Diving deep: Jake's moment of truth at San Sebastian.

Knodt, Ellen Andrews

In the sun also rises, Ernest Hemingway frames the fiestAatpamplona with two incidents in which Jake enjoys the sports of fishing or swimming. Critics have paid close attention to the trout-fishing incident at Burguete that precedes the fiesta, but much less attention to the days Jake spends swimming at San Sebastian afterwards.(1) Yet this incident, positioned after the fiesta and just before the end of the novel, provides a link between the fiesta and Jake's concluding remark to Brett, "Isn't it pretty to think so?" (SAR 247). Jake's solitary visit to San Sebastian is not just a respite from the fiesta, nor a merely pleasant interlude that interrupts the "real" story momentarily, but an occasion for Jake to reach a moment of truth, an epiphany that allows him to see his life objectively and to change.

Readers of The Sun Also Rises will recall that there are, in fact, two swimming scenes on two different days at San Sebastian.(2) These two scenes constitute a "complex type of foreshadowing" identified by Michael Reynolds in his analysis of A Farewell to Arms: "the echo scene, in which Hemingway will run the same scene by the reader twice. However, on the second run the emphasis of the scene will have shifted slightly so that the reader is invited to make a comparison between the two scenes" (Hemingway's First War 245). A close reading of the two swimming scenes in The Sun Also Rises reveals that on the first day Jake has an experience that produces an "epiphany" or a moment of truth, and on the second day, the "echo scene" reveals the change that has taken place in his character.

The swimming and diving scenes at San Sebastian are evocative, affecting a reader beyond the mere meanings of their words. A reader senses Jake's pain and his attempts to heal himself through contact with the natural world:

After lunch I went up to my room, read awhile, and went to sleep. When

I woke it was half past four. I found my swimming-suit, wrapped it

with a comb in a towel, and went down-stairs and walked up the street

to the Concha. The tide was about half-way out. The beach was smooth

and firm, and the sand yellow. I went into a bathing-cabin, undressed,

put on my suit, and walked across the smooth sand to the sea. The sand

was warm under bare feet. There were quite a few people in the water

and on the beach. Out beyond where the headlands of the Concha almost

met to form the harbor there was a white line of breakers and the

open sea. Although the tide was going out, there were a few slow rollers.

They came in like undulations in the water, gathered weight of water,

and then broke smoothly on the warm sand. (234-35)

The pleasure Jake takes in the natural world is evident in the "smooth sand" "warm under bare feet," and the "rollers" that break "smoothly on the warm sand." The soothing sounds of words like "smooth" and "warm" convey just how much Jake needs and appreciates comfort after the fiesta. But the swim to the raft and Jake's diving show his tension and beginning insight into his life:

I waded out. The water was cold. As a roller came, I dove, swam out under

water, and came to the surface with all the chill gone. I swam out to

the raft, pulled myself up, and lay on the hot planks. A boy and girl were

at the other end. The girl had undone the top strap of her bathing-suit

and was browning her back. The boy lay face downward on the raft and

talked to her. She laughed at things he said, and turned her brown back

in the sun. I lay on the raft in the sun until I was dry. Then I tried

several dives. I dove deep once, swimming down to the bottom. I swam with

my eyes open and it was green and dark. The raft made a dark shadow.

I came out of water beside the raft, pulled up, dove once more, holding

it for length, and then swam ashore. (235)

Jake's swim to the raft is uneventful, but as he pulls himself up, he is not alone. The raft's other occupants are a boy and girl easily intimate with each other, the girl having undone her swimsuit strap and laughing as the boy talks to her. Though Jake makes no comment beyond objective description of the couple, readers sense that he contrasts his and Brett's uneasy relationship with that of the boy and girl. In fact, it may be Jake's discomfort at being on the raft with the happy young couple that propels him offthe raft to take "several dives."

