Hemingway’s Hidden Metafictions

Photograph by Robert CapaMagnum.
Photograph by Robert Capa/Magnum.

Ernest Hemingway’s “The Sun Also Rises” was almost called something else. Early title contenders were “Fiesta: A Novel” (as the book was subsequently known in England), “Two Lie Together,” and even “For in much wisdom is much grief and he that increases knowledge increases sorrow”—a line that, like the winning candidate, comes from Ecclesiastes, and that, it is safe to assume, Hemingway might have abridged further if he’d used it. The evidence for these alternatives comes from early notes and manuscripts, which are included in a new edition of the novel, published this month.

There are signs of other felicitous decisions. The real-life socialite Lady Duff Twysden was given a better name, Brett Ashley. Maudlin dialogue was struck, as when the ill-starred Brett says to Jake Barnes, the narrator, “I love you and I’ll love you always.” (In the finished text, lines like “Well, let’s shut up about it” are more in the spirit of their unconsummated affair.) And Hemingway settled on a perfect final line. After Brett says, “Oh Jake . . . we could have had such a damned good time together,” the author at first had Jake respond, “It’s nice as hell to think so,” but later scribbled “Isn’t it nice to think so.” By the time the manuscript went to the printer, it had been altered again, to the sharp and sad and perfectly balanced “Isn’t it pretty to think so?”

Early drafts of the book are well known to scholars, and are available at the Hemingway Collection, at the John F. Kennedy Presidential Library and Museum, in Boston. But this new edition puts them in handy appendices, giving us lay readers a sense of Hemingway’s writing process, and, more importantly, of how different a novel “The Sun Also Rises” might have been.

All of Hemingway’s major changes to his manuscript move it toward a greater simplicity. In early drafts, the novel began in the middle of the story, at the bullfights during the festival of San Fermín, in Pamplona. Later, Hemingway opted for a more straightforward, chronological order, introducing the American expats Jake, Brett, and Robert Cohn in Paris, before they travel to Spain. In the manuscript that he sent to his editor at Scribner, Maxwell Perkins, the first two chapters detailed the characters’ histories and motivations. “This is a novel about a lady,” it began:

Her name is Lady Ashley and when the story begins she is living in Paris and it is Spring. That should be a good setting for a romantic but highly moral story. As everyone knows, Paris is a very romantic place. Spring in Paris is a very happy and romantic time. Autumn in Paris, although very beautiful, might give a note of sadness or melancholy that we shall try to keep out of this story.

It is diverting to consider how the novel would have been different if Brett were indeed the main character and the heroine—if it really were a story about a lady, rather than about the various men who loved her, or couldn’t. But more intriguing still is the second part of the opening, in which Hemingway breaks into the narrative to address the reader directly, and, in so doing, calls out the artifice implicit in the writing and reading of fiction. It is a wink at the marketplace—readers want lively, lighthearted tales from abroad—and alludes to the novel’s central dark, repeated joke: that everything awful in life, in all of its sadness and melancholy, is better laughed at.

Later, in another section that was cut, Hemingway writes:

I did not want to tell this story in the first person, but I find that I must. I wanted to stay well outside of the story so that I would not be touched by it in any way, and handle all the people in it with that irony and pity that are so essential to good writing.

Jake Barnes was named Hem in the early drafts, and in the version he sent to his editor, Hemingway retained the conceit that the book was not merely based on his real-life experiences but was actually a memoir: “I made the unfortunate mistake, for a writer, of first having been Mr. Jake Barnes.”

All of this was cut at the suggestion of F. Scott Fitzgerald, who, after reading the version that Hemingway had sent to Perkins, wrote a long, dismayed-sounding letter to Hemingway, in which he said, “I think that there are about 24 sneers, superiorities, and nose-thumbings-at-nothing that mar the whole narrative up to P. 29 where (after a false start on the introduction of Cohn) it really gets going.” Though Hemingway would later downplay Fitzgerald’s editorial influence, the published novel begins with the sentence: “Robert Cohn was once middleweight boxing champion of Princeton.”

In the letter, Fitzgerald also criticized Hemingway for injecting his own writerly persona into the text: “That biography from you, who allways believed in the superiority (the preferability) of the imagined to the seen not to say to the merely recounted.” With this fragment of a sentence, Fitzgerald gives Hemingway the familiar writing-class advice—show, don’t tell; less is more; and what is left out can sometimes be more meaningful than what is included. Earlier versions of the novel contained even more of this “biography”; Fitzgerald had caught the remnants of nervous self-consciousness that Hemingway himself had curtailed as he wrote.

There are several striking examples, in the drafts, of this uneasiness. After a digression about a washed-up but popular bullfighter, Hemingway writes: “Well none of that has anything to do with the story and I suppose you think there isn’t any story anyway but it sort of moves along in time and anyway there is a lot of dope about high society in it and that is always interesting.” Later, after describing the habits of his social set: “I don’t know why I have to put all this down. It may mix up the story but I wanted to show you what a fine crowd we were.” These moments, which did not survive the editing process, have a superficial confidence, an edgy bravado, but they are also anxious, the sign of a writer trying to figure out where his voice fits in among those of his characters.

The meatiest example of this kind of curious metafiction is in the second chapter of the novel’s first draft. Hemingway writes:

Probably any amount of this does not seem to have anything to do with the story and perhaps it has not. I am sick of those ones with their clear restrained writing and I am going to try to get in the whole business and to do that there has to be things that seem as though they did had nothing to do with it just as in life. In life people are not conscious of these special moments that novelists build their whole structures on. That is most people are not. That surely has nothing to do with the story but you can not tell until you finish it because none of the significant things are going to have any literary signs marking them. You have to figure them out for yourself.

At the start, it seems, Hemingway was attempting to write a novel very different from what would become “The Sun Also Rises,” which made his name as one of “those ones with their clear restrained writing.” He imagined a book in which the “whole business” of life gets expressed, in all of its messy detours and associations. In the same draft chapter, Hemingway goes on: “Now when my friends read this they will say it is awful. It is not what they had hoped or expected from me. Gertrude Stein once told me that remarks are not literature. All right, let it go at that. Only this time all the remarks are going in and if it is not literature who claimed it was anyway.”

This minor manifesto, embedded in a draft of his first novel, conceives of a book with greater intellectual and artistic ambitions than Hemingway ever produced—one akin to the more abstract fictions of the modernists. The line that he struck through—“It is not what they had hoped or expected from me”—becomes a potentially radical departure that Hemingway never realized, and that was nearly lost to history. Yet “The Sun Also Rises” is far from being a lesser thing, for all of its restrained clarity. It is partly a book of “literary signs,” perhaps against Hemingway’s own intentions. But it is also a book—Gertrude Stein be damned—of remarks, both in the elliptical declarations that the characters make to one another, and in the weighted silences that linger between them. “I mistrust all frank and simple people, especially when their stories hold together.” That line, which belongs to the narrator, and to the author, was there from the beginning. It is an echo of Hemingway’s more eager and brash equivocations in the drafts, a claim that there was an unseen depth to his plainspoken prose. It is an author’s note, a statement of purpose—subtly and skillfully absorbed into the art of storytelling.