HALF MAN, QUARTER SANDWICH

Sometimes the man eats the sandwich.

First two pics by Caroline 'Flashgun' Gannon.

Sometimes the sandwich eats the man.

And sometimes a headline is more exciting than the article underneath it, e.g. ‘Beckett and Guggenheim’s four days in bed, with a break for sandwiches.'

 

It’s a cracking headline if not exactly a great surprise.  According to the article, Peggy Guggenheim made the sandwich/Beckett remark in a ‘documentary about her life,’ though it doesn’t give chapter and verse.  In any case, it won’t come as a complete surprise to anybody who’s read her memoir Out Of This Century, Confessions of an Art Addict.

 

She depicts Sam Beckett as the kind of lad who’d happily spend four days in bed whether there was a woman in there with him or not. He was nicknamed Oblomov after the lead character in the novel by Goncharov. ‘I made him read the book and he immediately saw the resemblance between himself and the strange inactive hero who finally did not even have the will power to get out of bed.’

 

On the other hand she writes in Out of This Century that after she and Beckett first got together, after a dinner at James Joyce’s pad, they stayed in bed overnight and all the next day until dinner time that evening.  ‘We might be there still, but I had to go to dine with Arp, who unfortunately had no telephone.  I don’t know why, but I mentioned champagne, and Becket rushed out and bought several bottles which we drank in bed.’

 

I have a few questions.  How many bottles is ‘several’?  And did she drink her share of the several before going out to dinner, in which case she must surely have arrived three sheets to the wind? Or did she just stand up Arp?

 

In any case, no mention of sandwiches. Which I think is a shame.

Arp's the one in the middle below, supported by Hans Richter and Tristan Tzara.

 

 

BY THE BOOK

I can’t remember exactly when I first made an attempt to read Ulysses; but it was somewhere between starting to drink illegally in pubs and being able to drink legally in pubs.  And I was fascinated by the Lestryogonians section where Bloom eats a gorgonzola sandwich accompanied by a glass of Burgundy.

‘Mr. Bloom ate his stripes of sandwich, fresh clean bread, with relish of disgust, pungent mustard, the feety savour of green cheese. Sips of his wine soothed his palate.  Not logwood that.  Tastes fuller this weather with the chill off’ 

I wasn’t sure about the mustard with gorgonzola, or with cheese in general, but I know some people like that that kind of thing.

That passage in Ulysses cheered me up no end. I was already a bookish lad, and I thought. ‘This is great. This is what my life could be about: reading books and thinking about food.’  

At much the same time as I tackled Ulysses, I started to read Samuel Beckett’s novels, though somehow I missed, or at least had forgotten till I reread it a couple of weeks back, this passage in Murphy (1938).

‘She (Celia) entered the saloon bar of a Chef and Brewer and had a sandwich of prawn and tomato and a dock glass of white port off the zinc.’

I’ve had white port once or twice, though not off the zinc, and I know it wasn’t Borges brand, though for literary reasons I wish it had been.

It’s hard to think of white port without thinking of the song ‘White Port and Lemon Juice,’ or ‘WPLJ” originally by the 4 Deuces, then given some fame by Frank Zappa.

I don’t know if the Four Deuces ate a sandwich with their white port and lemon juice; I suspect not.

Then just the other day I was thumbing through a reprint of The Artistry of Mixing Drinks by Frank Meir of the Ritz bar in Paris (1934), and remembered it contained a poem by J. Ainsworth Th. Morgan titled ‘Ode to the Ritz Bar’ which contains these lines

‘The noise of liquor, ice and shake;

A kingly mixing knack,

A sandwich, almond or a chip, 

Then ‘bottoms-up” and “Smack.”! 

Of course we don’t know what cocktail our poet was thinking of, and we know there are such things as ‘cocktail sandwiches’ but it seems to me there aren’t many cocktails that go very well with a sandwich, and vice versa.

