Drink (53 page)

Manet also celebrated beer in his canvases. His late masterpiece,
Bar at the Folies-Bergère
(1882), shows a tired and pensive young waitress with her hands on the marble bartop of the celebrated nightclub. Neatly arranged on its surface are bottles of champagne, rose wine, absinthe, and Bass IPA, brewed in Burton-on-Trent, with its venerable red triangle trademark. This detail is emblematic of the great changes that had occurred in French art and society, post-phylloxera and -absinthe. It is hard to imagine David, the champion of vast and epic canvases, depicting French heroes at crucial moments, including anything but French wine in his paintings, let alone a Swiss cordial or an English brand of beer.

The market for Bass IPA in Montmartre was not entirely French, for the district had become a tourist attraction in its own right. It was home to nightclubs, the cancan, absintheurs, poets, and impressionists galore. Visitors from Europe, Africa, and the Americas poured into Montmartre and Paris during the 1870s and came in torrents for the Centennial Exhibition of 1889, which celebrated the temporary end of the French monarchy a hundred years before. The exhibition was crowned with a newly built monument—the Eiffel Tower. This enchanting folly, a celebration of iron in the same material, evoked mixed reactions among Parisians. The Church and traditionalists hated it. According to the men of God it was “a hideous, horrible phallic skeleton,” which left, in the opinion of establishment writers such as Alexandre Dumas and Guy de Maupassant, “a stain on the honor of Paris.” The common people, in contrast, were delighted with the erection, and their hearts beat with pride when the French tricolor was hoisted at its pinnacle, and its engineer boasted to the world, “This is the only flag to fly on a staff three hundred meters long.” The general enthusiasm for the Eiffel Tower was reflected in material culture: Its silhouette was adopted as a motif for absinthe spoons; indeed, it soon became a quintessential symbol of the city itself.

After the exposition of 1889, Paris waited until the next century to play host again to the exhibition-goers of the world. These returned in 1900 to find that its artistic center of gravity had shifted to Montparnasse; that Impressionism had drifted into Postimpressionism en route to somewhere entirely new; that modern had replaced decadent in poetry; but that absinthe was still drunk with the same abandon, indeed, if anything, had become more popular. This last perception was supported by statistics: In 1874, at about the time that Degas was painting his uncomfortable couple, France drank roughly seven hundred thousand liters of absinthe per annum; by the end of the first decade of the new century it was consuming nearly thirty-six million liters in every year.

The export market for absinthe, in contrast to its domestic counterpart, matured at a sickly pace. Overseas demand was greatest in French imperial possessions, including Vietnam and Tahiti, where the Postimpressionist painter Paul Gauguin kept his habit alive, and in ex-possessions, like New Orleans. However, it made slow progress outside of Francophone places. The British, as a rule, with the exception of a few poets and their single Impressionist of merit, Walter Sickert, did not take to it. Perhaps its reputation for filling the drinker with thrilling gothic visions was the problem. Why flirt with the occult when one already lived in Stygian gloom? Most British cities, including the capital, were choked with smog for weeks on end. The streetlamps in London were still on at noon, but even so, visibility was measured in yards, and after dark Jack the Ripper butchered women on the sidewalks. Conditions were too ugly to risk seeing on absinthe.

To each culture, a counterculture. The Aesthetic Movement, with figures such as Oscar Wilde and Aubrey Beardsley in its prows, sailed into the gloom of late Victorian London, bearing the important news of the discovery that the point of life was to admire, and to enjoy, everything beautiful in it. The concept of beautiful extended to stimulantssuch as cocaine, cigarettes, ether, and absinthe. Aesthetes were enchanted by the daring reputation the green-eyed temptress had acquired in France, and felt they should drink her in preference to the Highland whisky of neoromantics or the bottled ale of retrospective country squires. This sense of duty was articulated by Oscar Wilde: “I could never quite accustom myself to absinthe, but it suits my style very well.” He slipped it neatly into his philosophy via an anecdote, which dressed absinthism in Aesthetic costume: “Three nights I sat up all night drinking absinthe, and thinking that I was singularly clearheaded and sane. The waiter came in and began watering the sawdust. The most wonderful flowers, tulips, lilies, and roses sprang up and made a garden of the café. ‘Don’t you see them?’ I said to him. ‘
Mais non, monsieur, il n’y a rien
.’” (“No sir, there’s nothing there.”)

