Martini

by Frank Moorhouse

  She offered Antony the other pearl and the other goblet of vinegar.

  Astonished, Antony declined the course – the matching pearl in the vinegar – and he and the other guests applauded her and acknowledged that she’d won. He later had the remaining pearl made into two earrings to replace the one she had dissolved and consumed.

  ‘That,’ I told Voltz in the Pen and Pencil one night, ‘is said to be the most expensive drink in history.’

  ‘How could she drink the vinegar?’ Voltz asked, ever the sceptic. ‘It’d be undrinkable.’

  ‘A pearl is calcium carbonate, which can be dissolved in a weak acid solution such as vinegar, which is approximately 7% acetic acid – formula: CH3COOH.’ Voltz loves it when I give him chemical formulas.

  He nodded in approval. ‘I knew you’d have a Wollongong answer.’

  ‘The acidic vinegar is neutralised by the calcium carbonate of the pearl, much like an antacid tablet, so it becomes drinkable. Incidentally, some legends suggest that this drink is an aphrodisiac, probably conflated with the legends of oysters and virility. Don’t try it at home.’

  I didn’t tell Voltz that it was more likely to have been a goblet of wine and that she probably swallowed the pearl and retrieved it the next morning. I did not think that the aesthetics of that would please him.

  Strangely enough, my agent Rosemary Creswell then came in to the Pen and Pencil to join us and we linked up with a table of Americans, there in New York, who were, of all things, discussing the Australian early comic strip ‘Ginger Meggs’. But that’s another story.

  My favourite animal martini cartoon from the New Yorker is that of a squirrel sitting quietly in a bar drinking a martini. Instead of an olive, he has an acorn in his martini.

  Only squirrels are permitted to have acorns in their martinis. That’s a universal rule.

  ‘The Olive on the Toothpick Gives the Drink an Axis’

  The girl in the Martini story in Forty-Seventeen observed that the toothpick gave the martini ‘an axis’.

  The martini does require a toothpick (sometimes called a cocktail stick but not by anyone I know) – but never one with a piece of coloured cellophane paper at one end and preferably one made from wood, although I have met people who prefer clear plastic toothpicks for no good reason. Voltz and I were told by a dentist martini drinker in Harry’s Bar in Paris that plastic toothpicks are bad for the gums.

  In Boston I usually eat at the traditional American restaurant Schroeders, or at the Union Oyster House with Sam Dettmann – the restaurant, by the way, which introduced the mass-produced toothpick to the US, at least that is what Sam told me over a martini in the Oyster House.

  I guess I’m a wood snob, but I advise against tea-tree toothpicks (or chewing sticks as they are sometimes known) as being too strongly scented for the martini. The Maine white birch from which most US toothpicks are made is good.

  Voltz told me in Mary’s Bar that an American named Charles Forster invented the toothpick-making machine early in the 19th Century, but we know that the Americans and the Chinese are always claiming to have invented everything. Though the Chinese have not claimed the martini or the toothpick.

  He continued, ‘But I am having difficulty understanding how a toothpick comes from such large logs. I see many people filing down the logs to the size of a toothpick and I worry about the waste.’

  I was able to tell him that the birch logs would be steamed to make them easier to work and then each log would be ‘unwrapped’ – its age layers separate and are peeled off into thin sheets; the flat toothpicks would be stamped out of these sheets, while I suppose round toothpicks would come from very tiny blocks which would be fed into a milling machine called a ‘rounder’ to make them circular.

  ‘I am always appreciative of your technical know-how.’

  I said I preferred round to flat even if it meant more sawdust. I have a preference for those sharpened at only one end and I do like those with a small groove near the blunt end. I think these toothpicks look smarter. I don’t like the ones that are pointed at both ends.

  Voltz thought about this. ‘I think the aesthetic question centres on the groove. Is it ornamental or does it have some purpose now lost to memory?’

  ‘You mean a fairy or an elf, for example, could tie cotton around the toothpick and use it as, say, a harpoon?’

