Drink and be sober

Front matter

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Book / S 5

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Preface

Upon no subject — neither upon love nor upon war — have there been so many books written as upon drink. Indeed one may say there is no significant writer, from the historian Herodotus to the wanton poet Verlaine, who has not touched upon this dark problem.

And the reason is plain: it lies at the root of success in life, even as it lies at the root of happiness in love; it colors all literature because its stain is upon every phase of life. The philosopher has seen in it the higher problem of man's free will. Is Stoic self-control to be enforced by law? And if man is to be ironed and bar-locked into a sober way of life, what of that imperial will of his? He is of slight value as a citizen and as a national unit (the philosopher declares) who has not will-power enough to keep out of the gutter.

The political economists have written thousands of books — which you will never read — on the drink question. Not even the doctors

vii viii PREFACE

have differed so widely as they differ. They are uncommonly fond of statistics; and on both sides of the question they have attained a demoniac inaccuracy in the statement of facts. Temperance orators of the political sort have made it an issue. And the battle is ceaselessly waged in literature. Popular novelists write their confessions; they tell you how they have solved (victoriously) the problem of drink. These are brave, personal books. I commend them. I praise the writers. But over against Jack London you find no less a man than Gilbert K. Chesterton, battling, in the name of liberty, for the wild delights and festivals of drink — voluptas, gaudia. (His is the old English tradition — the tradition of Smollett and Dickens, which in its time was generous and gay; in their ample pages drink and love and laughter were triune; not even Mr. Chesterton can hold them together in the haggard Bohemia of modern fiction.)

You cannot, I say, get away from the drink problem. It meets you at every turn. It goes abroad at night with the criminal. It is in the madhouse and the jail. There is hardly a home in the broad land into which it has

PREFACE i*

not made its way. In some shape or other this monstrous problem confronts you at every crossroads of life.

When war broke over the world statesmen and leaders grappled with it, as though it were the one immediate evil. And it was the immediate evil. Until drink was chained and locked away men could not even kill each other decently and with efficient certainty.

(While the young and fiery patriot brandished his sword and shouted: " Let me lead Britons! " the old, old general, out of a serious wisdom, said: "When the canteen is fifty leagues in our rear, yes!"

And he had his way.)

If the game of death can be played only in terms of sobriety it is not unthinkable that the game of life can best be won in the same way.

But how are you going to establish the laws of the game? How are you going to do it in a civil world unruled by the abrupt tyranny of military law? How are you going to do it in a way that shall preserve the highest reverence for the dignity of social life and for human liberty?

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It is to answer these questions that I have written this little book.

I think there is one thing the state can do— and it is not a vision or a phantasy; it is a proved achievement— which will solve the drink problem. Not little by little, with shifts and compromises; but bluntly, compellingly and completely as Great Britain solved within her borders the problem of man's enslavement by man.

As you shall see.

But it is not for that impersonal thing, the state, I have written this book. I have written it for men and women. It is not the state, fed fat on revenues, that suffers from drink. Why should it be expected to act? It never has acted on its own volition. It has to be forced and bullied into the way of right-doing, for it is always (even in a democracy) far behind the public intelligence and the public will. That is why the drink problem is a personal problem — for the man and the woman.

Everyone must face it. I know quite well you are not a drunkard. You are not a dipsomaniac; your brain is not swept with drink-

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storms. Your brother is not drinking with Pan. Your daughter is not laughing with the alcoholic girls at the country club. And yet the problem is none the less a personal one — if for no other reason than that it is a problem of state economy and the state is just what you make it. It is organized in precisely the way you want it organized — you and the others who vote.

And so it is your problem.

