Martini

by Frank Moorhouse

  But you have to have Billie Holiday: Wished on the Moon, What a Little Moonlight Can Do, Miss Brown to You, Sunbonnet Blue (And a Little Straw Hat), I Cried for You, Summertime, Billie’s Blues, Fine Romance, Let’s Call a Heart a Heart, Easy to Love, Way You Look Tonight, Who Loves You?, Pennies From Heaven, Carelessly, Let’s Call the Whole Thing Off, They Can’t Take That Away From Me, I’ll Get By (As Long as I Have You), Mean to Me, Easy Living, I’ll Never be the Same, Me, Myself and I, He’s Funny That Way, Nice Work If You Can Get It, My Man, Can’t Help Lovin’ Dat Man, I Can’t Believe That You’re in Love With Me, You Go to My Head.

  Or Jackie Gleason’s suggestions from ‘Music, Martinis and Memories’ (1955): I Got It Bad and That Ain’t Good, My Ideal, I Remember You, Shangri-la, It Could Happen to You, Somebody Loves Me, The Song is Ended, Once in a While, I Can’t Get Started, Yesterdays, I’ll be Seeing You, Time On My Hands.

  And I would add Cole Porter’s Miss Otis Regrets, Anything Goes, What is This Thing Called Love, Night and Day, Let’s Misbehave, Please Don’t Make Me Be Good. And always, always, Moon River.

  What is This Demon? Alcohol and the Art of Drinking

  Explaining alcohol is a bit like trying to explain electricity to a private school student.

  What we drink is ethyl alcohol, known as ethanol, a clear, thin, odourless liquid – essentially a neutral liquid (the word alcohol comes from Arabic al-kuhul, yeah right, whatever you say, Mr Lexicographer) and originally referred to any essence of any substance (including powders) brought about by refining or distilling and from there the word moved to describe the liquid products of distillation or refinement, and this led to our current usage, that is, an intoxicating liquid.

  Alcohol is produced by fermentation, which occurs naturally when yeast, a microscopic plant (found in many places if you know where to look), is mixed with the sugar in fruit or vegetable juice. The process stops naturally when about 14% of the juice has turned to alcohol. Mead, made from honey, is thought to be the oldest recorded alcoholic drink but I would suspect that many cultures stumbled onto it at around the same time in its many natural manifestations – rotting fruit, grapes and so on. Alcohol can form naturally in fruit and in the sap of trees and very early in our history humans discovered this natural alcohol and began using it for pleasure and ritual.

  The traditional flavours of alcoholic drinks come indirectly from the plants from which the alcohol is made – grapes, grains, fruits and so on – and while the original flavours themselves may not survive the process (wine doesn’t really taste of grapes and nor does vodka taste of potatoes) the new flavours which do emerge have determined the classification, lore and mythologies of the various drinks.

  Distillation is the process used to make beverages with a higher alcohol content than the natural 14%. We humans just can’t leave well enough alone. In this process the fermented liquid is heated until it vaporises and the water content is reduced and the alcohol content increased. That is what happens in all those curling tubes on home-made stills. Distilled alcoholic beverages – whisky, gin, vodka and rum and so on – are referred to as spirits and usually contain 40% to 50% alcohol although are sometimes much higher.

  When drinking an alcoholic drink some of the alcohol is absorbed through the stomach walls into the bloodstream but most passes into the small intestine and then into the blood stream. It circulates through the body tissue and to the brain and within about ten to twenty minutes the drinker begins to feel its effects.

  A large person does not feel the effects of a drink as quickly as a small person because large people have more blood in their bodies in which the alcohol is diluted.

  A woman is likely to feel the effects of alcohol sooner than a man because it brings about rapid changes in the testosterone levels in the woman and because men are statistically larger than women. Because of its hormonal affect, a woman the same size as a man will show a higher alcohol level after the same number of drinks.

