The Sun Also Rises is 100! Here is How This Novel is Still Impacting America

 Frank Miniter (left) and Juan Macho and the Hemingway statue in Pamplona, Spain.

Ernest Hemingway’s The Sun Also Rises was first published on October 22, 1926—yes, it is 100. To the uninitiated, this novel on a group of ex-pats caught in the throes of the Lost Generation who decide to go from Paris to Pamplona feels lofty, dated, and perhaps even unfashionably masculine.

Many of the educated among today’s Millenials and Generation Z, if asked, might say that Hemingway’s prose changed American literature, as that is what all the introductions to his works say, but then they’d shrug.

Hemingway, after all, has largely been cancelled by academics. His explorations of manliness and his women characters, especially Lady Brett Ashley from The Sun Also Rises, do not conform with the tenets of postmodernism, let alone modern feminism.

The novel, nevertheless, is still an easy read. Its prose is luridly simple. It has been accused of being dressed-up travel journalism—it was, after all, based on a true escapade that Hemingway fictionalized. But under its flowing narrative of words painted with the simplicity, as Hemingway desired, of Paul Cezanne landscapes, are the depths of the iceberg that keeps drawing people beneath its words and thereby impacting more than just American literature.

I began to understand this when, before I followed the Hemingway trail from Paris to Pamplona with a group of Americans who all had their own reasons for falling under the Hemingway spell, I went to interview the author of Reading Hemingway’s The Sun Also Rises, the now late poet and professor H.R. “Stoney” Stoneback.

His redbrick nineteenth-century home had brick walls around it and a lovely garden between old trees. The home was hidden in the forested edge of a small Hudson Valley town.

Over a bottle of wine, Stoney explained he was a man of the times, of the 1960s and 1970s, when he began lecturing, but that through investigation he found the truth about Hemingway and himself. He explained that while he was in Paris as a young professor, “After work I could walk down the Boulevard Raspail to meet a friend at the Dome and never once think of Hemingway. We would eat at Lipps, go up on the hill afterwards, do the clubs, or go to a bal-musette where neighborhood locals still danced to an ancient accordion player, and never once think of Hemingway. By the sheer force of cultural complicity, at least, I shared in the ill-informed condescension toward Hemingway that had become so fashionable in the 1960s.”

At the time he met the novelist James Jones in Paris, author of The Merry Month of May, and Jones looked him over and accused, “What are you kid? Another young American novelist looking for Hemingway’s ghost?”

Stoney said he was more interested in French writers like Baudelaire and St.-John Perse, but Jones didn’t believe him.

Whatever Jones thought, Stoney shrugged and forgot all about the accusation. He went to poetry readings at the Paris bookstore Shakespeare & Company—a bookstore Hemingway often borrowed books from. In 1920s Paris Shakespeare & Company was owned by Sylvia Beach and was then located at 12 Rue de l’Odéon. Hemingway was then young and poor. Beach gave him a card for her lending library and told him to pay when he could. Hemingway used the card voraciously to educate himself.

Now the iconic bookstore is located on the quay across from Notre Dame. While there for poetry readings in the early 1970s Stoney listened as an American youth with a monotone and feckless voice attacked Hemingway’s “phony machismo” and “woman hating,” but again Stoney didn’t ponder this for very long. He didn’t then know finding the truth about these claims would soon fill the bulk of his intellectual life.

Stoney’s eyes opened to another Paris, to Hemingway’s Paris, in 1974 when he happened upon a copy of The Sun Also Rises at Shakespeare & Company. Stoney was then in Paris as a visiting professor teaching a course on Faulkner at the University of Paris. He hadn’t read the novel in years and bought a copy to reacquaint himself. He said, “I read the novel in my Paris apartment. As I read, I looked out my window across the Rue Saint-Jacques to Val-de-Grace and Hemingway’s Paris came alive for me.”

He realized Hemingway had embedded the deus loci, the spirit of place, of Paris in him long before. He asked himself: “How can a casual reading of a novel years before implant the spirit of a place in me?” For answers he began walking the places Hemingway described as he explored the places Jake, the main character in The Sun Also Rises, did and found one puzzling incongruity, an oddity that would turn out to be a key to understanding the Hemingway man our society has misunderstood and all but slain.

