 Book
Reviews
with Robin Osborne
Martini
By Frank Moorhouse
Knopf $35
Nothing succeeds like excess, as Oscar Wilde quipped, and in this season of excess it seems appropriate to choose a book about a drink whose very name symbolises excessiveness.
Australian writer Frank Moorhouse, perhaps best known for the linked novels Grand Days and Dark Palace, has partaken of many a martini, and other libations, during a long literary career. Wisely, he does not mix his drinking with his writing, preferring to wait until day's end to adjourn to a suitable bar where, typescript in one hand and drink in the other, he will review the day's efforts with a critical eye.
In a hardcover that is as elegant as its subject, Moorhouse muses about the history of the martini, that classic drink containing nothing but chilled alcohol - typically, two parts of gin to one of vermouth - including its role in popular culture, and spins an array of yarns about various people's encounters with it.
His partner in this endeavour is fellow aficionado, V. I. Voltz, with whom he discovered the martini 'under the revolving fans, amid the ferns and cane chairs' in Cambridge. For both it was love at first sip.
'Martinis are made from either London gin or Plymouth gin (which confusingly is technically a 'London gin') and no others... and never from the Dutch gin or sloe gin... which are both drinks that go their own ways,' Moorhouse explains.
He discusses martini cities, India 'definitely' not having any, despite Bombay Sapphire gin being a favoured brand, and the role of the cocktail in books and films, including James Bond's famous edict that his martini should be 'shaken not stirred', an in-joke, the author suggests, as gently stirred, rather than vigorously shaken, is the preferred method.
The name comes from the Italian vermouth makers, Martini & Rossi ('Why wasn't it called a Rossi? Rossi probably asked himself that question until he died.') while the glass is an 'emblem of swank times... So ubiquitous... that the NSW State Railways have as their 'No Drinking on Trains' sign a martini glass with a bar across it... I dream of the day when the martini glass symbol is there with a tick beside it and an arrow pointing to the bar car.'
My favourite story involves Ernest Hemingway, then reporting on WW2, who in 1944 armed himself with a Sten gun and led a group of American soldiers and French resistance fighters into the bar of the Ritz Hotel in Paris. Asked what they wanted, the author replied, 'How about seventy-three dry martinis?' These were duly lined up on the bar and the group drank to the 'liberation of the Ritz.'
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