In New York City there is a melancholy cohort that spends one million dollars a day for drink. I admit that you are not of them — but that army of slackers, wasters and criminals exists and continues to exist by your sovereign permission. I have no desire to come at you with a sentimental appeal. This is not a matter of sentiment. There is no use in changing a man's feelings (you will admit) if he goes on being wrong-headed. I have tried to put the case in a plain way — without exaggeration, without rhetoric, with sympathetic understanding of the drinker and even the purveyor of drink. You are a man of the world, I take it, and you want to see the thing broadly. You are keenly aware of the two xii PREFACE

sides of the question; you know there must be a choice — and all choice implies loss. Exactly what that loss is you have a right to know. I think in the end you will agree with' me that a remedy is needed — and must be applied by the state; but you have a right to know the facts and all the facts. You will find them, I think, honestly stated in this book. All of them — what alcohol is, why men drink it, why some drinkers are drunkards, what predisposition of mind or body encourages them, the pathology of vice and the psychology of the drunkard — strange and interesting things are these. You shall have to go with me into scenes of darkness and violence; you shall look in the face of crime — and hear mad voices shouting; always is it that you may know what thing it is — the Drink. Hear, too, what the scientist has to say, the physician, the economist and the student (less one-sided) of life; but, above all, see for yourself just what this confused problem is. For, I think, that when you see it — you, the men and women who direct the intelligence of the state and shape its will — then only it will be solved. You are not convinced?

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Before you pronounce judgment I trust you will read this brief in the case.

And then — what is of more importance — is the immutable fact that always, in the end, a moral crusade wins. And this is a moral crusade.

Contents

I. THE BLOOM ON THE GRAPE . i

I think it should be made clear in the beginning that there is only one " drink-problem " — that of drinking alcohol. The drink habit varies with different grades of society; it changes with climate; but the drink-problem neither varies nor changes. Just as the beer-drinker takes his beer for the sake of the alcohol in it, so the wine-drinker takes his wine, the brandy-drinker his brandy. He who drinks alcoholic beverages drinks for the sake of the alcohol — no matter what excuse he offers. So the first question is: What is alcohol?

II. WHAT ALCOHOL DOES TO THE " MAN 16

Chapter I The Bloom On The Grape

No one has any business to go wrong; always his intelligence should be in advance of his act.

And the one man in whom ignorance is inexcusable is he who plays with the wild and shifty forces of alcoholic drink. That man should be wise above others; his intelligence should be ever on outpost duty; and his first business is to know what alcohol is. For one thing is certain: when men drink — whether they drink beer or wine or brandy — they drink alcohol. The sole reason for the existence of these beverages is that they provide him who drinks them with a greater or less quantity of alcohol. They may be disguised with fanciful perfumes and flavors, hidden in a harlequinade of colors, but the reason for their existence is always the same — it is alcohol.

An immense amount of hypocrisy has grown up about the custom and habit of drinking alcoholic beverages. It has been given a free and lordly air, as though there were something exceptionally big-hearted and unselfish about it. This lie has come, roaring arrogantly, down through the ages. It has got itself told in prose and verse; in fact, it reels through most of the second-rate literature of every country.

That is bad enough; indeed, it is responsible for more than its fair share of the evils that come (unquestionably) from the abuse of alcohol — and I shall have a word to say, in due time and place, of the physiological basis of this false emotionalism and fugitive altruism; but there is a subtler hypocrisy which makes its appeal to man's vanity.

" It's a rare good vintage," says the wine-drinker, holding up his glass.

