When I pointed this out to Voltz in Campbell’s bar at Grand Central Station, he thought about it in silence and then asked me if there was a hierarchy of botanicals, from poor to fine.
‘I do not have a hierarchy of poor to fine in botanicals,’ I said. ‘We didn’t have such a hierarchy at Wollongong Tech.’
‘Not enough attention is given to the wording of labels. The label is a sacred document: it is the craftspeople who made the contents of the bottle talking to us, us the drinkers, us the martini drinkers. We have to be treated with respect. What we expect from a label is straight talking. I might write to them.’
I cannot discover where the idea that gin was a ‘depressive’ began. I have heard it all my life. Clinically, all alcohol is a ‘depressive’ in that it suppresses the responses of the nervous system but that is not what we mean conversationally by ‘depressive’. We mean, a drink that makes us sad. Gin hasn’t given the martini any reputation for sadness. It does not make me sad, and it doesn’t take much to make me sad.
Maybe it comes from the historical association with the poor and unhappy depicted in Hogarth’s drawings from the 1700s when gin was known as ‘mother’s ruin’. In Hogarth’s Gin Alley drawings drinkers are falling over in the street, a grinning woman scratches her syphilis sores, a mother feeds gin to her baby, and in the background a person has hanged himself.
From its beginnings as a cheap drink of the poor in England, gin emerged worldwide in the 1920s as a fashionable drink along with the idea of the cocktail party.
The huge expensive yachts and privately owned small ships floating in the Mediterranean are called Gin Palaces. When Voltz stayed with me when I was living at Duke Minx’s palatial house in upper Cannes, we would sit on the wide balcony with our drinks and make fun of the gin palaces. However, in some respects, we were living in a landed-mirror image of them.
In Cannes we usually drank Sidecars in homage to Scott and Zelda Fitzgerald.
Oh yes, and despite the folklore, a bottle of gin, quinine and a hot bath is not an abortifacient.
The Vodka Option
Any discussion about the martini really needs to include vodka. I realise that there are people (other than James Bond) who prefer vodka martinis.
I rush to assure you that most strict martini drinkers will allow a vodka-based martini as acceptable but I do not know when vodka martinis were first made.
Voltz, Dr Anderson and I drink vodka martinis now and then.
Vodka is a very old drink distilled from agricultural produce, traditionally from potatoes. It is considered to be odourless and colourless and is usually drunk this way, chilled in some countries but in Russia served at room temperature and straight (that is, not mixed with anything else), perhaps with a twist of lemon, and is the drink favoured by those who want not to have alcohol detected on their breath when they return to the office or to their families. Manufacturers now produce vodkas with added fruit flavours but in the basic technical sense there are no botanicals in vodka apart from the original potatoes or whatever from which it was distilled.
When I told Voltz that the writer Ian Fleming, who is generally held to be the model for Bond as well as his creator, drank martinis made from a mixture of gin and vodka he said, ‘The problem with that is that it brings two strong spirits into an arm wrestle.’
‘Perhaps it is a drink for those sorts of men who arm wrestle.’
‘You would not, for instance, order a gin martini and then as a second, order a vodka martini.’ Voltz looked at me. ‘Or would you?’
‘In all my life that possibility has never crossed my mind. If you had determined that your preference was for a gin martini it would be surprising if, having finished it, you decided to change path to vodka. It would have to be an exceptional circumstance.’
‘Perhaps in a situation where you discovered that you had no more gin and desired a second martini.’
‘But surely when you were making the first gin martini you would have determined that you did not have sufficient for the second drink?’
‘You may have thought that you had a second bottle in your bar, or in the pantry, or hidden somewhere in the house.’
‘It is a faint possibility. One usually knows precisely how much of what spirit is in the residence.’
‘Yes, I think you are right. And anyhow the second bottle, even if found, would not be chilled. Returning to the vodka/gin martini, I guess there would be a blending occurring. Juniper marries potato. Do we know for certain if vodka is made from potatoes? What’s the story on that?’
