779 Ernest Hemingway and The Sun Also Rises (with Mike Palindrome) RECLAIMED

Summary

The History of Literature – Episode 779

“Ernest Hemingway and The Sun Also Rises” (with Mike Palindrome) RECLAIMED
Host: Jacke Wilson | Guest: Mike Palindrome
Original Air Date: February 26, 2026 (Reclaimed from 2018)

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Overview

In this reclaimed episode, host Jacke Wilson and recurring guest Mike Palindrome revisit Ernest Hemingway’s classic novel The Sun Also Rises. They reflect on their personal histories with Hemingway’s writing, examine the enduring allure and criticism of his style, and explore the novel’s structure, themes, and literary significance. The discussion weaves together literary insight, personal anecdote, and close textual analysis—offering both a critical re-appreciation and a heartfelt conversation about how Hemingway remains relevant to new generations of readers.

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Key Discussion Points & Insights

1. Personal Connections to Hemingway

• [03:00] – [07:30]
  Jacke recounts youthful dreams of travel, mirrored in Hemingway’s own early adventures. He reflects on first encountering Hemingway and the seductive allure of falling into his literary circle:

  "Hemingway is a great one for saying, 'I know things you can learn from me...but only if you're the right sort of person who can gain this knowledge.' He’s a very seductive writer in that sense. You read Hemingway and you want to be his friend or in his circle, one of his crowd...or I did, anyway." – Jacke Wilson [06:10]

2. Who Is Hemingway? – Biographical Sketch

• [10:00] – [15:00]
  Jacke summarizes Hemingway’s background:
  • Born in 1899, Oak Park, Illinois
  • Early journalism, experiences in WWI (ambiguous war heroism, wounded in Italy)
  • Restlessness after returning home, Paris in the 1920s (lost generation, modernist circles)
  • Hemingway’s synthesis: modern style, emotional depth, and new American identity.

3. The "Lost Generation" and Modernity

• [13:00] – [15:00]
  Discussion of Paris as a cultural crucible and the community of expatriates building modernism.
  • Connections with Ezra Pound, Gertrude Stein, James Joyce, Fitzgerald, etc.
  • The Sun Also Rises as celebration and critique of this cohort.

4. Hemingway’s Enduring Appeal and Flaws

• [17:26] – [21:30]
  Jacke and Mike reflect on love/hate reactions to Hemingway—his style’s directness, his myth, and his reputation:

  “I don’t think there’s a writer that I have a stronger love-hate relationship with than Hemingway.” – Jacke Wilson [18:26]

• Mike identifies favorite works: A Movable Feast, The Sun Also Rises, “Hills Like White Elephants.”

5. How to Introduce New Readers to Hemingway?

• [19:00] – [21:35]
  Jacke suggests starting with short stories, then moving to novels; Mike leans towards The Sun Also Rises as a perfect entry point.
• Recognition that Hemingway’s fiction may resonate differently at various ages.

6. Paris vs. Spain – The Sense of Place

• [21:35] – [32:24]
  The novel’s structure: Mike and Jacke discuss how Hemingway evokes both Parisian and Spanish landscapes, using specificity without being heavy-handed.

  “You do feel like you’re there...the details are just perfect.” – Mike [30:56]

• The tactile, sensory pleasures of food and travel as essential Hemingway elements.

7. Language and Style–Economy, Clarity, and Sound

• [32:24] – [37:05]
  Deep dive into Hemingway’s stylistic signatures:
  • Minimal adjectives and adverbs
  • Plain but evocative prose
  • The pursuit of “the truest sentence”

  “He achieves a kind of poetry through it. Sometimes it can feel mannered or forced, especially in his later writing, but when he’s at his best, it’s so easy to read, it’s so vivid, and it feels so substantial, I think, because you’re getting this...all-protein diet: nouns and verbs.” – Jacke [35:59]

8. Masculinity, Vulnerability, and Critique

• [22:31] – [29:54]
  They reflect on Hemingway’s “bullying” persona, moments of sensitivity, and how The Sun Also Rises’s main character, Jake Barnes, complicates simplistic readings:

  "He can be this big bully...but then he also, you know, he writes poetry...he has a sentimental streak...it was easier to kill a man in war than to end the life of a friend." – Jacke [24:08]

• Discussion of Jake’s wounds—his impotence, his emotional restraint, and the interplay of bravado and tenderness.

9. Antisemitism and Character Complexity

• [28:03] – [29:44]
  Jacke and Mike examine the novel’s problematic depiction of Robert Cohn:

  “The anti-Semitism...I’ve forgotten how anti-Semitic it is. But then about 2/3 of the way through, I was writing notes like, is this Cohn's revenge?...he’s really the toughest guy here.” – Jacke [28:03] Mike contextualizes:
  “He gives Robert Cohn the first 70 pages...showing how being Jewish really loomed large for Jake and his friend Bill.” – Mike [28:56]

10. Structure and Thematic Pairing

• [29:26] – [30:23]
  Noted appreciation for the book’s structural symmetry—Cohn at the beginning, Pedro Romero at the end.

11. Hemingway’s Myth vs. Reality

• [39:30] – [43:03]
  Separation of Hemingway the literary craftsman and Hemingway the self-promoter/masked manly image.

  "For all the love-hate relationship with Hemingway, the thing that always kind of redeems him is how much he cared about literature." – Jacke [37:59]

• Stories of Hemingway’s own struggles, rejections, and humbleness despite the bravura.

12. American Identity, Maturity, and the Adolescent Mind

• [48:45] – [61:25]
  Comparing Hemingway to contemporaries like Fitzgerald and Woolf; contrasting American and European literary figures; Hemingway’s characters seen as "permanently adolescent."

  "[Van Wyck Brooks] said Hemingway was, in his way, a typical American, and there was something permanently adolescent about him." – Jacke [48:45] Discussion of the appeal for adolescent or young adult readers; whether his work loses its impact if read later in life.

13. The Aficionado’s Club – Exclusion vs. Allure

• [51:17] – [56:19]
  Jacke critiques Hemingway’s tendency to set up in-groups of understanding—whether with aficionados, writers, or bullfighters.

  “It can be kind of seductive...you realize that really it's just the club of Hemingway, that he's just trying to sort of set himself apart.” – Jacke [51:17] Mike and Jacke then comically discuss the low bar of American adulthood and group belonging.

14. Who Should Read Hemingway?

• [62:32] – [63:41]
  Agreement that The Sun Also Rises is still a worthwhile recommendation—especially for travelers. Debate over which short stories merit deep-dive analysis next.

