Drink (60 page)

The French postwar drinking culture demonized abstinence. People who chose to live without alcohol were condemned to be fat, ugly, and weak. Water drinkers had the worst of it, for “water tends to thicken the flesh.” This, according to Dr. Dougnac, was a defensive mechanism: “Fat is formed and intervenes in water drinkers, to neutralize the poisons derived from food that are not destroyed by internal secretions. These secretions are insufficient due to the lack of a stimulant like wine.” To be thin was to be chic in the 1920s, and unfashionably obese water drinkers were ostracized. They were also reckoned to suffer facial disfigurement as punishment for their temperance: “Wine takes its revenge on those who don’t drink it by covering their faces with acne, pimples, and red blotches.” Last but not least, dry people were believed to be feeble. According to a publication sponsored by a French wine merchant, “Since Prohibition, the Americans have retrogressed in sports. They have lost their superiority in world boxing championships and [can] only maintain their superiority in footraces over short distances.”

Wine was perhaps the only constant in French culture during the 1920s and ’30s. Whereas its visual art underwent radical transformations—Fauvism and Cubism and other rebellions against Impressionism were succeeded by neoclassicism and Dada—its creators kept on drinking. Pablo Picasso paid homage to Bacchus in his drawings; Henri Matisse took inspiration from the ecstatic bacchantes on Greek friezes to create exquisite representations of dancers; Pierre Bonnard learned to draw as an illustrator of champagne ads. Even the Dadaists found time for wine amid the chaos. French literature underwent similar convulsions to its art over the same period, during which decadence and symbolism gave way to surrealism, whose apostles made a place for wine in their ethos. According to André Breton, author of the
Surrealist Manifesto,
the perfect example of a surreal sentence was “The exquisite corpse will drink new wine.”

Paris, the epicenter of all the artistic turmoil, was reckoned by both its inhabitants and a large community of expatriates to be the cultural capital of the Western world. It was cheap and permissive, and these qualities attracted creative sorts from all around the globe. The American presence and influence was notable. Gertrude Stein made the international reputations of Picasso and Matisse as artists, and her own as a writer; Ernest Hemingway, Ezra Pound, and Scott Fitzgerald produced some of their best work in France. In some cases, Prohibition at home was a contributing factor to self-imposed exile among American authors. Although it was easy enough to get a drink almost anywhere in the United States, the laws against doing so were perceived as both oppressive and offensive. According to Malcolm Cowley, “Our own nation . . . passed the Prohibition Amendment as if to publish a bill of separation between itself and ourselves; it wasn’t our country any longer.” In Europe, by contrast, drinking was out in the open, and all the more pleasant for it, especially to those who drank hard. The difference in attitudes toward alcohol on opposite sides of the Atlantic was spelled out by Ernest Hemingway: “In Europe . . . we thought of wine as something as healthy and normal as food and also as a great giver of happiness and well-being and delight. Drinking wine was not a snobbism nor a sign of sophistication nor a cult; it was as natural as eating and to me as necessary, and I would not have thought of eating a meal without drinking.”

Hemingway presented the value of wine in the diet and elsewhere to an American audience in his first successful novel,
The Sun Also Rises
(1926). It is a Bacchic tale, whose centerpiece is the fiesta in honor of San Fermín at Pamplona. It has scarcely a page without a drink on it, and every character of importance is paralytic at least once in the story. American readers were reminded, via sideswipes at Prohibition and Wayne Wheeler, that the events recorded in
The Sun Also Rises
would not have been legal in the United States. Moreover, the demented, wine-soaked festival at its heart had no real counterpart in America’s heritage. Its depiction caused many of Hemingway’s countrymen to reexamine their culture, and those who found it desiccated followed the author to Spain in search of something more authentic.