I said I would look into that. I said I had a hunch that it was no longer mass manufactured from potatoes.
He then said, ‘I like the idea of it being made from potatoes. I am fond of the potato. However, the martini made from simple vodka instead of gin is a less complex martini and therefore more predictable and limited in its variations.’
I was able to tell Voltz a literary association with the combination of gin and vodka. ‘The poet Robert Lowell somewhere mentions a drink he calls a Vesuvio which is gin and vodka. After the volcano. I’ll get Dr Anderson to track that down.’
‘It would be good to know if Lowell drank them. I thought better of him. It seems a rather coarse drunkard’s drink, which I suppose fits. Except he was a refined drunkard. Or at least that is how I wish to think of him.’
At the Bayswater Brasserie with my martini companion of many years, Dr Anderson, I raised the question of this mixture of gin and vodka and Lowell.
‘I seem to remember,’ he said, ‘that Robert Lowell’s poem “Homecoming” says something along these lines, but don’t hold me to it:
At the gingerbread casino,
how innocent the nights we made it
on our Vesuvio martinis
with no vermouth but vodka
to sweeten the dry gin –’
We decided that Vesuvio reference was to the famous beatnik bar on the corner of Columbus Avenue and Jack Kerouac Alley in San Francisco.
Being a classicist when it comes to the martini, Dr Anderson then said to me, ‘However, let’s give that drink a miss.’
‘I’ll tell Voltz about Vesuvio and the beatnik bar, that will tickle him.’
It has, though, to be seen as a mad relative of the martini and given some degree of acceptance simply because Lowell so named it and Ian Fleming drank it.
When I conveyed this information to Voltz, he said, ‘I fail to see how the vodka would “sweeten” the gin. What did the poet have in mind when he said such a thing? Is it a sweetening of the soul he talks about? I suppose even poets let their language slip now and then. Poets are supposed to try harder. I am worried about Lowell now.’
I cannot remember when I first drank vodka or who introduced me to it. When I was a cadet journalist, I remember that vodka and tonic and gin and tonic were considered as ‘gay’ drinks; women drank Pimms Number 1 cup – a gin liqueur and herbs, originally a 19th Century ‘aid to digestion’, gin and tonic, and beer shandy (beer and lemonade); beer and Scotch were seen as male drinks; and dark rum a sailors’ or bushies’ drink.
The Lost Vermouth
I first explored vermouth on its own – sweet and dry – with the poet Jennifer Rankin when we lived with her one-year-old boy, Thomas, in a stone hut in Bundeena surrounded by bushland on the edge of the National Park. We were both in our twenties and I was writing my second book, The Americans, Baby. We were interested in first getting to know vermouth as well as drinking martinis. In our financially restricted way, we were also exploring fine dining and exotic foods using my David Jones’ department store credit account, a gift to me from my parents on my twenty-first birthday, on which we were living along with a small income mainly from me giving a lecture once a week at the Workers’ Educational Association in the city.
We intended to pay the credit account with the advance on my book when it was finished and accepted for publication. The absence of refrigeration in the hut made our exploration of the martini and
of gastronomy difficult. The hut had an old kerosene refrigerator and I worked very hard to get it back in service. Infuriatingly it froze on the first try but then died, which encouraged me to keep trying, so that just about every day I would think about the refrigerator and waste hours trying to get it going. It never froze again. Voltz often mentions this story from my earlier life and I always detect some disappointment in me for my failure to get the refrigerator going. I think he sees it as reflecting badly on Wollongong Tech for which he generally has developed a high respect.
Each week we bought a supply of food together with French wine and imported cheeses from David Jones which would be delivered to the wharf at Cronulla and then ferried across to us at Bundeena. We would lug it up the hill to our stone hut. Our introduction to game such as grouse, pheasant and so on was as imported tinned food. My friend, man of letters, and fellow martini drinker, Dr Anderson, was one of our visitors during those strange gastronomic explorations.
