Don't Try This At Home: Hemingway's First Major Novel (The Sun Also Rises, Part 1)

In Part 1 of our discussion on Ernest Hemingway's The Sun Also Rises, we welcome editor Verna Kale to discuss a young Hemingway's life experience leading up to writing the novel, his captivation with bullfighting and insider knowledge, the distinction between fairytale and reality, and the lack of a moral of the story. 

Verna Kale is an Associate Research Professor of English at the Pennsylvania State University and Associate Editor of the Hemingway Letters Project. She is the author of a biography of Hemingway, Ernest Hemingway, part of the Critical Lives series; editor of Teaching Hemingway and Gender; and co-editor, with Sandra Spanier and Miriam B. Mandel, of The Letters of Ernest Hemingway: Volume 6 (1934–1936).

To learn more or purchase a copy of the Norton Library edition of The Sun Also Rises, go to https://wwnorton.com/books/9781324045717.

Learn more about the Norton Library series at https://wwnorton.com/norton-library.

Have questions or suggestions for the podcast? Email us at nortonlibrary@wwnorton.com or find us on Twitter at @TNL_WWN and Bluesky at @nortonlibrary.bsky.social. 

Transcript

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[Mark:] You are listening to the Norton Library podcast, where we explore classic works of literature and philosophy with the leading Scholars of the Norton Library, a new series from ww Norton that introduces influential texts to a new generation of readers. I'm your host, Mark Cirino, with Michael Von Cannon producing. Today we present the first of our two episodes devoted to Ernest Heming’s great novel, The Sun Also Rises, as we interview its editor, Verna Kale. In part one, we discuss Hemingway's life and how it led to his writing this novel, its composition, its plot, and themes, and the unforgettable characters that go from Paris to Pamplona. Verna also chooses a letter from Hemingway's vast correspondence that illuminates this work. Verna kale is an Associate Research professor of English at Penn State University and Associate Editor of the Hemingway Letters Project. She has written a biography of Hemingway, has edited the book Teaching Hemingway and Gender, and co-edited volume six of the Letters of Ernest Hemingway. We are so pleased she could join us today. Verna Kale, welcome to the Norton Library podcast.

[Verna Kale:] Hi Mark, thanks for having me.

[Mark:] It's so good to see you and we're really looking forward to talking with you about your Norton Library edition of Ernest Hemingway’s The Sun Also Rises. Why don't we start by talking about Hemingway himself? He's such a colossal figure in popular culture, what do we sort of need to know about Hemingway as we approach The Sun Also Rises?

[Verna Kale:] I think it's important to realize that he was pretty young when he wrote this book, um he was in his early 20s and he had you know just recently moved to Paris, he was part of that expatriate literary scene and so he was in a lot of ways writing out of his own personal experience of that place and time of living in Paris of the 1920s and the the bull fights in Pamplona, which you know at the time he was writing weren't that famous. He kind of helped make them famous.

[Mark:] Well, Verna let's back up a little bit. How did Hemingway get to Paris and find his way to Paris? What was his childhood like? Where did he come from? 

[Verna Kale:] Um, so Ernest Heming way is an American writer. He was born in Oak Park Illinois, and he grew up with a fairly um, typical Midwestern childhood. He went off to Kansas City um, and worked as a journalist and then he went to World War I. He wasn't able to enlist in the Army because of his eyesight, but he signed on as an ambulance driver with the Red Cross and so um, he was stationed in Italy and during that time he was wounded and uh that was you know a very eye-opening experience for him, so he, he comes back to the United States, temporarily, and then you know he decides he's go for it. He wants to become a writer and the place to become a writer he figures isn't Chicago, but rather Paris. Paris is the place to be for a would-be writer and so he joins that expatriate scene of the early 1920s and he goes and he lives in Paris, France and he starts building a name for himself as a writer of short stories and vignettes and The Sun Also Rises was his first major novel that that he finished and um that's really the one that we we think of as really jump starting his career as a famous American novelist. 

[Mark:] So, The Sun Also Rises comes fairly early in his career and even fairly early in his life, does the plot and do the themes of The Sun Also Rises refer to his autobiography? Is it his -- is it an autobiographical novel, would you say? 

