Yet Hemingway refused to force the issue. The novel would happen when it was meant to happen. “I would put it off though until I could not help doing it,” he recalled later. “When I had to write it, then it would be the only thing to do and there would be no choice.” Until then, there was just one way to get there, in his opinion.
“Let the pressure build.”
IF YOU SHAKE a bottle of champagne vigorously enough, the cork will eventually shoot out with explosive force. Just when the pressure on all fronts had reached intolerable levels, the cosmos gave Hemingway his luckiest break. It came in the form of a sensual, dissipated English aristocrat with a penchant for men’s fedoras and casual lovers. The moment Lady Duff Twysden turned up in Paris, everything changed for Hemingway.
At first he didn’t know it. But in the summer of 1925, when he went to the San Fermín bullfighting fiesta in Pamplona, Lady Duff Twysden came along. Hemingway adored Spain; he eventually described it as “the country that I loved more than any other except my own.” He drew deep inspiration from Spanish culture, and bullfighting in particular: sitting ringside at a fight was like being at a war, he wrote. By the time they reached the fiesta, Hemingway appeared to have grown infatuated with Twysden, but she complicated any possibility of an affair by bringing along two of her lovers on the trip. One of them—Pat Guthrie—was a perpetually drunk Scottish debtor. The other, writer Harold Loeb, was the product of Princeton and two of New York City’s greatest and wealthiest Jewish families. Until Twysden entered the picture, Loeb had been one of Hemingway’s tennis friends and among his most ardent supporters. Now he was Hemingway’s rival.
The outing quickly degenerated into a Bacchanalian morass of sexual jealousy and gory spectacle. By the end of the fiesta, Loeb and Guthrie openly despised each other; Hemingway and Loeb would nearly come to fisticuffs in public over their entourage’s resident Jezebel; Lady Duff herself materialized at lunch one day with a black eye and a bruised forehead, possibly earned in a late-night scrap with Guthrie. Despite the war wound and the atmosphere she was creating, Twysden glowed throughout the fiesta. The drama became her.
It also became Hemingway, but in a different way. Seeing Twysden there amidst all of that pagan decadence triggered something in him. He immediately realized that he had material for an incendiary story. The moment he and Hadley left Pamplona to watch bullfights throughout the region, he began transcribing the entire spectacle onto paper, writing almost in a fever trance. Suddenly every illicit exchange, insult, and bit of unrequited longing that had broken out during the fiesta had a serious literary currency. The Hemingways kept up a manic travel schedule as the story flooded out of him; parts of the story were added in Valencia, Madrid, and Hendaye.
Hemingway eventually ricocheted back up to Paris, where he finished the first draft in September 1925. Soon he was calling the finished result The Sun Also Rises, a phrase borrowed from the Bible. Hemingway knew that he had a hot property on his hands—and his ticket out of the literary backwater.
“It is a hell of a fine novel,” he wrote to an editor acquaintance, adding that it would “let these bastards who say yes he can write very beautiful little paragraphs know where they get off at.”
After years of frustration and buildup, Hemingway’s debut novel had been conjured up in a mere six weeks. He was joining the novel club at last, and suddenly many stood to profit.
WHEN The Sun Also Rises was released a year later, those who had been translated onto its pages were incredulous that it was being marketed as fiction.
“When I first read it I couldn’t see what everyone was getting so excited about,” recalled Donald Ogden Stewart, a best-selling humor author who had been part of the Pamplona entourage. Hemingway repurposed him into the book’s comic foil Bill Gorton. In his eyes, The Sun Also Rises was “nothing but a report on what happened. This is journalism.” Stewart was not the only one who believed that Hemingway had shown his reporting chops, and nothing more. He had even written the whole thing as though delivering a juicy scoop on deadline.
When he began writing the novel, Hemingway failed to warn his characters’ prototypes that they were about to star in his big literary coup. That said, one evening he leaked the news to Kitty Cannell, another one of the novel’s unwitting real-life models. In Paris, some of the Pamplona crew had gathered for dinner to make amends. Nerves were still raw from the fiesta, which had concluded nearly two months earlier. After dinner, the group walked to a café nearby. Hemingway and Cannell were strolling together when he suddenly made a startling admission.
