The Sun Also Rises: An Autobiography

One of the main themes of The Sun Also Rises is Jake's focus on his own masculinity. He likes bullfights, fishing, and drinking, plus putting on the facade of being tough. We talked in class about how "Papa" Ernest Hemingway liked bullfights, fishing, drinking, and being a manly-man (especially as he grew older and got more famous). Of course, every author writes from experience, but I did some more research on Hemingway in order to make more comparisons.

From Wikipedia:
"Hemingway was raised in Oak Park, Illinois. After high school, he reported for a few months for The Kansas City Star..."

So we have a guy who was raised in the Midwest and was a newspaper reporter. Right after Ernest got out of high school in 1917, his father wrote to a classmate in Kansas to secure him the job (because he didn't want him going off to war.) Hemingway spent about a year in Kansas in total, and the Kansas City Star likes to brag that this time was "one of the most important periods of his life." Kansas does seem to show up in a lot of his works: Hemingway liked to "recast" scenes from his life into his books.

"Hemingway took the train to Kansas City in mid-October, arriving on Oct. 15, 1917. Dr. Hemingway accompanied him to the station. Ernest, who "was disgusted with teary fairwells,'' recast that scene in For Whom the Bell Tolls." Source

In 1918, Hemingway went to war on the Italian Front, only to be seriously injured. (Sound familiar?) He fell in love with the nurse who was healing him. That nurse, Agnes Von Kurowsky, would leave him for an Italian officer. He went back to America to be a reporter until 1921, when he and his wife left for Paris. "In Paris, Hemingway met writers such as Gertrude Stein, James Joyce, and Ezra Pound who "could help a young writer up the rungs of a career"."

A bunch of American expatriates at a cafe table in Spain, drinking heavily...

In 1923, Hemingway and his wife Hadley went to the San Fermin festival (as we've said, mostly unknown until The Sun) with some friends from Paris. Hemingway started to get interested in bullfighting here. "A few days after the fiesta ended, on his birthday (July 21), he began to write the draft of what would become The Sun Also Rises, finishing eight weeks later." Source

There are a lot of comparisons to be made here, even besides the obvious ones.  It was fascinating to see the bits and pieces of the author's life that contributed to his first novel, and how he sculpted them into the complex story we can still read deep themes into today. This blog post is getting too long already, though, so I'll leave that to commenters.

(Hilariously, I found this bit while researching:"Hemingway suffered a severe injury in their Paris bathroom when he pulled a skylight down on his head thinking he was pulling on a toilet chain. This left him with a prominent forehead scar, which he carried for the rest of his life. When Hemingway was asked about the scar, he was reluctant to answer." Source)

Life Imitates Art??

These introspective, complex novels are really changing how I see the world and what I notice.

Last weekend, my mom and I went to visit an decades-long family friend named Maureen, who had just finished up a garage sale and was cleaning up the last few tables as we pulled up. After quick greetings, both she and my mother lapsed into chatting about what was happening recently, jobs, and all the other stuff middle-aged women like to talk about. Having been reading Mrs. Dalloway for weeks, I've been feeling more attuned to social intricacies and the idea of what isn't said. As Maureen told us a story about her garage sale, I noticed details and came to conclusions I wouldn't have caught before.

Maureen leaned into the car window and told us conspiratorially (and slightly grumpily) about one neighborhood girl that had scored a lot of free stuff out of her garage sale. The girl had wandered around the tables, looking through antique hats and dresses before asking for one of the matryoshka dolls. [as she spoke, I watched a tweenage girl pedal on a pink bike out of the next garage around the bend.] "I mean, I let her have one. It wouldn't do any harm, and plus I would hate to be that mean neighbor, you know. So I gave it to her." She paused as the girl on the bicycle pulled up behind the car, dismounted, and came up to her. They had a brief, cordial conversation; I heard something about "the dress" and "you'll have to wait 'till later on that." The girl hopped on her bike and rode away happily.

"That was the girl," Maureen said. I asked about "the dress?", and learned that the girl had also asked to have a vintage flapper dress (for free!) from Maureen's collection and Maureen had hesitantly told her to wait on it.

She continued to tell stories of this girl and later her little brother, both of whom had skulked around the tables the whole time investigating antique silver letter openers ("which they didn't need, and I told them they didn't need"), wooden toys, and the like. They even started putting items into their pockets! At this point, I could feel myself starting to dislike this girl, this family, whose children thought it was ok to boldly ask for and pocket more free stuff after just having received free stuff. I did remind myself there was more to people than met the eye, but I was having trouble seeing it with this rude, cookie cutter couple of kids. Next door, I saw a generic-looking father-type guy step out onto the porch with a fluffy sheepdog.

"Yeah, I really like that family though." Maureen watched the man idly through the windshield as he threw a ball to the dog. "You know, the other day, it was the middle of the night, I saw an ambulance pull up to their house. There was a gurney and-- Yeah. You know, I was just sitting in my room at my window, just watching and thinking, "Who's gonna die. Who's died."

And bam, my perspective changed. That family, that looked so boring and tame on the outside to someone who might have just been driving by as the little girl pedaled out on her bike, or as the sheepdog caught the ball, had had an ambulance wailing on its curb just nights before. By looking at them, you wouldn't have any idea that his wife, her mother had been carried out on a stretcher. They gave no indication, showed no wounds, so who would know?

Now that it's written down, this seems more unrelated to 20th Century Novel than I intended, but I believe it shows a real-life example of what Woolf knew, and what we're starting to see Hemingway illustrating: People don't say everything they know when they talk, and they show even less to the world at large. Just as Clarissa put on her public face, just as Jake Barnes narrates the top 5% of the iceberg, people tend to wear and speak with a facade that masks vulnerabilities and insecurities. Had we decided not to stop at Maureen's and just driven down the avenue, we might have spotted the family. And of course, we would have had no idea of their drama! Even crazier, you could extend that logic to anyone. Like the proverb goes, everyone you meet is fighting their own battles. Maybe not everyone's mother recently almost died, but it's incredible to think that everyone you meet, or don't meet, has complex, complicated problems as much as you do.

(Fun fact: That feeling is called Sonder, according to a tumblr blog and Urban Dictionary. Trustworthy sources, but just knowing it's documented makes you feel a little smaller.)