I am thinking about Hemingway, planning a course on his novels, once we finish his short stories.  I would enjoy this, being able to read prose passages from For Whom the Bell Tolls (“Nay Rabbit, I won’t be going to Madrid with you”); Islands in the Stream (“He was happy on the flying bridge”); A Farewell to Arms (“She can’t die, but what if she does”); Hemingway’s walk with Bill Gorton through the streets of Paris, starting at the Left Bank, in A Moveable Feast; N”Cola’s laughing at the hyena in Green Hills of Africa; and Brett and Jake in the horse taxi at the Madrid Palace hotel in The Sun Also Rises.  Maybe add Belmonte’s scorning of the crowd in Death in the Afternoon and Cantrell’s handling of the surly guide in duck hunting in Across the River and Into the Trees.

Teaching Hemingway, like teaching Frank Lloyd Wright, has helped me see the forest for the trees, gaining understanding.  At first, I was just carried forward by my passion and the detail, only now discovering what Hemingway was all about.  I started with a few simple themes, elaborated during the initial lectures on short stories: survival in a violent world; the use of courage and dignity to persevere; the importance of ritual and routines and simple pleasures; the recuperative power of nature; and the disillusionment, psychic shock, and Existentialism of the Lost Generation.  I began to understand heroes like Nick in “Big Two Hearted River” and the Major in “In Another Country,” the haunting prose, the impressionistic descriptions framing laconic dialogue, the clear glass descriptions of nature, the irony and pathos.  Mainly I love the beautiful slices of life: World War I Italy, 1920s Paris’ and its Luxembourg Gardens, races at Auteil, and the Velidrome,  the Madrid of “A Clean Well Lighted Place,” and Madrid in the Spanish Civil War.

Hemingway brings World War I and the Spanish Civil War alive like no other writing.  He brings post war Paris alive like Fitzgerald does in Tender is the Night.  I began to piece themes together.  The Sun Also Rises was about people coping, Brett and Michael, and Robert failing, and Jake coping and enduring, and Bill Gorton and alcohol.  It is the same for the short stories– a tough world and you learn to endure by various means.  The world gets everyone; there’s no escaping.

Then Hemingway begins to change a bit in the 1930s, new wife, new setting in the U.S., new world and themes of the great sportsman.   He is reengaged, no longer expatriated or disillusioned.  His themes in Spain’s conflict are the search for truth by all means, and the dangers of ideology, and the tragedy of wasteful death.  In the outdoor sports arena of marlin, lion, and Miura bulls, there are codes to live and play by. That is how you get through life, more than just with dignity as in his World War I convalescent stories.  You play by the rules and have professional competence to get through.  Hemingway is a bit more macho, less Separate Peace.  Man tests himself against brutal nature, and qualities like courage and honor are still important.  This is the era of Hemingway on the Pilar, the Nordquist Ranch, and Philip Percival in Tanganyika.  It is also Hemingway’s era of non-fiction, and of reduced output due to drink at Sloppy Joes in Key West and at the Finca Vigia in Cuba.  It is the era when Hemingway’s ego, Papa Hemingway, starts injecting itself into his writings.  But, it is still man in nature and against nature, a man confronting violence through a personal code, looking for true values found in the primitive, lasting truths seen in “The Short Happy Life of Francis Macomber” and “The Snows of Kilimanjaro.”

These are masterful stories with beautiful prose on hunting, fishing, and bullfighting elsewhere.  It is no longer the apprenticeship of Nick Adams.  The theme is professionalism, courage, endurance, and rules of the game.  The heroes are a bit less heroic tutors suffering psychic scars, despairing.  They are tough men.  They don’t persevere with dignity alone, albeit shattered. They persevere through skill and courage, and make the transition to men, like Macomber.   It is more of a man’s world, less shell shock and disillusionment and the careless lifestyle of the expatriates.

Finally, we get to the third phase, Cuba and Martha Gelhorn and Mary Welsh, and the weakness of Across the River, his World War II stories, parts of Islands in the Stream The Garden of Eden, and A Dangerous Summer, but also the good:  The Old Man and the Sea and the Gulf Stream Esquire Articles and A Moveable Feast and the first part of Islands in the Stream.

