Compendium with a Twist

You can learn something very specific about someone by the drink they don’t order. If there’s a spirit they avoid as they scan the cocktail menu, it’s a good bet that it was their first big alcoholic mistake. An early dalliance with gin, for instance, may well keep martinis potato-based for the rest of one’s days.

For Peter Sellers, the poison was rye. The Toronto bookseller and his co-compiler of this slender volume, Rob Milling, explain their origin story thusly: “In a quest to expand our scientific knowledge, we took a bottle of Rob’s father’s Adams Antique rye and a large bottle of Coke to mix it with.” They subsequently discovered what it was to “awake crapulous.” As a result, Sellers now avoids that particular type of whisky.

The less predictable but more convivial outcome of their youthful debauchery was an extended search for the best hangover descriptions from literature and beyond. They brought their wry (not rye) collection to publishers in the 1980s, but everyone cut them off: too difficult to get the rights and too difficult to sell. Sellers and Milling put a cork in it, and only now, forty-odd years later, is Mosaic Press ready to decant their work. The blend has aged well.

Just as you can tell you’re at a decent bar by the selection of top-shelf spirits, you know Sellers is a knowledgeable guide by the fact that he starts off with the single best English-language sentence on his subject. “His mouth had been used as a latrine by some small creature of the night, and then as its mausoleum,” Kingsley Amis wrote in Lucky Jim. This is followed by the third-best sentence: “During the night, too, he’d somehow been on a cross-country run and then been expertly beaten up by secret police.” And then capped off by the second-best sentence, the one more in reach of our beleaguered guide: “He felt bad.”

Does the new sober-curious movement mean there’s less of a market for a book as specific as The Last Martini — or more? The teetotallers among us don’t know what it’s like to awaken “very slowly and clumsily like a fat man getting out of a swimming pool,” as per John Steinbeck. They’ve never appeared as “a thing smirking deep in the eyes of grace itself like a gorgon in an autumn pool,” as Cormac McCarthy would put it. And they’ve missed out on the “inconceivable anguish of horripilating hangover thunderclapping about his skull” inflicted upon Malcolm Lowry’s suffering consul. What better way to expand the mind than a second-hand pickling?

The offerings here are unapologetically of a certain vintage. Sellers considers an Internet Movie Database list of the best cinematic hangovers, from 2002, to be unworthy of his readership due to “a not-too-surprising shortness of memory at best and a rather disappointing ignorance of cinema history at worst.” Of course, memory loss goes with heavy drinking the way vermouth goes with gin, and less is always better.

If you’re offered the choice, should you be hungover in a book or in a movie? The Last Martini offers a side-by-side comparison of the depictions in C. S. Forester’s The African Queen and James Agee’s screen adaptation of the same agony for the Hepburn and Bogart film. On balance, the page is a better place to suffer: the screeching birds of the 1951 picture are not mentioned in the novel, and Allnutt is permitted to have “promptly brought up all the water he had drunk, but he felt better, all the same.” Sellers is also correct in asserting that if one must be duntish on screen, it’s “more charming in black and white.”

Even more enjoyable are the cures, most of which are finely crafted insults added to injury. Sellers is kind enough to include fiction on the subject in a chapter titled “That Would Be Great If Only It Really Worked.” He reminds us that Jeeves’s first act of service to Bertie Wooster was a hangover cure made of raw egg, red pepper, and Worcestershire sauce: “Gentlemen have told me they have found it extremely invigorating after a late evening.” Pushkin offers cucumber brine with honey, while Hunter S. Thompson suggests “12 amyl nitrites (one box), in conjunction with as many beers as necessary.” Exactly how many is that, sir?

It’s worth noting here that “the hair of the dog that bit you” is a reference to the ancient folk practice of treating rabies by rubbing the aggressor’s pelt into your wound. By comparison, more booze seems positively healthy.

The most entertaining treatment is offered by the character Littlejohn in Bill Pronzini’s detective novel Jackpot, from 1990: “Too much booze, see, that sends the old corpus into a glucose depression. So the first thing you got to do the morning after, you got to build your glucose level back up. That’s what the cinnamon buns are for.” And then, as he instructs the befuddled waitress, he needs bananas, six of them cut up in a bowl, “to give the old adrenals a kick in the ass to get them producing.” Two Amstel lagers after that, for electrolytes, obviously.

Recent research suggests that about a quarter of the population doesn’t get hungover. A particular combination of genetics, a strong immune system, and naturally low levels of anxiety seems to ensure that, for these lucky souls, the morning after is just another morning. This finding calls into question The Last Martini’s claim that its subject is universal — but it only makes the book more necessary. They can’t say they don’t know what they’re missing.