In 1918-19, the world experienced what one historian describes as possibly the greatest demographic disaster of the 20th century, perhaps of any century (Spinney 171). Misnamed the Spanish flu, this version of the H1N1 virus was estimated to have infected 500 million people or approximately one-third of the world’s population. It killed at least 50 million people, perhaps as many as 100 million (Barry 4). Overlapping with the final year of World War I, the raging pandemic added significantly to the tragic losses of the war and then stretched those losses far beyond the battlefield and throughout communities around the world. Young adults, those between 20 and 40 years of age, were especially susceptible, ironically because their stronger immune systems kicked into overdrive and filled their lungs with fluid and debris, making it impossible for the exchange of oxygen to take place (Barry 249-50). An estimated 8-10 percent of all young adults died from influenza (Barry 4). We have often talked of a lost generation of young men and some women caused by the Great War. The Great Flu Pandemic vastly expanded that concept and reality.
For reasons that historians are still exploring, public commemoration and analysis of the 1918-19 pandemic stopped soon after it ended. It took around 60 years before historians and scientists started to write the official stories of this pandemic. This doesn’t mean, however, that people who lived through the pandemic completely forgot it once it died down. Literary works written between the two world wars were one of the most prominent places where the pandemic and its effects were articulated. Sometimes this happened explicitly as in Katherine Anne Porter’s heartbreaking short novel “Pale Horse, Pale Rider” (1938), a story that was based, in part, on her own experience of nearly dying from influenza. Other times, as Elizabeth Outka powerfully demonstrates in Viral Modernism, evidence of the pandemic was more subtle, inscribed in literary works as a “spectral presence.” Unlike governmental representations which focused on the war, this literature captured “the changes [the pandemic] produced on the streets, in domestic spaces, within families, and in the body” (3). According to Outka, when reread interwar literature through the lens of the pandemic, “metaphors of modernism take on new meanings: fragmentation and disorder emerge as signs of delirium as well as shrapnel; invasions become ones of microbes and not only men; postwar ennui reveals a brooding fear of an invisible enemy” (3).
Susan F. Beegel has written about Hemingway’s experiences with the 1918-19 flu, including how his family dealt with the pandemic on the home front while he faced—and barely evaded—it in Italy during his recovery from his war injuries. She also points to several stories, published and unpublished, in which Hemingway writes, directly or indirectly, about the pandemic. Beegel’s extended example of the influence of the pandemic on his writing is A Farewell to Arms, especially as conveyed in the famous line that “the world” (not simply the war) “kills the very good and the very gentle and the very brave impartially” (Beegel 47; original emphasis). She concludes, “Perhaps it’s time literary scholarship recognized how thoroughly the pandemic affected Hemingway and his generation” (49).
Even though The Sun Also Rises came out six to seven years after the pandemic faded, it appears to hold evidence that this devastating event did not disappear from people’s consciousness. For one, its epigraph “You are all a lost generation” captures the loss of youth experienced not only through a horrific war but also through an equally horrific pandemic. Assuredly, Hemingway tells a different origin story about this epigraph, most memorably in A Moveable Feast where he attributes the saying to Gertrude Stein and then dismisses the “lost generation talk” because he hates “all the dirty, easy labels” (31). Yet he maintained Stein’s insight as one of his epigraphs to SAR, and he clearly wrote about the massive casualties of the war. He also was permanently spooked by the pandemic. Michael Reynolds observes that during this time, Hemingway developed a life-long anxiety about catching the flu: “drowning in his own mucous truly frightened Hemingway,” and he would take to bed at the slightest inflamed throat (19).
Someone with such a sensibility, that “brooding fear of an invisible enemy” which Outka proposes was widespread, would be primed to reflect it in his writing, whether intentionally or not. In fact, The Torrents of Spring (1926), the satire Hemingway published the same year as SAR, concludes with an author’s final note to the reader in which it is revealed that the mother of Diana (an older English waitress who marries Scripps O’Neil) had been taken “violently ill with bubonic plague” while living in Paris. However, her death was quickly covered up because the Great Exposition of 1900 was set to open the next day, and massive investments in this world’s fair would have been lost had there been a pandemic panic. “So the French authorities simply had the woman disappear” (366-67). Pandemics and their effects were clearly on Hemingway’s mind when he was preparing his first serious novel for publication.
Here I share one of the more apparently trivial but interesting ways in which Jake’s Paris contains signs that pandemic anxiety lingers even half a dozen years after the scourge ended. This evidence takes us to two Parisian gathering spots mentioned in the novel—Harry’s New York Bar and the bar at the Ritz Paris—both of which “brazenly offered their patrons a liquid reminder [of the pandemic]” by serving a cocktail named the “Flu” (Tichi 6-7). Jake recalls that three days ago a destitute Harvey Stone won “two hundred francs from [him] shaking poker dice in the New York Bar” (100-01), and Frances Clyne complains about not having enough money to lunch at the Ritz after her friend Paula did not show up (104).
This is not to say that Hemingway includes these places in his story to prompt readers to look to them for traces of the pandemic. The type of evidence I am considering is external to the novel, part of the social reality of 1920s Paris, rather than a representation overtly introduced by Jake’s narrative. If we had the time travel opportunity of exploring Paris of the 1920s à la Woody Allen’s film Midnight in Paris (2011), we might find this evidence ourselves, but we cannot do so simply by reading the novel. Still, this extra-textual material can help us understand better what it was like to live in post-war, post-pandemic Paris.
To be continued
Works Cited
Barry, John M. The Great Influenza: The Story of the Deadliest Pandemic in History. Penguin,
2024.
Beegel, Susan F. “Love in the Time of Influenza: Hemingway and the 1918 Pandemic.” War + Ink: New Perspectives on Ernest Hemingway’s Early Life and Writings. Edited by Steve Paul, Gail Sinclair, and Steven Trout, Kent State UP, 2014, pp. 36-52.
Bristow, Nancy K. American Pandemic: The Lost Worlds of the 1918 Influenza Epidemic. Oxford UP, 2012.
Hemingway, Ernest. A Moveable Feast. 1964; Bantam, 1965.
-----. The Sun Also Rises, edited by Debra A. Moddelmog, Broadview P, 2024.
-----. The Torrents of Spring. In Hemingway: The Sun Also Rises & Other Writings. Edited by Robert W. Trogdon, Library of America, 2020, pp. 291-367.
Outka, Elizabeth. Viral Modernism: The Influenza Pandemic and Interwar Literature. Columbia UP, 2020.
Reynolds, Michael. Hemingway: The Paris Years. 1989; Norton paperback, 1999.
Spinney, Laura. Pale Rider: The Spanish Flu of 1918 and How It Changed the World. PublicAffairs, 2017.
Tichi, Cecelia. Jazz Age Cocktails: History, Lore, and Recipes from America’s Roaring Twenties. New York UP, 2021.
Debra A. Moddelmog is dean of liberal arts emerita at the University of Nevada, Reno. She co-edited Ernest Hemingway in Context with Suzanne del Gizzo and is the author of Reading Desire: In Pursuit of Ernest Hemingway.