Note: This piece was written in August and pitched to The Spectator USA, who, after indications to the contrary, decided against running it in a December issue “drinks special.” So, on the eve of the Electoral College’s momentous (if not predictable) vote, here it is: a toast—to feigned civility, our dysfunction and my cocktail of choice. (And a stiff middle finger to any temperance zealot in high office who has, with stunning arrogance and ineptitude, brought ruin to the bistros and saloons of his or her constituency this year.)
“Let us candidly admit that there are shameful blemishes on the American past,” says Bernard DeVoto in the opening tick of The Hour, his salty salute to this country’s cocktail tradition. He had in mind rum, but the instinct to make such a raw confession in the hangover of cataclysm—it was 1948—is not peculiar to his generation; we too seem poised for, ahem, a fall (and, let’s be real, a winter) of self-flagellation and discontent.
For it is evening, again, in America. In February’s State of the Union address the President, channeling Ol’ Blue Eyes of ‘64 (and the Reagan of ‘84), promised, “the best is yet to come” and “the sun is still rising.” Lo! How it has fallen. By March it was evident the fault, dear Brutus, was not in our star, “but in ourselves,” that—as a body politic—we were lodging mortal pathogens of both a biological and psychological phenotype. The American gaze, already steeped in the cults of Narcissus and Trump (but I repeat myself), turned inward, brows furrowed and our tongues (and stomachs) twisted into knots (or, in the cities, into guns). Who are we? What is our creed? In the absence of truth—God, remember, is dead—Caesar reascended the throne, his thirst for answers to such metaphysical mysteries perennially unquenched, his rictus of perplexion now concealed by a bandana.
“Countries used to change slowly,” said poet Joseph Brodsky. “More slowly, at any rate, than people.” No more. By late May the die was cast. Dampened by Sino-like government malfeasance Lady Liberty’s torch was then turned to deleterious effect against her most ardent defenders. “Burn it all down!” yelled her nemeses. The cognitive dissonance of the arsonists—and their abettors—proved impervious to discourse; naturally, deprived of baseball, we resorted to the throwing of shade. We seem to suffer now, collectively, from a kind of rapid-onset dysphoria—pioneered by the gender-bending set—and mania for bedlam, simultaneously longing with Shakespearean paradoxy “to find ourselves dishonorable graves” and be “rescued from mediocrity,” per Ernest Hello, “by the Hand that rules the world.”
Reader, if that hand—whatever its celebrity or hue—extends to you a beverage riddled with alcohol, take it. Until we have a champion—until it is morning, again, in America—we might as well have a drink. As Evelyn Waugh concedes at the close of his debut novel, Decline & Fall, “Oh, damn, what else is there to do?”
Right or not we deserve—no, demand!—a cure, if not a balm, for our ressentiment. “You are confused,” Lady Philosophy would say (and does, through the pen of Boethius), “because you have forgotten what you are, and therefore you are upset because you are in exile.” What we are, of course, is a matter of contentious debate (“We are the ones we’ve been waiting for!”), but perhaps we could agree that what we’ve been of late—Foucauldian explorers of “the creative potential of disorder,” in the words of biographer James Miller—and how—impetuous, puerile, smug—has indeed orphaned us in foreign territory; we are all at sea. Why not redeem our noble inheritance and study instead the creative potential of something just as heady, but good? Something to lift our spirits.
Consider the humble gin and tonic, devised in the early 19th century by officers of the British East India Company, statues of whom are surely a-wobble. Better that our subject—our salve— be an import from old friends than a debauched French nihilist or, heaven forfend, the labs of Pfizer, no? For the apostle Peter warns, “whatever overcomes a person, to that he is enslaved.” Better then that we are the toys of a Georgian era potion than a Georgian era king. They may have been shoddy landlords, but the Brits know a thing or two about booze.
“An onion smells like an onion ought to smell,” said theologian Fulton Sheen. And a “drink” does what it ought to do—namely, alleviate the soul. It should induce a kind of out-of-body experience where one transcends this for the promise of that—flesh for spirit, suffering for bliss. It is an emigration—out of the workaday and into the sine qua non, out of Sodom and onto the Cross. A “G&T,” properly consumed, should stun, and enlarge with sudden clarity. It places a window where before was only wall, and something hidden is revealed, as if by magic. As if a ruse. Nonetheless, there it is. There He is, Witness Lee would say, in masquerade. “God is our food and we eat him.”
