An Unshakeable Love Affair

Sydney Morning Herald

Saturday November 5, 2005

ROSS FITZGERALD. Ross Fitzgerald is the author of 28 books. He is currently writing Under the Influence, a history of alcohol in Australia.

Synonymous with refined style, the martini is still as popular as ever, writes ROSS FITZGERALD.

Martini: A Memoir

By Frank Moorhouse

Knopf, 238pp, $35

Although I haven't had a teaspoonful of alcohol for almost 36 years, one of my favourite ditties is by the great Dorothy Parker:

I like to have a martini,

Two at the very most,

After three I'm under the table,

After four I'm under my host.

Frank Moorhouse first wrote about the martini in his book Forty-Seventeen. This was years ago, when he was in his thirties. The story relates how a man teaches his young female lover how to make a martini. As Moorhouse puts it now: "I see that in the story, the martini in some ways represents worldliness and also, perhaps, the elixir of life, the magic potion."

When Moorhouse himself was young, the drinking rules of his compatriots were: don't drink before midday; don't mix your drinks; don't drink on an empty stomach; don't mix grape and grain; don't begin your drinking before your companions; and if you avoid drinking spirits you will avoid becoming an alcoholic.

As he states towards the book's end, only "not drinking on an empty stomach" has any validity at all.

In a chapter of Martini: A Memoir entitled "The Venerated Craft", the author explains that, traditionally, the martini is "a drink of gin with dry vermouth added in proportions according to taste ... The classic martini is served icy cold with an unpitted green olive on a wooden toothpick in a conical glass on a stem."

There is much debate about whether the martini should be shaken or stirred. James Bond always orders his "shaken, not stirred". The one exception is in the movie You Only Live Twice in which Bond conspicuously orders his martini "stirred". Moorhouse suspects that "this is because the screenplay is by Roald Dahl who would know that stirring is generally the preferred technique among purists as it supposedly prevents the gin from getting 'bruised"'.

Moorhouse differs from the purist tradition. "I shake."

Much of the book is taken up with what the author calls "the mysteries of the martini". Unsurprisingly, the book is replete with arcane information. For example, after he signed the act repealing prohibition in 1933, President Franklin Roosevelt celebrated by mixing what was the first legal post-prohibition martini in the United States.

It's hard to disagree with Moorhouse's claim that "in film, in fiction and in folklore, the martini cocktail has been a classy icon now for more than one hundred years. It is one of the great narratives of modern folklore", and also "the most mentioned cocktail in English literature and in film".

Yet Martini: A Memoir is not all froth and bubble. In the chapter "What Is this Demon? Alcohol and the Art of Drinking", Moorhouse confides that when he was at high school in Wollongong, one of his mates had a girlfriend who consumed a full bottle of gin on the beach and died.

Alcohol is indeed a powerful depressant that affects all areas of the brain. Moorhouse accepts that "permanent brain damage is usually confined to long-term heavy alcohol users". Indeed, he approvingly quotes Dr Linda Calabresi, who maintains that studies show that "a moderate consumption of alcohol (one to two drinks a day) is associated with improved mental ability".

Savouring Moorhouse's superbly eccentric book, I was reminded of an old friend who died of a "wet brain". His martini of choice was 11 parts London gin, one part dry vermouth, icy cold, with a single olive - just like his heroine, the late Queen Mother. His favourite poem, which he would often recite when drunk, was by the brilliant New Yorker writer Ogden Nash:

There is something about a martini,

A tingle remarkably pleasant;

A yellow, a mellow martini,

I wish I had one at present.

Is there a message in this, I wonder?