The Sun Also Rises

Look, not a surprise.

Indeed, looking from the outside in, the situation brings to mind the way that the character Mike Campbell described his financial woes in Ernest Hemingway's The Sun Also Rises when he asked, how did you go bankrupt? And, of course, the famous reply was two ways, gradually and gradually.

then suddenly.

It does seem, though, that David Jones was beset by a series of economic and management issues over the last decade, at least, and that has led up to this sad development.

It is very hard.

I was just writing about The Sun Also Rises.

Apparently, this is the 100th anniversary this week.

a book that I think is Hemingway's greatest novel.

And I was reminded that the draft that he submitted to Simon & Schuster or Maxwell & Perkins, anyhow, had these extra two chapters on the front that Fitzgerald encouraged him in a long critical letter to look closely if he was overriding, if he was wasting words, if he was saying too much, if it was too much throat clearing.

And Hemingway took this advice to heart and chopped off two early chapters of The Sun Also Rises.

And so it begins now the way we know it begins.

And you just think, you know, if Hemingway needs to be more succinct and more careful about his word choice, we all probably do.

And I kind of didn't really understand the significance of it.

And that's the tricky thing when you're following bullfighting is, as you described in your article about when you're going in, not knowing and The more you get on, you really get that from Hemingway with his books, The Sun Also Rises about them.

The more you know, I suppose the same for any activity.

But it's interesting you mentioned Michael Jackson there because he kind of reminds me of a bullfighter a little bit.

Hemingway was inspired by Belmonte.

And it's a weird thing that just to you can't have an unmediated relationship with bullfighting outside of Spain.

Like, where do we hear about it? And probably you've heard about it in The Sun Also Rises, which gave a generation its name and also gave a generation kind of marching orders about what it meant.

Part of that society, where does life have any meaning after World War I and everything, looked at bullfighting as kind of an emblem of some of their values.

Gradually, then suddenly.

There's a famous exchange in Ernest Hemingway's novel, The Sun Also Rises.

One character asks another one how he went bankrupt.

The reply is beautifully economical.

So by this time, he has

The Sun Also Rises, his debut in 1926, Farewell to Arms.

And then a little bit after that is For Whom the Bell Tolls.

um so he had to the old man to see which is it comes about 52 so that's about 15 years later after this um so he's he's you know he's got some fame but at this time

Gellhorn had admired him for a decade.

Ever since she had read The Sun Also Rises.

From Hemingway's perspective, here stood a beauty in a tight black dress, bright sassy blonde, legs to her shoulders, with...

His first thought was, how do I get rid of this inconvenient young husband? But wait, the man was her brother.

In A Farewell to Arms, he asked why the world stayed poor for so long before the Industrial Revolution.

In The Sun Also Rises, Greg followed rare surnames across eight centuries and found that social status persists far longer than anyone had assumed, and his work has been cited around 16,000 times.

Greg's third manuscript, To Have and Have Not, on the determinants of social status in England from 1600 to the present, is the subject of today's conversation and a symposium on the journal's website.

Greg, welcome.

And particularly his kind of terseness and, you know, it's very modern style of writing.

And what actually happened with the first book was I sent a list to the publisher of 50 potential titles for the book and the 50th listed title.

was the one farewell to arms which was just a kind of joke at the end and within an hour the publisher got back and said yes this is the one and so they obviously had some instinct and for the second book my ambition going into it was not to have a title referring to Hemingway But somehow, again, there was just no better title than The Sun Also Rises.

And so then I realized, well, we might as well embrace this.