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IT’S NOT ONLY MEN WHO ARE VICTIMS OF POST-TRAUMATIC STRESS DISORDER—THE SUN ALSO RISES

The war between Nazi Germany and the Allies (including Britain, France, the U.S., China, and the Soviet Union), was coming on fast when thousands of miles away Hemingway wrote his two classic short stories set in east Africa. Actually, the opening shots of WWII were fired several years earlier, in the Spanish Civil War. The civil war began when Catholic officers and their Moorish mercenaries, aided by German and Italian fascists, attacked and tried to overthrow Spain’s democratically elected government. Spain, its people, language, and ruthless in-fighting, would mark Hemingway’s most passionate engagement with his time and come to dominate his life.

Hemingway’s best-known early books feature two war-shocked heroines—defiantly promiscuous Lady Brett Ashley in The Sun Also Rises and the grieving English nurse Catherine Barkley in A Farewell to Arms. Both novels are great antiwar documents as well as thrilling love stories.

The Sun Also Rises, Hemingway’s first novel, about the post-WWI “lost generation” of neurotic drunks lazing about in Paris and Pamplona, Spain, announced his arrival as an important writer. Hemingway seemed to be reinventing American literary language or creating a new kind of prose, by stripping it of sentimentality and rhetorical flourishes. His words announced a new emotional style. New? Hemingway’s early work was the crystallized result of all those childhood fishing trips in Michigan and his eavesdropping on silent family quarrels, picking up on the ugly undercurrents and the writing tutorials later given to him by “modernist” masters like Ezra Pound, Ford Madox Ford, James Joyce, and Gertrude Stein, not to mention silent movie techniques and jazzy life in those Kansas City shebeens. Nothing is ever new. Except for Lady Brett Ashley: “I lay awake thinking … about Brett … Then all of a sudden I started to cry,” Jake says in The Sun Also Rises.

In the actual Paris where the novel takes place you always saw mutiles de guerre on the streets, war-mutilated men on crutches or wearing eye patches, or hopping along on one leg or, in the case of double amputees, moving on rollers. In different ways a trench-war mind-set affected women and men alike. Almost all the fictional characters in The Sun Also Rises are haunted or hurt by the “war to end all wars,” as President Wilson described it, incorrectly. It was supposed to be so clean and glorious.

But 1914–18 turned out to be a human catastrophe. Death and disfigurement on this scale took a heavy toll on male survivors but also on women, as portrayed by Lady Brett, whose first, true love died in the trenches. She’d been on the loose ever since, unmoored, charismatic, proud, self-destructive, and, like Margot Macomber, trapped inside her own beauty. Brett is a survivor from a war that wiped out a whole generation of lovers, husbands, sons, and fathers … and for what? (Ava Gardner plays Brett in the not-bad 1950s all-star movie of The Sun Also Rises.)

The popularity of The Sun Also Rises comes from Hemingway’s creation of characters who are all one version or another of the “code hero,” men, and women, who share certain qualities—honor, courage, uncomplaining stoicism, dignity. You’ll find the code hero, male or female, young or old, in most of his stories.

It’s critical in reading Hemingway to understand how important the code hero is to him—and to whole generations, particularly of American men, not excluding this writer. Many of us dreamed of copying Hemingway’s code of grace under pressure and stoicism under pain. To be like Hemingway is to escape from a normal, dull life into one of adventure and risk, without complaining about the consequences. Many men of my wartime generation adopted Hemingway as a shadow Papa, not just for his writing style but by internalizing our idea of him to manage our emerging manhood.

My friend the New York writer Leonard Kriegel is a self-proclaimed “cripple” from an attack of childhood polio. Lennie lost the use of his legs at eleven. “Hemingway,” he later wrote, “saved my life. He taught me you can take from an injury to toughen yourself up and learn to survive as a man and as a human being.” And, just as important, he “seemed to assert his independence of the common life …” That’s exactly what the characters do in The Sun Also Rises.

In this, Hemingway’s first novel, the main players, like much of the American public, are bonded through the disillusionment resulting from the Great War. Old ideas and beliefs, the old religions and morals, have not saved Jake, Brett, Mike, or anyone else from the war’s catastrophe. Disoriented and “lost,” they’re in no shape to replace the useless old with a new system of values. Also traumatized, Hemingway looks for a new kind of syntax to express their angry disillusionment and sadness—a syntax without adjectives and adverbs, which tend to cover up honest emotion, and one that could, if possible, cancel out all those years of florid war propaganda.

Structurally, The Sun Also Rises is a thinly disguised autobiographical travelogue taking us from postwar Paris to the Spanish trout-fishing mountains to a Pamplona bullfight arena, where Brett falls for beautiful, unspoiled nineteen-year-old torero Pedro Romano, creating havoc for them both as well as for her foul-mouthed fiancé Mike Campbell, the poor needy whining Robert Cohn and more than any other character the sexually destroyed Jake. The girl can’t help herself, and when it all comes tumbling down, Jake for the hundredth time comes to her rescue, to put all the contradictory parts of her together again. What an interesting hero—maternal, caring, steadfast, and loyal. A little masochistic? Yes, perhaps.

