[In the following essay, Hart examines the rivalry between Fitzgerald and Ernest Hemingway, with specific reference to The Great Gatsby and The Sun Also Rises.]

My argument can be put briefly. Hemingway wrote The Sun Also Rises (1926) as a direct rejoinder to The Great Gatsby (1925): he created it as an aggressive defense of his own style against Fitzgerald's—and, derivatively, of his own view of reality. With The Sun Also Rises he declared almost open war against a rival whom he suddenly saw as formidable far beyond his expectations. Until Gatsby appeared, Hemingway had considered Fitzgerald merely a popular writer and, as a rival, a pushover.

The title The Sun Also Rises engages in a hostile way one of Fitzgerald's most prominent recurrent images in Gatsby, the romantic moon. Hemingway means to assert that the Sun, not the Moon, the earth, not the sky, constitute the essential truth of experience. This sun-moon argument includes the obvious idea that the sun stands at the center of the actual solar system while the moon merely reflects the sun—thus defining his relation to Fitzgerald. This is to say that the sun represents the major tradition in literature, the romantic moon merely reflects a subordinate one. In The Sun Also Rises Hemingway relentlessly pressed his war against Fitzgerald.

Fitzgerald and Hemingway both published major works in 1925. The Great Gatsby was released in April. Then In Our Time appeared in October. When Hemingway forged In Our Time, partly out of earlier material, he had every reason to think it a strong enough book despite its provenance and form to move him past Fitzgerald in the literary standings. And Hemingway, as we know, thought in such terms.

Fitzgerald had emerged suddenly in 1920 with This Side of Paradise, and his early success was part of his legend. He then wrote short stories, some of them excellent, and then finished his second novel, The Beautiful and Damned (1922). The stories were reprinted in two collections, Flappers and Philosophers and Tales of the Jazz Age. Fitzgerald, who was earning large sums of money from magazine publication, had a wide audience.

Hemingway played tortoise to Fitzgerald's hare. After the war he worked as a journalist and experimented with a new way of writing, also frequenting avant-garde circles in Paris. He published, almost secretly, two privately printed pamphlets, Three Stories and Ten Poems (July 1923; 300 copies) and then in our time (January 1924; 170 copies).

This minimal publication did attract enough attention in avant-garde circles for Edmund Wilson to review the two pamphlets in the influential Dial magazine of October 1924, and he did so with special attention to Hemingway's style, which he called “a limpid shaft into deep waters,” a strikingly apt description of what Hemingway was trying to achieve, Two of the three stories in the first pamphlet and the brief vignettes that constituted the second pamphlet came forward into In Our Time in 1925.

Working slowly and with great discipline at his craft, Hemingway would have been justified in thinking that the 1925 edition of In Our Time was far superior to anything Fitzgerald thus far had written. In Our Time is a powerful work, not quite a novel but much more than a collection of stories; and it has multiple interconnections with Eliot's Waste Land (1922). To use Hemingway's lingo, this book should have knocked Fitzgerald out of the ring. Meanwhile Fitzgerald was generously promoting Hemingway as a writer and reviewed In Our Time with astute praise in the Bookman for May 1926.

In October 1925, when In Our Time appeared, Hemingway was no longer competing with the early works of Fitzgerald. He was competing with The Great Gatsby, another matter altogether. As Hemingway—like everyone else—surely noticed, Gatsby was an enormous advance over everything else Fitzgerald had written. Eliot, who is present in Gatsby in many ways, wrote that it “seems to me to be the first step that American fiction has taken since Henry James.”

During that famous summer of 1925 Hemingway made his trip to Pamplona and then wrote The Sun Also Rises with what was, compared to his usual practice, great speed. He wrote it with Fitzgerald and The Great Gatsby much on his mind. His rapid composition may indicate anger and denied ambition; it surely indicates his mastery of his own style and ability to manage a longer form. Under Fitzgerald's sponsorship, Hemingway had broken with Boni and Liveright and moved to Charles Scribner's Sons and Maxwell Perkins. The Sun Also Rises appeared in October 1926.

In many obvious ways this novel is full of rage directed at Fitzgerald, who had shown nothing but goodwill and generosity toward Hemingway.