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Notable Quotes & Memorable Moments

• On Hemingway’s Literary Style:

  “He achieves a kind of poetry through it…when he’s at his best, it’s so easy to read, it’s so vivid, and it feels so substantial, I think, because you’re getting...nouns and verbs.” – Jacke [35:59]

• On the Allure and Seduction of Hemingway:

  “You read Hemingway and you want to be his friend or in his circle, one of his crowd...or I did, anyway.” – Jacke [06:10]

• On Hemingway’s Vulnerability:

  “It was easier to kill a man in war than it was to end the life of a friend who had been so true to him.” – Jacke [24:08]

• On American Literary Adolescence:

  “There’s something permanently adolescent about him that stood for certain immaturity in the American mind.” – Jacke, quoting Van Wyck Brooks [48:45]

• On The Sun Also Rises as a Traveler’s Classic:

  “It really is one of the first books that come to mind as a recommendation. When someone’s traveling, everyone should pack it in their bag.” – Mike [62:32]

• On Masculinity and Restraint:

  “Every kind of macho sentiment and every tendency that Hemingway has to...make it about manly things is completely balanced out by the fact that his narrator and kind of the hero physically is not manly.” – Jacke [61:25]

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Timestamps for Key Segments

| Timestamp | Segment | |---------------|------------------------------------------------| | 03:00–07:30 | Personal travel + first encounters with Hemingway | | 10:00–15:00 | Hemingway's biography & context | | 17:26–21:35 | How has Hemingway held up? | | 21:35–32:24 | Paris vs. Spain; sense of place | | 32:24–37:05 | Prose style; adjectives & adverbs | | 22:31–29:54 | Masculinity, sensitivity, anti-Semitism | | 39:30–43:03 | Hemingway the mythmaker; hardships | | 48:45 | Literary adolescence & American identity | | 51:17–56:19 | In-groups, the ‘aficionado’ problem | | 62:32 | Is Hemingway for travelers/young readers? |

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Tone & Atmosphere

Conversational, warm, reflective—Jacke and Mike blend humor with thoughtful critique, opening up Hemingway to both nostalgia and modern skepticism. Both emerge as admirers but not uncritical devotees, and their long friendship suffuses the discussion with trust and candor.

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Conclusion

The Sun Also Rises and Hemingway’s legacy are examined with the benefit of both youthful enthusiasm and adult distance. The episode provides rich insight into why Hemingway continues to be recommended to travelers and newly minted readers, yet remains problematic and hotly debated for his style, attitudes, and cult of personality. A must-listen (or, thanks to this detailed summary, a must-read) for anyone curious about why Hemingway endures.

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Next up: Chekhov, a contemporary novelist, a philosopher king, and lots more. Don’t miss it!

Transcript

[Jack Wilson]

The History of Literature Podcast is a member of the podglomerate Network and Lit Hub Radio.

Hey, folks, this is it.

I know it's gloomy. I know it's winter, we're all stuck inside, but the spring is coming. Hooray. Hooray. Let's start planning the fun things we're going to do. Here's your chance to join me and Emma on the very first History of Literature Podcast tour. We'll be headed to Literary England for some leisurely travel with visits to key literary sites, nice hotels, nice restaurants, and good people to share some stimulating conversation, including professors and writers and biographers and all kinds of surprises along the way. We'll see the Dickens Museum and the globe theater and Dr. Johnson's house and eat at the pubs and restaurants where famous writers got their grub and and lifted a glass to literature. March 1st is the last day to sign up and we would love to have you check out the [e-mail] or at John Shores Travel S H O R S. I hope you can join us.

[Alan]

I'm Alan. And I'm Sean, and together we host the Prancing Pony Podcast. Every week I explore Middle Earth with Sean or with other co hosts lately with in depth analysis and plenty of nerd humor from from the Hobbit to the Lord of the Rings and more. It's a great way for first timers to experience J.R.R. tolkien's captivating world. And for longtime fans, it's a deep dive into their favorite stories. So if you're ready to take the next step into the most beloved world in fantasy literature and become a part of a vibrant, active community of listeners, then look for the Prancing Pony Podcast wherever you listen.

[Jack Wilson]

Hello. Ernest Hemingway was one of the most famous American writers of the 20th century. His plain, economical prose style, inspired by journalism in the King James Bible with an assist from the Cezannes he viewed in Gertrude Stein's apartment, became a hallmark of modernism and influenced the course of American literature. In the early 1990s, Mike Palindrome and I, as college students, began reading Hemingway, and in 2018, we took another look at the writer and his novel the Sun Also Rises to see how they were holding up. That episode has been lost from our archives for several years. We reclaim it today on the history of literature. Okay, here we go. Welcome to the podcast. Well, I didn't travel much in the first part of my life. My father was afraid to fly and money was tight, so our vacations were limited to one or two Weeks in the summer when we'd load up the car and drive to the Badlands or Florida or Arizona to visit relatives. They were exciting, those trips. My sister and I sleeping in the back of the station wagon, all the luggage on top of the car. Staying at Motel Sixes, which got the name because the rooms cost $6 a night. Oh, how we envied those people at the Super Eights, lording it over us with their fancy $8.88 cent rooms. I'm just kidding. The Motel Sixes were exciting enough for us. They had an ice machine that we could use to fill our cooler and sometimes a swimming pool. And we got variety packs of cereal where you opened the little box and poured the milk right into the box. Once a trip, we got a bucket of what is now known as kfc, but we knew only as Kentucky Fried Chicken, making me dream of Kentucky, a land that must be filled with spice. But I had never been on a plane until I went to college, had never been east to Boston or New York, and had never been to Europe. I was in Chicago, which is also where Hemingway started. And then I was headed to Europe, where he was, too. I was about his age. It was easy to imagine following in his footsteps, except it wasn't. He'd been wounded in war. He was a newspaper reporter, a bullfighter, a boxer. And I was none of those things. So there was a lot to aspire to, a lot to try to learn from. And Hemingway is a great one for saying, I know things you can learn from me. I've learned things from secret experts, and I'll pass along knowledge, but only if you're the right sort of person who can gain this knowledge. He's a very seductive writer in that sense. You read Hemingway and you want to be his friend or in his circle, one of his crowd or. I did. Anyway, back when I was first reading the Sun Also Rises, I changed a bit. I grew up. I learned some things about life and about Hemingway, too. And so it was fun to talk to Mike about this book, which had once been so important to us as future travelers and world citizens, from a more domesticated vantage point. Both of us fathers and payers of bills, but with that heart of a traveler still beating inside the heart of a traveler. That's going to be the last part of me that goes. I think. I don't think I'll ever lose that excitement of loading up a carry on bag and boarding the train or buckling into the seat as the airplane taxis down the Runway. That's the life for me, a book a day, a new city, sometimes deciding to stay where one is in some fresh new location, maybe learning the language, meeting some new people, trying new things, seeking inspiration from being in a new place. Inspiration and self knowledge. There's a certainty that comes from being thrust into the uncertain. Is that you as well? Well, I hope it is. And that's why I have to tell you that this is your very last chance to sign up for our History of Literature podcast tour. We're not doing an African safari or a Cuban fishing expedition. No, this will be more refined than those famous Hemingway esque trips. This will be hotels, nice meals and great conversation and doing it in the heart of English language literature. London, Oxford and Bath for the next few days until March 1, 2026. You can sign up to join us on the tour. Our partners at John Shores Travel are taking care of everything. All decisions made for you, all arrangements covered. You just sit back and relax as our small group will travel together to the Globe Theater, to Virginia Woolf's Bloomsbury Charles Dickens House. We'll go to Bath where Mary Shelley and Jane Austen once roamed the streets, and on and on. It will be a great trip for lovers of books and lovers of life. Find out [e-mail] or at John Shors Travel. That's Shores S H O R S with no E. Okay, we'll get to Hemingway in a moment. But first, while I'm reclaiming this episode from 2018, I'm going to revisit a letter that I read as part of the introduction to this episode way back then. Subject thank you from a grateful and convalescent listener. Dear Jack, I discovered your podcast a few months ago and just wanted to say how grateful I am to be a listener of the History of Literature podcast. It has been a great comfort to me during a difficult time in my life. Excuse me. But first some relevant backstory. 14 years ago I got a concussion that resulted in a year long period of convalescence. I wasn't able to read for most of that year. At some point my grandmother picked up a book from the shelf and began to read to me. It was a beat up selected works of W.B. yeats that someone in my family had bought at a garage sale for 25 cents. 25 cents for a book that ended up changing my life. Listening to Yeats's verse each day, I began to memorize his poems. When I returned to the world healthy, I went back to university and decided to specialize in literature. I got an MA in lit as well, and then began a PhD which sadly did not work out because I brought to the school the baggage of too many new and creative ideas with me. Smiley face emoji. I gave up on literature and worked. I hadn't read a book in two years. Then 10 months ago I got another concussion. It was in this context that I discovered your podcast, which reignited my passion for literature that I thought I had lost forever. I now listen and re listen to your podcasts most nights before bed. It's become an incredible comfort to me during a difficult period of illness, and while it's been a tough time, it's also been a time of self searching and self reflection, of reevaluating who I really am and what truly matters to me. The passion for literature that oozes from each podcast and has really helped rediscover how important literature is to me. Your episode on Milton was particularly inspiring. Another of my Favorites was episode 150, Chekhov's the Lady with the Little Dog. The soft and compassionate voice with which you read the story was very comforting to listen to, along with the analysis before and after. As a side gig, you'd make a great reader of audiobooks.