I have heard the phrase hundreds of times — parroted in Parisian cafes, stated with a pompous air of discrimination at ornate dinnertables, muttered by wine-drunkards in the curtained darkness of Italian wine-shops. Now two things are to be said: the first is that a discriminating wine-palate is as rare as white peacocks are in Arizona; and the second is that such a man — a connoisseur in vintages — has gained his knowledge by wide drinking. It, no more than a knowledge of trigonometry, comes by nature. And when he tells you he drinks his wine because it comes from Capri — and quotes his Horace; or when he prates of the sunny hills of Burgundy or the white slopes of Provence, he is honest neither with himself nor with you. He may indeed like this flavor or that bouquet, but he drinks his Burgundy — not because its bouquet calls to him, but because there is fifteen per cent, of alcohol in the wine. He drinks for the sake of the alcohol, though it may be quite true that the flavor — the haunting immaterial poetry of the wine — makes him prefer that pleasant way of getting the alcohol into him. Why not? In other respects, too, he is a nice-mannered man. He had rather dine delicately at a well-appointed table than gorge on boiled food in a cellar. He has only disesteem for the coarse man who gulps down fiery rum. But he — just as the coarse fellow drinks the rum — drinks his Burgundy for the alcohol that is in it. That is the plain truth; the rest is mere hypocrisy — often unconscious hypocrisy, for the lie is so ancient that men inherit it, like the gout. Of course, the well-bred man prefers a radiant and delicate claret — a petulant wine of Champagne — to the dreary, soddening gin the " navvy " swills; but his object is the same — to get the alcohol into his system. (If you were a kissing man you had rather kiss a pretty, perfumed lady in silks and laces, than the plowman's blowsy girl; but it would be kissing all the same.)

Thus, I think, it should be made clear in the beginning that there is only one " drink problem " — that of drinking alcohol. It varies with different grades of society; it changes with climate; but the problem neither varies nor changes. The dreary a cider boy " of the Connecticut hills is brother to the flushed girl — in silk stockings — shouting for " high-balls " on the porch of the country club; and the Burgundy man is sib to the man of " mixed ale "; one and all are drinkers of alcohol.

And what is alcohol?

II It is a simple thing, alcohol

The chemist will describe it for you in a pretty arrangement of letters and arabic figures, from which you will learn that it is composed of carbon, oxygen and hydrogen. The kind you drink — or do not drink — is ethylic alcohol; and the chemist will tell you it is produced by the fermentation of aqueous sugar-solutions and subsequent distillations.

All of which is important but uninteresting.

It is only when the chemist tells you what causes the fermentation that you listen to him willingly. Then you meet — with profound amazement— the mycoderma cerevisice.

You may think of it, not as something fearsome, but as a species of fungus, made up of minute organisms, living much as you and I do in the ordinary way of life — taking nourishment, absorbing oxygen and giving off carbon, reproducing their kind and, in due season, dying; their biography at first glance would seem to be that of ordinary men. And yet you shall see that their strange little lives have all the inevitable horror of Greek tragedy.

They are found, these mycodermata, in great quantities — a veritable dust of microscopic life — on the skins of ripe grapes. They are mysterious dwellers in the bloom of the grape (whereof poets have sung) and they are the mysterious soul of wine. They are the obscure alcoholic gods.

Have you seen the brown Italian girls — or the great-limbed women of Switzerland — tread the grapes? At all events you have seen a wine-press. Then you understand how the resolute little mycodermata get into the juice of the grape. What they do there is the beginning — the first act — in the great human tragedy of drink.

The chemist (of whom you have heard) says they take from the grape-sugar a certain part of its oxygen. This changes the chemical relations of the carbon, oxygen and hydrogen of which the sugar is composed, and, by a rearrangement of the elements, alcohol is formed. You can watch the process; it is gradual. Little by little the oxygen is consumed, until the entire quantity of sugar disappears; what is left is alcohol. With the alcohol you find water, coloring matter, flavoring substances and

(tragically) the corpses of the little tnycodermata, who, having devoured all the sugar, die of starvation and sink into alcoholic graves. (It is a melancholy destiny, but not without parallel: In Persepolis they worshiped fire and fire destroyed the city.)

These little inhabitants of the bloom of the grape are their own victims. They are the makers of that mysterious and perplexing poison — alcohol — and they are its first martyrs. In their obscure and tragic lives you may see, if you will, a symbol; for it is as if, in inventing alcohol, they had invented suicide.

They build a house, but the house they build is death, and it falls and buries them in its ruins.

This, then, is alcohol, the chemist avers; and out of the fermented mass (wherein the suicidal mycodermata found drunken graves) the pure alcohol is distilled.