[Verna Kale:] He modeled a little bit of the plot and a lot of the scenery after his own real-life experiences at the fiesta in Pamplona, Spain and a lot of the cafe scenes early in the novel, in Paris are also modeled after real places and and even some of the people that he knew in Paris during that time. So, a lot of it is autobiographical, and I think that that's um that's fairly common for a young writer, you write what you know, and this was his first major uh book length work and so yeah, he he drew upon some of the real scenes and and people from that time period in his life. He first went to see a bull fight in 1923, and he really loved it, and then the next year 1924 he went back to Spain and brought some friends and loved it even more, and that was really kind of an idyllic time for him. And then 1925 is the year that he goes back with different friends, and that's when there was some tension in the friend group and a lot of that real life tension um kind of gets reimagined in the plot of The Sun Also Rises.

[Mark:] What do you think he liked about the bull fighting so much? What did he respond to? He's so associated with bull fights. Did he ever explain what it was about that activity?

[Verna Kale:] Well it definitely captivated him from the very beginning and I think, probably it had to do with the ritual of it and also uh Hemingway was crazy about having Insider knowledge into something and there's just something very mysterious about uh the bull fight that he he just felt this emotional connection to and he could learn a lot about it, he could learn the names of the um the bull fighters, he could learn their histories, he could look at the different types of bulls, and um you know form an opinion about how they were going to react in the ring, and uh the different techniques that they used to to um fight the bulls, and I think that this kind of specialized knowledge really appealed to him. Also, there was a certain amount of courage involved, and you know, Hemingway is well known for writing about people having personal courage and that connection between the Matador and the bull I think really appealed to him in a lot of ways.

[Mark:] You mentioned that part of the material for The Sun Also Rises was the sort of tense, network of relationships that made up the 1925 trip to Pamplona. Can you say a little bit more about that? Who were some of the people involved and what was so tense about it?

[Verna Kale:] So I I don't want to try and and match the characters one to one to the people in Hemingway's life, partly because um these days you know the the people I would mention are are no longer really famous except for having been there with Hemingway, they're famous because it kind of got written into his novel. Um, but you know there uh there was a a little bit of a love triangle happening between Hemingway and um a posh English woman, that he was very attracted to, uh she was in their friend group and there was that kind of uh tension between them and another member of their friend group who was there a a writer, a Jewish writer, um named Harold Lobe. Some of that kind of boils over in the manuscript, uh you can kind of see it when Hemingway was drafting the novel, sometimes people's real names would kind of creep in, so instead of writing “Jake,” in the earliest drafts of the novel, he would actually write hem, HEM, you know short for his own name, and instead of “Brett,” he would write Duff, which was the name of the woman he was kind of, you know, lusting after. I don't think that that relationship was ever consummated, but for different reasons than than Jake and Brett weren't consummated, but um you also have to to consider though that uh a lot of it is fiction Hemingway's real life wife was with them on this trip so, um it wasn't quite uh exactly like in The Sun Also Rises but, you know they definitely were a group with some conflict, and some hard feelings, and it was just a you know a difficult passionate trip, and it it gave him the raw material he needed. 

[Mark:] I'm glad you mentioned the manuscript because for some reason it seems like it's hard to talk about The Sun Also Rises, without talking about the writing of The Sun Also Rises, like the manuscript or the drafting of the novel has taken on legendary status where you wouldn't really talk about other novels in quite this way. What was it about the manuscript? What was, what do we know, what do we learn about his craft and how he visualized the book by looking at the drafts that he discarded?

[Verna Kale:} It's amazing to me to think about what it was would have been like to be around Hemingway when he was drafting this novel because my impression is they had this crazy summer, and he starts writing this book and he just pours it out by hand into these little um notebooks; the kind of notebooks that French school children would have taken to class, and he's just scribbling out this novel um at a pace that was not not the pace that he wrote his other novels at. Like later, you know 500 Words a day would be a good day for him -- this is just non-stop writing for about six weeks, he just dumps it in so he had been at the um Fiesta in Pamplona and then um, he and his wife moved on to other parts of Spain. Um, so they're still on vacation while he's writing this book and you know he's in Madrid, he's in Valencia, and every day he's just like pouring it into the notebooks and um he does go back and do some rewriting but, I get the impression that this book just kind of poured whole out of his head into these notebooks, which is amazing to think about the burst of creativity involved in in doing something like that. 

[Mark:] So what is the biggest difference between the The Sun Also Rises as we read it, and the novel as it was initially composed?

