Second Mencken Chrestomathy (64 page)

After his service in the Middle West, Dr. Jefferson became head bartender at the old Shoreham Hotel in Washington, from which he was translated, in the middle eighties, to the post of head bartender and chief of the wine cellar at the Rennert Hotel in Baltimore, that last surviving bulwark of the palmy days of American epicureanism and conviviality. The so-called wine cellar at the Rennert, of course, was chiefly stocked, not with the juices of the grape, but with the rarer and more potent essences that come from the still. Here, when Dr. Jefferson took charge, were ten barrels of rye whiskey that had been released from bond in 1844. Here was a whole vat of Kentucky corn that registered no less than 166 proof. The greatest of America’s connoisseurs visited the majestic vaults and dungeons of the old
gasthaus
as pilgrims might visit some holy shrine. Down in those aromatic depths Dr. Jefferson reigned a benevolent despot, and there he acquired his enormous knowledge of the history, etiology, chemical constitution, surface tension, specific gravity, flash point, muzzle velocity, trajectory and psychiatrical effects of each and every member of the standard repertoire of alcoholic drinks.

In one of his most interesting chapters he discusses the place that alcohol occupies in pharmacology, and shows clearly that the common notion that it is a stimulant is ill-founded. As a matter of fact it is not a stimulant at all, but a depressant. The civilized man does not drink alcoholic beverages to speed himself up, but to let himself down. This explains the extremely agreeable sensation produced by a cocktail or two before dinner. One cocktail, if it be skillfully prepared, is sufficient to put a man into a mellow and comfortable frame of mind. It quiets his nerves by anaesthetizing the delicate nerve ends; it dulls his reactions to external stimuli by shrinking and blocking up the cutaneous follicles; it makes him less sensitive to all distracting ideas and impressions, whether of a financial, domestic or theological character; and so, by the combination of all these processes, it puts him into that placid and caressing mood which should always accompany the ingestion of food.

I speak here, of course, of its general effects—that is, of its effects upon the nervous and vascular systems, and through them, upon the mind. Its local effect upon the esophagus and the stomach walls is probably stimulating, at least momentarily. For one thing, it increases the secretion of most of the constituent elements of the gastric juices, particularly hydrofluoric acid and citrate of manganese, and thus must necessarily make digesting more facile. But even here it operates as a depressant eventually, for it is obvious to anyone familiar with elementary physiology that a rise in the activity of the stomach is invariably accompanied by a compensatory fall in the buzzing and bubbling of the cerebrum and cerebellum. Our mental reactions are always a bit dull after a hearty meal; hence the feeling of peace which overtakes us at that time. The same feeling is produced by a few ounces of diluted alcohol.

Of even more interest than his discussing of such scientific aspects of his art is Dr. Jefferson’s account of what may be called its social or spectacular evolution. He has an interesting chapter, for example, upon the garb affected by bartenders in various ages of the Christian era. At one time, it appears, it was the custom for the bartenders in the chief American hotels to wear full dress when on duty, like head waiters, professional dancers and Pinero actors. (This same uniform, by the way, was worn by surgeons in England
before the days of asepsis. It was considered a gross insult for a surgeon to operate on a paying patient in other habiliments. The sleeves of the dress-coat were provided with buttons like those on shirt-sleeves, and the surgeon turned them back and fastened them with rubber bands before spitting on his hands and beginning his ministrations.) However, the claw-hammer disappeared from behind the bar during the Civil War and has not been seen since. Its departure was succeeded by an era of grave looseness in dress, and Dr. Jefferson says that there was a corresponding fall in the dignity of the bartender. In the shirt-sleeve days of the seventies, he was a nobody. It was a common custom indeed to address him indiscriminately as John, or even as Jack, much as one might address a waiter in a fourth-rate eating-house or a fellow convert at a revival. But once he got into his now familiar white coat, along about 1886, the gulf separating him from the public on one hand and from the caste of servants on the other began to widen rapidly, and in first-class barrooms he now occupies a position comparable to that of the druggist or the dentist, or even to that of the clergyman. He is no longer a mere pot-slinger, but a clean and self-respecting craftsman, whose pride in his subtle and indispensable art is signified by his professional accoutrements. This change in the public attitude toward him has naturally reacted upon the bartender himself. In the old days he took his swig from every jug and it was common for him to end his career in the gutter. But today he is a sober and a decent man and, unless fate has borne very harshly upon him, he has money in the bank against a rainy day, and dresses his wife and daughters as well as any other honest man.

Dr. Jefferson (whose aesthetic taste seems to be very advanced, for he quotes James Huneker’s books and W. H. Wright’s “Modern Painting,” and is satirical at the expense of the impressionists) believes that the modern barroom is one of the most marked triumphs of American design. He says there are at least twenty barrooms in the United States that deserve to be ranked, in their separate way, with St. Thomas’s Church in New York and the Boston Public Library. In his early days, he says, the present movement toward quiet refinement in barroom design was unheard of and the whole tendency of architects was toward an infantile gaudiness.
The famous barroom of the Palmer House in Chicago—paved with silver dollars!—was its extremist manifestation. But for a half-dozen years past the architects have been putting away their old onyx pillars and rococo carvings and substituting plain hardwood and simple lines. The improvement is too obvious to need praise. The typical hotel barroom of today is not only a hospitable and a comfortable place, but also and more especially, a noticeably beautiful place, and its effect upon those who visit it cannot fail to be inspiring. Even the ordinary saloon bar shows a certain forward movement. It is still, true enough, too flashily lighted, but its design is a good deal less delirious than it used to be. In particular, there is a benign passing away of its old intricate spirals and curlycues, and of its old harsh combination of mottled marble and red mahogany, and of its old display of mirrors, so reminiscent of the Paris bordello. One still fails, perhaps, to be soothed by it, but at all events one is no longer so grossly assaulted and tortured by it as one used to be.

Dr. Jefferson is an implacable antagonist of the American mixed drink, and all his references to it are unmistakably hostile, but nevertheless he is interested in it sufficiently to inquire into its history. Here, however, his diligence shows but meager reward. For example, he finds it quite impossible to determine the origin of the cocktail, or even the origin of its name. Its first mention in polite literature is in Nathaniel Hawthorne’s “Blithedale Romance,” published in 1852. But it seems to have been a familiar American drink a good while further back, for there is a legend in Boston that John Adams was very fond of it, and that he once caused a scandal by trying it upon the then rector of the Old South Church, the reverend gentleman quickly succumbing and taking the count. But this legend, of course, is merely a legend. All that one may safely say of the drink itself is that it was known in the first half of the Nineteenth Century, and all that one may safely say of its name is that it seems to be American. Even here, however, the pedant may be disposed to file a caveat, for the word “cock” passed out of usage in this country at a very early date, “rooster” taking its place, and so the primeval inventor of the drink, supposing him to have been American, would have been inclined to call it a roostertail rather than a cocktail. The explanation
may be that the thing was invented on American soil, but by an Englishman.

A similar mystery surrounds the origin of “highball,” despite the fact that the word goes back not more than twenty-five years. Why high? And why ball? In England, where the thing itself originated and where it has been familiar for many years, it is called a whiskey-and-soda. “Julep” presents equal difficulties. The etymologists say that it is an Americanized form of the Spanish word
julepe
(pronounced hoo-
lay
-pay), and derive the latter from the Persian
gul
, rose, and
ab
, water. But this derivation, as Dr. Jefferson justly points out, seems to be chiefly fanciful, and perhaps may be ascribed to some fantoddish journalist or college professor, either drunk or sober. It is highly improbable that the mint julep was known to the Spanish explorers of America, for they were not spirits drinkers but wine drinkers. Moreover, there is no mention of it in history until years after the last Spaniard had departed from these shores. Still more, it was first heard of, not in the Spanish parts of the country, but in the wholly English parts.

This scant and casual notice of Dr. Jefferson’s book scarcely does justice to one of the most interesting of recent volumes. The common notion that a bartender is an ignorant man is here set at rest forever. The author reveals himself not only as a gentleman of sound information but also as one of cultured habits of reflection. His book is written in excellent English from cover to cover, and the arrangement of its materials certifies to his possession of a trained and orderly mind. It is sincerely to be hoped that he will not allow it to be his last essay in the philosophy of his ancient (and perhaps now dying) art. Bartending has suffered greatly from the ignorant and cynical attitude of mind of the general public. When the average man thinks of barrooms, his mind quickly turns to memories of some of his own worst stupidities and follies, and so he comes unconsciously to the notion that the man on the other side of the bar is an ass also. Nothing can be more grotesquely unjust and untrue. The typical American bartender in this year of grace 1916 is a man of education, intelligence and refinement. He must be able to meet all classes and conditions of men in a dignified and self-respecting manner; he must understand human vanity; he must keep himself steadfast in the midst of
manifold temptations. Obviously, such a man can be no slouch. The boob, the osseocaput, the fat- or bonehead may get along very well in the pulpit, in business or at the bar, but it is quite impossible for him to survive
behind
the bar.