In The Sun Also Rises Robert Cohn, like Fitzgerald, has gone to Princeton—then a citadel of the WASP aristocracy. Cohn is a Jew, Fitzgerald a Catholic, and thus comparable outsiders at Princeton. Cohn's Jewishness can be read as a denigrating comment on Fitzgerald's Catholicness. Cohn tries unsuccessfully to be a gentleman, another comment directed at Fitzgerald. Fitzgerald, who was a hero-worshipper and who idolized Princeton athletes, was himself a failed football player. Cohn has had his Jewish nose flattened in the ring and thus “improved.”

Cohn (read Fitzgerald) is a romantic and a bad novelist. His failure as a writer is owing to his romanticism and bad taste. He admires bad novels (The Purple Land) while Jake Barnes (Hemingway) knows that Turgenev has the right stuff.

Throughout the novel Cohn displays atrocious manners. Like Fitzgerald he is a sloppy drunk. He talks too much, is bad with women, and women despise him. He is “unrealistic” about women. That this was Hemingway's opinion of Fitzgerald is abundantly demonstrated in A Moveable Feast, as in the notorious chapter “A Matter of Measurements.”

Hemingway had been befriended and promoted by Sherwood Anderson. In The Torrents of Spring (1925) he had launched a devastating attack on Anderson. The Sun Also Rises represents another such attack, this time against Fitzgerald, a much more formidable opponent.

Hemingway's attack is not only personal but also stylistic and moral. He would have framed it as moral realism versus romantic illusion.

Fitzgerald's central achievement as a writer is to use all the resources of language to capture the magnificence of the moment. In This Side of Paradise, he writes on the first page: “Beatrice Blaine! There was a woman!” But having said that, the very young writer must come through to show that this is so. Throughout this flawed early novel, the young writer sets himself such celebratory dares and must rise to the proof, often moving into prose poetry. Fitzgerald's prose wants to move toward and even into celebratory song.

Hemingway's prose, as the emotions it deals with grow more and more intense, moves toward total silence. At the end of The Sun Also Rises words fail:

“Oh, Jake,” Brett said, “we could have had such a damned good time together.”

“Yes,” I said. “Isn't it pretty to think so.”

Prose arias about Princeton, Dutch sailors, and the Riviera could not possibly live in that stylistic environment.

Gatsby provides a bravura demonstration of Fitzgerald's style and moral vision. It begins with a soggy bromide from Nick's father: “Whenever you feel like criticizing any one, just remember that all the people in this world haven't had the advantages that you've had.” Nick apparently thinks so highly of this verbal legacy that he treasures it. Indeed he is rather bromidic himself as we follow him through the wild events of the story. But his gift for cliché is challenged by what happens around him, and his capacity for eloquence finally issues forth in his last great song about the Dutch sailors, the virgin American continent, and history.

No doubt what provokes this eloquence in Nick is his total experience during that strange, even visionary summer of 1922; but its most immediate source is Jay Gatsby himself. He speaks seldom, but when he does his lines are startling: “Her voice was full of money”; “Can't repeat the past? Why of course you can”; he declares also that Daisy's love for Tom Buchanan was merely “personal.” At such moments Gatsby presses weirdly, magically, against ordinary expectations, even as does his half-crazy project of returning to 1917.

That Gatsby is a prince of language and can pass this power on to his demi-disciple Nick is a comment on Fitzgerald's own style. This aspect is hardly ever discussed by critics, but it is the essence of the Fitzgerald performance. He too is able to go off the charts, in scene as well as in phrase, perform in an almost crazy way, writing something zany that is also perfect, as he does, for example, in the scene in which the wheel comes off the car and the drunk can only suggest, “Put her in reverse,” and “No harm in trying”; or the scene in Nick's cottage before the appearance of Daisy, when Gatsby's head tilts back the clock on the mantle and almost causes it to fall; or the old timetable on which Nick wrote the now-graying names of Gatsby's remarkable guests “that summer.” Such brilliant zaniness often occurs in Fitzgerald in the smaller scale of a sentence:

The snow of twenty-nine wasn't real snow. If you didn't want it to be snow, you just paid some money.

“That's nothing at all. My father has a diamond bigger than the Ritz-Carlton Hotel.”

“Eatin' green peach. 'Spect to die any minute.”

There was something ineffably gorgeous somewhere that had nothing to do with God.

