Everybody Behaves Badly: The True Story Behind Hemingway’s The Sun Also Rises by Lesley M. M. Blume (review)

The title of Lesley Blume’s enticing study of the real life people in Hemingway’s The Sun Also Rises is spoken in a brief exchange between the novel’s war-weary protagonists, Brett Ashley and Jake Barnes. When Brett tells Jake how sick she has become of her present paramour, Robert Cohn—“Nobody else would behave as badly”—Jake replies, “Everybody behaves badly, [. . .] Give them the proper chance” (185). “Everybody” comprises an entire generation Gertrude Stein labeled lost and damned, “un generation perdu [sic]” (131). Blume explains, “It wasn’t their fault that they were drunk, aimless, and destructive; they had been ruined by an ignoble war and the flawed institutions that used to give life meaning” (132). More particularly, the title describes the miscreant behavior of Hemingway’s characters and their recognizable counterparts outside the novel, the author’s problematic literary ethics and abuse of friends, and even the in fighting of Hemingway’s publishers, some of whom believed the novel too vulgar to publish.

Blume never loses sight of the grim war in the novel’s background. Though in her tell-all scenario Hemingway’s motives are more personal: “I’m going to get those bastards,” Hemingway tells Kitty Cannell, one of the novel’s other real people. “I’m going to tear them apart” (xvii). He’s referring particularly to Harold Loeb and Bill Smith, the story’s Robert Cohn and Bill Gorton. But the way in which all the main characters—including Lady Duff Twysden (Lady Brett Ashley), Pat Guthrie (Mike Campbell), and the author himself (Jake Barnes)—torment one another with infidelities, jealousies, and caustic verbal assaults evokes Sartre’s famous remark that “Hell is other people.” Not only does Hemingway describe events that actually transpired in Montparnasse cafes like Le Select, Le Dôme, La Rotonde, and La Closerie des Lilas, but also intimate details of the characters’ personal lives—failed past marriages, assorted indiscretions, and painfully unflattering idiosyncrasies of temper and speech.

The unwitting real life models reacted to their co-opted lives with varying degrees of rage and dismay. It was reported, for instance, that the portrait of Harold Loeb as the romantic fool Robert Cohn earned Loeb nearly a decade on a psychiatrist’s couch, and that he went gunning for the author. Keeping tabs on his “demented characters” as he called them after the book’s publication, Hemingway insisted the only objection by the hard-drinking, promiscuous Lady Duff was “she never had slept with the bloody bullfighter Cayetano Ordóñez” (206). Hemingway was still fictionalizing. Duff reportedly said she was furious about the book and deeply hurt by his portrayal of her. She tells a friend that keeping company with bullfighters would have been like “being up to my ass in midgets” (206).

Blume’s roman à clef explorations prompt us to ask whose badness was worse, the purposeful dissipation of the author’s literary victims or his own unrepentant ambition and abuse of friends and family—Hadley and the little son they had two years into their Paris adventure. Calling Hemingway “the original Limelight Kid,” editor Robert McAlmon claims Hemingway prized people who were useful to his career and discarded them if they were not. Patrick Hemingway, another of the author’s sons, remarks that family life for his father was the enemy of accomplishment. To Hadley’s credit neither personal neglect nor her husband’s flagrant infidelity with second wife Pauline tarnished her respect for his literary genius or her pride in The Sun Also Rises, dedicated to her and which she signed for me, “From one who also saw the sun rise.” Mistreatment aside, though Blume does not speculate about this, I suspect Hemingway’s abiding love for Hadley explains her otherwise mysterious omission from the novel. One might expect Hemingway’s rancor toward fellow expats like Scott Fitzgerald, Sherwood Anderson, John Dos Passos...