The rules of the game, of the Hemingway “Code Hero,” I finally understood, were a metaphor for life.  They represent belief in honor and courage and professional skill.  Jake Barnes believed in them, as did Mendoza in Pamploma.  This extended beyond the etiquette of the ring, treating the bull with dignity, displaying bravery by killing over the horns, “reciebiendo,” not using too many banderillas to lower the bull’s head, working close, respectful of danger and having an obligation to the sport in your personal as well as in the corrida behavior, as Romero has and Garcia in “The Undefeated” has.  You do things well, like in baseball, hit the cut off man, lay down sacrifice bunts, run out fly balls, hustle, no grandstanding, that honors the sport.

The rules of the game, the code, extends to dying well in life, like Catherine Barclay, Richard Cantrell, and Harry in “Snows.”  Stoic characters, like Garcia and Robert Jordan as well, die quickly and violently, but are not afraid.  And, it applies to facing death and danger well, like Macomber and Belmonte, and the pudgy Lieutenant Colonel in the “Retreat from Caporetto” scene in Farewell, and the French soldier in “Under the Ridge,” and possibly Santiago in The Old Man and the Sea, and it includes how to face psychological and other scarring like Jake Barnes in Sun and the Major of in Another Country, and in other short stories,  including Nick in “Big Two Hearted River,” “Now I Lay Me,” and “A Way You’ll Never Be,” and facing old age in “A Clean Well Lighted Place.”

Thank you Hemingway, first and foremost, for the slices of life, or the world around World War I, the romantic world, for the Madrid well lit cafe, the Milan hospital in 1918, the Hotel Florida in Madrid in 1937, the Apartment on Rue Cardinal Lemoine, the Cafe des Lillas in 1925 Paris. Thanks for the great nature stories, the Venetian marshes and duck hunting, the wonderful blue and sliver marlin of the Gulf Stream, the wounded lion in Macomber, the trout in the pools.  Thanks for Hadley, Brett, Pilar, Kid Sister (Hare), Catherine.  Thanks for the terrible, wonderful endings, the French soldier lying stretched out under the ridge, the man who came closest to victory; the Italian Major who stares at the wall looking straight ahead while using the hand therapy machine, Jake Barnes, who says “isn’t it pretty to think so,” sitting next to Brett in the cab in Madrid, the old man at the bridge whose only luck is the fact that his cat can take care of itself, for Garcia in the infirmary in the corrida, for Santiago dreaming of lions on the beach, for Frederick Henry walking out of the hospital in Switzerland, for Nick deciding he can fish the swamp some other day, for the maid bringing the tortoise shell cat to the door in “Cat in the Rain,” for the praying mantis on the hook in “Now I Lay Me,” and the silk handkerchief, and blast furnace door opening, and for the two men on bicycles, and especially for Harry’s dream that he is riding in the plane as it turns left towards Nairobi and there is the flat topped Kilimanjaro, where he knows he is going.  Thanks mainly for your cats, F Puss and Boise.

It is the day before Thanksgiving.  I wake up a bit bitter, and lost in retirement, but I suddenly realize that I need to move on, and enjoy new pursuits, new chapters.  Someone better off for the new road.

I start to work on a more relaxed Randall, one who existed before ambition took hold, the person who used to be more like his mother. I had almost forgotten this model, placing memories of her aside after she passed in 1995, due to the pain. Our long-time Roswell neighbor, Jenny, knew this. She said it openly at the time of Mom’s funeral. “Randy Ray is in denial.”

I had almost forgotten this side, focusing on Dad’s needs and the more striving LeCocq side after her passing. I had almost forgotten the calm Hindmans and Riders from Winterset and Newton, with their Midwestern twangs and positive outlooks, and my maternal grandmother, Pearl, whom I was especially close to, the Christian Science Reader who never said anything negative about anyone. Yes, I would attempt to recall the boy of the Great Plains: Roswell, Kansas, and Lubbock.

I would focus on the positive. I would take writing seminars in Missoula, sketching courses at the Holter, or French at Carroll.

So what happened to ease the burden? In Christian Science, they would call it a “healing.” But, I think my mother stepped in. The day before, I had found myself looking at a photo of her and my dad on my bookcase, and had moved it to my desk, closer, without thinking anything of it. But, I was studying mom. I found I could focus on her face, and remember her voice. It was as if a closed part of my brain had reopened.

