The 1926 first edition with the misprint that lists for $750,000 wasn’t my first edition.
It’s the 100 anniversary of Ernest Hemingway’s first novel. It was 1985 or ’86 when I bought a new Scribner’s paperback edition for the one and only class in American authors that The College of Knowledge offered its English (read: Brit Lit) majors back during the Reagan Administration. I couldn’t put it down.
Tender Is the Night followed and also took me to a place and time that refused to let go of my imagination. But I kept returning to Sun year after year. It took on an even larger significance after my first case of testicular cancer. Just a few years later and Mrs. E. and I actually lived on the Côte d’Azur, traveled through Paris, Southern Spain and up through Basque country with our very own Basque national poet. That paperback went with us. It was two decades later after the second case of cancer that I went the “full Jake.” I re-read my copy recuperating in the Outer Banks, NC. Even deeper meanings.
In between, after reading all the Hemingway and all the Fitzgerald I could find, I delved into more English and American authors associated with the years between the wars. Then into the stories of the personalities — The Bright Young Things, The Lost Generation — that lit up those years so vividly with their outsized personalities. I dove deeper into Everybody Behaves Badly (Leslie M M Blume) and Living Well Is the Best Revenge (Calvin Thompkins), Sara and Gerald (Honoria Murphy Donnelly) and Amanda Vaill’s Everybody Was So Young. We’ve even seen some of the Murphy’s home movies.
All of that and a mania for classic movies (especially starring Cary Grant or the William Powell and Myrna Loy “The Thin Man” series) went into Easy and Elegant Life. I figured that by sheer dint of will power, a singular American idea, I could bend reality and achieve the sort of life to which I wished to become accustomed. I just failed to take into account how most of those novels ended and the times through which I am living. I succeeded, to a certain extent.
Or, as Jake puts it at the end of The Sun Also Rises, “Yes, isn’t it pretty to think so?”
I don’t know if you are a reader of imaginative fiction, but there is a new novel by Tim Powers, called “Mills of the Gods” that takes place during the “Lost Generation” years. Hemingway is a character in it.
Hello Michael. Thanks for the tip. I read anything thing that doesn’t move fast enough to get away. The bookshelves are overflowing and there are stacks on the back stairs! Definitely adding this to the queue.
Cheers!
Wow. Thank you for the personal insights. You’ve given me a lot of reading ideas. I read some of those in high school, but now you make me want to go back. Yes, such a worthy and interesting time in America. (I’m only slightly familiar).
My pleasure, Mr. McConnell. It’s worth a trip down memory lane every once in a while. Revisiting a book over years rewards you with new insights as you acquire experiences with age. Have fun!
By the late Calvin Tomkins.