Kingsley Amis on Drink

Kingsley Amis was a very funny writer, though he's rather unfashionable now for his middle England conservatism. This insularity, however, is part of the charm of On Drink, a book he wrote in the early 1970s. A very personal guide on how to drink properly, the book reveals the still nascent drinking habits of the new British middle class as well as Amis's own, often rather peculiar, tastes.

Amis centres his advice on drinking at home, in part because, in his view, "the pub is fast becoming uninhabitable" due to the constant presence of piped music and televisions and the rise of theme pubs. Amis was also writing in the 1970s, when middle-class dinner parties were becoming increasingly fashionable, and it is at would-be hosts that Amis aims his advice. His main concern "is not being given enough" to drink at such parties, but he goes on to tell exactly what should be bought, how it should be served, and, most importantly, how it should be drunk.

Kingsley Amis

He recommends a series of cocktails, or short drinks as he calls them, some of them classic - the martini or manhattan, for instance - some of them his own inventions, all described with painstaking and very precise instructions on how to prepare them. The Lucky Jim, named after his most famous novel, is "12 to 15 parts vodka, 1 part dry vermouth, 2 parts cucumber juice," with cucumber slices and ice cubes; Queen Victoria's Tipple is half a tumbler of red wine with Scotch: "The original recipe calls for claret, but anything better than the merely tolerable will be wasted. The quantity of Scotch is up to you, but I recommend stopping a good deal short of the top of the tumbler. Worth trying once," he concludes, advice I have yet to follow. Another, The Iberian, calls for Bittall - apparently "a light (i.e. not heavy) port flavoured with orange peel" which Amis seems to like - dry sherry, and an orange slice, to which Amis adds: "I can hardly stop you if you decide to make your guests seem more interesting to you and to one another by mixing in a shot of vodka." He also recommends punches that would knock out the hardest drinker: The Careful Man's Peachy Punch contains 5 bottles of medium-dry white wine, 4 bottles of champagne cider, 2 bottles of British peach wine, 1 bottle of vodka, and 2lbs of peaches (Amis probably found the metric system a little too European).

Amis's advice to the nation's population of inexperienced hosts is so precise that it extends to listing the essential items a home bar should have, as well as the types of glasses it should be stocked with, for example: "A wine glass holding about eight ounces when full, though it's a sensible general rule not to fill it more than about two-thirds of the way up." There are still restaurants in the UK who could do with following the latter instruction.

Despite the many pages spent detailing how to prepare cocktails, for Amis, serving wine is "a lot of trouble, requiring energy and forethought," and he prefers the simplicity of taking a beer out of the fridge and opening it. Unfortunately for Amis, in early 1970s Britain, "The pro-wine pressure on everybody who can afford to drink at all is immense and still growing. To offer your guests beer instead of wine ... is to fly in the face of trend as well as established custom." Nevertheless, Amis has plenty of advice on how to buy wine and what to buy. Beaujolais "should be attacked in quantity, like beer, and, like beer, slightly chilled, and, like beer, as soon after bottling as you like." Italian wines, it would seem, were too much for drinkers in the '70s: "Some people will find some of the reds a little heavy (cut them with Pellegrino mineral water)."

Amis is at his funniest in describing an inevitable consequence of drink, the hangover. He divides the hangover in two: the physical and the metaphysical. The physical hangover is immediately recognisable, and needs to be dealt with on waking: "If your wife or other partner is beside you, and (of course) is willing, perform the sexual act as vigorously as you can. The exercise will do you good, and - on the assumption that you enjoy sex - you will feel toned up emotionally." After a morning of eating and doing as little as possible, at 12:30 "firmly take a hair of the dog that bit you." The dog does not have to be of a "particular breed," but "a lot of people will feel better after one or two Bloody Marys simply because they expect to."

The physical hangover dealt with, the metaphysical hangover is then addressed, firstly by recognising that it is only a hangover and nothing worse: "When that ineffable compound of depression, sadness (these two are not the same), anxiety, self-hatred, sense of failure and fear for the future begins to steal over you, start telling yourself that what you have is a hangover." He recommends reading, particularly something gloomy: "I suggest Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn's One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich ... its picture of life in a Russian labour camp will do you the important service of suggesting that there are plenty of people about who have a bloody sight more to put up with than you (or I) have or ever will have." He also recommends music - Tchaikovsky or Brahms, or "any slow Miles Davis track. It will suggest to you that, however gloomy life may be, it cannot be possibly as gloomy as Davis makes it out to be." I have to say that I prefer my own hangover entertainment to be a little lighter than Amis's.

Of course, the best way to avoid a hangover is not to get drunk, and Amis has plenty to say on this too. He advises not expending too much energy while drinking, especially by dancing: "A researcher is supposed once to have measured out two identical doses of drink, put the first lot down at a full-scale party and the second, some evenings later, at home with a book, smoking the same number of cigarettes on each occasion and going to bed at the same time. Result, big hangover and no hangover respectively. Sitting down whenever possible, then, will help you, and so, a fortiori, will resisting the tempation to dance, should you be subject to such impulses." Amis feels the importance of sitting down and not dancing so strongly that he italicises the instructions to stress their signficance.

He also makes the salient point that to blame a hangover on mixing one's drinks is to miss the real reason: "After three dry martinis and two sherries and two glasses of hock and four of burgundy and one of Sauternes and two of claret and three of port and two brandies and three whiskies-and-soda and a beer, most men will be very drunk and will have a very bad hangover. But might not the quantity be at work here?"

His final conclusion is one that any reader of this blog will find as equally difficult to follow as Amis did himself: "If you want to behave better and feel better, the only absolutely certain method is drinking less. But to find out how to do that, you will have to find a more expert expert than I shall ever be."