[Verna Kale:] Um, some of the uh um the thinking about the characters went into the first draft and so you know when you're um, when you're working on a story as a as a creative writer, a lot of times you will do like character sketches and you'll kind of get to know your characters and then you write the story about those characters. Um, the first draft of the novel kind of had some of that character sketch in it as the draft, like some of Brett's backstory makes it into the first chapter um. Also, uh there's a little bit more commentary, like meta commentary, from the narrator that gets cut out in the later drafts where it's it's just very meta, it's like Jake talks to the to the reader as if he's aware that they're reading a novel and there's a little bit of that in the final polished version but a lot of that gets cut out from the early draft.

[Mark:] Verna, I know that you are active as an editor of the Hemingway Letters Project -- which is currently in the process of publishing every letter that Hemingway ever wrote and there are many many letters -- in your work with that project, is there a letter that also provides insight into Hemingway's process or into his thoughts about The Sun Also Rises that might help us as we approach this novel?

[Verna Kale:] Yeah, it's actually really interesting to read um volume two of the letters because, uh you do get to see him writing to various people about his work in progress, sometimes he mentions word counts things like that, um but what's really most interesting to me um are the letters to his parents when - because we kind of forget how young he was and he's actually still communicating with his parents and sending them letters about the work in progress as well and, it's interesting to see the different perspective that he offers to um his mom versus the perspectives that he would offer to like a fellow writer. There are two letters actually that I think are a really wonderful contrast that kind of show not just the different um personas that Hemingway had as a person and as a professional, um but also some of the ways that the novel fictionalizes the real life situation and, so there there's this letter from uh Hemingway to his mother in 1924 when he writes about um going to the uh to the village of Burguete, that's the the fishing village that makes up the middle part of the novel where um Jake and Bill go and they have this relaxing time in the mountains and he just he writes to his mom, this is a wonderful little town in the Old Kingdom of Nar only two kilometers from Roso which you probably remember from the shanan de Roland it's wonderful High green rolling country uh so and the um the trees are so old they look like illustrations in fairy tale books, trout streams flow in all the valleys and we've had good fishing and he just paints this wonderful picture of um that beautiful area. Then uh the next year, when he's writing to Ezra Pound, he's telling him this is another letter from Burguete same town, um 1925, this is the year that the book is set in and and the year that Hemingway ends up writing um the book. He writes to Ezra pound whose a, you know a famous poet, he says came here to find the fishing absolutely destroyed. Big Logging company cleaned out pools, um run logs down, killed off the trout, last decent fishing left in Europe. To me that contrast between the fairy tale idilic world and then what happens when the logging companies come in and they destroy it that's that's kind of interesting to me, and that doesn't really make it into the novel. And so, um I guess that's that's where the letter is really surprising; that the beautiful part of this idol, this fishing Idol in the middle of the novel, that's fiction. So you know, some of the the stuff is non-fiction, but then a lot of it is uh is this fiction and you get a sense that Hemingway really saw this part of Spain as being like a fairy tale, it really kept activated him and so these these two letters are kind of a a neat contrast to to show his mind at work.

[Mark:] Yeah, and it's amazing that all that happened to that land that he loved so much in just one year - that it went from paradise to this uh terrible place, that he didn't enjoy anymore. That's such a, what a fascinating combination. When we think about The Sun Also Rises, we can look back a hundred years ago and we see this as this legendary American novel -- Is that how it was viewed upon publication? Was it an instant sensation and did it make his reputation in 1926?

[Verna Kale:] In some ways it did, but a lot of that happened in sort of this insider uh group of, you know the Literati of Paris in the 1920s, um you know Hemingway was part of this scene that was producing the little magazines, um very artistic modernist uh short stories and poetry and things like that, so he had a reputation among that group, um and there was enough buzz about him that it reached the New York Publishers even before The Sun Also Rises was published, the person who would become his his future editor Maxwell Perkins at Scribners had heard of Hemingway from Fitz, from F. Scott Fitzgerald and kind of knew him by name, knew that he was a rising talent, didn't really um know much about his writing because it was being published in these tiny little magazines with a small circulation in Paris. So, he was kind of known by reputation to people who were in “the know” and so Scribners accepted the novel, sight unseen, and then they published it and um you know they're a major New York publisher, so he did get um a wider circulation when that book came out. But you know it wasn't a huge bestseller, it it sold something like 9,000 copies, which is good but that's not tremendous you know compared to you know other popular fiction, but it was the kind of thing that if you were um if you were in the know, you heard about it, and it did attract a lot of atten- like a lot of critical attention, there were reviews of it and so it it did help to start that reputation. I think that Hemingway is a household name um, that came a little bit later after you know the bestseller um Farewell to Arms and when he becomes you know um a regular contributor to Esquire magazine in the in the early 30s that's when he really became a household name. Um but, yeah it did it did help cement his reputation and it also very importantly kind of moved him out of that artsy crowd and into the mainstream crowd, and that was something that he wanted.

