Everyday Drinking_ The Distilled Kingsley Amis - Kingsley Amis [1]
A tremendous thing about the King—some of us were even allowed to call him that, too—was his abhorrence of meanness. From him I learned the gruff rule of his own house, which was more warm if less polite than his civil “How’s Your Glass?” It ran: “I’ll pour you the first one and after that, if you don’t have one, it’s your own f***ing fault. You know where it is.” (I have ever since told this to all my guests.) From these pages you will learn—see the Mean Sods and Mean Slags section—of the stern attitude he took to any parsimony. With alcoholic ritual, the whole point is generosity. If you open a bottle of wine, for heaven’s sake have the grace to throw away the damn cork. If you are a guest and not a host, don’t find yourself having to drop your glass and then exclaim (as Amis once did in my hearing) “Oh—thank heavens it was empty.” The sort of host who requires that hint is the sort of host you should have avoided in the first place.
On the sometimes-penitential consequences of generosity, do by all means consult the brilliant chapter on the physical and metaphysical hangover. It is a piece of selfless research, undertaken by a pioneer. It can save much avoidable pain and, to my certain knowledge, has done so. Thanks to Zachary Leader’s excellent biography, the world now knows what Kingsley’s innumerable friends had come to realize, which is that the booze got to him in the end, and robbed him of his wit and charm as well as of his health. But not everybody can take their own advice, or not forever, and the cheerful and wise counsel offered here will not lead you, dear reader, far astray. Winston Churchill once boasted that he himself had got more out of drink than it had taken out of him and, life being the wager that it is, was quite probably not wrong in that. In these pages, we meet another man who made it work for him, and for others, too.
—CHRISTOPHER HITCHENS
Christopher Hitchens is a columnist for Vanity Fair and a visiting professor of liberal studies at the New School in New York City.
EDITOR’S NOTE AND GLOSSARY
THE BOOKS THAT make up this collection—On Drink, Every Day Drinking (from which we’ve borrowed a title), and How’s Your Glass—were written by Amis between 1971 and 1984, a busy period that produced eight other books and a handful of edited volumes. They represent the work of a man whose interest in alcohol somewhat transcended the merely casual. Indeed, Amis was a drinker—even a drink-ist—a scholar and practitioner and, perhaps above all, a connoisseur.
Despite his occasional claims of ignorance, his knowledge of drink was stunning, even encyclopedic. And being encyclopedic, these volumes seem best presented in their unabridged state. This creates a certain amount of overlap in spots; like all drinking companions, Amis occasionally repeats himself. But like the very best of them, he is unfailingly entertaining, and to miss his second hilarious dissertation on Albanian wine, or Speyside scotch, or the affront of lager and lime, merely because there had been another one elsewhere in the book would be as self-denying as passing up a Laphroig simply because you’d had a Glenfiddich earlier in the evening.
So here is the complete, unexpurgated shelf of Amis’s musings on drink, taking in history, etiquette, social mores, trade secrets, arcana, and, of course, the practical aspects of the convivial life. It is, like its author, gloriously, unremittingly British, so we’ve included here a short