The Sun Also Rises - Ernest Hemingway (1926)

Back to back best books. Of course The Sun Also Rises is a classic of 20th century American literature, but has anyone read it lately?  I'm afraid to google it to see a a bunch of reassessments.  For me, it holds up.  It's flawed, it's imperfect, but it is also impossibly beautiful.  We haven't reviewed any books by Ernest Hemingway, only one about Ernest Hemingway, and that is probably one of the worst posts ever on Flying Houses (actually I don't think it's that bad, but it is extremely pretentious and off-putting).  I'll try to do better, here.

This is a quick little book.  67,707 words.  250 pages with fairly sparse print per page.

It's the story of a group of expatriate Americans in Paris, and their stay in Pamplona for the fiesta in the early 1920's.  It opens up with a portrait of Robert Cohn, one-time collegiate boxer and writer.  He is friends with Jake Barnes, a newspaper reporter with an injury from World War I.  Jake is also friends with Bill (I can't remember his last name) who is a writer and makes his entrance in the novel telling a very colorful story with many n-bombs (I realize this may be an offensive term, I apologize), though he does not seem to be a racist.  Actually he is portrayed as more of a beatnik type character, a precursor to Sal Paradise or Dean Moriarty.  All of these characters, in a way, are precursors.  The Lost Generation gives way to the Beat Generation...

There is also Lady Brett Ashley, and her fiancee, Mike (I can't remember his last name).   

Everyone is in love with Brett.  Eventually she hooks up with a young matador, Pedro Romero, who is 19.  The group drinks a lot, and they talk about bullfighting.

There is such a force of style in this book that the reader cannot help but be hypnotized.  That was the overall impression for me this time around.  The book is extremely dialogue-heavy.  Sometimes the dialogue is brilliant, and other times it feels unimaginative and clunky, as if the same scene is playing out over and over again: Jake & Co. get drunk and talk about how they all love Brett. 

Her entrance in the novel is notable because of the commentary from Jake on her companions.  The first time it went completely over my head, but this time it seemed pretty obvious they are supposed to be a bunch of gay dudes: "I was very angry.  Somehow they always made me angry.  I know they are supposed to be amusing, and you should be tolerant, but I wanted to swing on one, any one, anything to shatter that superior, simpering composure." (28) Also, the casual way he describes a prostitute he sort of picks up is charming and humanizing.

The real drama of the novel comes between Mike and Robert Cohn.  Mike gets very drunk in almost every scene and he usually says really inappropriate things:

"'Breeding be damned.  Who has any breeding, anyway, except the bulls?  Aren't the bulls lovely?  Don't you like them, Bill?  Why don't you say something, Robert?  Don't sit there looking like a bloody funeral.  What if Brett did sleep with you?  She's slept with lots of better people than you.'
'Shut up,' Cohn said.  He stood up.  'Shut up, Mike.'
'Oh, don't stand up and act as though you were going to hit me.  That won't make any difference to me.  Tell me, Robert.  Why do you follow Brett around like a poor bloody steer?  Don't you know you're not wanted?  I know when I'm not wanted.  Why don't you know when you're not wanted?  You came down to San Sebastian where you weren't wanted, and followed Brett around like a bloody steer.  Do you think that's right?'' (146)

So there is this love triangle story that is complicated by Romero, and Jake--though truly, the heart of the novel is the love story between Jake and Brett.  Could it be described as a love pentagon?  Bill is the only character that is not romantically linked with Brett.

Ernest Hemingway is a romantic figure, particularly in his associations with Paris.  Both The Sun Also Rises and A Moveable Feast are essential literary documents, particularly for any American traveling to Paris (and perhaps Spain).  There is a certain feeling in the work that makes the reader feel powerful.  The words have an import.  Sometimes, this style masquerades itself and masks otherwise unimaginative dialogue.  Usually, Hemingway's style is best served by the way his characters describe their surroundings, rather than the dialogue that is recorded.  Occasionally, dialogue is elevated to high art, as in the famous closing lines of the book, arguably the greatest ending of all time:

"Down-stairs we came out through the first-floor dining-room to the street.  A waiter went for a taxi.  It was hot and bright.  Up the street was a little square with trees and grass where there were taxis parked.  A taxi came up the street, the waiter hanging out at the side.  I tipped him and told the driver where to drive and got in beside Brett.  The driver started up the street.  I settled back.  Brett moved close to me.  We sat close against each other.  I put my arm around her and she rested against me comfortably.  It was very hot and bright, and the houses looked sharply white.  We turned out onto the Gran Via.
'Oh, Jake,' Brett said, 'we could have had such a damned good time together.'
Ahead was a mounted policeman in khaki directing traffic.  He raised his baton.  The car slowed suddenly pressing Brett against me.
'Yes,' I said. 'Isn't it pretty to think so?'" (250-251)

I mean really, that's what The Sun Also Rises is about, right?  The ending.  Perhaps it is not the greatest but it should be in the top 5 for 20th Century American fiction.  A Farewell to Arms would also make that list.  Hemingway is a great writer of endings.  There are a lot of "problematic" aspects of this novel that might otherwise keep it out of the pantheon of Great Books, but the ending makes up for everything.  Despite its flaws, the novel paints an indelible portrait of a time and place, such that the reader is transported there as if they had lived it themselves, and any novel that successfully achieves such a lofty goal as that demands to be read for generations.  From what I understand, Hemingway and Fitzgerald have not receded from their post as the greatest 20th century American writers, or their reputation as that.  In The Sun Also Rises, perhaps more than any of his other works, Hemingway lives up to his status as a literary icon.

The Rules of Attraction - Bret Easton Ellis

The context in which one reads The Rules of Attraction may color one’s view of it.  That was the case for me, at least.  The first time I read it was in September of 2003.  I was 20 and going to Paris for the semester.  I seem to recall reading the entire book on the plane flight from New York to Paris.  I seem to recall considering it a very good book for the reason of such speed—considered it to be on the same level of Less Than Zero.  Recently I have felt the opposite—that Less Than Zero is clearly the superior work, and that The Rules of Attraction is the “weaker sophomore effort.”  This is not the way I felt about The Beautiful and Damned (which oddly enough is the most popular review on Flying Houses—and by a long shot) and people tend to think of Bret Easton Ellis and F. Scott Fitzgerald in a similar vein.  For one, they both go by three names, which people generally do not take as a sign of pretension, but may be so (think of the “stature of the artist” view—or maybe just an attempt at accuracy for the names they were called).  They both write about young people and how their social lives affect their interior and exterior selves.  They both had success when they were very young (Ellis younger, however) and both were tagged as emblems of the generations they sought to capture in literature.  Popular films have been made out of their novels and short stories—and they continue to be made. 