  The body disposes of alcohol in two ways: elimination and oxidation. Only about 10% of the alcohol in the body leaves through being burned as energy and then eliminated from the lungs as gas. Some leaves the body through the kidneys as urine. About 90% of the alcohol leaves the body by oxidation through the liver. The liver oxidises the alcohol and excretes it into the bile.

  Bile is a fluid containing water, electrolytes and bile acids. The alcohol along with other stuff flows through the biliary tract into the small intestine from where it is eliminated from the body as faeces. The liver can oxidise about one drink every hour – which is why the morning after a heavy night you may find, if breathtested, that you still have alcohol in your body. The body recovers from alcohol faster than the brain. Walking around the block might burn off one drink. Coffee does not reduce the alcohol in your body or its physical effects, but the caffeine may brighten you up.

  Some drinks have more alcohol in them than others. Beer usually has between 2% and 6% alcohol, table wines from 11% to 14%, fortified or dessert wines (such as sherry or port) have 16% to 20%, and distilled spirits usually range from 40% to 50%.

  A regular glass of beer, a standard wine glass of wine or a measured nip of spirits have evolved traditionally and legally to contain approximately the same amount of alcohol per drink – so that we know where we are. Cocktails such as the martini break from the standard measures and become drinks of unknown potency – hence their mystery.

  A person who has a drink after eating a meal will feel less effect because the food slows the absorption of the alcohol, and can also carry some of it out of the system. A person with an ‘empty stomach’ will absorb the alcohol faster.

  The risky alcohol level is 1% in the blood, at which the breathing becomes paralysed and death occurs. However this is a very difficult level to achieve – usually we pass out or are sick before we can achieve this (although God knows, some of us try). Drinking yourself to death in this way is not really possible although when I was at high school one of my friends had a girlfriend who drank a whole bottle of gin on the beach and died.

  Alcohol affects the central nervous system but not the muscles or the senses themselves, only the control of these muscles and senses.

  Depending on the amount, alcohol can be a mild tranquilliser or can work as a general anaesthetic, albeit a poor one – pity those cowboys we see in movies who drink a bottle of whisky before their legs are amputated with a rusty saw.

  Dr Linda Calabresi, a practising GP and medical editor of Medical Observer and health columnist says this: ‘It is a popular myth that alcohol destroys brain cells – but untrue. Alcohol is a depressant slowing the activity of nerve cells in the brain. It affects all areas of the brain, including the frontal lobe, causing loss of reason and inhibition; parietal lobe, leading to loss of fine motor skills and slower reaction times; temporal lobe, giving slurred speech; occipital lobe, causing blurred vision and poor distance judgement; and the cerebellum, leading to lack of co-ordination and balance. Having said that, these effects are rarely permanent. Permanent brain damage is usually confined to long-term heavy alcohol users. There have been studies that show a moderate consumption of alcohol (one to two drinks a day) is associated with improved mental ability.’

  Some studies show that we become considerably more physically attractive to the person we are drinking with.

  Why do we become dehydrated when we drink alcohol – with all that fluid going into our bodies? The alcohol causes us to discharge more fluid than we take in.

  Luxembourg and Hungary consume the most alcohol per person – over ten litres per head – with Australia at about eight litres, slightly ahead of the US which is around six litres. France is around ten litres per head.

  These days, we undertake drastic changes to our diet in search of mystical rejuvenation of our body, or as a renewal of our personality, or to attain longevity (though the more I see of debilitated old age the less attractive longevity becomes). The promulgation of these changes of diet to friends and relatives
usually says, ‘I am about to become a profoundly different person – if you want to stay up with me, you had better change as well’. Many diets carry a prohibitive attitude to alcohol. The timorous mineral water and the ‘better not’ attitude to life rather than the ‘why not?’ attitude seem to me to be among the saddest of the health postures – a loss of joy, hedonism and self-exploration.

  The anti-alcohol hysteria seems worse among the intelligentsia of the US. I came across a miserable example in the New Yorker. A journalist unthinkingly writes that the rock singer Jerry Garcia and he ‘had some Chinese food cooked without any oil and, to prevent an overdose of health, some good champagne’.

