Everybody Behaves Badly: The True Story Behind Hemingway’s Masterpiece The Sun Also Rises

Lesley Blume’s probing journalism (the endnotes compose a quarter of this 300 page book) in Everybody Behaves Badly make it a fascinating read for anybody who appreciates the works of Ernest Hemingway. The book’s scope is at once both considerable and precise, capturing the formative years in Paris during which Hemingway developed his strange (to many of his contemporaries) and experimental and momentous style. The book begins with him stepping foot in Paris as a journalist right after the First World War and ends with the publication of Hemingway’s explosive literary debut, Everybody Behaves Badly (sorry Torrents of Spring) a few years later. Throughout this time, Hemingway met many characters, from Gertrude Stein to Harold Loeb, and many would be crucial in the honing of Hemingway’s style and many would introduce him to publishers. Others would find themselves portrayed unflatteringly within The Sun. Hemingway was a fortunate man who seemed to be perpetually running into all the right strangers. As each new character wafts into the narrative, Blume takes time to write a careful portrait for almost all of them. By the end of the portrait, the characters background is understood and an image of them is conjured. Although Hemingway is the main character, the book is told at a distance, allowing the reader to see all the going-ons and get a grip of the postwar environment. Hemingway’s character is fleshed out through both showing and telling. His processes and philosophies and personalities are all laid out. The book moves from vignette to summary to analysis to criticism and doesn’t lose any speed along the way. The narrative weaves back and forth and events overlap and blanks are filled. Blume accomplishes all this with a dazzling and vivid prose that is a curious blend of sophisticated vocabulary and occasional slang, giving this book the appearance of being both authoritative and casual. And by the time the book is finished, there is a proper understanding of the picturesque atmosphere under which Hemingway the journalist became the preeminent modernist writer.