Martini
Page 19
Pliny tells a version of the Cleopatra’s pearl story in his Natural History (IX.59.119–121) as does Horace in Satires (II.3.239).
FROM ‘THE WHOLE QUESTION OF THE DRINKS’ CART’
The Second World War began shortly after Susan Kozma completed the Schreibers’ living room. The Schreibers fled to London, taking some possessions with them including the drinks’ trolley. The Victoria and Albert Museum eventually found the drinks’ trolley and acquired it for their collection.
The V and A also has Ernest Race’s Bottleship Mark II (1963) which is a combined drinks’ cupboard and magazine rack on wheels. Race is best known for his Penguin Donkey: a strange two-sided bookcase designed to house only Penguin books.
FROM ‘WHERE ARE THEY NOW?’
Inaccrochable.
Gertrude Stein, when talking to Hemingway about one of his short stories said, ‘It’s good. That’s not the question at all. But it is inaccrochable. That means it is like a picture that a painter paints and then he cannot hang it when he has a show.’
‘But what if it is not dirty but it is only that you are trying to use words that people would actually use. That are the only words that can make the story come true and that you must use them? You have to use them?’
From Hemingway’s A Moveable Feast.
Sources
Medical details in this book when not attributed are taken from standard sources such as the Merck manuals or from medically trained drinkers including Dr John Marsden and his BBC program on alcohol.
Some extracts of this book were previously published in different versions: ‘Memoir of a Story: Story of a Memoir’ in Best Australian Stories 2003; ‘Meeting Mary McGeachy’ appeared as ‘Martini Festival’ in The Sydney Morning Herald’s ‘Spectrum’; ‘Martini City’ appeared in a different form in The Good Weekend; a version of ‘Martini – the story’ appeared as ‘Martini’, a chapter from Forty-Seventeen (1988); the chairperson piece on toothpicks is from my book Lateshows (1990).
Two names have been changed to avoid embarrassment to living people.
p.32 The description of Tennessee Williams’ typical writing day comes from Dotson Rader, Tennessee: Cry of the Heart (1985)
p.34 My friend Michael Fraser told me that he had lost a girl friend once when he asked her whether he could ‘fix her a drink’
p.37 The Toronto Study is by C. C. Trevithick, research assistant, M. M. Chartrand, research assistant, J. Wahlman, research assistant, F. Rahman, research assistant, M. Hirst, professor, J. R. Trevithick, professor, from the Department of Biochemistry, Faculty of Medicine and Dentistry, University of Western Ontario, Canada
p.43 The argument for having a very small amount of melting ice water in a martini comes from Robert Hess’s website ‘Drinkboy’ (www.drinkboy.com)
p.49 My martini-drinking writer friend in Paris is Tim Baker
p.50 ‘Fire and Ice’ from The Poetry of Robert Frost, edited by Edward Connery Lathem. Copyright 1923, 1969 by Henry Holt and Company. Copyright 1951 by Robert Frost. Reprinted by permission of Henry Holt and Company, LLC
p.57 Robert Lowell’s ‘Homecoming’ is from Collected Poems, edited by Frank Bidart and David Gewanter (2003)
p.67 The information about the wet martini comes from a conversation with Alison Handley
p.68 Ogden Nash, ‘A Drink with Something in It’ (1935)
p.71 Somerset Maugham, The Fall of Edward Bannard (1921)
p.79 The adjective ‘modernist’ and ‘moderne’ (from the Latin word modo meaning ‘just now’) is applied to the martini and its glass by Max Rudin in an essay ‘There is Something About a Martini’ (American Heritage magazine, July–August 1997)
p.87 The art of cocking the tail comes from an email sent to me by Virginia Gordon
p.98 Kurt Vonnegut Jnr, Breakfast of Champions (1973)
p.125 G.K. Chesterton, ‘A Ballade of an Anti-Puritan’ in Poems (1915)
p.131 F. Scott Fitzgerald, The Great Gatsby (1925)
p.131 ‘Moonlight Cocktail’, Glenn Miller and his Orchestra. Words by Kim Gannon. Music by Lucky Roberts
p.144 The information about autotrays comes from Susan Butler
p.149 Susan Kozma was not well when I talked with her. This is a constructed version of her remarks, given coherence from other sources, but it is, I know, the gist of her thinking
p.165 The quote from Jean Rhys comes from The Left Bank (1927)
p.174 The Sadness of Evanescence: the idea of the martini always being in a transitory state comes from Sandra Forbes
OTHER SOURCES INCLUDE:
Barnaby Conrad III, The Martini (1995)
Harry Craddock, The Savoy Cocktail Book (reprinted 1999)
John Doxat, World of Drinks and Drinking (1971) and private correspondence between the author and Doxat
Lowell Edmunds, Martini, Straight Up: The Classic American Cocktail (1998)
William Grimes, Cultural History of the Cocktail (1993)
Catherine Gilbert Murdock, Domesticating Drink: Women, Men, and Alcohol in America, 1870–1940 (1998)
Acknowledgments
There is a special thanks due to two great sports, Steven Katz (screenwriter of Shadow of the Vampire) who has been an assiduous investigator of the martini over the years, and a great martini companion; and to Matt Condon, companion and informant, who is not a martini drinker.
