At Large and At Small (20 page)

It is said that around the seventh century, somewhere near the Red Sea—whether it was Ethiopia or Yemen is a subject of debate—a herd of goats ate the magenta berries of a local shrub and began to act strangely. In a classic 1935 study called
Coffee: The Epic of a Commodity
, the German journalist Heinrich Eduard Jacob described their behavior thus:

All night, for five nights in succession—nay, for seven or eight—they clambered over rocks, cutting capers, chasing one another, bleating fantastically. They turned their bearded heads hither and thither; with reddened eyes they gambolled convulsively when they caught sight of the goatherds, and then they darted off swift as arrows speeding from the bow.

Having observed the frisky goats, the
imam of a nearby monastery—a sort of medieval Carlos Castaneda—roasted the berries in a chafing dish, crushed them in a mortar, mixed them with boiling water, and drank the brew. When he lay down, he couldn’t sleep. His heartbeat quickened, his limbs felt light, his mood became cheerful and alert. “He was not merely thinking,” wrote Jacob. “His thoughts had become concretely visible. He watched them
from the right side and from the left, from above and from below. They raced like a team
of horses.” The imam found that he could juggle a dozen ideas in the time it normally took to consider a single one. His visual acuity increased; in the glow of his oil lamp, the parchment on his table looked unusually lustrous and the robe that hung on a nearby peg seemed to swell with life. He felt strengthened,
as Jacob put it, “by heavenly food brought to him by the angels of Paradise.”

Whoa! Little did the hopped-up imam know that while he and the goats were happily tripping, 1,3,7-trimethylxanthine (otherwise known as caffeine) was coursing through their veins, stimulating brain activity by blocking the uptake of adenosine, a neurotransmitter that, if left to its own devices, makes people (and goats)
sleepy and depressed. Just enough of the stuff and you feel you’ve been fed by the angels of Paradise; too much, and Mr. Coffee Nerves (a diabolical cartoon character with a twirly mustache who graced Postum ads in the 1930s) gets you in his grip.

Caffeine was first isolated in 1819, when the elderly Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, who had swallowed oceans of coffee in his younger days and regretted
his intemperance, handed a box of Arabian mocha coffee beans to a chemist named Friedlieb Ferdinand Runge and enjoined him to analyze their contents. Runge extracted an alkaloid that, as Jacob put it, “presents itself in the form of shining, white, needle-shaped crystals, reminding us of swansdown and still more of snow.” Caffeine is so toxic that laboratory technicians who handle it in its purified
state wear masks and gloves. In
The World of Caffeine
, by Bennett Alan Weinberg and Bonnie K. Bealer, there is a
photograph of the label from a jar of pharmaceutical-grade crystals. It reads in part:

WARNING! MAY BE HARMFUL IF INHALED OR SWALLOWED. HAS CAUSED MUTAGENIC AND REPRODUCTIVE EFFECTS IN LABORATORY ANIMALS. INHALATION CAUSES RAPID HEART RATE, EXCITEMENT, DIZZINESS, PAIN, COLLAPSE, HYPOTENSION,
FEVER, SHORTNESS OF BREATH. MAY CAUSE HEADACHE, INSOMNIA, NAUSEA, VOMITING, STOMACH PAIN, COLLAPSE AND CONVULSIONS.

Anyone who doubts that caffeine is a drug should read some of the prose composed under its influence. Many of the books on coffee that currently crowd my desk share a certain…
velocity
, as if their authors, all terrifically buzzed at 3:00 a.m., couldn’t get their words out fast
enough and had to resort to italics, hyperbole, and sentences so long that by the time you get to the end you can’t remember the beginning. (But that’s only if you’re uncaffeinated when you read them; if you’ve knocked back a couple of
cafés noirs
yourself, keeping pace is no sweat.) Heinrich Eduard Jacob boasts that his narrative was “given soul by a coffee-driven euphoria.” Gregory Dicum and
Nina Luttinger claim that while they were writing
The Coffee Book: Anatomy of an Industry from Crop to the Last Drop
, they

sucked down 83 double Americanos, 12 double espressos, 4 perfect ristrettos, 812 regular cups (from 241 French press loads, plus 87 cups of drip coffee), 47 Turkish coffees, a half-dozen regrettable cups of flavored coffee, 10 pounds of organic coffee, 7 pounds of fair trade
coffee, a quarter
pound of chicory and a handful of hemp seeds as occasional adjuncts, 1 can of ground supermarket coffee (drunk mostly iced), 6 canned or bottled coffee drinks, 2 pints of coffee beer, a handful of mochas, 1 pint of coffee concentrate, a couple of cappuccinos, 1 espresso soda, and, just to see, a lone double tall low-fat soy orange decaf latte.