[Mark:] One of the accusations about The Sun Also Rises, I think it was even an accusation at the time, is some of the material that Hemingway chooses as as topics for his novel, like you hear that all they do is sit around and drink. Is that a valid charge or as the editor of The Sun Also Rises, are you here to refute that charge?

[Verna Kale:] There really is an astonishing amount of alcohol consumed in the course of that novel and I always like tell my students, I'm just like do not attempt this, like this is the amount of partying that happens in this novel is is truly astonishing, very bad for your physical and mental health. Um and you know the the people were also sleeping together outside a marriage and, and you know the subject matter was kind of shocking for people in his day and, there was kind of an expectation of novels that Hemingway kind of helped subvert honestly, that um a novel should have a moral, it should have some sort of edifying theme to it, and the theme of this novel in a lot of ways is that don't expect a moral, don't expect an edifying theme, you're not going to get it. Um, we have to make our own meaning because things are kind of meaningless, um that was the perspective that he brought and people picked up on that and either specifically um criticized it for all the drinking and the the loose morals, or they were just like these people just party all the time, there's there's no real point to this novel and a lot of people did criticize it for that. In in fact Hemingway's own parents, I I believe the exact word his parents used was that it was filth, so you know he uh he shocked a lot of people and surprised a lot of people with this novel but of course, if you write a book like that, people are gonna also love it and um, I think it uh definitely inspired a lot of imitators, in terms of literary style, subject matter, and also people just wanting to go um to Europe and to to live this seemingly carefree fun, fun life and and I definitely don't think that that was the point -- that you should go and imitate um Jake Barnes and crew.

[Mark:] Was there something about, it being after the war and many of Hemingway's characters are also out postwar as he is himself, is he making a comment about alcohol and, you're saying partying, and travel and all that -- Is that is he taking it maybe more seriously, than some of his critics are accusing him of? Is that possible?

[Verna Kale:] Oh absolutely, um he's you know, he's writing about the the kind of disillusion that people felt in the wake of World War I um and you see that early on in the novel when he goes to dinner with the the sex worker Georgette, and they they're talking about the war and how people are sick, or they're injured, um and uh no one wants to talk about it and you kind of get the impression that Jake is not the only one who is kind of drowning his memories um in in drink or in other ways to kind of escape thinking about the war um. And also, you know we have to think of it in its uh historical context in terms of alcohol. In the United States at the time, there was prohibition, which was made the sale of alcohol illegal, so in the United States um the uh you could drink alcohol at home I guess if you made it yourself, but you you couldn't go to bars um and drink, but in in France you could. And so that was actually one of the many draws, that's one of the reasons there was such the a huge expatriate American scene in France at the time, is that um life was a lot less restrictive, so you could go to bars. The bending power there was um was a lot greater, and so it was possible for someone to work as a a journalist, as Hemingway did as as Jake Barnes did, and you know have enough money to just kind of live comfortably and have a little bit more freedom.

[Mark:] Verna, I've also heard the accusation that The Sun Also Rises is essentially plotless, it might be entertaining, but it doesn't really have a clear narrative. Is that true?

[Verna Kale:] I don't think that's true, um you know we uh, we go into that novel we meet the characters, we start to care about them, they go places, uh things happen to them, there's you know there's a conflict, there's rising action, there's falling action, it's uh in some ways uh, an in you know internal conflict, it's not just the arguments in the friend group, there's also you know Jake Barn's struggle with himself to kind of Master his feelings for Brett. But I I wouldn't call it plotless, and I think that the students really enjoy reading this novel and they get they get really invested in it, they care about the characters, um and I don't think that uh students would agree to read the whole thing if it were plotless. And this is um a great book because it's it's one that the students really do enjoy doing the reading, and in fact sometimes I have to tell them like, “Oh we're we're not going to talk about that yet” you know, they they read ahead and they want to um, they want to see what happens next and I don't think that would happen in a book with no plot.