They have also both been equated with the characters they portrayed.  And it would be too hard to ignore Ellis’s recent doings: the recent New York Times article about The Canyons is more than an instructive exercise.  In it, Ellis is painted as a screenwriter who has seemingly abandoned the novel writing for which he is known and generally admired.  It is worth noting that Ellis is not known for having written the screenplay for anything yet—so a good deal of whether this latest entre into film remains to be seen.  But I will make a small prediction that The Canyons is going to be about as memorable as The Informers.  Which is to say, nothing compared to Less Than Zero or American Psycho.  The Rules of Attraction and Glamorama get mentioned as secondary works (though I personally believe there is a strong argument that Glamorama is Ellis’s best work—but see also this present review, regarding re-assessment of Ellis as one ages) and most people only know about Imperial Bedrooms or Lunar Park if they are devoted readers of Ellis.  Maybe Ellis has achieved his goals in literature and is now seeking success in film—but it is irresistible to question whether this is just another fact by which to compare him to Fitzgerald—that late Hollywood period, when he had to write for the movies to make a living, and where he burnt out too young.  Fitzgerald died at 44 and Ellis is currently 49 but there have been advances in longevity.  Rumors have flown about Ellis (hardly ignored by the author in his two most recent efforts) and whether he shares certain characteristics with his literary creations.  I will just say that personally, I have my views on this matter (okay I went to NYU and more than a couple people I met claimed personal connections to him—then again one kid in Los Angeles claimed that B.E.E. read his self-published first creative non-fiction book and as time as passed I have increasingly felt that the kid was a liar) and no review of The Rules of Attraction should fail to mention its obsession with “gossip,” but I will decline to offer any personal tidbits that might paint an unfortunate view: we will respect the separation between artist and art object in this review.

                To return to context, then: I liked The Rules of Attraction much better when I was 20 than I liked it when I was 29.75 years old.  Maybe it’s because of something that’s captured in one scene: dismay over the reality that you have reached a certain age, which Sean experiences when he finds out that a centerfold in the pages of Playboy is 19 years old—two years younger than him—when he has always seen centerfold models as being “older”:

“This girl is younger than me, and that does it—instant depression.  This woman, this flesh was always older and that was part of the turn-on, but now, coming across this, something I’d never noticed before upsets me more than thinking about the conversation that Lauren and Judy must have had.” (210)

And perhaps it summarizes my view when I say I don’t consider it a spoiler to tell the reader that Sean has had sex with Judy while Sean was going out with Lauren.  This is because I seriously doubt any reader gets into the nitty-gritty details of this text—draws a massive chart detailing every relationship and how they are part of a larger intelligent design—but also seemingly rough outlines of variations on the same theme: spoiled brats at a small liberal arts college, drinking and doing lots of drugs and having lots of sex. 

It is hard not to mention the context in which I viewed this book at age 20, too.  Briefly, from September through December of 2002, I was the editor of the film review section of the NYU student newspaper.  That context matters for two reasons.  First, the film version of The Rules of Attraction came out while I had the editorial reigns, and I published a vaguely positive review of the film while not feeling an especially strong urge to go out and see it (this in contradistinction to American Psycho).  Second, New York University is a college filled with the same types of characters as those that populate The Rules of Attraction.  So the book is successful on the second front.  If you have been to college—and more specifically, this “type” of college—then you will be able to identify with this book in at least some small way.  Even though the characters are ensconced in the mid-1980s, one may indeed be shocked by how little youth culture has changed—apart from “screen time” which is vaguely anticipated in certain scenes, such as when Sean thinks Lauren will think he is cooler if he says he is majoring in Computers….but I cannot find the page that this detail emerges in.

And that is one important thing to note about this book: it is either one long chapter, or about 80 mini-chapters (maybe I’m off on that number—it’s just off the top of my head—I don’t want to spend the time to count up every single number of times that each character speaks in an attempt to make some sort of numerological quotation, nor do I believe that Ellis wants us to do this)—and if that parenthetical is any sign, it’s harder to view it as the latter.  This plot evolves over the course of one fall semester—roughly the months of October and November.  This includes Halloween and it is worth noting here that it bears a similarity to Daylight Savings Time, in ways that I did not even think about.  Really, I must have considered this book to be of such an inspiring nature that I adopted one of its narrative techniques: present tense first-person shifting narration (except that I kept it in third-person).  Indeed some of the scenes we both include probably share some of the same “one-liners at party” dialogue.  I wrote Daylight Savings Time when I was twenty-three and twenty-four, and Ellis published The Rules of Attraction when he was twenty-four, and while I would not suggest that I was on the same level of Ellis at that age, I would suggest that our “mental age” was probably not far off.

                This can be interesting material—but generally it is not.  It suffers from the same problem as Palo Alto (recently reviewed here) by James Franco: we don’t know which character to root for because we’re not sure of what they care about, or how smart they really are.  It appears that Sean is smarter than he appears, but we never really get any satisfaction out of seeing that side of him, except maybe in the scene at Vittorio’s (a 70-year-old poetry professor relocating to Italy that makes passes at Lauren)—that is, we do not know whether the things he tends to remember have significance or not.  At one point Sean mentions how his "hippie" ex-girlfriend knows to talk about Ginsberg, but then does not realize he wrote “Howl.”  I suppose Sean is supposed to appreciate that he can see through her “feigned coolness,” but the reader is never exactly sure how much of the behavior of the three major characters is “feigned coolness.” 

                This is most apparent in Paul’s interactions with Sean, and perhaps less apparent in Sean’s interactions with Lauren.  Which leads me to recognize that I have not provided a plot-line for this novel yet.  It concerns Sean Bateman (younger brother to Patrick Bateman, who makes an appearance and even gets his own “monologue-mini-chapter”), who rides a motorcycle and says “rock and roll” and “deal with it” in response to other people’s random statements, Paul Denton, who is bisexual but seems more gay than straight, who is from Chicago and generally seems the most “stuck-up” of the characters, and Lauren  Hynde, who pines for her boyfriend Victor who is “spending some time in Europe,” who keeps  changing her major, who slept with Paul before the action of the novel “starts” and who sleeps with Sean in the course of it, and who may be the social conscience of the book itself.  These characters attend the same school as Clay from Less Than Zero (who also has his own “mini-chapter monologue”): Camden College.  Maybe it says something when I recall that Clay’s “excerpt” is one of the best parts of this novel, and apparently shows that Ellis has not “lost his gift” but has just shifted it in a less interesting direction.  This is not to say that the subject matter of this book is boring: it takes on a topic which is rarely examined in literature and provides a somewhat fascinating resolution of that issue.  The issue is sort of referenced in Less Than Zero but attacked head-on in this book—but maybe it’s the case that a good deal of the allure of Less Than Zero is its almost mystical, mysterious quality.  This is not as strongly the case here, and though Ellis begins and ends the novel mid-sentence and includes a “blank” Lauren mini-chapter, he generally is content keep his authorial gaze fixed upon “society” as the “topic” of the book. 

                Maybe I am putting words in his mouth or providing my own interpretive gloss but I swore I once read an article where B.E.E. claimed to be inspired by Balzac’s La Comedie Humane and that his work was his take on that sort of vision.  If this is the case, the problem mentioned above (i.e. the same problem with Palo Alto) makes this attempt a failure.  But, like Palo Alto, it is a book that I read very quickly the first time around, and that will certainly remind liberal arts B.A. holders of scenes from their own life and maybe cause them to write books vaguely imitating its literary style that lack sufficient quality for publication.  However I doubt that any of them had as much sex as occurs in this book.  Aside from the hypersexual element, the book is generally true to life, and thus good.  However, I would consider it to be a notch below even Imperial Bedrooms, which, while no masterpiece, at least involved a more mature narrator.  For the uninitiated to Ellis, reading about a Dressed to Get Screwed Party and then holding your own Dressed to Get Screwed Party is reason enough to experience this book once—just don’t expect to be as blown away your second time around.    

Big Sur - Jack Kerouac

We all go a little mad sometimes.

That line is from Psycho, but Kerouac might as well have written it.

Kerouac gets a bad rap, I think.  Most people go no further than On the Road, or The Dharma Bums if you are really lucky.  Almost no one can talk about Desolation Angels, The Subterraneans, or Big Sur (not to mention And the Hippos Were Boiled in their Tanks..).

In terms of ranking, I would put Big Sur just beneath Desolation Angels (slightly) as my favorite.  Desolation Angels is much longer, a real "adventure" novel.  Big Sur is a pretty compact little book, but does not appear as well-edited as The Dharma Bums.

The plot can be described as follows: Jack Duluoz stays at Lawrence Monsanto's cabin alone in Big Sur and does not drink, decides he's bored, goes back to San Francisco to get people to go with him to Big Sur to drink, gets sick and tired of everyone and thinks about not drinking, goes back to San Francisco and drinks and decides he likes everyone again, then goes back to Big Sur with them and drinks and has a total breakdown.

That may sound facile, but Big Sur is quite excellent.

Much of this book is devoted to describing the psychological conditions giving way to addiction and insanity.   And it is on these topics that Kerouac shines:

"I can hear myself again whining 'Why does God torture me?'--But anybody who's never had delirium tremens even in their early stages may not understand that it's not so much a physical pain but a mental anguish indescribable to those ignorant people who dont drink and accuse drinkers of irresponsibility--The mental anguish is so intense that you feel you have betrayed your very birth, the efforts nay the birth pangs of your mother when she bore you and delivered you to the world, you've betrayed every effort your father ever made to feed you and raise you and make you strong and my God even educate you for 'life,' you feel a guilt so deep you identify yourself with the devil and God seems far away abandoning you to your sick silliness--You feel sick in the greatest sense of the word, breathing without believing in it, sicksicksick, your soul groans, you look at your helpless hands as tho they were on fire and you cant move to help, you look at the world with dead eyes, there's on your face an expression of incalculable repining like a constipated angel on a cloud--In fact it's actually a cancerous look you throw on the world, through browngray wool fuds over your eyes--Your tongue is white and disgusting, your teeth are stained, your hair seems to have dried out overnight, there are huge mucks in the corners of your eyes, greases on your nose, froth at the sides of your mouth: in short that very disgusting and wellknown hideousness everybody knows who's walked past a city street drunk in the Boweries of the world---"(95-96)

And, as in Desolation Angels, there is some of the world-weariness that Kerouac felt upon being crowned "the King of the Beats":

"Because after all the poor kid actually believes that there's something noble and idealistic and kind about all this beat stuff, and I'm supposed to be the King of the Beatniks according to the newspapers, so but at the same time I'm sick and tired of all the endless enthusiasms of new young kids trying to know me and pour out all their lives into me so that I'll jump up and down and say yes yes that's right, which I can't do anymore--"(94)

Kerouac was about 38 or 39 during the events taking place in this book and he would be dead seven years after its publication.  His portrayals of himself as an "old man" therefore, may be somewhat accurate for the truly wild of the partiers amongst us.  Kerouac and F. Scott Fitzgerald (and to a lesser extent Hemingway) therefore represent the "second tier" of the so-called 27 Club.  While Fitzgerald is in the 44 Club and Kerouac is in the 47 Club, neither was apparently addicted to seriously hard drugs (I will leave Burroughs--84 Club--out of this...) but could not overcome their passion for drink.  While they went on to contribute several masterpieces to the American literary canon, they did so at their own expense, or perhaps out of the fear that they would not write anything better than their first books.

Kerouac and Fitzgerald also share the quality of writing "thinly-veiled autobiographies," though Fitzgerald did much more to add veils.  Kerouac admits that his entire oeuvre is one story--the story of his life--and an attempt to imitate Marcel Proust.  This is not the time for a discussion on the merits of burning the candle at both ends, or whatever phrase you like, but it is an interesting side-note.

Perhaps notable if one wants a very-detailed understanding of Kerouac's oeuvre/life is the character of Cody (previously known as Dean Moriarty in On the Road and Neal Cassady in real life) who strongly influences most of the action in this novel--or at least of its second half.  Cody is married to Evelyn, and Jack loves her.  They both believe they will be married in another life.  However, Cody also has a mistress named Billie.  He sets her up with Jack, and she eventually drives him insane at the end of the novel.  But there is this interesting story about marijuana prosecution when Cody makes his first appearance:

"Cody shakes my hand again--Havent seen him for several years because mainly he's just spent two years in San Quentin on a stupid charge of possession of marijuana--He was on his way to work on the railroad one night and was short on time and his driving license had already been revoked for speeding so he saw two bearded bluejeaned beatniks parked, asked them to trade a quick ride to work at the railroad station for two sticks of tea, they complied and arrested him--They were disguised policemen--For this great crime he spent two years in San Quentin in the same cell with a murderous gunman--His job was sweeping out the cotton mill room--I expect him to be all bitter and out of his head because of this but strangely and magnificently he's become quieter, more radiant, more patient, manly, more friendly even--" (55-56)

A key difference in this book is that now, Kerouac is rich.  Or at least semi-rich.  He has begun to receive proceeds from On the Road and characterizes himself as a celebrity disenchanted with what readers have interpreted him to be--a 26 or 27-year-old hitchhiking artist, in search of the next great adventure.  He is hardly this, and near the opening of the novel, he hitchhikes for what he says was the last time in his life.

But he lends $100 to Cody and this is enough for Cody to completely change his life around.  He reappears in what may be the most "exuberant" scene in the novel--at Monsanto's cabin in Big Sur:

"Suddenly, boom, the door of the cabin is flung open with a loud crash and a burst of sunlight illuminates the room and I see an Angel standing arm outstretched in the door!--It's Cody!  all dressed in his Sunday best in a suit!  beside him are ranged several graduating golden angels from Evelyn gold beautiful wife down to the most dazzling angel of them all little Timmy with the sun striking off his hair in beams!....."Happy birthday Jack!" yells Cody or some such ordinary crazy inane greeting "I've come to you with good news!  I've brought Evelyn and Emily and Gaby and Timmy because we're all so grateful and glad because everything has worked out absolutely dead perfect, or living perfect, boy, with that little old hunnerd dollars you gave me let me tell  you the fantastic story of what happened" (to him it was utterly fantastic)..." (106-107)

And then he gives him pot:

"You guessed it old buddy I have here the LAST, the absolutely LAST yet most perfect of all black-haired seeded packed tight superbomber joints in the world which you and I are now going to light up, 's'why I didnt want you to bring any of that wine right away, why boy we got time to drink wine and wine and dance" and here he is lighting up, says "Now dont walk too fast, it's time to stroll along like we used to do remember sometimes on our daysoff on the railroad, or walking across that Third and Townsend tar like you said and the time we watched the sun go down so perfect holy purple over that Mission cross--Yessir, slow and easy, looking at this gone valley" so we start to puff the pot but as usual it creates doubtful paranoias in both our minds and we actually sort of fall silent on the way to the car which is a beautiful grape color at that, a brand new shiney Jeepster with all the equipments...." (108-109)

From there, Jack is later introduced to Billie, and her son Elliott, which sets up the denouement of the novel.  He also meets Billie's friend Perry, who takes the "beat" attitude to its logical extreme, and causes Jack a moment of pause.  As a side note, there are also several meetings with generals in the U.S. Army which cause Jack some weird paranoia, but moving on:

"Strange--and Perry Yturbide that first day while Billie's at work and we've just called his mother now wants me to come with him to visit a general of the U.S. Army--"Why? and what's all these generals looking out of silent windows?" I say--but nothing surprises Perry--"We'll go there because I want you to dig the most beautiful girls we ever saw," in fact we take a cab--But the "beautiful girls" turn out to be 8 and 9 and 10 years old, daughters of the general or maybe even cousins or daughters of a nextdoor strange general, but the mother is there, there are also boys playing in a backroom, we have Elliott with us who Perry has carried on his shoulders all the way--I look at Perry and he says "I wanted you to see the most beautiful cans in town" and I realize he's dangerously insane--In fact he then says "See this perfect beauty?" a ponytailed 10 year old daughter of the general (who aint home yet) "I'm going to kidnap her right now" and he takes her by the hand and they go out on the street for an hour while I sit there over drinks talking to the mother--There's some vast conspiracy to make me go mad anyway--" (133)

This takes place in San Francisco, but later they will go to Big Sur, and Jack will experience his breakdown.

It is perhaps worth noting at this point my personal connection to this story.  While I am no stranger to incredible statements that may in fact be erroneous, perhaps the most incredible statement I have made of late is that I am, in fact, Kerouac's reincarnation.  Now I understand that all people are tied by a common humanity, and certainly some religious upbringings may cause others to experience certain sensations more closely than others--but Kerouac's description of madness in Big Sur is personally significant to me for two reasons: #1: In July 2012, I went to Big Sur and experienced a similar breakdown of sorts.  #2: In March of 2003 I experienced the physical, mental, and psychological sensations that Kerouac reports in this book (which I wrote about in my first significant written work "Autointoxication").  Kerouac would often say in bars, "I'm the greatest writer of the 20th century."  That may be up for debate, but it is not so far from the truth.  For me to say "I'm the greatest writer of the 21st century" certainly comes off as false, since I have not been published--but keep in mind that On the Road was published in 1958, when Kerouac was 35, and keep in mind that we share the same aesthetic sensibilities (to what degree he has influenced me I cannot be sure but I must say that before I ever read him --On the Road when I was 18--I did not have such a different artistic vision as I have today, which is not far from Kerouac's, or Proust's.

With that out of the way:

"I realize I may never come out of this and my mother is waiting for me at home praying for me because she must know what's happening tonight, I cry out to her to pray and help me--I remember my cat for the first time in three hours and let out a yell that scared Billie--"All right Jack?"--"Give me a little time"--But now she's started to sleep, poor girl is exhausted, I realize she's going to abandon me to my fate anyway and I cant help thinking she and Dave and Romana are all secretly awake waiting for me to die--"For what reason?" I'm thinking "this secret poisoning society, I know, it's because I'm a Catholic, it's a big anti-Catholic scheme, it's Communists destroying everybody, systematic individuals are poisoned till finally they'll have everybody, this madness changes you completely and in the morning you no longer have the same mind--the drug is invented by Airapatianz, it's the brainwash drug, I always thought that Romana was a Communist being a Rumanian, and as for Billie that gang of hers is strange, and Cody dont care, and Dave's all evil just like I always figured maybe" but soon my thoughts arent even as "rational" as that any more but become hours of raving--There are forces whispering in my ear in rapid long speeches advising and warning, suddenly other voices are shouting, the trouble is all the voices are longwinded and talking very fast like Cody at his fastest and like the creek so that I have to keep up with the meaning tho I wanta bat it out of my ears--I keep waving at my ears--I'm afraid to close my eyes for all the turmoiled universes I see tilting and expanding suddenly exploding suddenly clawing in to my center, faces, yelling mouths, long haired yellers, sudden evil confidences, sudden rat-tat-tats of cerebral committees arguing about "Jack" and talking about him as if he wasnt there--Aimless moments when I'm waiting for more voices and suddenly the wind explodes huge groans in the million treetop leaves that sounds like the moon gone mad--And the moon rising higher, brighter, shining down in my eyes like a streetlamp--The huddled shadowy sleeping figures over there so coy--So human and safe, I'm crying "I'm not human any more and I'll never be safe any more, Oh what I wouldnt give to be home on a Sunday afternoon yawning because I'm bored, Oh for that again, it'll never come back again--Ma was right, it was all bound to drive me mad, now it's done--What'll I say to her?--She'll be terrified and go mad herself--Oh ti Tykey, aide mue--me who's just eaten fish have no right to ask for brother Tyke again--"--An argot of sudden screamed reports rattles through my head in a language I never heard but understand immediately--For a moment I see blue Heaven and the Virgin's white veil but suddenly a great evil blur like an ink spot spreads over it, "The devil!--the devil's come after me tonight! tonight is the night!  that's what!"--But angels are laughing and having a big barn dance in the rocks of the sea, nobody cares any more--Suddenly as clear as anything I ever saw in my life, I see the Cross."  (177-178)

This passage represents the closest I have seen Kerouac come to describing a delusional episode with perfect accuracy.  Indeed I am hard-pressed to think of any other writer who has summed up those horrifying moments when one is alone in their mind and confused and cannot summon a rational thought but is instead reduced to broad, dualistic sensations of good and evil, heaven and hell, God and the Devil, blue and red, or white and black.

While this review is pretty much complete, a passage or two on gayness is always appropriate, particularly since my visit to Big Sur hinged upon whether I would hike to the hot springs or not (the same ones I cannot be sure):

"The boys reassure me the hot springs bath will do me good (they see I'm gloomy now hungover for good) but when we arrive my heart sinks again as McLear points out to sea from the balcony of the outdoor pools: "Look out there floating in the sea weeds, a dead otter!"--And sure enough it is a dead otter I guess, a big brown pale lump floating up and down mournfully with the swells and ghastly weeds, my otter, my dear otter I'd written poems about--"Why did he die?" I ask myself in despair--"Why do they do that?"--"What's the sense of all this?"--...--The hot water pools are steaming, Fagan and Monsanto and the others are all sitting peacefully up to their necks, they're all naked, but there's a gang of fairies also there naked all standing around various bath house postures that make me hesitate to take my clothes off just on general principles--In fact Cody doesnt even bother to do anything but lie down with this clothes on in the sun, on the balcony table, and just smoke--But I borrow McLear's yellow bathing suit and get in--"What ya wearing a bathingsuit in a hot springs pool for boy?" says Fagan chuckling--With horror I realize there's spermatazoa floating in the hot water--I look and I see the other men (the fairies) all taking good long looks at Ron Baker who stands there facing the sea with his arse for all to behold, not to mention McLear and Dave Wain too--But it's very typical of me and Cody that we won't undress in this situation (we were both raised Catholics?)--Supposedly the big sex heroes of our generation, in fact--You might think--But the combination of the strange silent watching fairy-men, and the dead otter out there, and the spermatazoa in the pools makes me sick....." (91-92).

Shortly after that is a mention of Nepenthe, which is where I rushed to catch a bus off of Big Sur to Monterey, and another mention of generals because there was something "sinister" about the fact that he had never met any general in his life and now he had met two of them (the third would be in a passage quoted above).  Henry Miller is also mentioned two or three times in the novel, apparently lurking somewhere around Big Sur, but unfortunately he does not make an appearance.  I went to Big Sur and attended a wedding at the Henry Miller Memorial Library and Museum, so that would have been the icing on the cake for me.

Later everyone leaves and he has a dream:

"Then I turn my rumbling attention to a couple of unknown Fin du Siecle poets called Theo Marzials and Henry Harland--I take a nap after supper and dream of the U.S. Navy, a ship anchored near a war scene, at an island, but everything is drowsy as two sailors go up the trail with fishing-poles and a dog between them to go make love quietly in the hills: the captain and everybody know they're queer and rather than being infuriated however they're all drowsily enchanted by such gentle love: you see a sailor peeking after them with binoculars from the poop: there's supposed to be a war but nothing happens, just laundry...." (102)

Perhaps you can tell from these passages that Kerouac paid scant attention to punctuation--there are probably more em-dashes in the novel than periods, and apostrophes in certain contractions are omitted.  This just shows Kerouac's increasing comfort in his own prose-style, and I do not think the style ever hinders the readability of the text.  In fact I think it makes it more readable, and perhaps this is why I like it better than On the Road.

But to be fair, I have not read On the Road in many years now (6 maybe?) and perhaps it is time for another reading and a new perspective on it.

This marks the end of Flying Houses book reviews for a while now--while I may attempt to review Americana by Don DeLillo, classes have started again today, and sadly (and for the last year) Flying Houses will experience significant hiatuses, and only include Negligent Infliction of Emotional Distress columns, or other writings not deemed publishable by those outlets to which I submit.

Bottom line: Read Kerouac.  And don't just stop at On the Road--even if you don't like it all that much.

Ernest Hemingway: A Life Story - Carlos Baker

Few people in this world will spend a full year reading a single book. It happened to me, who happens to run a blog primarily devoted to literature. It will never happen again.


To be sure, there were extenuating circumstances. But I recall that bright day in June of 2010 when I chanced upon this volume in a basket of books in my parent’s bedroom. It stood out to me like a beacon. It was a long book, but I had just finished Ada, which ran about 600 pages and made for extremely difficult reading. Soon I would be starting law school, and I would not be able to read anything besides my casebooks (so I thought). I thought I could finish it before I left for school, roughly two months away. I read the back, and the first line from the introduction: “He used to say that he wanted no biography written while he was alive, and preferably for a hundred years after he was dead.” (vii) It was immediately apparent that it must be my final book before law school. I had read many books which I thought might teach me how to write a stunning first novel (Less Than Zero, The Sun Also Rises, This Side of Paradise, The Catcher in the Rye) and I had read books by John Gardner or Stephen King or Anne Lamott or James Wood or Francine Prose on how to write good books and I had read a book of letters between Ernest Hemingway and F. Scott Fitzgerald but I had never read a biography on a writer I admired that might indicate a manner in which to live to best accomplish the task that I had set as my life’s purpose and mission: to write books that would outlast my own life, that would be a record of the life I had lived, that would elucidate my stance on the bits of human existence that were most worth remembering.

I took the book and went outside into my backyard. No one else was home, or would be for days, so I stripped to my underwear and sunbathed and read the first 50 pages. No one saw me, or if they did they said nothing, and I did not care. Here for a brief instant life was good. I had the day off work. I could fill my body with intoxicating chemicals and no one would know. I had settled down to learn from the example of a master.

The months rolled by and Friday, August 13th came, and I moved into my new apartment in Brooklyn. I had made it 250 pages through the book. I was obliged to put it down and read The Buffalo Creek Disaster. I did not read any more for a long time. Over Christmas Break, I began reading Invisible Man by Ralph Ellison. That was a very good book, and I was flying through it, and was preparing to write a review for Flying Houses when it was unfortunately stolen along with my messenger bag and iPod and digital camera and D & G glasses from a bar in Chelsea, on or around January 8, 2011.

I returned to this volume at points nearing the end of Spring Semester. My life between August 2010 and May 2011 was extremely painful and has been written about on this blog before, and will likely be written about again. I was finally able to return to this book in earnest near the end of May, before borrowing what will be the next review on this blog, Blindness. Still, I rarely read in Brooklyn, consumed by an internship and feelings of anxiety and hopelessness, time always slipping away without a thing to show for it. I have finally finished today, July 6, 2011, on Nantucket island, and will now state that this book is difficult reading.

One would not expect a biography to be a difficult read, but this is a very minutely detailed book. There are not many reviews of this book on Amazon but the few there admit it to be great. And true, one cannot complain that Baker leaves any stone unturned. This is a remarkably comprehensive account of Hemingway’s life. However, for me, it was too comprehensive, and those looking to tackle it should be forewarned of several distinguishing features.

First, there is almost no dialogue. Now, true, any biography attempting to portray a life realistically should not include much dialogue. A person’s words, spoken aloud in daily life, often go unrecorded and it is dangerous to try to imitate the way the subject may have spoken. Of the 564 pages in this book perhaps three or four pages (or less) consist of dialogue in quotations.
At first this may seem a petty complaint, but I do not think I have ever read a book with such little dialogue. And it leads to me reflect upon a comment a writing teacher of mine once said: “Dialogue is a reward for the reader.” Dialogue is like candy. Dialogue may be difficult to write, but is almost always easy to read. Pages consisting of dialogue in quotations will be flipped through noticeably faster than those of thick, dense, descriptive paragraphs. Law students reading casebooks may experience a similar feeling when reading cases that quote extensively from the record. These are often a relief. A little break. A reward. Here is the main dialogue I remember from the book:
“Buck, I just called to tell you I got that thing.”
“That thing? What thing?”
“That Swedish thing. You know.”
“You mean the Nobel Prize?”
“Yeah,” said Ernest. “You’re the first one I called.”
“God-damned wonderful,” Lanham said. “Congratulations.”
“I should have had the damn thing long ago,” said Ernest. “I’m thinking of telling them to shove it.”
“Don’t be a jackass. You can’t do that.”
“Well, maybe not,” said Ernest. “There’s thirty-five thousand dollars. You and I can have a hell of a lot of fun with thirty-five thousand dollars. The big thing I called about, Buck, is I want you to come down here and handle me. Everybody’s going to be banging on the door of the Finca. Buck, how about it?” (527)

“Buck” is Buck Lanham, a general in the U.S. Army stationed in France, Belgium, and Germany during World War II. He figures prominently in this book. The biography is actually dedicated to Buck Lanham and Dorothy Baker (the author’s wife). Buck Lanham becomes a close friend to Ernest, and later to Carlos Baker. Lanham must have provided the majority of first-person accounting on Ernest over the last seventeen years of his life or so. They met when Ernest was a war correspondent in Europe between 1943 and 1944.

My earlier point about dialogue should not be misconstrued. My comment referred to “blocked” dialogue. And that excerpt above may be the only such example in the book. But there is plenty of dialogue contained within the dense, descriptive paragraphs of the book. However, they are mostly phrases, or single sentences. Like one line of Ernest’s that he liked to say after his experiences in World War II: “How do you like it now, gentlemen?” This he said to his mother after threatening to cut her off when she was a poor old woman living in River Forest, IL in the late 1940’s. He had a very bad relationship with his mother because he believed she drove his father to suicide.

If the lack of “blocked” dialogue is a complaint, then my other complaint involves the subject matter of this book. True, there is plenty about Ernest’s writing, and his love and disdain for other writers, but the book is decidedly focused on the events in his life that inspired his writing. Consequently, there is an incredible amount of material of his time serving as a correspondent for the Spanish Civil War and World War II. The sections of the book about his time served as an ambulance driver during World War I are, for some reason, less tedious, perhaps if (or because) one has read A Farewell to Arms. There is almost nothing I remember about the Spanish Civil War from this book. But the stories from World War II are frankly ridiculous. Notably, there is one part where he sees a general crouched down behind a rock with his men, and he tells Buck Lanham, who is worried he will have to replace him, that the man is going to die because he has a stink of death about him. A day or two later the general does die, and Lanham asks how he could possibly know that was going to happen. Ernest replies that it is something one picks up while serving in a war.

There are other episodes where he narrowly escapes death about a dozen or so times, and it is incredible to observe such behavior where there does not seem to be any real hope of gain except for the thrill of being in a dangerous situation. Later he is questioned by the Inspector General when they suspect him of acting outside the scope of his duties as a war correspondent, in violation of the Geneva Convention. He lies, he commits perjury, and he is ashamed, because he actually does command troops. It is sort of hilarious that yes, he does have war experience, but he is basically just this writer that loves danger, and he is a big man with a big beard, and people automatically assume he is some kind of general, and he speaks with authority, and they listen to him.

There is much about his life near Havana, Cuba, and his fishing boat, the Pilar. In another hilarious episode, he learns about German submarines surfacing and demanding provisions from fishing boats in the area. He decides to assemble a ragtag group of eight individuals and calls the scheme Friendless, after the name of one of his cats. They get a bunch of grenades and plan to throw them into a German submarine when the enemy party might emerge on deck in an attempt to raid their fishing boat. They patrol the area, but they never get the opportunity to actually attack the Nazis.

There is much about hunting, and fishing. And there is much about the friendships he makes along the way, but few of the names will be previously familiar to readers of this book. If one wanted to make a movie of Hemingway’s life, this would be the place to start. However, it is clear from this book that he would absolutely hate the prospect of such a film. There are episodes involving all of the films that are adapted from his works, and it is only the film of his short story “The Killers” that he finds comes close to his written product.

The above material, if one is very interested in hunting, or fishing, or first-person accounts of wartime adventures, will be quite enjoyable. However, I must take issue with Baker’s writing style during these sections. True, he does seem to write with authority on the subject matter, but it can often be confusing for the lay reader without such experience—or worse yet, boring. But this is how Hemingway really lived: he wrote, he travelled, he admired the courage of those on the front lines of war and spent as much time with them as he could, he hunted and fished extensively, and he liked to surround himself with friends to drink and carry out such activities.

While he may come off as egotistical at times, what comes across more is his ability to listen to others and his thirst for hearing their real experiences. I have often marveled at Nabokov’s linguistic capabilities, and while Hemingway did not write in his second language, he also spoke French, Spanish, and some Italian. Rather than college at Oberlin or the University of Illinois, he immediately starts as a journalist in Kansas City, and readers in 2011 with too much money spent on education and too few practical skills actually learned will bemoan their existence. His knowledge of the arts and sciences is not diminished by lack of such education. He does not learn by studying (except when it comes to literature), but by doing.

Baker is at his best when discussing the literary aspects of Hemingway’s life. And I do not think it is just because I am so partial to him, but any paragraph that mentions F. Scott Fitzgerald is instantly quotable. It is true that there are too many quotations I could include here, but there are few other subjects I would want my review to contain. Here, after Baker mentions that Hemingway had been reading Thomas Mann (Buddenbrooks) and Turgenev (Fathers and Children) near the end of 1925, is one of the many episodes in which he holds court with visitors from a sickbed:

“From the fastness of his featherbed, Ernest discoursed at length to Fitzgerald on the importance of subject in fiction. War, said he, was the best subject of all. It offered maximum material combined with maximum action. Everything was speeded up and the writer who had participated in a war gained such a mass of experience as he would normally have to wait a lifetime to get. Dos Passos, for one, had been made by the Kaiser’s War, having gone to it twice and grown up in between. This was one reason why his Three Soldiers was such a swell book. Other good subjects, according to Ernest, were love, money, avarice, murder, and impotence. The Sun Also Rises, which he must now work all winter to revise, engaged none of these except the second and the last, but his hopes for the book were high. As soon as he recovered from his respiratory infection, he would take up the task of revision and typing.” (161)

Several of these episodes would be contained in A Moveable Feast, which is the last book that Hemingway works on, besides a lengthy article on bullfights that he observed on his last trip to Spain around 1959 or 1960. A Moveable Feast is treated as a series of “sketches” but if one has not read it, and would like to read about Hemingway, it is the real place to start. Much of their friendship took place after the writing of The Great Gatsby and before the publication of Tender is the Night:

“In spite of his own writing difficulties, Ernest played Dutch uncle to Fitzgerald, repeatedly urging him to get forward with Tender is the Night. The only thing to do with a novel, said he, was to finish it. Scott’s mood of depression was nothing but the Artist’s Reward. Summer was anyhow a discouraging time to work: only in the fall, when the feeling of death came on, did you find ‘the boys’ putting pen to paper. The good parts of a novel might be something a writer was lucky enough to overhear or they might be the wreckage of his whole damned life. The artist should not worry over the loss of his early bloom. People were not peaches. Like guns and saddles, they were all the better for becoming slightly worn. When a bloomless writer got his flashes of the old juice, he knew enough to get results with them. As always with Fitzgerald, Ernest managed to sound like a grizzled veteran of fifty rather than a comparative youngster of thirty whose second novel was not yet published.” (204)

Their friendship, however, is not always nice and friendly. In fact they have something of a falling out:

“As for Scott, he felt that only two events could possibly redeem him: either Zelda must die or Scott must develop a stomach disorder severe enough to make him stop drinking. Why did he refuse to grow up? Why was he drunk whenever Ernest saw him? His ‘damned bloody romanticism’ and his ‘cheap Irish love of defeat’ were becoming tiresome. Ernest, on the other hand, said that he had a damned good time all the time. When he was able to work, he never felt low. He took great pleasure in living for 340 days out of every 365. He was always conscious, he said, of living not one life but two. One was that of a writer who got his reward after his death, and to hell with what he got now. The other was that of a man who got everything now, and to hell with what came to him after death. Fame was anyway a strange phenomenon. A man might become immortal with ten lines of poetry or a hundred pages of prose. Or not, no matter how much he wrote, if he never had what it took. In his lifetime, a writer was judged by the sum total and average of his work. After he died, only the best mattered. He was convinced that human beings were probably ‘intended’ to suffer. But his experience had shown him that a man could get used to anything as long as he refused to worry about bad luck before it happened.” (238-239)

When Tender is the Night is published, Hemingway first rejects it, finding that it is basically a portrait of Fitzgerald’s life on the French Riviera, without any understanding of the psychological complexities of the characters he had picked out from real life. But his opinion would change:
“At first he had understated the book’s virtues and overemphasized its shortcomings. Scott obviously had talent to burn, said Ernest, but he had ‘cheated too damned much in this one.’ His problem was that he had stopped listening long ago, except to answers to his own questions. This was what dried a writer up. The minute he started listening again, he would sprout like dry grass after a sozzling rain. He must also learn to forget his personal tragedy. Everyone was bitched from the start, anyhow, and it was clear enough that Scott had to be hurt like hell before he could write seriously. It was his obligation to use the damned hurt in his writing, not to cheat with it. Neither he nor Ernest was a tragic character: they were only writers who must write. Most good writers, including James Joyce, were rummies. But good writers could always make comebacks. Scott was twice as good right this minute as he had been at the time of The Great Gatsby. ‘Go on and write,’ said Ernest.” (262) Fitzgerald then replies with an enthusiastic letter about how much he looks up to Hemingway and even needs to stop reading his books for fear that he will influence him too much.

Their friendship continues along pleasantly enough until Fitzgerald published “The Crack-Up” in Esquire in 1936. “Ernest was shocked. Scott, he felt, seemed almost to be taking pride in the shamelessness of his defeat. Why in God’s name couldn’t he understand that writers went through that kind of emptiness many times?” (283) Then there comes a decisive moment. Both Fitzgerald and Hemingway made a practice out of carving their characters from real life, but one story goes too far, and is worth a long excerpt:

“The story [“The Snows of Kilimanjaro”] also reached out to involve Fitzgerald. The dying writer was made to remember ‘poor Scott Fitzgerald’ and ‘his romantic awe’ of that ‘special glamorous race’ who had money. When Scott had discovered that they were not so glamorous as he had supposed, the realization ‘wrecked him just as much as any other thing that wrecked him.’ Ernest was determined not to follow Fitzgerald into the wreckage of a crack-up. As he had long ago told him, wreckage was made to be used by writers, even if it was the wreckage of one’s whole damned life. If the rich were indeed the enemy, Ernest would use them as such in his fiction.
“Ill and depressed among the green mountains of North Carolina, Fitzgerald was angered to see his name used in Ernest’s story. He got off a curt note on the stationery of the Grove Park Inn in Asheville.
Dear Ernest: Please lay off me in print. If I choose to write de profundis sometimes it doesn’t mean I want friends praying aloud over my corpse. No doubt you meant it kindly, but it cost me a night’s sleep. And when you incorporate it [the story] in a book would you mind cutting my name? It’s a fine story—one of your best—even though ‘Poor Scott Fitzgerald, etc.’ rather spoiled it for me. Ever your friend, Scott.
[P.S.] Riches have never fascinated me, unless combined with the greatest charm or distinction.
“Ernest presently wrote Perkins that Scott’s reaction was damned curious coming from a man who had spent all winter writing ‘those awful things about himself’ in Esquire. His reply to Scott himself said ominously that for five years now he had not written a line about anyone he knew because he had felt so sorry for them. But all that was past. He was going to stop being a gentleman and go back to being a novelist, using whatever material he damned well chose.” (290)

They correspond a couple other times with less rancor, but this is pretty much the extent of “gossip” contained in this book. Hemingway later reflects that Tender is the Night is probably Fitzgerald’s masterpiece around the time of the publication of For Whom the Bell Tolls and Fitzgerald’s death. Other literary figures, such as Ezra Pound, Sinclair Lewis, William Faulkner, J.D. Salinger, and Tennessee Williams appear in varying degrees, usually treading lightly so as not to upset Hemingway, who may justifiably be deemed a prickly personality—that is, if the slightest hint of a criticism emerged in an article or lecture. The exception is for Italian historian and art critic Bernard Berenson, who was in his 80s when he befriended Hemingway—Berenson never does wrong in his eyes. Famous movie stars such as Gary Cooper and Marlene Dietrich become close friends of his, as does Ingrid Bergman (but not her husband) and his attitude towards Spencer Tracy, who would play Santiago in the film adaptation of The Old Man and the Sea, is ambivalent.

In general the book is long and slow, but it is detailed. And it has always been something of a hobby of mine to stop by the same places where Hemingway has been in the past. While in Paris in 2003, I went to the Closerie des Lilas in Montparnasse and wrote a paper about how it had changed over the last seventy-five years. I have only been to Oak Park, IL proper a few times but have not driven by the house of his youth. He did not have very strong feelings for New York: “The homeward voyage was both stormy and dull. He gazed with surly distaste at the skyline of New York—the damned ‘chickenshit cement canyon town’ which he had left so exuberantly four months earlier.” (482) But he stayed at a friend’s house at 116 E. 64th St. in 1956 and at 1 E. 62nd St. in 1959. Notably for my present circumstances, he stayed at 45 Pearl Street in Nantucket in 1910 and sang at the First Congregational Church in a choir with his mother. I ran by the First Congregational Church yesterday en route to Cliff Rd. and hope to pass by 45 Pearl Street before I leave here the day after tomorrow.

His influence continues unabated fifty years after his death. While on vacation here, one of my sisters brought a biography of J.D. Salinger which came out this year. I found the coincidence remarkable. Here we are, both English majors (to a certain extent), both on vacation, one in law school and one considering going, one with an Ernest Hemingway biography and the other with a J.D. Salinger biography. I pointed out the one paragraph (on page 420, which only passes “the test” previously described here if one considers Salinger’s prose a narcotic) that describes their meeting in Paris in 1944 and asked whether she would show me the corresponding section in her book, which she did not. I wanted to have a debate about which writer would better stand the test of time as an American literary hero. It is tough, but I think Hemingway wins out. Another sister brought The Paris Wife, which my mother then read, which is a fictionalized account of his years in Paris, the title a reference to his first wife (out of four) Hadley, with her as the novel’s protagonist. So many coincidences show that he has permeated a great many fashions underlying the fabric of daily American life, down to the men in their middle-to-old age who have white hair and full beards, who bear an unmistakable resemblance. There are not many others who can be said to inhabit a state of appearance.

This book took me a very long time to read, and perhaps I found it slow and disappointing because it does not read like one of Hemingway’s books, where the prose has a tendency to fly off the page in often beautiful and original ways. Like Salinger after him, his literary style became the status quo, and remains a serious influence to this day. The final section of the book, the last fifty pages or so, went a good deal faster for me. His mind begins to deteriorate, and his weight drops to 175 pounds. The ending is somewhat sad, and also darkly funny when on the last night of his life he acts like everything is totally fine, and he wakes up early, and though his wife Mary has locked away the guns, he knows where the keys are kept. He goes about his death in a very matter-of-fact way. Of course he died too young and he might have produced several more great books yet, but he lived more than twenty years longer than Fitzgerald and surely left his mark on the world. If suicide is universally regarded as an immoral act, he at least may have had the excuse that it ran in his family, and that he could not help it if it were in his genes. He had two stays at the Mayo Clinic in Rochester, MN during the last couple years of his life to tend to his psychiatric condition with shock treatments and other medication, which seemed to have a positive short-term effect, but obviously not long-term.

I have surprisingly never reviewed one of Hemingway’s books on Flying Houses but The Sun Also Rises is a masterpiece. I read The Old Man and the Sea as an 8th grader, required for school, and probably did not appreciate it enough at the time. It deserves a second look. I read A Farewell to Arms in high school as another required book, but I enjoyed it very much. It also deserves a second look. I have read A Moveable Feast two or three times and it is highly entertaining, oftentimes hilarious. I have not read For Whom the Bell Tolls and this will hopefully be reviewed sometime here in the not too distant future. But for now, I have been consumed deeply enough by Hemingway and will move onto a new book with renewed vigor and a goal to never take this long to read a book again.

This Side of Paradise - F. Scott Fitzgerald

Of all the artists, writers, thinkers and musicians to pass in and out through the doors of this precipitously-governed country over the past two hundred and fifty years, there are few closer to my heart than the one, the only, FSF. So fragile was his constitution that he had to succumb to a heart-attack at the unlikely age of just 44. So brilliant was his mind that he could stir a nation with a debut novel at age 24. So inimitable was his voice that he could pen what very well may be the greatest American novel of all time a few years later. So much did he spend during the Depression that he had to constantly write short stories just to make a living. So risky was his lifestyle that he could spend a decade in France, revising the follow-up to that masterpiece while in the throes of alcoholism, marital difficulties, depression, and madness, and emerge with an arguably even greater masterpiece. So epic was his life that it would end in Hollywood, uncelebrated, all but forgotten, but not before the composition of a novel that, were it to be finished, would easily stand alongside his most celebrated work. So winning was his personality that Ernest Hemingway would walk with him into the bathroom to inform him that he had nothing to worry about, that everything was in its proper proportion.

It might just so happen that This Side of Paradise then, published when FSF was 24 but written over the course of several years, may contain his raison d'etre. What a beautiful novel, opening up in description of the person of Amory Blaine, son of Beatrice and a fading father character, born in Minnesota, educated at St. Regis, and finally Princeton, where the majority of it unfolds. Amory is a Romantic Egotist, a personage, and 90% of an intellectual, though lacking the ascetic nature of his philosophical friends Tom D'Invilliers, Alec Connage and Burne Holiday. He writes for the student newspaper, edits the literary journal, takes weekend trips into New York City, and romances several girls. Notably Isabelle and Rosalind. He believes he sees the Devil in one scene. He goes to the Jersey Shore and protects a friend sleeping with a floozy when the cops come in to bust things up. He becomes disillusioned by romance, and goes out on several-day-benders. Amory is not a boring character.

Critics today are quick to point out that This Side of Paradise does not contain as elegant a structure as Gatsby or Tender is the Night and is therefore, merely a "very good" first novel. Of course I disagree with them. Having read this the year before I began my undergraduate education, probably for the 2nd time a couple years later, the third time two years after that, and for the fourth time two years after that, some six months ago, I can safely say that each reading has held a different experience, and that the prose is more deeply-layered and nuanced than I am able to have remembered discerning in my previous reading two years earlier. Never mind that I have only read Gatsby three or so times, and Tender is the Night and The Last Tycoon and The Beautiful and Damned (highly underrated) only once all the way through, each. This Side of Paradise is the most user-friendly novel in his oeuvre, and the one most readily relatable to the youth of the 21st century. Gatsby may be even shorter, it seems, but those characters are a bit older. The characters in TSOP are little more than children, but they are given the freedom to live their life as impetuously as they see fit, and Fitzgerald is not dull in describing their activities.

And I still feel as if I have not properly communicated the greatness of the work. Should one point towards its "experimental" structure as being forward-thinking, or merely an anomaly in literature, a cut-and-paste job as some may have blithely referred to it? Or should one point towards the character of Monsignor D'Arcy as evidence that Fitzgerald was wiser than his years, or that he could not imagine a temperate person of substance in which to place his trust? Many details may be dashed off quickly, allowing the reader to make the assumption that in its published form there were still loose ends to be tied, inconsistencies or abnormalities yet to be revised, and there are even what appear to be typos when Fitzgerald breaks from his third-person-narration to command the reader, "Don't Misunderstand!" or to explain a significant detail like, "I see I am getting ahead of myself." A more strict academic reader might dismiss Fitzgerald's first creation as the work of a dilettante or dandy before he acquired the necessary skills to concoct as perfect a novel as Gatsby. But regardless of the lack of perfection, TSOP is as close to perfect as you can get while still being human, in my own meaningless opinion as a writer. The first-person lapses only enhance the novel for me, only give it more mysterious meaning that cannot yet be fully understood. The structure is wild and refuses to provide any easy asnwers to the reader. The ending is nearly the same level of poetry as that famous final page of Gatsby. Which is the more classic line? "Born ceaselessly into the past" or "But that is all?" Carraway's invocation of Gatsby's condition will move many hearts, but Blaine's assessment of his own lack of a grasp on life, society and the world, is one sentiment that cannot by refuted by claiming a lack of application in reality.

Often called the "voice of the Jazz age," Fitzgerald created characters drawn so closely from life that anyone who has known more than a few hundred people in their time will be amazed at a character's resemblance to some such person they met at a party, or in a dorm, or at a bar, or a club meeting. True, Fitzgerald is often described as having milked his real life for his fiction, but after all these years, the gesture is not an unkind one. Who would think that people in New York in 1919 would not be far off from people in New York in 2001? Sure, Amory Blaine might laugh if you were able to describe the Internet to him, but if you were to have a drink with him, it would be little different from meeting anyone you might have known in the years between 18 and 22.

For his stunning statement on youth and ambition, Fitzgerald's first novel introduced him to the world at large before being swiftly forgotten and considered out of fashion. Gatsby may be the book in every high school classroom, but students might be urged to seek out TSOP on their own, as they might read something they could actually identify with, rather than something that they might just not understand.