Their book contains only 196 pages
and doesn’t look as if it took very long to write; that decaf latte aside, the authors’ caffeine quota per day must have been prodigious. (But note their exactitude: coffee makes you peppy, but it doesn’t make you sloppy.)

The contemporary master of the genre is Stewart Lee Allen, known as “the Hunter S. Thompson of coffee journalism,” whose gonzo masterwork,
The Devil’s Cup
, entailed the consumption
of “2,920 liters of percolated, drip, espresso, latte, cappuccino, macchiato, con panna, instant and americana.” (It isn’t very long, either. By the time Allen finished, his blood must have been largely composed of 1,3,7-trimethylxanthine.) Following the historical routes by which coffee spread around the globe, Allen gets wired in Harrar, San‘a, Istanbul, Vienna, Munich, Paris, Rio de Janeiro,
and various points across the United States, attempting to finance his travels and his coffee habit with complicated transactions involving forged passports and smuggled art. He ends up on Route 66, in search of the worst cup of coffee in America, in a Honda Accord driveaway filled with every form of caffeine he can think of: Stimu-Chew, Water Joe, Krank, hi-caf candy, and a vial of caffeine
crystals (scored from an Internet site that features images of twitching eye
balls) whose resemblance to cocaine occasions some exciting psychopharmacological plot twists when a state trooper pulls him over in Athens, Tennessee.

But in the realm of twitching eyeballs, even Stewart Lee Allen can’t hold a candle to Honoré de Balzac, the model for every espresso-swilling writer who has followed in
his jittery footsteps. What hashish was to Baudelaire, opium to Coleridge, cocaine to Robert Louis Stevenson, nitrous oxide to Robert Southey, mescaline to Aldous Huxley, and Benzedrine to Jack Kerouac, caffeine was to Balzac. The habit started early. Like a preppie with an expensive connection, he ran up alarming debts with a concierge who, for a price, was willing to sneak contraband coffee beans
into Balzac’s boarding school. As an adult, grinding out novels eighteen hours a day while listening for the rap of creditors at the door, Balzac observed the addict’s classic regimen, boosting his doses as his tolerance mounted. First he drank one cup a day, then a few cups, then many cups, then forty cups. Finally, by using less and less water, he increased the concentration of each fix until
he was eating dry coffee grounds: “a horrible, rather brutal method,” he wrote, “that I recommend only to men of excessive vigor, men with thick black hair and skin covered with liver spots, men with big square hands and legs shaped like bowling pins.” Although the recipe was hell on the stomach, it dispatched caffeine to the brain with exquisite efficiency.

From that moment on, everything becomes
agitated. Ideas quick-march into motion like battalions of a grand army to
its legendary fighting ground, and the battle rages. Memories charge in, bright flags on high; the cavalry of metaphor deploys with a magnificent gallop; the artillery of logic rushes up with clattering wagons and cartridges; on imagination’s orders, sharpshooters sight and fire; forms and shapes and characters rear up;
the paper is spread with ink.

Could that passage have been written on decaf?

Balzac’s coffeepot is displayed at 47 rue Raynouard in Paris, where he lived for much of his miserable last decade, writing
La Cousine Bette
and
Le Cousin Pons
, losing his health, and escaping bill collectors through a secret door. My friend Adam (who likes his espresso strong but with sugar) visited the house a few
years ago. “The coffeepot is red and white china,” he wrote me, “and bears Balzac’s monogram. It’s an elegant, neat little thing, almost nautical in appearance. I can imagine it reigning serenely over the otherwise-general squalor of his later life, a small pharos of caffeine amid the gloom.”

When I was fifteen, I went to Paris myself. I didn’t realize it at the time, but that summer I stood
at a fateful crossroads. One way led to coffee, the other to liquor.

I was a student on a high school French program in an era when the construction of
in loco parentis
was considerably looser than it is now. I began each day with a
café au lait
at a local patisserie and ended it with a
crème de menthe frappé
at a bar. One afternoon, after we had left Paris and were traveling through southern
France, the director of the program invited me to lunch at a
three-star restaurant in Vienne, where we shared
pâté de foie gras en brioche
,
mousse de truite Périgueux
,
turbot à la crème aux herbes
,
pintadeau aux herbes
,
gratin dauphinois
,
fromages
,
gâteau aux marrons
,
petits fours
, and a Brut Crémant ’62. I’d never drunk half a bottle of wine before. Afterward, en route to Avignon in Monsieur
Cosnard’s Mercedes, I was asked to help navigate, a task that appeared inexplicably difficult until I realized I was holding the map upside down.