Other friends and good sports who gave me wisdom for this book were Don Anderson, Xavier Hennekinne, Judy Rymer, Jane Palfreyman, Virginia Gordon, David Catterns, Robert Taylor, Tim Herbert, Michael Fraser, Harry Catterns, Michele Garnaut, Barry and Jenny Porter, Lenore Coltheart, Joanna Logue, Annie Coulthard, Julia Leigh, Ophelia and Michele Field, Derek Johns, Sam Dettmann, Sam Gerovich, Inez Baranay, Josephine Hingston, Elizabeth Hingston, Roger Simpson, Professor William Anthony (for esoteric details), Fay and Peter Martin and Frank Thompson.
And thanks to THE MARTINI WORKSHOP, run by Susie Carleton, Verity and Xavier, those other fine elves who joined with me to explore the history of the drink: Annette Hughes, Annie Coulthard, Peter Banki, Angela Bowne, Brian and Suzanne Kiernan, David Kirk, Catharine Lumby, Duncan Fine, Caroline Bucknell, Ed Campion, Patsi Zeppel, Don and Betsy Graham, Carol and Nick Dettmann, Jessica Dettmann, Sandra Forbes, Robert Farrar, Tim and Julie Baker, Jim Freston, Rosemary Creswell, Errol Sullivan, and Donald and Myfanwy Horne.
The bar staff at the Bayswater Brasserie are almost a College of the Martini, especially Leonard Opai and Naren Young.
The final draft of this book was written at the historic Minnamurra House, Jamberoo, owned by Carol and Nick Dettmann, and offered to me so generously for my work over the years; and in the home of Roscrana and Parks Chrestman in the Blue Mountains, also kindly loaned to me as a retreat.
I thank Meredith Sime and Susie Carleton and the University of New South Wales, who were patrons of this book.
I want to especially thank Don Anderson, Angela Bowne, Xavier Hennekinne, Matt Condon, Johanna Baldwin, Jane Cameron, and Tim Herbert for reading the manuscript and offering incisive responses. Thanks to Jessica Dettmann for coming up with the line ‘How to live a martini and mix a life’. And thank you to my agents, Lesley McFadzean and Siobhan Hannan.
An extra-special thanks to Jane Palfreyman, my publisher, for being so accommodating and so inspiring about such an eccentric book.
And of course, as ever, my very special thanks to my dear friend and former agent over many years, Rosemary Creswell, who was never fazed by the messes I got myself into around the world and to whom this book is dedicated.
Frank Moorhouse was born in the coastal town of Nowra, NSW. He worked as an editor of small-town newspapers and as an administrator, and became a full-time writer in the 1970s. He has written fiction, non-fiction, screenplays and essays, and edited many collections of writing.
Forty-Seventeen was given a laudatory full-page review by Angela Carter in The New York Times and was named Book of the Year by The Age and ‘moral winner’ of the Booker Prize by the London magazin
e Blitz. Grand Days, the first novel in The Edith Trilogy, won the SA Premier’s Award for Fiction. Dark Palace won the 2001 Miles Franklin Literary Award and was shortlisted for the NSW Premier’s Literary Award, the Victorian Premier’s Literary Award and the Age Book of the Year Award.
Moorhouse has undertaken numerous fellowships and his work has been translated into several languages. He was made a member of the Order of Australia for services to literature in 1985 and was awarded an honorary doctorate from Griffith University in 1997.
BY THE SAME AUTHOR
FICTION
Futility and Other Animals
The Americans, Baby
The Electrical Experience
Tales of Mystery and Romance
Conference-ville
The Everlasting Secret Family and Other Secrets
Forty-Seventeen
Grand Days
Dark Palace
Cold Light
OTHER BOOKS
Room Service
Lateshows
Loose Living
The Inspector-General of Misconception
NON-FICTION
Days of Wine and Rage
Martini: A Memoir
COLLECTED WORKS
Selected Stories (also published as The Coca-Cola Kid)
FILM AND TELEVISION SCRIPTS
Between Wars (feature film)
Coca-Cola Kid (feature film)
Everlasting Secret Family (feature film)
Conference-ville (telemovie)
Time’s Raging (with Sophia Turkiewicz, telemovie)
The Disappearance of Azaria Chamberlain (docudrama)
BOOKS EDITED BY THE AUTHOR
Coast to Coast 1973
State of the Art
Fictions 88
A Steele Rudd Selection
Prime Ministers of Australia
The Best Australian Stories 2004
The Best Australian Stories 2005
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted by any person or entity, including internet search engines or retailers, in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including printing, photocopying (except under the statutory exceptions provisions of the Australian Copyright Act 1968), recording, scanning or by any information storage and retrieval system without the prior written permission of Random House Australia. Any unauthorised distribution or use of this text may be a direct infringement of the author’s and publisher’s rights and those responsible may be liable in law accordingly.
Version 1.0
Martini: A Memoir
9781742746661
Copyright© Frank Moorhouse, 2005, 2007
The moral right of the author has been asserted.
A Vintage book
Published by Random House Australia Pty Ltd
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First published in Australia by Knopf, 2005
This Vintage edition first published 2007
National Library of Australia
Cataloguing-in-Publication Entry
Moorhouse, Frank, 1938–.
Martini: a memoir.
Updated ed.
ISBN 978 1 74051 361 6 (pbk.)
. 1. Moorhouse, Frank, 1938–. 2. Martinis. 3. Cocktails. I. Title.
641.874
Cover design by Gayna Murphy, Greendot Design