[Mike]

Well, thank you.

[Jack Wilson]

At any rate, I recently decided to buy you a virtual coffee to say thank you. I'm not exactly flushed with cash right now, and no, it's just a small token, but I really hope it helps. And I like to imagine you now in a cafe amongst friends, sipping on an iced latte on a hot summer day, the espresso mixed with milk fueling a discussion about one of your favorite writers. From the bottom of my heart, thank you Jack from Peter in Toronto. Here's what I said in 2018 Peter, thank you so much for the email. It is truly heartwarming and gratifying to know where I was in all this. I have spent many hours alone myself, alone on a journey, alone in bed or just alone alone. I know what it's like to have company, whether that's books or a voice in your ear. I'm glad I could be there for you. Thank you for the email and I hope you continue to enjoy the show and most of all, I hope you heal and recover and get back to full strength. The world can use more thoughtful people and more readers and can use them thinking and reading with as much power and love and empathy as they can summon forth. And let me add now in 2026, Peter, are you still out there? I hope that you're still listening to the show and that You've been healthy, happy. A lot has changed since 2018, but our need for connection has not. Stay well, my friend. Ernest Miller Hemingway was born in 1899 and grew up in Oak Park, Illinois, a suburb just outside Chicago. His grandfathers were Civil War veterans in the Union army, his mother a doctor, his I'm sorry, his father a doctor, his mother a musician. He did well in school, especially English, and spent his summers hunting and fishing in northern Michigan. In high school, he was not known as a great athlete. He played football, he swam, played water basketball and was the team manager for track. After high school, he skipped college and went instead to Kansas City, where his uncle had gotten him a job at the Kansas City Star. He then became a journalist and when World War I broke out, volunteered for the Army. They turned him down because of his poor vision. Devastated, he signed up with the Red Cross as an ambulance driver. He was 18 years old when he sailed for Europe. The day he arrived, a munitions factory blew up and he had to carry mutilated bodies and body parts to a makeshift morgue. A few weeks after arriving, he was delivering chocolates and cigarettes to Italian soldiers in the trenches when he was hit by a mortar shell, knocking him unconscious and ending his involvement in the war. For the rest of that trip in Europe, he spent the trip recovering in Milan, where he fell in love with his nurse, an experience he later drew upon for his novel, A Farewell to Arms. Now what? Back home to recover. But he was restless in Oak park after having the adventures of war, the excitement of being in Europe and the love of a nurse, and he was frustrated. His town was infatuated with war of a different kind. The romantic versions of war of the 19th century, of Napoleon and Grant, cavalry and swords and marches through the countryside in regular formations. Nothing like the trench warfare he had experienced and nothing psychologically like the fear he'd felt of worrying that he might lose his knee forever. He needed to get out, so he got a job with a newspaper and was able to spin that into a trip to Europe as a correspondent. Now he was in Paris, a 22 year old who'd seen a lot and was hungry for more. And he had ideas of what made good writing. He had learned from Sherwood Anderson and some others, like Ring Lardner, where the world of fiction might be headed. But he applied his lessons from newspaper writing to all of that, too. Simple words, plain language, economical style. It was his genius to adapt and advance and put this all through the tight prism of his emotional experience. And that would end up changing American letters Let's Save the Rest of His Life, which we've also covered in several other episodes here at the History of Literature, because today we're going to focus on A Sun Also Rises, the novel he wrote that celebrated his time in Europe, those early years. He was married, he had a young son, but he was still the hungry and eager young man who'd gone to Italy and ended up traumatized by war, but perhaps strengthened by the experience too. This was the Paris of Ezra Pound, James Joyce, Gertrude Stein, Wyndham Lewis, Ford, Madox Ford, F. Scott Fitzgerald would arrive soon. Hemingway was part of this world. Americans and other expatriates living cheaply in post war Paris, living in a great world city, a world of books and art and culture. Modernism had swept in and Hemingway combined all of this. You might say he embodied it. The world of conversation and camaraderie, of grown up experiences and little boy pleasures, the fishing he did and skiing and hunting and boxing and of course his trips to Spain and the bullfighting he loved, and the witty repartee, the hard boiled insults, the embittered love triangles, the doomed affairs, the new development of America and increasing world power, and the creative tension between the rising strength of the new nation, encountering the proud empires of England and France and Portugal and Spain, and the new ways of viewing literature, the explosion of modernity with its focus on identity even when it appears in fragments, and the way that language echoes those changes and once they are exploded, seeks to rebuild them, paragraph by paragraph, sentence by sentence, word by word. A continent was rebuilding itself after a war. A man was rebuilding himself after a devastating wound. And with rebuilding comes the possibility of reinvention. Hemingway did that, and in so doing he developed a style and a legend and a way of life that would forever change the way America viewed its literature and even itself. Ernest Hemingway and the Sun Also Rises after this.