While living in this stone hut we had much time without company and Jenny invented and had us play out tableaus or playlets, often extending over many days, mostly with a sexual component. One she loved was Settler Family in which we would talk and act as if we were in the first Australian settlement dealing with an unknown landscape and conditions to which the bushland setting of the hut lent itself. She would like to play the convict prostitute and I had to play the role of an officer from the NSW Regiment. She also liked acting Rich Sheep Station Lady and would induce me to act as a male in pre-feminist times, which led to weird games of submission and punishment. She also developed a game called Jealous Husband where we played out being stalked and besieged by Jennifer’s estranged husband. Sometimes, late at night, we would come to believe that he was out there stalking us and we would devise and rehearse escape and defence manoeuvres.
During this time Jenny and I drank martinis and played New Yorker Round Table at the Algonquin but without refrigeration or ice, we had to pretend that they were cold enough.
I once had a strange encounter with an earlier historical martini.
To create my character Edith Campbell Berry in my novels Grand Days and Dark Palace set in the 1920s and 1930s, I used the archives of the League of Nations in Geneva to identify some of the few women officers of her age and I then tracked their careers through the files. A young Canadian woman, Mary McGeachy, who joined the League in the late 1920s, became something of a model for Edith.
Fortunately, McGeachy was an ambitious and productive officer who made suggestions and involved herself in in-house arguments and she left lots of documents for me to trace. As I read her files, unopened for fifty or more years, her life in the secretariat began to fill my mind and to inform my book while I imaginatively created her inner life and her social life outside the office.
While I was writing and researching the book I began visiting the French town of Besançon, about two hours from Geneva, where purely by chance, I met a Canadian couple from London, Ontario, at a dinner party at which I talked about my project and mentioned my preoccupation with this Canadian woman from the past. Almost a year after this coincidental meeting at the dinner party, a letter came from the Canadian couple saying that they had met a relative of Mary McGeachy who told them that Mary was still alive, in her nineties, and living in upstate New York.
I was confounded.
I knew that all the key players in the League of Nations had to be long dead and, because of my fictional construction and mind set, I had trouble accepting that someone from those early days of the League could still be alive. I was later to learn that Mary had put her age up to get the job with the League – as boys did to get into the army during World War I – and then put it down by seven years when she married at the age of forty.
I rang the UN Pensions department and asked them if they handled the League pension scheme and they did. I asked how many people still received a League pension. They told me only one – Mary McGeachy.
Without warning her or her family for fear of being told not to come, I flew to Keene Valley to talk with her. The family was bemused but didn’t turn me away. At my first visit, Mary McGeachy was sitting in a chair in her nightdress and robe, in the living room of a timber house looking over the Adirondacks. On her lap were Le Monde and the Wall Street Journal.
I walked across the room tight with almost unbearable anticipation. I knew so much about this woman, both factually and by imaginative construction. It was hard for me to accept that she did not, in turn, know me. We shook hands, and I dragged a chair across to be closer to her, and in my nervous ness dragged up the carpet with it. I must have also talked loudly because she said, ‘It’s all right, my hearing is perfect.’ She did, however, apologise for her voice which was breathless and a little roughened.
To me, Mary Craig McGeachy seemed to be an apparition. I had studied newspaper photographs of her from the early days and these constantly were superimposed on her face as I looked at her then. As I began to chat with her, my mind moved in and out of time, as, I sensed, did hers. There was an intermingling of the real, the ghostly, and the fictional.
I felt very drawn to her and found her a becoming woman. By touching her hand I was pulled back through the mirror of history.
Orson Welles once described this sensation to a journalist. He reached across and took the journalist’s hand. ‘This hand that touches you now, once touched the hand of Sarah Bernhardt …’ He went on to say that we are only about four or five handshakes from Shakespeare.