As well as using intoxication as an aid to characterization, and as a cultural marker, Hemingway discriminated between the types of drunkenness caused by specific drinks, as if each different potion had its own special magic. Absinthe, for example (then still legal in Spain) knocks out every character in
The Sun Also Rises
, including its narrator, whereas even a skinful of wine causes no such trauma. Fastidious descriptions of drink and drinkers were common to Hemingway’s subsequent work; indeed it is hard to imagine a Hemingway novel without alcohol. This focus on booze, and its ability to alter the character of the drinker, was also apparent in the work of many of Hemingway’s contemporaries; indeed was typical of the so-called Lost Generation of writers who rose to prominence after the First World War. Their number included Scott Fitzgerald, who joined Hemingway in Paris in 1926, shortly after finishing his third novel,
The Great Gatsby
.

A masterpiece of the Jazz Age, written in the south of France and Italy about Prohibition America,
The Great Gatsby
is awash with drinking scenes and drunks. It features all the emblems of the Roaring Twenties—extravagant automobiles, the cult of celebrity, conspicuous consumption, and fortunes won by dubious means. Jay Gatsby, the central character, has elements of Trimalchio, the slave made good in the
Satyricon
of Petronius; indeed, the original title of the novel was
Trimalchio in West Egg.
Gatsby, like his Roman equivalent, serves only the best, in oversized cups. His champagne glasses are the size of finger-bowls and are endlessly replenished.
⁶⁵
The intoxication it engenders in his guests is of the amiable, albeit vacuous kind. They are mindless hedonists, typical of their venal era.

The depiction of the influence of alcohol in Fitzgerald’s next novel,
Tender Is the Night,
was far more critical. Drinking humiliates and ruins the hero of the book and kills a minor character outright. Set on the French Riviera, which Fitzgerald and his wife, Zelda, helped establish as a popular summer resort, the novel commences in splendor and ends in sorrow. It took Fitzgerald nine years to write, during which period his own equilibrium vanished and he fell victim to his bottled muse. According to Hemingway, Fitzgerald never had been able to take his drink. Without warning, he sometimes underwent a dramatic and sinister transformation after only one or two measures. His wife was also a problem drinker, and in the opinion of Hemingway, her habit aggravated that of Fitzgerald, to the detriment of his writing: “At this time Zelda could drink more than Scott could, and Scott was afraid for her to pass out in the company they kept that spring and the places they went to. Scott did not like the places or the people and he had to drink more than he could drink and be in control of himself, to stand the people and the places, and then he began to drink to keep awake after he would usually have passed out. Finally he had few intervals of work at all.” Zelda, like the heroine of
Tender Is the Night,
required medical treatment for her mental health. Scott, like Dick Diver, his fictional hero, went into physical decline. The book itself is a tour de force, although Fitzgerald himself felt its last section had been compromised by his drinking habits: “I would give anything if I hadn’t had to write Part III of
Tender Is the Night
entirely on stimulant. If I had one more crack at it cold sober I believe it might have made a great difference.”

By the time of its publication, Fitzgerald had returned to the United States for good. His creative powers were fading, largely as a result of his drinking. He made a living by selling short stories, including one entitled “An Alcoholic Case,” which, in contrast to the cheerful roles allotted to drink in his first three novels, portrays the fluid as addictive and destructive, in the style of temperance noir. He also supported himself by going to work as a scriptwriter in Hollywood, like his fellow dipsomaniac, William (“Civilization begins with distillation”) Faulkner.

Faulkner kept the whiskey flag flying throughout Prohibition. While alcohol plays a far less important role in his work than that of Hemingway and Fitzgerald, he exceeded them both in personal consumption. He drank steadily while composing and binged furiously when not. A friend from his New Orleans days described how they prepared booze in bulk at the height of Prohibition: “The favorite drink at that time was Pernod, made right there in New Orleans, and it cost six dollars a bottle. We made it up in great pitchers for all our parties. We also made gin in the bathtub using five gallon cans of Cuban alcohol and adding the proper little bottle of juniper essence, which you could buy at the corner store.” In addition to making a portion of his liquid inspiration, Faulkner also ensured a steady supply through bootleggers, buying whiskey by the gallon so as to be sure he could get suitably “corned up” before putting pen to paper.

