Martini

by Frank Moorhouse

  He says, ‘Sister, don’t you mean a “martini”?’

  The nun says, ‘If I wanted more than one, I would’ve asked for it.’

  Gordon’s wife, Jackie Kott, an actress, then came into the conversation and said she remembered as a young wife making martinis for one of her first dinner parties. The first two martinis took away her hostess nerves and she had a third, and then heard herself say to those she’d been chatting to, ‘I could do with some food – when on earth are they going to serve dinner?’

  The Mysteries

  We arrive now at the mysteries of the martini.

  During the time of my youthful marriage and my confused husbandhood, which I have mentioned and about which I may have told too much, I was working as a reporter on a newspaper in a country town. I had a second mentor in the town (not a lover), that is, other than Paul, a man named Penfold (it seems in recollection that he was always referred to as ‘Penfold’). He had one of the most analytically penetrating minds I’d encountered up to my then twenty years of age.

  The University of Sydney in those days sometimes based a lecturer in the larger country towns to teach in adult education classes which were organised by local committees of the Workers’ Educational Association. In this town, it was Penfold, and we held him in high regard. He had degrees in law and arts and was a heavy drinker. He had broad interests but saw himself as a scholar of politics and international affairs.

  I was to follow Penfold into adult education where I became an administrator and a tutor with the WEA and a few years later, after I’d left the town, Dr Anderson was to take over Penfold’s adult education duties there.

  I became Penfold’s drinking companion and he in turn became my personal tutor for two years while I studied as an external student at the University of Queensland. His best adult education work was sometimes to enter the bar at around midday or earlier with all the newspapers, copies of Foreign Affairs, The Economist, The Atlantic Monthly, Nation, and whatever other magazines had come into his life over the last few days. He would sit at the bar, order his middy of beer and then begin to read the newspapers and journals. After his first beer he would then engage the nearest drinkers in conversation about the day’s news. Or more than likely they would engage him. Within an hour there would be a few drovers, a few shearers, a few council workers, a few retired schoolteachers, bums and layabouts and whoever else might turn up, engaged in a discussion with Penfold who would sometimes refer to his journals, reading from them, explaining terminology and introducing concepts. He had been a member of the Communist Party but had abandoned it and become anti-communist.

  One afternoon Penfold blundered drunk into the house where Paul and I lived and discovered Paul and me in bed having sex and then blundered out. The three of us never discussed it.

  One of the propositions that I remember Penfold arguing was that it didn’t matter which subject he taught, he would always be teaching the same subject, what he called the method of inquiry, even, he’d say, if he taught flower arrangement or, I suppose, the nature of the martini.

  He argued that regardless of where you begin, any subject, if approached the right way, would carry you into all the great questions of life. Take flower arrangement. What is beauty? Botany and the structure of nature. Why this flower and not another? The economics of horticulture. Aesthetics and theories of interior design. Folklore and the role of flowers as political symbols and in coats of arms. The War of the Roses. The great questions of civics and politics. Why do we bother to ‘arrange’ flowers? How should we live? He also believed that in adult education there were no silly questions. Any question contained a pathway to something interesting and relevant.

  So while drinking a martini I sometimes stare into it and remember Penfold. What is it, I say to him, that we can learn from the martini? I suppose we can just get drunk, or meander off in less awesome directions and see only the ‘dancing myriads of winking eyes’. We don’t have to learn from the martini.

  But if we were so inclined I can hear Penfold say, well, the first is The Lesson of Elegant Simplicity: how fine the simplicity of the martini can be in an otherwise congested and over-elaborated existence full of things, full of the need for ownership of things, conspicuous consumption and the demands of life performance, of life competence. Should we spend more time at the gym and when there, are we doing it right? Should we somehow put more into our friendships? Should we spend, or have spent, more time with our children? Have we got our values right? Is our life ‘in balance’? Should we know more about tantric sex? Would it brighten up our lives? Should we meditate? Should we diet harder? Should we give more to those in hardship?

