TOAST TO A TIPPLER
Alcoholism is among the most savage, heart-breaking and destructive of all forms of entertainment. Its awful legacy includes sundered families, highway fatalities and “Arthur 2: On the Rocks.” But Kingsley Amis’s drunkopedia “Everyday Drinking” renews one’s faith in the bottle. How bad can it be to tuck away five glasses of wine and a couple of belts of Scotch on a Saturday night, one wonders, when the King did worse on a Tuesday afternoon (and lasted an above-average 73 years)?
The newly-collected volume of Amis columns and essays about how (and, crucially, why) to drink does not lack for authority. Amis was not just a tippler but a “drink-ist,” in the formulation of fellow specialist Christopher Hitchens, who provides an introduction and an (invaluable, to Americans) glossary. (Poteen, Hitchens says, is “an aggressive species of Irish moonshine,” while dipsography is “writing about drinking (in reverse of the more common practice).”
I’ll go a step further than Hitchens: Amis was an alcoholite. In this (of course) bar-sized book you will find no nonsense about the dangers of crawling into the bottle but brisk advice on how to make yourself comfortable there. There are chapters on the boozer’s diet (cut back on solids), a recipe for a morning pick-me-up (“an excellent heartener and sustainer at the outset of a hard day, when you have in prospect one of those grueling nominal festivities like Christmas morning, the wedding of an old friend of your wife’s or taking the family over to Gran’s for Sunday dinner”) and maintenance of the hangover.
This last is helpfully divided by Amis into the P.H. (physical hangover) and the M.H. (metaphysical hangover). Other day-after analysts, Amis astutely notes, “omit altogether the psychological, moral, emotional, spiritual aspects: all that vast, vague, awful, shimmering metaphysical superstructure that makes the hangover a (fortunately) unique route to self-knowledge and self-realization.”
To an American, the book’s most surprising aspect is its lurking British deprivation, the culture of permanent shortage and scrabbling want. Amis spent most of his adult life in the ranks of his country’s most famed novelists, yet price is a constant source of worry. It is in his first General Principle, or “G.P. I,” that he exhorts: “Up to a point (i.e. short of offering your guest one of those Balkan plonks), go for quantity rather than quality.” Sounds like a freshman at a kegger, not a distinguished man of letters living a few hundred miles from the most bountiful wine regions on earth. Is there anyone hosting a party in the New York intelligentsia today who can’t afford enough of a nice Bordeaux to keep the conversation lubed?
One of Amis’s most hilarious chapters is now as archaic as a guide to spats – it advises the “Mean Sod,” or cheap bastard, how to save money when hosting a party by limiting the amount of booze dispensed via delaying tactics – but it’s an anthropologically priceless study of high hostility.
To cut costs on gin, “put the tonic and ice and thick slice of lemon in first and pour on them a thimbleful of gin over the back of a spoon, so that it will linger near the surface and give a strong-tasting first sip, which is the one that counts.” Not that it is a worthy choice for the professional: “I find this a rather unworthy, mawkish drink best left to women, youngsters and whisky distillers.”
Is drinking, as Homer Simpson had it, the “cause of, and solution to, all of life’s problems”? Amis points out that “the human race has not devised any way of dissolving barriers, getting to know the other chap fast, breaking the ice, that is one-tenth as handy and efficient.” To put it another way, “Conversation, hilarity and drink are connected in a profoundly human, peculiarly intimate way.”
Alcohol does have a few things to answer for, but Johnnie Walker never plowed his car into a schoolbus. Johnnie doesn’t even drive. Why blame him for our faults? Amis quotes the literary critic George Saintsbury: “When a man commits a crime under what is miscalled the ‘influence’ of drink, he should, where possible, be punished double – once for the bad act, and once for the misuse of the good thing, by forcing it to reveal his true nature.”
