CounterPunch Exclusives

CounterPunch Exclusives

Everything that Rises Must Converge: Hemingway’s “The Sun Also Rises”

Hemingway, Harold Loeb, Lady Duff Twysden, Hadley Richardson, Ogden Stewart and Pat Guthrie at a cafe in Pamplona, Spain, 1925. Photo: John F. Kennedy Presidential Library.

When I heard the shocking news of Ernest Hemingway’s suicide on July 2, 1961, I was sipping a Pernod in a Paris bar/café named Storyville, named after the famous “red light district” in New Orleans where I could hear jazz on LPs. I could not have imagined a more suitable place to take-in the details that “Papa,” as he was known, “blew his brains out and much of his face with a W. C. Scott long-barreled side-by-side shotgun.” (Those are the words of the American novelist, Clancy Sigal, the author of Going Away, who co-wrote the screenplay for the feature film Frida which features fictionalized versions of Diego Rivera, Frida Kahlo and Leon Trotsky.)

Hemingway was 61-years old in 1961; he had won the Nobel Prize in Literature seven years earlier, and he was the world famous author of The Sun Also Rises, his debut novel, which is prefaced by a quotation from Gertrude Stein who told Hemingway, “You are all a lost generation.”

The Sun also includes a quotation from Ecclesiastes which provided the novel with a title that reads, “the earth abideth forever…the sun also ariseth and the sun goes down and hasteth to the place where he arose.” The author had converted to Catholicism and perhaps wanted to advertise his new found religion.

I read The Sun Also Rises as a sophomore in Lionel Trilling comparative literature class at Columbia alongside T. S. Eliot’s The Waste Land, James Joyce’s Ulysses, Kafka’s short stories, Thomas Mann’s The Magic Mountain and Marcel Proust’s In Search of Lost Time.

In Paris, in the summer of 1961, living on $5 a day or less and traveling across the City of Light on foot I felt like I belonged to the Lost Generation of the 1920s, and that I might catch a glimpse of Hemingway drinking in a cafe on the Left Bank, wandering along the Seine, or observing the gravestones in the Montparnasse cemetery where Charles Baudelaire was buried and later where Samuel Beckett and others would join him.

On the 100th anniversary of the publication of The Sun Also Rises in 2026— a year after the 100th anniversary of the publication of The Great Gatsby —I reread Hemingway’s novel and also reread Clancy Signal’s spirited Hemingway Lives (2013) a vigorous defense of the author know as “Papa,” despite all his many flaws. Clancy died of congestive heart failure in Los Angeles at the age of 90. Born in 1926, the same year that The Sun Also Rises first appeared in print, Clancy writes, in Hemingway Lives that he was in a London, where he lived much of his life, and in a pub of course when he heard the news of Hemingway’s suicide.

I met Clancy in San Rafael, California and later corresponded with him for a couple of years when he grumbled about IRA bombings in London, especially after explosive devices went off at the Tower of London and the Houses of Parliament. The novelist Doris Lessing, one of his lovers, connected me to Clancy and Clancy to me because, as she explained, we shared a commitment to radical politics, including an anti-fascist, anti-Yankee agenda which also bound us to Hemingway who gave his Nobel Prize to Fidel Castro. Doris and Clancy were role models I had in mind in the Sixties when I wrote about my romantic relationship to Marge Piercy who was also a writer and a feminist.

Clancy appears as the American, Saul Green, in Lessing’s big postmodern novel The Golden Notebook. Lessing appears in Sigal’s........

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