  In this congested existence, the martini – in its classic glass, icy cold and frosty, with its toothpick and olive, aesthetically elegant, containing the fire of life within its iciness – stands out as a way of denying these demands of life and the complications of possessions. It is a way of focusing on something that will bring us to calm and stillness. The American satirist from the 1930s H.L. Mencken said that the martini is ‘the only American invention as perfect as a sonnet’ (and there we have Mencken claiming the martini as an American invention).

  However, as we observe this seeming perfection we know at the back of our minds – and this, Penfold would say, is the burden of knowledge – that in such an elegant and seemingly simple creation as the martini there is The Lesson of Infinite Nuance.

  As I have drunk the martini over the years I never cease to be dazed by the possibilities of variation within the simple classic martini.

  Voltz told me this story. ‘I had dinner with a woman friend from Vancouver who said that the most popular bar there, West, has a bartender who will mix you a martini based on his reading of your character – he calls it a “signature martini”. So he looked at her and what she was wearing, asked her some questions, and then mixed it up – she said he referred to her qualities of reticence, and so on, as he was mixing the martini. He made her a vodka and mango concoction. I asked her if he put vermouth in it and she said, “No, it was really just a vodka infusion.”’

  I found it interesting that this guy in Vancouver was advertising himself as a specialty martini-maker and mind-reader.

  ‘A martini isn’t a “specialty” drink; it’s a drink with a certain purity: you should always know what you’re getting, although occasionally one will be especially well-made and will stand out,’ Voltz grumbled.

  ‘Ah,’ I said, ‘but there’s the mystery of it. Sometimes for reasons we cannot detect one martini will stand out.’

  There is a release that comes from recognising the mysteries of variation in the martini. It is this: regardless of the variations that are open to us, we can carefully and in a precise way mix the defined versions of a classic martini and every time it will come out tasting different.

  Thus this infinite nuancing inherent in the martini means that no two martinis can ever be strictly the same. Too many variations are always in play: the twenty or so botanicals; the different olives, let alone the salt and that lactic acid that might make their merry way into the martini from the olive brine; the temperature of the drink; even of the regional variations in the water from which the ice was made; the proportions of gin and vermouth; even the atmosphere of the bar in which it is drunk; the city (or train) in which it is drunk; the company in which it is drunk. Perhaps even the season – Lake Tahoe in the Fall.

  Dr Anderson, for example, even more than Voltz, ponders the weather, and wonders in which weather is it not wise or happy to drink a martini, although he admits that he knows of no weather in which it is wrong to drink a martini, nor season.

  In the blending of these twenty or so flavours we lose the multiplicity of flavours but in return we receive a unique, single flavour. Once blended, the flavours cannot be chased and rediscovered by taste. Do not try to find the botanicals. Just let your palate register the particular, singular martini in your hand, at the time.

  A martini may remind yo
u of another martini. I was having a martini with Dr Anderson on a hot February day at the Bayswater Brasserie when he said that the drink and the weather reminded him of a martini he had on an island of Hawaii about five years before. He could not remember the name of the island but he sure as hell remembered the martini.

  The paradox, then, is that while the drink appears so simple and while its perfection seems so attainable, it is far from simple, and far from perfectly achievable. In fact, in its nuancing it teaches The Lesson of Tantalising Elusiveness.

  Every time it is served, the martini represents a journey towards an unattainably ideal drink.

  However, I rush to say, that does not take away from the fact that we drink remarkably fine martinis at times, even if they are just, just, always an infinitesimal distance from perfection – paradoxically and thankfully, it can be also an imperceptible distance from perfection.

  Take the question of coldness. This ideal state for the martini – as cold as domestic refrigeration can make it, or the nearest we can get to it – exists just after it is made, exists perhaps for minutes at the most at the advent, but from then on it is warming up. But this warming of the martini by our hand should be seen as part of its nature. From the time we begin to drink the martini, the chill is going from the drink; the illusion of its pristine perfection is fading before us as we reach out to grasp it.

