Claudia Arellano
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Mr. Allen
English 101
June 7, 2009
“Isn’t it Pretty to Think So?”
The Purpose of Drinking in Hemingway’s
The Sun Also Rises
Throughout Hemingway’s, The Sun Also Rises, Jake Barnes and his ex-patriot
friends are portrayed as constantly drinking, and drinking excessively. It is tempting to
accept Matt Djos’ reading of Alcoholism in Ernest Hemingway’s ‘The Sun Also Rises’: a
Wine and Roses Perspective on the Lost Generation, of the novel as pure alcoholic
pathology. Alcohol provides an anesthetic and means of escape for the WWI haunted
Lost Generation of American ex-patriots in Paris, but Hemingway provides us with
plenty of examples of the problematic nature of this alcoholism. Jake Barnes, the
protagonist of SAR cannot rely on alcohol to erase his memories or current problems, and
generally it makes things worse. Still, Alcohol CAN take the edge off of day to day
human interactions, and provide a pleasant shared experience that is a means of
connecting with people throughout the novel. Djos does not even get this obvious truth in
the novel, and Michael Soto’s, Hemingway among the Bohemians: A Generational
Reading of The Sun Also Rises, and Jeffrey Schwarz, “The Saloon Must Go, and I Will
Take it with Me”: American Prohibition, Nationalism and Expatriation in the Sun Also
Rises, provide us the fascinating key to the true inner meaning of this “roman a clef”.
SAR is, in fact, both a celebratory travelogue/alcoholic Zagat’s guide to Post WWI
Paris/Spain AND a protest novel that rebels, in form and substance, against the repressive
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climate in America following WWI. Heavy drinking at every opportunity becomes the
artistic duty of those who saw Prohibition as basically the advancement of the KKK
agenda under the guise of a puritanical Anti-Saloon League campaign that embodied a
pro-WASP (White, Anglo-Saxon, Protestant), bigoted, anti-immigrant, nationalist
movement and national attitude. Drinking also becomes a ritual whose correct
performance is a means and model, however costly, for generating authentic experience.
It is Hemingway’s answer to Mencken’s denunciation of the ex-patriot. Though Mencken
criticized the new American nationalism, he saw the ex-patriots as escaping the
puritanical climate of America, but doing nothing productive, “not one of them has
written a line worth reading”(Schwarz).
Brett and her fiancé, Mike, are constantly cutting off any “bothersome” talk, any
unpleasantness, conflict or honest consideration of reality with another drink, or plans for
another drink, or movement to another locale for another drink. It does not fix anything,
and it often makes things much worse, but it does serve as a constant means of avoidance.
Brett repeatedly refers to any serious conversation as “talking rot” and when drinks are
suggested, you are not “talking rot”. She says, “talk’s all bilge.” (Hemingway) It certainly
does allow her to avoid and escape, but later the alcohol, and her own behavior, will lead
to a series of violent confrontations (55).
Early in the novel, Barnes is disgusted with the whole thing, “This whole show
makes me sick is all.” He is tormented by his love for Brett and his inability to
consummate that love physically due to his war wounds, so he goes off by himself. “I
was very angry….I wanted to swing at one, any one, anything to shatter that superior,
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simpering composure. Instead I walked down the street and had a beer…. The beer was
not good and I had a worse cognac to wash the taste out of my mouth” (28-29). Despite
his sarcastic/humorous telling of the story, alcohol does ultimately fail to drown his
sorrows. Later we see him crying in his apartment, as alcohol, and even his supposed
religion of Catholicism have failed him. “Well, people are that way. To hell with people.
The Catholic Church had an awfully good way of handling all that. Good advice,
anyway. Not to think about it. Oh, it’s was swell advice. Try and take it some time. Try
and take it.” (39)
This is essentially the whole argument of Djos, alcoholism is pathology, weakness
and failure, regardless of motives. Djos suggests, “we, as readers, have hopefully seen
enough insanity, enough emptiness, enough self-destruction and self-reproach to discredit
the friendships, the values, the drinking, the lives of these characters” (6). Djos dismisses
the usual focus of commentary related to SAR (adventure, rebellion, pleasure) and instead
focuses on the obvious echoing of the same puritanical Anti-Saloon League rhetoric of
the time period. Djos misses the point, focusing on the Bohemian window-dressing. He
does not “get it”. This conventional wisdom sounds just as rational as part of an AA
diatribe as in a William Jennings Bryant speech extolling the virtue of a pure
Americanism. It is both superficial and self-righteous in its criticism, and ties a possible
vice, drinking, to a whole bunch of other things that we should also condemn: their
friendships, their values, their whole lives!
