Dardis does Hemingway

The Thirsty Muse: Alcohol and the American Writer (rev. ed. 1991), an excellent book by Tom Dardis, who died in 2001, tells of booze's pernicious effects on four writers' talents. I've always been torn over Hemingway — obviously not my kind of prose. I offer a few passages from Dardis on Hemingway's decline; the meat of the literary judgment comes at the end.

pp. 162-63:

In those Paris years the day's drinking for Hemingway did not begin until his self-imposed quota of words had been achieved; keeping alcohol and writing apart seemed easy enough, and Hemingway appeared to have a special talent for drinking, despite occasional signs that all was not as benign as it might appear. . . .

His writing flowed miraculously in the late twenties with a power comparable only to that of Faulkner at the same time. Besides The Sun Also Rises and A Farewell to Arms, Hemingway published a series of short stories that continue to command our admiration . . . .

pp. 188-89:

The characters in The Sun Also Rises were heavy drinkers, especially Brett and Jake, but they appear abstemious compared with Cantwell [Across the River and into the Sea], to whom Hemingway has attributed his own vast capacity. He tells us about each and every drink the Colonel consumes, starting with his arrival in Venice in the late afternoon.

Cantwell begins with a gin and Campari before moving on to the bar at the Gritti Palace Hotel, where he drinks three very dry double martinis. When he leaves the bar for his room, his waiter gratuitously serves him a gin and Campari, which the Colonel regards as "an unwanted drink," but he finishes it nevertheless, as he tells himself that "it is bad for him." It's then time to meet Renata at Harry's New York Bar, where he lowers three Montgomerys, explaining to her that they are extra-dry martinis made with a ratio of fifteen parts of gin to one of vermouth. Now the couple return to the Gritti Palace to order their dinner and the wines to drink with it. They begin with a bottle of Capri Bianca, proceed to two bottles of Valpolicella, followed by a bottle of champagne, Roederer brut '42. They like the Roederer well enough to order another bottle but have to settle for Perrier-Jouet, which brings their meal to a close.

When they leave the hotel for their lovemaking in the gondola, they take along another bottle of the Valpolicella. At the end of his evening, the Colonel has a nightcap from still another bottle of Valpolicella, which the waiter has thoughtfully left in his room. Over a period of six or seven hours Cantwell has consumed between twenty-four and twenty-eight ounces of alcohol in the gin drinks and a dozen or so in the various wines. It all adds up to more than a quart, which would render most of us insensible. Although the Colonel is described as terminally ill with a cardiac condition, he is nevertheless capable of performing the sexual act in the gondola with Renata at least twice and arising the next morning "at first light" with no aftereffects.

There is something of "cloud cuckoo land" in the ritualistic manner the characters muse over the name-brand drinks they order, but Hemingway was seemingly oblivious to reality here because this was the way he then drank in order to maintain himself comfortably in daily existence . . . .

191-192

At fifty Hemingway had unquestionably become that which he had always scorned: a rummy, or a man who cannot go without a maintenance drink for more than an hour or so without extreme discomfort. As his son Patrick remarked, the moment his father was deprived of alcohol he became badly depressed; he now required at least a quart per day.

Conforming to the adage that you cannot underestimate the taste of the American public, Across the River and into the Trees sold extremely well despite a critical reception that was mostly hostile. His next book, coming just two years later, was The Old Man and the Sea, which succeeded in winning him the Nobel Prize. Telling people that the novella is a trite, sentimental tale often produces an effect similar to informing children that there is no Santa Claus and that they will get no Christmas presents. If is a self-conscious work brimming over with Christ and crucifixion symbols; it is fatally marred by its whimsical, folksy talk about the Indians of Cleveland and the Great DiMaggio. Hemingway had set down a far superior tale about indomitability in "The Undefeated" in 1927, a story written without sentimentality but with the care of a writer in perfect control of his material. What should be hard and taut about The Old Man and the Sea is instead soft and self-indulgent.

Nevertheless, the little book took the world by storm and has become a fixture in the curriculum of American schools because it is short and contains "symbols" that the teacher can unveil for the student; it is currently the American student's major contact with Hemingway. The fantastic triumph of the book included its being hailed by people of taste such as Bernard Berenson and Cyril Connolly, who compared it to Flaubert's "A Simple Heart." This sudden swing in opinion about his work made his oft-repeated question "How do you like it now, gentlemen?" take on new meaning.

Like nearly all of Faulkner's later work, The Old Man and the Sea is based directly upon observations from the distant past: Hemingway had written an embryonic version of his tale about Santiage and his giant marlin for the pages of Esquire in 1936. "Invention from knowledge," as he liked to call his method of writing, was his uncanny ability to create situations, places and people entirely from what he had seen. But that talent was now in abeyance, and the occasionally self-parodic image of Papa Hemingway was in full command. By the time Across the River and The Old Man and the Sea had appeared, Hemingway had lost the "magic," the thing he justly praised in the best of Fitzgerald and Faulkner. By the early 1950s his writing had become as marred as Faulkner's was by this time. In the midst of a book in which he had invested a great deal of emotional capital, he indulged in literary vendettas against people like Sinclair Lewis, whom he pilloried in Across the River. There was now a kind of boozy sentimentality running through his work, visible on many of the pages of The Old Man and the Sea. It is fair to say that with a single magnificent exception to come, everything he published after 1940 partakes of this increasingly prosaic quality.