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Tag Archives: booze

Martin Amis: Why Are So Many Writers Drinkers?

14 Saturday Jun 2014

Posted by jrbenjamin in Interview

≈ Comments Off on Martin Amis: Why Are So Many Writers Drinkers?

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Alcohol, Alcoholism, Anatol Yusef, booze, Creativity, drinking, Drugs, interview, Interview Magazine, John Freeman, Kingsley Amis, Martin Amis, PEN World Voices Festival, Smoking, wine, Writing

Martin Amis

Interviewer: Why have you been less interested in writing about drugs than you have about drink? Does it have to do with how you grew up? Your father hasn’t exactly avoided booze as a subject.

Martin Amis: Yes, he’s a serious drinker. Drink, like sex, tells us an extra thing about someone. It strikes me more and more that we don’t really know much about each other, even people we know well. We keep so much hidden. You put the 10% on display: the rest is all secret. And when people are drunk, you find out another 10%; and when you discover what someone is like intimately, you discover another 10%, or maybe more.

Interviewer: I don’t know if drugs give you another 10%. Sometimes I think drugs remove something.

Martin Amis: Or obscure the original 10%, yes. In my early novels, people smoke dope and stuff, but alcohol is something everyone has an attitude towards, especially in New York where it seems everyone has stopped drinking.

Interviewer: Smoking, too.

Martin Amis: You’re more efficient when you don’t drink. But also you keep that other 10%. Someone from New York said to me not long ago, ‘You produce an awful lot, are you a workaholic?’ I said, ‘No I’m an alcoholic.’

In fact I’m not an alcoholic, but drink is present every day of my life in those few glasses of wine at the end of the day. When people say that I often think it means a few bottles. Funnily enough, a mild hangover is often a good start in order to write. I think the reason writers do drink a lot, almost without exception — American novelists, if they’re not Jewish or alcoholics — is that writers have time to recover. You haven’t got to get up the next morning. And perhaps, more than most people, you do want an escape from yourself.

__________

Excerpted from a 1976 interview with Martin Amis.

While its original text is not available on the web, this exchange was recently reenacted at the PEN World Voices Festival by Amis, John Freeman, and Anatol Yusef.

Martin Amis Christophers Hitchens

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Drink like Winston Churchill

16 Friday May 2014

Posted by jrbenjamin in Literature

≈ Comments Off on Drink like Winston Churchill

Tags

Alcohol, beer, booze, Brandy, Britain, C. P. Snow, Champagne, Charlie Chaplin, Cigars, drinking, Franklin Roosevelt, Harry Hopkins, history, Jock Colville, Johnnie Walker, Paul Reid, Port, The Last Lion: Defender of the Realm, William Manchester, wine, Winston Churchill, World War Two

Winston Churchill

“He himself had always ignored dietary rules and rarely paid a penalty for it, and he drank whatever he wanted, usually alcohol, whenever he wanted it, which was often. Harry Hopkins (Franklin Roosevelt’s most trusted adviser and go-to man) entered Churchill’s bedroom one morning to find the prime minister in bed, wrapped in his pink robe, ‘and having of all things a bottle of wine for breakfast.’ When Hopkins commented on his breakfast beverage, Churchill replied that he despised canned milk, but had no ‘deep rooted prejudice about wine, and that he had resolved the conflict in favor of the latter.’ Furthermore, the Old Man told Hopkins, he ignored the advice of doctors because they were usually wrong, that he had lived almost seven decades and was in perfect health, and that ‘he had no intention of giving up alcoholic drink, mild or strong, now or later.’

His normal wartime regimen included a glass of white wine at breakfast (taken as a substitute for tea during the war, when only canned milk was available). Then, a weak scotch and soda, refreshed with soda throughout the morning. At lunch, perhaps a port, always Pol Roger champagne, a brandy or two (likely Hine, and bottled in the previous century), sometimes a beer. After his nap and before dinner he’d nurse another whisky (Johnnie Walker Red Label was his favorite brand). At dinner, more champagne during the meal, followed often by ‘several doses of brandy’ in the latter stages. He loved his meals as much as the libations that accompanied them… Another such drinker would recoil from food, but Churchill’s appetite was unaffected, and he rarely lost possession of his remarkable faculties…

Despite his prolonged, consistent, and prodigious consumption of alcohol, Churchill was not a drunk. But neither was he a moderate social drinker, as some of the memoirs and protestations of his close friends and private secretaries maintain… On occasion he would go too far, such as described in Jock Colville’s account of taking the Old Man up to bed at around 3:00 A.M. after a brandy-fueled evening. Both Colville and Churchill thought it hilarious when Churchill, attempting to settle into an armchair in order to remove his shoes, missed the chair entirely and fell onto the floor in a jumble of legs and arms. ‘A regular Charlie Chaplin,’ Churchill offered as he struggled to regain his footing…

The British essayist C. P. Snow encapsulated the paradox of Churchill’s drinking when he remarked, ‘Churchill cannot be an alcoholic because no alcoholic could drink that much.’ It could of course be argued that had he exemplified the ideal of moderation — more exercise, less drink, less reckless behavior, fewer cigars — he might well have lived a full and rich life for many years beyond the ninety he was granted.

