And a large glass of the Invariable, taken hot
Not long before he died, Simon Gray and I discussed the extraordinary paradox: why was it that New Labour does everything in its power to discourage smoking and everything in its power (notably longer licensing hours) to encourage drinking? After all, we agreed, drink caused infinitely more human misery, both to drinkers themselves and to their families, than cigarettes. Smoking does not produce suicides, whereas drinking does, every day. Any doctor or hospital consultant will tell you that booze kills many more people than lung cancer, and that’s not even counting road deaths caused by drunken drivers. Above all, smoking does not lead to crime, whereas over 50 per cent of violent crimes are caused by alcohol. Certainly drink needs no encouragement from government to flourish — society, in Western countries, does that pretty comprehensively. For instance, literature is drink-sodden.
In the oeuvre of which novelist, I asked Gray, does drink play the biggest part? He thought Hemingway. And it’s true that, in 1922 I think, he invented the phrase, ‘Have a drink’ (meaning alcohol). On one of the two occasions I met him, sitting at an adjoining table outside La Coupole, Montparnasse, he lined up six martinis in front of him, having carefully instructed the waiter how to have them made, then drank them one after another. There is a lot of drinking from wine-flasks in Fiesta and the Spanish Civil War book. Across the River and Into the Trees is a very drinky tale. Is there any Hemingway short story, let alone novel, in which a drink is not swallowed? I don’t think so. On the other hand, Kingsley Amis must run him close. There is serious drinking in Lucky Jim, One Fat Englishman and The Old Devils, indeed in all Amis tales. The account of Jim Dixon waking up with a hangover is not easily forgotten:
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.
I suppose some would argue that such passages act as a deterrent. Amis was good at them. There is another excellent hangover description in — what is it? That Uncertain Feeling, perhaps, or Take a Girl Like You. But on the whole Amis, like Hemingway, made drink, even in large quantities, attractive. As George Gale used to say, ‘Kingsley ought to be paid to act as liter ary adviser to the Scotch Whisky Association.’ Perhaps he was. Certainly, towards the end of his life, he took to carrying around with him, in his taxi, a bottle of single malt, Glenmorangie.
All the same, my vote would go to Dickens. Not that he was a drunk. Far from it. There is no recorded instance of him being seen and described as drunk by any of his friends (or enemies). He was always firmly in control. But he was fascinated by liquor; its variety, nomenclature, the places and ways it was drunk; and its effects on different people. He loved bringing it in; it is often the thread which holds his narratives together. This propensity is detectable in some of the Sketches by Boz. But it comes to full fruition in The Pickwick Papers. In that delightful book there are 295 references to alcoholic drink (including ‘the Inwariable’). Pickwick himself gets drunk more than once. In many ways it is a paean to drink, a sort of anti-temperance tract. Indeed, in the course of it the temperance people get it in the neck and are revealed as humbugs, secretly drinking pineapple rum, and their leader, Stiggins, is given the fine tipsy line: ‘It’s my opinion, Sir, that this meeting is drunk, Sir!’ Not just in his writings but in his actual living, drink — its purchase, storage, consumption and ethos — played a conspicuous part, as the 12 sumptuous volumes of the Pilgrim edition of his letters (some 14,252 in all), plus their countless footnotes, reveal. Dickens hits the jackpot with Pickwick at 24, and thereafter he never lacked the means to buy and store a huge variety of liquor of the highest quality. A good stock was, to him, the surest sign of having arrived. Wherever he lived, next to his workroom, the cellar was the most important room in the house. It was of paramount importance to him that it be properly arranged, as well as filled, and jealously guarded. Here he is, in America, instructing his sister-in-law, Georgiana, about locking it:
I have been constantly thinking about that cellar key, and I will tell you how we will keep it. Order from Chubbs’s man one of the ordinary little iron cash boxes to keep it in. To that cash box have made two keys, both electrotyped gold. Of those keys you shall always wear one, and I will always wear the other, and the box itself shall be kept, not in your room, but in mine, in some drawer that we will settle upon. Then, I think, we must be safe!
Dickens was always terrified not just that an intruder might get into his cellar and consume or take away his best drink, but that the liquor itself was, in some way, being interfered with, as he put it. There is a paranoid letter that survives, addressed to a famous firm of distillers:
Mr Charles Dickens sends his complements to Messrs. Seager Evans & Co., and begs them to test the accompanying bottle of gin, drawn from their cask this morning. It appears to Mr Dickens to have neither the right strength nor flavour, and he thinks it must have been tampered with at the Railway. When the cask was tapped at Gad’s Hill on Saturday, it was observed to be particularly full.
Of course Falstaff himself, the anti-hero of Gad’s Hill, thought someone was interfering with his sack. But then Falstaff was drunk at the time, whereas Dickens was sober. He seems to have ordered spirits by the barrel. Not just gin, but whisky, which cost him £35 8s each barrel. He ordered sherry by the barrel, too, both dark and light (Amontillado or Manzanilla), and of course barrels of French wine. He seems to have got port by the pipe, shipped direct from Oporto, then bottled at Gad’s. There are orders in his letters for ‘six dozen quarts [magnums] of champagne, and six dozen pints’. He was always on the lookout for high-quality champagne at advantageous prices. He ordered brandy by the case, too, and insisted on the best quality. It was a matter of pride always to offer his guests the finest liquor, both at home and on the expeditions he organised. His cellar might be guarded like Fort Knox but he was generous with its contents. He sent his sister ‘a Dozen of fine old Brandy, which I hope will do you good’.
Dickens, indeed, had a comforting belief in the medicinal qualities of fine alcoholic liquor. He described with relish a restorative mixture he discovered in the United States, to be taken in bed before rising, and called an Eye-Opener. Another, with which he dosed himself for what he called ‘catargh’, was known as a Rocky Mountain Sneezer, and was made up of brandy, rum, bitters and fresh snow. While working and travelling flat out in America, he devised for himself a curious diet, which he described, in a letter to his daughter Mary, as his ‘system’:
At seven in the morning, in bed, a tumbler of new cream and two tablespoons of rum. At twelve, a sherry cobbler and a biscuit. At three (dinner time) a pint of champagne. At five minutes to eight, an egg beaten up with a glass of sherry. Between the parts [of his public readings] the strongest beef tea that can be made, drunk hot. At a quarter past ten, soup, and anything to drink that I fancy. I don’t eat more than half a pound of solid food in the twentyfour hours, if so much.
Dickens passed the last years of his life on this largely liquid diet, dying at 58, still in full spate of work and spirits, and in full possession of his faculties. Hard to say whether he was a good advertisement for alcohol or a bad one.
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