In the decades following her trial for the murder of her father and step-mother, Lizzie Borden walked the streets of Fall River, Massachusetts — a minor celebrity, and major curiosity. She tried on new identities, tried to establish some semblance of a new life, but the shadow of her past was always looming.
Lizzie Borden
took an ax
And gave her mother forty whacks
When she saw what she had done,
She gave her father forty-one.
Lizzie Borden
went to trial
came to court in grim denial.
Once the jury did acquit
All life remaining, she’d submit.
Lizzie Borden
unbow your head
there goes guilt, good townsfolk said.
When a coon coat she did try
rose up gossip, hue and cry.
Lizzie Borden
bought a house
installed plumbing, waltzed some Strauss.
When she sat at window parlor
out came children’s mocking holler:
“Lizzie Borden
offed her mom
with a hatchet and aplomb.
Though the deed was fairly done
next time neater with a gun.”
Lizzie Borden
raised her fork
traveled Europe and New York.
When she danced she quite impressed
theater friends and actresses.
Lizzie Borden
amour-propre
girls on French Street skipping rope.
There they chanted, “ho, ho, ho
Lizzie’s got no beau, beau, beau.”
Lizzie Borden
counted stars
electric lights and motorcars.
Some nights sometimes nothing’s changed
Is from one’s life one oft estranged?
Lizzie Borden
strolls tonight
gasps at starlings flock in flight.
By the town’s grave riverfront
slip of memory to confront.
Lizzie Borden
blood on hands
wakes on couch to strict demands.
When she stoops at parents’ tomb
no kneel nor prayer, no sin assume.
Lizzie Borden
fate betrayed
calls abed for chambermaid.
Most days thrums a heart jejune
Most nights summon crooning moon.
Lizzie Borden
sine qua non
chauffeured drive to Tiverton.
Feckless, faceless, friendless girl
time’s unfair when prayers unfurl.
Lizzie Borden
bids Fall River
her soul-cracked soul deliver.
Fast decades once claimed their due
retreat ere now in now’s debut.
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The Centaur’s skin, all moon-grained in an idle mirror,
reminds him of an ailing heart,
drawn out in sundry mortal quests.
Who, at this age, would not look past him
as a beast, rough handled in the summing of his tales?
Once a brute of intellect, sheer force of intellectual will,
he drank Madeira till the moon expired.
The beasts, the brutes, would come and go,
envious juries, their pleasures derived from their smallness,
while he, in moods of languor,
marked his province in broadest gestures.
At this hour, the railroad tracks pattern
the iron ground in frozen tracery;
the quaint smoke rises, sinks.
His rages, mellowed by years, come unpredictably now;
he’s last to adjudge the solitary afternoons a virtue,
and paws the earth till it concedes
its clods the stiffened peels of roots.
The veterans homes, where his comrades wheel,
goad him toward another momentary rage; sooner
blow your head off than entertain compassion
in the guise of these mercenary helpmeets.
The table-talk of ogres,
eating side by side in certain watchful pride,
tends toward the banal,
as Proust and Joyce in the half-lit cafeteria
talked of failing eyes, neurasthenia;
roughly they eat wild mushrooms,
mouths crammed full with morels, truffles, bitter puffballs,
epicures lost in reverie,
nostalgiasts for the earth’s remonstrating gyre.
Somehow I’ve always managed to live near trains,
the lulling senescence of the midnight whistles,
the undertow of diesel thrumming.
I’ve managed shrugging off the stillness that
infects the night like poison dew,
and leaves you wanting for the miracle of going places.
It came to me, upon a revelation, that
heavens are wanting too,
implausible in their effort of embrace and forgiveness.
Though eschatologies suggest
a logical reproach,
still I go daydreaming in my cups,
seeking out the morning paper in bathrobe and slippers
before the second cup of coffee takes its whiskey,
and the day begins to fall,
a repository for our flaming dreams.
Baudelaire said
you must live in drunken rapture
to escape martyrdom to time,
but sometimes I find I can live high enough on the hog
on suggestion alone, taking sober idea from the stillness
of those nights when the trains run vivid
in the garden, and the aroused beasts
in their auroras
prance madly to the music in their heads.
The Centaur sleeps past noon these days,
turns the tv volume up. He frets at the way his teeth
(half no longer his) don’t fit the mouth he remembered.
Worse, his amateur canvases
turn out like sloppy imitations of greater masters.
