A Norton Critical Edition: Ernest Hemingway’s The Sun Also Rises ed. by Michael Thurston

Abstract

Reviewed by: A Norton Critical Edition: Ernest Hemingway’s The Sun Also Rises ed. by Michael Thurston Donald A. Daiker A Norton Critical Edition: Ernest Hemingway’s The Sun Also Rises. Edited by Michael Thurston. New York: Norton, 2022. 348 pp. Paper. $14.38. The Norton Critical Edition of The Sun Also Rises, edited by Michael Thurston, is welcome because of its illuminating textual annotations but disappointing because of its one-sided approach to the novel’s meanings and value. [End Page 116] In addition to the full, magnificently annotated text of Ernest Hemingway’s first and arguably finest novel, the Norton Critical Edition (hereafter NCE) includes biographical and autobiographical material, background pieces on postwar Paris, bullfighting, and literary influences, and a brief selection of letters. For criticism, the NCE provides contemporaneous reviews by Edmund Wilson, Allen Tate, and others followed by ten essays of “Modern Criticism.” The volume concludes with a useful Hemingway chronology and an uneven selected bibliography. If you are reading The Sun Also Rises for the first or fourteenth time, your best bet is the annotated NCE text. That’s because this 1926 Hemingway novel includes references and even whole conversations that are difficult and even impossible for twenty-first-century readers to comprehend. The competing editions, like the Hemingway Library Edition and trade paperbacks, offer no annotations at all. The Library of America edition edited by Robert W. Trogdon provides helpful annotations not as footnotes but hundreds of pages away in a section labeled “Notes.” Besides, the NCE notes are far more extensive and helpful. Whereas Trogdon says nothing about Robert Cohn’s “feeling of inferiority and shyness . . . on being treated as a Jew at Princeton” (5),1 Thurston tells us that “Princeton had the lowest number of Jewish students among the Ivy League universities” (5). Trogdon does not gloss the passage when young men arrive at the dancing club, but Thurston’s note would have been appreciated by my students: “Hemingway’s description suggests that the young men are homosexual. Jake’s subsequent reaction confirms this” (17). Trogdon ignores Jake’s reference to the “n***** drummer” at Zelli’s restaurant in Montmartre, but Thurston responds with an informative and nuanced mini essay (47). Following the exemplary model of the Hemingway Letters Project, the annotated NCE enlarges our experience and deepens our understanding of The Sun Also Rises. The NCE aptly includes what is perhaps the most famous letter from one American writer to another: F. Scott Fitzgerald’s letter to Hemingway praising the novel he had read in manuscript but urging that its original opening be deleted because of its “sneers, superiorities and nose-thumbings” (195). Thurston also includes several relevant Hemingway letters but not some of the most significant: Hemingway’s letter to Fitzgerald cautioning that Sun is “not . . . at all for a child to read” (Letters vol. 3, 75); his letter to Canadian writer Morley Callaghan asserting that Sun “is not about sex” (Letters vol. 3, 112); and his letters to his editor Maxwell Perkins explaining why he cannot further reduce the book’s “profanity” (Letters vol. 3, 107), why it “is a great mistake to put real [End Page 117] people in a book” (Letters vol. 3, 110), why Sun is not “a jazz superficial story” (Letters vol. 3, 148), and why Gertrude Stein’s epigraph, “splendid bombast,” should not be taken seriously (Letters vol. 3, 158). Thurston’s well-written, informative, and lucid “Introduction” helps explain his choices of critical essays. For Thurston, Sun lacks anything like a moral code or set of values. Instead, he writes, readers “are invited to find meaning in the arduous achievement of technique” (xxi). Thus, it is Hemingway’s “stylistic achievement”—his “mastery of the sentence”—and not “moral behavior” (xx] that is central to the novel and best accounts for our enjoyment of it. If you had read only the ten chosen “Modern Criticism” essays, you would scarcely have known that the novel’s central relationship is between Jake Barnes and Brett Ashley. You would be largely unaware of the novel’s most important dramatic scenes—the bedroom scene in Paris, the seduction scene in Pamplona, and the scenes in a bedroom, bar...