  Cooking with some oils is not bad for your health, Chinese food is one of the healthiest, and, for God’s sake, a glass of champagne is not ‘anti-health’ by any medical measure.

  I do not want to put pressure on people who shouldn’t drink alcohol and I acknowledge that there are such people. And some people find alcohol an unpleasant drink. Abuse of alcohol does lead to health problems.

  I also acknowledge that some people are always at ease, socially brilliant, articulate and playful without a drink. Maybe I speak for the less than socially adequate.

  I write more to counter the damage the new prohibitions do to the art of dining and to some of our finer social traditions of celebration and fellowship. I mean the implied bond which is inherent in drinking alcohol with someone, the bond of shared angst, the implicit offering of candour (not always forthcoming), the act of simple companionship, even if that companionship is only that of the night.

  And yes, the shared drinks do involve a subtle social risk of self-exposure, of the slackening of the formal and disciplined self. It is a little adventure.

  To be blunt, I think that the world would be a better place if more people took a few drinks now and then. As Humphrey Bogart said, ‘The problem with the world is that everyone is a few drinks behind.’

  I want at this point to say that I also continue to defend occasional deep intoxication. It is not for everyone. Not for every day. But it has its wonders.

  It has also to be said, however, that it took me nearly a lifetime to learn that one could drink just one or two glasses, say with food, and then stop drinking and go on to other activities without the accompaniment of alcohol.

  I also concede that alcohol enhances very few activities, not surgery or driving or flying, but conversation and dining are the obvious ones that it does enhance.

  I have also observed people who improve intellectually after a few drinks. Alcohol seems to bring clarity and releases vocabulary in some people; removes intellectual shyness. It sponsors daring connections that they would not have otherwise made.

  Timothy Mo in his novel The Redundancy of Courage observes that the Canadian woman journalist ‘would put back a very large highball and seem to become only more focused’.

  Creative work and important decisions in my experience benefit from being discussed both in the sober condition and after a few drinks.

  The adage about drink that ‘it makes old friends seem like new friends and new friends seem like old friends’ is a perfect description of the beneficial effects of alcohol in creating a renewed awareness of each other and contributing to the art of listening (not always).

  As for jet lag and drinking, I have flown quite a lot and have sometimes taken drinks and sometimes not, and I think the connection between alcohol and jet lag is nonsense. Long flights across time zones are inescapably disorienting. Putting brown paper in the soles of your shoes doesn’t work either. Travel is often enhanced by a few drinks, especially the plane trip and the train journey, but also the arrival.

  And some of my finest musing has been done at a solitary meal in a restaurant, with a book or a magazine and a bottle of wine; alcohol then becomes the ring master of my mental circus.

  I can’t help but think that for some people the health hysteria does mask a revived puritanism: the fear of the unvisited self; and the search for ever more control of self through diet; the conviction that one doesn’t deserve easy pleasure or any pleasure but also, and much worse, the disapproval of other people’s pleasure.

  Allow me to quote a couple of my own beloved characters, Edith and Ambrose, from Grand Days and Dark Palace.

  Ambrose tells Edith his precepts about drinking, including precept six which is: To drink too quickly is unpleasant; to drink too much is a waste.

  Edith replies, ‘I think I have a new precept and it contains a saving grace.’

  ‘What is this new precept?’

  ‘That everyone who has taken drink becomes a little mad.’

  ‘A very good observation. But where is the saving grace?’

  ‘The saving grace is that as long as everyone in the circle is drinking, the madness is shared, and therefore may not seem to be madness to those in that circle. What would be misbehaviour for a non-drinker is – among those drinking – forgiven or passes unnoticed. And on many occasions, never remembered, or if remembered, is excused.’

  Edith also learns that people remember their own embarrassments and rarely those of others.

  The spacing of the drinks is required if both the drink and the cadence of intoxication is to be appreciated, allowing us to feel the drink in our body and in our consciousness. Spacing avoids the blind, blurred, insensate rush to oblivion.

