Hurt does the voices well: a roughened Midwestern growl for the expatriate the hard-drinking writer Bill Gorton, a credible Scottish burr for the even-harder-drinking Mike Campbell, husband-to-be of the beautiful, lost Lady Brett Ashley (more about her later), and a Greek accent just this side of cartoonish for the rich old bon vivant Count Mippipopolous. For the expatriate American reporter Jake Barnes, Hurt keeps the voice neutral—appropriate for a narrator—but with a bitter edge appropriate for a man literally castrated by a wound in World War I. In fact, the only character he doesn’t quite nail is the one at the center of everything: Brett herself.
But who does have a handle on her? When I first read the novel, the conventional wisdom was that Brett is the “typical” castrating Hemingway bitch—a type that turns out not to be typical at all in Hemingway’s work—and that it was just like her to be most deeply in love with Jake, who’d already had the job done. I’m not sure I really bought that, but I figured I was an innocent who didn’t get what dark stuff was really going on. This time through the book, Brett seemed to be a damaged soul, a spirit too large for the life to which she’s sentenced herself. I couldn’t feel sorry for Mike Campbell—she didn’t hide her affairs from him, and he didn’t leave her. And this time, it became clear to me that she’s called “Lady Brett” only for ironic reasons. “Lady” is only borrowed finery: she’s waiting for her divorce from an abusive husband with the entry-level title of baronet. In fact, she’s an increasingly desperate woman who can’t pay her own way, waiting to be married to a bankrupt outrunning his creditors.
Is Brett a predator out to undo her lovers, the boxer-turned-novelist Robert Cohn and the teenage bullfighter Pedro Romero, and to humiliate her husband? Is she simply a woman taking pleasure where she chooses? Is she a neurotic alcoholic who’ll screw anybody in sight to get away from herself? The first theory—which I hope is no longer conventional wisdom—is silly. Cohn undoes himself by mopily attaching himself to Brett and her friends after their affair is over, and Romero isn’t undone at all. The day after Cohn (a boxer, remember) beats him to a pulp, Romero performs the bullfight of his life, and Brett leaves him because she thinks the relationship would ultimately damage his matadorian purity. (Or so she says, but I can’t see any reason to doubt her.) And Mike Campbell knows the deal as well as Brett does: they may not be good for each other, but they’re well matched. As to the other two explanations—is she a free woman or a puppet manipulated by alcohol and the damage done to her—who’s really free enough in his or her own life to decide that one?
Oh, and does she love Jake because she can only settle for the unattainable, because he’s already undone as a sexual being, or just because— which seems to be why he loves her . I’ll pass on that too, but anybody who believes in simple, single human motivations is welcome to take a shot at it.
Now that I’m old enough to be the father of any of these characters, they still seem older, more sophisticated and worldly-wise than I am. It might be because reading the book takes me back to when I was a teenage naïf, but I’d like to give Hemingway more credit. He sets “The Sun Also Rises” in an idyllic—and idyllically rowdy—Europe with one foot still in the Middle Ages. Yet his characters, as elaborately oversophisticated and post-everything ironic as the cokeheads in “Bright Lights, Big City,” seem like contemporaries given to a few archaisms such as “grand” and “swell.” In fact, Bill Gorton is even ironic about irony.
“Work for the good of all.” Bill stepped into his underclothes. “Show irony and pity.”
I started out of the room with the tackle-bag, the nets, and the rod-case.
“Hey! come back!”
I put my head in the door.
“Aren’t you going to show a little irony and pity?”
I thumbed my nose.
“That’s not irony.”
As I went down-stairs I heard Bill singing, “Irony and Pity. When you’re feeling . . . Oh, Give them Irony and Give them Pity. Oh, give them Irony. When they’re feeling … Just a little irony. Just a little pity. He kept on singing until he came down-stairs. The tune was: “The Bells are Ringing for Me and my Gal.” I was reading a week-old Spanish paper.
“What’s all this irony and pity?”
“What? Don’t know about Irony and Pity?”
“No. Who got it up?”
“Everybody. They’re mad about it in New York. It’s just like the Fratellinis used to be.”
This is all the more fun if you know that F. Scott Fitzgerald was Hemingway’s friend and rival and that Bill is making fun of a review of “The Great Gatsby.” But you don’t need to, anymore than you need to know who or what the Fratellinis were—if I’d cared I would’ve Googled it—to understand that these people are high-level banterers, and probably smarter than you are.
Finally—and go ahead and laugh—I don’t think I ever quite understood all that’s going on in the novel’s ending, which is as justly admired as the ending of … oh, “The Great Gatsby.” You remember, but:
“Oh, Jake,” Brett said, “we could have had such a damned good time together.”
Ahead was a mounted policeman in khaki directing traffic. He raised his baton. The car slowed suddenly pressing Brett against me.
“Yes,” I said. “Isn’t it pretty to think so?”
It’s easy enough to see the ruefulness: the only pleasure they can have together is the contemplation of something that never was and never can be. Easy enough, too, to get that part of Jake’s subtext is the thought that love between real people in the real world is never as pretty—and isn’t that a well-chosen word? Not “beautiful”—as the ideal and unattainable. I didn’t see, though, what a change in attitude this was for Jake, who for most of the novel found miserable comfort in pining for the damned good time he and Brett could have. All that’s happened in the novel has brought him to a small, and maybe even transitory, recognition that his world, his wound, and his beloved are exactly and irrevocably what they are. But there’s one more thing that I still don’t understand. Is Jake (mildly) rebuking Brett for a useless fantasy—which may in fact be one more of the poses she strikes for the world and for herself? Or is he (mildly) seeking to come closer to her by suggesting that she, too, knows that their ideal life together is a pretty thought, no more—and no less. I figure that by the time the 150th anniversary rolls around, I’ll understand everything.