[Mark:] What kind of a hero or protagonist is Jake Barnes?

[Verna Kale:] He's kind of a mystery because he he struggles with an injury that he sustained in World War I and that is not mentioned very specifically until later in the novel, and so there there's something that he um, there's something bothering him early in the book and as you read you um, it kind of becomes clearer what that is -- the the nature of the injury that he has sustained, but this has affected him and his interactions with other characters. He's tried to make a life for himself that he can get along in, despite his injury and so part of that is just keeping a nice, orderly life um, he enjoys going out, he enjoys meeting friends, he enjoys playing tennis, and as long as he can do those things he's okay but, when he's around Brett, who's you know kind of the love of his life, these old hurts open up again and he you know he can't be with her and, that causes him a lot of pain. And so a lot of the the novel is um, you know seeing him try to reconcile, how do you live um in the world when uh you know something has happened to you, how do you um how do you go on? And um I think a a lot of people can can kind of relate to, that like you know his his attempt to uh navigate the world despite the the difficulties that that he's facing.

[Mark:] You mentioned Brett Ashley, what about her? What is so great about her? What does Jake love about her?

[Verna Kale:] She's one of those people that commands attention when she walks in the room, um she's described as being um very curvy, but with a masculine slicked back haircut, very ahead of trends. Like there's a a line about how she started that trend of you know, wearing your hair in a in a masculine way, um people are drawn to her, men are drawn to her, and she's uh she just seems like a very dynamic person, but she's also like Jake. She's she's also damaged in um, important ways and that also goes back to the um to the war and some of the things that she experienced as um, she was part of the volunteer Aid Detachment, so she worked as basically -- a not a nurse -- but as a a volunteer who would have helped the nurses treat the wounded, she was also married to someone previously who um probably suffered from PTSD, and had threatened her with domestic violence, so she hasn't had an easy past. And that's the one thing I do want to uh make sure that students understand when they read this book, is that they don't, sometimes they'll dislike her because they think that she's um using people or that she doesn't care, and I kind of want to remind them to pay close attention to the way that Jake describes her backstory so that you kind of understand why she's doing the things that that she does; she's coping in her own way with you know, drinking too hard and and having these love affairs, um if you're sympathetic to Jake you kind of get mad at Brett for breaking his heart, but at the same time I think that a lot of people read her as an independent woman who you know, why should why should Jake be allowed to boss her around? Or or Robert or any of these people? Like why can't she do what she wants to do and and they actually really respond to that.

[Mark:] In all of Jake's travels in Paris and then Spain we meet so many different characters, is there a minor character, a bit character, that Hemingway might have sketched for just uh temporarily that sticks out to you that you might want to talk about for a little bit?

[Verna Kale:] There are a lot of really interesting minor characters in this book, uh my students always really love Bill, uh the friend and the banter that that he and Jake have together. Bill just seems like kind of a um a happy go-lucky guy and people respond to that um, and then there are these like kind of even more minor, minor characters -- the the um the colorful characters that kind of populate the scenes early in the novel in Paris um, for example, the owner of the nightclub, then there's Count Mippipopoulos, who is this soldier of fortune, he's got these arrow wounds in his chest, he's um kind of an interesting guy. Even more minor than that, like the minor, minor, minor characters uh, you've got the drummer in the nightclub scene where Brett, you know, smiles at the drummer and it's clear that like she's friends with him, well who is that guy? And and I've I've read some compelling arguments that suggest that he's modeled after a real life um uh guy named Eugene Jack Bullard, who was a the first African-American combat pilot, a guy who had worked as a boxer, and an Entertainer, and um was in the French Air Force, and in the resistance later in World War II and it's sort of like this really interesting guy. He just shows up like a brief moment in the nightclub scene and so there's like all of these, you know rich layers, even the the minor characters, you could you could write notes about them. I wanted to write notes about all of them, but I had to keep the the endnotes strictly to the necessary information.

[Mark:] Verna Kale, thank you so much for joining us on the Norton Library podcast to discuss Ernest Hemingway’s The Sun Also Rises. Thanks Verna.

[Verna Kale:] Thank you, Mark.

{Mark:] The Norton Library edition of The Sun Also Rises by Ernest Hemingway, edited by Verna kale is available now in paperback and ebook. Check out the links in the description to this episode for ordering options and more information about the Norton Library, including the full catalog of titles.

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