GEORGE MONTEIRO
627
diating such friends in time. If Loeb's Jewishness was more of a tool use–
ful in Hemingway's repudiation of Loeb than one of its causes, perhaps the
same argument can be used to explain Jake's ambivalent feelings about
Cohn and his Jewishness. But into the mix must go Hutchins Hapgood's
point about Hemingway's use of his Jewishness against Cohn. Obviously
referring to Loeb though not naming him, Hapgood explains to
Hemingway, as he reports in
A Victorian in the Modern U0rld
(1939):
Your character of Cohn in
The Sun Also Rises,
is a remarkable picture
of a human being. I know the man who served as a sitter to you for
the portrait, know him very slightly, and it is a striking fact that only
on the slightest acquaintance, he affected me the same way as he
affected the other characters in your book. Without doing or saying
anything that I could fairly resent, he yet made me feel uncomfortable,
the two or three times I was with him. But he made me uncomfort–
able not because he was a Jew but because he was the man you call
Cohn.
It
has never seemed to me to be fair to put into an unfavorable
picture of a human being the factor of race as a causal relationship. It
is certainly something which one cannot expect the Jews to like.
Such misuse was not only unfair on Hemingway's part, as Hapgood
charges, but, it might be added, unrelentingly abusive onJake's.Joyce Carol
Oates draws a telling contrast between Hemingway's Jake and Fitzgerald's
Nick Carraway, when she discusses "the Jew Robert Cohn":
The fact that Cohn cannot drink as heavily as the others, that the bull–
fight sickens him (especially the disemboweling of the picador's
horse), that in this noisy macho milieu he finally breaks down and
cries-these things seem altogether to his credit; he emerges as the
novel's most distinctly drawn character. One waits in vain, however,
for Jake Barnes to rise to Nick Carraway's judgment of Jay Gatsby:
"You're worth the whole damn bunch put together."
Be all that as it may, Loeb the writer had already addressed his dis–
comfort with his Jewishness when
The Sun Also Rises
appeared in the fall
of
1926.
Although
The Professors Like Vodka
was published later, it was writ–
ten before the publication of
Sun.
Loeb's hero, John Mercado, teaches
American literature at an American university. When we meet him he is
spending his summer in Paris, accompanied by a fellow teacher named Bill