An almost parallel situation appears in the short story "Summer People," written in 1926, the same year as The Sun Also Rises, but published after Hemingway's death in The Nick Adams Stories. In "Summer People," Nick Adams feels uncomfortable seeing his friends Kate and Odgar sitting on the dock because, as Abby Werlock explains, "Nick strongly desires Kate, but not while Odgar . . . remains with her" (126). Nick, like Jake, dives into the water and thinks to himself how wonderful it is: "He did not care anything about swimming, only to dive and be underwater" (NAS 226). In fact, Nick muses about how it would be to make love to Kate underwater (228). However, in "Summer People" Nick keeps his eyes closed on his first dive, then tries sinking down with his ieyes open, and condudes, "It was no good. He could not see underwater in the dark. He was right to keep his eyes shut when he first dove in" (227). Nick does not "see" anything during this experience, either physically or metaphorically. That is, this moment produces no special insight or fundamental change in Nick. When he surfaces, he rejoins Kate and Odgar on the dock and sits with his back to Kate, who rests her foot on his back. The three friends engage in small talk while Kate and Nick communicate through his pushing against her foot: "Nick pressed his back hard against her foot" (229). Following their swimming, Kate and Nick (Odgar forgotten) slip away from their companions and make love under the hemlocks (232-34).

Hemingway may have had this story in mind when he wrote about Jake's coming to the raft and seeing the boy and girl there. The swimming scenes of "Summer People" augment our appreciation of the underlying sexual tension Jake feels in The Sun Also Rises. Although he notices the girl sensually "browning her back," Jake, unlike Nick Adams, is unable to follow through and have sexual intercourse. It is Jake and Brett's exquisite frustration that they can feel great sexual attraction but not realize sexual intimacy because of Jake's war injury. When Brett says, "Love you? I simply turn all to jelly when you touch me," Jake replies, "And there's not a damned thing we could do" (26). Just before the swimming scenes at San Sebastian, Jake has watched Brett go off with the bullfighter Romero and is feeling "Low as hell" (222).

In any event, when Jake dives to the bottom, he swims "with [his] eyes open" in contrast to being "blind" with drink on the last night of the fiesta (224). He sees and recognizes the "dark shadow" of the raft containing the young couple. For Jake, the shadow is the nature of his relationship with Brett. While they profess their love for one another and while, as Linda Miller says, Jake understands Brett better than anyone else (171), Jake and Brett cannot stay with one another. Early in the novel, when Jake asks, "Couldn't we just live together?" Brett replies, "I don't think so. I'd just tromper you with everybody. You couldn't stand it" (55). In this moment, looking up at the dark shadow of the raft, Jake sees their relationship for what it is, a shadow that will never be lifted, a relationship which will never improve or come to fruition. Jake can now begin the change that enables him to utter the novel's famous last line. H.R. Stoneback agrees that the dive has significance for Jake: "His primary need has been to see clearly his situation with Brett, to deal with it. He has been `blind,' in several senses, with regard to Brett; he has taken his dive to the bottom, again in several senses, but in the baptismal swimming scene his eyes are open in the deep, green water, and after he emerges, everything looks very sharp and bright and sun-blazoned in the concluding pages of the novel"(11).

The experience Jake undergoes during his deep dive may be fraught with even more meaning than his recognition of the "dark shadow" of his relationship with Brett. Evidence that Hemingway associated swimming and diving with suicide appears in two biographical sources. Carlos Baker reports a 1926 journal entry written in Hemingway's black notebook shortly after he completed The Sun Also Rises:

"When I feel low," he wrote, "I like to think about death and various

ways of dying. And I think about probably the best way, unless you

could arrar ge to die some way while asleep, would be to go offa liner at

night.That way there would be no doubt about the thing going through

and it does not seem a nasty death. There would be only the moment of

taking the jump and it is very easy for me to take almost any sort of

jump. Also it would never be definitely known what had happened and

there would be no post mortems and no expenses left for anyone to pay

and there would always be the chance that you might be given credit for

an accident." (qtd. in Life 167)

