In tenth grade, I read a biography of Ernest Hemingway. I used to claim to have read a lot of books I hadn’t read, and I thought that if I read Hemingway’s biography I wouldn’t have to actually read him. But the biography amazed me. Hemingway didn’t go to an office; he travelled around all the time and did only cool things. I, too, wanted to travel around and do only cool things.
I was a sad, nervous kid, fat, acne-wracked, living in a house where my parents were always shouting. We didn’t have much money. I had a brain-damaged older brother and, when he was in the hospital, we would steal whatever we could find there. At home, my father used to wear a thin robe with the name of the hospital printed on the back.
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Writing had allowed Hemingway to lead a glamorous life. I decided that I was going to be a writer. I had written stories before, but they had all been terrible. I believed I had written only two good lines in my life. These were from a science-fiction story I had attempted: I have seen stars swoon into darkness. I have seen cliffs of stardust a hundred billion miles high. I was so proud of these lines that I would recite them whenever I had the chance. The biography said that Hemingway wrote very simply, so that anything false would be exposed. I thought that Hemingway might have chosen to write this way for moral reasons, but I would do so because I wasn’t capable of doing any better.
Hemingway’s novel “The Sun Also Rises,” from 1926, is about an American man who was injured in the First World War and was left incapable of having sex. This man and his friends live in Paris. They are alcoholics and traumatized by the war, and they couple and uncouple and travel to Pamplona for the running of the bulls. I sat at my desk in my small room and read it. I believed that the book was going to show me how to escape my life, but I got to the end of the first chapter and found that it had made no impression. The writing was so plain it had no flavor. People walked in and out of scenes and talked but didn’t do anything. I sat at my desk hollow with fear. How was I going to become a writer and travel around and do cool things when I didn’t even appreciate good writing?
I started reading the chapter again. This time I read very slowly and tried to experience each sentence. The opening line of “The Sun Also Rises” is “Robert Cohn was once middleweight boxing champion of Princeton.” The second time I read it, I imagined someone saying these words out loud. I stopped at the period and allowed there to be silence. The sentence felt self-contained, as if it wasn’t trying to be anything but itself. It was like a smooth pebble. Now that I am fifty-four, if I were to describe why it works, I would say that having nouns at both ends of a sentence can make it seem complete and self-sufficient. This was probably what I was feeling when I was fifteen.
The second sentence is “Do not think that I am very much impressed by that as a boxing title, but it meant a lot to Cohn.” Even to my teen-age self, this was a weird sentence. The “much” seemed unnecessary, there only to call attention to itself, to the fact that someone was speaking. But who was being addressed? And the two “that”s—the first one functioning as a way to pace the sentence, and the second a statement of fact—had a disconcerting effect. Even now, encountering these differing “that”s feels like having one foot safely planted while the other slips out from under me. From my current perspective, I’d add that the second sentence engages with certain issues that were fundamental to modernism in English-language fiction. This particular strain of modernism grappled with the difficulty of capturing in language the nonverbal aspects of subjective experience. With this strange second sentence, Hemingway asserted that “The Sun Also Rises” was a story being told, and thus side-stepped some of the issues that occupied James Joyce, Virginia Woolf, and Ford Madox Ford.
I kept reading. When I didn’t respond to a sentence, I tried to take it in more deeply by counting the number of words in it and circling the punctuation. By the end of the first chapter, I was beginning to experience Hemingway’s language in the way that I think it was intended to be experienced. And, by the end of the book, I was a different person. The difference felt physical, as if I had been picked up and relocated. It was like moving a refrigerator and being able to see clearly where it once stood. I now felt truly connected to language and therefore to a history of people who loved language. I felt less alone. I felt that art was important and moral.
After “The Sun Also Rises,” I read everything that Hemingway had written, and I read it in the same slow manner. When I read “A Moveable Feast,” I wondered how someone who could write so well could ever die by suicide. When I read “The Fifth Column,” it reminded me of the silliest parts of “For Whom the Bell Tolls.” When I read “The Old Man and the Sea” and then some critical assessments of the book, I thought about whether it really mattered that some of the details—such as a fisherman being able to lug miles of fishing line to his boat—made no sense.
