What I mean is: I think I got A Moveable Feast as a "here's what it was like living in those days" book - very clearly not a "read this as a Major Important Novel" book - but none of the stories and none of the major novels.
(Hemingway isn't the only one: I read Moby-Dick the spring of my senior year, entirely on my own, since I realized at that point it would never be assigned reading, and I might as well get to it while I was still in fighting trim for books like that.)
Of course, we all have holes in our reading: no one can read everything. No one can even read all the things they want to read, which is a vastly smaller universe. And I didn't have a burning desire to read Hemingway for a long time - the mental image I've mostly had is of him as an old man, grumpy and self-indulgent, a caricature of toxic manhood if ever there was one.
But one weird thing about getting older is that I find it's easier to see creators at different points in their lives - that parallax of my own life making it clearer that this is a young man's book and that is from the older version.
And so, as we're coming up on a hundred years later, I've been vaguely interested in Young Hemingway, the guy who was a reporter, ran off to The Great War, and then decided to make himself A Great Writer. That's why I read The Sun Also Rises, his first novel, originally published in 1926, soon after a couple of story collections started to make his name.
Sun is mildly autobiographical, all of the critics agree - or, rather, that it started that way and shifted as Hemingway wrote it. Jake Barnes, the narrator, is a reporter (check) in Paris (check) who was wounded in WW I (check). But Hemingway makes Barnes mostly an observer to events, and my sense is that Hemingway was more involved - yes, writers always take notes and re-use things they see, but I think Hemingway shifted a lot of "something like this happened to me" over to other characters in the process of fictionalizing it.
Maybe, what I'm trying to say - in the crudest possible way - is that The Sun Also Rises is Hemingway asking the literary question "What if I'd gotten my dick shot off in the war, so I couldn't have the complicated affairs I do have? What would that be like?"
Jake Barnes is perhaps the prototype of the Guy Who Can't Get the Girl, because of that wound which is referenced a lot but never quite explained. (Because no book in 1926 could bluntly say "his war wound left him permanently impotent.") Because he can't have her, his pursuit of Lady Brett Ashley is purer and his relationship with her less conflicted. He can be her good friend because they both know he's no competition.
And there's a lot of competition.
Brett is a mess in multiple ways, but the attractive kind of mess - a woman old enough to know what she wants and what she can do and still young enough to be alluring and to get it. She also has a minor British title from her nearly-discarded current husband and the cultural background to live up to that title and embody what it means; the book doesn't make her background entirely clear but she must have grown up among upper-class Brits, since she can live that way thoughtlessly.
And I mean "thoughtlessly" in nearly every sense; that's how Brett does everything.
Barnes is the core of the story, our narrator and still center, of course - Brett loops in and out of the story multiple times; she's the kind of woman who's always running around Doing Things (with men paying for it), just a little bit too much effort and going just a bit too far. It's slightly overstating it to say Sun Also Rises is the story of how Jake's normal life is smacked repeatedly by the wrecking ball of Lady Ashley, but only slightly.
Hemingway's prose, at this point in his career, is relatively simple but doesn't come across as simplistic, as some of his later works can. There's a journalistic vigor in the way it tells the story, with a tight focus on facts and specifics. Here is A Thing, the prose says: look at it. Emotional states and self-reflection are elided; deep meanings are left to be inferred. That, I think, has made it a good book for teaching purposes: Hemingway points at things he doesn't say, and teachers can use that to explain how Fine Prose works.
I don't believe that Brett and Jake could ever have worked. But I don't believe Jake thinks that, either - as the last line telegraphs. Brett probably believed it; she's a person who can always believe in something, if it's intriguing or convenient or fun in the moment. That's the point, of course: The Sun Also Rises is a novel about wanting something you can't have, and, in the most typical old-fashioned way, that "thing" is a woman and the one wanting it is a man.
It's a slow book, a book made up of mostly small moments. Some encounters in Paris, a long vacation in Spain, people that you see for a while and then go away, only to come back later. There's a whole larger cast I'm ignoring here, the circle that Jake and Brett run with, people who also drop in and out, show up here and there.
In the end, I was impressed. I don't know if I'm all the way won over by Early Hemingway - there's still something faintly artificial around the edges - but it's a strong and supple style that works well to tell this story about these people, and that's what matters for a novel.
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