The Sun Also Rises is a young man’s book. Hemingway wrote it when he was 26 years-old, at a time when he was beginning to feel his oats as a writer, beginning to feel that he had it in him to become a great writer. He was hanging out with the smart set of English and American expatriates in Europe, and with the fast set there, too, which intersected with the first set to a degree.

It was a time in his life when all his eccentric friends seemed extraordinary, all their antics dramatically resonant in some way, all their follies witty. He came to have a different view of these friends, but he set a number of them down with enough precision in this novel that we can judge them for ourselves — see past whatever Hemingway may have seen in them at the time, a kind of tragic desperation, to something that seems more like frivolous self-indulgence.

Which is to say that the grand ambition of the novel doesn’t quite stand as fulfilled — the attempt to chart the tragedy of a generation, scarred by war and lost to itself.  The one character who is literally scarred by the war, the narrator, made impotent by a war wound, is the one character who seems spiritually whole and serious, though ravaged by regret.  His wound is too literal, an objective correlative that isn’t really dramatized in the group portrait of his friends.

What stands is the crystalline portrayal of times and places, the vibrant documentation of a certain type of person, in prose that is still startling today for its force and purity.  It’s Hemingway prose at its best, before he grew self-conscious about it, before it took on the mannerisms which, in his later work, are so easy to parody.

The prose and the dialogue of The Sun Also Rises are beyond parody — beyond easy imitation, almost beyond emulation.  They create an immediacy of felt experience as vibrant as the memories of real events in our own lives.  The novel, compromised as it may be on some levels, constitutes one of the greatest of all literary achievements, one that comes alive on the page with astonishing vitality as often as one cares to read it.

Hemingway retained the power to write such prose almost to the end of his life — what he lost was the power to sustain it the way it is sustained in The Sun Also Rises and to nearly the same extent in A Farewell To Arms.

Category — research.

This book is an account of Hemingway’s first African safari, in 1933 — a more or less straightforward report of his adventures, but shaped with a novelist’s craft.

I read it for the first time in my late twenties, after my own first trip to Africa. My life had fallen apart and my sister Libba sent me a ticket to Kenya, where she was then living, and Africa put my life back together again. I suppose my sister knew that Africa would do this, but in any case it did.

[Photo by Libba Marrian]

I read the book to get Hemingway’s take on the place. I did not read it well back then. I was surprised by what seemed to be irrelevant pontificating about the state of modern literature, and by the pettiness Hemingway ascribed to his own character in certain episodes of the narrative. I found the book entirely fascinating but odd, vaguely disappointing. I somehow missed the shape of it, and the power.

The pontificating about literature amused me, late in life, and touched me. It was sort of like Babe Ruth calling a home-run shot, saying, “I’m going to beat this pitcher and knock one out of here.” Hemingway was promising the same, “the pitcher” in his case being his literary competitors, the home-run being the book he was writing. This seemed like a fine sporting gesture, and one that could be made only by a very fine writer who knows he’ll have more times at the plate if he strikes out in this one.

Green Hills Of Africa is not a dazzling shot out of the ballpark — more like an inside the park homer, solidly hit to the wall, between the fielders. Hemingway has to run like hell to beat the throw home and for long moments you’re sure he won’t make it, but he slides under the catcher’s tag at the last moment and scores.

It takes some extraordinary writing to do this, and a long final brilliant section about a desperate but exhilarating kudu hunt, in which he hits the dirt in front of the plate, slides outside it but manages to get one hand on it as he passes it, scoring the run.

Reading the book the second time I was moved almost to tears by this section — entitled “Pursuit As Happiness”. In it, Hemingway evokes with startling clarity the country he was hunting through, the precise details of the hunt, as well as the almost supernatural joy he took in the endeavor, threatened constantly by his sickening fear that he would lose track of his prey, or shoot badly when he came up on it.

I’m not a hunter myself — I’ve never even fired a gun larger than a BB rifle — but the pursuit Hemingway writes of here can stand for every kind of pursuit, the pursuit of excellence in your work, the pursuit of a woman, the pursuit of any moment in life lived to its fullest.

As is usually the case with Hemingway, the end of the pursuit is never quite what the hunter imagined it would be, never as satisfying, but it’s something more, too, something beyond what he could have imagined — a memory of exaltation that exists forever, that can be put into words so others can share it. The exaltation is spiritual — it comes from a sense of having been if only briefly in touch with something eternal, bigger than oneself, something that will carry on in all its glory and power after one is gone . . . something that. once experienced, confers a kind of immortality.

I mistrust all frank and simple people, especially when their stories hold together . . .

— Jake Barnes, The Sun Also Rises

Category — research.

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The story of my life.

If qualities have odors the odor of courage to me is the smell of smoked leather or the smell of a frozen road or the smell of the sea when the wind rips the top from a wave.

— Ernest Hemingway, Death In the Afternoon

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TRAVEL

The railroad track is miles away,
And the day is loud with voices speaking,
Yet there isn’t a train goes by all day
But I hear its whistle shrieking.

All night there isn’t a train goes by,
Though the night is still for sleep and dreaming
But I see its cinders red on the sky,
And hear its engine steaming.

My heart is warm with the friends I make,
And better friends I’ll not be knowing,
Yet there isn’t a train I wouldn’t take,
No matter where it’s going.

With thanks to Huger Foote, and in honor of Duquesne Whistle.

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Ernest Hemingway’s Death In the Afternoon is a really wonderful book, and also one of the God-damnedest books ever written. It’s very hard to categorize or even describe.

It presents itself as a treatise on bullfighting, and it is that to a degree. You can learn an awful lot about bullfighting from it. I don’t know how reliable its information is but I can attest that it’s fascinating and extremely entertaining information. Hemingway, being a storyteller, can rarely stand to pass along any wisdom without attaching a tale or anecdote illustrating that wisdom in practice.

But information is not really the point of the book. What it really sets out to do is celebrate Hemingway’s passion for the subject, his joy in elucidating its subtleties and meanings, and at the same time recapture for himself and convey to us the atmosphere of the places in Spain where he came by his knowledge.

The tone of the book is conversational, though it’s an eccentric style of conversation, because Hemingway was an eccentric. It’s also a very good-humored book and often quite funny. We see Hemingway’s wit here at its best, without the labored jollity found in much of his later work.

There are, too, here and there, passages of sublime writing, of absolutely breathtaking prose.  It’s not what you could call a “major work” but it has some major writing in it, on one subject or another.

A year and a half before he started writing this, Hemingway had published one of the great novels of the 20th century, A Farewell To Arms, which was both a critical and a commercial success. He was acknowledged almost universally as one of the most important writers of his time.  He was well-off financially, from his work and from his second wife’s fortune.  He was young, 32 years-old, good-looking, brilliant and vigorous.

It was a time in his life before his self-doubts began to overwhelm him, before he cared much what critics thought, because most of them thought well of him.  He had nothing to prove to anyone but much to share.

All of that good fortune shines through the book, written in an exhilarating state of grace, from a deep reserve of strength and faith in his own ambition.  Reading it is like taking a drug, drinking from a fountain of youth.  It was a fountain that ran dry for Hemingway, as it will for all of us, but Death In the Afternoon will never run dry, its invigorating waters will always run as clear and strong as a Spanish trout stream.

There are some things which cannot be learned quickly and time, which is all we have, must be paid heavily for their acquiring. They are the very simplest things and because it takes a man’s life to know them the little new that each man gets from life is very costly and the only heritage he has to leave.

— Ernest Hemingway, Death In the Afternoon

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