Jake adores Brett and is loved in return, but Hemingway—mindful of the censor-heavy 1920s—skips over exactly why they cannot make love.

It is often forgotten how good Hemingway is with love. Love consummated (“Ten Indians”), love disappointed (“Fathers and Sons”), love killed (A Farewell to Arms) and love frustrated almost to the point of madness (as with Brett and Jake because of his wartime injury). Hemingway understood the romantic dizziness of love, and how women are less afraid than men of letting themselves be vulnerable. This has led some readers to think that his heroines too willingly hand over their identity to a man, as Catherine seems to do in A Farewell to Arms. “There isn’t any me. I’m you. Don’t make up a separate me,” she assures Lt. Henry. Even when she gets pregnant she soothes him. “I’ll try and not make trouble for you … But haven’t I always been a good girl until now?”

Although both are war widows, troubled and troublesome, Brett is not the same as the apparently submissive Catherine. Brett has her own indomitable, self-destructive ways of fighting to keep her bruised identity, even as she insists she’s just “one of the chaps.” Brett’s dilemma, like that of Grace Hemingway, is that she is of, but also ahead of, her time.

Some readers dismiss Brett as the school slut grown up, a man-destroying alcoholic nymphomaniac. After all, she can drink the male characters under the table and has slept with at least three of them including the New York would-be writer Robert Cohn, her fiancé Mike, and the “beautiful boy,” nineteen-year-old bullfighter Pedro Romero. She lets Cohn make love to her just to get rid of him and sleeps with Mike because, well, that’s what one does with a fiancé. And sex with Romero because he’s so beautiful.

Though Brett calls herself a “bitch,” she still condemns herself for being one. But what exactly is bitchiness in this context? It doesn’t solely refer to Merriam-Webster dictionary’s “a mean, spiteful and malicious woman” but something more complicated. When Hemingway famously said, “We are all bitched from the start [of life]” he meant that, according to Catholic doctrine, except for Jesus and Mary we are all born in original sin. So, yes, Brett, a creature of her impulses, has fallen from original grace and, some argue, makes a satanic habit of wrecking men. Hovering over this misnamed “lost generation,” not so much lost as war-stunned, is an inexplicit Catholicism, or a reaching out for a merciful God, shared by almost all the characters except Robert Cohn, who is Jewish, and the marvelous, life-enhancing Count Mippipopolus who has been through so many wars he wants nothing else but to enjoy life.

Although Jake relates the plot, the Sun’s main character is really war-shocked Brett, hard up for money (and sex), and who as a nurse cared for Jake in hospital. She knows the exact nature of the wound that makes him incapable of making love. They strongly desire each other and can do nothing about it, except kiss in taxicabs and think about what might have been.

Robert Cohn, a Princeton graduate, is crazy for Brett who sleeps with him but otherwise treats him like an insect. Jake and Cohn are supposed to be best friends, but Jake—and here it’s hard NOT to identify Jake with his author—calls Cohn “that kike” with his “hard Jewish stubborn streak” and “Jew superiority.” Worst of all, Cohn is a leech, an embarrassment, sniveling and hanging around when he’s not wanted. Cohn, though a fierce amateur boxer, is not a war veteran and is presented as a weak and contemptible character.

Hemingway is regularly charged with being anti-Semitic in Cohn’s portrait, and with some justification. The Oak Park suburb he was born into was one of many American all-white “sundown towns,” so called because there were signs posted at many city limits reading, typically, “Nigger, Don’t Let the Sun Go Down On You Here.” Oak Park may have been more genteelly racist, keeping out “undesirable elements” like Negroes. Reflexive anti-Semitism in the little town was so common that the American writer, Kenneth Fearing, an Oak Park boy of Hemingway’s time, felt it best to keep his Jewish heritage a secret.

Anti-Semitism was in Hemingway’s literary culture too. Novels by Hawthorne, Willa Cather, Theodore Dreiser, as well as the dime novels Hemingway read as a child, were full of Jewish stereotypes. Unexamined prejudice—Fagin, Shylock, long snotty noses, greedy, stingy, unclubbable in polite society—was simply a fact of American life, from the slums to Harvard University with its “Jewish quota.” In Paris, Ernest’s friend, boxing partner and mentor Ezra Pound blamed the Great War on Jewish bankers and “world Jewry.” Disliking Jews was common currency. At the same time, many of Hemingway’s expatriate personal friends were black, gay, Jewish, or female. But deep-dug prejudices die slowly. Hemingway’s racial bias would change significantly only when he met and fought alongside Jewish and African-American volunteers on the Loyalist side of the Spanish Civil War. In the stress of war in Madrid he became a close friend of the black, gay writer Langston Hughes. But that was ten years in the future.

