HEMINGWAY'S THE SUN ALSO RISES AND JAME'S THE AMBASSADORS.

HAYS, PETER L.

ALTHOUGH NEITHER of the extant inventories of Hemingway's reading specifically includes Henry James's novel The Ambassador (1903), neither excludes it.(1) Hemingway knew the work of Henry James well and, I will argue, had probably read The Ambassadors by 1925, when he wrote The Sun Also Rises. If so, it was an influence Hemingway endeavored to conceal. In a letter to Waldo Pierce written on 13 December 1927 (just after son Bumby has cut Papa's pupil with his fingernail), Hemingway wrote: Pauline has ... read Henry James (The Awkward Age) out loud--and knowing nothing about James it seems to me to be shit. He seems to need to bring in a drawing room whenever he is scared he will have to think what the characters do the rest of the time and the men all without exception talk and think like fairies.... He seems an enormous fake in this. What ho? Was he a fake? (SL 266)

But Hemingway's late 1927 statement that he knew nothing of James is misleading.

We know that Hadley Richardson, Hemingway's wife from 1921 until their divorce in January 1927, liked James very much. Hemingway himself tells us so in A moveable Feast (38, 156), and Hadley said that James was her favorite author (Diliberto 204). Mike Reynolds cites Ezra Pound's 1926 criticism of Hemingway for "`following in the wake of H.J.'" in "An Alpine Idyll" and concludes that "Hemingway read more Henry James than we have credited him with" (Reynolds 22-23). James appears in The Torrents of Spring (1926), where the waitress Mandy tells the story of his death (38-39), and in the manuscript of The Sun Also Rises, where Bill Gorton and lake joke about James as someone rendered impotent by an unspecified mishap with a bicycle. (2) In June 1926, fully a year and a half before his letter to Peirce disclaiming knowledge of lames, Hemingway responded to Maxwell Perkins's complaints about the bicycle story--"I believe that it is a reference to some accident that is generally known to have happened to Henry James in his youth" (SL 209). He eventually agreed that James would appear simply as "Henry" in the published text (SAR 115).

Hemingway's biographical knowledge of James probably came from Van Wyck Brooks's The Pilgrimage of Henry James, a book criticizing James's expatriation and condemning him for losing touch with America. (3) Published in 1925, with prepublication chapters appearing in The Dialin 1923, the book informed Hemingway about lames, but Brooks's treatment of American authors living abroad aroused Hemingway's ire, and he responded negatively in the transatlantic review (May 1924, 355) to Brooks's winning the Dial Prize. F. Scott Fitzgerald, however, thanked Brooks from Paris in June 1925 for a signed copy of The Pilgrimage of Henry James, saying, "I read the James book, so did Zelda + Hemingway [sic] ..." (Correspondence 170).

So, despite his disclaimer, Hemingway knew Henry James and almost certainly had read him by the time he began writing The Sun Also Rises in 1925. In particular, I believe he had read James's The Ambassadors, and that, as Linda Wagner-Martin argues briefly in "The Intertextual Hemingway" (and I hope to argue in greater detail), the most compelling evidence for this is the obvious influence of James's 1903 novel on Hemingway's work.

Let's begin with the slighter correspondences, James's novel recounts the mission of a morally upright Massachusetts journal editor, Lambert Strether, in Paris on behalf of his literary patron and ostensible fiancee, Mrs. Newsome. Strether is supposed to separate Mrs. Newsome's son Chad from an affair with Madame de Vionnet and return him to wholesome Woolett, Massachusetts, and the family mills. Like The Sun Also Rises, The Ambassadors is narrated in the first person--"The principle I have just mentioned as operating ..." (1)--although James limits his narrator largely to Strether's point-of-view and consciousness. Into their relatively objective accounts, both narrators interject authorial comment, lake, for example, telling us that he feels he hasn't shown Cohn adequately, lames, although praised for keeping the novel "within [his] hero's compass," interposes frequently, as John Tilford has recounted in a classic article, "James the Old Intruder."