Although there is no direct evidence that Jake contemplated suicide as he swam at San Sebastian, on the last night of the fiesta he felt "Low as hell" (222), and Jake describes the dive to the bottom of the sea as seductively"green and dark." If readers sense a hidden importance in the deep dive, it may be Jake's contemplation of death by drowning.(3)

The second biographical reference connects Jake's decision to surface from the dive and a much later incident in Hemingway's life. According to Carlos Baker, Hemingway wrote to Lillian Ross on 24 August 1950, telling her

... of a long deep dive he made on the 23rd of August far out in the Gulf

Stream where the water was a mile and a half deep. By his own account

he werlt "way down," letting out all the air. It was awfully nice down

there and he was tempted to stay. Then he reflected on the need of setting

a good example to his children, and his pride came surging back. If

"they" wanted him, they would have to come and get him. He told himself

that he would not stay down there--"not for nobody nor for nothing."

He swam and kicked his way to the surface, red-faced and

blowing, and climbed back aboard the Pilar. (Life 485-86)

Hemingway, in this incident, returns to the surface with a new resolve, just as I suggest Jake does in the San Sebastian dive. It is not so much that the dive "figuratively" symbolizes Jake's "probing depths of his inner self," as Donald Daiker suggests in one of the few essays to acknowledge the importance of the San Sebastian scenes, but that the act of diving offers a physical challenge which prompts a life-or-death decision.

Hemingway's characters (and Hemingway himself) frequently test their limits by physically placing themselves in danger, and although Jake's diving deep is not the equivalent of Romero's fighting bulls or Robert Jordan's blowing up bridges, it is still part of the author's pattern of physical challenges. Significantly, Jake confronts this challenge alone, following a common Hemingway pattern. According to Beongcheon Yu, "[w]hether hunting, fishing, or even bullfighting, strictly speaking, one must play solo. Behind this fact lies Hemingway's conviction that in the game of death, the last one that man is expected to play, he must also play solo; and that every man must die alone, which is as absolute as the fact of death itself" (126).

Hemingway's manuscript for the posthumously published novel The Garden of Eden also connects swimming and suicide. Robert Fleming reports that the manuscript includes a plot treating Nick Sheldon, a painter, and his wife Barbara, who become involved in a love triangle that ends with Barbara writing a suicide note. Hemingway wrote two versions of the note, one in which Barbara says she has killed herself with sleeping pills, and another in which she plans to drown herself on a beautiful sunny day at a time when the high tides have cleansed the water in Venice (Fleming 130-32).

The published novel omits the Sheldon plot but has many swimming scenes that Hemingway uses to explore the characters' charging relationships. For example, at the beginning of The Garden of Eden, newlyweds David and Catherine Bourne play "under the water like porpoises" (21). A few pages later, David and Catherine have an argument about his book reviews ("clippings"), and by Chapter Five they are no longer swimming together regularly. When David and Catherine meet Marita, the swimming resumes, but now David and Marita are together in the water. At the end of Chapter 17, David ends an argument among the three of them by announcing that he is going for a swim, and Marita "followed him and outside the cove while they treaded water she said, `She's crazy'" (152), in reference to Catherine. David and Marita continue to deepen their relationship, and this increasing closeness is reflected again in the swimming and diving scenes as Marita competes with Catherine for experiences with David in the water. David dives from a high rock, trying to come as close as he can to Marita without hitting her (161), and later, when David and Catherine swim, Marita asks David if he dived "from the high rocks" (170). When he says no, Marita replies, "I'm glad of that" (170). At the end of the published novel, when David tries unsuccessfully to write again after Catherine has burned his manuscripts, Marita, knowing what might soothe David's frustration, suggests a swim. Editor Tom Jenks chose to end the published Garden of Eden with the two (now different) lovers frolicking in the sea, David "making a boil in the water that a porpoise might have made" (241). Hemingway's readers are used to seeing routine daily activities such as eating, drinking, and bathing reflect the mental states of characters, and it seems safe to add swimming and diving to the list.