In another scene in SAR, Barnes claims that:
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It was like certain dinners I remember from the war. There was much wine, and ignored
tension, and a feeling of things coming that you could not prevent happening. Under the
wine I lost the disgusted feeling and was happy. It seemed they were all such nice
people. (150)
Despite the fact that this scene was immediately preceded by Mike, showing, bad
manners and berating Cohn for hanging around where he’s not wanted, this was blamed
on alcohol, “Mike was awful. He’s terrible when he’s tight.” (149). In many cases the
party atmosphere does have a pleasure in itself, and takes the edge off the frustrations and
tensions of life. This is what Jeremy Mahadevan is referring to in his article, “A
compleat life with less pain.”
Tjos doesn’t even complete the list of examples of wine-soaked, dysfunctional
incidents. Jake meets Harvey Stone, who hasn’t eaten in five days (49) yet he is still
drinking. Cohn eventually beats up several characters, really injuring the bullfighter
Romero, perhaps because he is drunk, perhaps because he is just crazy over his obsession
with Brett. Brett herself doesn’t really blame her bad behavior on alcohol (though it
certainly enables her), as she possibly enjoys leaving a trail of broken hearts and
mayhem. She says, “It’s my fault Jake. It’s the way I’m made” (212) Mike repeatedly
becomes abusive and makes a scene when he is tight and he is perpetually broke, drinks
on credit, and even gets into a bar brawl in Pamplona over his bad debts in Biarritz. The
final scene of Hemingway/Barnes in Madrid pouring drinks, after Brett has congratulated
herself on choosing not to be “such a bitch” (247) and breaking it off with the 19-year old
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bullfighter, then calling Jake to come to her rescue, “Don’t get drunk, Jake, she said. You
don’t have to. How do you know? Don’t, she said. You’ll be alright” (250).
Despite the obvious destruction and havoc associated with excessive drinking,
which is abundant throughout the novel, there is also some social bridging through shared
experience of something pleasant, and a sense that such experiences, including drinking,
are somehow worthwhile in themselves. Barnes meets the count in Paris, and we find
that he is someone who has really lived. He has been through wars, been shot through
with arrows, and has had the money to live large. The count’s pronouncement on alcohol
is perhaps the best distillation of Hemingway’s own opinion, “You ought to write a book
on wines, count, I said. Mr. Barnes, answered the count, all I want out of wines is to
enjoy them” (66).
Cohn is a negative example, the guy who fails to bond, and ultimately alienates
himself further under the wine. Barnes and others repeatedly refer to Cohn, or criticize
him, in anti-Semitic terms, but his real sin is not that he is a Jew, but that he doesn’t
appreciate things for what they are, and he acts based on his notions of how things should
be (because he read them in Mencken or Hudson). Cohn may drink with the crowd, but
he is continually criticized for not drinking, literally, which serves to say he does not get
the right experience from the exercise.
Jake’s rejection of the bigotry of the new Americanism doesn’t really become
clear until his experiences in Spain. Up to this point, we see him as participating in the
accepted prejudices of the time, particularly in his anti-semiotic references to Cohn, but
also in offhand references such as to “niggers” who are “all teeth and lips” (69), and even
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in his own bitterness that Catholicism has not proven any solace for his injuries or
shortcomings.
There is only a small part in the book in which Jake and Bill reveal their
sentiment on what was going on in America. It takes place during their fishing trip. Jake
and Bill are fishing and drinking, enjoying each other’s company amongst beautiful
nature, bonding. They also crack a bunch of jokes that are lost on most modern readers,
but in 1926 when the book was released, Hemingway’s readers would have understood
these allusions and know the famous and infamous American figures mentioned. Schwarz
helps to unravel not only the various social and political references, so that we understand
the context and possible implications of the constant celebration and practice of drinking,
but also begin to understand the core motivations of Barnes/Hemingway that are
overlooked and dismissed by Djos.
