And Another Thing | 15 November 2008

Not long before he died, Simon Gray and I discussed the extraordinary paradox: why was it that New Labour does everything in its power to discourage smoking and everything in its power (notably longer licensing hours) to encourage drinking? After all, we agreed, drink caused infinitely more human misery, both to drinkers themselves and to their families, than cigarettes. Smoking does not produce suicides, whereas drinking does, every day. Any doctor or hospital consultant will tell you that booze kills many more people than lung cancer, and that’s not even counting road deaths caused by drunken drivers. Above all, smoking does not lead to crime, whereas over 50 per cent of violent crimes are caused by alcohol. Certainly drink needs no encouragement from government to flourish — society, in Western countries, does that pretty comprehensively. For instance, literature is drink-sodden.

In the oeuvre of which novelist, I asked Gray, does drink play the biggest part? He thought Hemingway. And it’s true that, in 1922 I think, he invented the phrase, ‘Have a drink’ (meaning alcohol). On one of the two occasions I met him, sitting at an adjoining table outside La Coupole, Montparnasse, he lined up six martinis in front of him, having carefully instructed the waiter how to have them made, then drank them one after another. There is a lot of drinking from wine-flasks in Fiesta and the Spanish Civil War book. Across the River and Into the Trees is a very drinky tale. Is there any Hemingway short story, let alone novel, in which a drink is not swallowed? I don’t think so. On the other hand, Kingsley Amis must run him close. There is serious drinking in Lucky Jim, One Fat Englishman and The Old Devils, indeed in all Amis tales. The account of Jim Dixon waking up with a hangover is not easily forgotten:

The light did him harm, but not as much as looking at things did; he resolved, having done it once, never to move his eyeballs again.