My first graduate lit. course – this was like forty years ago – was taught by a guy who wore Brooks Brothers suits.  Soft gray blazers.  Blue or pink button-down shirts. Silk ties.  He always made me think he had just walked off an Ivy League campus.  That was probably his intent.  I didn’t know much about style or fashion, but I appreciated his preparation to teach the course.  Dressing up the way he did must have been very important to his instruction. We read a lot of Hemingway that semester.  The instructor was a Hemingway “Fanboy.”  Jaja.   Image was everything.  I can’t remember his name, but I loved the class.  Professor Fanboy’s passion for his work may have inspired me to become an English teacher. That’s why I still have the books – They are here with me in Mexicali.  This week, I’m re-reading The Sun Also Rises.

Ernest Hemingway may have been just twenty-one years old when he wrote this book.  I suppose you can call it an autobiographical novel.  In lit class, we call it a Roman de Clef – a story based on real-life people and experiences.   Much of the action is based on Ernie’s time spent in Paris after World War I.   The book is full of angry drunks, bitter lovers, and bloody bullfights.  Ernie wrote himself into the middle of each and every scene.  My graduate professor loved Ernie like a god.  He read us pages like he was reading out of the bible.  Ernie was a writer extremely dedicated to his craft.  He believed in living each day to the fullest in order to write the most authentic stories.   Like clockwork, he was behind his typewriter at 6:00 every morning, and he stayed there until noon. The rest of the day, he drank.  He just got shit-faced.

Ernie was good for making friends.  He had charisma and good looks.  Often he would head down to the Parisian racetracks at Auteil with his novelist buddy John Dos Passos.  These two may have relished their starving artist identities.  Ernie convinced John that if they bet according to his tried and true system, with the anticipated winnings, they could afford to extend their writing in Paris.  Ernie’s secret was he could smell out the winners.  He would take John down to the paddock before each race and sniff out the testosterone level in each horse.  They would pool their money and bet all they had on the foulest-smelling horse.  I know.  I know.  We think of these writers  today as brilliant, transcendent writers, but they weren’t featured members of the ”Lost Generation” for nothing.  By the time they laid their money down, they must have been wasted out of their minds.

The Sun Also Rises is more of the same.  Jake Barnes is the book’s narrator.  He was wounded in the war in a way he would never be able to have normal sexual relations again.   Now he is in Paris trying to regain meaning in his life.  He works as a foreign correspondent for a Canadian newspaper. Up until this point, I had never read a book like this before.  Everything about him is sad and bitter and impotent, but Jake isn’t going to take his impotence lying down.  He’s going to make the most out of each day if it kills him.  Sound like someone familiar?  In 1921, everyone was talking about F. Scott Fitzgerald, and no one knew anything about Ernest Hemingway.  This is when Ernie fell in love with a beautiful woman named Lady Duff Twysden.  For all her looks and money, she may have been a sadder drunk than Ernie.  She let herself be passed around from one man to another with little regret or care.  Watching this happen over and over,  Ernie suddenly became inspired to write about her and her frightful disposition.  In the book  he named her Lady Brett.  He named himself Jake Barnes.  Jake, Lady Brett, and everyone else in this book has been hurt bad by the war. They are disillusioned with their lives.  They hate themselves.  Ernie knows the landscape, all right.

My favorite part of the book may come from a happier passage.  Ernie is a manly man.  Much of his youth was spent in the rugged outdoors; hunting, camping, and fishing in his family’s summer home in Northern Michigan.  Ernie’s skills and knowledge translate nicely to Jake’s character in the road trip chapter.  Jake and his writer friend Bill leave Paris for Pamplona to see the bullfights.  But, they take their fishing gear with them.  They are first going to stop at Burgette to get some fly fishing in.   They bring a lot of wine with them, but that doesn’t stop them from fully immersing themselves in the Great Outdoors. For five wonderful days, they lose themselves on the Irati River.  Ernie’s descriptions are both breath-taking and spirit-lifting.

I never was or never will be a romantic like the characters Ernie writes about, but I admire his writing style.  He writes of his relationships and adventures around the world in a way we can all understand and empathize.  He leaves out the adjectives and adverbs.  He gets right down to it.  As a newspaper writer, Ernie learned the art of the simple declarative sentence. Rarely does he preach to the reader.  He believes it is just as important the decision what to put in to his stories, as what to leave out.

At an age very close to where my students are now, Ernie wrote his first novel The Sun Also Rises. By the time he was out of high school, he was in hot-blooded pursuit of his American Dream.  He wanted to be a great writer.  When World War I broke out, he was denied entrance to the Army, so he volunteered as a Red Cross ambulance driver to be stationed in Italy.  A few weeks into his service, he was struck by an Austrian Mortar while aiding soldiers in an allied bunker. It wasn’t enough for Ernie to be a good writer, he wanted to be the best.  He was ready and willing  to sacrifice whatever it took.  Hundreds if mortar fragments lodged into his legs and thighs.  Here in Milan recuperating from life-threatening injuries, he found what he was looking for.  Soon after, he used this experience in the writing of two novels I read in my first semester of graduate school:  The Sun Also Rises and Farewell to Arms.    Thank you, Professor Fanboy!