  ‘I was not thinking along those lines. I don’t often think about what fairies in their fairy economy might need or what use they might put a toothpick to.’

  ‘There is nothing wrong with ornament.’

  ‘The groove makes the toothpick a more serious-looking item,’ he said. ‘In my mind, that is. You can think fairy if you want.’

  While I think it is OK to hold the toothpick in your mouth for a short time, as it seems to give some primal oral gratification, and I know some men seem to adopt it as a ‘look’, I want to say that I do not play bar games with toothpicks or matches. I will walk away when someone begins to arrange toothpicks or matches on the bar and I hear them saying something like, ‘These twelve toothpicks rep resent six sheep pens of the same size. After one of the pieces of the fence is stolen, the farmer wants to rearrange the remaining pieces so that he will still have six pens of equal size. How does he do it?’

  Another form of bar-room behaviour I find curious is the compulsion to tear things apart.

  Voltz is a person who has a tendency to destroy his toothpicks. However, I am not going to discuss in any way – nor am I qualified to discuss – drinkers who are habitual twisters of cocktail straws, disintegrators of toothpicks, and shredders of cocktail napkins and coasters. Some of my other friends do these things. I ignore it when they do. Wreckers. Followers of Shiva, the Indian god of destruction. Though thankfully this tendency does not, in my experience, extend to the wrecking of bars or hotel rooms. As I look at their despairing messes, I wonder if it is a metaphor for their lives, a reflection of their inner selves. Sometimes I think, ‘Out of the crooked timber of humanity no straight thing can ever be made.’

  I say to them now, nothing is really a mess if you have words with which to analyse it accurately and to give it a verbal arrangement and an order.

  Just for the record, I cannot see the point of using two toothpicks to suspend the olives across the glass from edge to edge above the martini, a practice which some bartenders feel is part of their contribution to the martini.

  I once wrote about a rather eccentric character whose life ambition is to chair panel discussions at literary festivals.

  The chairperson eventually ends up at a festival on Baffin Island. He reports that he ‘will also be teaching the Eskimos the art of martini olive stick making, although timber is scarce on Baffin’. He continues:

  Drinking martinis is what Eskimos call ‘leaning into the wind’, leaning into the wind, that is, of life.

  Three things should be observed about the martini olive stick. It should be longer than the martini glass so that it can be twirled in a contemplative way while drinking and talking. The martini stick should have character as an object, and carry the dignity of the tree from whence it came … The stick should also impart the spirit of the forest to the drink which we know is there but which should not be discoverable in the blended taste of the whole drink. But yes, when the toothpick is in place in the martini, there resides in the drink the spirit of the forest.

  Here on Baffin we talk a lot about the role of the martini and quiviannikumut. They are the same word in Eskimo and there is no easy translation, but roughly, it means ‘to feel deeply happy while having total clarity about the wretched human condition’.

  Ignorance suggests that there are no trees in the arctic. But under the snow there is a miniature forest of matted birches and willows. A sapling of a Richardson snow willow the thickness of a finger can contain two hundred years of growth rings. An Eskimo willow tree this old would yield about half a dozen martini sticks. Every two hundred years there would be wood for another six olive sticks.<
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  It is worth pondering that my olive stick whittling demonstration will use up one thousand years of Eskimo forest. I acknowledge that as a craft industry it will be problematic for the Eskimo people and will conflict seriously with the principles of conservation.

  Interestingly, the Eskimo word for forest translates as ‘place of insufficient snow’ and their word for ‘picnic’ means ‘food shared with ants in place of insufficient snow’.

  The coldest martinis in the world are made on Baffin Island. As you know the problem with the martini is that people do not chill every ingredient sufficiently. On Baffin there is no trouble keeping everything chilled. Even the martini drinker’s tongue is chilled.

  Voltz and I have often talked about how the martinis would be in the famous hotel constructed of ice in Iceland. We both worry about the ambience of this ice hotel. Voltz is not willing to classify Reykjavík as a martini city.

  ‘Perhaps the idea is more to be kept as a fantasy?’ I suggested.