When Jake brings only two bottles of wine to their fishing spot, he is accused of
being “in the pay of the Anti-Saloon League”, an organization that had a big part in
Prohibition being ratified on January 17, 1920. This is also a reference to William
Jennings Bryan (WJB) who was revealed to be secretly on salary to the Anti-Saloon
League, to fight for the noble cause of Prohibition. Bryan was one of those Americans
who made the distinction between what he considered American and un-American and
desperately fought to retain what he considered a pure America, favoring the WASP,
middle class, rural Americans and excluding what was considered the unsavory
immigrant element in American society. The Anti-Saloon League and the Ku Klux Klan
often supported the same political agenda and at times were indistinguishable. WJB was
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the Great Commoner from Nebraska. Schwarz quotes historian Thomas Coffey,
describing Bryan as “a devout, fundamentalist upholder of the bible, and a fierce
defender of America’s rural or small-town values against the dangers of city license and
sophistication…. Those bastions of cocktail sipping intellectuals and guzzling
foreigners.” Yet Bill and Jake sarcastically claim he and others attended Catholic
universities.
Prohibition is seen as a symbol of a political and social climate of intolerance and
bigotry, beneath which is actually a crass sell-out, a commercialism or mercenary
hypocrisy – or at least corruption. Another leading proponent of Prohibition, and the new
intolerant and bigoted “Americanism” was Wheeler, who Jake jokes is the President of
the Austin Business College, implying that his Puritanism is really just a business. They
also mention a famous baseball player of the day, who was rumored to have “sold out”
that most pure and American game of baseball. Bill agrees that “The saloon must go” but
adds, “and I will take it with me.” Bill says, “he will put the chicken before the egg in
honor of Wheeler”, alluding to the hypocritical nature of one group of immigrants
discriminating against another as well as the racist implications Creationism vs.
Darwinism. Rejecting this new Americanism naturally means rejecting prohibition, and
therefore embracing the bar, and “taking it with you.”
Schwarz describes the Basque culture of Spain as a nationalism quite the opposite
to the new Americanism – accepting rather than intolerant, wine-soaked and enjoyable,
rather than puritanical, and hypocritical, or at least corrupt. During the fiesta in
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Pamplona, their banner actually reads, “Hooray for wine, hooray for the foreigners”,
which again, Cohn fails to get. He says, “Where are the foreigners?” (58)
Europe becomes a place for Americans to break free from the constraints of America and
American Nationalism. Europe is a complete contradiction to the repressive atmosphere
in America epitomized by prohibition itself, and drinking can be seen, and is celebrated
as a rejection of prohibition, and all that it represents.
Schwarz goes beyond the use of alcohol as escape and protest, and also describes
how “ritualized drinking serves a particular social function not only within this Basque
culture, but also in uniting these different groups of peoples and their different cultures.”
Schwarz points out the various occasions in which Bill, Jake, and even Brett are taught
the proper way to use the leather wine bag, (and on each occasion Cohn fails to see the
point, and literally sleeps through his opportunities to be initiated into the proper form).
“Drinking wine becomes a serious act that must be taught to outsiders so that they can
share the experience.”
Soto, in Hemingway and the Bohemians, takes us deeper into this “seriousness”
of drinking, and the way in which it serves as the key to the “quasi-religious” concept at
the heart of SAR, but only after first providing us with the false key of “and easily
decoded truth”, through “knowledge available to a select few” based on the international
guessing game of “who’s who” in the novel. Reviews of the time echoed, in “selfconfident, cosmopolitan sophistication”, that “those who know” could easily name the
real people upon whom Hemingway based the characters of SAR. While some readers
of the time might actually recognize the characters if they were part of an insider group,
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or at least decode the “lingo” if they were hip enough, the novel forms a trap of selfcongratulation – which misses the actual point of the novel. The point is not that
Hemingway got the insipid Parisian café banter and slang correct, but that the banter, and
the real people/events behind the fiction, are evidence of authentic experiences of the
author. Soto references Maurice Beebe, who describes SAR as a “Sacred Fount” that
“recreates [and initiates the reader into] direct experience. And by this means, “insider
status can be transferred to outsiders” (Soto’s quotation of Merton). But the valuable
