Hemingway & Bailey's Bartending Guide to Great American Writers (12 page)

“Learn to be very stingy very soon and drink alone in the dark.”

Visiting in upstate New York, Powell and Edmund Wilson drove into town one day for a bottle of vodka. On the way home, the car had a flat tire. Wilson’s daughter, who was driving, waited while Powell and Wilson wandered off into a cornfield with the bottle, purportedly looking for help. As both writers were short and the summer corn tall, they soon disappeared. Hours later, Wilson’s daughter returned home to find Powell and Wilson sitting on the porch. It seems they had spent the afternoon in the cornfield polishing off the vodka. They had finally stumbled out, into another county altogether, and a sheriff had driven them home.

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E
BIE FOUND THE BOTTLE
and some glasses.

“Want some?” she offered the girl.

“A half one,” said the snip. “I learned that in Ireland. I went back last year, and my dad thought it was awful I didn’t drink. ‘Come on, Maureen,’ he’d say, ‘a drop’d do you good, just a half one.’ He’d put away a dozen half ones. I’d say, ‘Why don’t you take a full one, pop, you want it,’ and he’d say, ‘No Maureen, I only take a half one, I’m no drunkard, my girl.’”

“I have a martini and I feel, once more, real.”

After Robert Lowell’s writing class at Boston University, Sexton and fellow classmate and poet Sylvia Plath would jump into Sexton’s Ford and zoom off to the Ritz Carlton. Sexton would park illegally in a loading zone, reasoning that she and Plath intended to get loaded. Once at the bar, according to Sexton’s letters, the two poets would sip cocktails, eat free chips, and talk at length about their first suicide attempts.

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O Mary, tender physician,
come with powders and herbs
for I am in the center.
It is very small and the air is gray
as in a steam house.
I am handed wine as a child is given milk.
It is presented in a delicate glass
with a round bowl and a thin lip.
The wine itself is pitch-colored, musty and secret.
The glass rises on its own toward my mouth
and I notice this and understand this
only because it has happened.

“It gives me the wimwams to be in a house that’s bone-dry.”

Stafford’s alcohol consumption was impressive, even by the standards of her contemporaries. Often she found it necessary to hide her drinking, as she did from her first husband, Robert Lowell, no teetotaler himself. When living together in a dry village in Maine, Stafford hired the local sheriff to drive her twenty miles for rum. She used to hide bottles behind cookbooks and sneak nips from a flask she kept in her purse. One night after a party, Stafford was chauffeured home with another guest. Perhaps it was a sign of the times, but both women played sober, until without warning and quite spontaneously, they each threw up in their respective handbags.

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P
ROBABLY THE PROCESS WAS GRADUAL
but it seemed to her that very suddenly and with no warning at all she was drunk. The sensation was wholly novel and delightful. It was an awakening to a new surrounding: the light altered, the room expanded, the faces were familiar and her host and hostess acquired a hospitality of which she was the principal beneficiary. But the awakening was combined with a delicious bodily drowsiness and though to her eyes the barroom seemed large, to her physical being it contracted its spaciousness into a small, snug nest.

“Only lust and gluttony are worth a darn.”

Living in Hollywood, now a successful screenwriter (his script for Hitchcock’s
Lifeboat
was nominated for an Academy Award), Steinbeck hobnobbed with celebrities such as Charlie Chaplin, Burgess Meredith, and Spencer Tracy. He was particularly fond of Robert Benchley. Witty, inventive, and good with a bottle, the two writers were kindred spirits. In fact, at one of Steinbeck’s pool parties, they invented a game to test their capacity for booze. Empty wine bottles were placed at the bottom of the pool and various guests took turns diving down to retrieve them. If guests drowned in the process, it was decided they had had too much to drink.

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