Great lines from The Sun Also Rises

Damn you, Paris Wife. Now I have to re-read this book which I barely remember from 20 years ago (also to re-read: A Moveable Feast although that's not in the cards in the immediate future.) I want to read more of Hemingway actually and since I plan to eschew anything that involves slaughtering bulls or African wild life, I think the list should be quite manageable.

One of my favorite literary scenes from a movie, btw, was in Peggy Sue Got Married when teen Peggy asked the local beatnik guy why he was so enamored with Jack Kerouac. He said "He [Hemingway] is the perfect American author: fat, violent and drunk.....Jack Kerouac doesn't have to KILL a BULL to have something to write about." I fell a little in love with that guy then, even if I have no intention of ever reading On the Road and do like me some Papa now and again.

Here's an article about the real life inspirations for the characters. The Paris Wife also goes into some detail on the trip to Spain that inspired this novel. Interestingly, Ernest was married to Hadley at the time but she does not appear in it. According to McLain's book, Ernest said this was because she was the only well-behaved person on the trip and was too above the muck to include in the story.

And here is a study guide with further links, courtesy of Grand Valley State.

Great lines:

On the writer Robert Cohn (he was someone in Hem's circle named Harold Loeb who slept with Duff-Lady Brett in the book-and went insane with jealousy when she slept with someone else):

Then there was another thing. He had been reading W. H. Hudson. That sounds like an innocent occupation, but Cohn had read and read "The Purple Land." "The Purple Land" is a very sinister book if read too late in life. It recounts splendid imaginary amorous adventures of a perfect English gentleman in an intensely romantic land, the scenery of which is very well described. For a man to take it as thirty-four as a guide book to what life holds is about as safe as it would be for a man of the same age to enter Wall Street direct from a Paris convent, equipped with a complete set of the more practical Alger books. Cohn, I believe took every word of "The Purple Land" as literally as though it had been an R.G. Dun report. You understand me, he made some reservations, but on the whole the book to him was sound. It was all that was needed to set him off. 

(this was a real 19th century novel, btw. Borges called it the best example of "gaucho literature." It involves an Englishman's misadventures in Uruguay. R.G. Dun is the predecessor of Dun and Bradstreet.)

On Lady Brett's early morning visit:

This was Brett, that I had felt like crying about. Then I thought of her walking up the street and stepping into the car, as I had last seen her, and of course in a little while I felt like hell again. It is awfully easy to be hard-boiled about everything in the daytime, but at night it is another thing.

On the bad vibes of certain streets:

It was like a certain stretch on the PLM between Fontainbleau and Montereau that always made me feel bored and dead and dull until it was over. I suppose it is some association of ideas that makes those dead places in a journey. There are other streets in Paris as ugly as the Boulevard Raspail......Perhaps I had read something about it once. That was the way Robert Cohn was about all of Paris. I wondered where Cohn got that incapacity to enjoy Paris. Possibly from Mencken. Mencken hates Paris, I believe. So many young men get their likes and dislikes from Mencken.