The Sun Also Rises

The Sun Also Rises

Ernest Hemingway

BOOK I

Robert Cohn was once middleweight boxing champion of Princeton. Do not

think that I am very much impressed by that as a boxing title, but it

meant a lot to Cohn. He cared nothing for boxing, in fact he disliked

it, but he learned it painfully and thoroughly to counteract the feeling

of inferiority and shyness he had felt on being treated as a Jew at

Princeton. There was a certain inner comfort in knowing he could knock

down anybody who was snooty to him, although, being very shy and a

thoroughly nice boy, he never fought except in the gym. He was Spider

Kelly’s star pupil. Spider Kelly taught all his young gentlemen to box

like featherweights, no matter whether they weighed one hundred and five

or two hundred and five pounds. But it seemed to fit Cohn. He was really

very fast. He was so good that Spider promptly overmatched him and got

his nose permanently flattened. This increased Cohn’s distaste for

boxing, but it gave him a certain satisfaction of some strange sort, and

it certainly improved his nose. In his last year at Princeton he read

too much and took to wearing spectacles. I never met any one of his

class who remembered him. They did not even remember that he was

middleweight boxing champion.

I mistrust all frank and simple people, especially when their stories

hold together, and I always had a suspicion that perhaps Robert Cohn had

never been middleweight boxing champion, and that perhaps a horse had

stepped on his face, or that maybe his mother had been frightened or

seen something, or that he had, maybe, bumped into something as a young

child, but I finally had somebody verify the story from Spider Kelly.

Spider Kelly not only remembered Cohn. He had often wondered what had

become of him.

Robert Cohn was a member, through his father, of one of the richest

Jewish families in New York, and through his mother of one of the

oldest. At the military school where he prepped for Princeton, and

played a very good end on the football team, no one had made him

race-conscious. No one had ever made him feel he was a Jew, and hence

any different from anybody else, until he went to Princeton. He was a

nice boy, a friendly boy, and very shy, and it made him bitter. He took

it out in boxing, and he came out of Princeton with painful

self-consciousness and the flattened nose, and was married by the first

girl who was nice to him. He was married five years, had three children,

lost most of the fifty thousand dollars his father left him, the balance

of the estate having gone to his mother, hardened into a rather

unattractive mould under domestic unhappiness with a rich wife; and just

when he had made up his mind to leave his wife she left him and went off

with a miniature-painter. As he had been thinking for months about

leaving his wife and had not done it because it would be too cruel to

deprive her of himself, her departure was a very healthful shock.

The divorce was arranged and Robert Cohn went out to the Coast. In

California he fell among literary people and, as he still had a little

of the fifty thousand left, in a short time he was backing a review of

the Arts. The review commenced publication in Carmel, California, and

finished in Provincetown, Massachusetts. By that time Cohn, who had been

regarded purely as an angel, and whose name had appeared on the

editorial page merely as a member of the advisory board, had become the

sole editor. It was his money and he discovered he liked the authority

of editing. He was sorry when the magazine became too expensive and he

had to give it up.

By that time, though, he had other things to worry about. He had been