SWIGGING WITH SCRIBBLERS: WHY DRINKERS WRITE

While looking for something completely different, I happened to find this wonderful picture of Samuel Beckett. 

There’s something about that untouched glass of red wine that looks utterly inviting and enticing, and you know it’s in Paris, and looking at it, I think it might be the best-tasting, most inspiring glass of wine in the whole history of the world.  You think I’m exaggerating?

And I began to wonder if I could find pictures of my other “favorite” authors with a drink in front of them.  Since my favorite (and I know it’s a dodgy term) authors include Borges, Kafka and Pynchon this was clearly not going to be an absolute easy task.  Since the list also includes Chandler, Kerouac, Burroughs, Ballard and Christopher Hitchens, it might in part seem like shooting drunken fish in a barrel, but all in all, it wasn’t quite as straightforward as I’d expected.  Hitchens admittedly was easy:

But Kerouac was surprisingly hard.  OK, I was just image-searching the Internet, not trawling through library archives, but I had the feeling I’d seen loads of pictures of Jack with a drink in his hand.  Maybe so, but I can’t find them now.  The best I can do is the one below.  I guess it’s hard liquor in that little cup.  And note the pipe.

Raymond Chandler proved surprisingly difficult too.  He’s seldom photographed without a pipe or cigarette, and quite often he’s holding a cat (a good standby prop for author portraits), but no sign of the office bottle, a martini or a gimlet.  However, there is this scarcely improvable one, sitting between Mr. and Mrs. Anthony Blond, a position in which you’d definitely need a drink.

No problem with finding a picture of Burroughs holding a drink, though it’s rather easier to find one of him holding gun.  And we all know how well guns and drink went together in Burroughs's life.  

And I did find this gorgeous picture of Borges and Ballard; plenty of bottles in the background, and Ballard clearly has a drink in his hand, though admittedly Borges doesn’t.

I can see why certain authors might think it’s bad for their image to be seen with a drink in their hand, though others of course think it’s more than fine.  Ernest Hemingway ran the gamut of guns, drink and cats, sometimes more than one at a time.

And what about female authors?  I imagine they might might be even less willing to be photographed booze in hand, even if they have some reputation for enjoying a drink, even for writing about it.  Dorothy Parker for instance, always looks amazingly prim in her photographs.  This is the best I can come up with:

Although whenever an actress plays Dorothy Parker on screen or stage, a drink is a ubiquitous prop.  Here’s Jennifer Jason Leigh in Mrs. Parker and the Vicious Circle.

As for some of my other fave raves: Joan Didion – no, she looks like she’d keel over if she ever had so much as a glass of sherry, though there are many, many pictures with cigarettes.  Angela Carter, Renata Adler, Lydia Davis: no boozy picture that I can find.  No cigarettes or guns either, though Lydia Davis is often seen with a cat.  So thank heavens (in so many ways) for Deborah Eisenberg. I can’t say that I’ve found zillions of pictures of the divine Ms. E staggering around, gin bottle in hand, but there is this deeply wonderful picture of her: drink in one hand, Wallace Shawn in the other (so to speak), he in turn being a writer who’s obviously unafraid to be seen with a drink in his own hand.  Hurrah. 

               Is this connection between booze and writing important?  Well, it does seem that many a writer likes a drink.  Of course many a plumber or carpenter likes a drink too, but writers get to write about it, and then their biographers write about it again.  There’s a new book out by Olivia Laing, titled The Trip to Echo Spring: Why Writers Drink;  it's about  Hemingway, Tennessee Williams, Carver, Cheever, Berryman and Fitzgerald.  

As for why writers drink, well a million words probably won’t answer the question, but there are some fairly wise one here from Blake Morrison writing about the book in the Guardian:  “Why do writers drink? Why does anyone drink? From boredom, loneliness, habit, hedonism, lack of self-confidence; as stress relief or a short-cut to euphoria; to bury the past, obliterate the present or escape the future. If Olivia Laing's entertaining book fails to come up with a simple answer, that's because there isn't one.”