Summer 1926. A rented villa on the French Riviera. F. Scott Fitzgerald is nearing 30 and a year past The Great Gatsby. A younger writer has asked what he thinks of a novel about to come out. Fitzgerald writes him 10 pages. The book is very good, he says, but it doesn't get going until page 29. “You can't play with people's attention,” he tells Ernest Hemingway. Within days, Hemingway writes their shared editor in New York. The opening chapters are gone. The book moves faster that way, he says, and Scott agrees. That's how Matthew Gallagher opens his review in the Journal's Fall Books section.
The Sun Also Rises came out 100 years ago this month. It named the Lost Generation and drew its picture, the reviewer writes. Its copyright ran out a few years ago. The Library of America has marked the 100th year with an annotated edition. The Hemingway scholar Robert W. Trogdon edited it. Gallagher calls it a beautiful book and an excellent guide. It has notes, photographs and a chronology. It also prints the chapters Hemingway cut, and letters from the period, Fitzgerald's among them.
The story itself is short on plot and long on tangled feelings. Jake Barnes, an American who fought in the war, works for a newspaper in Paris. He drinks a lot with his friends. Lady Brett Ashley, a British socialite, is getting a divorce. She plans to marry Mike Campbell, another veteran, who is deep in debt. He is the one who, asked how he went bankrupt, answers, “Two ways. Gradually, then suddenly.” The group heads to Pamplona, Spain, for the San Fermín festival and its bullfights. Things fall apart. The reviewer also names the book's prejudices, including the antisemitism aimed at Robert Cohn, a writer in the circle.
A war book in disguise
Critics have knocked the novel as too macho and too ugly from the day it appeared. Gallagher thinks they miss the point. These people are hiding in parties because they survived World War I, and Hemingway never spells it out. The reviewer served in Iraq. He has taught the book in workshops and recommends it to veterans who want to write. A veteran reads it with different eyes, he says. He points to Jake crying alone in bed. He points to Mike mocking military medals, and to Brett, who lost her first love in the Mesopotamia campaign. Cohn is the one man the war never touched. The others resent him for it. He's also the one who leaves Pamplona and gets on with his life.
Our read
This is Cash Flow (M5) with a Behavioral lesson on top. Mike Campbell's answer is the truest thing in the book about money. Debt doesn't arrive all at once. It builds slowly, out of sight, a little more going out each month than coming in. Then one day the bank or the landlord or the tax bill says so, and it feels sudden. It wasn't. The time to act is during the gradual part, while the numbers are still small and boring. That means knowing what you owe, at what rate, and what the monthly interest alone costs you.
Fitzgerald's advice works for money too. He told Hemingway the start dragged, and Hemingway cut it. Most plans get better by subtraction. One fewer card, one fewer subscription, one fewer loan. We read a household's cash flow the way Fitzgerald read that manuscript, looking for the part that drags. It's a lot easier to fix on page 29 than on the last page.