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

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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.

IN 1922, F. Scott Fitzgerald (right) published his second novel, The Beautiful And The Damned, and shortly afterwards his collection of short stories, Tales From The Jazz Age. His heroes and heroines were also in rebellion against their parents’ generation: they were flighty, unconventional, frivolous, thumbed their noses at acceptable behaviour, embraced sexual freedoms and generally upset older folk.

In America’s cities, many of the young were quick to follow a new fashion and emulated the lifestyle of Fitzgerald’s hedonists — although up to a point. And one wonders just how much such emulation took place in the small towns in the backwaters of the United States, a country in which the population of the cities was only just beginning to outstrip that of its rural areas.

Four years later came Hemingway’s novel The Sun Also Rises, and young folk were presented with a new fashion to embrace: out went light-headed Jazz Age frivolity and hedonism, and in came hard-drinking cynicism. As Carlos Bakers puts it in his biography of Hemingway

Malcolm [Cowley] discovered that winter [of 1926 when The Sun Also Rises was published] that Hemingway’s ‘influence’ was spreading far beyond the circle of those who had known him in Paris. Girls from Smith College, coming to New York, ‘were modelling themselves after Lady Brett . . . Hundreds of bright young men from the Middle West were trying to be Hemingway heroes, talking in tough understatements from the on the side of their mouths’.

Note, though, that although Cowley came across young folk emulating Hemingway’s protagonists, he did not report meeting any who were ‘in despair’. The real despair came three years later after the Wall Street crash and the subsequent Great Depression which saw one in four of the men and women out of work. The illegal drinking and hard-edged cynicism were nothing more than a fashion — there was no intellectual or existentialist dimension to their behaviour; and if there was, no one noticed.

. . .

Quite telling is Hemingway’s possible, or even probable, motivation for writing The Sun Also Rises. It was anything but the work of a pure artist whose sole concern was for ‘his art’ and to whom everything else was irrelevant (one of the images Hemingway put about).

We know that the young Hemingway was desperate to have a literary career, and he knew that the recent publication of his first volume of short stories was not sufficient to start one: he had to write and publish a successful novel, but, to be frank, he had few ideas for one.

Conscious of that imperative he had, just a month before he and his wife Hadley had set out for Pamplona at the beginning of July 1925, started on a novel. He had called it Along With Youth, but work petered out after he has written just 27 manuscript pages.

Then his trip to Pamplona in 1925 and the drunken disharmony among his group presented him with ‘a plot’, and he immediately set about getting it down on paper. That ‘plot’ changed shape at least twice, and despite Hemingway’s claim several years later in a letter to Maxwell Perkins, his editor at Scribner’s, that

95 per cent of The Sun Also [Rises] was pure imagination. I took real people in that one and I controlled what they did. I made it all up

the author Donald Ogden-Stewart (left) who was along on the 1925 trip was bemused when he read the novel. According to one Hemingway biographer, Carlos Baker

Don Stewart was mildly amused at [sic] the caricature of himself in the figure of Bill Gorton. He recognised a few of his own quips in the talk between Bill and Jake, but the whole book struck him as a little more than a very clever reportorial tour de force.

 Although Hemingway had completed the first draft of The Sun Also Rises in nine weeks, it certainly did not resemble the novel that was eventually published. Comparisons between the different drafts now stored in the Hemingway Archives of Boston’s John F Kennedy Library show that the novel it became did not take shape until the work was extensively revised.

In letters to friends Hemingway variously and at different times described his novel in progress — or, better, drafts of it — as ‘tragic’ and ‘funny’.

Its focus also continually changed. It began life as a story about a Spanish bullfighter, then Duff Twysden — the characters all retained their real names in the first drafts — became the central character; she, in turn, made way for Jake Barnes (pretty much Hemingway’s idealised alter ego) to take centre stage.

Hemingway preferred method of composition was to sit down and write on spec to see where his story would take him, and he didn’t draft an outline until he had written several thousand words. Thus what began as a short story, then became a long story became a novel when it dawned on Hemingway that he might finally be able to produce the work he knew he needed to consolidate his writing career

. . .