I was reminded of Tim O’Brien’s The Things They Carried, his novel of Vietnam and the memories the soldiers carried with them which kept them whole. O’Brien’s message was the importance of memory. Memories not only make the living whole, they also bring people back to life, keeping them living. The dead are like unused books, on the bookshelf, never taken down and opened.

In the novel, Tim O’Brien went back and rescued little Linda, his nine-year-old childhood friend who died of a brain tumor. He went back and they were skating on the pond in Minnesota, and he did some spins, and leaped into the dark air, and came down thirty years later a whole Timmy, connected by memories, showing how he got from where he was to where he is at age 43. Little Linda brought Timmy back, the real Tim, pre-Vietnam, who he was, saving him. And he saved her, taking her off the shelf. Memories save.

On this day, I, too, apparently went back, to New Mexico as a kid, and found Mom, and am taking that leap. Or, maybe she found me.

In 2010, I drove to Oxford, Mississippi to research William Faulkner.  The only thing I remember about the long drive down was a yellow tabby cat at the truck stop in Texarkana, catching bugs, happy, sleeping a bit on the grass where pets can walk, a bit fat, alone, apparently dropped off and left, no aware of its plight. I said a prayer for it as I headed off towards Little Rock. Knowing I would not be back that way. It was hard to drive away.

Arriving in Oxford, I went to the Faulkner sites: the the Anne Chandler house (Compson house), the Murray Faulkner house where he lived as a child, the bank his grandfather ran, the 1834 Nielson Department Store (the Snopes and Sartoris hardware store), the Rowan Oak mansion he purchased in 1933, after sale of Sanctuary, with cypress trees lining the walkway and with outbuildings, and his grave site at the cemetery. I also spent time at the University of Mississippi, where he lived in the Delta Psi dorm near ‘the Grove.” The Civil War was still present, in the cemetery at the University where seven hundred dead from Shiloh are buried, and the statue of the Confederate soldier in the city square, dedicated “to honor their patriotism.” I also travelled outside Oxford, the the area around Batesville, where Faulkner hunted deer every year, and Frenchman’s place and the northern suburbs where the fictional Sartoris Plantation was set. Yokanapathanawa County.

Downtown, on city square, I had shrimp and grits at City Grocery restaurant, tables lining the walls in the long, narrow room, brick walls, overhead fans, white tablecloths, bent wood chairs, and wooden floors. I spent some time in the Faulkner alcove, upstairs at Square Books. I walked around the central square, lined with two story wooden buildings, most with plantation shutters and some with wrought iron balconies and tables for eating. There was a calico cat sitting on the wooden walkway connecting the shops and buildings, Fortunes Ice Cream, Roosters Blues House, and Ajax Diner.

I am thinking of the Faulkner message, as he put it in his Nobel address. What is important is to re-discover the old universal truths. We have to find deep within ourselves the love, pity, and compassion, which make us human. By finding love, we can endure. Those who don’t find it, like the Snopes in The Hamlet, Mrs. Compson in The Sound and the Fury, and McLendon in “Dry September,” are doomed.

Faulkner also taught us about the importance of courage, another traditional value, illustrated best in “Odor of Verbena,” “The Bear,” and “Barn Burning.”

Faulkner taught how to write, to forget style and get it all down in a sort of stream of consciousness, run on sentences and all, the emotion coming through, the moments of illumination and inspiration coming with fast paced writing. Get it all down, on the head of a pin, the whole story and don’t worry about plot. Just string together myths, southern history. And Faulkner, the failed poet, taught the value of lyrical paragraphs. Write from the heart, about the heart and internal conflict, portraying a slice of life. It’s more about characters anyway, with images strung together.

Hemingway wrote about characters, but not in depth, just about how to live life in a violent world where things have lost their meaning. Faulkner goes into more depth. His characters were round. He is like Tim O’Brien, laying out how we feel inside, seeing our own weaknesses and the pathos we all feel, how we empathize when we see something sad happening to an individual, an outcast.

Critics have pointed out that there is a lot of social and economic determinism in Faulkner.  Plantation owners and slave descendants are tapped by their past and by “roles.”  There are sad endings and the bitterness of defeat and loss which began on Cemetery Ridge. There are few happy endings or examples of individuals overcoming adversity. Instead, we see a world of racist police, ineffectual white males, abused females, cynical parents, mixed race outcasts, and unenlightened  poor whites. African Americans suffer in trying to escape this society where judges are corrupt and the law perverted and ministers are hypocrites

But Faulkner is not a nihilist. The way to overcome this world is through elemental Christian virtues of self-restraint and mutual respect which involves forgiveness of others and oneself,  One needs a proper balance between pride and humility and a lot of charity.

