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

The title of Lesley M. M. Blume’s lively and eminently readable account of the people and events behind the composition of Ernest Hemingway’s The Sun Also Rises (1926) comes from a scene in Pamplona in which Jake Barnes, the novel’s narrator and protagonist, tells Lady Brett Ashley, the woman he has long loved, “Everybody behaves badly. . . . Give them the proper chance” (145).¹ Jake then illustrates the truth of his statement when, moments later, unable to resist Brett when she calls him “darling” and implores him to “Please stay by me and see me through this” (147), he agrees to escort her to the bullfighter Pedro Romero so that the two can go to bed together.

It is true that there is some bad behavior in The Sun Also Rises. Not only does Jake violate his own values, his afícion for bullfighting, in introducing Brett to Pedro, but his pimping directly leads to fistfights in which Robert Cohn, who had earlier spent a week with Brett in San Sebastian, knocks down Brett’s fiancé Mike Campbell, knocks Jake out cold, and then finds Romero and hurts him “most badly” (165). But Blume exaggerates when she writes that “Against a backdrop of ceaseless drinking, bullfights, and sexual jealousy over . . . Lady Brett, civility among the group members quickly spirals into a morass of insults, jealousy, and fistfights” (122). When Blume characterizes Hemingway’s—and Fitzgerald’s—subject matter as “renegades from society behaving badly” and charges Jake as well as Brett with “purposeful dissipation” (210), I have to wonder if we are reading the same novel.

As one example, it is puzzling why Blume says so little about the many characters who behave not badly but quite well. There is not a single mention of Count Mippipopolous in book 1 or the Englishman Harris in book 2, two important minor characters who have learned—in one of the novel’s central metaphors—to get their “money’s worth” of life’s pleasures. Nor is there much about the role of loyal innkeeper and aficionado Juanito Montoya. Most surprisingly, Blume has little to say about Pedro Romero, whose bullfighting teaches Jake—and the reader—both how to confront life’s challenges and how to wipe out past defeats: “Romero’s bull-fighting gave real emotion, because he kept the absolute purity of line in his movements and always quietly and calmly let the horns pass him close each time” (134). As for his beating by Cohn, “He was wiping all that out now. Each thing that he did with this bull wiped that out a little cleaner” (175).

Perhaps because it challenges her thesis that everyone behaves badly, Blume overlooks Jake’s determined efforts to forge a workable philosophy of life and to evolve a definition of morality. She entirely ignores the central chapter 14, which many readers consider the thematic core of the novel. It is there that Jake defines immorality as “things that made you disgusted afterward” (119)—a definition that Hemingway himself embraces in Death in the Afternoon (1932)—and expresses his cardinal belief that “Enjoying living was learning to get your money’s worth and knowing when you had it” (119). In the chapters that follow—in Pamplona, Bayonne, San Sebastian, and finally Madrid—Hemingway dramatizes the consequences and implications of Jake’s reflections.

It becomes clear that Blume’s purpose is neither to evaluate The Sun Also Rises, other than to label it a “masterpiece,” nor to account for its achievement: she has no interest in—and barely mentions—the breakthrough, dialogue-rich Nick Adams stories like “Indian Camp,” “The End of Something,” and “Cross-Country Snow” that Hemingway had written a year earlier. Nor does she focus on interpreting the novel, for she is not a literary scholar or critic. Although she fails to include a list of works...