Jake's deep dive is not one of many in The Sun Also Rises, but a single event possibly carrying greater meaning. For the deep dive off a raft to carry the possibility of suicide and the recognition of a relationship's end is not unlikely, for by 1926 Hemingway had read and admired the works of James Joyce, inventor of the literary "epiphany." Michael Reynolds tells us that by 1924 Hemingway "had read all the Joyce in print. Dubliners he would later call the twentieth century's one sure bet for immortality" (Hemingway's Reading 21). According to A. Walton Litz, "inherent in Joyce's notion of `epiphany'[is] the `showing forth' of character through seemingly trivial action or detail" (23). In his first notebook for The Sun Also Rises, Hemingway explains the way he sees these "special moments":

In life people are not conscious of these special moments that novelists

build their whole structures on. That is most people are not. That

surely has nothing to do with the story but you can not tell until you

finish it because none of the significant things are going to have any

literary signs marking them. You have to figure them out by yourself.

(qtd. in Svoboda 12)

If Jake undergrone an epiphany, a "special moment," during his dive, one should be able to sense a change in Jake during his second day at San Sebastian, and I think the evidence bears this out. Jake's second day of swimming serves as an "echo scene" inviting comparison with the first. As he did the day before, Jake begins by describing his waLk to the beach:

Everything was fresh and cool and damp in the early morning. Nurses

in uniform and in peasant costume walked under the trees with children.

The Spanish children were beautiful. Some bootblacks sat together

under a tree talking to a soldier. The soldier had only one arm.

The tide was in and there was a good breeze and a surf on the beach.

(237)

In contrast to his vagueness of the day before--"There were quite a few people in the water and on the beach" (234)--this time Jake notices specific people on the beach. The soldier with one arm may remind him of his own war wound, and the beautiful children, of his resulting inability to father children of his own. As Daiker notes, the nurses may remind Jake of how he met Brett when he was in the hospital (79). Jake's observations are sharp and realistic, but without dwelling on them, he turns quickly to the beauty of the beach and to his swim.

Jake's swim on this morning is both tiring and playful. He has to dive through the waves, which tires him, but he also rides the waves ashore. He even plays a kind of game with the waves, attempting to swim without a wave breaking over him:

I swam out, trying to swim through the rollers, but having to dive

sometimes. Then in the quiet water I turned and floated. Floating I saw

only the sky, and felt the drop and lift of the swells. I swam back to the

surf and coasted in, face down, on a big roller, then turned and swam,

trying to keep in the trough and not have a wave break over me. It made

me tired, swimming in the trough, and I turned and swam out to the

raft. (237)

This Jake seems to be much more in tune with his surroundings and to recognize his limitations. When he gets to the raft, which this time is unoccupied, he notices the harborscape:

I looked around at the bay, the old town, the casino, the line of trees

along the promenade, and the big hotels with their white porches and

gold-lettered names. Off on the right, almost closing the harbor, was a

green hill with a castle. The raft rocked with the motion of the water.

On the other side of the narrow gap that led into the open sea was another

high headland. (238)

While Richard Peterson sees Jake's description as "seemingly extraneous" but useful in establishing Jake's "expertness" as a character who notices details (193), I think Carlos Baker assesses Hemingway's descriptive technique more accurately:

[T]he carefully ordered accounts of natural scenery in his pages reveal,

on close examination, a deliberate and intelligent artifice. The description

is nearly always directly functional within an action.... What we

tend to get in Hemingway is a subtle interweaving of the natural

conditions in the background and the human conditions in the foreground

or the middle-distance. (Writer As Artist 67-68)

That Jake on this second day at San Sebastian is taking a leisurely look around, noticing the features of the harbor, suggests that his decision to live without Brett is behind him.. So, too, does his floating on the swells, feeling the natural motion of the water, and looking at the sky. He no longer is preoccupied (weighed down3 by his inner confusion.

