Everyday Drinking: The Distilled Kingsley Amis

Born in London in 1922, KINGSLEY AMIS was one of the best-loved British novelists of the twentieth century. He was the author of more than twenty novels, including the classic Lucky Jim, and a number of other works of criticism, poetry and memoir. He was knighted in 1990, and died in 1995 at the age of seventy-three.

BY THE SAME AUTHOR

NOVELS

Lucky Jim

That Uncertain Feeling

I Like It Here

Take a Girl Like You

One Fat Englishman

The Anti-Death League

I Want It Now

The Green Man

Girl, 20

The Riverside Villas Murder

Ending Up

The Alteration

Jake’s Thing

Russian Hide and Seek

SHORT STORIES

My Enemy’s Enemy

Collected Short Stories

VERSE

A Case of Samples

A Look Round the Estate

Collected Poems 1944–1979

GENERAL

New Maps of Hell: A Survey of Science Fiction

The James Bond Dossier

What Became of Jane Austen? And Other Questions Rudyard Kipling and His World

Harold’s Years (ed.)

The New Oxford Book of Light Verse (ed.)

The Faber Popular Reciter (ed.)

The Golden Age of Science Fiction (ed.)

WITH ROBERT CONQUEST

Spectrum I, II, III, IV, V (ed.)

The Egyptologists

CONTENTS

Introduction: The Muse of Booze

by Christopher Hitchens

Editor’s Note and Glossary

I. ON DRINK

Introduction

Drinking Literature

Actual Drinks

Tools of the Trade

The Store Cupboard

First Thoughts on Wine

Further Thoughts on Wine

Wine Shopper’s Guide

What to Drink with What

Abroad

Mean Sod’s Guide (Incorporating Mean Slag’s Guide)

The Hangover

The Boozing Man’s Diet

How Not to Get Drunk

II. EVERY DAY DRINKING

III. HOW’S YOUR GLASS?

Introduction

List of Abbreviations

Quizzes

Wine—Elementary

Wine—Intermediate

Wine—Advanced

Wine—France

Wine—Germany

Wine—Italy, Spain, Portugal

Wines—Others

Beer in General

Beer in Particular

Vodka

Aperitifs and Such

Gin

Liqueurs

Rum

Cognac and Armagnac

Brandy (One Step Down)

Distillation

Minor Spirits

Scotch Whiskey I

Scotch Whiskey II

Whiskies and Whiskeys

Port

Sherry

Madeira, Marsala and Others

Cocktails and Mixed Drinks

Inventors and Inventions

Pousse-Café I

Pousse-Café II

Pousse-Café III

Alcohol and Your Interior

Answers

Introduction

THE MUSE OF BOOZE

IT’S REASONABLY WELL known that the arts of brewing and fermenting arose in nice time for the dawn of human civilization (there are ancient poems and mosaics and that sort of thing, dedicated to the celebration of the fact), but it’s at least as notorious that an opened flask of alcohol is a mouth that can lead to hell as well as heaven. This being the case—and one day we shall work out the etymology that leads us to use the simple Italian word for a bottle, fiasco, in the way that we do—then it is as well to have a true Virgil to be our guide through the regions infernal as well as paradisiac.

The late Sir Kingsley Amis (who wrote these slender but thoughtful volumes before receiving his knighthood and who was also the expert to consult on things like the derivation of fiasco) was what the Irish call your man when it came to the subject of drink. More perhaps even than of Graham Greene, of whom he once wrote a short biography, it could be said that the booze was his muse. I cannot think of any of his fictional work in which it does not play a role, and in several of his novels that role is dominant. (The famous hangover scene in Lucky Jim, not equaled for alcoholic comedy in our literature even by Shakespeare’s night porter or portly knight, has only one rival that I can call to mind, and that is Peter Fallow’s appalling waking moment in Tom Wolfe’s The Bonfire of the Vanities.) Fiascos apart, other Amis books like One Fat Englishman and The Green Man contain some incidentally sapient advice about how to keep drinking and yet remain functional.

It has been said that alcohol is a good servant and a bad master. Nice try. The plain fact is that it makes other people, and indeed life itself, a good deal less boring. Kingsley grasped this essential fact very early in life, and (so to speak) never let go of the insight. This does not mean that there are not wine bores, single-malt bores, and people who become even more boring when they themselves have a tipple. You will meet them, and learn how to recognize them (and also how to deal with them) in these pages.

