The Hour

Have you read Bernard DeVoto’s The Hour: a cocktail manifesto? It was published in 1958, three years after his death. Tin House Books has recently reissued it, and I’ve only recently discovered it.

A comic manual on drinking like a gentleman, it converts the author's preferences into absolute rules, the violation of which mark you as a heretic or worse. He issues imperial proclamations. The following are typical: There are only two cocktails. The bar manuals and the women’s pages of the daily press, I know, print scores of messes to which they give that honorable and glorious name. They are not cocktails, they are slops. They are fit to be drunk only in the barbarian marches and mostly are drunk there, by the barbarians. The only two drinks he considers proper cocktails are a slug of whiskey – whether rye, bourbon, Scotch or Irish doesn’t matter – and a martini, for the preparation of which he gives detailed instructions. Whiskey and vermouth cannot meet as friends and the Manhattan is an offense against piety. With dry vermouth it is disreputable, with sweet vermouth disgusting. It signifies that the drinker, if male, has no spiritual dignity and would really prefer white mule [moonshine]: if female, a banana split. The only alcohol mixture he permits is gin and dry vermouth.

His tributes to the beauties of the cocktail hour are funny but nonetheless they ring true. Here’s one example: This is the violet hour, the hour of hush and wonder, when the affections glow and valor is reborn, when the shadows deepen along the edge of the forest and we believe that, if we watch carefully, at any moment we may see the unicorn. I have, in fact, seen the unicorn once or twice, but no more than that. Mostly I achieved a quiet glow, a sense that my day had, after all, been a good one and that the next one would be too.

Alas, I write of my drinking in the past tense, for I’m now on the wagon, a lamentable place from which to view this fallen world. I used to love a drink before dinner, looked forward to it all day. I’d prefer to drink with one or two friends, but that was hard to arrange every day, and my wife doesn’t drink. So usually I would drink alone, while listening to music, preferably one of Nancy Lamott’s solo CDs. Just one slug of whiskey – an ounce and a half of Scotch - drunk at room temperature, in violation of DeVoto’s stricture that drinks must be served cold. Well, nobody’s perfect.

I would still be savoring a scotch before dinner had not a cruel fate betrayed me. Whiskey and acid reflux disease are even more incompatible than whiskey and vermouth. My heartburn became so painful and persistent, in spite of powerful anti-reflux medication, that I was forced to adopt a diet of low fat, low acid foods, and of course I had to stop drinking alcohol.

It’s not been a total loss. That half hour that I devoted to a drink can now be put to more productive use, and after dinner I’m able to continue working if I want to. In the good old days, warmed by a drink, I’d say the hell with it, I’ve worked long enough, and would read a novel or the paper after dinner, and go to bed feeling that the world was not such a bad place after all. I was wrong, of course: the world is a bad place when you can’t have a drink at the end of the day.