Hemingway & Bailey's Bartending Guide to Great American Writers (9 page)

“What’s the use of winning the Nobel Prize if it doesn’t even get you into speakeasies?”

In the late 1930s, a chance meeting took place between two of the literati’s most notorious nuisance drunks. This was in the bathroom of the “21” Club. At one urinal was Lewis, who was known for hurling insults and mimicry and, often, quite spontaneously passing out; at the other urinal, John O’Hara, known not for passing out but punching out. Apparently, Lewis had previously written some disparaging comments about O’Hara’s
Appointment in Samarra.
Recognizing Lewis, O’Hara immediately launched into a tirade, but before it could come to blows, the Nobel Prize winner zipped up and scampered out the door.

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T
HROUGH A FROTH OF MERRIMENT
he brought the shining promise, the mighty tray of glasses with the cloudy yellow cocktails in the glass pitcher in the center. The men babbled, “Oh, gosh, have a look!” and “This gets me right where I live!” and “Let me at it!” But Chum Frink, a traveled man and not unused to woes, was stricken by the thought that the potion might be merely fruit-juice with a little neutral spirits. He looked timorous as Babbitt, a moist and ecstatic almoner, held out a glass, but as he tasted it he piped, “Oh, man, let me dream on! It ain’t true, but don’t waken me! Jus’ lemme slumber!”

“I was always willing to drink when any one was around. I drank by myself when no one was around.”

Not content to just write about adventure, London frequently courted danger, especially when drunk. Sometimes the danger was nature, as when he staggered down an Oakland wharf, made for a sloop and lost his footing. Swept along by the current, he gazed drunkenly at the gaslights of San Francisco and thought this might be the end. Muscles all but frozen and cramping, London was saved by a Greek fisherman. Other times the danger was man, as when docked in Yokohama. There, London drank sake night and day for a week, until finally the Japanese police chased him off. Forced to dive into the harbor, he swam safely back to the boat. That time he was officially registered as drowned.

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W
OLF
L
ARSEN TOOK THE DISTRIBUTION
of the whiskey off my hands, and the bottles began to make their appearance while I worked over the fresh batch of wounded men in the forecastle. I had seen whiskey drunk, such as whiskey and soda by the men of the clubs, but never as these men drank it, from pannikins and mugs, and from the bottles—great brimming drinks, each one of which was in itself a debauch. But they did not stop at one or two. They drank and drank, and ever the bottles slipped forward and they drank more.

Everybody drank; the wounded drank; Oofty-Oofty, who helped me, drank. Only Louis refrained, no more than cautiously wetting his lips with the liquor, though he joined in the revels with an abandon equal to that of most of them. It was a saturnalia. In loud voices they shouted over the day’s fighting, wrangled about details, or waxed affecionate and made friends with the men whom they had fought.

“My poem possesses and obsesses—like whiskey, that other inspirer.”

Although more temperate than Jean Stafford, his first wife, Lowell still enjoyed the not infrequent binge. The only problem was that alcohol had the potential to make him drunk out of his mind (literally). One such occasion happened in Buenos Aires. In short order, he enraged the U.S. ambassador by bringing communists to dinner. He tweaked an Argentine general who, it turned out, was the country’s president in waiting. He called the cultural attaché illiterate, and on the main boulevard, stripped naked and hopped onto a statue of a horse. When they finally found Lowell he was drinking and arm-wrestling with the radical Spanish poet Rafael Alberti. It took six paramedics to stuff him into a straitjacket.

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The man is killing time—there’s nothing else.
No help now from the fifth of Bourbon
chucked helter-skelter into the river,
even its cork sucked under.

Stubbed before-breakfast cigarettes
burn bull’s-eyes on the bedside table;
a plastic tumbler of alka seltzer
champagnes in the bathroom.

“I’m drinking hot tea and not doing much.”

Not nearly so powerful as a Long Island Iced Tea, McCuller’s favorite drink while writing was a mixture of hot tea and sherry that she kept in a thermos. She named the concoction “sonnie boy” and, often claiming it was only tea, would drink straight through the workday. McCullers must have felt the liquor helped her creativity. At Yaddo, the famous writers’ colony, she began with a beer at the typewriter just after breakfast, then moved on to her “sonnie boy,” and finished with cocktails in the evening.

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