From the Baltimore
Evening Sun
, Sept. 3, 1934

I hadn’t been in one for three or four years, but save in the wine-list there was no visible change. The same side-show murals on the walls, and the same cacochromatic play of lights. The same sad youths laboring the same jazz. The same middle-aged couples bumping and grunting over the dance floor like dying hogs in a miasmatic pen. The same interludes of dismal professional entertainment, with the same decayed vaudevillians. The same crooners, male and female, bawling maudlin jingles into the same mikes. The same shuffling and forgetful waiters. The same commonplace food. The same poky service.

The wine-list showed some cuts in price. Highballs had come down from the 75 cents of Prohibition days to half a dollar, and some of the simpler kinds of cocktails were but 40 cents. There were champagnes as low as $5 a quart, and still wines at $2.25, $2, and even, in a few cases, $1.75. But the transcripts of the labels (often misspelled) were empty of temptation: they all seemed to be third-rate trade-goods. Every beer listed was, to my unhappy personal knowledge, bad. Of the good beers now on the market there was no mention. It was a task to make up one’s mind what to drink. I chose an almost anonymous white wine, and regretted it heartily.

What the mark-up is in such places I don’t know, but it can’t be much less than 100 per cent. For the overhead is heavy, and the flow of business is not swift. While the clients are performing the lethargic obscenity that they call dancing they are not drinking, and most of them seem to dance every number. I observed one crème de menthe frappé that lasted, by my watch, more than an
hour, and one bottle of indeterminate red wine that sufficed for four people all evening. There was nowhere in the place, so far as I could see, any high-pressure boozing, and certainly no one was tight, save maybe my waiter—an habitual heel-drainer, or I am no criminologist. The dancers, with few exceptions, looked very silly, but they were all sober. No carcasses of the stewed, whether male or female, hung along the bar.

Why do people go to such places? It is hard to make out. To lose themselves in the color and gayety? I could discern no more gayety than is usual in a Bible class, and the standard color scheme is far more exhilarating to bulls than to human beings. To be soothed and carried away by the music? There is no music, but only an idiotic beating of tom-toms, with occasionally a few measures of a banal tune. To seek grace and exercise in the dance? There is no grace in such stupid wriggling, and no exercise in doing it over a few square yards of floor. To dally with amour? But surely the place for amour is not under 5,000 candle-power of red, yellow, green and blue lights, with strangers ricocheting from the cabooses of the high contracting parties, and catapulting them hither and yon.

The music interested me most, for one often hears, even from good musicians, that jazz is not to be sniffed at—that there is really something in it. But what, precisely? I can find nothing in what is currently offered. Its melodies all run to a pattern, and that pattern is crude and childish. Its rhythms are almost as bad; what is amusing in them is as old as Johann Sebastian Bach, and what is new is simply an elephantine hop, skip and jump. Nor is there anything charming in jazz harmony, once it has been heard a couple of times. The discords, three times out of four, seems to be due to ignorance far more than to craft, and the modulations, in the main, are simply those of a church organist far gone in liquor. As for the instrumentation, it appears to be based frankly on the theory that unpleasant sounds are somehow more pleasant, at least to certain ears, than pleasant ones. That theory is sound, and it has many corollaries: indeed, the love of ugliness is quite as widespread, and hence quite as human, as the love of beauty. But it still remains a scientific fact that a thin and obvious tune played badly on an imperfect reed instrument, is hideous, and no metaphysics,
however artful, can ever reduce that fact to fancy. And it is likewise a fact that a single fiddle, if it be pitted against three or four saxophones, a trumpet, a bull-fiddle and a battery of drums, gives a very bad account of itself, and can make little more actual music than a pig under a fence.