Anyway, I picked up The Sun Also Rises again in anticipation of hanging out in Key West, Hemingway's old stomping grounds. The vacation didn't work out, but I'm happy to have had a reason to revisit the book--it's definitely one of those novels that clicks a little deeper with age.Hemingway's bunch of obnoxious, wasteful drinking buddies doesn't seem quite so glamorous anymore. It's clearer now how impotent they all are (not just poor Jake with his unnamed WWI casualty), and how hollow the relationships are. The main "love" relationship, Jake and Brett's codependent talkfest, has even less reality in it than Gatsby's infatuation with Daisy Buchanan. What's clearer to me now too is that Hemingway never took the crew seriously, either. They're a collection of "almosts." Almost a novelist, almost a real journalist, almost a Lady, almost a civilized group traveling in sophisticated circles.
But they're not without charm--and that's probably the best thing Hemingway does. He takes a deeply unlikeable group of people, and makes their petty squabbles and one night stands seem like Important Plot Points. And his attention to the machoness of Spain and bullfighting has been caricatured and become oversimplified--but what people seem to lose is how well he does it. Like so many male writers, he (or Jake, anyway) can't talk about sex directly...but the same sensuous care comes out in the details.
[Random Sun Also Rises note: my copy is a battered one I bought used at the UConn CoOp way back when. The previous owner wrote all over it. She or he starts off the first few pages with a few valid points about Jake Barnes's sexual issues. Then the comments get rarer, and rarer. Eventually, there's a tiny, final note in the bottom corner of a page: "I *heart* Chris." Ah, UConn. Turning out the great literary minds. There are also a few comments in my own handwriting that I don't remember making, proving that I wasn't always the book jotting prude that I seem to be these days.]
To follow up the novel, I went with the man himself. Or the Lillian Ross version, anyway, which is just as good to me. In the early 1950s, Ross befriended Hemingway and his wife, and ended up with Portrait of Hemingway, which ran as a (controversial) article in the New Yorker. Apparently people didn't like Ross's impressionistic presentation of the writer, including his odd personal habits and weird syntax. 1950s America might not have liked it much, but I did. So much of the Hemingway discussion today is filtered through the way he died (see also Plath, Sylvia). I'd much rather see the vaguely inappropriate portrait of a flawed man than the death mask of a tragic man. Hemingway was clearly kind of annoying, but also a gregarious and generous friend.The book (extremely short, since nothing is added from the magazine piece except a couple of brief intros/analyses from Ross) is also a reflection on Ross's unique journalistic ability. She seems to have the talent of being the kid sister and the authority figure at the same time--something that was evident even when I saw her a couple years ago (at a surprisingly spry eighty years old) interviewing Robin Williams. When she goes, she'll take the last link to the spunky, pre-Tina Brown New Yorker with her, and it'll be incredibly sad. But she's still with us, so I'll save the pouring of the 40 for my homie for when the time is right.
Hemingway, as we all know, is not with us, so the least I can do is dig up his stuff every few years and pay my respects by looking at it with whatever small amounts of wisdom I've picked up in the meantime.
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