But only on occasion does one appear before you seemingly fully formed, like a Bol Bol on the hardwood. It must be assembled, or “constructed,” according to lasting architectonic postulates. (“Who is ‘building’ drinks tonight?” is my old man’s way of putting it.) It is a craft. There are unassailable rules, processes and pre-political realities to be honored. And just as aesthetic decisions distinguish the work of a Frank Gehry from that of Gaudí—the amusing from the amazing—so too can a drink merely slake or, in a perfected state, stagger like a vaulted nave. But such a thing is a relic of another age when, as the poet Longfellow perceived, “Builders wrought with greatest care […] For the gods saw every where.” In our immanentized eschaton who but the oafs with whom you toast is to judge and appreciate your handiwork? Better that God is not dead.
The glass must be glass. Or crystal. Plastic is the stuff of sippy cups and doggy bags and an ersatz culture. If you can’t discern an ass from an elbow be my guest—or, rather, someone else’s—and proceed. (“It doesn’t,” however, “take much more to go first-class,” says mom, whose German vis viva lends this prescription its uncompromising rigor.) A bijou rocks, or old fashioned, glass with vertical walls is ideal—anything bigger is, like a cigarette boat, gauche. Bagged ice is fine for the college fraternity punchbowl, but for a cocktail the molded kind, or ice from a vintage Frigidaire, is best. Fill your glass with it, first—to the brim. Fill your two-ounce jigger, next, to the brim with Tanqueray and pour it in. Do not “eyeball” it—did Bernini “eyeball” it? We are striving here for majesty, for “The Lark Ascending,” for ordnung, for an antidote to our disenchanted, deconstructed times. There is no place for a Stockhausen at this bar. You are a builder.
And a dramaturg. Fuse the gin with the juice of a lime wedge and add the rind. Top—to the brim, almost—with Schweppes and tuck a small, square napkin beneath; solid white is preferable to toile de Jouy or noisy psychedelia—there is enough ostentation in the glass. Now, agitate with a knife—a cavalcade of bubbles should come hissing up from the depths. Dim the lights, solicit a piano (Ahmad Jamal’s will do) and a comrade or two, and “wonder,” as my grandfather does (in jest, of course, and with a wink), “what the poor people are up to tonight.”
After a few sips the drinker should begin to sense the vague outlines of what novelist Oakley Hall called the “frontier between history and legend.” Such is the power of gin, to unearth Shangri-La. It is the drinker who haunts, dare I say polices, this place with her calvary of melancholics and dreamers pitched against the “straight edge” and its tyranny of sobriety. But per the Peter Parker principal, “with great power comes great responsibility”—this is no task for the timid, nor the Kerouacian bacchanal whose savior faire degenerates into disrepute and vomit before dinner.
No, to today’s air of chi-chi and trivia gin brings a whiff of class. It conjures images of smoking jackets, Brideshead, sarcophagi—a lost world. England. An old England. The past. Perhaps “a composite past, eerie, veiled and obscure,” narrated by Clive Aslet and swirling with visages of Minterne Magna, Glastonbury Tor, mad hatters and Macca (pre-Wings). Gin is an accessory to things vanished, things dimly perceived, to the mysterium tremendum. I pity the man to whom all this is incomprehensible or, if he is Mohammedan, forbidden; he is, to an Albert Einstein at least, “as good as dead, a snuffed-out candle.”
Indeed, it belongs to another generation and another country. For the American, gin is an heirloom, a vestigial limb we schlep—because, like kith and kin, it abides unconditionally—with beatific patience through bitter election cycles, wasted Advents and disease, borrowed. It will never be ours, like jazz is ours. Nonetheless, it is a gift worthy of our misuse. And though it stirs in the drinker the romance of possibility and premonitions of adventure, it belongs, conversely, to dusk—to endings.
After two drinks all work should be, if not impossible, perverse. To be sweetly taken by gin is to become a sabbath unto oneself. It should nudge one into repose, to assume the mind of the philosopher-inventor. Hummingbirds, snowfall, telepathy, the filibuster (forgive us!), sideburns, the moon, sex (in 1963, according to Philip Larkin)—all are inventions of the gin drinker. For an hour or two she is somehow improved, the very apprentice of God, suspended in a purgatorial soup of pleasant contradictions—she is, in the incomparable tongue of Waugh’s Charles Ryder, “drowning in honey, stingless.”
And then, gradually, it is night, the aura fades and she is—again—solely an American, drowning.
Image: Artist unknown. Public Domain.
Impolitic 