and prostitutes included, while the idle rich pose. Jake, the one with a job, keeps paying bills that others dodge. Critics split sharply over Brett. James Nagel calls her one of the most fascinating women in twentieth-century American fiction, whereas Nina Baym files her among Hemingway's cruelest female portraits.
The spare prose shows off his iceberg theory, leaving most feeling beneath the surface. Hemingway set the frenzy of the fiesta against quiet Spanish countryside, a country he considered healthy and untouched by war. He treated bullfighting as tragic and beautiful, and Jake must work hard to be accepted into the circle of aficionados, a rare honour for a foreigner. As many as 200,000 English speakers lived in Paris then, drawn by a favourable exchange rate.
Source: The Sun Also Rises
