Memo to Jake Barnes: It’s Called Oral Sex

The Sun Also Rises by Ernest Hemingway.  The Sun Also Rises & Other Writings 1918-1926.  Library of America, pp 369-570.  *****

One of the mildly annoying facts about the Hemingway oeuvre is that the Hemingway stand-in—easy to identify in every book—is always irresistible to women.  Maybe Hemingway himself was irresistible; at least four wives that we know of found him so[1].  But in The Sun Also Rises, the narrator, Jake Barnes, has been damaged by a war wound, so he is unable to engage in conventional intercourse.  That doesn’t stop him from picking up a prostitute at the beginning of the novel, and hanging out with her through the early scenes[2].  It also doesn’t prevent Lady Brett Ashley, the female lead, from being madly in love with him, though Lady Brett—as we gradually discover—is not terribly discriminating.  This tragic situation has its most famous expression in the novel’s final lines, which were quoted in the recent PBS documentary.

“’Oh Jake,’ Brett said, “we could have had such a damned good time together.’

“Ahead was a mounted policemen in khaki directing traffic.  He raised his baton.  The car slowed suddenly pressing Brett against me.

“’Yes,’ I said.  ‘Isn’t it pretty to think so.’”

I hate to break into this cynical, world-weary, slightly drunken moment (words that describe many moments in this novel), but there’s always a way, if two people are in love.  I remember the paraplegic men in the movie Born on the Fourth of July¸ who liked to say, “If you don’t have it in the hips, you better have it in the lips.”  The problem is not that, as that scene rather clumsily suggests, Jake can’t raise his baton.  The problem is that no one in this novel has the emotional depth to love anyone else, including Jake and Lady Brett.  Perhaps that’s what Gertrude Stein meant in the words of the epigraph, “You are all a lost generation.”  I’m not sure they were more lost than any other generation.  But that epigraph is one of the most quoted lines from the book.

I do think the vaunted Hemingway style finds its purest expression in the stories of In Our Time, but The Sun Also Rises is also beautifully written, and I can understand how it exploded on the literary scene in 1926.  The author was all of 27 years old.  He had been wounded in the war.  His writing has a directness and vividness and simplicity with few precedents in English prose, though critics mention Mark Twain and Stephen Crane.  And the behavior of the characters, the casual act of picking up a prostitute, the bar hopping that goes on constantly, must have seemed daring in its day (especially since Prohibition was in full swing).  It’s startling to find this kind of sophistication and world weariness in a man so young.

My favorite section of the novel is when Barnes and his friend Bill Garton[3] go off on a trout fishing expedition in Spain.  That section is Hemingway at his best, his description of the landscape, of riding on the roof of a bus with the locals, of all the mechanics of trout fishing, the enjoyment of the simple acts of life like eating and hiking and just inhabiting a beautiful place.  The man had a zest for life that was infectious.

But the drinking!  My God!  A few weeks back I wrote something to the effect that characters in James Baldwin’s novels drink as much as anyone in Hemingway and Faulkner, and I need at this point to apologize profusely to Baldwin’s memory.  His characters are teetotalers compared to this crowd.  These people drink day to day to a stunning extent, but it’s when they go off to Pamplona for the week-long bullfight fiesta that they really get into the booze.  I don’t understand why a man with such a zest for life wants to blot it out to such an extent.  And Jake’s not the only one.  A couple of other characters outdo him, including Lady Brett—whose hands shake if she hasn’t had a drink for a while—and her fiancé Mike, who is pretty much blind drunk throughout the fiesta.  At least he didn’t have to endure Jake’s mansplaining about the intricacies of bullfighting.  You can’t see the bullfight for all the bullshit.

Every man in the novel is gaga over Lady Brett, who is 34 as the story unfolds and possibly the most world weary of the bunch.  She chooses Mike as a fiancé apparently because he’s an all-around good guy[4], but also adores Jake, has had an affair with the obnoxious Robert Cohn, whom nobody in the novel can stand, and eventually has a risky affair—and runs off with—the 19-year-old bullfighter Pedro Romero.  That must have sounded perfectly possible when I read the novel at the age of sixteen, but as I look back nearly sixty years later I haven’t known many 34-year-old women who lust after 19-year-olds, however good they are in the bull ring.  By the end of the novel I found Lady Brett pathetic.

I was also shocked by the novel’s gratuitous anti-Semitism.  I don’t doubt that Robert Cohn was obnoxious, but part of the problem is that everyone picks on him constantly, and when he’s not around they make constant reference to his Jewishness, starting with our narrator’s third sentence.  “He cared nothing for boxing, in fact he disliked it, but he learned it painfully and thoroughly to counter-act the feeling of inferiority and shyness he had felt on being treated as a Jew at Princeton.”  (How does Jake Barnes know that, by the way?  It seems unlikely that Cohn would have told him, in so many words.)  A lot of Cohn’s supposed obnoxiousness begins with simple gestures of friendship.  But one guy after another coldly rejects them.

I’m being critical, but I loved reading this novel, and comparing my reactions to those of my teenage self, when I found the whole thing quite thrilling (and had not yet had a girlfriend, or taken a drink for that matter.  I had caught a few fish).  The writing still carries me through.  But I think these people lead stupid lives, and I only have so much patience for reading about stupidity.  They wouldn’t be nearly so lost a generation if they’d ease up on the booze.

[1] To someone like Mary Walsh, who came in fourth, you want to say, Excuse me, but don’t you notice a pattern here?

[2] Even the prostitute seems to have a thing for him.

[3] Based on William B. Smith, a friend from Michigan, and Donald Ogden Stewart.  Many of the novel’s characters have real-life counterparts.

[4] We’re startled toward the end of the novel to find out that he has virtually no money, can’t even buy a round of drinks, though he just checked into a hotel.  Apparently he’s living off Lady Brett entirely.