2009-07-03 - 10:51 a.m.

Maybe this is about mutability. I've now read The Sun Also Rises for a third time. I read it first when I was too young for it, I suspect. I was 18, in my first year of college. I took an introduction to western literature course, in which we read Oedipus Rex, Hamlet, The Heart of Darkness, lots of World War I-era British poetry, and then The Great Gatsby and On the Road. Those last two fired me up. As is the case when something fires you up, you go looking for more, and so during spring break, while at home, I went to the local library and got a worn copy of The Sun Also Rises, because my professor had recommended it. Because my library card (so old that my name and address were typed on it) had expired and because I was 18 and in no mood to re-up it, I slipped the paperback into my backpack and walked out. This was before the Allegany County Public Library system had any kind of electronic security system to prevent theft of books. I read it very fast, lying on my belly on my parents' downstairs couch, and enjoyed it. It made me want to go trout-fishing.

I read it again when I was 24. My girlfriend at the time and I took a two-week road trip out west, from Baltimore to Chicago to the Black Hills to Yellowstone, down through the Tetons, through Salt Lake City and through all the great parks in southern Utah, down to Las Vegas, east to the Grand Canyon, back up again through Utah and then back home. We did a lot of driving, about 3,500 miles worth. When she drove, somewhere in the middle of the trip, I got out a copy of The Sun Also Rises. This copy was a hardcover that I'd bought at a secondhand store in Arbutus, in the suburbs. It was, as they say, a handsome edition: crisp, little-used, free of marks or tears. The dust jacket was missing but that was fine because I've never been a big fan of dust jackets. I read it very fast. At one point, I remember my girlfriend saying, "I wish you'd stop reading. I'd like someone to talk to." And I did stop for a while, but the roads were long and I wanted to keep on reading. I really liked it this second time. I felt like I got a little more out of it in terms of the big guns--heartache, jealousy, emptiness--but really what got me going was Hemingway's style, that famous clipped, tough-guy stuff that in the end made me quit my job as a small-fries reporter so that I could try to do the other kind of writing. That copy is now in Norfolk, in a box with lots of other books that I wish I had back.

And now, the third time. I know there are too many books in the world--too many everythings, really--for me to read a book three times, but I picked it up and right away got sucked in by that style, that urgency, that pared-down declarative style that makes you feel that this story in your hands is a story that must be told. This copy was neither the first (which I returned a few years ago), nor the second, but a third, which I think a friend got from a free-book place and gave to me because she knew I liked Hemingway. This time, I was in Utah again, for this conference, and I read it on the plane rides out and back, and in my room out there, in that ski town. I finished it yesterday. I didn't go nearly as fast this time and I think part of it was because I think I got a little more of the subtlety. For the first time, I realized that it's really a tragedy, a very sad one that's covered up by that Hemingway style, by bullfighting, by drinking in cafes, by talk of train travel and Spanish landscapes, by trout fishing. It's a story about a man who loves a woman but who can't have her. A very old story and one that's old for good reason. I poked around on the internet and I saw an interview Hemingway gave later in life. He said that it's a story about a sad English lady and that Cohn is the hero. And those two basic, fundamental shifts in looking at the story made me look at the book in a new way. Of course it's about a sad English lady because Brett's the focus of everything in the story. Everybody wants her and she wants everybody and as a result, nobody wins. And Cohn's the only one who's got any integrity left. He's the only one who doesn't drink, who isn't sarcastic at every opportunity, who tries honestly and earnestly but who still doesn't get what he wants and that not getting what he wants results in some kind of honest sadness that's unique to him. It's heartbreaking, really, for all the characters, and that's what I got out of it this time.

This third copy, it'll go back on the red bookshelf bought from Ikea, in this apartment that's a part of this world of mine with all these colors and layers, all this dust and laughter.

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