I was talking to some friends of mine today about Ernest Hemingway. They were calling him a faggot, because they’d been made to read him by lady English teachers with asinine thoughts about him (one of my friends words).

I disagreed, of course, because I love Hemingway as much as a man has ever loved an author he never had the chance to meet. Hemingway has an ability to be so evocative with so few words, it’s unbelievable.

To illustrate this, and to illustrate to my friends why I think that Hemingway is actually the manliest writer to ever do it, I recited to them, in brief, the story of The Sun Also Rises, and my favorite scene in the book from memory. I’ll do the same for you now, and then I have some other thoughts I might elucidate if I have time.

The Sun Also Rises is a novel about one of the most miserable guys that ever lived, as an avatar of everything bad that happened to every veteran of the first world war. He is an American expatriate living in a stumbling-to-its-feet France, among an entourage of other expats. Most important among them is Brett, the woman he loves but cannot be with for so many reasons. Amidst the sort of melodramatic milieu you would expect of wealthy aristocratic expatriates, which Jake, the protagonist finds unfathomably boring, a large group of friends decide to head south for the summer to enjoy the countryside of Spain. Jake is more interested than normal in this because it will allow him to indulge in one of the few passions he allows himself to actually enjoy these days: bullfighting. Jake is a foreign correspondent for American newspapers covering the bullfights, mostly from local reporting, and relishes, as much as he’s able to, the opportunity to see it firsthand again.

And so, he, and Brett, and a bunch of their friends, and the man that Brett is presently romantically entangled with, head south to a small town in the countryside with a bullring and set up shop for the time being.

Eventually, word reaches the town that one of the most exciting bullfighters in the country will be coming to town, and with him, one of the most fearsome bulls in Spain. The stage is set for high drama, which as you might imagine, unfolds in just about as compelling a manner as you might imagine one of the greatest authors of all time could make it.

Really though, the stage is set more than well enough for my favorite line.

After the bullfighter arrives to town, but before his most important fight, Brett leaves her lover she’d brought with her, and starts seriously pursuing the bullfighter. He’s more than receptive. Jake watches the whole thing from afar, crushed by the entire situation. Crushed by watching the woman he loves go from man to man like it were nothing. Crushed by seeing the woman he loves fall in love with yet another man he feels close to. Crushed by watching her jeopardize his bullfighting ability with constant distractions. Crushed by his inability to do anything. Crushed by knowing that he doesn’t even want to, anymore. And in the midst of watching all of this unfold before him, and doing all he can not to weep at the scale of the tragedy that seems to never loosen its grip on him, for even a second, Brett and the bullfighter invite him to a party. He accepts. He is stunned into a total apathetic coma. Watching the party like a bullfight, taking particular note of how Brett and the bullfighter move together, how confidently he steps, how sure both of them are of their movements. Noting the fervor of the crowd watching them, the tension building in the room.

And as all of this is going down, Brett takes a moment to have a drink of champagne, and offers Jake a glass, and he accepts. And delivers my favorite line of any book, ever:

“It was amazing champagne.”

And that is why I love Hemingway. He can take a scene and a mood and distill it into a sentence that you can feel drip with all of the emotion of the character. You read that sentence and you just know how Jake feels. You feel it in your own soul. The crushing weight of the scene, of the situation, of the narrative, of the entire world bearing down on Jake’s chest, like a bull on the charge. And the moment he sips the champagne, and notices how good it is, despite everything, despite the deep, deep pit of despair he finds himself in, he feels the bull plunge his horns into his chest and toss him aside.

And THAT is Ernest Hemingway.