Hemingway left us with wonderful characters: Santiago fighting the Marlin in the Gulf Stream, Catherine Barclay, dying heroically in Monreaux, Jake Barnes living stoically in Paris, and the old man in a clean, well lit, Madrid cafe.

Faulkner left us Quentin and his wonderful, tragic sister Caddy Compson, taking care of Benjy in The Sound and the Fury, Ellen the Fox in Sartoris, Drusilla Hawk in “Odor of Verbena,” Will Mayes in “Dry September,” Uncle Buddy in Go Down Moses, Bayard and Ringo in “Ambuscade,” Mrs. Armistad in “Spotted Horses,” Lucas Beauchamp in Intruder in the Dust, Nancy in “That Evening Sun,” and Jack Houston in The Hamlet.

I wish I had gone back to check on that cat in Texarkana.

Sitting on the top floor of the Davidson Library at UCSB, looking out at the Channel Islands, their low gray mountains concealed by gray mist. The ocean is a dark blue, but with a few light blue currents running out like channels on the surface. I see only one sailboat, running with the rough wind and current, bobbing, its sails flapping.  I am reading F. Scott Fitzgerald.

I love Fitzgerald’s short stories, the way he displays human emotions and youthful romance, and the way he expresses people’s dreams, which are, as Malcolm Cowley said, the handle by which Fitzgerald takes hold of his characters. My favorites are stories from his early success years, 1919-24, stories full of glitter of the Jazz Age and Flappers, full of high spirit. This was a time when Fitzgerald was the spokesman for the era, defining it, along with Zelda. “Winter Dreams,” is perhaps the best of the lot, set in Lake Forest, about a poor boy, Dexter Green, who falls for debutante Judy Jones, based on Fitzgerald’s infatuation with Ginevra King while at Princeton. Winter Dreams is beautifully lyrical: “the sun went down with a riotous swirl of gold and varying blues and scarlets and left the dry, rustling night of Western summer. Dexter watched from the veranda of the Golf Club, watched the even overlap of the waters in the little wind, silver molasses under the harvest moon. Then the moon held a finger to her lips and the lake became a clear pool, pale and quiet… There was a fish jumping and a star shining and the lights around the lake were gleaming. Over on a dark peninsula a piano was playing the songs of last summer and of summers before that– songs from ‘Chin-Chin and ‘The Count of Luxembourg…”

“Absolution” is my second favorite, a fascinating psychological story, with interior monologues, about Catholic boyhood in North Dakota and a repressive father and society, and ending with a great passage: “it would be night in two to three hours, and all along the land there would be these blond northern girls and tall young men from the farms lying outside the wheat meadows, under the moon.” “Bernice Bobs Her Hair,” is about an Eu Claire girl in St. Paul, a beautiful portrait of the early 1919 era just after the war, as the Jazz Age is beginning, showing the old and the new, the modernist changes just starting to take place. “The Sensible Thing,” is about Scott and Zelda and their broken engagement and renewal of it, using the characters George O’Kelly and Jonquil Cary in Tennessee (vice Montgomery, Ala), where George, jilted, goes off to Peru and makes big money as a mining engineer, then returns for Jonquil. There is another great paragraph: George comes back and takes Jonquil for a walk, “…but a curious thing happened. George stepped aside to let her pass, but instead, she stood still and stared at him for a minute. It was not so much the look, which was not a smile, it was the moment of silence. They saw each other’s eyes and both took a short, fairly accelerated breath, and then they went on. That was all. Never would this April moment come again.” “The Jelly Bean” is another poor boy gets rich to deserve the rich girl to no avail story. Shades of The Great Gatsby to come.