  ‘We could do the figures on the idea of setting up a martini bar made of ice in Manhattan. As a business proposition.’

  ‘The idea of a bar built of ice doesn’t suggest the kind of contemplative lounging in a banquette that goes with the martini.’

  ‘No. You’re right. Don’t bother doing the figures. Maybe we’ll check out Reykjavík but I don’t have high hopes.’

  And before you say anything, I inquired of Sheila Rogers, a remarkable broadcaster at the Canadian Broadcasting Commission, and she told me that Innuits do not mind the word Eskimo. Eskimo is a strange word. The Oxford Dictionary says that it is Danish deriving from the French word Esquimaux (pl.), which in turn comes from the Algonquin language, and means, literally, ‘eaters of raw flesh’. Australians invented the word ‘esky’ from Eskimo, to describe a portable insulated container, usually used for transporting drinks.

  I once carved some toothpicks from a eucalyptus sapling and chose to believe that they added something to the martini. I sent half a dozen to Sheila Rogers, who raved about them.

  The indefatigable Voltz reported another toothpick reference to me which is also admitted as a variation on the classic martini. ‘I’ve been reading some hard-boiled 1950s fiction lately, and I found this in a book called Wild Wives by Charles Willeford.

  ‘Willeford writes, “I call my martini a Desert Wind. Nine-tenths gin, one-tenth vermouth. No olive. No onion. Nothing. Just a toothpick.”’

  I find that a stark image – a clear martini with only a toothpick – a single leafless tree in a desert while the powerful wind of the martini blows around it.

  As a side note, I have found that there is much social uneasiness about toothpicking. Voltz covers his mouth with his hand. Some people do it furtively with their fingernail when they feel they are unobserved. I think we should all be more open about it or, conversely, we should take a toothpick to the washroom after a meal and do it there.

  It is the custom in civilised countries for restaurants always to place a container of toothpicks on the table during meals.

  According to Elissa Schappell, an editor and contributor to Tin House magazine in NYC to which I also contribute, the writer Sherwood Anderson, Winesburg, Ohio (1919), died from peritonitis in 1941 after swallowing the toothpick while drinking a martini. I cannot imagine what it was that Anderson was doing with the toothpick, or the martini, or his mouth, or his hands which caused this to happen.

  They Had a Date with Fate in Casablanca

  In film, in fiction and in folklore the martini cocktail has been a classy icon now for more than one hundred years. It is one of the great narratives of modern folklore. Dr Anderson and I would go on record as saying that the martini is also the most mentioned cocktail in English literature and in film.

  These days, the martini is seen as a symbol of finer, older values – an embodiment of something lost, something worth reaching back for. It has come to represent a life of balance and taste – of connoisseurship.

  The martini glass, in particular, has come to be the emblem of high times or swank times. The martini represents a signing-on for the pursuit of high times – the ordering of a martini is always an unspoken commitment.

  Of all the cocktails – it is said that there are about six thousand listed cocktails (listed by whom? And where is this list? Voltz always asks) – it is the martini which has come to epitomise this quest for connoisseurship. For me, connoisseurship is an attitude of mind; it simply means being interested in knowing the fine things that the world has to offer and coming to know some of the discernments which our senses can convey (without becoming overly fastidious) while also knowing that we can never reach the end of this journey.

  The fashionable or iconic beginnings of the martini coincide with the arrival of the cocktail hour in public places rather than in homes, and with the movie soundtrack in the late 1920s and along with this, the depiction of the cabaret and nightclub with all its talk, noises, music and possibilities.

  The movie soundtrack allowed scriptwriters and film-makers to create the nightclub bar and cocktail-party style of fast conversation, wit, banter, repartee and smart talk – in the 1920s there was a magazine called Smart Talk – together with jazz, dance bands and blues and torch singers.

  Perhaps since hearing this scripted clever-talk on the screen, we’ve had to speed up and smarten up our own conversation. And this cavorting on the screen probably spurred on the idea of creating the cocktail lounge at home where people were starting to have the makings of cocktails displayed on their sideboards and then in the cocktail cabinet or on the drinks’ trolley.

