by Mark Bailey
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1917–1977. Poet. A member of the confessional school. His second book, Lord Weary’s Castle, was awarded the Pulitzer Prize. Life Studies, considered one of the most influential books of poetry in the twentieth century, won the National Book Award. In 1974 he won another Pulitzer, this time for The Dolphin.
WARD EIGHT
Named after an election district in Boston, the Ward Eight was created at the famous Locke-Ober Café in anticipation of another victory for the Democratic Party machine. Lowell, a renegade from a prominent Boston Brahmin family, was a staunch Democrat. Did he vote in the eighth ward? We do not know. Did he drink a Ward Eight? Now that’s a different story . . .
2 oz. rye or bourbon whiskey
1 dash grenadine
½ oz. lemon juice
¾ oz. orange juice
Maraschino cherry
Orange slice
Pour all ingredients into a cocktail shaker filled with ice cubes. Shake well. Strain into a white-wine glass filled with ice cubes. Garnish with cherry and orange slice.
From “The Drinker,” 1960
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.
Carson McCullers
“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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1917–1967. Novelist, short-story writer, playwright, and screenwriter. McCullers achieved early acclaim with her first novel, The Heart Is a Lonely Hunter. After receiving a Guggenheim Fellowship, she wrote Member of the Wedding, another critical success; her adaptation for the stage was awarded the Drama Critics Circle Award. The novella The Ballad of the Sad Café is perhaps her finest work.
LONG ISLAND ICED TEA
Notorious, the Long Island Iced Tea (when made correctly) is incredibly potent, but tastes and looks like nonalcoholic tea. It’s perfect for discreet drinking, which McCullers indulged in often. But be warned, invented in the Hamptons by bartender Robert Butt, the Long Island Iced Tea will knock you out cold if you’re not careful.
½ oz. gin
½ oz. vodka
½ oz. tequila
½ oz. light rum
½ oz. Cointreau
¾ oz. lemon juice
Top with cola
Lemon wedge
Pour all ingredients except cola and garnish into a cocktail shaker filled with ice cubes. Shake, and then strain into a Collins glass filled with ice cubes. Add cola until color of tea. Garnish with lemon wedge. Serve with two straws.
From The Ballad of the Sad Café, 1951
THE WHISKY THEY DRANK THAT EVENING (two big bottles of it) is important. Otherwise, it would be hard to account for what followed. Perhaps without it there would never have been a café. For the liquor of Miss Amelia has a special quality of its own. It is clean and sharp on the tongue, but once down a man it glows inside him for a long time afterward. And that is not all. It is known that if a message is written with lemon juice on a clean sheet of paper there will be no sign of it. But if the paper is held for a moment to the fire then the letters turn brown and the meaning becomes clear. Imagine that the whisky is the fire and that the message is that which is known only in the soul of a man—then the worth of Miss Amelia’s liquor can be understood.
H. L. Mencken
“I drink exactly as much as I want, and one drink more.”
An ardent and vocal opponent of Prohibition, Mencken wrote letters and essays railing against the Volstead Act. In The American Language, he devoted pages to the etymology of bar slang. With his friends in New York, Mencken spent an inordinate amount of time searching for the perfect watering hole, the Alt Heidelburg in Union Hill, New Jersey. In Baltimore, he joined drinking clubs, such as the aptly named Stevedores, a group that “devoted itself to the unloading of schooners”—schooners of beer, that is. When not out drinking at speakeasies or clubs, Mencken was drinking at home. An avid home brewer, he once gave Sinclair Lewis a home brewery system with the hope that it would keep him off the harder stuff.
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1880–1956. Newspaper editor, critic, journalist, and linguist. A reporter for the Baltimore Herald, Mencken later joined the Baltimore Sun. He edited the satirical magazine Smart Set and founded the American Mercury. Mencken’s six-volume collection of essays, Prejudice, stands as a major literary achievement, as does The American Language.
STINGER
Created during Prohibition, the Stinger was invented to cover the taste of cheap speakeasy swill. Either you will love or hate this after-dinner drink. We are going to venture that Mencken loved it. After all, he once claimed, “I’m ombibulous. I drink every known alcoholic drink and enjoy them all.”
