Book: The Old Soak and Hail And Farewell

Overview
Don Marquis’s The Old Soak and Hail And Farewell (1921) gathers a popular vein of his newspaper humor into book form at the dawn of Prohibition. The volume centers on the Old Soak, a bibulous, self-justifying philosopher of the saloon, and concludes with a valedictory sequence that broadens the mood from comic defiance to rueful farewell. Written by a columnist with a finely tuned ear for American speech, the collection blends barroom tall tale, domestic skirmish, and civic satire into a portrait of a country trying to legislate temperance and a man determined to elude it.

The Old Soak
The Old Soak is less a plot-driven protagonist than a recurring voice. He speaks in monologues, letters, and snappy dialogues, a kind of homespun Socratic method fueled by memory and moonshine. He adores drink with the candor of a lover and the sophistry of a lawyer, and his reasoning turns every count against him into a defense: liquor, he argues, is patriotic, medicinal, ancestral, or at least inevitable. Domestic comedy runs through these pieces: the Old Soak faces the steady skepticism of his long-suffering wife and the anxious respectability of younger relations, who would like him sober yet profit from his ingenuity when supplies run low.

Scenes pivot on the daily absurdities of the dry era. He extols “real” whiskey against harsh substitutes, recalls guarding a private cache in the cellar, contemplates dubious patent remedies, and rails at the hypocrisies of officials who sermonize by day and sip by night. Bootleggers, druggists, and speakeasy doormen wander in as foils, while the Old Soak conducts philosophy seminars on topics like the difference between thirst and appetite, or the moral superiority of a convivial drunkard over a dour reformer. The punchlines are vigorous, but Marquis threads them with a wistful sense of a social world disbanding.

Hail And Farewell
The closing section modulates from monologue to a broader, more reflective register. The jokes remain, yet the accent shifts toward elegy. These pages lift the gaze from one obstinate tippler to a city of shuttered bars and displaced barkeeps, to the rituals of last calls and the strange quiet that follows. Marquis salutes the lost theater of the saloon, its brass rails, its unwritten codes, its cross-class conversation, while observing how quickly new customs spring up in back rooms and kitchen sinks. “Hail and farewell” becomes a double gesture: greeting an improvised future and bidding goodbye to an institution that, for all its vices, organized a public life of talk and company.

Themes and Style
Under the laughter runs a debate about American character. The Old Soak embodies the individualist instinct to bargain with the law and the national genius for turning prohibitions into opportunities. Marquis skewers sanctimony without celebrating ruin; he understands addiction’s comedy and its melancholy, and he lets the Old Soak’s charm coexist with his evasions. The style marries dialect humor to quick epigram and mock-heroic flourish, capturing the rhythms of a voice that is both shrewd and self-deluding.

Significance
As a time capsule of early Prohibition, the book records the jury-rigged culture that bloomed under the Volstead Act, and it helped fix the Old Soak as an American archetype, part rascal, part moralist, part casualty. Its popularity led to stage and screen adaptations, but the lasting appeal lies in Marquis’s humane balance of satire and sympathy. The Old Soak and Hail And Farewell preserves a world evaporating even as it jokes about its own evaporation, raising a glass to what is vanishing and to the stubborn, unquenchable talk that remains.