In my opinion Kingers—which I was allowed to call him—was himself a very slight cocktail bore. Or, at least, he had to affect to be such in order to bang out a regular column on drinks for the pages of a magazine aimed at the male population. In real life, Amis was a no-nonsense drinker with little inclination to waste a good barman’s time with fussy instructions. However, there was an exception which I think I can diagnose in retrospect, and it is related to his strong admiration for the novels of Ian Fleming. What is James Bond really doing when he specifies the kind of martini he wants and how he wants it? He is telling the barman (or bartender if you must) that he knows what he is talking about and is not to be messed around. I learned the same lesson when I was a restaurant and bar critic for the City Paper in Washington, D.C. Having long been annoyed by people who called knowingly for, say, a Dewar’s and water instead of a scotch and water, I decided to ask a trusted barman what I got if I didn’t specify a brand or label. The answer was a confidential jerk of the thumb in the direction of a villainous-looking tartan-shaded jug under the bar. The situation was even grimmer with gin and vodka and became abysmal with white wine, a thing I still can’t bear to hear being ordered. If you don’t state a clear preference, then your drink is like a bad game of poker or a hasty drug transaction: It is whatever the dealer says it is. Please do try to bear this in mind.

A tremendous thing about the King—some of us were even allowed to call him that, too—was his abhorrence of meanness. From him I learned the gruff rule of his own house, which was more warm if less polite than his civil How’s Your Glass? It ran: I’ll pour you the first one and after that, if you don’t have one, it’s your own f***ing fault. You know where it is. (I have ever since told this to all my guests.) From these pages you will learn—see the Mean Sods and Mean Slags section—of the stern attitude he took to any parsimony. With alcoholic ritual, the whole point is generosity. If you open a bottle of wine, for heaven’s sake have the grace to throw away the damn cork. If you are a guest and not a host, don’t find yourself having to drop your glass and then exclaim (as Amis once did in my hearing) Oh—thank heavens it was empty. The sort of host who requires that hint is the sort of host you should have avoided in the first place.

On the sometimes-penitential consequences of generosity, do by all means consult the brilliant chapter on the physical and metaphysical hangover. It is a piece of selfless research, undertaken by a pioneer. It can save much avoidable pain and, to my certain knowledge, has done so. Thanks to Zachary Leader’s excellent biography, the world now knows what Kingsley’s innumerable friends had come to realize, which is that the booze got to him in the end, and robbed him of his wit and charm as well as of his health. But not everybody can take their own advice, or not forever, and the cheerful and wise counsel offered here will not lead you, dear reader, far astray. Winston Churchill once boasted that he himself had got more out of drink than it had taken out of him and, life being the wager that it is, was quite probably not wrong in that. In these pages, we meet another man who made it work for him, and for others, too.

—CHRISTOPHER HITCHENS

EDITOR’S NOTE AND GLOSSARY

THE BOOKS THAT make up this collection—On Drink, Every Day Drinking (from which we’ve borrowed a title), and How’s Your Glass—were written by Amis between 1971 and 1984, a busy period that produced eight other books and a handful of edited volumes. They represent the work of a man whose interest in alcohol somewhat transcended the merely casual. Indeed, Amis was a drinker—even a drink-ist—a scholar and practitioner and, perhaps above all, a connoisseur.

Despite his occasional claims of ignorance, his knowledge of drink was stunning, even encyclopedic. And being encyclopedic, these volumes seem best presented in their unabridged state. This creates a certain amount of overlap in spots; like all drinking companions, Amis occasionally repeats himself. But like the very best of them, he is unfailingly entertaining, and to miss his second hilarious dissertation on Albanian wine, or Speyside scotch, or the affront of lager and lime, merely because there had been another one elsewhere in the book would be as self-denying as passing up a Laphroig simply because you’d had a Glenfiddich earlier in the evening.

So here is the complete, unexpurgated shelf of Amis’s musings on drink, taking in history, etiquette, social mores, trade secrets, arcana, and, of course, the practical aspects of the convivial life. This is the complete vintage Amis: uncut, unfiltered, and made only better by age. Bottoms up.

—ED.

GLOSSARY

best bitter: a middleweight division of the pale ales, which also include the weaker session or ordinary bitter (at up to 4.1 percent alcohol) and the more forceful premium or strong bitter (at a serious-minded 4.8 percent or more)

Black Velvet: a cocktail made from stout and sparkling white wine, traditionally Guinness and champagne

blower: telephone

bob: a shilling; that is, twelve pence, or one twentieth of a pound

Bovril: a traditional beef-flavored concentrated yeast extract, served spread on toast or mixed with hot water as a beverage

brace cold snipe: one pair of room-temperature cooked birds

castor sugar: very finely granulated sugar

Chambéry: a raspberry (framboise) liqueur; substitute Cham-bord

champagne cider: an effervescent fermented cider produced using a method similar to the one used for champagne

chaptalization: a method of fortifying wine by adding sugar to the unfermented grapes

claret: Any of the wines of Bordeaux. The British affinity for these wines may be traced to the Middle Ages, when the area containing the region was held by the Norman crown. After King John granted the region tax exemptions in hopes of shoring up shaky loyalties, Bordeaux became a main source of wines (including its typical clairet) for England.

cobbler: a tall drink involving lemon, soda, sugar, and some kind of alcohol, notably gin, bourbon, or sherry

crown-cork opener: Neither cork nor crown, the crown cork is what we think of as the ordinary top of a glass beer bottle. The opener, originally manufactured by the Crown Cork & Seal Company, is the typical piece of bar apparatus.