“I’m writing a book,” he told her. “Everybody’s in it. And I’m going to tear these two bastards apart,” he added, indicating Harold Loeb and Hemingway’s childhood friend Bill Smith, who were walking along nearby. Furthermore, Hemingway informed her, “that kike Loeb is the villain.” He then reassured Cannell that because he thought she was a wonderful girl, he wouldn’t put her in the novel.
“But, of course, he did put me in,” she wrote woefully years later.
Cannell, Loeb, Lady Duff Twysden, and the other figures who had inspired the book’s characters reacted to The Sun Also Rises with varying degrees of rage and dismay. Not only did the book depict in painful detail events that had transpired in Paris and Pamplona, but also vast swaths of their personal backgrounds had been blatantly used as the characters’ biographies. Loeb found himself cast as the hapless, insufferable Robert Cohn. Cannell had been translated into Cohn’s aging, desperate American girlfriend, Frances Clyne. Twysden had been transformed into the glamorous but anguished Lady Brett Ashley; the caricature permanently branded her as an “alcoholic nymphomaniac,” as Hemingway would later describe Twysden herself. Hemingway had depicted details of his friends’ failed past marriages, college sporting activities, idiosyncrasies of speech, and assorted indiscretions.
“He had a rat-trap memory,” says Hemingway’s son Patrick. “Anything that he experienced was at his immediate recall. That was one of the great assets that he had.”
Because Harold Loeb, Donald Stewart, Lady Duff, and some of the others were well-known figures, The Sun Also Rises proved a scandalous sensation in the cafés of the Left Bank, London, and New York. At first, however, the book’s greater literary significance was lost on many of Hemingway’s fellow expats. Some saw The Sun Also Rises as just another of the naughty romans à clef common among their crowd. Many of the Paris colony’s writers regularly fictionalized, reported on, and satirized their fellow imbibers, lovers, and colleagues; the Quarter was a glass house in which everyone threw stones at one another.
Unfortunately for Hemingway’s prototypes, others saw the book as a groundbreaking work, perhaps even an instant classic. At least one critic had noted that Hemingway had shown glimmers of genius with his stories and vignettes; now he was proving it. Of course some critics hated The Sun Also Rises, but few dismissed it as fluff. After all, it had a biblical title, and a weighty epigraph purloined from Gertrude Stein: “You are all a lost generation.” It had been clever of Hemingway to add these ingredients, which immediately notified readers that The Sun Also Rises wasn’t merely a run-of-the-mill bitchy tell-all. Rather, it was profound cultural commentary. Hemingway made it clear that he was not interested in silly little Jazz Age stories of the F. Scott Fitzgerald variety. Though both authors wrote about profligate socialites who drank too much and slept with people they shouldn’t, Hemingway’s work, he was quick to point out, explored death, regeneration, and the meaning of life. (And if that failed to entice readers, he added, there was “a lot of dope about high society” in it—always a reliable hook.)
Like all works that aim to please almost everyone, The Sun Also Rises ran the risk of pleasing no one. Yet Hemingway pulled it off. His high-low formula held fast. Elite critics bought it as a convincing exposition of postwar angst and heralded the spare new style. And as Hemingway hoped, all of that swank society, sex, and booze duly titillated the less high-minded readers. Overnight, it seemed, he went from bei
ng a promising upstart to an important provocateur.
The bewildered real-life Sun characters were left with little recourse in the wake of such success. Life before the book’s publication “later [became] known to some of us as ‘B.S.’ (Before The Sun Also Rises),” recalled Kitty Cannell. “A.S.”—after Sun—amounted to lives permanently altered by Hemingway’s unsparing ambition. The portraits would haunt Cannell, Loeb, and the others for the rest of their lives, but for Hemingway, his onetime friends were simply collateral damage.
After all, he was revolutionizing literature, and in every revolution, some heads must roll.
