Novel ideas / The Sun Also Rises is still a great American novel |
To pinpoint the precise moment Ernest Hemingway came up with the idea for his first novel, The Sun Also Rises, which is celebrating its centenary this year, is not difficult. All we have to do is follow the trail back to Pamplona.
In 1925, after a cold winter in Paris, a 25-year-old Hemingway was keen to return to the San Fermín bullfighting festival in the Basque town of Pamplona, near the northern coast of Spain. He had yet to make his mark as a writer, although he was surrounded by some of the heavyweights of expatriate literature: Ezra Pound, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Gertrude Stein and Ford Madox Ford, all of whom believed Hem had a future as a novelist. He worked closely with Ford on the expat literary journal the Transatlantic Review, and Gertrude Stein was a regular visitor to his tiny Paris apartment above a nightclub called the Bal au Printemps. Stein would sit on Hemingway’s huge Empire bed and advise him how to improve his short stories, while his wife Hadley and son Bumby played in the kitchen.
It was Stein who suggested he travel to Spain to gather material for a novel. Hemingway assembled a posse of pals to accompany him, including Harold Loeb, Don Stewart and Duff Twysden, an English bohemian who became the model for Lady Brett Ashley. The other two friends would become Robert Cohn and Bill Gorton in the novel, while Hem would cast himself as troubled war veteran Jake Barnes.
What keeps the reader engaged is the simmering tension Hemingway captures between all the characters
What keeps the reader engaged is the simmering tension Hemingway captures between all the characters
The big attraction at San Fermín was the bullfighting, the daily corridas surrounded by a full week of 24-hour partying. Hem considered himself a true aficionado of bullfighting – rare among Americans in the 1920s – and knew the names of all the matadors in the fiesta that year, knowing some of them personally. To adherents such as Hemingway, the sport is a combination of artistry, theatre, violence and technical precision that generally ends with the death of the bull by the sword of the matador. On the rare occasions that it doesn’t, then the matador’s days are over. Hemingway was keen to impress his expatriate companions: he knew more than they would ever know about the mysterious art of the corrida de toros. While in Pamplona he........