Darby and Joan Club: a senior citizens’ social club

dipsography: writing about drinking (typically refers to literary writing, not bar tabs, public-indecency citations and the like)

Double Diamond: a bitters-style beer brewed by Carlsberg UK, reviled by some and fiercely loved by others

extract spread and tablets: Marmite and its hideous kin of yeast extracts, unaccountably enjoyed by the British and Australians as a spread on toast

GLC: Greater London Council, the administrative body that served the city area from 1965 to 1986

hock: Any of the white wines produced along the German Rhine. The name derives from the Rheingau village of Hochheim. Think Riesling, if it’s for you, or liebfraumilch, if you’re serving company

Husband’s Scotch: a whiskey (like J & B) whose light color makes it appear more watered down than it is

look a charley: appear foolish or tasteless

Malvern water: Spring water, a traditional favorite of royalty and the ideal accompaniment to good scotch

Montilla: a fino sherry, named after the Spanish town of Montilla-Morales, where it is produced

Moselle: a wine from the Mosel-Saar-Ruwer area of Germany

old stager: a veteran or old hand; in this context, presumably a longtime toper

peach wine: Typically chardonnay wine with peach flavoring, this is still widely available and a favorite of avowed non-connoisseurs. Once described as the perfect wine for sitting in front of the TV with

poteen: An aggressive species of Irish moonshine made from potatoes or, less often, from barley and yeast. It was outlawed by the English in 1670. Despite the fact that doctors through the years have suggested it may lead to alcohol poisoning and even mental illness, and that commercial (presumably nonblinding) brands of poteen were made legal in 1997, many traditionalists still prefer the rough-hewn authenticity of the homebrewed stuff

sack: A strong Spanish wine, the antecedent of sherry. The term may also apply to sweet wines from Madeira, Malaga, and the Canary Islands. Favored by Shakespeare’s Falstaff, likely for its assertive alcohol content, as high as 16 percent

Sassenach: a term (a bit derogatory) used by Scots to describe the English

SDP: Social Democratic Party

slivovitz: a colorless, brandy-like, and extremely dangerous alcohol made from fermented plum juice

stand-up party: as opposed to a dinner party, a gathering at which food is served buffet-style

stune: in Irish slang, a college’s student union

toper: drunkard; sot; convivial person

tot: one-thirtieth of a bottle of liquor; 25 ml

Worthington: A brewery noted for its Worthington’s White Shield ale, a traditional IPA-style brew. Now owned by Coors, which still sells White Shield as a specialty ale

yobbo: according to the OED, a rude and loutish young man

On Drink

INTRODUCTION

ANTHROPOLOGISTS ASSURE US that wherever we find man he speaks. Chimpanzee-lovers notwithstanding, no animal other than man is capable of laughter. And, although some undiscovered tribe in the Brazilian jungle might conceivably prove an exception tomorrow, every present-day society uses alcohol, as have the majority of those of the past. I am not denying that we share other important pleasures with the brute creation, merely stating the basic fact that conversation, hilarity and drink are connected in a profoundly human, peculiarly intimate way.

There is a choice of conclusions from this. One would be that no such healthy linkage exists in the case of other drugs: a major reason for being on guard against them. More to the point, the collective social benefits of drinking altogether (on this evidence) outweigh the individual disasters it may precipitate. A team of American investigators concluded recently that, without the underpinning provided by alcohol and the relaxation it affords, Western society would have collapsed irretrievably at about the time of the First World War. Not only is drink here to stay; the moral seems to be that when it goes, we go too.

It has certainly increased its hold on our lives with the world-wide move to the towns and the general increase in prosperity. Wine and beer are—in origin, in the countries that produce them—drinks of the village and the poorer classes; gin and whisky belong to the city and, these days at any rate, the rather better off. In other words, our drinks are getting stronger as well as more numerous.

The strains and stresses of urban living, to coin a phrase, are usually held accountable for these increases. I should not dissent from this exactly, but I should single out one stress (or strain) as distinctly more burdensome, and also more widespread, than most: sudden confrontation with complete or comparative strangers in circumstances requiring a show of relaxation and amiability—an experience that I, for one, never look forward to without misgiving, even though I nearly always turn out to enjoy it in the event. While the village remained the social unit, strangers appeared seldom, and when they did were heavily outnumbered by your family, your friends, people you had known all your life. Nowadays, in the era of the business lunch, the dinner party, the office party, the anything-and-everything party, strangers pour over the horizon all the time.