On a trip to Chartres on his own towards the end of September within days of completing his first draft of The Sun Also Rises, Hemingway had considered various titles for his new novel. He also cast about for ways to give it a bit more intellectual clout — he wanted to make his name as the writer of ‘serious’ literature and had previously announced his ambition that the work should appeal both to ‘highbrows and lowbrows’. First, he wrote a brief foreword, given here in full (including Hemingway’s deletions):

One day last summer Gertrude Stein stopped in a garage in a small town in the Department of Ain to a have a valve fixed in her Ford car. The young mechanic who fixed it was very good and quick and skillful. There were three other mechanics all about the same age in the garage. ‘Where do you get the boys to work like this?’ Miss Stein asked the owner of the garage. ‘I thought you couldn’t get boys to work any more.’ ‘Oh yes,’ the garage owner said. ‘You can get very good boys now. I’ve taken all these and trained them myself. It is the ones between twenty-two and thirty that are no good. C’est un generation perdu. No one wants them. They are no good. They were spoiled. The young ones, the new ones are all right again.’ ‘But what becomes of the others?’ ‘Nothing. They know they are no good. C’est un generation perdu. A little hard on them,’ he added. I did not hear this story until after I had written this book. I had thought of calling it Fiesta but did not want to use a foreign word. Perdu loses a little something by being translated into lost. There is something much more final about perdu. There is only this to say that this generation that is lost has nothing to do with any Younger Generation about whose outcome much literary speculation occurred in past times. This is not a question of what kind of mothers will flappers make or where is bobbed hair leading us. This is about something that is already finished. For whatever is going to happen to the generation of which I am a part has already happened. There will be more entanglements, there will be more complications, there will be successes and failures. There may be other wars. A few will learn to live perhaps one or two may learn to write or paint. But the things that are given to people to happen to them have already happened. There will be many new salvations brought forward. My generation in France for example in two years sought salvation in first the Catholic church, 2nd communism Dadaism, third the movies, fourth Royalism, fifth the Catholic church again. There may be another and better war. But none of it will matter particularly to this generation because to them the things that are given to people to happen have already happened.

Perhaps at a pinch, this foreword might be interpreted as evidence that Hemingway’s novel portrayed ‘a generation in despair’ or at least a generation which was ‘lost’, and substantiate the claim that he had intended it to do so from the outset. But that would be difficult to do.

For one thing, that explanation does not square with what we know of the novel’s genesis — first it was to be a short story, then a longer story, and finally it became (once the first 3,600 words had been binned as irrelevant as Scott Fitzgerald advised) the novel as published.

Admittedly, the ‘lost generation’ theme need not necessarily have been present in the novel’s early drafts, and as Hemingway revised the novel, after hearing the anecdote from Gertrude Stein, a great deal of re-shaping and re-writing might have taken place. It could plausibly be claimed that in revising his novel Hemingway had realised it could portray a ‘lost generation’ in despair and reshaped it accordingly.

Yet notably Hemingway doesn’t explain why this ‘lost generation’ should be assumed to be ‘in despair’ about life (and Stein’s garage owner says nothing on the matter). Nor is it obvious why being called a ‘lost generation’ — as he and his peers were described by Stein — is intrinsically more profound and tragic than, say, their parents’ generation calling the Sixties ‘hippies’ ‘long-haired layabouts’.

As for a younger generation being ‘in despair’, the manuscript drafts stored at the JFK Library in Boston demonstrate that widespread revision did take place but in a sense those revisions are irrelevant: we can only proceed on the basis of the novel as it was and continues to be published.

And, as pointed out above, a reading that The Sun Also Rises shows us a ‘lost generation’ set of characters ‘in despair’ is simply not substantiated by the text. More to the point that reading wilfully strays rather too close to bending the facts to justify a conclusion we want to reach: that A Sun Also Rises is a portrayal of a ‘lost generation’ in despair.

. . .

From what we know of Hemingway, he was a forceful, ambitious — and occasionally quite ruthless — young man, a self-promoter who was said to have had a gained a literary reputation before he had published a word. As John Raeburn demonstrates in his book Fame Became Him, Hemingway had a knack of establishing himself, and being accepted as, an expert and authority in many areas simply by telling those around him that he was one.

Hemingway was also what we would now call a gifted ‘networker’ who, according to Fitzgerald, ‘would always give a helping hand to a man on a ledge a little higher up’. He always had his eye on the main chance, and it is not implausible — and, I suggest, far more likely — that his foreword was a simple calculation: he wanted to give his novel the intellectual clout and stature he believed it needed to be accepted as ‘serious’ literature.

Whatever it’s purpose, though, it is not clear what Hemingway was trying to say in that foreword. It is bitty, incomplete and confusing, and like much that confuses, it seems he had not sufficiently thought it through. He says, ‘[his] generation’ had ‘sought salvation’

first in the Catholic church, then communism Dadaism [sic], third the movies, fourth Royalism, fifth the Catholic church again.