insider status is not one of recognizing Parisian cafes or even the particular Bohemians of
the left bank. That information is no more valuable than Hudson’s Purple Land, which
Hemingway/Barnes describes as dangerous if taken literally as “a guidebook to what life
holds.” (17) Though this is, in fact, what Hemingway has created in SAR; seeking in both
form and content to find a way towards a narrative authenticity and a “mechanics of
reproducing real expression.” Hemingway’s own translingual didacticism parallels the
rituals of initiation into the Basque form of drinking, which Soto says, “could easily be
called a form of instruction, or initiation, or induction” into Hemingway’s lost generation,
and into his way of seeing and experiencing authenticity. Even in the silly coining of an
inside term among the fishermen who, mock biblically, utilize several bottles of wine, we
see how language is used to capture an authentic moment, and an initiation. Hemingway
reports truthfully and initiates the reader into a quasi-religious order, not of Catholicism,
but of “afición”. The scenes in which Barnes translates different Spanish words, and
particularly in his explanation of the term “afición” (136-37) educate the reader in the
proper attitude, and the key, for understanding SAR. “afición” even becomes the source
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of grace, “for one who has “afición” he could forgive anything.” We are all sinners, we
all drink and misbehave, but we are redeemed by genuine passion, not by puritanical,
(false/hypocritical) self-righteousness. Soto quotes Beebe, [not just rejecting oppressive
society, but] “seeking an environment congenial to his temperament” – shared
experience, bonding initiation via a genuine passion. This is what Hemingway offers the
reader, as Soto puts it, “it is a difficult code, but it can be learned.” And so we see in a
new light what Soto also notes, Cohn is out, “not so much because he is Jewish, but
because his ideas are derivative.” He is not genuine. He does not have authentic passion
in life. He cannot be forgiven. Just like Mencken’s bankrupt bohemians, with their “fake
European sentiments”. Like William Jennings Bryan, who is really a sell-out, and even
the bullfighter whose “sincerity …would be set off by the false aesthetics of the
bullfighters of the decadent period” but who had also sold-out, and discounted his
authenticity, and any pleasure in his moments of greatness, by pre-selecting the safer
bulls. But the reader may learn, what Soto describes, “how to reconceived [one’s]
relation to society… and, best of all, enjoyment. I’ll utilize to that!”
Beneath the escapism, and problematic alcoholism of SAR there is also a
celebration of shared pleasure and direct experience that serves as both a protest and an
alternative to the oppressive atmosphere of post-WWI American nationalism. Though
readers of the day would most likely have enjoyed the humorous references to political
figures of the day, perhaps the most important distinction Hemingway is trying to make is
the difference between a Menckensian false Bohemianism, and Hemingway’s own search
for a place or a context in which he can feel both accepted and genuine, or at least a more
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congenial atmosphere. At the very end, he is still tortured by his dysfunctional
relationship with Brett. He is still struggling with the problematic nature of alcoholism
(Brett says, “Don’t get drunk, Jake,”, and “you don’t have to.” And Jake said, “How do
you know?”). Nonetheless, he is not looking for a romantic notion of what could have
been or what might be. His answer to Brett’s “… we could have had such a damned
good time together” is perhaps his answer also to Djos’ notion that Hemingway would be
better off taking a sober inventory of himself, and working the 12 steps, or even WJB and
Wheeler’s notion of a “pure” America: “Isn’t it pretty to think so?”
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Works Cited
Djos, Matts. “Alcoholism in Ernest Hemingway’s ‘The Sun Also Rises’: a Wine and
Roes Perspective on the Lost Generation.” The Hemingway Review. 14.2 (1995):
64. The Literature Resource Center. Gale Group. Glendale Community Coll. Lib.,
Glendale, CA. 6 April 2009. <http://galenet.galegroup.com>.
Hemingway, Ernest. The Sun Also Rises. New York: Scribner, 1954.
Mahadevan, Jeremy. “A Compleat life with Less Pain”. Kuala Lumpur 19 Nov. 2004: 3.
Proquest. Glendale Community College, Glendale, CA. 28 April 2009
<http://proquest.umi.com>.
Schwarz, Jeffrey A. “The Saloon Must Go, and I Will Take it With Me”: American
Prohibition, Nationalism, and Expatriation in the Sun Also Rises.” Studies in the
Novel 33.2 (2001): 180. Literature Resource Center. Gale Group. Glendale
Community Coll. Lib., Glendale, CA. 4 May 2009
<http://galenet.galegroup.com>.
Soto, Michael. “Hemingway Among the Bohemians: A Generational Reading of The Sun
Also Rises.” Hemingway Review. 21.1 (2001): 5-21. Literature Resource Center.
Gale Group. Glendale Community Coll. Lib., Glendale, CA. 3 May 2009
<http://galenet.galegroup.com>.