The reason why I, and most others, usually turn out to enjoy meeting such creatures is simply and obviously the co-presence of drink. 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 as letting you and the other chap, or chaps, cease to be totally sober at about the same rate in agreeable surroundings. Well and good, the serious student of the effects of drink will retort in the grim, curmudgeonly tone peculiar to serious students of the effects of drink; well and good, but what about what happens later? What about those who drink, not to cease to be totally sober, but to get drunk? What about the man who drinks on his own?

Well, what about it and them and him? I have nothing to offer, nothing more to add to serious sociological speculation about the whys and wherefores of indulgence in alcohol. Or only this: leaving aside dipsomaniacs, most or many of whom are born, not made, I feel that there is very little we can safely add, in discussing our motives for drinking, to the verdict of the poet who said we do it because we are dry, or lest we may be by and by, or any other reason why.

Where and what and how we drink, or should drink, are different and more interesting questions. As to where, this is so much a matter of individual preference and geographical opportunity that I should drop it right away, except that it gives me a long-sought chance to deliver a short, grouchy blast against what has been done, and what is still being done, to that deeply, traditionally British drinking centre, t he pub.

With some shining exceptions, of which my own local is one, the pub is fast becoming uninhabitable. Fifteen or twenty years ago, the brewing companies began to wake up to the fact that their pubs badly needed a face-lift, and started spending millions of pounds to bring them up to date. Some of the results of their refurbishings have been admirable: more and more comfortable seating, improved hygiene, chilled beers, snack lunches that in general have reached such a standard that, when in quest of a midday meal in unfamiliar territory, you will usually find quicker service and much better value for money in the pub than in the near-by trattoria.

But that is about as far as it goes. The interior of today’s pub has got to look like a television commercial, with all the glossy horror that implies. Repulsive themes are introduced: the British-battles pub, ocean-liner pub, Gay Nineties pub. The draught beer is no longer true draught, but keg, that hybrid substance that comes out of what is in effect a giant metal bottle, engineered so as to be the same everywhere, no matter how lazy or incompetent the licensee, and, in the cases of at least two well-known, lavishly advertised brews, pretty nasty everywhere. But all this could be put up with cheerfully enough if it were not for the bloody music—or that kind of uproar having certain connections with a primitive style of music and known as pop. It is not really the pop as such that I object to, even though pop is very much the sort of thing that I, in common with most of the thirty- or thirty-five-plus age-group, would have expected to go to the pub to get away from. For partly different reasons, I should also object to having Beethoven’s Choral Symphony blaring away while I tried to enjoy a quiet pint with friends. If you dislike what is being played, you use up energy and patience in the attempt to ignore it; if you like it, you will want to listen to it and not to talk or be talked to, not to do what you came to the pub largely to do.

I have always understood that pop and popular music came to pubs because the brewers hoped thereby to reverse the falling-off in the recruitment of younger patrons noticeable in the post-war period. If I am right in that assumption, then they were wrong in theirs. Pop not only tends to drive the older customer out; it fails to attract, and even keeps away, large sections of the young, including some who welcome pop on its own ground. (I wonder very much what would be the effect on the trade of a publican who put up a notice at his door saying, No Music Inside. Will someone try it?) Anyway, we pay the pipers; we ought to be able to call the absence of tunes.

Until we can, many of us will prefer to drink in our own or our friends’ homes. But here too, certainly in the homes of more than one or two friends of mine, the fairly serious, reasonably discriminating drinker can find plenty to offend him without having to look at all far. What most often springs to his eye is not being given enough. Those of us who are poor or mean cannot or will not do much about this. But for the benefit of those who are neither, who have merely got their priorities wrong, let me enunciate

G.P. (General Principle) 1: Up to a point (i.e. short of offering your guests one of those Balkan plonks marketed as wine, Cyprus sherry, poteen and the like), go for quantity rather than quality. Most people would rather have two glasses of ordinary decent port than one of a rare vintage. On the same reasoning, give them big drinks rather than small—with exceptions to be noted later. Serious drinkers will be pleased and reassured, unserious ones will not be offended, and you will use up less chatting-time going round to recharge glasses.

My final observation, before getting down to details, is that serving good drinks, like producing anything worth while, from a poem to a motor-car, is troublesome and expensive. (If you are interested, a worthwhile poem is expensive to the poet in the sense that he could almost always earn more money by spending the time on some other activity.) But I undertake, in what follows, to keep a sharp eye on both points, to show where and how trouble can be minimized and to what degree you can legitimately cut down costs.

It is the unbroken testimony of all history that alcoholic liquors have been used by the strongest, wisest, handsomest, and