NINETY YEARS LATER, the high-low siren call of The Sun Also Rises continues to beguile readers. Some other novels that have earned voice-of-a-generation status—Jack Kerouac’s On the Road, for example—feel dated in comparison. But Sun still feels fresh and modern, and it remains a best-seller around the globe. While exact statistics are closely held by Hemingway’s heirs, Scribners estimates that 120,000 copies of the book are sold domestically every year, but sales overseas could easily double that number. The publisher knows of at least eighteen translation markets; Charles Scribner III says he would be shocked if worldwide sales were under 300,000 copies a year.
The Sun Also Rises still banks on the same dual function that made it a craze the moment it was released: it remains at once a vanguard work of modernist art and also a depiction of a sexy, glamorous world rife with naughty behavior—and little of the flawed human nature depicted in the book’s pages has changed.
“Everybody behaves badly,” observes protagonist Jake Barnes. “Give them the proper chance.”
It was true then and remains true now. Little bourgeois morality can be detected in the pages of The Sun Also Rises. The novel reveals a world where people aim to please themselves—even if their actions don’t bring them much pleasure. For the more inhibited reader, this has long provided a voyeuristic thrill. In the Sun realm, accountability, fidelity, and routine seem like dowdy residents of a faraway, more puritanical country.
Of course, much of the novel’s appeal lies in the specific era it depicts, although in real life, Hemingway’s Paris could be even sexier and darker than the Paris of The Sun Also Rises, and his early 1920s excursions to Pamplona were even more debauched, rivalrous, and confused than his fictionalized retellings. Artists and bullfighters alike were willing to kill or be killed in order to rise to the top of their fields. In both realms, it was a zero-sum game. There was, after all, so much at stake—especially for Hemingway. He knew what he wanted to achieve and who he wanted to be, and no one and nothing could stand in his way.
1
Paris Is a Bitch
IN 1921 EVERYONE IN AMERICA was talking about a young midwestern novelist. He was everything that a thrilling new writer should be: ambitious (“I want to be one of the greatest writers who have ever lived, don’t you?” he once told a friend), appallingly youthful (he was twenty-three when he published his first book), exuberant, and controversial. For his publishers, it was the happiest of arrangements: this fellow was poised to become the voice of the postwar generation, and a lucrative one at that. He alarmed his elders; his peers adored and imitated him. Already the social rhythms of the young decade were obediently following the strokes of his pen. His name was F. Scott Fitzgerald.
Back in the Midwest—Chicago, to be precise—Fitzgerald had some competition brewing, although he did not know it. Another feverishly ambitious would-be novelist was watching Fitzgerald’s success and planning something of a coup d’état. Fitzgerald’s fame was encouraging, but his stories, he thought, were frivolous, dizzy with flappers, Ivy League shenanigans, and champagne bubbles. Plus, what was new about his style? Fitzgerald might have been writing about a new generation, but he was doing so in the voice of an older one. Shouldn’t the so-called voice of a generation have a genuinely fresh voice, a new way of spinning out sentences? Adjectives were so passé, so Victorian.
It was time for a revolution. At least that was the opinion of Fitzgerald’s then-anonymous rival, who would soon seize the opportunity to spearhead that revolt personally. This young man was not alone in his opinion: already he had accrued a cult-like following. Admittedly that cult was rather small: it consisted of one devotee, the writer’s fiancée. No one in the vaster world had heard of Ernest Miller Hemingway, the author. There was no reason for anyone to have heard of him. He had yet to publish a single short story.
Yet his fiancée, Hadley Richardson—a sturdy, relentlessly optimistic redhead eight years his senior—was sure he was destined to become a renowned writer, even a cultural icon. At first she hadn’t felt an overwhelming “glorious faith in his future,” but he had swiftly changed her mind. Their life together quickly became geared toward launching his career. She wrote worshipful missives to him, validating his ambitions and practically begging to be his “helper.”
No one was more assured about the magnitude of his future than Hemingway himself. Not only did he believe he was capable of creating masterly modern stories; he likely knew that he himself was a masterly modern story. He was undeniably charismatic. His handsome features were chiseled but sensual: there was that full mouth and pleasing symmetry, and an intense stare that implied a certain shrewdness. He had “the kind of eyes that can stare straight into the sun,” as Fitzgerald would later write of one of his own characters.