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[Jack Wilson]

Okay, Joining me now to talk about Ernest Hemingway and the Sun Also Rises is our old friend Mike, the president of the Literature Supporters Club. Mike, welcome back to the History of Literature podcast.

[Mike]

Hey, Jack.

[Jack Wilson]

So, Mike, I think you actually introduced me to hemingway 25 years ago or so. As I recall, your recommendation was something like just pressing it in my hands and saying, here's the Sun Also Rises. You've got to read this. I do remember there was one passage that I think you quoted as kind of a. You had committed it to memory, and it was your. What should I say? Your recommendation focused on one particular passage. I don't even know if I want to quote it back to you, but

[Mike]

basically, is it Brett Ashley,

[Jack Wilson]

the description of her? Yeah, yeah, I think that was it. And I think that was enough. And it got me rolling. And I'm sure I've read all of Hemingway. I know I was deeply immersed in it for a while, even back then. There were certain things that drove me crazy about Hemingway, but there were also things I loved. And I think.

I don't think there's a writer that

I have a stronger love, hate relationship with than Hemingway. So how has he held up for you over the years? Do you still feel the same way? And what do you think of Hemingway today?

[Mike]

I reread him a fair bit, but mostly A Movable Feast and the Sun Also Rises. I mean, some of his short stories, like Hills Like White Elephants. I was just reading to my daughter, my teenage daughter. But, yeah, I think those three works, although I have to say I actually enjoyed For Whom the Bell Tolls and Farewell to Arms. I know that a lot of people have kind of put those by the wayside now.

[Jack Wilson]

Well, here's. That's interesting because here's what I had written down. I was going to ask you, if someone was brand new to Hemingway, where would you start them out? And I had put down. Tell me what you think of this. I had put down maybe start with a handful of his best stories, like maybe four or five of his best stories. Then the Sun Also Rises or A Farewell to Arms in either order. Then A Movable Feast, because I think you do need to read some of his fiction before you can really enjoy A Movable Feast. And then I would probably put more stories in there, go a little deeper in there, or For Whom the Bell Tolls. And I don't know if the Old man in the Sea makes it in or if that's just tacked on for somebody who's still looking for more. Then there's some other books, too. I enjoyed Death in the Afternoon and a couple of the others. The Other Bull Fighting One, the one about the summer, the long summer, whatever it is.

[Mike]

Never read that at that point.

[Jack Wilson]

I think it's people who really want to be fully immersed in Hemingway. And some of the books I would not recommend at all.

[Mike]

My problem with the short story, I like the idea of. I like some of his short stories, but my problem with recommending those is that you either like or hate short stories. And you don't. In that sense, you don't give it. You don't forgive it the way you forgive a novel. Because I've had friends who said, like, yeah, Sun Also Rises seems like a dopey story, but then they're just like, I really. I loved it when they got to Spain. I didn't like Paris. Yeah. So there's that. You know, there's a forgiveness to a novel, then. That's why I was thinking they should start with Sun Also Rises. I mean, the Movable Movable Feast is a lot of fun, but I agree with you that you sort of need his fiction in order to, like, even enjoy. To enjoy more the escapades. Because Movable Feast, like, I love this one book by Noel Riley Fitch wrote Sylvia beach and the Lost Generation. She also wrote a book called Hemingway's Walks, which I really recommend. It's such an entertaining book. All the anecdotes about Pound and Gertrude Stein. So we can get to this. But I really go back to Hemingway because I love the whole idea of Paris in the 20s.

[Jack Wilson]

Yeah. Well, I think Noel Reilly Fitch had a book that I have loved from for years and years and years. It's a tiny book, but I think it was written by Noel Reilly Fitch. And it's called the Literary Cafes of Paris. And that was a book that I had with me. And. Same thing. There's a lot of anecdotes, a lot of. This is where Joyce used to write. This is where Hemingway used to write. And it was fantastic. I walked through Paris with that book as my guide.

[Mike]

Yeah. I mean, so someone like Ford Madox Ford. I think the Good Soldier is better than anything Hemingway's ever written. The Hemingway myth and the anecdotes. I mean, did Ford Maddox. Was he just like a, you know, like a homebody? I mean, I don't know anything about. Because he was in Paris at the same time, I believe.

[Jack Wilson]

Yeah. And that the problem with Immovable Feast is it also. It's Hemingway's bullying side. Hemingway, that's. That's one of the biggest problems I have with Hemingway. And you see it in the Sun Also Rises. I Have some theories about it, but you see him kind of punching down sometimes he's at his worst when he's lording it over someone who's weaker than him. And often being weaker just means they're more feminine or. Or they're literally a woman or they're Jewish or, you know, you know, they're just not as cool as him, not as strong as him. And that's where he's kind of at his worst. And you see it in a movable feast. He kind of picks on Gertrude Stein, he kind of picks on Fitzgerald. He kind of portrays them in a way that feels self aggrandizing and not very charitable.

[Mike]

But I like that. I find it refreshing the way, you know, he kind of takes down Fitzgerald.

[Jack Wilson]

Does Fitzgerald really need taking down such a sad sack figure anyway?

[Mike]

And his description of Gertrude Stein and Alice Tolkis, I think it's refreshing. That's probably why I reread it. I find that I can reread it

[Jack Wilson]

well, and I'm kind of jumping all over. We're kind of jumping all over the place here. But Hemingway, he then has this very sensitive side and he's got. He can be very charming. He's. He's like this big bully and he's all about bull fighting and boxing and all these manly, you know, deep sea fishing and betting and all of these, the manliest sports you can find and war. But he then also, you know, he writes poetry. He's got. Virginia Woolf said, called it moments of bare and nervous beauty in the Sun Also Rises. You know, he does have a real. He's got a sentimental streak. There's a story of him weeping because his cat. Something was wrong with his cat and he had to kill his cat. And he wrote letters about it, about how tormented he was and. And how he was losing a good friend and nobody would know what it was really like. It was easier to kill a man in war than it was to end the life of a friend who had been so true to him. And he wasn't necessarily just hard. A lot of it feels like sort of bravado, but that, you know, that he's got this real soft side underneath.

[Mike]

Yeah, I mean, I think that's reflected in the, you know, and the Sun Also Rises. That man. I really love the passages when Jake Barnes is by himself. I started to notice how much the writing changes when he's by himself than when he's in company.

[Jack Wilson]

Yeah, he's more willing to open up

[Mike]

and he's kind of more willing to open up but at the same time harder on himself.

