The Sun Also Rises and the ‘lost generation’ — Part I

EACH of these essays/entries is intended to stand alone, so there is a certain degree of duplication in them as it is unlikely they will be read in sequence or even that all will be read by a visitor to these pages. This is intentional: someone reading an essay/entry must not be puzzled by some allusion she or he might not understand because they have not read the other essays/entries.

List of posts

No single factor was as illustrative of the failure of The Sun Also Rises to convince the critics that Hemingway was a great writer than its failure to convince them that it was the record of a generation and that its author was the spokesman for that generation.

Frank L. Ryan The Immediate
 Critical Reception of Ernest Hemingway.

A new generation does not appear every thirty years . . . or “about three times in the century” to quote Fitzgerald; it appears when writers of the same age join in common revolt against the fathers and when in the process of adapting a new lifestyle they find their own models and spokesmen.

Malcolm Cowley, A Second Flowering.

But [Malcolm] Cowley’s sentimentalism is itself part of the mythology about the characters of The Sun Also Rises, and the novel mothered fictions about itself. Even Hemingway could not stop the legend that he was depicting the Lost Generation. He protested that Earth and not Jake Barnes, not even the matador, Pedro Romero, was the hero. Few critics believe Hemingway even today.

 Bertram D. Sarason, Hemingway And The Sun Set. 

Instead of being the epic of the sun also rising on a lost generation, [The Sun Also Rises is] strikes me as a cock and bull story about a lot of summer tourists getting drunk and making fools of themselves at a picturesque Iberian folk-festival. It’s heartbreaking. If the generation is going to lose itself, for God’s sake let it show more fight . . . When a superbly written description of the fiesta of San Fermin in Pamplona . . . reminds you of a travel book . . . it’s time to hold an inquest.

John Dos Passos, reviewing The Sun Also
Rises for New Masses, Dec 1926.

A year and a half after its publication, Richard Barrett spoke of the impressions which the novel was having on the younger people about him, of the young men and women who spoke so reverently of it, marked passages in it, and kept it by their beds, apparently for solace in the dark hours. But one searches in vain for this response from the reviewers who did not hear in it the mournful sounds of a lost generation.

Frank L. Ryan The Immediate
 Critical Reception of Ernest Hemingway.

It was an age of miracles, it was an age of art, it was an age of excess, and it was an age of satire.

F. Scott Fitzgerald in Tales Of The Jazz Age.

THERE’S a cynical observation that if you ask five or ten or fifteen economists to define ‘economics’, you’ll get at least 20 definitions. Something similar is true when talk turns to the so-called ‘lost generation’. It is a staunch article of faith that Ernest Hemingway’s novel The Sun Also Rises portrays — and, more to the point, that he intended the novel to portray — members of that ‘lost generation’, men and women in such despair at the state of the world that they had reduced themselves to leading aimless lives of drunkenness and promiscuity. Does it?

The answer has little to do with whichever definition of ‘the lost generation’ you are working. Far more relevant is that the received interpretation was decidedly post hoc. If we accept that Hemingway’s men and women in The Sun Also Rises were getting drunk and engaging in casual sex because they could no longer cope with the world as they experienced it, we are, essentially, merely taking on trust the word of critics and academics: the novel itself doesn’t convey that at all.

Pertinently, the now orthodox interpretation of The Sun Also Rises as a portrayal of young folk in despair didn’t even gain currency for a year or two after the novel was published in 1926. Fifty-four years later, in 1980, by which time the canonisation of Ernest Hemingway as ‘one of our greatest writers’ was being more keenly scrutinised, Frank L. Ryan observed in The Immediate Critical Reception of Ernest Hemingway

A year and a half after its publication, Richard Barrett spoke of the impressions which the novel was having on the younger people about him, of the young men and women who spoke so reverently of it, marked passages in it, and kept it by their beds, apparently for solace in the dark hours. But one searches in vain for this response from the reviewers who did not hear in it the mournful sounds of a lost generation.

So the question is: how did that interpretation come about and why is it now almost universally accepted?

Poet and literary critic Malcolm Cowley (below) suggests that a better, more accurate, name for the so-called ‘lost generation’ would be the ‘World War I generation of writers’. He identifies them as idealists 

born in the last decade of the 19th century generation who became disillusioned with their fathers’ values and had high hopes of change, but soon realised once the war over it was still business as usual.

Other commentators, more vaguely, use the term the ‘lost generation’ to encompass all the writers who came to prominence in the 1920s. Still others claim it was specifically that group of expatriates, like Hemingway, who congregated in Paris in the 1920s.