  The martini, then, is always in a transitory state – what is known as The Sadness of Evanescence: to fade from sight; to become effaced, from the Latin evanescere, vanus meaning to become empty. It is astounding that the human mind is able to conceive of this perfection, to imagine the perfect martini, and then to accept that it is unattainable, and then to acknowledge that the imperfection can at times be imperceptible, and yet still continue to seek it without falling into madness. Maybe we do fall into madness. I suspect that Voltz is mad.

  Oscar Wilde said that since Hamlet the world has been sad in a new way. Maybe since the martini the world has been calmed, intrigued and, at the same time, made happily world-weary in a different way. Maybe the martini represents the modernist consciousness and now, at the same time, through its contrast to The Crazy Drinks and their challenge, is also enfolded into a post-modern consciousness.

  Anyhow, this, I hope, is the message we send to our children every time we drink a martini. And if it isn’t, it means that the terrorists have won.

  And so we reach the ultimate paradox: there is no such thing as the martini.

  Yet there is a story that dedicated martini drinkers love to tell, which has been told to me over and over again in many bars, and was first told to me by David Catterns – Harry’s father – many years ago, after his first visit to New York. Martini Drinker comes into bar, orders a martini. Bartender says, vodka or gin? The Martini Drinker says, just a martini. Bartender says, olive or twist? Martini Drinker says, just a martini. ‘Straight up or on the rocks?’ Martini Drinker says, just a martini. Bartender goes away and comes back with a gin martini, some vermouth, straight up with a single olive on a toothpick. The bartender knew but didn’t know he knew.

  The story is a folktale that works on the illusion that there is only one martini.

  There is a more pointed version. In the film Deep Impact, the actress Téa Leoni has had a bad day and goes to a bar and orders, ‘A martini. Up. Big.’

  As we have seen, historically too, it has never been the same thing – Jack London, Ian Fleming, Dorothy Parker and Kurt Vonnegut were drinking different martinis.

  The martini exists only as versions of itself, both defined versions, and random versions caused by random factors.

  It is The Lesson of the Paradox of Jacky’s Axe, which Dr Anderson says is taken from a now deceased cartoonist named Eric Jolliffe and his cartoon series entitled ‘Saltbush Bill’. In one of the cartoons, Jacky is chopping wood and the boss comes by and says, ‘That’s a fine axe you got there, Jacky.’

  ‘Yes, boss,’ says Jacky, ‘this is the best axe I ever used. Only three new handles and one new head in all the time I had it.’

  The ‘axe’ has continuity as an idea, a perfect abstract type, not as an object. So does the martini.

  As the Greek philosopher Heraclitus said, the road up and the road down are one and the same but are not seen as such. Yeah, right, Heraclitus, thanks, and yet everything flows and nothing stays. But we go on with our lives, nevertheless.

  Maybe it’s something else other than the drink that we are trying to capture when we drink the martini. Not only are we in search of a perfect martini, we are in search of a transmuting potion that will take us to another state of existence. Now, in the at times unliveable 21st Century, we are, perhaps, hoping it will take us to another time and another world – say a bar car on a train in 1940 with the landscape receding. As well, of course, taking us to solace, transcendence, temptation and folly.

  And we can meet the uncontrollable variations with a curious openness.

  I have mentioned the pleasing world-weariness of the martini, the resigned state of being jaded. The martini is relaxed about the struggle along the path of enlightenment: it parodies the path of enlightenment. It has become part of the custom of the martini drinker to dissect every aspect of the drink, so much so that discussion about the martini often becomes cabbalistic. I wrote earlier that you may eat the olives in a martini any old way, even unthinkingly, but I said that this does go against the martini game. Nothing about the martini is to be done ‘unthinkingly’.

  The martini is both a simple demonstration and a parody of the Platonic dictum that the unexamined life is not worth living.