He was puzzled by Hemingway’s description of the Rue Saint-Jacques, a street in the Latin Quarter of Paris that was a main axial road of medieval Paris. Hemingway described it as “the rigid north and south of the Rue Saint-Jacques.” But this street isn’t “rigid,” actually it’s a medieval street that bends. Why would such a master of detail get a street he knew well wrong? Stoney asked a Parisian friend who was a lover of history. His friend replied by asking, “Do you know of Saint-Jacques de Compostelle?” Stoney said he didn’t. His friend asked, “Do you know, then, Santiago de Compostela?” Stoney said he did. Santiago de Compostela is a church in Spain that is at the end of ancient Christian pilgrim routes known as the El Camino de Santiago (“Way of Saint James”). The ancient paths lead from France to the shrine of the apostle St. James the Great in the Cathedral of Santiago de Compostela in Galicia.

“More than a place, my friend. Come, walk with me,” said Stoney’s friend.

They walked along the Rue Saint-Jacques. His friend pointed out that Val-de-Grace was a well-known church, monastery, and a hospital used for the wounded in World War One. The additions, added to the street in the nineteenth century, are what seem rigid. Stoney could see this and said so, but there was more, much more. His friend explained that the place’s inclusion in the novel has a deep importance. This site was a religious step on the Way to St. James. There was even a hospice there for those traveling the holy path. The hospital for wounded soldiers was also important because Jake had a war wound that made him impotent. Stoney found that Hemingway had Jake symbolically following the path to heal his spirit, a journey to Spain he took every year. This was a journey Hemingway took many times while he lived in Paris. As someone who’d been wounded in World War I, Hemingway knew of these things and was affected by them. He used this in his writing as devices to give the novel its unseen depths that people sense but so often don’t completely comprehend.

Stoney was intrigued and started to dig. He found that even the name “Jake” marked Hemingway’s main character in The Sun Also Rises as a pilgrim, as the Liber Sancti Jacobi (also known as the “Codex Calixtinus”) is a twelfth-century anthology of background detail and advice for pilgrims following the Way of St. James. Also, in the Old Testament, Jacob wrestled with the angel all night. They wrested to a draw and the angel (described only as a “man”) touches Jacob in the “socket of his thigh,” hobbling him. The angel then tells him. “Your name shall no longer be Jacob, but Israel; for you have striven with God and with men and have prevailed.” Jacob then forever after had “the power with God and with men.” His life was then “preserved” and “the sun rose upon him.” Stoney found that Hemingway had given the character the name Jake with this biblical reference in mind. He discovered that Hemingway sent Jake on a holy pilgrimage to heal, not his wounded body, but his soul, and to help his companions do the same.

Though his novel was first titled Lost Generation and then Fiesta, Hemingway finally crafted the title The Sun Also Risesfrom biblical verses in Ecclesiastes: “One generation passeth away, and another generation cometh; but the earth abideth forever. The sun also ariseth, and the sun goeth down, and hasteth to the place where he arose.” He wanted to point the Lost Generation toward optimism—the sun doesn’t just set with war, it also rises afterward.

As the novel progresses Hemingway shows us through Jake, often by contrast to the character Robert Cohn, the codified behavior he lives by—the rules grounding and defining the Hemingway man. Stoney found that understanding that Jake was on a pilgrimage, and was acting as a guide to a group of wayward people caught in the meaningless drinking and promiscuity of the Lost Generation, is a key that opens a door to the unwritten code Hemingway was obsessed with.

During his search for answers in the wilderness of academia, Stoney said he had other literary evenings in Paris with French and American writers “in lavish penthouses off Etoile and private receptions for artists” and that he found that “in spite of their condescension to Hemingway as some kind of outré fisherman or gauche big-game hunter, bully, self-parotic monosyllabic mutterer, many were really trying to relive Hemingway’s Paris, trying too hard and doing it with infinitely less style, grace, intelligence, and discipline.”