At the end of the day, frankly, you pays your money and you makes your choice as to what the phrase means, but whatever it is, Hemingway’s novel is now firmly wedded to the idea of a ‘lost generation’.

. . .

Cowley makes his case well: in A Second Flowering, he examines the works of eight poets and writers born between 1894 and 1899 who might be thought to belong to that ‘lost generation’. Some joined up and fought in the war; some, like F Scott Fitzgerald, enlisted but never made it to the front; others served in a theatre-of-war ambulance service like the novelist John Dos Passos, the poet e e cummings and Hemingway. (Hemingway only managed four weeks, however, though on that basis he claimed for the rest of his life that in 1918 he ‘had gone to war’. Strictly speaking he had ‘gone to war’, although certainly not in the sense in which the phrase is usually understood). All, Cowley says, were scornful of the older generation. Cowley writes

The war . . . gave them the feeling of having lived in two eras, almost on two different planets. The second era seemed tawdrier in many ways, but still it had become their own world or century

and he quotes Dos Passos from a letter the novelist wrote to a classmate

If we only governed the world instead of the swagbellied old fogies that do . . . Down with the middle-aged!

Cowley describes how

For a few months after the Armistice — only a few — young American writers were full of hope for themselves and the world. The democracies were triumphant, all the great tyrannies were overthrown, and perhaps young men could play their part in an old American dream, that of building a new order of the age . . . The hope faded in 1919. Among the events of that disastrous year in American history were the Treaty of Versailles, which the Senate would refuse to ratify for the wrong reasons; the May Day riots of servicemen against Socialists; the general strike in Seattle, followed by strikes in major industries . . . the Volstead Act, passed over the veto of a crippled President; the rescinding by Congress of all the progressive measures adopted during the war. Together those events . . . . affirmed the moral dictatorship of congressmen from rural districts and left political power in the hands of businessmen with narrow aims: they wanted profits and very soon would have bigger profits than ever before, at an exorbitant cost to the world.

Yet one should acknowledge that the scorn for, and disgust with, their fathers’ generation felt by Cowley’s post-World War group of writers is hardly different to that of every younger generation, which, ironically, eventually becomes a new ‘fathers’ generation’.

Two generations later, those men who served in World War II — and who saw friends killed — were understandably upset and perhaps baffled that they and their values were rejected by their sons and daughters, the 1960s ‘hippies’; then, of course, those same feckless ‘hippies’ themselves grew old to become the ‘boomer’ generation now scorned by ‘millennials’; we don’t yet know the name by which the generation sired by those ‘millennials’ will be known, but we can be almost certain they, in turn, till turn on their parents.

Cowley’s analysis of his World War I generation is reasoned, solid and useful, and the debilitation that generation’s disillusionment caused might best be demonstrated by a typical — though an extreme — example, the life of Harold Stearns. Stearns makes an appearance in The Sun Also Rises as the drunken

The death notice of Harold Stearns
in the New York Times, in 1943

cadger Harvey Stone, and was one of many real-life men and women Hemingway used, thinly disguised, to populate his novel.

In fact, except for the character of Bill Gorton, who was an amalgam based on Hemingway’s friends childhood friend Bill Smith and the writer Donald Ogden Stewart, every main character in the novel had a real-life counterpart, and none was too pleased by how they were depicted. In her account of the genesis of the novel, Lesley M. M. Blume notes

When The Sun Also Rises was released . . . 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. . . Hemingway repurposed him into the book’s comic foil Bill Gorton. In his [Stewart’s] eyes The Sun Also Rises was ‘nothing but a report of what happened. This is journalism’

As a young man, Stearns was the very soul of enlightened liberalism. His father died before he was born, and he had a peripatetic childhood, but by the age of 16 he was earning money writing theatre reviews and able to pay his way through Harvard with with his journalism.

When he graduated in 1913, he moved to New York and was eventually taken on as a staff writer on The New Republic, founded in 1914 as a left-liberal progressive newspaper. Later, he edited the political and literary magazine, The Dial for a year. He made his name with two books: the first, published in 1919, was Liberalism In America in which he juxtaposed President Woodrow Wilson’s purported idealism with how that liberalism was failing in practice; then, in 1921, he published America And The Young Intellectual in which he accused the US of crushing its young ‘free spirits’.