When I had finished reading Hemingway, I started writing at a much higher level. Hemingway had taught me how to say one thing while suggesting something else, how to make the resulting tension serve as a substitute for plot. I loved the challenge of writing a scene without dialogue labels, and the marvellous effect of doing this: I felt as if I were floating inside the room with my characters.
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By the time I was in my twenties, though, I had become irritated with Hemingway. The explanation I offered for my dislike was that the guy seemed to know nothing about human beings. So many of his characters were stoic and brave. Actual humans tend to be confused, vibrating, changing. They doubt themselves and then blame themselves and others for the doubt. I argued that Hemingway should be read as a life-style writer or a self-help guru. This was what I said to others, but the truth was that, when I first read Hemingway and fell in love with art, I believed that it would rescue me from my feelings of uselessness, from sexual envy, from worries about money. Because all these remained, I had to put my peevishness somewhere.
For decades, I didn’t reread any of Hemingway’s major novels. But, whenever a previously unpublished story was discovered, I read it. “I Guess Everything Reminds You of Something,” which was included in “The Complete Short Stories,” seemed so obviously great and in such a different way from Hemingway’s other stories that I felt immature for having thought I could judge him.
I recently decided to reread “The Sun Also Rises.” I read the first line but the sentence’s balance and the stillness this generates didn’t impress me. It felt like the sort of solution to a pacing problem that an M.F.A. student would come up with. And the second sentence with its “that”s seemed less clever and brave than so many other examples of the same device I now knew. For example, the opening of Dostoyevsky’s novel “The Gambler”: “I’ve finally come back from my two-week absence. Our people have already been in Roulettenburg for three days.” Here, the opening sentence is disconcerting because the speaker is coming back to a physical space, but is returning from an absence, which is not a physical space. Can one return from an absence? If one cannot return from an absence then one is not back.
But the real problem I began having with the book was that from the very first paragraph it is virulently antisemitic. The opening paragraph has a Jewish character whose nose is described as being improved when it is broken. To me, as a teen-ager, the book’s antisemitism had seemed merely a device to separate those who knew how to live properly and those who did not; I had not registered its ugliness. Now, it gave me the heebie-jeebies.
And as the book went on there was more and more ugliness. There was misogyny, of course: women are harpies or one of the boys. There was also homophobia: the narrator acknowledges that one should not hate homosexuals but he does: “Somehow they always made me angry. I know they are supposed to be amusing, and you should be tolerant, but I wanted to swing on one, anyone, anything to shatter that superior, simpering composure.” Although the book makes positive claims about what one should be—brave, admiring of nature and grace—its architecture is held up primarily by hatred of various people and groups.
I found myself reading the book quickly, unable to slow down to the pace that Hemingway’s style requires, knowing, as I sped through, that what I was doing was as senseless as taking big gulps of a grand-cru wine. Periodically, I was shocked by the book’s brilliance—in the bar scenes where so many people are talking, for example, and the reader is hovering among them—and by its breathtaking beauty. More significant, in addition to being wretched, the book is also periodically wise.
After describing the funeral of someone killed by a bull, Hemingway tells us what happened to the bull:
While the novel seems to equate bravery, as manifested through behavior in the bullring, with moral clarity, here the emblem of bravery has been turned into garbage. Bravery in the bullring does not lead to clarity outside it. Hemingway rejects the idea that one thing can explain another. He acknowledges that things are always and only themselves. But although he nods at this wisdom, he continues to ignore it, by remaining committed to the idea that by being stoic, by valuing and appreciating certain acts of machismo, like bullfighting or fishing, one can escape moral chaos. This is like Hemingway saying, “I know, I know,” to a counter-argument, and then going on to say the direct opposite of what he has just claimed to know.
I finished the book and felt disappointed with myself for not having been a more generous reader. I also believed that whatever I might gain from rereading Hemingway, it probably wouldn’t be worth the irritation. ♦