Both novels recount the adventures of middle-class American journalists in Paris involved with attractive women, not of their own nationality, with whom they conduct affairs. In both books, Paris is portrayed as something of a Babylon, a seat of moral degeneracy. Certainly Mrs. Newsome and her daughter Sally consider it so--Jim Pocock, Sally's husband, looks forward to its being so--and James even calls it such: "It hung before him this morning, the vast bright Babylon" (63). In The Sun Also Rises, Brett is accompanied by a crowd of homosexuals, whom "Rotarian" Hemingway uses to signal the moral "degeneracy" of the crowd. As J. Gerald Kennedy has pointed out, Hemingway moved the bal musette he personally frequented from its actual location under his apartment on rue du Cardinal Lemoine around the corner to rue de la Montagne Sainte-Genevieve, where there was indeed a bar catering to homosexuals (Kennedy 105-106). And in The Ambassadors, Montagne Sainte-Genevieve is where Chad originally lives in Paris, in a colony of expatriate artists, where "the best French, and many other things, were to be learned" (64). Although both novels are set in Europe, We meet very few continental Europeans-- in The Ambassadors, beyond servants and innkeepers, only Italian Gloriani, half-French Madame de Vionnet, and her daughter; in The Sun Also Rises, beyond concierges, restaurateurs, waiters, bus passengers, and fellow bullfighting spectators, only Georgette, Montoya, and Romero.

Certain resonant phrases occur in both novels. For instance, I had always thought that the phrase "one of us," used by Brett to characterize Count Mippipopolous, was taken by Hemingway from Conrad's Lord Jim (38, 249, 272, etc.), a novel Hemingway revered. But "one of us" also occurs in The Ambassadors (87), where Maria Gostrey uses it to characterize Little Bilham. Similarly, I had always thought that Hemingway had taken "irony and pity" from Gilbert Seldes's review of The Great Gatsby, a review Fitzgerald had shown him in Paris, and to which Hemingway refers in A Moveable Feast (154). But "irony and pity" too occurs in The Ambassadors (239). While Hemingway may still have gotten these phrases from Conrad and Seldes, his use may have been reinforced, consciously or unconsciously, by their appearance in James.

There are other correspondences as well. Marie de Vionnet, that wicked Parisian woman, tells Strether, "I'm terrible for churches" (209);(4) and Brett, that terrible Scotswoman in Paris, tells Jake on leaving church, "Don't know why I get so nervy in church.... Never does me any good ... I'm damned bad for a religious atmosphere.... I've the wrong type of face" (208). In addition, Brett and Robert leave Paris at the same time for a liaison, just as Chad and Marie leave Paris together (245-246, and as James reminds us, 278). Finally, good manners are the measure of character in both novels. We judge both Sally Pocock and Robert Cohn harshly for their lack of tact and good manners, just as we elevate Strether, the Count, Jake, and Romero. Both novels even have dinners where great tension is controlled by manners: in The Sun Also Rises, at the end of Chapter XIII: "There was much wine, an ignored tensions.... It seemed they were all such nice people" (146). In The Ambassadors, at the Cheval Blanc after Strether has discovered the Lovers' true State and deception of him, " it herewith pressed upon him that their eminent `lie', Chad's and hers, was simply after all such an inevitable tribute to good taste as he couldn't have wished them not to render" (403).

There are, however, more important, more basic similarities. First, thematically, in both novel codes of conduct--whether Strether's Woollett Puritanism or Jake's pre-war Catholicism--are under scrutiny, being altered under changed circumstances or left behind. In Strether's case, Paris has opened his eyes to a more cosmopolitan view. Early in the novel, Maria Gostrey asks him, "You've accepted the mission of separating him from the wicked woman. Are you quite sure she's very bad for him?" (37); in short, she asks him to dispense with his simple categories and judge pragmatically based on observation. Similarly, we see Jake struggling to fashion a moral code. Neither Catholicism nor the simple pieties he has grown up with work for him after his war-time injury and in his present situation with Brett: The Catholic Church had an awfully good way of handling all that.... Not to think about it. Oh, it was swell advice. Try and take it sometime. Try and take it. (31)

and Maybe if you found out how to live in it you learned from that what it was all about.... That was morality; things that made, you disgusted afterward. No that must be immorality. (148-149)

As Linda Wagner-Martin has observed (176), Strether's advice to Little Bilham--"Live all you can; it's a mistake not to" (153)-- parallels the thematic message that Hemingway delivers through lake. Although sexually wounded and thus denied not only normal sexual satisfactions but also relationships based on sex and procreation--a family, children--Jake nevertheless seeks as much enjoyment from life as he can. He works conscientiously, has a circle of friends (not all of whom appear by name in the text [69]), enjoys fine dining and drinking, reading, playing tennis, fishing, swimming, and, pre-eminently, bullfighting. "Enjoying living was learning to get your money's worth and knowing when you had it. You could get your money's worth. The world was a good place to buy in" (148).

