There are lots of excellent guides to Hemingway’s Paris—to the Paris of Hemingway’s own haunts and homes. (Noel Riley Fitch’s Walks in Hemingway’s Paris, for example, is great for walking tours, while Winston Conrad’s Hemingway’s France is a beautifully illustrated introduction to Hemingway’s time in Paris.) We don’t have, however, what every reader of Hemingway’s novels and stories wants: illustrations of the places where Hemingway’s characters move and meet, beyond the apartments and cafes where Hemingway was known to spend his time.
It isn’t difficult to find these places, since Hemingway’s writings offer excellent directions. Using only a copy of In Our Time, I have found my way from the railway bridge in Seney, Michigan up into the hills where the river that Hemingway called the Big Two-Hearted meanders through water grasses. (It’s really the Fox you find above Seney; the Big Two-Hearted is elsewhere in Michigan, but apparently too beautiful a name for Hemingway to pass up.) You never do find the place where Nick Adams claims to see the hills surrounding Lake Michigan—that may be an emblematic addition to real geography—but you certainly can find many campsites similar to that one where Nick eats his canned spaghetti and baked beans, and where he catches many fine trout between breaks for raw onion sandwiches and cigarettes.
In the autumn of 2002, teaching as a faculty member of the Augustana College (Rock Island) European Term program, I taught The Sun Also Rises to an excellent group of mostly non-English majors. These student-travellers were excited to know the story, and to try all of the cafes—and not at all daunted by the cost of ten dollar drinks at the Select, Dome, or wonderful Closerie des Lilas. They were also eager to get to know Paris through Hemingway’s novel.
Working on the assumption that there are many more students and other readers of Hemingway’s The Sun Also Rises who may be eager to know Jake Barnes’s Paris, I offer this web site.
In October of 2002, blessed with lovely sunny autumn weather (rather than the fall weather that drives Hemingway out of Paris in the opening sentences of A Movable Feast ), I walked and photographed the route that Jake and Brett take in the carriage ride of Chapter IV, Jake’s walk to work in Chapter V, and the walk and carriage ride to the Ile St-Louis that Jake and Bill Gorton take in Chapter VIII. In the following linked pages, you will find my labeled photographs illustrating brief passages from The Sun Also Rises.
The attentive reader will realize that in describing these walks and rides in beautiful detail, Hemingway is interested in more than local color or the attractions of travel writing. It is significant that while one walk—Jake’s walk to breakfast on the Rue Soufflot—is purposeful and linear, the other two are inconclusive and circular. Through these emblems, the purposeful nature of a genuine vocation (which Jake’s writing might be, if taken as seriously as Hemingway took his writing) is contrasted with the inconclusive and obsessively repetitive devotion to Brett Ashley, representative of hedonism and self-obsession (though not entirely to blame for her own situation).
In Chapter IV, the self- and other-destructive Brett joins Jake for a nighttime carriage ride from the bal musette near the Place de la Contrescarpe out to the Parc Mountsouris and back to the Select in Montparnasse. This pleasure ride fails to give pleasure, as Jake and Brett discuss their incredible frustration over their love and the fatal sexual incompatibility that keeps them apart. (I set aside for the moment that no critic has yet explained adequately why Jake and Brett could not learn to give each other sexual pleasure, giving their love its necessary—they believe—sexual dimension.) The nearly circular shape of this ride, its departure from one party of hollow men and women matched with arrival at a nearly identical party, (part of this ride is spent on the Avenue des Gobelins, the gobelin an apt emblem of the warped living dead) echoes the deep shape of the entire novel. No matter where Jake travels, he finds that he was dead right in telling Robert Cohn that “going to another country doesn’t make any difference” (19).
Nor does another café, another dance hall, even another bullfight. Jake’s existential situation doesn’t change no matter where he goes. He loves a woman who won’t have him, considering him damaged goods, and who doesn’t hesitate to humiliate him with invitations to assist her in arranging her serial love affairs. Jake’s circular travels, within Paris or across the Franco-Spanish border, take him not an inch from his troubles, which are moral and psychological. He must decide, in the end, what he, as a compassionate and sensible man, owes to his friends and his lover. In Madrid, Jake will enter another horse cab, and will make a decision on that question. It is a decision that will make all the difference.
But this is not the place to explain it. Back to the novel’s circular rides.
The walk and ride of Chapter VIII is a bit more complicated. Again, the circular shape is important, but in this walk Jake takes good care of his drunken friend, Bill Gorton. Indeed, in his treatment of Bill, Jake takes the side of sensible moderation and nourishment. Brett joins the two men for a brief time, and though her mood is calm and friendly, she is posed as unhealthily tantalizing (primarily to Bill) and connected with inebriation rather than nourishment. Thus, it is significant that Jake and Bill leave both Brett and the neighborhood of bars and parties for a “good meal” together in a quaint café on the Ile St-Louis. This meal, which an American grandmother might have prepared—roast chicken, green beans, mashed potatoes, a salad, and (yes) apple pie—represents the healthful alternative Jake might choose in breaking his obsessively circular life with and around Brett. After this nourishing meal, Jake and Bill talk more intimately and sincerely. They admire the Seine, Notre Dame, and the historic neighborhoods on their climb up from the river into the Left Bank. This walk ends, as Jake’s carriage ride does, at the Select. And Jake is forced to endure Mike Campbell’s crude sexual excitement about Brett, who is now sleeping with Mike. But as the chapter ends, Jake’s ability to choose well is highlighted, as Jake and Bill decide to take in the fights. Like the bullfights that appear later in the novel, the fights are ritualized and controlled events of violence. These rituals are the only antidote Jake seems to find for his less-controlled reaction to the violence of war, and for the disappointments the war bred.
Click on the link to my critical essay on The Sun Also Rises if you want to know how I read Jake’s attempts to cope with his obsessively circular, frustrating situation. Please respect the essay as my intellectual property, using proper citation practices if you draw upon the essay in your own writings.s
And please enjoy the photographs—at least until you can travel to Paris to capture images of your own. I have decided not to supply maps, but encourage those lucky enough to read The Sun Also Rises in Paris to use the novel and any good street map to follow Jake’s footsteps. None of the street names have changed—though a wooden foot-bridge to the Ile St-Louis has been replaced by the stone Pont de la Tournelle, and a few of the cafés Jake visits have unfortunately closed.
My quotations from The Sun Also Rises are from the Scribner Paperback edition.
David Crowe, Ph.D.
Associate Professor and Chair of English
Augustana College
Rock Island, IL 61201
This web site was designed by Mark Hurty, a professional design consultant based in Moline, Illinois. I thank him for his fine work. Mark can be reached at mark@hurty.com .
My thanks to the Committee of the Augustana College Research Fund, who elected
to finance the design of this web site.
© David Crowe, 2003