The conclusion was clear:
Why would anyone want to feel like this?
Although I never became a teetotaler, I knew—especially when I woke up the next morning with a hangover—that I would cast my lot with caffeine, not with alcohol. Why would I wish my
senses to be dulled when they could be sharpened? Why would I wish to forget when I could remember? Why would I wish to mumble when I could scintillate? Of course, since even in those days I was a loquacious workaholic who liked to stay up late, you might think I’d pick a drug that would nudge me closer to the center of the bell curve instead of pushing me farther out on the edge—but of course I didn’t.
Who does? Don’t we all just keep doing the things that make us even more like ourselves?

As I lay in bed with a godawful headache, sunlight streamed through the open window, and so did the smell of good French coffee from the hotel kitchen downstairs.

Heinrich Eduard Jacob called coffee the “anti-Bacchus.” By the middle of the seventeenth century, when it had filtered westward from the Middle
East and
begun to captivate Europe, its potential consumers were in dire need of sobering up. “The eyes, the blood-vessels, the senses of the men of those days were soused in beer,” observed Jacob. “It choked their livers, their voices, and their hearts.” The average Englishman drank three liters of beer a day—nearly two six-packs—and spent a lot of time bumping into lampposts and falling into
gutters. Coffee was hailed as a salubrious alternative. As an anonymous poet put it in 1674, “When foggy Ale, leavying up mighty trains / Of muddy vapours, had besieg’d our Brains, / Then Heaven in Pity… / First sent amongst us this All-healing Berry.”

Between 1645 and 1750, as coffeehouses sprang up in Paris, Vienna, Leipzig, Amsterdam, Rome, and Venice, the All-healing Berry defogged innumerable
Continental brains. But until tea gained the upper hand around 1730, the English were the undisputed kings of coffee. By the most conservative estimates, London had five hundred coffeehouses at the turn of the eighteenth century. (If New York City were similarly equipped today, it would have nearly eight thousand.) These weren’t merely places to drink the muddy liquid that one critic likened
to “syrup of soot or essence of old shoes.” In the days when public libraries were nonexistent and journalism was in its embryonic stages, they were a vital center of news, gossip, and education—“penny universities” whose main business, in the words of a 1657 newspaper ad, was “
PUBLICK INTERCOURSE
.”

London had a coffeehouse for everyone (as long as you were male). If you were a gambler, you went
to White’s. If you were a physician, you went to Garraway’s or
Child’s. If you were a businessman, you went to Lloyd’s, which later evolved into the great insurance house. If you were a scientist, you went to the Grecian, where Isaac Newton, Edmund Halley, and Hans Sloane once staged a public dissection of a dolphin that had been caught in the Thames. If you were a journalist, you went to Button’s,
where Joseph Addison had set up a “Reader’s Letter-box” shaped like a lion’s head; you could post submissions to
The Guardian
in its mouth. And if you were a man of letters, you—along with Pope, Pepys, and Dryden—went to Will’s, where you could join a debate on whether Milton should have written
Paradise Lost
in rhymed couplets instead of blank verse. These coffeehouses changed the course of English
social history by demonstrating how pleasant it was to hang out in a place where (according to a 1674 set of Rules and Orders of the Coffee House) “Gentry, Tradesmen, all are welcome hither, / and may without affront sit down together.” And they changed the course of English literature by turning monologuists into conversationalists. A 1705 watercolor that now hangs in the British Museum depicts
a typical establishment, a high-ceilinged room dominated by a huge black coffee cauldron that simmers over a blazing fire. The periwigged patrons are sipping coffee, smoking pipes, reading news-sheets, and scribbling in notebooks, but most of all—you can tell from their gesticulations—they are talking.

Looking back, I see that my evenings in Dunster House were a penny university in miniature.
It therefore saddens me to report that these days my coffee-drinking is
usually a solitary affair, a Balzacian response to deadlines (though in smaller doses) rather than an opportunity for publick intercourse. Time is scarcer than it used to be; I make my coffee with a disposable paper filter stuffed into a little plastic cone, not in a
cafetière à piston
. My customary intake is only a cup or
two a day—still with milk and sugar—though I ratchet up my consumption when I’m writing. In the spirit of participatory journalism, every word of this essay has been written under the influence of 1,3,7-trimethylxanthine, in quantities sufficient to justify the use, after a respite of thirty years, of the mug with the polka-dotted pig.