I wanted to stay well outside of the story so that I would not be touched by it in any way, and handle all the people in it with that irony and pity that are so essential to good writing. I did not want to tell this story in the first person, but I find that I must. It is a wink at the marketplace-readers want lively, lighthearted tales from abroad-and alludes to the novel’s central dark, repeated joke: that everything awful in life, in all of its sadness and melancholy, is better laughed at. But more intriguing still is the second part of the opening, in which Hemingway breaks into the narrative to address the reader directly, and, in so doing, calls out the artifice implicit in the writing and reading of fiction. It is diverting to consider how the novel would have been different if Brett were indeed the main character and the heroine-if it really were a story about a lady, rather than about the various men who loved her, or couldn’t. Autumn in Paris, although very beautiful, might give a note of sadness or melancholy that we shall try to keep out of this story. Spring in Paris is a very happy and romantic time. As everyone knows, Paris is a very romantic place. That should be a good setting for a romantic but highly moral story. Her name is Lady Ashley and when the story begins she is living in Paris and it is Spring. we could have had such a damned good time together,” the author at first had Jake respond, “It’s nice as hell to think so,” but later scribbled “Isn’t it nice to think so.” By the time the manuscript went to the printer, it had been altered again, to the sharp and sad and perfectly balanced “Isn’t it pretty to think so?” Maudlin dialogue was struck, as when the ill-starred Brett says to Jake Barnes, the narrator, “I love you and I’ll love you always.” (In the finished text, lines like “Well, let’s shut up about it” are more in the spirit of their unconsummated affair.) And Hemingway settled on a perfect final line. The real-life socialite Lady Duff Twysden was given a better name, Brett Ashley. There are signs of other felicitous decisions. The evidence for these alternatives comes from early notes and manuscripts, which are included in a new edition of the novel, published this month. Early title contenders were “Fiesta: A Novel” (as the book was subsequently known in England), “Two Lie Together,” and even “For in much wisdom is much grief and he that increases knowledge increases sorrow”-a line that, like the winning candidate, comes from Ecclesiastes, and that, it is safe to assume, Hemingway might have abridged further if he’d used it. Ernest Hemingway’s “The Sun Also Rises” was almost called something else.
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