  It has to be admitted that sometimes, in dark times, I am inclined to the blind, blurred, insensate rush to oblivion. Well, perhaps never quite insensate. I once quoted Chekhov to Voltz. Vanya, in the play Uncle Vanya, says, ‘I drink to create the illusion that I might be alive.’

  ‘Sometimes I think Chekhov was a Martian,’ Voltz said. ‘His emotional response to the world was profound – but profoundly and inevitably wrong. Nobody drinks to remind himself that he’s alive. You drink to get the hell out of here.’

  I have discussed the Japanese tea ceremony and its relationship to martini drinking. Neither the Japanese tea ceremony nor martini drinking have an expression to describe the condition of feeling angst and finding that intoxication simply changes the nature of the angst. But we all know it does.

  The drinking rules of my youth were: don’t drink before midday; don’t mix your drinks; don’t drink on an empty stomach; don’t mix grape and grain; do not begin your drinking before your companions; and if you avoid drinking spirits you will avoid becoming an alcoholic.

  In my experience, only ‘not drinking on an empty stomach’ has any validity and not starting drinking before your companions is good form. And I think it is good to remember the golden rule of the British Foreign Office: never to be drunk at the wrong time of the day. That is probably related to not drinking before midday, however it is sometimes a guilty pleasure to do just that.

  Sculptured drinking requires the spacing of drinks – sometimes called pacing oneself – which requires the selection of the appropriate drinks to the time of day and to the season and in relation to meals (see martinis at breakfast), the appropriate glass, the combination of atmosphere, light, music, company or reading matter (itself a form of company), view (water, cityscape, parkland) or non-view (in a shuttered bar facing the wall, never facing a mirror), and angst with which to engender a comfortable what-the-hell mood. It is sometimes possible to at least attempt to savour the absurdity of finding oneself a conflicted person with no way out.

  But don’t dwell too long on the unfairness of it. Being unconflicted has a downside too.

  Notes

  FROM ‘THE VENERATED CRAFT’ AND ‘THEY HAD A DATE WITH FATE IN CASABLANCA’

  The Thin Man films (there were five) were based on novels by Dashiell Hammett (1894–1961) who also wrote The Maltese Falcon. Hammett’s books have now become part of the Library of Congress American classics series. He was a long time companion of writer Lillian Hellman (1905–1984).

  The blurb of my copy of The Thin Man says, ‘Nick and Nora Charles are Dashiell Hammett’s most enchanting creations, a rich, glamorous coup
le who solve homicides in between wisecracks and martinis.’

  Curiously enough, the blurb writer is totally wrong. The martini cocktail is never mentioned in the book. It is as if the blurb writer wanted the characters to drink martinis – or, more likely, that the blurb writer had seen the film but not read the book.

  Hammett and his characters were Scotch and soda drinkers. Legend has it that Hammett himself drank ‘like he had no expectation of being alive much beyond Thursday’.

  I sent this information to Voltz.

  He replied, ‘It may be of interest to you to know that Hammett died on a Tuesday.’

  One critic has described Hammett as one of those writers who lifted detective fiction into an intelligent literary genre with the hypotheses that human society is driven by greed, brutality, and treachery – Voltz’s view of life.

  Hammett went to gaol in the 1950s for refusing to give evidence to the House Un-American Activities Committee set up to investigate communist influence in the US.

  Both he and Hellman were involved in leftist activities and organisations, however Hellman said that she never joined the Communist Party although she was certainly slow to condemn it.

  In 1952 Hellman was called to appear before HUAC but instead she fled from the US. In a famous letter to the committee in which she refused to reveal the names of associates and friends who might have communist associations, she wrote: ‘But to hurt innocent people whom I knew many years ago in order to save myself is, to me, inhuman and indecent and dishonourable. I cannot and will not cut my conscience to fit this year’s fashions, even though I long ago came to the conclusion that I was not a political person and could have no comfortable place in any political group …’

  Hellman and Hammett were both blacklisted by Hollywood from the late 1940s to the 1960s.

  FROM ‘THE DIAMOND: THE PEARL: THE ACORN’