Then I came to the second period of Fitzgerald’s writing, from publication of Gatsby in 1924, until Zelda’s first breakdown in 1930, stories of glamour and disillusionment. These are about the gaudy, rich age, and and how this age ultimately brought individuals down. The Lost Generation were victims of their time, of a historical moment. There are two short stories I particularly liked from this era, “The Rich Boy,” about a spoiled wealthy boy’s feelings of superiority and his inability to find love, displaying Fitzgerald’s curiosity about the rich and how their minds work, going to clubs for dinner with friends and living alone with a valet. “The Last of the Belles,” another story based on Zelda (Ailee Calhoun) and Scott’s courtship, this time set in a Tarleton, Georgia camp town, centers on the spoiled Ailee, against the backdrop of what they hear of the horrors of war going on. Fitzgerald drops one of those illuminating insights into the era and humanity: “As they danced on the floor, a three piece orchestra was playing ‘After You’re Gone,’ in a poignant and incomplete way that I can hear yet, as if each bar were ticking off a precious minute of that tune… it was a time of youth and war, and there was never so much love around.” Another illuminating paragraph: “And now the young men of Tarleton began drifting back from the ends of the earth, some with Canadian uniforms, some with crutches or empty sleeves. A returned battalion of National Guard paraded through the streets with open ranks for the dead, and then stepped down out of the romance forever and sold you things over the counters of local stores.” And, “it seemed she was bearing him off into the lost midsummer world of my early twenties, where time had stood still and charming girls, dimly seen like the past itself, still loitered along the dusky streets.”

Then the final act, (1930-40), as disaster comes to Fitzgerald, with Zelda in a sanitarium and Scott an alcoholic. This is a new type of story, more emotionally complicated, with less regret for the past, more dignity in the face of real sorrows. We see such tragedy in his most wonderful short story, “Babylon Revisited,” about a man named Charlie Wales, who is in Paris to see his daughter, but fails to regain custody as he recovers from alcoholism. It is a sad, touching story of a father’s love. Wales drops his young daughter off at his sister-in-law’s after a visitation day together. “All right, ‘good bye Dads, Dads, Dads, Dads,’ the daughter says. He stands out front and looks up at her window, waiting in the dark street until she appeared, all warm and glowing, in the window above, and kissed her fingers out into the night…” “Babylon” has beautiful lyrical passages of Paris: “Outside, the fire-red, ghost green signs shone smoothly through the tranquil rain. It was late afternoon, and the streets were in movement; the bistros gleamed… The Place de la Concord moved by in pink majesty.”

Then there is Fitzgerald’s second novel, Tender is the Night, one of my all-time favorites. Like all his works, there is glamour, with a lot of underlying thought. The story is about the decline of Dr. Dick Diver, who becomes an expatriate in France after World War I, his wife, Nicole, who suffers from schizophrenia, and the young actress Rosemary, with whom Diver has an affair.

Tender is the Night has beautiful lyrical passages which evoke the European Riviera and the time: “It was pleasant to drive back to the hotel in late afternoon, above a sea as mysteriously colored as the agates and cornelians of childhood, green as green milk, blue as laundry water, wine dark. It was pleasant to pass people eating outside their doors, … when they turned off the Corniche d’or and down to Gausse’s hotel through the darkening bands of trees, set one behind the other in many greens, the moon already hovered over the ruins of the aqueducts…” It is a novel of imagery and lyricism. “A false dawn sent the sky pressing through the tall French windows, and getting up, she walked out on the terrace, warm to her bare feet. There were secret noises in the air, an insistent bird achieved an ill-natured triumph with regularity in the trees above the tennis court; footfalls followed a round drive in the rear of the hotel, taking their tone in turn from the dust road, the crushed stone walk, the cement steps, then reversing the process and going away…” Even Hemingway admired Fitzgerald’s genius with words.

Fitzgerald is analyzing Diver’s decline, and looking at himself in the process a bit. Diver was corrupted by money and the times, and by his early successes and what people said about him, and he had some internal weaknesses going back to his childhood. He had been brilliant at Harvard and Hopkins, became a psychiatrist, and written some good early papers which got him attention from the Austrians. But, he was not perhaps serious enough, and succumbed to a young actress, and to his wife’s easy money, taking him out of the mainstream of his work, to the Riviera, to run a guest house. The conclusion seems to be that Dick Diver was never really solid enough, even though he attracted people with his charm and intelligence. He was a good psychologist at Hopkins, did a few good scholarly papers, but never advanced beyond that initial flash and was influenced by the admiration others showed for him. He practiced in Austria, met Nicole, his patient whom he married, got involved with the rich at Antibes, and fell for a young actress, who eventually moved on. Diver should have confined himself, as his wife’s sister said at the end, to his bicycle excursions on the Riviera. When people get out of their depth, they lose their heads, no matter how charming a bluff they put up. He fell eventually to alcohol and dissipation. He lost himself, as he said at one point, he wasn’t the same person he had been. He couldn’t tell what hour or month this had happened. “Once he had cut through things… but, at some point the spear had been blunted.” His psychiatrist business partner in Austria put it best: “Dick is no longer a serious man.” Dick was a bit of a romantic fool, like Fitzgerald, charged by illusions and imagination, but also destroyed by them.