[Jack Wilson]

Right. Well, that's the biggest. That's the big tension in the book. Right. And that was the thing I noted when I read the Sun Also Rises this last time I wrote. The first note I wrote was this is something we have to. It will let us examine Hemingway for how he's going to pull this off because he's got this wounded war veteran who's got. Who's impotent from his wound and he's also a first person narrator. So how much is he going to reveal about how he feels about this and how much is he just going to have this sort of hard boiled take on things and just allude to it and be all stiff upper lipped and everything about it and just let us sort of see how tough he was in gridding this out and how much would he open up and tell us what it was really like to have this wound? And sometimes he does the former and sometimes he does the latter. And I noticed that most of the time when he is opening up, it's because the character is half drunk. And I didn't know if that was Hemingway kind of using that as a crutch like his. As if to say his. His hero would not be so sentimental. Except once he gets drinking too much, then he lets himself. He lets all these emotions run through him.

[Mike]

A common critics interpretation of kind of manly works is to say that the other characters are actually other versions of the narrator. And you can sort of make the argument that Jake Barnes was someone like Robert Cohen, perhaps before the injury. Because I feel like Robert Cohen beats him up. He's stronger than him. He's kind of wilier than Jake Barnes. The way he. I love the way he and Brett have a weekend away.

[Jack Wilson]

Yeah.

[Mike]

Both of them sort of tell Jake separately. Jake reacts in this very kind of Zen way, like, you know, what am I supposed to do about it?

[Jack Wilson]

I mean, yeah, there's parts where like,

[Mike]

you know, you want him to get angry, you know, but he just kind of shakes his head like, oh, I can't perform sexually. I mean, I can't. Yeah.

[Jack Wilson]

And the first chapter or so I kept writing down, I can't believe how anti Semitic this is. And you know, I've forgotten how anti Semitic it is. And there's certain lines that are really ugly. But then about 2/3 of the way through, I was writing notes like, is this Cohen's revenge? You know, is this. Does this make up for it? It almost seemed like Hemingway had set us up for it. If I Thought Hemingway was a little more aware. I would have thought that that was the best way to read it. That it was. You see the way that this guy has been dismissed or overlooked because of his being Jewish. And then at the end, you realize it's more of a surprise when it's like, oh, wait, he's really the toughest guy here. And he's really. He's kind of the. The biggest rival for Lady Brett Ashley. He kind of takes the others down more than you would think that he would.

[Mike]

Yeah. I mean, the antisemitism, the way I've always read it is he gives Robert COHEN the first 70 pages of the book, which is. When you reread it, it's a real surprise how much of Robert Cohen you get. And I think part of giving you all of him is showing how being Jewish really loomed large for Jake and his friend Bill. I think Bill is. Is even worse than Jake. Yeah.

[Jack Wilson]

And it is true. I think a lot of people think the opening, spending so much time with Kohen makes the book kind of lopsided, or it's sort of a flaw in the book. But actually this time, reading it through, I got to the end and I thought the beginning of it being so focused on Cohen really helps the structure of this.

[Mike]

Yeah, I agree.

[Jack Wilson]

It made the end matter. It made what happened with Kohen matter a lot more that you had spent so much time with Kohen at the beginning.

[Mike]

Yeah, I mean, it's very structured. You know, you have cone and Paris. And then. Because I think after the first time I read it, I kept. I ran from it thinking it's all about Paris, all about Paris. And then the second time I read it, I was like, it's really set in Spain with the fishing trip and the bullfighting. And the third time I read it, I just felt this real balance. The way you have Conan at the beginning and then you have Pedro the bullfighter at the end.

[Jack Wilson]

Mm.

[Mike]

It's so well structured.

[Jack Wilson]

Yeah. So what do you. Are you with people who prefer one location over the other?

[Mike]

I mean, I think I'm a romanticist and I love the descriptions of Paris and I love the way. I don't know if people were writing like this in his time, but few people do it today without being heavy handed, which is. He actually names places and names streets, streets.

[Jack Wilson]

And we went over the bridge on Such and such street, and we opened the gate at such and such street and we traveled through it and where the hotel was and. Yeah, it does. You do feel like you're there I

[Mike]

mean, if you were trying to describe, like, say I was, you know, on Wabash Avenue and we headed toward the Chicago river. And you could just fall prey to just kind of being boring. I mean, you know, just naming places. But somehow the way he does it, the details are just perfect. I'm trying to find a passage where he does Paris. I think it's also. He captures the time of day, captures the pedestrians. Like, he's very, very good at, like, really setting the scene.

[Jack Wilson]

Yeah.

[Mike]

Here the taxi stopped. This is chapter six. He goes, the taxi stopped in front of the Rotund. No matter what cafe in Montparnasse you ask a taxi driver to bring you to from the right bank of the river, they always take you to the rattan. Ten years from now, it will probably be the Dome. It is near enough. Anyway, I walked past the sad tables of the Breton to the Select. There were a few people inside the bar and outside alone. Sad Harvey Stone. I mean, it's just. It's fun to read. I mean, if you've been to Paris and, you know, those cafes, it's. It's really fun to read.

[Jack Wilson]

You know what the secret is to that prose? And this is. This is something. I don't know if I ever knew this, even though I feel like I read at one point. I had read everything there was to read by Hemingway or about Hemingway, but I don't remember reading this before. Maybe just got lost. So basically, all of these writing programs and all of these how to Write programs will tell you, avoid adverbs. Distrust words that end with ly. Cross those out. And when you read Fitzgerald, for example, it's really shocking how much he uses adverbs. Because the style. Everybody has so adopted that style of, you don't need adverbs. They just get in the way. It's better to have the verb carry the action. And so I'm used to reading Hemingway thinking, well, I'm not going to see a lot of adverbs here. I know he was very careful about that. What I didn't realize is that he said, well, when I was starting out, I learned from Ezra Pound not to use adjectives and to distrust adjectives. And in that passage that you just read, the only adjective I heard was sitting sad. That carried the whole weight. And it's just verbs and nouns. And he also has sort of their descriptive passages where it kind of tricks you, but it's not actually using adjectives or adverbs, but it's. You are seeing the place. But I. I flagged the the start of this is how A Farewell to Arms begins.

[Mike]

And I'll.

