Making It New: 1900–1945 413The experience of war was also vital here. Like so many of his generation, Hemingway
learned from that war not just a distrust but a hatred of abstraction, the high-
sounding generalizations used as an excuse, or justification, for mass slaughter.
“I was always embarrassed by the words sacred, glorious, and sacrifice and the
expression, in vain,” says the protagonist Frederic Henry in A Farewell to Arms, set,
of course, in the Great War: “the things that were glorious had no glory and the
stockyards were like the stockyards of Chicago.” “There were many words that you
could not stand to hear and finally only the names of places had dignity.” Like
Frederic Henry, Hemingway came to feel that “abstract words such as glory, honor,
courage, or hallow were obscene”; the simple words, those that carried the smallest
burden of stock attitudes, were the safest ones. What the individual, and the writer,
had to respond to were things and experiences themselves, not ideas about them;
and the closer he or she stuck to them, the less risk there would be of losing what was
truly felt under a mass of evasions and abstractions. The real thing the person or
writer must pursue, Hemingway felt, is the truth of the individual, immediate
experience and emotion. That truth is discovered by the Hemingway hero – just as
it is by Huckleberry Finn – in seeing and responding to things for himself. And it is
expressed by Hemingway – just as it is for Huck’s creator, Mark Twain – in describing
things for oneself, things as they are, not mediated by convention or abstraction.
The style, in fact, is a measure of a commitment; it is the proper reaction to the
world translated into words.
What Hemingway was after, in terms of words and action, is caught in perhaps
his most successful novel, The Sun Also Rises, the seminal treatment of the “lost
generation” and its disillusionment in the aftermath of World War I. The story is
slight. The book describes a few weeks of spring in Paris, during which we watch the
hero Jake Barnes living his customary life. He then goes on a fishing trip in Spain
and attends a fiesta in Pamplona. Running through this small slice of his life is a
minimal plot, concerned largely with the relationship between Jake and an
Englishwoman, Brett Ashley. Brett is the woman with whom Jake has been in love
off and on for some time. But when the novel ends, Jake and Brett are exactly
where they were at the start. The novel finishes where it began; the characters walk
around in a circle, not getting anywhere but just surviving. This is a world full
of people with nothing to do and no place, apparently, to go. The characters –
typically, for Hemingway, and for many stories of the postwar period – are situated
in another country, an alien place; and they seem cut off from all sense of purpose,
communal identity, or historical direction. Their common situation is, as one of
them succinctly puts it, “miserable” – existentially, that is, rather than economically.
Few of Hemingway’s characters have to worry about where the next meal is
coming from; on the contrary, they tend to eat rather well, food being one of the
“real things,” the basic sensory pleasures of life. They live under constant stress,
the pressure of living in a world without meaning, and their challenge is to show
grace under that pressure. In a sense, this is a novel of manners: each character is
judged according to how clearly he or she sees the truth – and, if they see it, how
well or badly they behave.GGray_c04.indd 413ray_c 04 .indd 413 8 8/1/2011 7:53:56 AM/ 1 / 2011 7 : 53 : 56 AM