Where Hemingway Drank: and why we care

Where Hemingway Drank:
and why we care

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In today’s installment of Proof, an occasional series about alcoholic drink in the New York Times, Alexander Nazaryan has a column that deals mostly with Ernest Hemingway’s favorite Paris watering holes and his fiction. In this piece Nazaryan records widespread, and completely untrue, stereotypes about both.

On the first subject, Nazaryan visits the Hemingway Bar at the Ritz Hotel in Paris. He tells us that he is disappointed to find that this in not in fact the bar Hemingway knew and that, “Hemingway and his coterie of American expatriates in the 1920’s drank at a larger bar in the hotel, which is now the unappealingly modern Ritz Club.” This is, at least according to the best source I know, Ernest Hemingway, entirely incorrect.

Hemingway records his version of his life in Paris in the 1920’s in, “A Movable Feast,” a remarkable piece of writing which is one of the most underrated pieces of evocative literary biography ever written. In “Feast” Hemingway tells us that his favorite hangout during his early years in Paris was the Closerie de Lilas, which according to Google Maps is still in business at 171 Boulevard Montparnasse in Paris. This café was about a block away from Hemingway’s cold water flat above113 Rue Notre Dame du Champs and Hemingway would often work at the Lilas because it was rare that celebrities and art scene hangers-on would wander down from the famous cafes at the corner of Boulevards Montparnasse and Raspail to bother him. When he was done working Hemingway would often go up Montparnasse to Raspail himself to have a drink with friends, or “completely worthless characters,” depending on which chance happened to put in his way.

Hemingway does not seem to have thought much of the large and famous Café Rotonde. In fact he wrote a scathing commentary on the crowd to be found there for the Toronto Star in which he allowed that, “The scum of Greenwich Village, New York has been skimmed off and deposited in large ladlesful on that section of Paris adjacent to the Café Rotonde.” He was a little more tolerant of the other “big café” the Dome and records that once he, “passed the collection of inmates at the Rotonde and, scorning vice and the collective instinct, crossed the boulevard to the Dome,” where he had a pleasant drink with the artist Jules Pascin. Pascin’s suicide would later shock the left bank community and Hemingway says that when thinking of Pascin he preferred to recall that happy evening and, “the lovely painter that he was.”

But Hemingway and his friends and acquaintances, I can not think of a writer who was less likely to have a coterie than Hemingway, did most of their drinking at smaller cafes near the Montparnasse/Raspail intersection, primarily the Select and the Dingo. (The Select is also still in business at 99 Montparnasse. The Dingo at 10 Rue Delambre is now an Italian restaurant according to Google,) Hemingway was drinking in the Dingo when he first met Scott Fitzgerald. His preference for these cafes is also confirmed in the fictional descriptions in, “The Sun Also Rises.” When his colleagues ask the protagonist, American reporter Jake Barnes, which are the trendy clubs in “the Quarter” he agrees that “the great place” is either the Dingo or the Select. It is at the Select that Robert Cohn separates from Frances. When Jake is looking for Brett and Michael he goes first to the Select and when they aren’t there he immediately finds them at the Dingo. el

According to Hemingway when, during the 20s and 30s, he had the money to go some place expensive he drank at the bar of the Hotel Crillon. It was Scott Fitzgerald, who achieved financial success as a writer before Hemingway, who drank at the Ritz during the expatriate period.

The problem with the Hemingway Bar at the Ritz, then, is not that it is in the wrong room but that it is in the wrong hotel, and indeed, is the wrong sort of place in the wrong part of town. If there were any justice, or authenticity, the name would be changed to the Fitzgerald Bar. Hemingway tells us that Fitzgerald went there frequently and that it, “meant very much to him.”

My objections to Nazaryan’s criticisms of Hemingway as a drinker and a writer are just as deep but a little harder to prove denotatively.

Nazaryan tells us that Hemingway was, “a notorious alcoholic whose drinking hastened the slow burn of depression and led to his suicide.” Hemingway tells us that, “In Europe then we thought of wine as something as healthy and normal as food and also a great giver of happiness and well being and delight. Drinking wine was not a snobbism nor a sign of sophistication nor a cult; it was as natural to me as eating and as necessary, and I would not have thought of eating a meal without…wine.”

Nazaryan also dismisses Hemingway as a writer telling us that, “The uncompromising machismo of his characters came to seem like an anachronism in the wake of World War II and its brutalities. By the 60’s, Papa was past his prime.” In the first place Hemingway died in 1961 so by most of the 60s he was dead. Before he left however, he finished “Feast” which is a better piece of writing than either Mr. Nazaryan or I will ever do. That isn’t so bad for being past your prime.

But Nazaryan’s remarks represent of course the accepted post-structuralist take on Hemingway, that he was a macho self promoter without subtlety. But of course since Hemingway never went to college, much less earned a degree in literature, it is absolutely necessary for literature professors to represent him as second rate. If he was, as I believe, the greatest practitioner of the modern style and the most influential American writer to date, then his career would be a challenge to the very existence of the literary establishment.

I find it especially odd that the example of macho shallowness that Nazaryan chooses is the Robert Jordan character from, “For Whom the Bell Tolls.” In this novel, his masterpiece, Hemingway develops Jordan as the quintessential stream of consciousness protagonist. We enter into his mind. We see his doubt, his struggles, his internal conflicts. We see how much he relies on women. How important the strength of Pilar and the love of Maria are in his life. The only thing macho about Robert Jordan is that he does his duty, that he fights and dies for a cause. And it is this, a devotion to a sense of morality beyond himself, and not any sense of machismo, that offends the current literary establishment.

Perhaps there is a clue to resolving the disagreement that Nazaryan and I have about Hemingway, in the name given the bar at the Ritz. Hemingway did not drink there until late in his life. Fitzgerald loved the place. Nazaryan tells us that Hemingway is an anachronism and that Fitzgerald is more suited to our times. But it is Hemingway’s name that draws people in off the street, not Fitzgerald’s. Perhaps Hemingway’s sin then is not in being passé, but in being popular with readers who have no literary training.