  But these esoteric discussions and stories and martini folklore are a pathway. They are a pathway into conversation with an old friend, or with a stranger in a bar. The martini sponsors fellowship, and fellowship and storytelling are our only solace from existential terror.

  I once asked Voltz whether the martini could ever be drunk ironically. He replied that the martini was quarantined from irony because there had to be one part of our lives that was exempt from irony. He’d chosen the martini.

  ‘Sure, there are martini jokes,’ he said, ‘but why waste time talking about it ironically? The rest of the world can be talked about ironically. That’s enough. And another thing, if you tried to talk about the martini ironically, it would enfold the irony.’

  I have given talks about the martini – at the Sydney Writers’ Festival, two at M-on-the-Bund in Shanghai, two at the Hong Kong International Literary Festival.

  I have been to quite a few literary festivals around the world but I have never been to one where three of the four Horsemen of the Apocalypse were also present: war, pestilence, and death – they were there at the Hong Kong Festival. And I am certain that the fourth horseman – famine – wasn’t far off out there, somewhere. On the day the festival began, news hit of a ‘killer flu’, called at first atypical pneumonia and later SARS, which had hit hundreds of people in Hong Kong and about which WHO had just issued a worldwide alert.

  Having just checked in when I heard this, I headed for the Sonata bar, a highrise hotel bar in Hong Kong overlooking the bay and the glittering teeming life of the city. With some sense of calamity – it was the first time I had been caught in a plague – I took with me the newspapers full of news of this mystery illness sweeping the island and perhaps the world.

  I ordered myself a martini, discussed the making of it with the barman, and went to a table.

  Nearby, I saw a man, sitting, head in his hands, with a martini in front of him. I guessed that he might be also a guest at the festival and, because of the martini, I asked him. He was.

  We joined up and as I sat down he said, ‘I see you have stuffed olives in the martini. Don’t you find that the capsicum is a little too, how should I say, colourful? That red spot in the glass?’

  Oh God, I thought, it’s Voltz’s brother. And then I thought, it’s the red blood spot of the plague. I told him and we laughed. His name was Jon Cannon and he rang thr
ough to his wife, the novelist Lui Hong – Startling Moon – and she came up to the bar with their three-year-old Ann and also ordered a martini.

  Together we sat there looking out over Hong Kong Bay, over the whole world, drinking our martinis, and joking with bravado about the plague sweeping the island, recalling Thomas Mann’s Death in Venice in which the authorities try to keep the news of the plague a secret so as not to spoil the tourist season: ‘There is no plague in Venice’.

  Lui and Jon had to make a decision whether to stay or go and decided that the flight out on the aircraft might present more of a risk than staying in Hong Kong.

  Given my private low state of mind, it didn’t seem to matter whether I stayed with the plague or left. My old mate, the remarkable Richard Hall, historian, former private secretary to Prime Minister Gough Whitlam, was dying in Royal Prince Alfred Hospital and I was back in therapy.

  The next day there were people in the streets wearing masks.

  The news then was that hundreds were infected and dying.

  Ten writers had cancelled.

  I was on the program to give my lecture entitled ‘The Martini Dialogues’. On the night of my first appearance, the American invasion of Iraq began, and people at the festival started talking of a new world war – ‘the clash of civilisations’.

  I acknowledged to the audience that it could be seen as extraordinarily decadent to be talking about the right way to make a martini in the midst of a plague surrounded by who knew how many dead and dying and at the outset of a war of unknown magnitude and implication. And myself in therapy again. And Richard Hall dying.

  I did know, however, that the bon vivant Richard Hall, although not himself a martini drinker, would approve of me giving the talk.

  The internationally famous Dr Meghan Morris, a professor in cultural studies at Lingnan University, rose from the audience and said that she considered my willingness to talk about the martini and the presence of a full house to hear it in the famous M on the Fringe restaurant was ‘an affirmation of the good life in the face of the human condition’. The audience and I applauded her.