And dozens more. Often a single such touch redeems an otherwise mediocre magazine story. They are so striking that they gave rise to the suspicion that Fitzgerald thought of them when he was half in the bag. That his style can press up to the edges of sanity and maybe beyond Fitzgerald acknowledges in his great story “Absolution” when he gives us in Father Schwartz a visionary stylist who has slipped over the line: “Well, go and see an amusement park. … It's a thing like a fair, only more glittering. Go to one at night and stand a little way off from it in a dark place—under dark trees. … It will all just hang out there in the night like a colored balloon—like a big yellow lantern on a pole.”

Nick Carraway moves from the banalities of his father into the magical world of Gatsby and his language. This central characteristic of Fitzgerald's style is Keatsian and, behind that, Shakespearian. Throughout Hamlet the prince says all those remarkable things while his friend Horatio remains a steady but pedestrian Senecan stoic out of Wittenberg University. But, with the death of the prince, Shakespeare gives Horatio some of the best lines in the play, far beyond anything he could articulate earlier. It is a conversion: “Goodnight, sweet prince, / May flights of angels sing thee to thy rest.” So much for the Senecan stoic.

Keats, it is hardly necessary to argue, was a poet of great importance to Fitzgerald, and in The Great Gatsby the nightingale's song is heard only in a Keatsian moonlight.

Reading Gatsby in the spring of 1925, Hemingway could not have missed the large thematic role played by the moon, sailing into that novel from folklore, romantic tradition, and most immediately from Keats's Endymion. Gatsby himself, it has often been pointed out, seems weakened in the daylight scenes but lives much more powerfully after dark; and throughout the action he is associated with moonlight at especially important moments.

In Endymion the hero falls in love with Cynthia the moon goddess, and this poem has not only thematic resemblances to Gatsby but narrative parallels as well. The moon illumines the poem as much as it does Fitzgerald's novel.

And lo! from opening clouds, I saw emerge
The loveliest moon, that ever silver'd o'er
A shell for Neptune's goblet; she did soar
So passionately bright, my dazzled soul
Commingling with her argent spheres did roll
Through clear and cloudy, even when she went
At last into a dark and vapoury tent—

When Endymion at last meets the moon goddess, she somehow brings the spirit of the moon with her to the bottom of a well as if to protect it from the violations of daylight:

                                        When, behold!
A wonder fair as any I have told—
The same bright face I tasted in my sleep,
Smiling in the clear well. My heart did leap
Through the cool depth.

The moon is as important in Gatsby as it is in Endymion, which Fitzgerald probably could recite from memory. The Gatsbian moon first appears in that remarkable sentence when Nick first glimpses Jay Gatsby: “The wind had blown off, leaving a loud bright night. … The silhouette of a moving cat wavered across the moonlight, and turning my head to watch it, I saw that I was not alone—fifty feet away a figure had emerged from the shadow of my neighbor's mansion, and was standing with his hands in his pockets regarding the silver pepper of the stars.”

Gatsby, as the first chapter ends, has “stretched out his arms” toward the green light at the end of Daisy's dock. At the end of This Side of Paradise, the last time we see Amory Blaine, he is under the stars, stretching out his arms toward them and toward Princeton. The similarity of the postures is striking; and in his essay “Princeton” (1927) Fitzgerald wrote about his university in lyrical and ideal terms that could easily express the emotions of Gatsby in the scene just described.

One of Gatsby's parties ends with that amazing scene in which a wheel is broken off a car driven by the drunken driver. This is a parodic version of Gatsby himself. At the same time Gatsby is bidding farewell to his multitude of guests: “A wafer of a moon was shining over Gatsby's house, making the night fine as before, and surviving the laughter and the sound of his still glowing garden. A sudden emptiness seemed to flow now from the windows and the great doors, endowing with complete isolation the figure of the host, who stood on the porch, his hand up in a formal gesture of farewell.”

In the flashback to Gatsby's boyhood in chapter 6, we learn that Jay Gatsby was born out of James Gatz under the light of the moon: “A universe of ineffable gaudiness spun itself out in his brain while the clock ticked on the wash-stand and the moon soaked with wet light his tangled clothes upon the floor. Each night he added to the pattern of his fancies.” That clock ticking on the washstand recalls the clock alluded to earlier.