Further evidence of Jake's more balanced perspective is the way he reflects on his physical condition. Although on his way out to the raft Jake thinks that "[t]he water was buoyant and cold. It felt as though you could never sink," he realistically acknowledges his limits when he says, "I thought I would like to swim across the bay but I was afraid of cramp" (237-38). H.R Stoneback notes that when Jake says that the water is "buoyant," "this is charged language, and it bespeaks Jake's peace, at last" (19).

Jake completes his swim by expertly balancing himself on the raft, timing his dive to the raft's tipping. He "dove cleanly and deeply, to come up through the lightening water, blew the salt water out of [his] head, and swam slowly and steadily in to shore" (238). In this passage there is no dive to the bottom where it is "green and dark," but a dive that emphasizes coming up through " the lightening water" and a slow, steady, controlled swim ashore. This Jake is now ready for Brett's telegram, and when it comes he is not surprised but rather resigned to fulfilling his responsibility: "Well, that meant San Sebastian all shot to hell. I suppose, vaguely, I had expected something of the sort" (239).

According to Daiker, Jake now "looks with brutal honesty at his relationship with Brett" (80). As he travels to the end of the line in Madrid, "All trains finish there. They don't go anywhere" (240), and takes care of retrieving Brett, Jake behaves in a distinctly different way from previous encounters. He is more detached with Brett, asking "Anything you want me to think about it?" (244) when she remarks that she was already in school when Romero was born, and cautioning her that "You'll lose it [whatever was good in the Romero experience] if you talk about it" (245). Only Jake's drinking seems to belie his detachment. After three martinis apiece and five bottles of wine (with lunch), Brett pleads with Jake, "Don't get drunk, Jake. You don't have to" (246). Jake puts her off by asking "How do you know?" and then by changing the subject, "Want to go for a ride?" (246). Although struggling here with his emotions, Jake, as Daiker says, "has mastered his life by gaining the strength and self-control to end once and for all his destructive relationship with Brett" (86). Robert Lewis agrees that Jake has "a greater knowledge of his condition than at any other time" (35). Such mastery is certainly the product of Jake's cumulative experience, including the Romero incident, but the crystallizing moment occurs while diving deep at San Sebastian.

NOTES

(1.) Carlos Baker, in Hemingway: The Writer as Artist, concentrates on Burguete and alludes to San Sebastian as part of a "pleasurable contrapuntal method" of alternating "emotional and moral climates" (85). Richard Peterson characterizes "Jake's retreat to San Sebastian" and "swimming in the cold water" as "wash[ing] away memories of the fiesta at Pamplona" (53). Philip Young says that Jake "washes away his hangovers in the ocean" and returns to Brett unchanged (58). Arthur Waldhorn links Jake's description of his routine with that of Nick Adams in "Big Two-Hearted River" and calls San Sebastian "a respite out-of-doors" (95, 111). Richard R Adams fits San Sebastian into a Waste Land interpretation, suggesting a "death by water theme" (247). Robert W. Lewis notes the importance of Jake's two swims at San Sebastian in a religious sense: "Jake returns to the fertile sea for purification.... After the renewal of the sea, Jake is ready to answer the call for help from those without even his tentative faith" (32).

(2.) San Sebastian was named for a Roman martyr said to be a beautiful youth beloved by the Emperor Diocletian. Diocletian turned against the youth when he became a Christian and had him killed by archers. Thus even the place name evokes Jake's sexual and religious struggles.

(3.) Hemingway's exact contemporary, Hart Crane (born 21 July 1899), died in 1932 at sea in just such a manner.

WORKS CITED

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-----. Hemingway: The Writer as Artist. Princeton: Princeton U P, 1972.

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-----. The Nick Adams Stories New York: Scribner's, 1972.

-----. The Sun Also Rises. New York: Scribner's, 1926.

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-----. Hemingway's Reading, 1910-1940. Princeton: Princeton U P, 1981.

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