26 HATCHETATION

In 1882, Oscar Wilde took his message of flower power on a coast-to-coast tour of the United States. He found decadence alive and kicking at the sunset end of the Anglo-Saxon diaspora. The people of California and its neighboring states maintained a gold rush mentality toward drinking—more was their eternal ideal and more there was. Whiskey aplenty arrived by rail, and the West itself produced ever-increasing quantities of wine, brandy, and beer. Wilde got his first taste of western hospitality during a visit to the Matchless silver mine in Leadville, Colorado. “At the bottom of the mine,” he recorded, “we sat down to a banquet, the first course being whiskey, the second whiskey, and the third whiskey.”

Other British writers followed Wilde west, and all were equally enamored with the liquid hospitality they received in Pacific America. Rudyard Kipling, who found San Francisco a “mad city—inhabited for the most part by perfectly insane people whose women are of remarkable beauty,” was much taken by the
Pisco punch,
a drink then in vogue, whose principal ingredient was a clear Peruvian brandy. Sweet to the taste, yet highly potent, this ambrosia inspired Kipling to speculate on its composition: “I have a theory it is compounded of cherubs’ wings, the glory of a tropical dawn, the red clouds of sunset, and fragments of lost epics by dead masters.”

The idyllic countryside outside San Francisco, and the wines produced there, also attracted the praise of visitors. In 1880, Robert Louis Stevenson spent several months in the upper Napa Valley with his new American spouse. He dedicated part of
The Silverado Squatters,
his account of his stay, to the winemakers around him, whom he conceived of as prospectors searching the valley and its surrounding slopes for the ideal
terroir
, which might impart unique flavors to their vintages: “Bit by bit, they grope about for their Clos de Vougeot and Lafitte, those lodes and pockets of earth, more precious than the precious ores, that yield inimitable fragrance and soft fire; those virtuous Bonanzas, where the soil has sublimated under sun and stars to something finer, and the wine is bottled poetry.” Stevenson was certain of their eventual success: “The smack of Californian earth shall linger on the palate of your grandson.” This was a prayer as much as a prophecy. He hoped Napa wines might one day replace the great French clarets and burgundies whose vineyards were then being wiped out, forever as it seemed at the time, by phylloxera. The vineyards of California did not escape the dreaded pest, but it arrived in the state after the discovery that foreign vines grafted onto native American rootstock were immune, and the devastation France had suffered was avoided.

The science of winemaking in California had come a long way since the days of Agoston Haraszthy. A research facility dedicated to oenology had been established at the state university, whose studies made an immediate contribution to the fecundity of local vineyards and the quality of their wine. By 1887, California production was fifteen million gallons per annum, four years later it had risen to twenty million, and in 1897-a freak year—it touched thirty-four million gallons, which resulted in a price crash. Between 1858 and 1890, some of the state’s most famous producers commenced operation, including Charles Krug, Karl Wente, and Jacob Beringer.

California brewing grew at similar pace to Californian winemaking. Its specialty was
steam beer,
so named because of its ultrahigh level of carbonation: When a barrel of the stuff was tapped there was an explosion of foam, like steam from a ruptured boiler. The carbonation was natural and resulted from the addition of a quantity of green wort to each barrel (a German technique, known as
krausening
), which caused a second bout of fermentation. Steam beer was a relic from the gold rush era. The first brewers in San Francisco, faced with a burgeoning thirst and a shortage of both raw materials and of ice for cooling, had been forced to adopt the practice of krausening, which enabled them to manufacture a lager style of beer at high speed, in hot conditions, that was ready for drinking within twelve days, i.e., less than half the time of traditional lagers. Its distinctive properties and low price won it a place in the hearts of Californians, so that by the time that ice was plentiful, and California was bulging with capital for new breweries, steam beer, an invention born of necessity, continued to be manufactured in preference to alternatives of better quality.

