1 - Good Style, Bad Content, No Philosophy: The Initial Reviews

Summary

MANY AMERICANS FLED TO EUROPE in the 1920s to escape Prohibition and the nation’s Puritanism or their parents’ proscriptions; according to Kenneth Lynn’s Hemingway there were 35,000 in Paris in 1927 (149). Reviewers tended to be chary of youthful publications coming from abroad, dismissing many as outré experiments or pornographic excursions. Even those published in the United States received a wary eye when the subject matter depicted European life. Newspaper and general magazine reviewers, who catered to the general populace, saw that life as dissolute, unproductive, and therefore un-American. And Hemingway agreed. He sought to distinguish himself from most of the American expatriates living in Paris, for he considered them lazy loafers, living for the most part on their parents’ money and taking advantage of an extremely favorable exchange rate between American dollars and French francs (20 francs to the dollar). They talked about art but did not create any, while he was a hard working journalist/author at first, and then author alone (suppressing the fact that he was being supported by his wife’s trust fund). In an article he wrote for the Toronto Star Weekly that was published 25 March 1922, Hemingway wrote:

The scum of Greenwich Village, New York, has been skimmed off and deposited in large ladlesful on that section of Paris adjacent to the Café Rotonde… .

… The trouble is that people who go on a tour of the Latin Quarter look in at the Rotonde and think they are seeing an assembly of the real artists of Paris. I want to correct that in a very public manner, for the artists of Paris who are turning out creditable work resent and loathe the Rotonde crowd.

… They [these expatriates] are nearly all loafers expanding the energy that an artist puts into his creative work talking about what they are going to do and condemning the work of all artists who have gained any recognition. (By-Line, 23–26)

Thus it is not surprising that one reviewer, at least, thought that The Sun Also Rises was a satire on those same hard-drinking, time-wasting expatriates: “Here is a book, which, like its characters, begins nowhere and ends in nothing. … It is a raw satire sometimes almost horrible in its depiction of futility. …