Hollywood, where not only Fitzgerald and Faulkner but a host of other established authors were lured to write scripts, had emerged as the dominant cultural power in America during the 1920s and ’30s. As such, its influence over people’s perception of alcohol was all-important. Since the movies had come of age during Prohibition, they might have been expected either to damn liquor or be altogether dry of it. Celluloid had been considered the ally of temperance in its infancy. No fewer than three film versions of
Ten Nights in a Bar-Room
had been made by the time the saloons closed their doors forever, and other box office hits such as
The Saloon Keeper’s Nightmare
and
Distilled Spirits
helped create a subgenre of temperance movies. Such high-minded entertainments portrayed alcohol as a menace that wrecked lives. Films were also considered protemperance because they offered Americans a counter-attraction to the saloon. The country had twenty-one thousand picture houses by 1916, and these were family places, whose sober audiences sat still in silence for the show. However, moviemakers quickly found that cinema-goers responded positively to comic, and even sympathetic, images of drunkards. Charlie Chaplin broke into movies on the strength of his stage portrayal of an inebriate, which he repeated for the cameras in
His Favorite Pastime
(1914),
A Night Out
(1915), and
One
A.M.
(1916)
. The circus clown was reborn as a drunkard on the screen.

As the twenties progressed, filmmakers pandered to their audiences with movies showing the excitement, glamour, immoral behavior, and heavy drinking at the pinnacle of American society.
Alimony
(1925), for example, offered moviegoers “brilliant men, beautiful jazz babies, champagne baths, midnight revels, petting parties in the purple dawn, all ending in one terrific smashing climax that makes you gasp.” The drys complained and threatened legislation to curtail the representation of drinking in a positive light; in response Hollywood adopted self-censorship (in 1926) in the form of the Hays restrictions, which forbade the depiction of “drinking scenes, manufacture or sale of liquor, or undue effects of liquor which are not a necessary part of the story or an essential element in the building up of the plot.” Some studios held the line—drinkers turned their backs on the camera before taking a cocktail— but others decided drink was a necessary part of most stories, whether it was shown as the devil in a keg of bootleg whiskey, or heaven in a cocktail glass. It appeared in the former role in the first all-talking movie,
Lights of New York
(1928), which depicted Gotham as a blot on American values, overrun with speakeasies and murderous gangsters. Its two provincial heroes who get sucked into this black hole of vice are advised by a streetwise cop at the end to “get on the first train to the mountains an’ the flowers an’ the trees, an’ leave the roarin’ parties of the city to roar on without ye.”

However, the burden of relevance was reinterpreted in subsequent flicks, which did not center their plots on drinking per se. Hollywood decided it simply was not possible to make contemporary dramas featuring men and women who didn’t booze. “Lunch is poured,” announces a title card in the opening scenes of
Our Modern Maidens
(1929), whose titular virgins proceed to drink, dance, and seduce their way through the film with deranged abandon. The movie was well-received by the critics, one of whom described it as “this vivid picture of ultramodern youth.” Thereafter, realism triumphed over self-censorship. Actors and actresses were shown drinking and enjoying doing so, especially if they were heroes or heroines. Villains, in contrast, drank water or nothing. By 1930, when the fifth celluloid version of
Ten Nights in a Bar-Room
hit the screens in New York, its dry sentiments were dismissed by critics as archaic and ridiculous, although “those who come to laugh will probably stay to laugh.”

The movies had a huge influence over America. According to a 1932 report commissioned by President Hoover, “for the vast audience the pictures and ‘filmland’ have tremendous vitality. Pictures and actors are regarded with a seriousness that is likely to escape the casual observer who employs formal criteria of judgment. Editors of popular motion picture magazines are deluged with letters from motion picture patrons, unburdening themselves of an infinite variety of feelings and attitudes, deeply personal, which focus around the lives and activities of those inhabiting the screen world. . . . These [letters] are filled with self-revelations which indicate, sometimes deliberately, more often unconsciously, the influence of the screen upon manners, dress, codes, and matters of romance.” Filmland was also an influence over people’s attitudes to alcohol. Indeed, shortly after the repeal of constitutional Prohibition via the Twentieth Amendment, a director of MGM stated his belief that “it was the motion picture, showing that in spite of prohibition liquor was an immense factor in American life, that had a great deal to do with changing sentiment on the question.”