After all, he was revolutionizing literature, and in every revolution, some heads must roll.” He was, it seems, utilizing his training as journalist and reporting just the facts, ma’am. According to Blume, Hemingway’s fiesta compatriots were unnerved by how realistically and unsympathetically they’d been portrayed in his book: “The portraits would haunt for the rest of their lives, but for Hemingway, his one-time friends were simply collateral damage. (One of Blume’s book’s takeaways: unlike his fictional hero, Hemingway’s war wound did not affect his virility, thank you very much.)īlume’s exploration of the real-life story behind the book shores this up. Jake Barnes, Hemingway’s version of Eliot’s protagonist, is a representative victim of this world, and his famous wound, received in the Great War, is a symbol of the general impotence of the times. It is widely held that The Sun Also Rises is a prose version of The Waste Land its theme, the sterility of life in the modern world. Her research reveals that the novel’s tale of the “Bacchanalian morass of sexual jealousy and gory spectacle” was “nothing but a report on what happened.” In other words, Ernest Hemingway’s famous, career-launching debut novel was essentially gossipy reportage.Īnd yet, subtle authorial movements (readers who know Hemingway’s book will remember how pared-down the language is, how little reflection or interpretation of events the narrator offers) shift the novel into its position as a masterpiece of “The Lost Generation.” As the critic W.
Blume tracks Hemingway’s original group of friends on their pilgrimage to the Pamplona bull fights in the summer of 1925 through letters, interviews, and archives. There’s a new book out called Everybody Behaves Badly: The True Story Behind Hemingway’s Masterpiece The Sun Also Rises in this exhaustively researched tome, Lesley M.M.
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