Books: Hemingway's "The Annotated Sun Also Rises: 100th Anniversary Deluxe Edition"

 

The Annotated Sun Also Rises: 100th Anniversary Deluxe Edition

Edited by Robert W. Trogdon; Introduction by Adam Gopnik

Library of America; hardcover, 376 pages; $39.95; available today, Tuesday, October 13th

Robert W. Trogdon is professor of English at Kent State University. He has served as the editor for The Cambridge Edition of the Letters of Ernest Hemingway. A scholar of twentieth-century American literature and textual editing, he has published extensively on Hemingway's writings.

Adam Gopnik is a staff writer for The New Yorker, the magazine he has written for since 1986. He is the author of Paris to the Moon. 

This annotated version of The Sun Also Rises is coming out close to the day of when it was published a century ago, October 22, 1926. It confirmed Hemingway as a foundational figure of literary modernism and the voice of the "Lost Generation."

Hemingway captured the excesses and fractured psyches of British and American expatriates in Paris and Spain after World War I. He wrote of the allure of 1920s Montparnasse nightlife, the vibrancy of the Iberian countryside, and the frenetic energy of the corrida and the running of the bulls.

This annotated edition features 140 illustrations and photographs, as well as over 200 illuminating marginal notes to reveal how Hemingway translated real episodes, locations, and people directly onto the page. This includes his 1925 trip to Pamplona, which was beset by jealousies and rivalries. There is also a documentation of the novel's explosive reception and enduring cultural legacy, synthesizing the best that has been thought and written about this book over the last century.

Robert W. Trogdon writes in this excerpt from his Preface: Ernest Hemingway's 1926d debut novel, The Sun Also Rises, depicts a world and a time that now belong to the past, no less so than Dante's Florence or Shakespeare's London. France and Spain of the 1920s no longer exist. Gone are the bad musette, the Paris Herald, and the colorful expatriate crowd at the Rotonde whom Hemingway once derisively characterized as "[T]he scum of Greenwich Village." Modern Pamplona, transformed by global tourism and the game of Hemingway's own novel, contrasts sharply with he bullfighting culture (aficion) of Hemingway's era. And Hemingway's novel is steeped in the headline news of 1925 such as the Scopes Monkey Trial, Pope Pius XI's Holy Year of Jubilee, and sporting events, as well as the long aftermath of the Great War and the psychological traumas of its veterans.

It is also true that Hemingway drew inspiration from his own life, translating real episodes, locations, and people directly onto the page. Nowhere is this more evident than in The Sun Also Rises. Beginning with the novel's contemporary readers in the Latin Quarter of Paris, many have noted that Hemingway's characters were scarcely veiled portraits of the expatriate circle who accompanied him on the 1925 trip to Pamplona to see the bullfights, organized by Hemingway himself.

The wealth of material in here is engrossing, starting with letters Hemingway wrote to his father, Clarence, to and from F. Scott Fitzgeald, and a letter to Gertrude Stein and Alice B. Toklas. Interestingly, perhaps to show Hemingway's writing process, this edition has two discarded chapters from The Sun Also Rises.

There is a Chronology of Hemingway's life, from when he was born in 1899 to his untimely passing in 1961, with nearly each year of his life, as well as world events that shaped him, documented in such exquisite detail. 

In this excerpt from Adam Gopnik's Introduction: The Sun Won't Set, he writes of what sets Hemingway apart: Part of the book's perpetual fascination is due to he intensity of the code, the instructions on the way to live and eat and love, that Hemingway dramatizes. For the truth is that Hemingway, instinctively, did not really replace one social code with another but translated exactly the code that had existed and been honored before the war into a new language that could become credible and useful after. Jack's stoicism, which strikes the novel's tonic note, is essentially, the stoical code of the prewar British upper classes: Never complain about misfortune; retreat under stress to the recesses of one's own mind; eat well and drink plentifully; always value simple sensual pleasure, particularly of the rural kind, hunting and fishing, before verbal discourse.  It is the code of the bullfighter as well, of course, ot at least of Hemingway's version of it, and in another way the projected code of the bull: Life is indubitably fatal; you fight off the matador as long as you can; uncomplaining elegance in loss, grace under pressure - the pressure of death - is everything. (Hemingway thought that the code of the bullfighter and the code of the bull were the same, though the bulls of course did not get to vote on this.) That it is a new articulation of the very code of the class destroyed by the war - or left bereft and tipsy, like Lady Brett - and unavailable to outsiders like the Cohns of this world is one of the odder and more touching inner vibrations of the text. 

But Hemingway brought the stoical code back to life exactly by not articulating it as a self-conscious code. He gave it new life as a series of sensual experiences. We reread the book now for the almost too vivid physical detail - and we reread particular passages even as we reread the whole, exactly because of the "how" of the magic trick that brings the sensual experience to the page is so mysteriously, and yet so expertly, achieved.

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