[Jack Wilson]

I'll read the passage and then I'll tell you what the adjectives in the passage were. In the late summer of that year, we lived in a house in a village that looked across the river and the plain to the mountains. In the bed of the river there were pebbles and boulders, dry and white in the sun. And the water was clear and swiftly moving and blue in the channels. Troops went by the house and down the road, and the dust they raised powdered the leaves of the trees. The trunks of the trees, too, were dusty. And the leaves fell early that year. And we saw the troops marching along the road and the dust rising and leaves stirred by the breeze falling and the soldiers marching. And afterwards the road bare and white except for the leaves. So that's the passage. So you really get a sense of this place. And it's a beautiful. You know, it carries a kind of beauty to it. But the adjectives are so few and they're so plain. The boulders are dry and white. The water is clear and blue. The trunks are dusty. The road is bare and white, and that's it. The only adverb is swiftly. But there's ways that he gets the description through. Like he says, the dust they raised powdered the leaves of the trees, which is kind of an adjective, you know, it's a description of the leaves. But it's done through this sort of movement or. Or action, you know, that it's powdering the leaves of the trees, rather than just the leaves of the trees were powdery or speckled with white or, you know, something like that. But when you are looking for that and you. I know he. He's famous for short sentences, although the sentences really aren't that short. But he's famous for having these kind of brick by brick, concrete. One description after the other. Carefully chosen words. Carefully chosen for their effect and also for their sound and for their placement in the sentences. And he achieves a kind of poetry through it. Sometimes it can feel mannered or forced, especially in his later writing. But when he's at his best, it's so easy to read. It's so vivid and it feels so substantial, I think, because you're getting this. It's like this all protein diet. You're just getting nouns and verbs.

[Mike]

Yeah. I mean, it's. You know, it's. It's a bit of a magic trick because, you know, the danger is you just feel like you've read page upon page and you feel like you're not getting any kind of flavor, you know, you're not getting anything to, like, chew on.

[Jack Wilson]

Right.

[Mike]

I think he writes drunks so well, or people starting to get drunk. There's this dialogue in sun and Soul Rises where there's this kind of bland dialogue. And then the narrator goes, I was a little drunk. Not drunk in any positive sense, but just enough to be careless. Right. That's just. That's perfect.

[Jack Wilson]

Yeah. When he's writing about bull fighting, he can be like that too, where it's. He's not. He's not developing this. This really unusual vocabulary or this real elaborate way of describing things. He's not like a philosopher who has to invent his own language to talk about something, but he's talking about something in a way that you can actually participate in the description. With Hemingway, you understand what he means, even if you're. You don't know that much about bullfighting.

[Mike]

I used to have a writing teacher who had this great exercise and can't do it with his novels. I mean, you could try, but basically he said, you take any short story and you try to delete three sentences in each short story, and it's actually very easy, but not with a Hemingway short story. Yeah, it's kind of a fun exercise to try.

[Jack Wilson]

For all the love, hate, relationship with Hemingway, the thing that always kind of redeems him is how much he cared about literature. And sometimes you see it slipping a little bit where he seems like he's more trying to promote himself than actually get the story across. And I know that was a criticism of, like, his magazine article writing and stuff, that he really only had one character and that was the author. And sometimes you sense that from the stories and parts of the novels as well, that he's really just trying to promote the myth of Hemingway. But setting that aside, the redeeming quality in his short stories and in the best of his novels is he really cares about the words and he cares about the story and he cares about literature. And he had this. Here's the kind of thing that makes me love Hemingway. Here's a quote he told a friend this. The rejection slip is very hard to take on an empty stomach. There were times when I'd sit at that old wooden table and read one of those cold slips that had been attached to a story I had loved and worked on very hard and believed in. And I couldn't help crying. End quote. And you just think, you know, that's. I've known a lot of bullies and a lot of Macho guys. And, you know, none of them had that slight to them, that redeeming quality of having a kind of love for literature and art that Hemingway had.

[Mike]

There's all that stuff around Hemingway that makes you want to love him. I think that that's why he's an enduring figure. I think people who haven't read anything by Hemingway and may never will associate him with Paris.

[Jack Wilson]

Yeah. I mean, where do you think people associate? Well, they probably associate him with Paris. Right. The lost generation in the 20s.

[Mike]

Yeah.

[Jack Wilson]

I guess it's Paris, it's Cuba, it's Africa, it's Michigan, it's Chicago and Kansas City. He worked in Toronto for a while, but I don't think most people associate him with Toronto. I don't even know, actually if he was based in Toronto, if it was just he was being paid by the Toronto Star. I guess, when he was. That was when he was in Europe a little bit in Italy. I mean, he rode the book that was set near Venice. And also he was in. That was where he drove the ambulance in World War I. But, yeah, I never really think of him in New York, like, as I do with Fitzgerald. Sometimes. I think of him in Idaho, I guess, where he had his. I think he had his ranch there. That's about it.

[Mike]

Wherever he went, he's very immersive, you know, that you don't feel like he's there like a typical American, when in fact, he was quite a typical American from the Midwest and.

[Jack Wilson]

Yeah.

[Mike]

Trying to earn a living. And you get the sense that he didn't put up with a lot of crap. Yeah. You know, a lot of pretense because, you know, for him to be associated with Paris and literature and, you know, an art scene, you sort of feel like he would have, you know, been correcting us and saying, like, no, no, you don't understand what we were doing. We were just making a living. We were doing what we loved. Like, stop. Like, stop dressing it up into, like, you know, into some kind of, like, elitist clique.

[Jack Wilson]

Yeah. Maybe that's why he's popular. He does not seem pretentious.

[Mike]

That's definitely true. I mean, you know, when you read English authors like Evelyn Waugh and I love Evelyn Waugh, but after a while, you just think, boy, these people have so much money and they are so whiny. They are so whiny. You want to grab them and be like, what is your problem?

[Jack Wilson]

And that's probably why A Sun Also Rises is so good and why A Moveable Feast is so good. Where he's thinking back to those days. It's when Hemingway was hungry and when he was not a literary superstar, world famous, you know, he was basically this young guy trying to figure out who he was, trying to make it as a writer. He had had a lot of trouble with his parents. I think they actually, I don't know if they burned, I think his father might have burned the copies that were sent to him of Sun Also Rises. That it was. He viewed it as filth that he couldn't have in his house. And he had a lot of things that he was trying to work through to figure out who he was. And along with it, I think were a lot of, I guess I'd say growing pains or just he wasn't immediately successful. He did have those years where he was trying to get by.

[Mike]

Yeah, I mean, it's, you know, the descriptions of walking up, his walk up, putting coal because the room was cold.

[Jack Wilson]

Yeah.

[Mike]

Sipping the last of the whiskey, always offering whiskey to guests. I mean, there's all this stuff where you just feel like, you know, he's scraping by a little bit. And you could scrape by back then and still live in Paris. So it's double edged a little bit when you think like, oh, I mean, who today in what city could you scrape by and try to write a novel? But yeah, I mean, the scenes, in rereading the book and reading the scenes in Spain, I was just bowled over. When he's in Spain, he goes, it is always cool in the downstairs dining room. And we had a very good lunch. The first meal in Spain was always a shock with the hors d' oeuvres and egg, coarse meat courses, vegetables, salad and dessert and fruit. You have to drink plenty of wine to get it all down. Robert Cohen tried to say he did not want any of the second meat course, but we did not interpret for him. And so the waitress brought him something else as a replacement. A plate of cold meats, I think. I mean, you can taste the food. You want to be there. I mean, the idea that you have to drink a lot of wine to get down the food. Yeah, I mean, that sounds like a feast. It's a luxury.