  One of my favourite martini scenes in movies (but not my favourite movie at all) is in The Thin Man (1934) in which Myrna Loy and William Powell play Nick and Nora, two upper-class private detectives created by Dashiell Hammett.

  Powell is drinking in one of those great 1930s nightclub bars: Art Deco furnishing, bar stools, tables with table lamps (and sometimes table-to-table telephones), a black pianist playing jazz, tuxedos – almost the definition of a perfect martini bar until I heard Voltz arguing for the bar car on a moving train. Since Cambridge, we have discussed this idea further at Sardi’s, and he has now amended his earlier dictum.

  ‘I still think a train is the perfect place for a martini,’ he said, ‘but not all trains. Only trains travelling from or heading towards a martini city. I now think the train should be umbilically connected to a martini city. In North by Northwest, it was New York to Chicago – two martini cities. If you get on a train in Taos, New Mexico, bound for Salt Lake City, for example, you shouldn’t have a martini.’

  I argued that the train bar itself was a place in its own right and reminded him that we had decided that a train was, in fact, an imperturbable space.

  ‘Maybe you’re right,’ he said. ‘Maybe I worry too much about these matters.’

  I reminded him that, anyhow, in North by Northwest Mr Thornhill (Cary Grant) drinks a Gibson.

  ‘What has that got to do with anything? I was reminding you. You mustn’t become pedantic,’ he said.

  ‘I mustn’t become pedantic! That’s rich.’

  Probably to challenge his thinking somewhat, I then said that my London agent, Derek Johns, had named Istanbul as a martini city.

  ‘On what grounds?’ Voltz asked wearily. I told him Derek’s story about Istanbul where his host mixed some martinis on the European shore of the Bosphorus, put them in an insulated container, and then he and Derek boarded a boat, sailed the short distance across the river to the Asian shore, where they drank their martinis. Derek said that it is the only city in which you can mix a martini on one continent and drink it on another.

  Voltz refused to show that he was impressed by this story but said that he would ‘take the Istanbul nomination under consideration’. He also worried that the insulated container would not have kept the martinis cold enough.

  Anyhow, in The Thin Man, Nick (William Powell) has a martini in front of him when Nora (Myrna Loy) comes in. Sh
e is served a martini. She looks at Nick and realises that he is quite drunk and asks, ‘How many martinis have you had?’

  He says six.

  Nora calls to the barman, ‘All right, will you bring me five more martinis, Leo? And line them up right here.’

  If, as Voltz argues, glasses were smaller in the 1930s, Nora’s drinking of six martinis makes more sense. Or were the drinks weaker? Or the human bodies stronger? Or the appetite for life stronger? Six martinis by today’s measure is a lot of martinis.

  But the point is that this scene is a stunning assertion of the social mobility of the New Woman and the unisexual nature of the martini.

  Nora as played by Myrna Loy shows that in 1934 she can enter the bar without a man.

  She can talk directly to the barman.

  And she can order her own drink.

  She can even go to excess.

  She can ask for, and get, what she wants.

  What was reflected in films was being played out in real life. It was in the nightclub and the lounges of grand hotels that women crossed another historic line in social mobility. The drink that symbolised this moment in history was the martini. It was also the time for wearing make-up during the day and the invention by Helena Rubenstein in Paris in 1921 of the handbag compact mirror and the lipstick tube. Men began to see women checking, and even refreshing, their make-up at the bar.

  It really began with the arrival of the fashionable department store in the second half of the 19th Century. Women could, for the first time, go into the city alone or with other women to shop at these stores, or for morning or afternoon tea or lunch in the store dining room unchaperoned and unaccompanied by a man and unobserved by the ‘village’.

  It was not too far down the block from the department store tearooms to the lounges of grand hotels and then to the cocktail lounge or a fashionable restaurant where respectable women could, for the first time, drink in public without men. And then not too far to the nightclub and all it promised.