Bill Gorton
Jake's fishing companion and the book's comic engine — arriving from New York with stuffed dogs on his mind and 'never be daunted' as doctrine.
A good lunch, a cold bottle, and the fishing to go on. Over lunch on the river he turns handing across the wine into a mock sermon: let us rejoice in our blessings, let us utilize the fowls of the air, let us utilize the product of the vine.
The book
At a glance
- American writer, flush from a successful book, Jake's oldest easy friendship
- Paris, the Burguete fishing chapters, and Pamplona
- Budapest, absolutely wonderful; Vienna, four days he cannot account for
- Chicago — Jake answers for him, on the train south from Paris
- 'Utilize', 'irony and pity', and never be daunted
Who they are in the book
Spoiler-freeBill is the friend the book relaxes around. A writer with money from his last book and a syndicated wit, he blows into Paris via Vienna and Budapest, tries to buy Jake a stuffed dog on general principle, and turns the walk to dinner into a comic monologue on irony, pity, and the expatriate condition. He is the only man in the cast whose friendship with Jake carries no bill and no undertow — which is why the novel gives him its greenest chapters.
Those chapters are Burguete: five days of trout, wine cooled in the stream, and the double act with Jake that readers remember as the happiest writing Hemingway ever did. Bill sees the crowd clearly — his verdicts on Cohn and Mike are the book's fairest — but he'd rather fish than judge, and the novel largely agrees with him.
How the book draws them
- The patterVaudeville rhythms in the mountain air — 'utilize a little of this,' the irony-and-pity routine — comedy as a way of saying the serious things sideways.
- The appetiteEggs before chicken, wine over money, and no meal in the book enjoyed harder — the fishing picnic by the Irati is half his.
- The decencyHe needles Cohn like the others but stops sooner, and says the quiet fair thing when Mike goes too far — the book's conscience in a comedian's suit.
- The stuffed dogHe stops dead at a taxidermist's window and campaigns, at length, for Jake to buy a stuffed dog. Simple exchange of values, he explains: you give them money, they give you a stuffed dog.
- The expatriate sermonOver breakfast at Burguete he indicts Jake as one of the worst type — lost touch with the soil, gone precious, drinking himself to death, all talk and no work. It is a joke, and it is also the book's own charge sheet read aloud.
- Borrowed wordsHis vocabulary spreads. Harris picks up 'utilize' from him within a week at the inn, which is the plainest measure of how much company Bill is.
Bill has no ending to spoil — he fishes, jokes, sees the fiesta through, and goes home intact, the one main character the novel doesn't charge admission. The men behind him fared differently. Bill Smith was Hemingway's boyhood fishing friend from the Michigan summers, transplanted to the 1925 fiesta almost unchanged. Donald Ogden Stewart, the famous humorist who'd been at Pamplona in 1924 and 1925 and supplied Gorton's professional wit, went to Hollywood and won an Academy Award for the screenplay of The Philadelphia Story — then was blacklisted in the fifties for his politics and lived out his last three decades in London, where he died in 1980.