1½ oz. brandy
1½ oz. white crème de menthe
Pour ingredients into a mixing glass filled with ice cubes. Stir well. Strain into a chilled cocktail glass.
For a dryer version, increase brandy 1/2 oz. and decrease crème de menthe 1/2 oz.
From The Baltimore Sun, c.1910
WHAT WOULD BECOME OF ROMANCE if there were no alcohol? Imagine a teetotaler writing Much Ado About Nothing, or the Fifth Symphony, or Le Malade Imaginaire, or Peer Gynt, or the Zend-Avesta, or the Declaration of Independence or any other great work of feeling and fancy! Imagine Wagner, bursting with ginger-pop, at work upon Tristan and Isolde. Imagine Leonardo, soaked in health drinks from Battle Creek, fashioning the unfathomable smile of Mona Lisa!
Edna St.Vincent Millay
“Who cares what tripped a fallen woman?”
To pay for a holiday in Europe, Millay agreed to write some quick pieces for Vanity Fair under the byline Nancy Boyd. She would need liquor and company to help her get it done. Late one night, while writing and drinking bootleg gin with Edmund Wilson and the poet John Peale Bishop, a drunken Millay asked the two men to hold her in their arms. She instructed Wilson to take her lower half, Bishop the upper. Whether this resulted in a ménage à trois is not entirely clear, but it does support Millay’s famous declaration, “My candle burns at both ends.”
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1892–1950. Poet and playwright. Millay was one of the most celebrated lyrical poets of her era. At age twenty, she won a scholarship to Vassar for her poem “Renascence.” With her collection The Harp-Weaver and Other Poems, she became the first woman to win the Pulitzer Prize.
BETWEEN THE SHEETS
Greatly sought after in her day, Millay was known as much for her love affairs as she was for her verse. What better a cocktail then? Basically a Sidecar with rum, a Between the Sheets is the perfect nightcap. Like Millay herself, it is wonderfully seductive.
¾ oz. brandy
¾ oz. light rum
1 oz. Cointreau
½ oz. lemon juice
Pour all ingredients into a cocktail shaker filled with ice cubes. Shake well. Strain into a chilled cocktail glass.
From “Feast,” 1923
I drank at every vine.
The last was like the first.
I came upon no wine
So wonderful as thirst.
I gnawed at every root.
I ate of every plant.
I came upon no fruit
So wonderful as want.
Feed the grape and bean
To the vintner and the monger;
I will lie down lean
With my thirst and my hunger.
John O’Hara
“I started Thursday. By Saturday morning I’d drunk myself sober.”
O’Hara was a notoriously temperamental drunk. He tried at various times to punch out Robert Benchley, actor Paul Douglas, renowned neurologist Dr. Howard Fabing, and at the “21” Club, apparently once, a dwarf. The owner of the Stork Club, Sherman Billingsley instructed his staff to always seat O’Hara by the door so they could be rid of him more easily.
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1905–1970. Novelist and short-story writer. O’Hara built his reputation writing about class differences. A large number of such stories appeared in The New Yorker. His first novel, Appointment in Samarra, established him as a major literary figure. Butterfield 8, another major success, solidified his standing. His later novel Ten North Frederick won the National Book Award.
PLANTER’S PUNCH
One, two, three, four, punch. Punch, which literally means five in Farsi, Hindi, and over a dozen other languages, should have a minimum of five different ingredients. O’Hara probably did not know this. Something of a barroom brawler, he believed a punch needed only five clenched fingers.
2 oz. dark rum
1 oz. light rum
½ oz. Grand Marnier
½ oz. simple syrup
½ oz. lime juice
1 oz. orange juice
1 oz. pineapple juice
1 dash of grenadine
2 dashes of Angostura bitters
Maraschino cherry
Orange slice
Pineapple wedge
Pour all ingredients (except fruit) into a cocktail shaker filled with ice cubes. Shake, and then strain into a Collins glass filled with ice cubes. Garnish with cherry, orange slice, and pineapple wedge. Serve with two straws.
From Butterfield 8, 1935
THE SUMMERS WERE FUN IN NEW YORK. 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.
Eugene O’Neill
“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.
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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.
From 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.”
Dorothy Parker
“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.”
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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.
From “You Were Perfectly Fine,” 1929
THE 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?”
Edgar Allan Poe
“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.