On Barfing

   This is a subject with which we are all familiar, but I am unusual in that I choose to bring it up. I do so because I just read an account of such an activity and was reminded of reading of another. Neither of them are from novels written about fraternities, but both involve nausea that is self-inflicted, and not from actions such as sailing or riding on the Tilt-A-Hurl at the amusement park. More specifically, I am referring to the barfing that results from having consumed too much alcohol, and when one ends up “Talking to Ralph on the big white telephone.” My first experience of puking because of drinking occurred in early adolescence, a fact of which I am no longer proud. Encountering examples involving adults overindulging, in books written by real authors, means I know longer need to feel embarrassed.

   It is probably quite common to run across vomiting in literary works and there are likely several doctoral dissertations about the subject. The two episodes I have chosen may be unique in that they both involve stairs, and are perhaps at least worthy of treatment in a master’s thesis. In the first case, the barf is encountered on the way up the stairs, while in the second it is found when descending. The first is presented because of the quality and vividness of the description of the source of the spew. The second is offered as a slippery way for me to introduce you to a good book by an author who has drank and puked a lot.

  This example is provided by Patrick Leigh Fermor, who as a teenager in the early 1930s is walking across Europe. On this winter day he is looking for a Hofbräuhaus and finds one.

    I was back in beer territory. Halfway up the vaulted stairs a groaning Brownshirt, propped against the wall on a swastika’d arm, was unloosing, in a staunchless gush down the steps, the intake of hours. Love’s labour lost. 
   Each new storey radiated great halls given over to ingestion…[One can get an idea] of the transformation that beer, in collusion with almost non-stop eating -- meals within meals dovetailing so closely during the hours of waking  that there is hardly an interprandial moment -- can wreak on the human frame… The trunks of these feasting burghers were as wide as casks. The spread of their buttocks over the oak benches was not far short of a yard. They branched at the loins into thighs as thick as the torsos of ten-year-olds and arms on the same scale strained like bolsters at the confining serge. Chin and chest formed a single column, and each close-packed nape was creased with its three deceptive smiles. Every bristle had been cropped and shaven from their knobbly scalps. Except when five o’clock veiled them with shadow, surfaces and polished as ostriches’ eggs reflected the lamplight. The frizzy hair of their wives was wrenched up from scarlet necks and pinned under slides and then hatted with green Bavarian trilbys and round one pair of elephantine shoulders a little fox stole was clasped….Hands like bundles of sausages flew nimbly, packing in forkload on forkload of ham, salami, frankfurter, krenwurst and blutwurst and stone tankards were lifted for long swallows of liquid which sprang out again instantaneously on cheek and brow…. Huge oval dishes, laden with schweinebraten, potatoes, sauerkraut, red cabbage and dumplings were laid in front of each diner. They were followed by colossal joints of meat -- unclassifiable helpings which, when they were picked clean, shone on the scoured chargers like calve’s pelvises or the bones of elephants. Waitresses with the build of weight-lifters and all-in wrestlers whirled this provender along and features dripped and glittered like faces at an ogre’s banquet.” A Time of Gifts, pp.90-92.

   The second case is provided by Dervla Murphy in Transylvania and Beyond. Like Fermor, she is walking alone in Europe, near Rarau which is in the Bistrita Mountains (close to the Obcine Range of Bukovina, to give you an idea of its remoteness.) Again, like Fermor, she is looking for a place to drink and bed down and spots a nine storey, unheated old lodge where she finds: 

   “A merry party of eight foresters wore mittens, and sheepskin jackets with the collars rolled up, and fox-fur hats with the ear-flaps pulled down… [They were] mixing cognac, white wine, tuica and beer, which seemed to me unwise. I little realized how soon I was to be the victim of their unwisdom…..[After spending a cold night in her sixth-floor eyrie she got up at dawn]:

Descending the mock-marble staircase in semi-darkness, I slipped on a pile of vomit and landed five steps down with my right ankle twisted under me. It had taken all my body weight, plus a heavy rucksack, and I at once knew it was broken. Apart from the pain, there is an audible thing: the brain, if not the ears, ‘hears’ bones crunching. Picking myself up -- some moments later -- after the first pain-wave had ebbed - I accepted that now was the time to do some involuntary research into  Rumania’s medical service. [which is very poor and the next town is inaccessible to motor vehicles].....Next morning my foot was, if viewed objectively, quite beautiful -- the size and shape of a rugger ball and marbled blue, green, brown and red, like high-quality nineteenth-century endpapers.

[The barfer later shows up - with a bottle to apologize]: By the end of the bottle (we were assisted by my nurse-attendants) Bogdan looked much more cheerful, having been assured that I quite understood his aberration -- that I, too, had over-indulged to the point of throwing up. This admission on ‘granny’s’ part severely shocked [those around her].

From the chapter “Footless in Moldavia” pp.190-193. 

   That's dear Dervla above and the event described happened in 1990 in Rumania. It was one of many unfortunate incidents and the first is found in the first chapter ("Dispossessed on the Frontier") when the Securitate steals all of her belongings. She takes off walking toward the mountains anyway and generally slept outside. When asked if she was afraid to sleep alone, she answered: "There's nothing to be afraid of if you are alone, if no one knows you're there. If however, three hard-drinking men know you're there, a move is indicated." Given that remark, she was probably leery of bunking down with eight foresters, but she was also used to it: "Even in the forenoon there were usually a few men eager to grope at me, while hiccuping in my face; already they were too far gone to see that I was old enough to be their mother. (Or in some cases, grandmother).
   I forgot to mention that Ms Murphy was around 60 back in 1990.

Sources: 
   In a recent post about jails,  I indicated that I was re-reading Fermor's A Time of Gifts and will probably read-again about the rest of his journey in: Between the Woods and the Water and The Broken Road.
   Apart from Transylvania and Beyond, Murphy has written: Where the Winter is Young: Winter in Baltistan; Cameroon With Egbert,(her horse); Tales From Two Cities: Travel of Another Sort; Full Tilt : Ireland to India With a Bicycle, and Eight Feet in the Andes, (The eight feet belonged to Dervla Murphy, her nine-year-old daughter Rachel and Juana, their staunch and beloved mule. They set out to travel some 1300 miles through the Andes from Cajamarca to Cuzco. Along the way they met the descendants of the Incas, suffered hard-ships such as landslides and tormenting insects and revelled in the grandeur of their wild surroundings.)

   As far as I can tell, Ms Murphy is still going full tilt. One of the things I learned when doing this (learning things is another reason for doing them), is that you can find interviews with her on YouTube, during which she is usually holding a beer. She is now 88.

Post Script:
   You are probably surprised that I did not use the word 'Vomitorium' which you, like I, thought was a place where those Germans and the Romans went to purge themselves to make room for more food and drink. We were wrong, since another thing I learned from this exercise is that vomitoria are those entrances and exits from which people can pour from stadiums. I am glad I found this out because one of my loyal readers is a classicist and he would have spotted the error. Actually, he is not that loyal and will only see this if I tell him I have written it. Non-classicists can simply look at the Wikipedia entry for Vomitorium. He can verify this by re-reading:  Radin, Alice P. (8 January 2003). "Fictitious Facts: The Case of the Vomitorium". APAClassics.org. American Philological Association, or "Purging the Myth of the Vomitorium: Ancient Romans Used the Word, but Pop Culture Has the Concept all Wrong," Stephanie Pappas, Scientific American, Aug. 28, 2016.