Summer Reading: The Sun Also Rises

I hate Hemingway. He is both a virulent misogynist and an anti-Semite. His lauded Spartan prose style is choppy and arid. His books are a strain of simple verbal diarrhea. There is nothing to like about him.

At least that’s what I said whenever Hemingway’s name was brought up until just about a month ago, when I read “The Sun Also Rises.”

I had been in Paris for 6 weeks. All summer I had been walking past cafés where Hemingway drank himself into (and out of) depression. An American in Paris, I couldn’t help but think about that earlier, more famous group of Americans in Paris: Fitzgerald, Stein, Miller, Hemingway. (The fact that every other person I spoke to brought up “A Moveable Feast,” the precious book where Hemingway nostalgically trashes all of his friends and mentors, only encouraged this train of thought.) And so, with only a week left, I finally succumbed to a friend’s insistence that I read “The Sun Also Rises,” because I was an American in Paris and Hemingway was, well, Hemingway—the American ex-patriot who spent time in Paris.

I had tried to read “The Sun Also Rises” in middle school when I knew nothing of Hemingway other than his name (which seemed to carry serious cachet with my teachers). I hadn’t been able to get past the first 20 pages. I was repulsed by the way he characterized Robert Cohn, describing his “hard, Jewish, stubborn streak” and noting of a certain expression that it is how “his compatriot must have looked when he saw the promised land.” This is the worst of Hemingway: completely unnecessary, uncontrolled racism, plain and simple. Rather than taking the time to describe Cohn as a person, an individual, with individualized attributes, Hemingway just lazily throws catch-all racist epithets that go no more than skin deep.

But this time, I managed to hang on beyond those discouraging first pages. I quickly got caught up in the game of following Hemingway’s characters from location to location in Paris, lost in the fun of envisioning the streets where I had just been —sometimes as recently as that afternoon.

As I turned page after page, I found that the telegraphic sentences I remembered as terse and barren were immensely satisfying to read. They were exciting. They lent his writing a sense of immediacy and importance that is hard to rival. They flashed by and I realized that, despite myself, I was enjoying it. I was party to Jake Barnes’ trip out to Pamplona. I sat there and drank wine with them and the peasants with their leather wine skins. I got embroiled in the drama of the unfulfilled desires shared by Lady Brett Ashley and Jake Barnes and understood the absurdity of Cohn’s idea of romantic love.

I finished the book in two days.

It’s not as though I’ve become a Hemingway fanatic overnight. I haven’t: I still hate Hemingway as a person; I still find him despicable; I still take issue with his cynical worldview. But yes, I now can admit that he is a powerful writer. I’ll no longer bash him utterly and completely—just mostly.

—Sanders I. Bernstein