Hemingway & Bailey's Bartending Guide to Great American Writers
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HEMINGWAY & BAILEY’S BARTENDING GUIDE
TO GREAT AMERICAN WRITERS
ILLUSTRATED BY EDWARD HEMINGWAY
WRITTEN BY MARK BAILEY
Algonquin Books of Chapel Hill
“It has been my experience that folks who have no vices have very few virtues.” —Abraham Lincoln
“If I had to live my life over, I’d live over a saloon.” —W. C. Fields
Contents
Introduction
Tools of the Trade
JAMES AGEE Whiskey Sour
CONRAD AIKEN Negroni
SHERWOOD ANDERSON Old-Fashioned
JAMES BALDWIN Shandy Gaff
DJUNA BARNES French 75
ROBERT BENCHLEY Orange Blossom
JOHN BERRYMAN Bronx Cocktail
CHARLES BUKOWSKI Boilermaker
TRUMAN CAPOTE Screwdriver
RAYMOND CARVER Bloody Mary
RAYMOND CHANDLER Gimlet
JOHN CHEEVER Rusty Nail
JAMES GOULD COZZENS Half and Half
HART CRANE Mai Tai
WILLIAM FAULKNER Mint Julep
F. SCOTT FITZGERALD Gin Rickey
DASHIELL HAMMETT Martini
LILLIAN HELLMAN Daiquiri
ERNEST HEMINGWAY Mojito
CHESTER HIMES Tom Collins
JAMES JONES Singapore Sling
JACK KEROUAC Margarita
RING LARDNER Manhattan
SINCLAIR LEWIS Bellini
JACK LONDON Bacardi Cocktail
ROBERT LOWELL Ward Eight
CARSON McCULLERS Long Island Iced Tea
H. L. MENCKEN Stinger
EDNA ST. VINCENT MILLAY Between the Sheets
JOHN O’HARA Planter’s Punch
EUGENE O’NEILL Gibson
DOROTHY PARKER Champagne Cocktail
EDGAR ALLAN POE Sazerac
DAWN POWELL Dubonnet Cocktail
ANNE SEXTON Kir Royale
JEAN STAFFORD Cuba Libre
JOHN STEINBECK Jack Rose
HUNTER S. THOMPSON Greyhound
JIM THOMPSON Sidecar
JAMES THURBER Brandy Alexander
TENNESSEE WILLIAMS Ramos Fizz
EDMUND WILSON White Russian
THOMAS WOLFE Rob Roy
Sources
Acknowledgments
Introduction
This book grew out of a simple observation: writers like to drink. Not all writers, of course, but most. Or at least they used to. The writers in this book, for example, forty-three great men and women of American letters. From James Agee to Thomas Wolfe, the list includes five Nobel Laureates and fifteen Pulitzer Prize winners, not to mention the National Book Award winners, Academy Award winners, and just plain best-sellers. It’s a who’s who of our nation’s most accomplished novelists, short-story writers, poets, playwrights, journalists, and critics. And they all loved their liquor.
The two of us were talking about this one snowy night a few years ago. We were at a Christmas party in a bar in Greenwich Village, sitting on barstools drinking beers and feeling a touch nostalgic. The night had not started out that way. For any number of reasons (the cheer of the holiday season, the beauty of snow falling in New York, the pleasure of an open bar), we had been looking forward to a pretty serious bender. Yet to our surprise, the party was not with us. There we were, in a bar filled with writers, and the crowd could not have been more tame.
In the good old days, we imagined, things would have been very different. In the good old days, the myth of the hard-drinking writer was not just a myth. But clearly that world had disappeared long ago. Still, the stories remained—F. Scott and Zelda Fitzgerald showing up at parties in their pajamas, Ernest Hemingway busting John O’Hara’s walking stick over his own head, John Steinbeck and Robert Benchley diving for wine bottles at the bottom of a pool. The drunken tales of wilder times. And, of course, the cocktails survived too, if barely—the Sidecar, the Stinger, the French 75—like the language of a lost civilization. We ordered more beers. But wasn’t that at least something—the stories, the cocktails? We took another sip. And wouldn’t it be something greater still to travel back, even if only in spirit?
We decided to give it a try. One more round, but this time a Mojito, as Hemingway would have had it. And a Gin Rickey for Fitzgerald. We watched the bartender line up the glasses.
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In New York, Los Angeles, Paris, at places like the “21” Club, the Musso & Frank Grill, and the Ritz Hotel, classic writers drank classic cocktails. Some had clear favorites. Others were more fickle. What they shared, though, was a common thirst and a high regard for the well-made drink.
Through research, deduction, and a little imagination, we have tried to honor that with our own recipes. We have tested every cocktail in this book—tested and re-tested. They are well-made drinks, true to the spirit of their day and, as important, delicious too.
When asked about writers and their affinity for alcohol, Truman Capote quoted Irish playwright Brendan Behan, “We are drinkers with writing problems.” It was a confession of sorts, that the scales had tipped for him. Maybe they tipped for other writers in this book too. Why did they drink so much? Did alcohol help or hurt their writing? These are worthwhile questions and there are no easy answers. But then this is, after all, a bartending guide, and who are we to say.
What we have done is to offer up some brief excerpts from their literary works. Tidbits from the novels and short stories, the plays and poems and articles that made these writers great. One thing is clear: however pickled these writers may have been, they left an extraordinary body of literature behind for us.
So let’s lift the first glass to them, to these forty-three great men and women. It is our hope that through their drinks, their stories, their colorful faces, that you too will be able to travel back—to the good old days. All we ask is that you be a little careful as you go. Remember, a couple of cocktails doesn’t make you a drunk, and no amount of liquor can make you a writer.
Edward Hemingway & Mark Bailey
Tools of the Trade
UTENSILS
SIMPLE SYRUP
1 cup granulated sugar
1 cup water
(One-to-one ratio, as much as desired for use or storage.)
Stir 1 cup of granulated sugar and 1 cup of water in a saucepan over medium heat. Bring to a light boil and then let simmer until sugar is completely dissolved. remove pan from heat, and let cool.
If storing, pour cooled syrup into a glass bottle or jar, cap tightly, and refrigerate. Should keep for a week.
GLASSES
GARNISHES
James Agee
“After one drink it’s very hard not to take another, and after three it is even harder not to take three more.”
Agee, often quiet and despairing when sober, was transformed by alcohol. The life of the party, no, but he could be terrifically entertaining. Director John Huston found that the more Agee drank the more he talked, and the funnier he got. A clever parodist, he liked to mime a piss-drunk Ulysses S. Grant accepting the sword from Robert E. Lee at Appomattox and sliding onto the floor. Although not an actor, Agee occasionally cast himself in bit roles. He played a drunk in both The Bride Comes to Yellow Sky and a television film on Abraham Lincoln. Clearly, he knew how to play to his strengths.
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1909–1955. Novelist, journalist, screenwriter, film critic, and poet. Let Us Now Praise Famous Men, poorly received at the time of publication, is Agee’s most celebrated work. His unfinished autobiographical novel, A
Death in the Family, won the Pulitzer Prize. The African Queen, written with John Huston, was nominated for an Academy Award.
WHISKEY SOUR
Like many southern writers, Agee (born in Knoxville, Tennessee) loved his bourbon. One of America’s oldest cocktails, the venerable Whiskey Sour is a fine way to imbibe yours. When made just right, a balance between sweet and sour is achieved.
2 oz. bourbon, rye, or blended whiskey
¾ oz. simple syrup
¾ oz. lemon juice
Orange or lemon slice
Maraschino cherry
Pour all ingredients into a cocktail shaker filled with ice cubes. Shake well. Strain into a chilled cocktail glass. Garnish with orange or lemon slice and cherry. Traditionally, a raw egg white is added to give the drink a silky consistency.
The Whiskey Sour can also be served on the rocks in an Old-Fashioned glass.
From A Death in the Family, 1938
“BLESS YOU, PAPA.”
“Rats. Drink your drink.”
She drank deeply and shuddered.
“Take all you can without getting drunk,” he said. “I wouldn’t give a whoop if you got blind drunk, best thing you could do. But you’ve got tomorrow to reckon with.” And tomorrow and tomorrow.
“It doesn’t seem to have any effect,” she said, her voice still liquid. “The only times I drank before I had a terribly weak head, just one drink was enough to make me absolutely squiffy. But now it doesn’t seem to have any effect in the slightest.” She drank some more.
“Good,” he said. “That can happen.”
Conrad Aiken
“A poet without alcohol is no real poet.”
One evening at a pub in England, Aiken and Malcolm Lowry (a writer who also liked his liquor) set to drinking at a relatively brisk pace. After more than a couple, they headed out into the thick fog. At nine o’clock, Aiken’s worried wife, Clarissa, was stunned to see two mud-soaked zombies lurch into the house. It turned out they had staged an impromptu javelin-throw—this across an inlet where three rivers converged. Unfortunately, Aiken forgot to let go of the javelin and fell into the river. Lowry slipped in after him. Given the dark night and the slimy wall, they were lucky the tide proved lower than their blood alcohol levels.
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1889–1973. Poet, short-story writer, and novelist. Aiken gained recognition with his first book of verse, Earth Triumphant. His Selected Poems was awarded a Pulitzer Prize, his Collected Poems a National Book Award. Aiken’s best-known short story is “Silent Snow, Silent Secret.”
NEGRONI
The Negroni, supposedly named after a bar-hopping Italian count, has a remarkable red-orange color and a taste as distinctive and complex as any Aiken poem. You have to appreciate Campari, and not everyone does. Like a Martini, a Negroni can be made dry or sweet.
1 oz. gin
1 oz. sweet vermouth
1 oz. Campari
Orange twist
Pour all ingredients into an Old-Fashioned glass filled with ice cubes. Stir gently. Garnish with orange twist. Sometimes a splash of club soda is added.
The Negroni can also be served straight up in a cocktail glass.
From “Punch the Immortal Liar,” 1921
Punch in a beer-house, drinking beer,
Booms with his voice so that all may hear,
Bangs on the table with a red-haired fist,
Writhes in his chair with a hump-backed twist,
Leers at his huge nose, in the glass,
And then proclaims in a voice of brass:
Let all who would prosper and be free
Mark my words and listen to me!
Call me a hunchback? call me a clown?
I turned the universe upside down!
And where is the law or love or chain
That can’t be broken by nerve or brain?
Sherwood Anderson
“When you get drunk there is no difference between you and a lot of drunken advertising men.”
In New Orleans, an introduction was arranged between Anderson and the young William Faulkner. They became instant friends. As impressed as Anderson was with Faulkner’s talent, he was equally impressed with his astonishing tolerance for alcohol. Faulkner attributed his own heavy drinking to his limp and a metal plate in his head, World War I injuries received as a pilot in the Canadian Flying Corps. Believing the tale, Anderson worked the details into a short story, not knowing Faulkner had in truth been too short to enlist. Years later, Anderson himself would be severely injured, fatally in fact. This was not due to wartime exploits, but from drinking itself. Aboard an ocean liner bound for Brazil, Anderson accidentally swallowed a toothpick at a cocktail party. He died shortly afterward of peritonitis—an infection of the stomach.
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1876–1941. Short-story writer and novelist. Most famous for Winesburg, Ohio, a collection of interrelated short stories. In form and subject matter, Anderson’s work was a major influence on younger American writers, including Faulkner, Hemingway, Steinbeck, and Wolfe.
OLD-FASHIONED
You would think with a name like “Old-Fashioned” the recipe would be set in stone, but in fact a heated debate rages around the fruit. Some argue to muddle it; others add it as garnish; still others leave it out altogether. It is not known how Anderson took his Old-Fashioned, but we like our fruit as garnish—and, out of respect for the author, no toothpick.
1 cube of sugar
3 dashes Angostura bitters
2½ oz. bourbon, rye, or blended whiskey
1 dash simple syrup
1 orange slice
1 maraschino cherry
Lemon twist
Place a sugar cube at the bottom of an Old-Fashioned glass. Add bitters, and muddle. Pour in whiskey and a dash of simple syrup. Fill the glass with ice cubes, and stir gently. Garnish with lemon twist, orange slice, and cherry. Sometimes a splash of club soda is added.
From Winesburg, Ohio, 1919
ONE NIGHT TOM FOSTER GOT DRUNK. That came about in a curious way. He never had been drunk before, and indeed in all his life had never taken a drink of anything intoxicating, but he felt he needed to be drunk that one time and so went and did it. . . .
Tom got drunk sitting on a bank of new grass beside the road about a mile north of town. Before him was a white road and at his back an apple orchard in full bloom. He took a drink out of the bottle and then lay down on the grass. . . .
“It was good to be drunk,” Tom Foster said. “It taught me something. I won’t have to do it again.”
James Baldwin
“At four o’clock in the morning, when everybody’s drunk enough, then extraordinary things can happen.”
In Paris, Baldwin spent many long nights in cafés drinking and arguing with writers James Jones and William Styron, fellow expatriates with a similar fondness for booze. At Jones’s home, where they would often start out and end up, Jones had a bar made out of an old church pulpit. Late at night, Baldwin, who in his youth had been a preacher, would entertain his friends by delivering mock sermons on the evils of drink.
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1924–1987. Novelist, essayist, short-story writer, and playwright. Best known for his autobiographical first novel, Go Tell It on the Mountain. Baldwin’s second novel, Giovanni’s Room, explored homosexuality and created controversy. An active voice in the civil rights movement, he followed with Another Country and The Fire Next Time. Baldwin spent much of his career as an expatriate in Paris.
SHANDY GAFF
In his novel Tell Me How Long the Train’s Been Gone, Baldwin’s young protagonist Leo takes one of his first drinks ever—whiskey with ginger ale. The Shandy Gaff is beer with ginger ale. Originally created in Great Britain, Shandies have been around since the late 1800s.
8 oz. lager beer or amber ale
8 oz. ginger ale soda
Pour beer into a chilled beer mug, add ginger ale.
From Tell Me How Long the Train’s Been Gone, 1968
&
nbsp; OUR MOTHER RETURNED AND SHE POURED the drinks. I wasn’t really permitted to drink, and, luckily, in those days, I didn’t like to drink; but this prohibition, like all of my parents’ prohibitions, was rendered a dead letter by the fact that my parents knew very well that I did whatever I wished, outside. Now, my mother said, “I’m making yours real weak, Leo,” and handed me a glass of ginger ale only very faintly colored by whiskey. “That’s just so you can feel part of the family,” she said, and handed drinks to my father and Caleb and sat down. Caleb and our father looked at each other, but neither of them smiled. I drank my ginger ale. I thought of a girl I knew. I tried to think of everything but the room I was in, and the people I was with.
Djuna Barnes
“I’ve wrestled with tigers until my nightdress was soaking wet, that is, struggling not to take a drink.”
Sharp-tongued and independent-minded, Barnes was a fixture on the Left Bank and a force to be reckoned with. Peggy Guggenheim claimed she averaged a bottle of whiskey a day. Walter Winchell said he saw her hit a spittoon from thirty feet away. Barnes enjoyed her lovers too, men and women alike. She must have packed in more than enough during her nights at Le Dome, Hotel Jacob, and the Dingo, because when she returned to the States, she spent the next forty-odd years as a recluse. Even a drunk Carson McCullers, who’d come around to pay homage at Barnes’s West Village apartment, was left to cry on the doorstep.