For the Scot who gets his alcohol from barley, the American who gets his from maize or the German who takes his from a potato, the process is the same; each depends upon the collaboration of these indefatigable little organisms. When the grain is malted and made ready for fermentation most of the starch is turned into grape-sugar — making thus a saccharine solution akin to grape-juice — which serves as food for the mycodermata. (They are usually introduced in yeast ferments.)

Alcohol is a liquid, ethyl hydrate — C2H5OH, says the chemist; in its pure state it is limpid, colorless and the odor is suave.

Ill

There are two things I wish to make perfectly clear: what man does to alcohol, and what alcohol does to man. They are epic things. Pure alcohol is, as I have said, limpid, colorless and suave of odor. When man has had his way with it, its limpidity is troubled, and its colors and odors are those of a girl of the night. I am not referring here to the base falsifications and adulterations of modern spirits, wines and beers; there is a chapter for that in this book. What I would note here — for convenient reference — is the form in which alcohol is offered and the amount of alcohol the common beverages contain. They vary greatly, of course.

Brandy, which Dr. Johnson called a drink for strong men — and he was the son of a drunken generation — is produced by distilling wine and contains (when first made) about fifty per cent, of alcohol. It is your real 'alf an' 'alf. In its first stage it is a colorless liquid. It is only when it is put up in casks that it steals an amber hue from the wood. Gradually its alcoholic strength diminishes — a fair French brandy contains about forty per cent, of alcohol when it comes to market. The alcoholic strength of whisky, whether distilled from barley, maize, rye or other grains, is a trifle less; rum, a product of distilled molasses and the refuse of the cane-sugar factories, is not quite so strong as whisky; and gin, which is a distillation of unmalted grain, rectified and flavored with juniper berries, contains about thirty per cent, of alcohol. These are the commoner spirits— at least, in the white man's world.

In natural wines, derived from the fermented juice of the grape, the quantity of alcohol varies from eight to twenty-five per cent. Beer is a beverage made (theoretically) from the fermented infusions of malt, flavored io DRINK AND BE SOBER

with hops. The ales and beers of commerce vary greatly in strength; in general, they may be said to contain from three to nine per cent, of alcohol.

These familiar facts had to get themselves told; one cannot discuss a thing without first defining it — that were to tug at a rope of sand. And the various forms of alcoholic drink — each having its own pleasure and pain and its own peculiar drunkenness — are quite as important as the mysterious poison they have in common; and each will demand separate consideration. But for the moment — at this point — my purpose is broader. I want to show what alcohol does to man; what it does to any man and every man, to you as to another. After all, the subject is important only because it is personal — because the problem of drink can be stated in terms of your personal relation to it.

IV

You have asked yourself — if not you are asking yourself now: " Is alcohol a good thing for me?"

THE BLOOM ON THE GRAPE n

Possibly you have made many experiments — or one or two. Then you have found — what every man from the honest scientist to the thoughtful barman finds — that alcohol is not a good thing for you; in certain ascertained quantities being, in fact, a bad thing.

So the problem comes to this: " How much can I take without undue harm?"

The question cannot be put in a fairer way — in a way more scientific and less emotional. It shows that you have a practical mind. You open, as it were, a profit and loss account with alcohol. You do not call it — as I have heard it called — a pandemic plague. You do not lie awake nights cursing the mycoderma. You go about it in a practical way. On one side of the account you set down what you lose in moral, mental and physical ways; on the other side — with scrupulous fairness — the gains.

For there are gains.

Let us get that matter clear once for all.

There are gains, or humanity had not for so many ages drunk deep — you had not been able to look back to the twilight of history and seen (everywhere) mankind at its cups.

Something, you know, these wine-stained generations gained, or they had never paid the bitter price.

What are the most apparent gains?

