Steady Drinking
r'ut, permon of the Colonel, there would be ls,. 'e the course of a liaison visit to an American D:cLial permission? And why just an hour? For he Compleat Imbiber 3. Edited' by Cyril Ray. tiAl.t. never forget the horror which I felt when cocktail hour' in the Officers' Club. Why by 41rY regiment I was told that that evening, by (Putnam, 25s.) i;c.'ur it was—at the end of which the bar was "ed up as formidably as a bank. What I could °( bear 4.7,.s the implied idea that drink was 13e1,1,ething out of the ordinary, something at once 1 dnd enshrined, above all something ;en must not play a continuous part in day- ""alo life. By the same token, I always feel un • iss? when approaching 'drin' anthologies, uich seem to me, by their verky existence, to
is'eourage the assumption that drink, like poetry,
0,4 enenmodity to be got out only on very special i;e4sions and then hurried away with a guilty key might have known, however, that Cyril 4'Y Could never be charged with this crime tigrainst nature. Like myself, he clearly regards evil* as the essential lubricant of life. In any fll"bso it is presented in this, the third Cornpleat dier Mr. Ray himself leads off with a catholic Dinscluisnion on toasts; there follow some pleasant `ces under the heading 'Fact' (in which we ahrn• for example, all about the ample drinking e.(1.1-11e of Mr. I. B. Priestley), some fanciful
r. including a cunning little tale by V. S.
preett, under 'Fiction,' and finally, under thaee' some racy accounts of drinking habits n' °oghout the world, free and otherwise. Drink- 41: in fact, is here discovered as something tin 'ell sensible people everywhere do most of the
necessary without (too much) prejudice to other
Oic the if less wholesome activities. So much
o , American Cavalry : no wonder they took tong to subdue the Redskins.
SIMON RAVEN
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