[Jack Wilson]

I think that's, that's one of the things that's so great. I mean, he does, he'll talk about writing and he'll talk about how he just sat in a cafe and he would think, write the truest sentence, you know, and he would, you know, agonize over that. Or he would talk about, you know, the famous, I don't know, he rewrote the ending of A farewell to arms 17 times or something. And you know that he's living his life, thinking and working very hard at his writing. But when you read the books, you don't feel like you're reading about a guy who's kind of taking it easy and spending all of his day painting or writing poetry or something. You think it's a guy who is always planning the next fishing trip, or he's about to go out hunting, or he's really got to meet somebody at this bar, or he's got to encounter the bullfighter who he knew last time he passed through the city, or he's boxing, you know, and he's always. He feels like a guy who's got a lot of activities that have nothing to do with writing.

[Mike]

Yeah. I mean, when. It begs the question, when did he have the time to write?

[Jack Wilson]

Yeah. And he's also. He's got to turn in stories. I guess. That's the other thing. He's a newspaper writer, so you kind of feel like he's working that way, too. So it is kind of appealing. There is something very appealing. And I sort of. I went through Europe at an age, you know, I think Hemingway, when he was in Paris, was during Prohibition in the States. So I feel like a lot of the drinking was him basically sending this almost like a postcard home, you know, saying, like, it's amazing here you can drink all that you could drink so easily. And, like, he gets a little carried away, describing the. How much the wine costs and how they. Which ones they drank chilled and how he buys a flask to put the. The alcohol in. And, you know, it's. So much of it is centered around what people are going to drink, but that's kind of how it was like, when I was 20, you know, the drinking age in America was 21, and I was 20, and I was thinking, this is amazing. Nobody's running around with fake IDs and nobody's trying to talk someone into buying beer for them. You can just walk into a store. And that's sort of just one aspect of the way it makes people feel when they're in Europe. I think if you're young and you're traveling and you think, I'm on a train, and pretty soon I'll be in another country, and then I'm going to go somewhere totally different. And Hemingway really captures that feeling. I think there have been generations of Americans who have read that the Sun Also Rises as they're traveling through Europe and Feeling a lot like he did, that he's this American who kind of fits in, but everything is still kind of new. And every time you're accepted by people in the local country, you feel like it's this great feeling. You feel like you're a world citizen.

[Mike]

I really agree with that. I have this theory that there's a way that literature can allow you to not hallucinate, but just fantasize about your own life. And I think Hemingway's fiction works that way, because you take someone like Siebold, you're absolutely thinking nothing else. When you're reading Sebold, W.G. sebold, I think the way his mind works and the sentences work, they just close off. Like, you have to pay complete attention. Your mind can't wander. But with Hemingway, I find that you can want. Your mind wanders, and it's so pleasant because the sentences, while they hold together, absolutely hold together. They sort of, like, do different things. They kind of veer off. I mean, you know, I think that's something that really appeals to teenagers and people in their 20s that maybe if you, for instance, you were asking me what book, you would start with another question is, is it too late to read Hemingway? I mean, if you're 39 and someone says, oh, you got to read this. I mean, maybe you're too old.

[Jack Wilson]

It's a little like maybe you read the Catcher in the Rye first, and then within five years, you read Hemingway, and then. And then you move on. I mean, it's sort of. There was a great. I read this obituary after Hemingway died, and it was. I think it was in the New York Times, and they had collected all of these statements by writers who had talked about how influential he was and how important he had been to American letters and how they themselves had based their writing style on him, or certain books had really inspired them. And there was this one by Van Wyke Brooks, who was an author and literary historian. And he said Hemingway was, in his way, a typical American, and there was something permanently adolescent about him that stood for certain immaturity in the American mind, which I think is kind of right. I think there's. Part of it is this feeling of games. Like a lot of his activities feel like a kid trying to play an impressive game. That it's. Oh, here's. Here's the danger. It's like a kid who's going for a joyride in a car or who is, you know, impressing somebody by skydiving or something. There's. It's got that kind of, you Never feel like he's all that mature when he's bragging. Let me get to something that has really bothered me about Hemingway ever since I first started reading him.

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[Jack Wilson]

The thing that's always driven me crazy about Hemingway is that he has this thing about an aficionado and a specialty. He frequently uses this where he, the narrator or the Hemingway stand in, goes into some town, and there is some kind of specialist there, like a master bullfighter. And they recognize in Hemingway somebody who truly understands what they're trying to do. And then you feel like they're in this specialized club of people who have very particular knowledge. And not everybody. Some people will never understand. And Hemingway is sort of embarrassed by his friends of how far away they are from where he and the. The master bullfighter are in their understanding of things. And it can be kind of seductive. As a reader, you think you want to be in that club, and then you realize that really it's just the club of Hemingway, that it's. He's just trying to sort of set himself apart is how it ends up feeling to me. And I've expanded this. This is where I've sort of turned this into a theory. I've expanded this into his writing style, where sometimes I feel shut out of it, that he'll say things like, it was a good fight, or we stayed in a small, good room. And I can't tell if he's trying to boil the experience down in a way. You know, he has a lot of quotes about how you try to feel the emotion, and then you try to write it in a way that other people will feel the emotion, too. And I kind of feel that way sometimes with some of his simple phrases, when he says things like, the bed was warm and good and I wanted to sleep all night, or, you know, something like that. And I think, oh, I know exactly how that feels when the bed feels warm and good. But then other times when he says something was a good fight, it feels like he's making a judgment that he's saying, I decided it was good. And I get to decide because I'm in this Special club of people who have superior taste and judgment. And when I go into a town, people recognize me as one of, one of the best and one of the people who have this superior taste in judgment. And you will, you will never live up to my standard. And so just accept it. When I say something is good, that means it was good. Do you ever read Hemingway like that?

[Mike]

I mean, I guess part of me thinks there's so many adults that are really adolescent. Yeah, generally,

[Jack Wilson]

American adults have set a low bar. So, yeah, if he's even a notch above it, that's. He's probably better than most.

[Mike]

I mean, I, I, I, I always kind of recoil when someone describes some, some guy as a good guy, because I feel like that means they don't really know him, but they're hoping he's not, like a serial killer.

[Jack Wilson]

Yeah,

[Mike]

but that goes to just having lower standards and just wanting people to leave you alone. That's almost like the Hemingway standard, is that keep me company when we go on this fishing trip. But for God's sakes, get a hold of yourself. Don't get sick on yourself. I mean, that's the standard. Don't make me have to care for you.

