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Hemingway and Bailey’s Bartending Guide to Great American Writers
Mark Bailey
By
Published: Jan 01, 2006
Category:
Food and Wine
Hemingway & Bailey’s Bartending Guide to Great American Writers
Mark Bailey
Christmas. Greenwich Village. Mark Bailey was sitting at a bar with his friend Edward Hemingway, an artist, illustrator and grandson of the hard-drinking writer. They were sipping beers. The writers standing around them were nursing club sodas.
This seemed wrong. America has many traditions, but few it actually honors. One is the tradition of drinking among American writers — and drinking to extreme, at that. As Truman Capote once said (astutely quoting Brendan Behan), “We are drinkers with writing problems.”
Bailey and Hemingway could have dealt with their distress as many of us do — strap on their Nikes, fire up their iPods, and rush off to the gym to pound down a few miles on the elliptical trainer. But one of then bore a great name, the other a large thirst.
In short, they had a…duty.
So they set out on a patriotic quest.
Their mission: make the case for classic cocktails by sharing great drink recipes and outlandish literary anecdotes of the kind generated whenever men and women of talent knock back two or three too many. And, just for good measure, they found excerpts from each writer’s fiction that deals with the results of liquor.
If you are firmly seated on a bar stool and promise not to chug your Perrier, I will share some of their findings.
“Don’t you know that drinking is slow death?” F. Scott Fitzgerald asked. Robert Benchley took a sip and replied: “So who’s in a hurry?”
Charles Bukowski could drink 30 beers at one sitting.
Raymond Carver invited friends to a party, but failed to attend as he got drunk in another city.
Unable to pay a bar bill in Paris, Hart Crane started a brawl so he could get arrested.
Lillian Hellman was in New York. Dashiell Hammett, her paramour, was in Los Angeles. In the middle of the night, she telephoned him — and got his secretary. She was too drunk to realize he had no secretary, but when she sobered up, she flew to LA, went to Hammett’s house, smashed his bar and immediately returned to New York. Bailey’s comment: “Hellman knew where to kick a man.”
Ring Lardner once drank for 60 hours straight (though “straight” seems inexact).
H.L. Mencken: “I’ll drink as much as I want, and one drink more.”
A doctor told Dorothy Parker she had to stop drinking — or she’d be dead within a month. Parker: “Promises, promises.”
[Let me state for the record: I do not endorse this behavior, I merely note it. Myself, I drink fruit juice cut with seltzer. Indeed, my only joke about drinking is about the Jewish allergy to it — I can tell this, I’m Jewish. It goes: “Why don’t Jews drink?” Answer: “Because it dulls the pain.”]
In the spirit of the book, here’s a drink recipe.
MANHATTAN
2 ounces rye, bourbon or Canadian whiskey
1 ounce sweet vermouth
2 dashes of Angostura bitters
Maraschino cherry
Pour whiskey, vermouth and bitters into a mixing glass filled with ice cubs. Stir well. Strain into a chilled cocktail glass. Garnish with cherry.
Cheers!
To buy “Hemingway & Bailey’s Bartending Guide to Great American Writers” from Amazon.com, click here.
