ERNEST HEMINGWAY, THE SUN ALSO RISES (FIESTA)
LECTURE QUOTES
OWEN ROBINSON
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 he 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 fight
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 anyone 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 someone verify the story from
Spider Kelly. He 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 feel 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 selfconsciousness 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 attractive 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. (Ernest Hemingway, Fiesta (The Sun Also
Rises) (London: Pan, 1969), pp.5-6.)
‘There you go. And you claim you want to be a writer, too.
You’re only a newspaper man. An expatriated newspaper man.
You ought to be ironical the minute you get out of bed. You
ought to wake up with your mouth full of pity.’
‘Go on,’ I said. ‘Who did you get this stuff from?’
‘Everybody. Don’t you read? Don’t you ever see
anybody? You know what you are? You’re an expatriate. Why
don’t you live in New York? Then you’d know these things.
What do you want me to do? Come over here and tell you
every year?’
‘Take some more coffee,’ I said.
‘Good. Coffee is good for you. It’s the caffeine in it.
Caffeine, we are here. Caffeine puts a man on her horse and a
woman in his grave. You know what’s the trouble with you?
You’re an expatriate. One of the worst type. Haven’t you
heard that? Nobody that ever left their own country ever wrote
anything worth printing. Not even in the newspapers.’
He drank the coffee.
‘You’re an expatriate. You’ve lost touch with the soil. You
get precious. Fake European standards have ruined you. You
drink yourself to death. You become obsessed with sex. You
spend all your time talking, not working. You are an expatriate,
see? You hang around cafés.’ (p.87)
[Montoya] smiled again. He always smiled as though bullfighting were a very special secret between the two of us; a
rather shocking but really very deep secret that we knew about.
He always smiled as though there were something lewd about
the secret to outsiders, but that it was something that we
understood. It would not do to expose it to people who would
not understand….//
Aficion means passion. An aficionado is one who is
passionate about the bull-fights. All the good bull-fighters
stayed at Montoya’s hotel; that is, those with aficion stayed
there. The commercial bull-fighters stayed once, perhaps, and
then did not come back….//
Montoya could forgive anything of a bull-fighter who had
aficion. He could forgive attacks of nerves, panic, bad
unexplainable actions, all sorts of lapses. For one who had
aficion he could forgive anything. At once he forgave me all my
friends. Without his ever saying anything they were simply a
little something shameful between us, like the spilling open of
the horses in bull-fighting. (pp.99-101)
They were all standing outside the chapel where San Fermin
and the dignitaries had passed in leaving a guard of soldiers,
the giants, with the men who danced in them standing beside
their resting frames, and the dwarfs moving with their whacking
bladders through the crowd. We started inside and there was a
smell of incense and people filing back into the church, but
Brett was stopped just inside the door because she had no hat,
so we went out again and along the street that ran back from
the chapel into town. The street was lined on both sides with
people keeping their place at the kerb for the return of the
procession. Some dancers formed a circle around Brett and
started to dance. They wore big wreaths of white garlics
around their necks. They took Bill and me by the arms and put
us in the circle. Bill started to dance, too. Brett wanted to
dance but they did not want her to. They wanted her as an
image to dance around. (pp.117-8)
Ernest Hemingway
(1898-1961)
“You are all a lost generation” – Gertrude Stein