[Jack Wilson]

Yeah, yeah. Oh, there is a ton of that in Hemingway. And it's. Usually there's one other guy and Hemingway and that guy. Like, maybe there's a guide or, you know, the, the person who is actually good at what they do. And Hemingway brings a crowd to that guy. And Hemingway and the guy are the two who really know how it works. And with everybody else, he's basically saying, you got to get a hold of yourself. You're going to embarrass yourself and me because of your weakness.

[Mike]

Yeah, that reminds me of when I. One of my first jobs out of college, I was an intern at a place, and they paid a good wage, and some of the interns were asking, how do you get a permanent job here after the trial period? And one of the higher up said, whatever you do at any of the events, the office events, don't vomit. And we were like, okay, that's pretty low standard. And then somebody vomited. And then the guy, we went back to him, and we're like, hey, you said you shouldn't vomit. I mean, but this guy got a full, you know, offer, and he said, yeah, no, I'll just change that to don't vomit on someone else's shoes. That seemed to be the standard.

[Jack Wilson]

That's the standard. That's the American adolescent. That was probably, you know, there were probably a Lot of Hemingway readers I can remember when I was in Europe, this guy came and he saw me, and this. Maybe I'll start to wrap this up as I tell this story, but one of the things I really liked. So let me back up even more. I'm going to run through three of my notes here. Okay, so Virginia Woolf had this thing where she said, even though she was praising Hemingway for these moments of bare and nervous beauty. And she said it's an abrupt and outspoken book. And she finds a lot to like about Hemingway and his carefully chosen phrases and the way he places them all together and everything. But then she says his characters compared with Chekhov are as flat as cardboard. And she said they're never surprising. They're basically. That she didn't find much new or innovative in his characters. And I think she was going so deep in her stream of consciousness type stuff that I think that was probably why that he was staying to the surface where it was a lot more predictable. But I do think I really remember this really resonated with me, and I remember it resonating with me when I was in college of this feeling where Jake is. He's not very posh. And this, I think, could only occur in early Hemingway. But Jake is not very posh. But it's like the people who are posh want him around because the rest of their posh friends are totally insufferable. And Jake actually is someone who is just kind of. He's kind of fun to be around. And he's. He's not as snobby as the others or, you know, for whatever reason. And it reminded me so much of this feeling, even though I guess it's a cardboard character, but it reminded me so much of this feeling I had when I was in Europe that there were all of these people there who would invite me to things. And I wasn't part of their group, but I realized they really didn't like the people in their group. So even if they all kind of looked down on me because I wasn't in this, you know, a lot of them were from Brown and had a lot of money, and they had all of these advantages, and they knew they were in each other's social set, and they would probably end up getting married to each other or whatever, but they just really couldn't stand to spend time with each other. So they would invite me and a couple other guys just to come and kind of mingle just so that they could get through an evening without it being full of, you know, just these Guys bragging. And one of these guys came in and. And I don't know if I had said something that made people laugh or for some reason he got upset with me.

And he said, you know what your problem is?

I was like, no, I don't. And he said, you're a Fitzgerald guy, and I'm a Hemingway guy. And I just thought. And that, I think, is kind of the. The American adolescent mind in a nutshell, that somebody is so devoted to their. The idea of themselves as this swaggering macho. I'm. I'm gonna literally grab a bull by the horns and throw him, as Hemingway once did when he was standing watching a bullfight. For some reason, he was inside the ring watching a bullfight, and the bull came flying over toward him, and he just grabbed it by the horns and threw it. But so, you know, people who have this idea of themselves, they want to live in this world where they're striding through Europe like Hemingway, it's kind of an ugly American side. But with Hemingway, I guess we're excusing it.

[Mike]

I think he's not exactly a bro, and I think he distinguishes himself from that crowd. I think, you know, like I was saying before, I think Bill and Robert Cohen, even Robert Cohen, the way he brags and, you know, Jake is definitely the most refined of the coarse, physical men. And, you know, there's something reserved about Jake, the way he absents himself early in the night to just be by himself, or he wants to, you know, be alone. And he's like, if you don't want to fish with me, that's fine. I'm going fishing. I think there's something very American about that kind of independence, where even, you know, I think, you know, Americans can be less of a herd than people, you know, make. Make us out to be at this

[Jack Wilson]

time in the 20s, it was before America had really become a superpower. And there's something. Yeah, there's something earnest and exciting about Hemingway and being an American at that time, where it really is. He's new and he's fresh. And there's also something in the Sun Also Rises that gives it this ballast, which is his narrator is impotent. So every kind of macho sentiment and every tendency that Hemingway has to. To make it about manly things is completely balanced out by the fact that his narrator and kind of the hero physically is not manly. And so in this disturbing to him way, it kind of gives all of the puffery a sort of ballast that keeps it rooted to the earth. And I think Makes it one of Hemingway's most charming and readable books.

[Mike]

Yeah, I mean, I think it really is one of the first books that come to mind as a recommendation. When someone's traveling, everyone should pack it in their bag.

[Jack Wilson]

Well, maybe not everyone. Give it a try. Give some stories a try. Maybe we should do a Hemingway story as one of our deep dive stories.

[Mike]

Yeah, we could do Indian Camp or Hills Like White Elephants. Hills Like White Elephants.

[Jack Wilson]

Like White Elephants would be good. Killers, clean, well lighted place. There's plenty. We'll have to. Maybe we'll have to draw out of a hat or something.

[Mike]

I was going to surprise you and quickly reread the Old man and the Sea and report back to you.

[Jack Wilson]

Okay, that sounds good. And you also have. You're going to be doing a solo episode, one I'm going to abstain from, which is I don't know if we should reveal who the author is. Maybe we should let people guess, but that's something we can look forward to. I thought we could also do a special Halloween episode where we do a short story, maybe A Telltale Heart or another Edgar Allan Poe story.

[Mike]

Yeah, we could do the Most Dangerous Game. Oh, I was always haunted by that.

[Jack Wilson]

I don't think that would affect kids the same anymore because of all of the video games.

[Mike]

That's basically Fortnite.

[Jack Wilson]

They're basically doing it all now. Okay, well, let's leave things there. Mike, as always, thanks for joining me on the History of Literature.

[Mike]

Thanks, Jack.

[Jack Wilson]

Okay, there we go. That's going to do it for this episode of the History of Literature. A blast from the past 2018.

[Mike]

Wow.

[Jack Wilson]

Already a long time ago. My thanks to Mike for joining me. We will be back with Chekhov next time. And then a visit from a contemporary novelist and a look at a philosopher King that's around the corner. We'll have a famous French story soon and a look at the author of Tristram Shandy and why he was such a phenomenon in the early years of the Soviet Union and lots more besides. So please do subscribe and check in with us from time to time. I'm Jack Wilson. Thank you for listening and we'll see you next time.

[Mike]

Sam. Foreign.

[Dr. Pam King]

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