Read Hemingway & Bailey's Bartending Guide to Great American Writers Online
Authors: Mark Bailey,Edward Hemingway
Hemingway & Bailey's Bartending Guide to Great American Writers (11 page)
Butterfield 8,
1935
T
HE SUMMERS WERE FUN IN
N
EW
Y
ORK
. Planters’ Punches. Mint Juleps. Tom Collinses. Rickeys. You had two or three of these to usher in the season, and paid a visit or two to the beer places, and then you went back to whiskey and water. What was the use of kidding yourself? Everything was done at a moment’s notice. If you wanted to go to a night club to hear Helen Morgan or Libby Holman you made the decision at midnight, you scattered to dress, met an hour later, bought a couple of bottles, and so to the night club.
“The artist drinks, when he drinks at all, for relaxation, forgetfulness, excitement, for any purpose except his art.”
As a young man, O’Neill was something of a hellion. During his brief time at Princeton, he once went berserk on absinthe, destroying most of his furniture and pulling a revolver on his friend. Even more extreme were the years living above the gin mill Jimmy the Priest’s, at three dollars a month. Part of a brotherhood of seamen, drifters, and wastrels, O’Neill drank raw whiskey for breakfast. Penniless, he would drink wood alcohol mixed with sarsaparilla and benzine, alcohol mixed with camphor, varnish diluted with water. Somehow it didn’t kill him; in fact, decades later those experiences would help create a masterpiece,
The Iceman Cometh.
..........
1888–1953. Playwright. O’Neill’s first published play,
Beyond the Horizon,
won the Pulitzer Prize; he would win three more. In 1936, he became the second American to receive the Nobel Prize for Literature. But it is his later plays that are the most enduring:
The Iceman Cometh, Moon for the Misbegotten,
and
Long Day’s Journey Into Night.
GIBSON
Whatever the original recipe, a Gibson is now nothing more than a dry Martini garnished with cocktail onions. Drinking at the bar of the Garden Hotel in New York, O’Neill often added a splash of club soda to his, but we don’t recommend that. As the stories make clear, when it comes to experimenting with alcohol, O’Neill is not a man to imitate.
2½ oz. gin
½ oz. dry vermouth
2 or 3 cocktail onions
Pour gin and dry vermouth into a mixing glass filled with ice cubes. Stir well. Strain into a chilled cocktail glass. Garnish with cocktail onions.
The Iceman Cometh,
1940
MOSHER: . . . Give him time, Harry, and he’ll come out of it. I’ve watched many cases of almost fatal teetotalism, but they all came out of it completely cured and as drunk as ever. My opinion is the poor sap is temporarily bughouse from overwork. (
Musingly
) You can’t be too careful about work. It’s the deadliest habit known to science, a great physician once told me. He practiced on street corners under a torchlight. He was positively the only doctor in the world who claimed that rattlesnake oil, rubbed on the prat, would cure heart failure in three days. I remember well his saying to me, “You are naturally delicate, Ed, but if you drink a pint of bad whiskey before breakfast every evening, and never work if you can help it, you may live to a ripe old age. It’s staying sober and working that cuts men off in their prime.”
“One more drink and I’d have been under the host.”
Although married a number of times, Parker was chronically lonely. Her one enduring romance seems to have been with the bottle. She shared a tiny office with Algonquin pal Robert Benchley and joked, “An inch smaller and it would have been adultery,” but alas the two friends were never to become romantically involved. Parker relied upon liquor and wit to combat her loneliness. Such as when she was admitted to a sanatorium and announced that she would have to leave every hour or so for a cocktail. Her doctor refused, telling her that if she did not stop drinking, she would be dead within the month. Parker’s reply: “Promises, promises.”
..........
1893–1967 Poet, short-story writer, drama critic, playwright, and screenwriter. After working as a drama critic for
Vanity Fair,
Parker began a long association with
The New Yorker
. She was the only female founding member of the Algonquin Round Table.
CHAMPAGNE COCKTAIL
Parker, who initially did not like the taste of alcohol, started out drinking Tom Collinses. But gin made her sick, so she soon moved on to scotch and water. Later she discovered champagne. She immediately composed a poem to her new love: “Three be the things I shall never attain: Envy, content, and sufficient champagne.”
1 sugar cube
2 dashes of Angostura bitters
Champagne
Lemon twist
Drop sugar cube into a chilled champagne flute and soak with bitters. Fill with champagne. Garnish with twist. Sometimes an ounce of cognac is added.
T
HE PALE YOUNG MAN EASED HIMSELF CAREFULLY
into the low chair, and rolled his head to the side, so that the cool chintz comforted his cheek and temple.
“Oh, dear,” he said. “Oh, dear, oh, dear, oh, dear. Oh.”
The clear-eyed girl, sitting light and erect on the couch, smiled brightly at him.
“Not feeling so well today?” she said.
“Oh, I’m great,” he said. “Corking, I am. Know what time I got up? Four o’clock this afternoon, sharp. I kept trying to make it, and every time I took my head off the pillow, it would roll under the bed. This isn’t my head I’ve got on now. I think this is something that used to belong to Walt Whitman. Oh, dear, oh, dear, oh, dear.”
“Do you think maybe a drink would make you feel better?”
“The desire for society comes upon me only when I have become excited by drink.”
In keeping with the spirit of his work, Poe died under mysterious circumstances. On August 27, 1849, in Richmond, Virginia, Poe joined the Sons of Temperance and took a public pledge against alcohol. But only a month after, at a birthday party, he was seen taking a drink. Poe then disappeared completely, showing up several days later at Gunner’s Hall in Baltimore, on Election Day. He was fall-down drunk and apparently wearing someone else’s clothes. He died four days later of causes that to this day remain unclear.
..........
1809–1849. Poet, short-story writer, and literary critic. Poe’s first collection of short stories,
Tales of the Grotesque and Arabesque,
contains his most famous work, “The Fall of the House of Usher.” With
The Murders in the Rue Morgue
and “The Purloined Letter” he created the modern detective story. As for verse, musical and mellifluous, “The Raven” brought Poe national fame. His other celebrated poems include “The Bells” and “Annabel Lee.”
SAZERAC
Poe had a great affection for absinthe. Sixty-eight percent alcohol mixed with a toxic herb called wormwood, absinthe was the drink of choice for poets and artists of the mid- to late nineteenth century. Until banned in 1912, absinthe was a key ingredient of the Sazerac. One of the first cocktails created in America, the Sazerac originated in New Orleans in the early 1800s. We have replaced the absinthe with Pernod. We hope Poe will forgive us.
3 dashes of Pernod
2 oz. rye whiskey
¼ oz. simple syrup
3 dashes of Peychaud bitters
Lemon twist
Pour Pernod into a chilled Old-Fashioned glass. Swirl until entire inside of the glass is coated, then discard excess. Pour rye, simple syrup, and bitters into a mixing glass filled with ice cubes. Stir well. Strain into the Old-Fashioned glass (no ice). Garnish with lemon twist.
Fill with mingled cream and amber,
I will drain that glass again.
Such hilarious visions clamber
Through the chamber of my brain.
Quaintest thoughts, queerest fancies
Come to life and fade away.
What I care how time advances;
I am drinking ale today.