Extraordinary things happened to him. Even when those things were terrible, they made a hell of a story. Spotlights sought him out as though by magnetic attraction. Three years earlier, just short of his nineteenth birthday, he had fallen victim to shelling and enemy fire while distributing chocolate and cigarettes to soldiers on the front lines in Italy. As the first American casualty in Italy, he had garnered press attention across the country. The New York Sun reported the number and quality of shrapnel pieces that had savaged his legs: “227 marks, indicating where bits of a peculiar kind of Austrian shrapnel, about as thick as a .22 caliber bullet and an inch long, like small cuts from a length of wire, smote him.” The Chicago papers were also filled with Hemingway news. A coterie of gift-bearing admirers surrounded him as he recovered in a Milan hospital.
“Men loved him,” recalled his nurse Agnes von Kurowsky.
And he loved the attention; in fact, it was, he wrote to his parents, “the next best thing to getting killed and reading your own obituary.” But a few headlines and the adoration of a few comrades in arms was not the sort of destiny Hemingway had in mind. His ability to inspire devotion in his peers would prove an essential ingredient in his success, but he craved attention of a loftier caliber. One did not simply lurch out of nowhere, however, and become a world-renowned revolutionary author. He still actually needed to pen the work that would make him famous and establish him as the true literary voice of the modern world. It was an inconvenient but unavoidable stepping-stone.
He was working on it. By the summer of 1921, he had an idea for a novel. Hadley was beside herself with excitement.
“It’ll be wonderful to have you writing a novel,” she informed her twenty-two-year-old fiancé. She was willing to do whatever she could to help bring it to fruition. “I’ll be as happy as happy to be with you thru it all or be kicked out or slid into a corner or anything you like,” she assured him. She could tell already that Hemingway’s first novel would be a wholly modern work, stripped down and lean. His approach “eliminated everything except what is necessary and strengthening,” she complimented him. It was all wonderfully simple, “but as fine as the finest chain mail.”
She and Hemingway were then living in different cities as they planned their wedding. Hadley was anticipating the event from her native St. Louis; Hemingway had set up shop in Chicago, where he was scraping together a meager living as a reporter at a magazine called The Cooperative Commonwealth and penning freelance pieces for the Toronto Star. He had been training himself to become a reporter since high school in Oak Park, Illinois, where he wrote for his school paper, The Trapeze. During
those early years he had also been trying his hand at writing fiction and had already acquired a bit of literary bravado.
“Cicero is a pipe,” he wrote in 1915. “I could write better stuff with both hands tied behind me.”
Hemingway wasn’t drawing on a grand family literary tradition, although a streak of creativity did run through his clan. His mother had once been an aspiring opera singer and often took her children to concerts, plays, and art exhibits in nearby Chicago. Yet by the time he was a teenager, it was evident that his talent lay in writing, not in the visual or performing arts: his English teachers praised him, and his themes were often read aloud in class. The Tabula, his high school literary magazine, printed some of his earliest short stories—which, like some of his later work, involved subjects such as boxing, woodland living, and suicide. Back then, his work was more imitative than original; he frequently wrote in the style of Ring Lardner, a popular sports and humor writer. Yet when Hemingway graduated in 1917, he was nominated Class Prophet—a designation that could be seen as prophetic in its own right, considering that he would later help envision and usher in the era of modern literature.
The literary encouragement, however, had more or less ended after he left Oak Park High School. Hemingway’s doctor father wanted him to attend Oberlin College; but the First World War was then raging in Europe, and Hemingway, like countless other young men of his generation, was determined to see action instead. He later admitted to having viewed the entire war as something of a sporting event, and dubbed his younger self an “awful dope.” Defective vision prevented Hemingway from enlisting in the military, but in 1918 the Red Cross Ambulance Corps deemed him good enough for service and promptly dispatched him to Italy, where he was wounded within weeks of his arrival.
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