I hadn't read any Hemingway before this but I had been eager
to. I accumulated an impression of him through various sources, such as
conversations with friends, reading snippets about him and also the Any
Human Heart TV series, which is brilliant and something all people
should watch. The impression I had of Hemingway was reinforced by his writing.
It was indeed full of drinking, boxing and bull fighting and so the 'man's man'
image of Hemingway continued to exist for me. But at the same time there was an
ever present feeling of disillusionment and loss which accompanied the
protagonist Jake Barnes and his circle of friends - a tension in the book which
is constantly felt and rarely seen. I saw Hemingway's young, rich and lost generation
of the interwar period as a blend of Evelyn Waugh's degenerate and
debauched Bright Young Things, and Jean Rhys's troubled Sasha Jensen in Good
Morning, Midnight (1939).
The decadence of Jake Barnes' circle of friends meant that
they very rarely fell into boredom, especially that which is invoked by lack of
money; perhaps a state of exhaustion or a sense of tediousness in their
actions, but never genuine boredom – Jake Barnes always seemed happy to go
fishing in the middle of nowhere or fraternise with the locals and drink wine.
This is where we can see parallels with Waugh's depiction of the Bright Young
Things in Vile Bodies (1930).
Adam Fenwick-Symes’ group of friends gallivant through the streets of
London, using places such as the Ritz as nothing more than rest stops, and 10 Downing
St. as a party retreat. Both groups lived their lives as well as they could; jazz
and drinking, debauchery and perversion - anything to allow them to ignore – to
forget – the pain of that the first half of the twentieth century brought and instead
enjoy life.
However there is a huge difference in the characterisation
and the way that the generations are presented. The Sun Also Rises attains far greater depth, and the characters
are more human than those in Vile Bodies
who are better described as caricatures. This distinction in the presentation
of both parties simmers own to one of the key differences which is their
involvement in the war.
Those in The Sun Also
Rises have experienced the war, such as Jake who was in fact wounded and
whose wound serves as a physical reminder of the persistent devastation the war
has had, particularly to the individual. The Bright Young Things’s generation
have avoided this – their anxiety comes from living in the wake of The
Great War, which they were too young to experience, and the shadow of World War
II which loomed in the distance. They were living in Eliot’s Wasteland and
stood on the precipice to further disaster. Not only that but their generation was
sandwiched between their fathers and their sons who experience these, but they
will see but not be involved. They lack that opportunity for 'glory' which was
so valued amongst the upper-classes, and in fact all of Britain during their lives.
In my opinion this why Waugh could not convey the omnipresent
anxiety or trauma of interwar Europe as well as Hemingway could. Possibly
because the experience of war carries with it far more suffering than the
potential of a war, but it could also be that Waugh was in fact part of the
generation that had avoided the war (at least at the time Vile Bodies was published, he did later fight in the Second World
War). He was a BYT and Hemingway a veteran, and the audience that they wrote for
was completely different. Waugh didn’t want to concern himself with war – in fact
in Vile Bodies when war had broken
out, it was experienced in the back of a car drinking champagne.
When The Sun Also
Rises was published at a time when people where only just becoming ready to
talk about the effect it left in the lives of those who had experienced it. Some
novels such as Rebecca West’s The Return
of the Soldier (1918) did write about the post traumatic stress it invoked,
but it wasn’t really until the late twenties when it became ‘acceptable’ (for
want of a better word) to talk about what had happened, and how it had changed
life as it was once known. Wilfred Owen, whose poetry defines the literary
output of the war for so many people, had only a handful of poems published
before his death in 1918, and only gained notoriety in the late twenties.
Now the comforting forgetful snow was melting; the mood was
changing and at the same time so was the literature. One couldn’t ignore what
happened, but it was still difficult to express it. Richard Aldington claimed
in 1926 that ‘those who have attempted to convey any real war experience, sincerely,
unsentimentally, avoiding any ready-made attitudes (pseudo-heroic or pacifist
or quasi-humorous) must have felt the torturing sense of something
incommunicable.’[1]
Here we stumble upon one of the great strengths of Hemingway and The Sun Also Rises – the subtlety of
his writing and the huge impact it has. The 'Iceberg Theory' associated with
Hemingway's writing is explained in Death in the Afternoon (1932): 'if a writer of prose
knows enough of what he is writing about he may omit things that he knows and
the reader, if the writer is writing truly enough, will have a feeling of those
things as strongly as though the writer had stated them.'[2]
As I said before, there’s a feeling of constant tension in
the book which is always felt, but rarely seen. The tension truly emerges in
the scenes between Jake and Lady Brett Ashley, who share a love affair hampered
by the wound Jake sustained in the war that has afflicted his sex life. The
moments of privacy they share are limited to only a few scenes, and when they
speak there’s no huge outburst of feelings, but we quickly understand the
torment they experience from not being able to be together, and the damage the
war has left. We realise that, like Vile
Bodies, the carpe diem philosophy is a way of forgetting – of ignoring the anguish
and the damage that the war had inflicted upon the individual. It was now
starting to permeate into the consciousness of the world. It couldn’t be forgotten
by those who had experienced it and who were still living with the
consequences. That’s why Hemingway could present the anxiety far better than
Waugh, even if it wasn’t explicitly expressed.
By the time Good
Morning, Midnight is published Europe had two decades to come to terms with
the destruction of war, and was now holding its breath before plunging into
another. There was no longer an abashed attitude to the way the individual
suffers, and modernist literature, in particular, was able to communicate
suffering in one of the truest ways known to the art world. Good Morning, Midnight deals with the
isolation and estrangement of Sasha Jenson in interwar Paris. Almost certainly
her experiences capture the emotions of many. Like Jake and the BYTs, Sasha attempts
to live a life devoid of tragedy and tries to move on from the pain that she
had suffered, but for her it can’t be done. Like Jake she is scarred both
physically and emotionally, but unlike Jake we are able to see how entrenched
the psychological issues are upon her personality, and the effects it has on
her daily life.
What I meant earlier about The Sun Also Rises acting like a blend of Vile Bodies and Good Morning,
Midnight can be summed up by comparing one another through something all
books have in common, which is a heavy reliance on alcohol. If one was to read The Sun Also Rises alongside Vile Bodies one may be able to attribute
the large quantities of Spanish wine being drunk to the urge to have a good
time, to enjoy life and indeed being Hemingway-esque. This would be the visible
10% of the iceberg. However, if it was to be read alongside Good Morning, Midnight then the rest of
the iceberg would be far more visible, the sadness of Jake Barnes’ life much
more prominent. This is what I loved about The
Sun Also Rises, how it truly captured the many levels of human emotion, and
the fact that it could be read multiple times and each time feeling new. It’s not something you can accumulate by watching Any Human Heart, no matter how
brilliant it is.
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