Intellectual battles, academic fornications,
the jeweled spices of between a woman’s legs,
skulls smashed like crockery in fields of valor,
are as hands as numb as stones against the pressing days.
Last night the good Madeira was brought out,
cigarettes were abandoned in modernist ashtrays,
and Theseus, moving to gin, reenacted
how he had slayed the Minotaur.
Persephone, standing by, had heard it a million times.
I listened for the train’s compensatory verse,
knowing as it did that all motion has
nothing or infinity as its endpoint,
and stumbled toward the Centaur, who,
all hoof and brawn, his murmured eloquence summoned
like a vestige of a civilized world,
waved the last guests out the door,
the grandest king of grandest days.
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And you whose face so famously winces
from its inner self, ghost trace of pockmarks
of some earlier you, lips agape, like a corpse’s,
you—you of no fixed address, no idée fixe,
gifted in fetish of doubting and double regret,
you must set loose from this abandoned shore,
perchance to trip upon another more
unyielding. This milieu, this passing second,
this whirling wheel collapsed in tungsten light,
is Rome as Athens was to the Romans.
One wanderer seeks matter in the havoc
of his wandering, as you seek substance
in the doubting self, confiding to interrogative you,
hedging thoughts as if they might portend mortality.
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A brief look at the untold riches of cocktail literature.
When Prohibition in America ended on Tuesday, December 5, 1933, at precisely 4:31 pm, almost overnight the drinking public decamped from backrooms and speakeasies into suddenly plentiful public taverns and opulent supper clubs. After thirteen years of being relegated to bathtub gin concoctions, the cocktail was poised to reestablish its former glory.
At the same time, liquor-related literature started making its own comeback. Liquor had always been a staple literary subject. More than 25 liquor-related titles had been published during the cocktail’s first Golden Age, between the mid 1800s and Prohibition. The first of these, The Bon Vivants Companion-or-How To Mix Drinks, by Professor Jerry Thomas appeared in 1862, the last, Hugo R. Ensslin’s Recipes For Mixed Drinks, in 1917.
During Prohibition, drink manuals came mostly from Europe, such as Harry Craddock’s epic Savoy Cocktail Book (1930), featuring recipes from London’s Savoy Hotel bar, and Harry McElhone’s mischievous Barflies and Cocktails (1927), which showcased drinks, anecdotes and cartoons from the legendary Harry’s New York Bar, birthplace of the Sidecar, Bloody Mary, Boulevardier, French 75 and more (in continuous operation since 1911, by the way). The few books published in the U.S. consisted, naturally, of manuals on how to circumvent the law and make your own booze.
But by 1933, a new wave of cocktail books started showing up on bookstore shelves; between 1933-1935 more of these books were published than during the entire first Golden Age. For the most part, they were written by talented bar owners and tenders. But one of my favorites, So Red The Nose-or-Breath In The Afternoon (Farrah & Rinehart, 1935), features thirty libations presumably concocted and presumably enjoyed by the likes by Ernest Hemingway (of course!), Theodore Dreiser, Edgar Rice Burroughs, Irving Stone, Alexander Woollcott, Erskine Caldwell.
So Red is a time capsule, evocatively illustrated by Roy C. Nelson, whose drawings, done in the post-deco style of Al Hirschfeld, or 30s and 40s Looney Tunes & Merrie Melodies cartoons, conjure a time when the past was not so far in the past. Its recipes also tended to run to the gloriously, celebratorily, absurd. Hemingway’s Death In The Afternoon Cocktail comes across as a wtf! joke of a drink –
Pour 1 jigger of Absinth into a champagne glass. Add iced champagne until it attains the proper opalescent milkiness. Drink 3 to 5 of these slowly.
But in fact this is a rather legendary Hemingway recipe that’s been on menus since the cocktail revival went into full swing circa 2005.
Is this drink, essentially an Absinthe Highball, any good? Well, if bitter wormwood/anise laced sparkling wine ignites your senses, then by all means, drink three or five. Personally, I enjoy absinthe, especially when it’s ritualistically served by dripping water though a sugar cube that’s been placed on a perforated absinthe spoon.
Dreiser’s American Tragedy Cocktail includes these special ingredients:
1 teaspoon full nitroglycerin
1 treaspoon heavy ground gunpowder
2 jiggers ethel gasoline
1 lighted match
Please accompany the above by horrific series of eccentricities, aversions and drinking habits based upon my notorious and incurable alcoholism. Limit one drink per customer, please, notes Dreiser.
