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