Churchill once summed up his relationship with drink thus: ‘I have taken more out of alcohol than alcohol has taken out of me.'”

__________

Excerpted from The Last Lion: Winston Churchill, Defender of the Realm, 1940-1965 by William Manchester and Paul Reid.

More:

  • From the same biography: a stunning account of Winston’s energy
  • Christopher Hitchens’s golden rules of boozing
  • The greatest ever description of a hangover, from the inimitable Kingsley Amis

Winston Churchill

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Kingsley Amis on How to Host a Party on the Cheap

09 Saturday Nov 2013

Posted by jrbenjamin in Humor

≈ 4 Comments

Tags

Alcohol, booze, drinking, Everyday Drinking, hosting, Kingsley Amis, party, sangria, whiskey, wine

NPG x131053; Kingsley Amis and Elizabeth Jane Howard by Francis Goodman

“The object here is not just to give a party on the cheap, but to get away with it and even end up looking good, or good enough. The traditional strategy is notoriously to offer your guests a flat choice between (boring) red wine and (dull) white wine. Youngsters and other uncritical persons quite like this policy, but it’s becoming increasingly vulnerable to the kind of old stager who doesn’t mind asking loudly for a real drink. Yes, you can tell him there’s none around all right, but you won’t look good.

Clearly a more flexible approach is called for. Lead with the old choice of red and white, but give it a face-lift by picking a couple of those so-called country wines from southern France now to be seen in off-licences and supermarkets. They’re plonk actually, but their fancy French names will prevent the fact from getting through to most of those there. Say threateningly: ‘Of course, they are a wee bit off the beaten track’ to anyone who looks doubtful.

Follow this up with quite a large jug of Bloody Mary and another of Sangria or Wine Cup. Only the old stagers will notice that the Bloody Mary is nine tenths tomato juice and the Sangria mostly lemonade darkened with Angostura bitters — a nice touch — and they won’t dare say anything, at least not with their wives around. Those wives can be very useful. Ingratiate yourself by lighting their cigarettes, complimenting them on their appearance, even seeming to listen to what they say. Your ideal, long-term objective is a quarrel between each old stager and his wife on their way home, with him going on about your meanness and her saying you were very sweet and he’s nothing but a frustrated drunk.

If anybody has the pluck to ask for a gin and tonic or a whisky and soda, respond by leaving the room at once and staying away a good ten minutes. You spend them in some nook or niche or broom cupboard where you prepare all the drinks. In the present case fill a glass with ice, which is troublesome but softer on the pocket than booze, add tonic and pour in about a teaspoon of gin over the back of another spoon—it’s the first sip that counts. Whiskies are trickier. Use the darkest brand you can find and put the soda in first. When that’s done, hang on until you reckon you’ve been absent long enough to deter anyone from having a second try. Fill in the time by reading the paper and gulping your own private malt whisky.

If you’re entertaining the wretched crowd to dinner, not just drinks, then of course a whole new world of shortchanging opens up. And don’t, by the way, imagine that this is no more than a light fantasy. Anyone who does can’t have been around much yet.”

Kingsley Amis and Martin Amis

__________

From Amis’s manual about the sauce Everyday Drinking.

Now read more of Kingsley, in the greatest ever description of the morning after:

Kingsley Amis

The Hangover

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The Greatest Literary Description of a Hangover

16 Sunday Sep 2012

Posted by jrbenjamin in Literature, Writing

≈ 5 Comments

Tags

Alcohol, booze, Boris Johnson, drinking, Fiction, hangover, Jim Dixon, Kingsley Amis, Lucky Jim

Kingsley Amis

The following is the best account of a hangover that has ever been put to page. It represents the first time anyone attempted to describe, in high literary style, those first few flustered moments of waking up the morning after a rowdy night, and it comes in the middle of Kingsley Amis’s hilarious book (and my favorite novel) Lucky Jim. To set the scene: Jim (Dixon) has been invited, along with his girlfriend, to stay at the country home of his boss (the head of his department at the University). The first night there, Jim winds up getting into the family’s supply of sherry and whiskey. Here is the next morning:

__________

“Dixon was alive again. Consciousness was upon him before he could get out of the way; not for him the slow, gracious wandering from the halls of sleep, but a summary, forcible ejection. He lay sprawled, too wicked to move, spewed up like a broken spider-crab on the tarry shingle of the morning. The light did him harm, but not as much as looking at things did; he resolved, having done it once, never to move his eyeballs again. A dusty thudding in his head made the scene before him beat like a pulse. His mouth had been used as a latrine by some small creature of the night, and then as its mausoleum. During the night, too, he’d somehow been on a cross-country run and then been expertly beaten up by secret police. He felt bad.”

London’s mayor Boris Johnson discusses the scene:

__________

From the novel Lucky Jim by Kingsley Amis.

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