In both The Sun Also Rises and The Ambassadors, it is usually the protagonist who pays. lake, as Scott Donaldson told us a quarter century ago, is constantly paying for dinners, cabs, hotel rooms, rented cars, bathing cabins, and experience: "I thought I had paid for everything.... You paid some way for everything that was any good.... Either you paid by learning about them, or by experience, or by taking chances, or by money" (148). James says of Strether, "it was he somehow who finally paid" (337); Strether finds himself "Somehow paying for it.... He usually paid for it" (382).

Moreover, both protagonists, despite their generosity, wind up ostensibly empty-handed. Strether knows that his engagement to Mrs. Newsome is over, yet denies both Marie de Vionnet's offer of continuing friendship--including her suggestion that Strether might replace Chad in her life--and Maria Gostrey's "offer of exquisite service, of lightened care, for the rest of his days" (438; their similar names, Marie and Maria, indicate their parallel roles in Strether's life). Jake ends back where he started: Brett has left Romero, but announces her intention to go back to Mike, and Jake, suffering in her presence from a desire that cannot be satisfied, gets drunk. In tune with the cyclicality implied in the novel's title, Jake must have again "the feeling as in a nightmare of it all being something repeated, something I had been through and that now I must go through again" (64).

We can ascribe Strether's decision either to his Woollett rectitude--his desire not to seem to profit from his parisian excursion on a mission for Mrs. Newsome--or we can ascribe it to his (or James's) "basic Puritan distrust of the flesh" (Crews 325). But James insisted in his Preface to the New York edition that Strether had benefited through his increased awareness: "he now at all events sees; so that the business of my tale and the march of my action ... is just my demonstration of this process of vision" (xxx). Jake, like Maria Gostrey (and May Bartram in "The Beast in the Jungle"), waits for his beloved; he has waited for Brett for at least the seven years since their meeting during the war.(5) But he, too, winds up with greater vision. Jake, like Strether, sees at the novel's end that his wound is not the sole barrier preventing his happiness with Brett--she is incapable of faithfulness in any long-term domestic relationship, any relationship that would redefine her in a more submissive, conventional role.

Both Hemingway and James deal with the problem of innocence, and for both authors, lack of awareness is a dangerous quality. James portrays the dangers of innocence in Daisy Miller, in Isabel Archer, and, to a lesser extent, in Strether. As Frederick Crews has stated, "the International Theme--naive American versus sophisticated Europe--remains the context of James's drama, but the moral question becomes more complex as naivete comes less and less to be regarded as a virtue in itself" (321).(6) The same applies to Robert Cohn. He comes to France with a code of conduct that Jake calls "prep-school stuff" (39), believing that verbal slights (even assumed ones) demand fighting for one's honor, that sex equals love, that he can "make an honest woman of [Brett]" (201) through his devotion to her, and that it is not bad taste to tag along with his former lover in the presence of her fiance and present lover, while she acquires still another lover.

Cohn, like Strether, is a romantic--Strether cherishes Lambinet landscapes and refuses to see the evidence before him; Cohn cherishes "his affair with a lady of title.... He stood waiting ... to do battle for his lady love" (178). But Cohn is not the only romantic in The Sun Also Rises. Jake waits seven years for Brett because he will not read the evidence before him--his own physical incapacity for sex and Brett's insistent promiscuity--and act appropriately. Jake, too, has to learn the anti-romantic message of Hemingway's novel, and perhaps he sees that, too, at novel's end.

Another major likeness between the two novels is structural. We judge the major characters in juxtaposition to each other. In the absence of a firmly defined moral code in either novel, we evaluate the characters by their individual actions, Strether in juxtaposition both to Waymarsh's inflexibility and to Chad and Marie de Vionnet's situational morality. Similarly, we judge Jake's manners, his decency, and above all his self-control against the behavior of Cohn, Brett, Mike, and Romero. In the absence of authorial comments--none by Hemingway, few by James--this technique of juxtaposing major figures demands the reader's close involvement with the text and the characters.

Finally, the dissimilar styles of the two authors also insist on the reader's close involvement. James's ambiguities are legend. Almost no one replies to a question in this novel without pausing dramatically to weigh the question and phrase an appropriate, but indefinite, response, The narrative and dialogue alike are filled with ambiguous references, qualifier upon qualifier, and multiple tergiversations. To quote a recent critic, James's style is one of "psychological nominalisations, obliquity, deixis, expletives, ellipsis, and colloquialism.... There is a great deal of abstraction and indirection, as people and ideas are represented by pronouns and circumlocutions ..." (Bellringer 50-51). But James's style does two things: it forces the reader to read closely and slowly, sometimes traversing the same passage several times, and it corresponds to the ambiguities present in the situation.