The moon appears again in chapter 6, but this time as a “pale, thin ray of moonlight” over one of Gatsby's parties, as Nick and Daisy stand watching a movie director slowly kiss the cheek of his star actress. The scene is a pale version of genuine romance.

Five years earlier, in 1917, when Lt. Gatsby was in love with Daisy in Louisville, “they had been walking down a street when the leaves were falling, and they came to a place where there were no trees and the sidewalk was white with moonlight. They stopped here and turned toward each other.” There we have the “moment,” with the moon turning the sidewalk white. The leaves are falling, but the lovers are oblivious of time.

The Gatsbian moon is much more than the conventional moon of romance, and its full significance becomes clear only after Gatsby himself is dead in his swimming pool and is wreathed by the fallen leaves of autumn. Nick returns, perhaps for the last time, to the North Shore of Long Island and thinks about Gatsby. Absolutely everything in this coda is important. Nick notices “on the white steps, an obscene word scrawled by some boy with a piece of brick.” Nick erases the word. (J. D. Salinger after World War II could print that but had Holden Caulfield erase it.) Then Nick wanders down to the shore and reflects: “Most of the big shore places were closed now and there were hardly any lights except the shadowy, moving glow of a ferryboat across the Sound. And as the moon rose higher the inessential houses began to melt away until I gradually became aware of the old island here that flowered once for Dutch sailors' eyes.” Given the extensive preparation for this, the phrase as the moon rose higher is inevitable. The phrase flowered once reaches back to Daisy, Myrtle, the Carraways, and much else. But, though Jay Gatsby is dead, his moon still rises; and now Nick, no longer the child of his banal father, commences his own nightingale's song under the moon in this unexpected bravura aria.

That he is the “son” now of Gatsby is indicated by his inclusive “we” when he says that “tomorrow we … will stretch out our arms farther.” When he had first glimpsed him, Gatsby was stretching out his own arms toward Daisy's green light, and at that point Gatsby was the son of Amory Blaine, who had stretched out his arms toward Princeton. For all the irony with which he surrounds the words “we … will stretch out our arms farther” at the end of The Great Gatsby, Fitzgerald will not give it up. It is of the essence, and it informs his style, which itself is always stretching beyond, with Fitzgerald's taking risks Hemingway could not imagine.

What we are to understand, as that moon rises over Long Island at the end of Gatsby, is that this end is not the end. The moon of imagination that transformed James Gatz into Jay Gatsby will continue to rise everlastingly, the imagination transforming things for better or worse according to its own quality. This is Fitzgerald's “answer” to Eliot's Waste Land, which he had written into this book as the Valley of Ashes and which he calls the “waste land.” As against Eliot, Fitzgerald says that this moon, rising in the night sky, is a permanent force, not a force for romantic illusion. Though Gatsby mistakenly worshipped his Daisy, Fitzgerald wrote in Gatsby that the moon is the power of the transforming imagination.

Fitzgerald probably would not have been surprised by the prophetic grasp of The Great Gatsby as the transforming imagination did indeed transform the Valley of Ashes, known as Flushing Meadow. Jay Gatsby was a product of money and imagination. The New York World's Fair of 1939 and 1940 arose out of the Valley of Ashes, a landfill, as a triumph of money and imagination, its Trylon and Perisphere, designed by Wallace Harrison and André Fouilhoux, a culmination of the modernist movement in architecture and an emblem of transcendent optimism. Today, with the great fair gone, the Valley of Ashes has been once again transmogrified into the National Tennis Center, named after Louis Armstrong, a jazz musician who had no interest in tennis. Fitzgerald would have understood these startling changes completely.

Hemingway first met Fitzgerald at the Dingo Bar in the rue Delambre, Paris, in late April or early July 1925. The meeting occurred after the publication of Gatsby but before the publication of In Our Time. It seems probable that Hemingway had read Gatsby by the time of the meeting. However that may be, Hemingway's account of the meeting in A Moveable Feast is venomous at Fitzgerald's expense.

During the next summer Hemingway made his trip to Pamplona, gathering the material that would go into The Sun Also Rises. He completed the novel rapidly, and delivered the typescript to Maxwell Perkins at Scribner's in February 1926.

