July 20, 2001
Breakfast Martini
"Breakfast of Champions"
is a nickname for the Martini (see Nicknames). Presumably its humor
has to do with the fact that no one would drink a Martini at breakfast.
But some do, or did. In an article in World Tennis (August
1980), Bud Collins reported that Clarence Chaffee, then ranked No. 1 in
the 75-and-over division of the U.S. Tennis Association, drank a Martini
at 9:00 A.M. every day (p. 12). I am reminded of a passage in the
Laws of Plato where he refers to "the presence of Dionysus in that
sacrament and pastime of advancing years-I mean the wine cup-which he bestowed
on us for a comfortable medicine against the dryness of old age, that we
might renew our youth, and that our harsher mood be melted to softness
by forgetfulness of our heaviness, as iron is melted in the furnace" (666B;
trans. A.E. Taylor).
A second example. This
drinker differs as much from Clarence Chaffee as one adult male homo sapiens
could differ from another. It is Tennessee Williams. One of
his partners, Dotson Rader, describes his typical day:
During those three days
in New York with him [in 1969], living in a suite that, like all his dwellings,
smelled of Listerine, I quickly became used to his routine. He arose
early and made himself a martini, ordered a pot of coffee, and with a bottle
of red wine in hand toddled into the living room and sat down at his portable
typewriter, a battered Royal manual, and worked until noon. Then
we went to lunch and later took a swim. He maintained the same schedule
until he died.*
A third example
draws one aspect from each of the two preceding: occupation and state of
residence. The writer E.B. White moved to a farm in Maine in the
late 1930s. Tradition has it that he always drank a Martini before
breakfast. Documentation for this habit? Perhaps only Brendan
Gill is his book about The New Yorker, in an odd passage tossed
in, as far as I can see, without regard to context:
From White's unwritten Guide
to Good Writing: "Before I start to write, I always treat myself to
a nice dry martini. Just one, to give me the courage to get started.
After that I am on my own." **
Is there a source for White's
drinking a specifically pre-breakfast Martini? I use this medium
(my webpage) to make a query. While I am at it, here is a quotation
which I have seen attributed to E.B. White and for which I don't have the
source:
"Martinis ... have
a muting effect on the constant ringing in my ears, and as five o'clock
approaches, my thoughts turn toward the elixir of quietude. Gin stops the
bell from ringing."
Drinking before breakfast
now seems strange, but, at the beginning of the nineteenth century, in
the days of the "alcoholic Republic," it was common (see M,SU 76).***
The cocktail was a morning drink until the first decade of the twentieth
century. "Honora," someone in an advertisement by Heublein of the
1890s, drinks a cocktail on the sly before breakfast. A couple of
references in fiction: John Philip Sousa (1902) has a character drinks
a "matin Martini" (M,SU 14). G.H. Lorimer (1906 ) has a young
man drink a Martini on the way to work in the morning (M,SU 16).
Prohibition undoubtedly did much to change the timetable.
*Dotson Rader, Tennessee:
Cry of the Heart (Garden City, NY: Doubleday and Co., 1985), p. 25.
I am grateful to Rusty Greenland for this reference.
**Here at The New Yorker
(London: Michael Joseph, 1975), p. 299. Nothing about it, I think,
in the biography by Scott Elledge: E.B. White: A Biography (New
York: Norton, 1984).
***W.J. Rorabaugh, The
Alcoholic Republic: An American Tradition (New York: Oxford University
Press, 1979).
© 2001, Lowell Edmunds |