The Sun Also Rises
by . New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons. 1926. 12mo. viii+256 pp. $2.00.
IN writing this I am thinking not of confirmed fiction readers but of the great company of men like myself who are bored by current fiction, who find other people’s love affairs uninteresting, and the shadowy characters of novels much less exciting than the real figures of business life.
Such men are hereby informed that a new thing has happened in the world. A writer named Hemingway has arisen, who writes as if he had never read anybody’s writing, as if he had fashioned the art of writing himself.
When I first heard about him I was prejudiced. A reviewer gave the impression that he was just another of the bad little boys who think it is so brave to run around chalking smutty words on the back fences of literature. I dislike those bad little boys, not because they are bad, but because they are dull. Just as I rebel at the theatrical managers when they promise jokes — which require brains—and then fulfill their promise by taking the clothes off the chorus which requires no brains. I thought Hemingway was just another of these smarties. I apologize to him for that thought.
It is true that his book deals with people who have no morals. They drink too much. They are wafted about by their passions as easily and with as little concern as feathers are carried on the wind. They have no religion, and no ideals in the accepted sense of the word. But they have courage and friendship, and mental honestness. And they are alive. Amazingly real and alive.
They are not described. Nothing is much described. The book starts; people enter and talk. They travel, and you travel with them. They go to a town in Spain to see a series of bullfights, and for several nights they hardly sleep at all — tense at the fight all day, drinking and dancing all night. It is all very reprehensible. But so real that when you are finished with it you actually feel tired, as though you had been through it all and lost all that sleep.
To me, Hemingway seems the freshest, new voice since Frank Norris, excepting only Lardner and Lewis, I hope nothing will happen to him, I hope that he will not go around with other writers, or talk at women’s clubs, or get a good opinion of himself. I should like to have him some day write a book about more respectable people. It is the fashion of current writers to look down on respectable people. Some day a great writer will discover that they too can be interesting, can have adventures, and humor, and all the rest. Maybe Hemingway will find that out. But meantime I ask him please to take care of his health. The world has plenty of almost everything— doctors, lawyers, bankers, merchants. But what a shortage of comedians! And of men who can tell a story that is even half as interesting as a day at the office or a game of golf.
BRUCE BARTON