A year later, he edited a collection of essays by leading liberal writers called Civilization In The United States. In it, according to the New York Times, America was depicted as a land of greed and puritanism where none of the finer things in life had a chance to flower. Stearns then declared himself disgusted with the US and moved to Paris, but there he began 13 years of increasing dissolution, eating very little and drinking a great deal.

Although the exchange rate made Paris cheap for Americans in the 1920s and Stearns had intended to earn his living from writing, he wrote nothing, had very little money and soon existed by borrowing cash. He largely kept himself to himself, though he existed on the periphery of the Montparnasse circle of expatriates of which Hemingway was a part.

After several years of increasing poverty and desolation, a well-wisher helped him land a job as a racing tipster for the Paris edition of the Chicago Tribune under the name ‘Peter Pickem’. He later transferred to the Paris edition of Britain’s Daily Mail, but was eventually sacked. Finally, after spending several months more or less living in the gutter, his teeth rotting and losing his sight, he was repatriated to the US by an American charity.

It would, though, be misleading to cite Stearns as typical of the ‘lost generation’ in despair at the state of the world and drinking themselves to death. Stearns’s demons were personal and he was an extreme example of ‘the disillusioned liberal’. Others who could be regarded as belonging to that reputed ‘lost generation’ in Paris did not lead such dissolute lives, and drinking to excess and indulging in all kinds of sexual activity, whether covertly or not, has been a consistent feature of all societies.

Pertinently, the alleged ‘bad’ behaviour of the American expatriates was being viewed and condemned by a nation buttoned up by Prohibition and — an often distinctly hypocritical — puritanism. Unhelpfully, most accounts have Paris of the 1920s being a comparatively sober city compared to the three ‘fin de siecle’ decades leading up to World War I.

. . .

If one accepts Cowley’s account of the gradual disillusion of a number of young writers who lost faith in their country and what they regarded as its venal values, there certainly was a ‘lost generation’; but more to point is the question: were the characters in Hemingway’s The Sun Also Rises also part of that ‘lost generation’ as is now almost universally claimed?

At best one might charitably respond: if they were, it’s really not obvious. At worst the answer is a stark and definite ‘no, they were not’. In his review of the novel for the Marxist magazine New Masses, Hemingway’s then friend and confidant John Dos Passos (below) quite possibly nails it when he scathingly wrote

Instead of being the epic of the sun also rising on a lost generation, [The Sun Also Rises is] strikes me as a cock and bull story about a lot of summer tourists getting drunk and making fools of themselves at a picturesque Iberian folk-festival. It’s heartbreaking. If the generation is going to lose itself, for God’s sake let it show more fight.

In fact, Dos Passos, who had been part of Hemingway’s party on a Pamplona trip a year earlier, later apologised for his New Masses review, though whether he had changed his mind about the novel or simply decided he did not want to risk their friendship with Hemingway (which was, though, irrevocably shattered 11 years later in Spain) is not recorded.

When considering the behaviour of characters in the novel, it is counter-intuitive to grant it a philosophical dimension immediately, though as they are ‘characters in a novel’ doing so is tempting. 

Yes, the cast of The Sun Also Rises drink a great deal in Pamplona, but then so did the Spanish townsfolk and others attending the festival who were presumably not part of a ‘lost generation in despair’. 

Yes, one of them — Brett Ashley — was easy with her favours and might by some be thought of as promiscuous (in the course of the novel she had three lovers: Robert Cohn, the young bullfighter Romero and, presumably, her fiancé Mike Campbell). But to assume prima facie that she slept around because she was in despair over the state of the world, her and others’ lives and future of here generation is simply not warranted by the text of the novel.

Bill Gorton is, in fact, remorselessly cheerful, and Robert Cohn essentially nothing but a spoiled rich kid mooning like a love-struck adolescent for the woman who has rejected him. Mike Campbell, the only character apart from Jake Barnes who had fought in the war might qualify as a member of the ‘lost generation in despair’, but although the war is briefly mentioned, nothing Campbell says or does in the novel would remotely lead to that conclusion.

Unusually, the alleged despair of a ‘lost generation’, one of the supposedly central themes of The Sun Also Rises, did not even register for a year or two, and it is difficult to establish just when that interpretation gained currency. In The Immediate Critical Reception of Ernest Hemingway, Frank L Ryan notes

No single factor was as illustrative of the failure of The Sun Also Rises to convince the critics that Hemingway was a great writer than its failure to convince them that it was the record of a generation and that its author was the spokesman for that generation.

This, written in 1980 and 19 years after Hemingway’s suicide, was not the hitherto standard narrative of the writer’s achievements and literary significance.