At the end, Nicole is recovered, from years of just existing and taking care of the kids, and she and Dick are separated. He is, she hears from his occasional letters and from mutual friends, living in the Finger Lakes region of New York, in an inconsequential practice, still working on an unpublished treatise, having relationships with younger women, and ending up in smaller and smaller towns in the region. “Perhaps, she liked to think, his career was biding its time again, like Grant’s at Galena.”

The story is haunting and autobiographical, reminding the reader of Fitzgerald’s early phenom success, followed by his drinking, Rivera and Hollywood years, a downward spiral that led to his final heart attack in 1940 (age 44).  This is a novel less of external action than of internal consciousness. It is narrated. Fitzgerald is telling, not showing, unlike Hemingway. But, it has greatness in it. It is about how people re-define themselves as they go along in life, how they are defined by others based on their successes and failure.

I am re-reading The Sun Also Rises, admiring Hemingway’s “existential hero,” the novel’s protagonist, my hero, Jake Barnes. What does it mean to be an existentialist, like Jake?

You have to have alienation to get started.  You need disillusionment. Hemingway’s “Lost Generation” had those.  Jake is scarred psychologically and physically from World War I.  His war wound has made him impotent, and destroys his relationship with Lady Brett Ashley, whom he loves.  He has to sleep with the light on, to keep out the bad dreams and existential dread.  He has lost religion and traditional values, focusing instead on daily existence, not what its all about and the hereafter.  He says to himself, “its a good world, I just wish I could learn how to live it, figuring out what it is all about afterward.”

He learns how to live it. Jake finds significance in this life in concrete physical sensations and daily existence, walking to work, enjoying morning coffee in the office while reading the paper, having lunch at good cafes with friends, drinking in Montparnasse, going on fishing trips, and following bullfighting in Spain.  Jake is very controlled and has his routines, and is good at his work as a journalist.  He is not like his nihilistic friends, who reject work and drift from bar to bar in meaningless fashion.

Existentialism requires finding alternative significance or meaning in life.  Jake creates this “alternative significance,” maintaining a strong set of friends despite their faults, finding meaning in interpersonal relationships,” including in love.  He finds achievement significance in his work.  He is productive and rational, and his work gives him a sense of order and control over his life. He also finds significance in nature and sport, in fishing and following bullfights.  He could have found alternative meaning in culture, moral causes, or the quest for knowledge, etc., like other existentialists.  Each person finds his own meaning.

Jake understands existentialism is about “freedom.”  Since existence is inherently meaningless, individuals are responsible for giving meaning to their life by imposing an individual value system on themselves and their actions.  Freedom is an opportunity, not a burden.

Jake has developed his own value system or code of behavior: not blaming others or circumstance, doing things well, relying on professional skill in fishing and his work, and in his knowledge of bullfighting.  He displays courage and dignity, i.e. “grace under pressure.”  He exercises great self-control, comes to terms with his injury, and leads his own life, not trying to conform.

Hemingway’s “Code Heroes,” like Jake, substitute the big truths with small ones.  They play by the rules, which means doing things well and honorably, and relying on professional skill in life and sport. In bullfighting, that means not cutting corners, but facing the bull with courage in his territory, delivering the sword over the horns, not faking danger but working close to the horns.  On Safari, it means not leaving a wounded animal to bleed to death in pain, but going in the bush after a wounded lion, or standing up to a charging Cape Buffalo.  It means not shooting from the car or talking about the thrill.  Hemingway uses war, bullfights, and big game hunting as lessons in facing death and proving courage, the only arenas where you can get close to “the moment of truth.”  The code goes back to the primitive “rightness of bravery” idea.  Jake believes in the importance of dignity, honor, and courage.  He also knows that in life, it is important to be a good sport.  Jake is brave, and a good sport.