The Sun Also Rises is anti-political. Neither Hemingway nor his young war survivors show any desire to get into why they’re all so shell-shocked. The late Great War is experienced not as a consequence of political decisions but as an act of God, an unavoidable force majeure, a natural misfortune. The characters really know better but don’t talk about it. It just happened, like a hurricane or flood. Talking about it would only make the pain worse. The Armistice, when the Germans surrendered after five awful years of mutual murder, was only yesterday, and it takes time to process such injuries. Anyway, in the novel there’s always that strict code of stoicism demanding control of wild and angry emotions. You make wry, drunken, sometimes hurtful jokes to distance yourself from what is unbearable.

Lady Brett genuinely reciprocates Jake’s love, except that she needs sex and he can’t provide it. Instead, he cares tenderly for her by always being available when she needs a shoulder to cry on. He is the story’s “mother” to a bunch of slackers postponing the day when they must settle down to ordinary life.

Brett is a “free” woman who pays the price in guilt, shame, and self-reproach. “I’ve never been able to stop anything,” she confesses to Jake. “I’ve always done what I wanted … [and] “I feel such a bitch.” Jake, with priest-like patience born of his sexual problem, is always there for her as in a dangerous trapeze act. His genital wound has unmanned but not dehumanized him. In several ways Brett is a predictor of today’s “go for it, girl,” while Jake is what Hemingway himself never became, a dutiful house husband.

Gertrude Stein, Hemingway’s Jewish mama-mentor in Paris, and the godmother to his first child “Bumby” (Jack), slapped a misleading label on them all as a “lost generation” because they lived in pessimism and for pleasure. But there’s nothing “lost” about Brett and Jake. They’re simply recovering war-wounded expatriates, out of time and country, living for the moment, a habit they’d developed in the blood-soaked trenches or at home waiting for the dread telegram.

The single exception is the Princeton boxing champ Robert Cohn who likes to beat up people either as a response to their anti-Jewish cracks or because he’s jealous that they’ve slept with Brett. Actually he’s no more (or less) obnoxious than Brett’s fiancé Mike (a truly nasty piece of work who can’t stand “that kike’s … Jew superiority”) or anyone else in their crowd. Cohn has published an unsuccessful novel and is dominated by his girlfriend Frances Clyne’s smotherliness and his own undignified need for Brett, whom he follows around like a puppy.

In all this craziness why should a reader bother with Jake-or-Hemingway’s primitive prejudices, against gays (their “simpering composure”), blacks (“nigger drummer, all teeth and lips”), and of course Jews? Is Hemingway off the hook merely as a “product of his time”? Suffice for now that Hemingway’s racial attitudes evolved as he fought in Spain alongside black and Jewish activists who would never have been allowed to live in Oak Park. He never quite lost his Midwestern biases, but as we will see, he had to keep them in check once he married the militantly anti-racist Martha Gellhorn.

So today, once we register Brett & Co.’s Paris-to-Pamplona binges of sex and drink, pointless and pointed quarrels and bullfight terminology, all those veronicas and tercio de banderillas, ole!, we feel The Sun Also Rises as a profound drama not of “lost” souls but of bruised characters much like ourselves struggling to stay emotionally alive. Their traditional value system was blown away at Passchendaele, Fossalta di Piave, and the Somme. Words like honor, glory, and patriotism were ruined for them with overuse, as tricks that lured them to their moral deaths. Now they have nothing—except each other.

More than any other character in the story Brett is a “Hemingway code” hero, clipped of speech, entering full-heartedly into the man’s world of her clique. In actions more than words she indicates what this coming women’s revolution would look like. She wears mannish hats, drinks hard, and is perfectly aware of her sexual power. She bobs her hair and dresses in the modern manner to suit herself, perhaps in designs by Coco Chanel, who in her time was also a revolutionary. “Brett … wore a [flesh exposing] slipover jersey sweater and a tweed skirt,” observes Jake, “and her hair was brushed back like a boy’s. She started all that.”

Robert Cohn is still stuck on a Victorian male pose of over-protecting the swooning maiden. Jake is less sentimental. Brett is a “thirty-four-year-old drunk,” he bluntly tells Cohn. Jake’s love of Brett is profound because he knows what she is, a wounded warrior like him. Unspoken in the violent arguments between Jake and Cohn over Brett is the cultural revolution all around them. British women have got the vote and are newly used to working outside the home due to the absence of men. Casual sex no longer labels a woman like Brett as a whore (except in her own eyes). She is “free,” but her freedom is bought with the bones of a whole generation of dead men still rotting where they fell in No Man’s Land.

In a sense, impotent Jake is the perfect lover because he cannot use sex, money, or mind-games to control her. He has become the counterpart of her as a free woman: Jake Barnes is a Free Man, one of the few we will meet in Hemingway.