He said he wasn’t at first sure what Hemingway’s overlooked and unfashionable Catholicism had to do with the code Hemingway was articulating through Jake in The Sun Also Rises and in so much of his other work, but that by degrees he began to see it as the key to understanding Hemingway.

With Stoneback’s insights in mind, I went with a group of wayward Americans to the cafes Hemingway loved. We were a group of four men and three women that would wax and wane as friends joined us and parted in Paris and along the Hemingway trail. At forty I was the youngest in the group. Most of them were members of the Hemingway Society and had followed the Hemingway trail from Paris to Pamplona many times.

Outside the Les Deux Magots, we stepped around three people playing jazz softly on the sidewalk and lingered with dozens of others. We talked about the harmony of the scene and someone noted that Hemingway, even as he loved Paris, didn’t embrace all these people. Hemingway had contempt for café trash. He called them the “weird lot” in a 1922 article titled “American Bohemians in Paris.” He wrote: “The scum of Greenwich Village, New York, has been skimmed off and deposited in large ladlesful on the section of Paris adjacent to the Café Rotunde. New scum, of course, has risen to take the place of the old, but the oldest scum, the thickest scum, and the scummiest scum has come across the ocean, somehow, and with its afternoon and evening levees has made the Rotunde the leading Latin quarter show place for tourists in search of atmosphere. It is a strange-acting and strange-looking breed that crowd the tables of the Café Rotunde. They have all striven so hard for careless individuality of clothing that they have achieved a sort of uniformity of eccentricity.”

So yes, Hemingway was a conservative even in his age, but seeing all this made it clear that his modern stereotype is empty, even dishonest. He liked guns and hunting and fishing, but he was far too well educated and traveled to be called a redneck. He read prodigiously and wrote elegant prose and loved a refined drink and collected fine art, but he also enjoyed a cowboy brawl. He divorced many times and was likely an alcoholic a good portion of his life, but he was a romantic who married and converted to Catholicism to improve himself. He went mad at the end and killed himself, but he lived life on the seas and in foreign countries and on battlefields and went on safaris and always seemed to be having a hell of a time. To deflate his persona from all this and much more to something that could be easily flushed, his detractors had to simplify and parody him.

Nevertheless, even the most gifted critic can’t talk away what’s real. Hemingway was complex, secretive, and deliberately fashioned his public persona. His critics aren’t the central reason he is often misunderstood today; he kicked up mystery around himself to fashion a certain tough-guy, man-of-the-world persona, and many are confused by that aura.

As for the “café trash,” the truth is that even as he mocked them, he also mingled with them and was drawn to those among them who weren’t imposters, to those who were really trying to be painters, writers, and other things. His friend and later biographer, A. E. Hotchner, noted that Hemingway preferred people who were boldly being what they seemed.

Hemingway also worked. As he did, he defended his privacy from those living false lives. When Hemingway lived in Paris, he sought out quiet cafés, such as the Place Saint-Michel, to write in, and he noted in the posthumously published A Moveable Feast how he loathed those who bothered him when he was working in a café. To Hemingway there was a code of conduct to how one behaved, even in the cafés. Not understanding the code was no excuse. Such a person must be taught to behave.

He became friends with Picasso and F. Scott Fitzgerald and many other painters and writers and at times relied on their generosity to pay his rent. After writing in a quiet café or in one of his apartments, Hemingway would go to the Le Dôme Café or Café de la Rotunda.

So, we went to Café de la Rotonde at the corner of Boulevard du Montparnasse and Boulevard Raspail. This was a place Picasso painted and where the painter Diego Rivera frequented, and also that Tsuguharu Foujita drew. We found the walls and ceilings were bright with gaudy colors twisting in rainbows of shapes from what trend in art none us could name. We ordered martinis and had to explain how to make them in our poor French and we smiled at the helpful but bemused conduct of the waiter. The café was crowded in the evening and well lighted by chandeliers and was full of decorative people.

Days later, we were in Pamplona waiting for the bulls to run, but that is not something Hemingway actually did. They would not let non-Spanish run in those days. Still, at each step, we experienced the mountainous depths beneath The Sun Also Rises. It affected us and, now at 100, it is shaping anyone who encounters this easy-to-read but deep novel.