The new states to the east of California also experienced a brewing boom. The mining towns that sprang up around productive veins were invariably adorned with saloons and breweries. Perfect brewing conditions in and around Denver encouraged German immigrants to put aside their picks and washboards and turn their hands to making lager. One such, Adolph Coors, who set up in Golden, Colorado, in partnership with another German, turned out a brew of such exceptional quality that within a year, according to the
Colorado Transcript,
“Messrs. Schuler and Coors have leaped to the front rank of brewers . . . and their beer is regularly sold in Denver and the mountain and valley towns.” Arizona and Washington enjoyed similar surges in production. In Phoenix, the Arcade Brewery, once again run by Germans, was considered one of the wonders of the territory and a tribute to the thirst of its few citizens. So great was their love of beer that they paved the sidewalk of First Street with empty bottles, packed neck down into the dirt. According to eyewitness accounts, this produced a durable, if irregular, surface: “The walk was so uneven a person felt as if afflicted with the blind staggers when walking over it.”

The output of local breweries in former wildernesses was supplemented by imports delivered by the spreading railroads. From the 1880s onward national brewers emerged in America, whose brands of beer were available from coast to coast. While there was a degree of consolidation within the industry, most brewers expanded their production and reach through organic growth. The nation seemed to be possessed with an insatiable thirst for beer. Between 1880 and 1910, U.S. official production increased at more than twice the rate of the country’s population: from 13 million barrels per annum to 59.5 million. The numbers were enough to attract syndicates of investors from the London Stock Exchange, who among them spent a fortune in the early 1890s acquiring American brewers. The foreign interlopers did not, however, succeed in capturing any of the national champions,who responded to the new competition by streamlining their distribution and perfecting their brands. Pabst of Milwaukee, distinguished by the blue ribbon on its label, was the first brewer to manufacture a million barrels of beer in one year (1893), followed by Anheuser-Busch, with its signature “A and Eagle” and the trademark
Budweiser,
and by Schlitz, the beer with the globe on its bottles, emblematic of the confidence and ambitions of the American brewing industry.

While such confidence was scarcely misplaced in the West, whose population drank with a rare vigor, in the midwestern and eastern states opposition to King Alcohol was rising. The temperance movement had grown into a serious political force. It had focused its efforts on the so-called local option, i.e., the prohibition of the retail of alcohol at the state, city, and county level. Following up on their initial success in Maine, temperance organizations had succeeded in persuading voters and state assemblies in Kansas, Iowa, Maine, New Hampshire, and Massachusetts to incorporate prohibition within their constitutions. Although such bans were often no better than legal fictions—it was easy to find public drinking places open in territories that, officially, were alcohol free—they were important precedents: If Americans could vote to live in a nominally dry state, then they might, one day, vote to live in a dry country.

In addition to plugging away at the local option, the temperance movement stepped up its efforts in the field of indoctrination. The women of the WCTU had decided that education was the key to victory in the fight for an alcohol-free America. To this end, they established a
Department of Scientific Temperance Instruction in Schools and Colleges
within their organization, under the command of Mrs. Mary Hannah Hunt. Her mission was to instill a prejudice against alcohol into American children through compulsory propaganda. Mrs. Hunt envisaged a future when “from the schoolhouses all over the land will come trained haters of alcohol to pour a whole Niagara of ballots upon the saloon.” She succeeded in embedding temperance in the school curriculum in every state except Arizona. It was taught to children disguised as personal hygiene or physiology. If they started drinking, they were told, they would grow up stunted, foul-breathed, and mad; they would beat their spouses, if they were lucky enough to marry; and would harm themselves and those around them until claimed prematurely by the grave. Such fictions were presented as scientific facts, which were proven with theatrical demonstrations of the deadly powers of alcohol. Many young Americans were treated to a show in which a slice of raw calf brain was immersed in a jar of spirits. It turned gray and blotchy at once, and the students were advised that the same would happen to their brains the instant they took a sip of liquor. Alcohol, they were taught, scorched the skin of the drinker’s throat, hence the burning sensation. It also turned the blood into water, and the heart into fat: “Such a heart cannot be so strong as if it were all muscle. It is sometimes so soft that a finger could easily be pushed through its walls.” Scientific temperance was augmented by mathematical temperance, of a similarly wretched standard of probity, as the following example, from the “Think a Minute” series for first-grade students, illustrates: