Everybody behaves badly: the true story behind Hemingway’s masterpiece The sun also rises (US: Mariner Books, 2017) eloquently delivers what its sub-title promises and more. Lesley M.M.Blume takes her title from something the Jake Barnes – the Hemingway alter ego – says in the novel, that “Everyone behaves badly – given the chance.” And with a couple of honorary exceptions they really do, not least the man himself. For here we are deep in Lawrencian territory: “Never trust the teller, trust the tale,” as D.H.Lawrence wrote in, as it happens, his Studies in Classic American Literature, published in 1923. And for all the bad behaviour and bad faith exposed, Lesley Blume never suggests that it is anything other than a true classic in the making she’s talking about here. This book about the book is an engrossing tale, tellingly told.

Not that everyone was thrilled by The sun also rises when it came out in 1926, least of all those very thinly disguised in its pages. Maxwell Perkins, an editor at Scribners, had to fight to get the hot new novel he’d acquired past his boss at the conservative publishing firm’s board meeting:
Perkins marched into the meeting, determined to defend his acquisition as important literature, not mere profanity.
“It’s a vulgar book,” Charles Scribner Sr declared. “There are four-letter words in it that I never would permit on the page of any book that enters a gentleman’s home.” (p164)
After what was effectively a case study in early modern publishing marketing hype, which Blume makes interesting in itself, most of the reviews were extremely favourable. There were exceptions, though:
The New Masses ran a review that must have felt like a kick in the crotch to Hemingway. John Dos Passos reduced his friend’s book to “a cock-and-bull story about a whole lot of tourists getting drunk.” […] Dos Passos did concede, however, that the cock-and-bull story was well written. (p201)
Which is, on one level, a fair summary of the action, an account of a road trip – hey, a road novel – that hadn’t lived up to expectations. Not so much the cock-and-bull though, given that some involved thought Hemingway had practically written a non-fiction account – with the names changed – of an actual journey out of boho Paris down to Spain for the start of the bullfighting season. Like Donald Stewart, who …
… wasn’t particularly impressed by the book’s artistic merits. Back in California, he got a copy and found himself uneasily transported back to the Pamplona misadventure.
“It was so absolutely accurate that it seemed little more than a skilfully done travelogue,” he later recalled. “What a reporter, I said to myself.” (p208)
Thing was, Hemingway hadn’t told his friends what was coming, and with the success of the book a couple of the originals for the closely drawn lead characters had cause to date their lives as either pre- or post- the book’s publication.
Ernest Hemingway has been one of my favourite writers since I read A farewell to arms for a course many years ago. Ultimately it was the sadness that got to me then – never mind the rhythm of the pared-down prose – after that perilous journey across the lake. I’ve stuck with him in the face of all the macho celeb bullshit that comes with the image; I’d say it doesn’t pollute the writing as much as some wilfully find – it’s not that simple. True, vegetarian me has shied away from Death in the afternoon, but it’s still in the pile, and I still expect to take something from it. The first time I read The sun also rises it was called Fiesta. More booze, liaisons and bullfighting than sex and drugs and rock and roll but with the immediacy with which it’s written it felt like I was there. For what it’s worth, I also think To have and to hold is underrated as an innovatory literary thriller. These covers take me back (mind, I’m not that old – the older ones were bought second hand):




Hard to think now of Ernest Hemingway as avant-garde, but that he was. When he and his wife Hadley moved to Paris – centre of the creative universe at that point in time – they shared a fully fledged bohemian experience, living cheaply in dodgy accommodation and patronising all the right cafes and bars. Armed with letters of introduction from an established novelist friend, who he later cruelly satirised in a short novel even Hadley thought was “detestable”, Hemingway got to be mentored by Gertrude Stein and Ezra Pound, the intellectual heavies of the Parisian émigré literary scene. But his eyes were on a bigger prize. Touting In our time, his first mainstream collection of short stories, he predicted (wrongly as it turned out at first) …
It was going to sell well […]. Unlike the work of his other experimental contemporaries, his writing would have wide appeal. “My book will be praised by highbrows and can be read by lowbrows,” he assured [his first US publisher].
There was a growing buzz, though. What was necessary was a big novel. Scott Fitzgerald, a big supporter, was already successful, but it was his subject matter – the post-war Jazz Age – that distinguished Scott from the Henry James legacy, rather than a new way of writing. The sun also rises was that novel:
“People watched Hemingway and watched what Hemingway was doing and cared deeply about it, as I did, and weren’t too much impressed by Scott,” recalled Archibald MacLeish […]. “Scott doesn’t exist when you’re talking at the level of Picasso and Stravinsky.” But Hemingway was about to reach that stratum, and his peers sensed it.




In her introduction to Everybody behaves badly, Lesley Blume makes the suggestion – fodder for a hell of a modern EngLit exam question – that, “Some other novels that have earned voice-of-a-generation status – Jack Kerouac’s On the road, for example – feel dated in comparison.” Discuss! And I’m not going to argue – though I will cringe a bit at the words ‘sexy’ and naughty’ – when she sums its perennial attraction:
The sun also rises still banks on the same dual function that made it a craze the moment it was released: it remains at once a vanguard work of modernist art and also a depiction of a sexy, glamorous world rife with naughty behaviour – and little of the flawed human nature depicted in the book’s pages has changed.
The Lost Generation
The book’s original working title was The lost generation, and Hemingway retained Gertrude Stein’s “You are all a lost generation” quote as an epigram. So he only really had himself to blame when it was welcomed as if its purpose had been to, in Blume’s words, “depict definitively his damaged generation”. Never mind that its eventual title on publication in the US came from the Old Testament, from Ecclesiastes: “One generation passeth away, and another generation cometh: but the earth abideth for ever, the sun also riseth …”. (In the UK Jonathan Cape chickened out and went with Fiesta, losing the resonance). Blume again: “… it fit neatly with Hemingway’s belief that each generation was just as lost as any other:
“Nobody knows about the generation that follows them and certainly has no right to judge,” Hemingway insisted. “I didn’t mean the book to be a hollow or bitter satire but a damn tragedy with the earth abiding for ever as the hero.”
Like Bob Dylan, he was still protesting, spurning his voice-of-a-generation acclamation decades on. Regardless of the disclaimer (how gorgeous is the phrase ‘moving towards capitalised status, by the way?):
… the idea of being part of a “lost generation” took hold hard and fast. The epithet was quickly moving towards capitalized status. In subsequent generations, similar umbrella identities would be ascribed to each era’s under-thirty crowd: the Beat Generation, Generation X, the Millennials, and so on. But the Lost Generation was the forerunner of modern youthful angst banners, and The sun also rises was its bible. That said, no one in that demographic seemed particularly glum about being “lost”. Membership in this new club had an undeniable glamour. (p209)
[Compared with Scott Fitzgerald’s Jazz Age] … Lost Generation decadence had nothing to do with dinner dances and eating clubs. Rather, it was all about purposeful dissipation. With Jake and Brett as their lodestars, self-fashioned Lost Generationers were spiritually obliged to defy convention, embrace hangovers as holy, and indulge in sexual adventures. The more ill-fated the better. (p210)
Hadley Hemingway nee Richardson
There was someone who played a huge part in the launching of Ernest Hemingway on the wider world, but who doesn’t appear in The sun also rises: his wife, Hadley Richardson. That’s her in the middle of the photo on the cover of Everybody behaves badly. It was her modest trust fund that had seen them through the years of striving, and quite simply, Hemingway dumped her when success came – a theme not unusual in music, sport and the arts in general. He expressed regret in his later memoir of the time in Paris, A moveable feast, and it all seems sad, disappointing. Ernest, you rat.
As she observed her circumstances that summer, it must have dawned on Hadley that Hemingway had already made the choice between her and Pauline, and that decision carried a weighty symbolism. There on the Riviera, surrounded by their new friends’ beautiful villas, with her husband’s fashionable mistress perpetually on hand, it must have become painfully clear that Hemingway had moved on. They were already in the physical world of his future – a glaringly bright, illustrious realm far away from the naive, hungry aspirations of their carpenter’s loft in Paris. Hemingway and Hadley were no longer allies defying the idle, ignorant rich while taking refuge in the joys of a warm bed, simple food, and uncomplicated love. (p183)
In the process of trying to find details of a novel I’d read and liked about Hemingway’s wives (all four of ’em) I came across an article that made me see the end of the marriage in a different light. (That novel was by Naomi Wood, and called Mrs Hemingway; I wrote about it here – an impressive piece of work). Guardian columnist Hadley Freeman had always disliked her first name, even more so after she’d been advised to read A moveable feast. We will gloss over some, ahem, controversial opinions aired here; I laughed regardless of the potential insult, because of the way she says it:
This point brings me to another problem I have with my name: I hate Hemingway. His gratingly self-conscious style – all brutalised declarative sentences – has, to my ears, the rhythm of a pub bore sounding off. More repugnant than his style is his mentality. He is the literary version of the worst of Bob Dylan, purveying that tired cliché of a man as solitary figure, necessarily selfish and the sole protagonist of his story, for whom women are either spoilt sluts or sweet saints, there to look pretty, subjugate themselves and then, eventually, be left behind so he can find another girl in another town wearing a lace dress. It’s such a boring, sophomoric view, one almost excusable in a twentysomething man, less so in a fiftysomething, and it explains why, in my experience, so many men love Hemingway (and Dylan, come to that). And why I don’t.
The thing is, she becomes reconciled to her name after reading another novel telling Hadley’s story. That novel is The Paris Wife by Paula McLain, which I shall doubtless be reading soon. I not going to say precisely what changed Ms Freeman’s mind, except to reassure you the ex-Mrs Hemingway had a good life after the events described in Everybody behaves badly. If you’ve read this far you’ll probably fancy reading the article in full: Hadley Freeman: Me and Mrs Hemingway | Books | The Guardian
While we’re here I’m going to leave a link, too, to a fine performance from another favourite, the excellent Mary Chapin Carpenter, of her fine song Mrs Hemingway, about the Paris years. Enjoy (sorry about the ads):
Mary Chapin Carpenter : Mrs Hemingway – YouTube
I’ll leave you with this photo, just for comic effect – the newly married Hemingways, Switzerland 1922:
