Steiner's Digest

I recently reread Hemingway’s debut novel The Sun Also Rises (for Brits: Fiesta). I first read it as a young man, perhaps at the age of 16 or 17. At the time I did what Hemingway wants the reader to do: I detested Robert Cohn and admired the dignified stoicism of Jacob Barnes. Barnes takes life as it is, attempts to enjoy it as much as he can and bravely bears his affliction (he is impotent because of a war wound).

Today, after almost thirty years, I realise that Robert Cohn was and is much closer to me than Hemingway’s alter ego Barnes. Cohn is full of anxiety, desperation, suppressed anger, indecisiveness, romantic longing, and fear. His insecurity and shyness make him distrustful of the motives and behaviour of others and, of course, they sense that immediately. The result: the more he wants to belong the less he is accepted. 

While Barnes is a hero in the old-fashioned sense of the word, Cohn is as imperfect and fallible as me – and perhaps many men.  But we don’t see that. We detest Cohn because we instinctively identify with the hero and are in constant denial of our faults and weaknesses. I don’t know about women, as I’ve never met a woman who read and enjoyed the books of the super macho Hemingway. But from my experiences a man like Cohn is still not too popular with the ladies. 

However, I’m convinced that Hemingway, as any great author, didn’t just ‚make up‘ this major character. He put as much of himself into him as into Jake Barnes, just as Tolstoy was as much Andrei Bolkonsky as he was Pierre Bezukhov. 

It is also likely that Hemingway created that character to master or rather eradicate his own fears and anxieties, everything that he considered as unmanly and undignified. Cohn is the devil that Hemingway exorcised in the process of the writing of this novel.

It seems that he was successful, as „The Sun Also Rises“ became a major success and put him on the way towards fame, fortune, as well as becoming a major building block of the macho myth the author created around himself.

At the end, however, the devil caught up with him. Alcoholism, illness, and depression made him unable to write, i.e., to exercise any more demons. In the end he shot himself, just like his father, whose suicide in 1928, two years after the publication of The Sun Also Rises, Hemingway had considered throughout all his life as an act of cowardice.

I wonder if it was Cohn or Barnes who pulled the trigger.