When I shook hands with the Canadian writer Morley Callaghan in Toronto just before he died, I thought, ‘This is the hand that knocked down Hemingway in the boxing ring in Paris in 1929’. For a while Callaghan, Hemingway and Fitzgerald were rated together as fine writers. Callaghan was a regular contributor to the New Yorker. But then Callaghan inexplicably fell from the pinnacle. He was so overlooked by the critics for much of his career that Edmund Wilson thought him ‘the most unjustly neglected writer in the English language’.
One of the things I wanted to learn from Mary McGeachy was about the social and sexual life of the young people who went to the League. I suppose I approached it with some deference to her age. But she got my drift and said, ‘Naughty girls are the best companions. I wasn’t a naughty girl, I was a friend of naughty girls.’ As it turned out, she was being evasive; other information I eventually came across showed that she was fairly unconventional in her love life.
Although I went to visit her to learn about those early days at the League of Nations, I found that, instead, it was I who told Mary about the life she had forgotten or couldn’t recall. ‘You must tell me all about myself,’ she said, at one point. I also found that it became my task to tell her family about their mother’s life at the League, which until then had been unknown to them.
I learned that Mary was also a life-long martini drinker but shortly after I had spent the time talking with her and returned to France, an interesting thing happened.
Her son-in-law, who both owns and runs the bar at the Keene Valley Inn, described one night, just after my visit to her, when she sent back her martini, saying it wasn’t right. This surprised him because he’d been making her martinis every night for years.
He asked her what it was she wanted changed and it turned out that she wanted a martini made from dry and sweet vermouth and vodka 25:25:50. ‘It was a drink I hadn’t known her to have before. It seemed to have suddenly appeared out of her past.’
I had come across this drink in my research – it was a Gin Turin (albeit with vodka), a Genevan forerunner of the martini, drunk by the bon viveurs in the 1920s, Turin being a place where Martini & Rossi have a distillery.
When Mary asked for this drink, she was slipping back into history, through the martini glass, back into her past in the heady days of Geneva just after the War.
Perhaps by showing her documents and talking about these old days, I had returned her old life to her, and she had that night, returned there in her mind.
Some connoisseurs resist the notion that you can vary the proportions of the martini according to mood. The proportions of gin and the vermouth in the martini has provoked endless discussion.
The original mixture before the 20th Century seems to have been equal parts of gin and vermouth. Today bars serve a severely dry martini from which the vermouth is all but excluded. Most bartenders these days will swirl vermouth in the glass, then discard it, and pour chilled gin or vodka into the glass with an olive or two on a toothpick.
Some well-known martini drinkers have promoted this shift away from vermouth. Bunuel, for example, with his beam of light passing through the bottle of vermouth to strike the gin.
Hemingway mentions what he calls the Montgomery martini in his novel Across the River and into the Trees. A Montgomery is gin and vermouth in proportions of 15:1 – the name is a reference to the English World War II Field Marshal General Montgomery who, legend has it, would not attack without overwhelming superiority.
Some people feel that marinating the olives in vermouth is enough vermouth for the martini. I don’t like this because it confuses the flavour of the olive.
My secret agenda in this book is to bring back the vermouth to the martini. It is Voltz’s life’s work. It is not easy.
Voltz said on the phone recently, ‘Oh, and by the way, I went back to that place in Grand Central which you introduced me to, the Campbell. I ordered a martini and the bartender used a little atomiser to apply vermouth to the glass. I objected and had him make me a proper one.’
Campbell’s is above Grand Central Station, the restored large private office of the early 20th Century tycoon John W. Campbell. The bar is dimly lit, with dark wooden walls and decorated with renaissance antiques, grand pianos and organs.
Voltz emailed me recently: ‘There was an advertisement in the New Yorker this week for Grey Goose, which at last included a martini recipe that included vermouth. I believe this is a result of my letter to the company upbraiding them for not including vermouth in their Classic Martini recipe. A small triumph in the overwhelming tsunami that is modern life.’
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