But from what were his generation seeking salvation? It would be useful to know and would rescue the claim that he and his peers were ‘in despair’ as many now insist. But Hemingway simply doesn’t specify or elucidate.

Then there is the curious line that there might be ‘another and a better war’? What on earth might a ‘better’ war be? Who knows. It really is a curious line to take. As for the suggestion that

none of it will matter particularly to this generation because to them the things that are given to people to happen have already happened

what at first might vaguely sound profound becomes, on just a little analysis, something close to fifth-form [US 10th grade] gobbledegook. Perhaps Hemingway eventually realised that his foreword wouldn’t achieve a great deal, which is why he discarded it.

In his foreword, though, Hemingway at least links that mooted ‘lost generation’ to a war, the Great War (as it was then known). But the obvious question is: who had greater reason to be ‘in despair’ as a result of that war as Hemingway interpreters claim his ‘lost generation’ was? Would it be one of the 23 million casualties who survived the conflict though without a limb or two, perhaps suffering from debilitating poor mental health, or having lost a father, brothers and sons in the conflict? Those who returned to a soulless existence of being employed in a menial job or who could not even work? Or would it be the people identified by Johns Dos Passos

summer tourists getting drunk and making fools of themselves at a picturesque Iberian folk-festival?

What about Jake Barnes, you ask, who lost his prick in the war? Surely he had good reason to be in despair? Well, yes, he did and he was: he cried at night, suffered because others though his wound was akin to a joke and could not physically express the love he felt for Brett Ashley.

But the ‘lost generation’ interpretation of The Sun Also Rises is not about Jake Barnes and his predicament. Others in his group — the successful novelist Bill Gorton, the very wealthy Jew Robert Cohn, the rather self-centred femme fatale Brett Ashley and the drunken bankrupt Mike Campbell — are not in despair, or not in the way those who champion Hemingway would have us accept. Robert Cohn’s possible ‘despair’ is simply that Brett Ashley had first taken him into her bed and had then discarded him.

Mike Campbell’s despair, presumably, is about the fact that he is always short of money. Bill Gorton simply isn’t in despair. Brett Ashley might be said to be in ‘despair’ because the man she professes to love can’t perform with her. Compared to those 23 million casualties of the war the ‘despair’ of this group is somewhat small beer.

A Hemingway aficionado could still insist that foreword composed in Chartres does make sense and is evidence that ‘the despair of a lost generation’ was the central theme of Hemingway’s novel, but to accept that claim we are obliged to indulge in a great deal of intellectual origami. We would instead be advised to heed the wise advice of William of Ockham, summed up in his Principle (or Law) of Parsimony (generally known as Ockham’s Razor) that

The explanation requiring the fewest assumptions is most likely to be correct.

The problem with much exegesis of Hemingway’s work by literary scholars, students, academics and critics is that they tie themselves in knots interpreting Hemingway’s work on the assumption that his stories must have deeper significance simply because ‘he’s one of America’s greatest writers’. As circular arguments go it’s a good one: ‘Hemingway is a great writer because he wrote this’ and ‘this is great literature because it was written by Hemingway’.

. . .

After Hemingway discarded his foreword, he opted instead simply to use the two epigraphs which now precede the novel. The first was the remark Gertrude Stein had recently made: ‘You are all a lost generation’. The second was a biblical quotation, Ecclesiastes 1: 4-7. That one of which runs (there are various versions)

Generations come and generations go,
but the earth remains forever.
The sun rises and the sun sets,
and hurries back to where it rises.
 The wind blows to the south
and turns to the north;


round and round it goes,
ever returning on its course.
All streams flow into the sea,
yet the sea is never full.


To the place the streams come from,
there they return again.

This is arguably an odd choice. Whereas Stein’s remark might — though vaguely — sound pessimistic in keeping with a novel purporting to portray a generation in despair, the quote Hemingway uses from Ecclesiastes is reasonably upbeat and somewhat at odds with Stein’s comment. It might well be paraphrased by Scarlett O’Hara’s line in Gone With The Wind

After all, tomorrow is another day

and you wonder whether Hemingway realised the intrinsic optimism of the quote he chose. What makes it more puzzling is that perhaps verses 1-3 of Ecclesiastes immediately preceding the quotation chosen might well have been more appropriate to the mood of a group of people ‘in despair’

‘Meaningless! Meaningless!’
says the Teacher.


‘Utterly meaningless!
Everything is meaningless.’
What do people gain from all their labors


at which they toil under the sun?

Those lines would be far more useful to sum up the mood of a ‘lost generation’ in despair, and Hemingway will surely have read them when he went looking for a significant quotation to use as an epigraph.