“Art begins in a wound, an imperfection – a wound inherent in the nature of life
itself – and it is an attempt either to learn to live with the wound or to heal
it.” (John Gardner, A Moral Fiction)
They went back after Christmas
break, and I was alone again in the deep dark Dutch winter, so I reached for the
source, the images that most had thrilled me back at the beginning, images of
Paris, the Bohemian life, Hemingway whom I hadn’t read since 1988, when I spent
the summer drifting around the Place de la Contrescarpe, parking myself in front
of 74 rue Cardinal Lemoine and shuddering with the desire to live, experience,
read, write, and, most of all be cultured, whatever that was. Periods of great
longings are always more attractive in retrospect, and, looking back at the
abundance of that summer – an apartment in the 16th and infinite time with
absolutely no deadlines, no expectations, I feel some friendliness towards the
incomplete and wounded person that I was. So my rereading of The Sun Also Rises this week was a step
backwards in time, hoping to redeem that summer and….
We are all in love
with Hemingway, right? Even though it’s a terrible relationship. He is even more
deeply wounded than we are, permanently exiled, ludicrous, pretentious,
unreliable, self-serving, promiscuous, mean, and narcissistic. But he is the
absolute coquette, and we women are jealous, jealous, jealous, of his
self-sufficiency, his life of eternal wanderings in and out of cafes and bars,
of writing a few “true” paragraphs here and there, of taking the train to
Lausanne to cover big events for whatever newspaper, and doing whatever the f**k
he wants to just because he is Ernest Hemingway, even BEFORE he is Ernest
Hemingway. Like Jack Kerouac, Hemingway represents everything that we want to be
but can’t because there just isn’t any attractive female version of the
blazingly sexy alcoholic, suicidal maniac whom everyone lusts to be. Like
Kerouac, his wound keeps him forever incomplete and on the road, looking for a
cure that he will never find, and writing novels about it.
(And where
did he get that great job??? “Upstairs in the office I read the French morning
papers, smoked, and then sat at the typewriter and got off a good morning’s
work. At eleven o’clock I went over to the Quai d’Orsay in a taxi and went in
and sat with about a dozen correspondents…” Goes back and goes to lunch with
Robert Cohn.Walk up to the Café de la Paix for coffee. Office. At five o’clock
meets Brett at the Hotel Crillon. Writes some letters, she doesn’t turn up. Taxi
to Café Select. Driver takes him to Rotonde instead. Sees Harvey Stone. Cohn
appears. Go to Select, Stone reappears. Jake says let’s go to Lilas. Frances
comes. They cross Blvd Montparnasse, sit down in a café. Goes back to flat after
listening to Frances complain about Robert. Brett has been there with the Count.
They come back in an hour. Drink there; chauffeur comes in with basket of
champagne. Go to an excellent restaurant in the Bois, paid for by the Count.
Bottle of brandy from 1811. Takes Brett home in the Count’s car. He goes
home.)
Like Abelard’s loss, Hemingway’s only makes him more extravagantly
virile, more desirable. Jake is like Heath Ledger’s character in Brokeback
Mountain. In both cases the figure behind the character – Hemingway and Heath
Ledger – is playing a game with the audience. I am so overwhelmingly manly, he
jokes, so over-the-top unquestionably a real man, that I can play at not wanting
to have sex with women and women will only want me all the more.
It’s
all a fake, he’s just pretending to be sad. Early on in the book, he thinks that
Brett only wanted what she couldn’t have. “…I started to think about Brett and
all the rest of it went away. I started to think about Brett and my mind stopped
jumping around and started to go in sort of smooth waves. Then all of a sudden I
started to cry. Then after a while it was better and I lay in bed and listened
to the heavy trams go by and way down the street, and then I went to sleep.”
It’s just that pleasant nostalgia for those early lost loves that we never
really wanted anyway because we were on the way out even as we enjoyed the
flurry of feelings that they aroused, but for which we will sigh, irresponsibly,
for the rest of our lives, letting new loves know that they can never measure
up.
And the bullfighting, my God the bullfighting. Jake is responsible
for the still-current masculine conviction that talking about sports is cool but
that what women use to bond (shopping, talking about clothes, weight, kids) is
somehow ridiculous. Fine Jake, but I wish that someone could tell me how
watching anything makes you manly. How is watching a bull get a sword thrust
into its muscular shoulder manly? In other words, how does manliness equate with
spectating? I had never lingered over those bullfighting passages before but
forced myself to do it this time – like eating meat, I think that if you are
going to read Hemingway you have a moral obligation to recognize the thing for
what it is. They are brilliant passages, each pathetic detail, the bull going
crazier and crazier, his eyes rolling, smoke coming out his ears. But the
coolness one derives from watching is so infuriatingly tautological: “These men
were aficionados. Those who were aficionados could always get rooms even when
the hotel was full. Montoya introduced me to some of them. They were always very
polite at first, and it amused them that I should be an America. Somehow it was
taken for granted that an American could not have aficion. Here might simulate
it or confuse it with excitement, but he could not really have it. When they saw
that I had aficion, and there was no password, no set questions that could bring
it out, rather it was a sort of oral spiritual examination with the questions
always a little on the defensive and never apparent, there was this same
embarrassed putting the hand on the shoulder, or a ‘Buen hombre.’”
Is
Hemingway speaking our language? Are we all talking back, self-conscious,
complicit in his mythmaking? Or is it just a joke? The last few lines where
Brett complains that they could have had so much fun and Jake replies that it’s
nice to think so makes me think that he is. It’s a great story that we tell
ourselves, but we all know that it’s a fake. Like the idea of sitting in a bar
until very late at night drinking and smoking. A lovely story but in fact it
just feels really bad the next day. It’s sordid, stupid and sodden. And we know
and still we do it, we know it and still we love it. Like Brett. Jake tells
her:
“Don’t do it.”
“I can’t help it. I’ve never been able to help
anything.”
“You ought to stop it.”
“How can I stop it? I can’t stop
things. Feel that?”
Her hand was trembling.
“I’m like that all
through.”
Me, too.
Oh well, “[u]nder the wine I lost the disgusted
feeling and was happy. It seemed they were all such nice people.”
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