Hemingway's style in The Sun Also Rises, published only twenty-three years later than The Ambassadors, is radically different. More suited for the twentieth century's rapid-paced machine age, an age of flight and radio, Hemingway's prose does not take as long to read. But it, too, requires close reading. Hemingway frequently does not identify the speakers in his text, forcing the reader to attribute lines based on order of speech from the last-identified speaker or from what he or she knows about the speaker, forcing the reader to characterize the individuals in the text. Hemingway also uses pronouns without clear antecedents, the famous "it" and "they." And the tone of Hemingway's texts needs to be interpreted correctly. When Brett says of Cohn, on learning that he plans to accompany her and Mike to Pamplona, "He's wonderful" (84), we need to hear the sarcasm, the irony, or we miss the point.

Just as Strether must decide between Woolett or Paris, morality or Madame de Vionnet, Jake must decide between pandering for Brett and her latest desire, young Pedro Romero--a boy who should not be mixed up with a hard-drinking woman almost old enough to be his mother--or maintaining his aficion for the art of bull-fighting. Does he deny his artistic, almost religious passion for the corrida to foster the whim of a woman he loves, a favor that will pair her with a potent lover, especially when the tryst is doomed to failure, given Brett's record? To do so means losing Montoya's long-standing friendship and becoming an apostate to his own aesthetics for the sake of Lady Ashley's short-lived pleasure. The Sun Also Rises is written for the modern, post-war age with its quicker pace, more explicit language, and greater tolerance for sexual liaisons, but the moral ambiguity remains. As Hemingway himself said in a letter to Hadley in 1943, "maybe I'll turn out to be the Henry James of the People" (SL 556).

NOTES

A shorter version of this article was given at the Segundo Coloquio Internacional Hemingway, Cojimar, Cuba, 1997.

(1.) In Hemingway's Reading, 1910-1940, Michael Reynolds lists four books by James in Hemingway's library--The American, Art of the Novel, The Awkward Age, Portrait of a Lady and a volume titled simply Novels and Stories of Henry James (Items 1169-1173). Brasch and Sigman, who inventoried Hemingway's library at the Finca Vigia (1941-1961), list six additional titles by James, and two copies of the mysterious Novels and Stories (Items 3337-3348). Neither Reynolds nor Brasch and Sigman list a place of publication, publisher, or date for Novels and Stories, so the edition is impossible to identify with assurance, leaving us unable to determine whether the volume or volumes included The Ambassadors.

Brasch and Sigman's note indicates that the Novels and Stories of Henry James is an item "not verified in a standard bibliography" (xc). Although it's impossible to say without examining the actual books in the Finca Vigia library, the title seems to be that of a thirty-five volume set of James's complete novels and short stories published by Macmillan in 1921-23, a British version of the New York edition of The Novels and Tales of Henry James. If so, what Brasch and Sigman identify as two copies of the same text may, in fact, be two separate volumes in the series. We need to examine the books themselves to identify their contents, not only the works they contain, but also any comments or underlining by Hemingway.

(2.) Interestingly, the Henry James allusion does not occur in the original holograph manuscript, reprinted by Matthew Bruccoli (The Sun Also Rises: A Facsimile Edition 312). Hemingway must have added it during his revisions of the original text.

(3.) According to Leon Edel, "Ernest Hemingway was the creator of the legend that James was impotent.... The novelist ... developed his fantasy from Van Wyck Brooks's The Pilgrimage of Henry James (1925) which appeared while he was writing his novel" (721-722).

(4.) Of course, by "terrible for," Madame de Vionnet means that she adores churches, not the opposite.

(5.) For Maria's waiting, see page 301 of the novel, lake's likeness to Maria and May both in patience and nurturing is part of the androgynous, if not traditionally feminine role he plays in The Sun Also Rises, keeping peace between Robert and Michael, and nurturing Brett. This feminine role is underscored by the story Jake reads during the fishing at Burguete, A.E.W. Mason's "The Crystal Trench," in which a woman waits twenty-four years for a glacier to release the body of her lover, who has fallen into one of its crevasses (120).

(6.) According to Alan Bellringer: "It does, up to a point, work to fit The Ambassadors into the Innocence-Experience framework, with its idealistic and mild American protagonist coming, painfully and comically, to appreciate the richness, contrasts and colour of French life, especially with regard to the relation between the sexes" (100).

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PETER L. HAYS University of California, Davis