Then an episode occurred that must have been excruciating for Hemingway. By the spring of 1926 The Sun Also Rises was going into galley proof at Scribner's. Hemingway and his wife, Hadley, visited the Fitzgeralds at Juan-les-pins on the Riviera. The Fitzgeralds did not like their place, the Villa Paquita, and turned it over to the Hemingways. Fitzgerald read a carbon copy of the typescript of The Sun Also Rises, and he wrote Hemingway a long and surgically professional memorandum on the faults of the novel, which by then was in galleys in New York. Hemingway must have been appalled, but he swallowed his pride and made the changes Fitzgerald recommended, including the major cut of about the first twenty pages of the typescript, which dealt at length with Cohn. In New York the galleys had to be reworked to incorporate the changes. “I can't imagine,” Fitzgerald wrote, “how you could have done these first 20 pps. so casually. You can't play with peoples attention.”

Both the title of the novel and the epigraph from which it comes are puzzling in relation to the novel. The quotation from Ecclesiastes is about the everlastingness of the earth, which, Hemingway said, is the subject of the novel. But this is only partly true, if at all true. The novel is about ragged and painful human relationships; about transitoriness, love, and suffering; and about the courage of endurance and silence in the face of overwhelming emotion. The original title of the novel was Fiesta, which, with suitably ironic overtones, does seem more appropriate than the eventual title. Why Hemingway changed the title we cannot know. The one we have, however, may glance obliquely at The Great Gatsby, as if to say that, well, if the moon of imagination rises there, the sun of realism will rise here. The title can be seen as an assertion of moral realism (Hemingway) as against the supposed illusions of romance (Fitzgerald). We may think that as the moon rose over Gatsby's Long Island the sun will now rise triumphantly over Hemingway's Spain and in the mind of Jake.

Was there a winner in this contest that Hemingway imagined? The moon of transforming imagination did rise over Fitzgerald's Valley of Ashes, and constituted Fitzgerald's oblique answer to Eliot's Waste Land; but Hemingway has his own answer to Eliot. Jake Barnes is a wounded Fisher King, but there is no Grail in his blighted kingdom. With his Old Testament name, Jacob, and his residual dried-up Catholicism, and his sexual wound, Jake cannot unite himself with the pagan Brett. The old Christian-pagan Western synthesis has been shattered, and though Jake tries to pray, he cannot heal the wound in his own heart and in the heart of Western civilization. Still he does fish in that cool stream near the monastery of Roncesvalles (he cannot reach the Chapel Perilous); he does sustain the stoic code of the soldier, and he knows the power of silence. Unlike Cohn, Jake is a gentleman. He is a wounded and emotionally shattered veteran, but also a reconstructed Western man.

Furthermore Hemingway asserted his Lady Brett against Fitzgerald's Golden Girls, and she more than held her own. Such figures as Lauren Bacall, Humphrey Bogart, Edwin R. Murrow, and many other post-1920s figures would be unthinkable without Hemingway, as would the hard-bitten journalism of World War II.

After 1926 Hemingway long remained a master of the short story and wrote one more novel at the peak of his powers, A Farewell to Arms (1929). As a world figure Hemingway rose like the sun during the 1930s, becoming a modern Byron and a media star. Despite the gorgeous ruin of Tender Is the Night and whatever we make of the fragments of his Hollywood novel, The Last Tycoon, Fitzgerald never achieved again the near-perfection of Gatsby.

Hemingway seemed to forget about the power of silence, compression, and deep suggestion, becoming more and more prolix until—despite a few brilliant recoveries—he managed to achieve the verbal elephantiasis of the manuscript of The Garden of Eden. During the 1930s he continued his war against Fitzgerald, insulting him in “The Snows of Kilimanjaro,” often wise-cracking about him as a writer who had passed from adolescence to senility without ever becoming an adult, and taking some nasty shots at him from the grave in A Moveable Feast.

And yet, in 1926, who won? In The Great Gatsby Fitzgerald had written an even stronger novel than The Sun Also Rises. He even had improved The Sun Also Rises with his last-minute and immensely important corrections. When Hemingway first read The Great Gatsby early in 1925, he may well have sensed that what Fitzgerald was doing was beyond him and been furious. Then he published The Sun Also Rises and proved Fitzgerald's achievement was beyond him.