And the Dry Martini pops up again in Kenneth Robert’s Lively Lady:
take a small pitcher with a well rounded interior put in it nine cubes of ice
add four cocktail glasses of gin
add two cocktail glasses of niolly prat vermouth
stir briskly sixty revolutions with a long-handed spoon (the only method which doesn’t bruise the gin)
pour into cocktail glasses
add twist of lemon peel so lemon oil is sprayed on the liquid
repeat until pitcher is empty
Hmm. That’s how I’ve always made my Martinis, although I add a dash of orange bitters, as called for in the original recipes circa 1903-1906. (Note: in old cocktail books, a cocktail or wine glass equals two ounces; a pony is one ounce)
These days writers, perhaps, don’t drink as public performance art half as much as they did eight decades ago. In 2020, we’re more apt to hear about the sobriety of ex-drinkers like James Ellroy and Stephen King than the epic bouts and hangovers of Cheever, Bukowski, Mailer et al. But if So Red ushered the way toward excesses, it also foretold the craft cocktail revival of early twenty-first century.
Speaking of snapshots of time, my copy has an interesting handwritten inscription on the inside cover that I’ll share with you here. I have to translate the cursive Palmer Method, so here goes:
December 25, 1940
Dear Bob,
I pray that this volume will take its place with the rest of the valued works you prize so highly.
This is by no mere collection of story tellers nor anthologies of verse, but a practicable, workable affair used by those of modern epicurean tastes.
I pray for you, brother.
Rev. Jay
Brother Cleve has traveled the globe, playing keyboards and spinning records. Fascinated by local spirits, he’s collected innumerable books about cocktails and spirits. He is the Beverage Director at Paris Creperie in Boston, MA, and lectures extensively on cocktails and their histories.
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Natum ipsum mel id. Sea ei possim offendit. Sed epicurei menandri at, ne per nulla numquam. Ne aperiam constituam eum, modo fabellas splendide cum id. Ut novum molestiae mediocritatem vis, salutatus democritum eu quo. No viderer minimum ocurreret has, usu ne autem facer suscipit, nam ne reque mentitum. Offendit moderatius ea sed. Ad nisl reque cum, ut omnis facer integre mei. Perfecto accusamus ut sed, mea ad purto tollit antiopam. Simul laudem atomorum est no, vis eu etiam animal. Nam eu diam utamur, per ea eros eius prodesset, ei scripta equidem duo.
Docendi omnesque salutatus mel ut. Mel tota aperiri blandit ei. Duo detraxit efficiantur at, te vis amet alia. Ea mel iusto interpretaris. Homero nusquam pertinax an ius. Ne sit melius voluptua. Ius brute molestiae eu, est et aliquam debitis. Vero iudico dignissim per ex. Ex nonumes apeirian quaestio nec. Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet, te nulla mundi accusata cum. Ei laudem admodum cum. Voluptua luptatum sententiae eu mea, cum porro graeci moderatius ad, usu eu lucilius dissentiet. Ne eius minim oblique mea, dolor appareat comprehensam et vix, et sea modus liberavisse. Cu oratio maiorum verterem mei. Vix in zril aliquid.
Two things are infinite: the universe and human stupidity; and I’m not sure about the universe.
Albert Einstein
No viderer minimum ocurreret has, usu ne autem facer suscipit, nam ne reque mentitum. Offendit moderatius ea sed. Ad nisl reque cum, ut omnis facer integre mei. Perfecto accusamus ut sed, mea ad purto tollit antiopam. Simul laudem atomorum est no, vis eu etiam animal. Nam eu diam utamur, per ea eros eius prodesset, ei scripta equidem duo. Docendi omnesque salutatus mel ut. Mel tota aperiri blandit ei. Duo detraxit efficiantur at, te vis amet alia. Ea mel iusto interpretaris. Homero nusquam pertinax an ius. Ne sit melius voluptua. Ius brute molestiae eu, est et aliquam debitis. Vero iudico dignissim per ex. Ex nonumes apeirian quaestio nec. Amet aeterno gubergren ne per, illum tincidunt eu cum. Nibh everti vivendo ius ne, an quas disputationi mea. Legere libris scripta vel ad, molestie menandri vis et, nam ex zril intellegam. Id possit constituto sea, solum graeco vel at.
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