"The Sun Also Rises"

Years ago, I wrote a play that centered on a fictional encounter between Tennessee Williams and Ernest Hemingway that might have taken place at Hemingway's Key West compound in 1955. The play was structured somewhat like a bullfight, and like a bullfight, there was tragedy, particularly the tragedy of Ernest Hemingway that would result in his suicide a half dozen years later.

My use of the bullfighting metaphor and structure for the play was based largely in Hemingway's "Death in the Afternoon"(1932) and "The Dangerous Summer" (1985, written in 1959 and 1960) together with Williams' interest in and admiration for bullfighters that Hemingway shared -- particularly Antonio Ordóñez. 

I did not read Hemingway's first novel "The Sun Also Rises," which is in part a bullfight novel featuring the running of the bulls and bullfights in Pamplona and a romantic and beautiful young bullfighter character, Pedro Romero and those who love him. I didn't read it because I had seen the movie version of the book many years ago, long before I even thought of the play, and thought the movie was terrible. Perhaps one of the worst film adaptations of a Hemingway novel ever.

The other day, I watched it again on the YouTube. It was worse than I remembered it. It was utterly dreadful. 

The movie posits the Hemingway character (Jake Barnes) as a curmudgeonly middle aged man played by Tyrone Power, though the story (according to the film's opening narration) takes place in 1922 (the novel says 1924-25). Hemingway was born in 1899. He was a young man, a very young man in Paris and Pamploma during the period of the novel (creative non-fiction or roman a clef). 

Well, the last week or so, I've been reading a copy of "The Sun Also Rises" that I brought back from California last month and I finished it yesterday. It's much better, worlds better than the movie. It, however, reads like a first novel by a very young man who hadn't actually lived much but who was coming to believe he was or soon would be King of the World.

Hemingway has fascinated me for most of my life, and I have enjoyed practically everything of his that's come my way. Perhaps I feel some kinship with him, though the adventures of my life are nothing like his. Practically nothing in my life has been like his.

And yet... there may be kinship of some sort, maybe it's that Midwestern origin we share, an origin we left behind early and never really reconnected with.

While "The Sun Also Rises" is very much the work of a novice novelist, it's not a bad book. In fact, I found it fascinating. Hemingway's descriptions of his (character's) lives, loves and longings are sometimes superficial, yet it wasn't difficult for me to find compassion for them, even when they behaved badly -- as they very often did.

They were young -- Barnes and Romero particularly so -- and wild and the world had recently been turned upside down by the War to End Wars.

Barnes had been wounded and made impotent in that war. Hemingway had been wounded as an 18 year old ambulance driver in Italy. He may well have been made temporarily impotent, but he got over it and fathered the first of his children in 1923 a couple of years before he started writing "The Sun Also Rises." 

The play I wrote deals with desire. And my interest in exploring these characters' desire stemmed from my Buddhist studies. Neither Williams nor Hemingway were Buddhist practitioners as far as I know, and both were clearly driven by desire throughout their lives. Desire for attention and fame, desire for love and devotion, desire for wealth and glamour. Desire for drink and drugs as well.

Their drive and desire led them to gain what they sought, yet it also ensured their demise, Hemingway much sooner than Williams, but both in the end driven to death by their demons of desire.

"The Sun Also Rises" deals with desire too, but formlessly, as if Hemingway hadn't yet discovered what was driving him. And I think that's true. He didn't know, and he wouldn't find out for years. When he did, when he saw and confronted his own desires, I think it tore him apart -- and led to his suicide.

I appreciated the book -- whereas I didn't appreciate the movie -- in part because it was formless, searching. Whether it was the definitive novel of the Lost Generation I'll leave to the critics to decide.