You set them down as social cheer, as the exhilaration that lifts dull mortality to a flashing level, as forgetfulness — that drowsy forgetfulness of the actualities of life, which is perhaps the rarest thing a man can purchase. You set them all down; for you know that not every drinker seeks only physical and material drunkenness. No; across a world of pitiful attempts at wine-born merriment, you see the poet seeking the blue flower of the au-dela, the dreamer hunting his dream. (I am not embellishing with rhetoric the drunkard's vice or taking away its ethical significance; for it is a sad and certain fact that those who sought the dream in wine found the nightmare — as James Thomson found it in the " City of Dreadful Night," and Poe in the " Valley of Many-colored Grass"; but to minds of this order even the visionary chase seems to be a gain.)

Set it all down in the account. What men like best about drinking in company, which is the admired way to drink ("who drinks Hollands alone and in a churchyard") is unquestionably the social freedom — the letting down of bars. I do not deny this gain. Why should I? The bashful man, exhilarated by alcohol, loses his nervousness, the reticent man grows frank and confidential — it is only at such a moment you learn his grandfather was hanged; in fact, in such company life becomes free and unbuttoned. The historic example is that of Theodore Hook. When he went sober into society he sat silent, shamefaced and glum. His second bottle set him singing, rhyming, playing the mimic — an admirable wit. Distinctly there was a social gain there, for it made a droll, public entertainer out of a bashful unsocial man. Here the gain, as you observe, is not so much to the man who does the drinking as it is to his companions, who have the opportunity of seeing him flash and caper and throw off his buttoned-up reserve of manner. Of course, a question still to be considered is the price the drinker pays for it. For the time being set it down: the drinking man gains a certain social cheer — lawless in a way, but indubitably fascinating to the kind of man who cannot " let himself go " when he is sober. In a deeper " mist of intoxication," to use Thoreau's phrase, that man " forgets his troubles n — not a negligible advantage.

In what you have set down you have summed up the chief gains to be got by drinking alcohol, in this coaxing form or that.

It makes a man bolder than he is by nature. I have always loved that story of the mouse who came upon a little pool of whisky spilled upon the floor; he drank, and once again; then he cocked up his head and said: "Where's that cat that was chasing me yesterday? "

I accept this quality of boldness to be got from drink, but I would reluctantly admit it as a social gain. Burke, the criminal, who gave his name to a peculiarly atrocious kind of crime, said he got his " courage " from drink; indeed, he had to have a dram of brandy before murdering a child. It is an undesirable kind of courage. —

(I know whereof I speak. I never followed Burke's way of life, but once upon a time in my green youth I was a reporter on a New York newspaper. One day I was told to interview . He was never a pleasant, forthcoming, courteous man to the interviewer, and this day he was singularly soreheaded and gruff, owing to a smashing political defeat.

" Go ask him," said my editor, " what he

thinks of Senator ," — it being the

hand of Senator that had knifed him; and

my editor — -who was Mr. Foster Coates — added thoughtfully: " You had best put a pint of champagne in you first." I was innocent and I took his advice; also the pint. Unfortunately the plan didn't work. When I came

face to face with Mr. I discovered

— to my dismay — that he had taken two pints!)

Gayety and social freedom and cheer, perhaps forgetfulness of unpleasant things, and courage of a sort — these, I think, are the best alcohol has to offer. They are all tolerably agreeable results. That is why you have set them down in your list of alcoholic gains. And now r the question is: How does alcohol do these things to a man? Whence come the glow of good feeling, the companionable frankness, the unbuttoned freedom of mood?

First of all—

Chapter II What Alcohol Does To The Man I

And first of all I am not writing of the drunkard.

I have in mind the practical man you were when you drew up a profit and loss account with alcohol; the kind of man who says: "I can take an ounce of alcohol a day — in so many glasses of beer or brandies-and-soda," or, being a big, stark, healthy man, " my two ounces a day"; in other words, the man out of whose mouth comes the familiar quotation: " Thank Heaven, I can drink and be sober! "

I am interested in that man.

The teetotal scientists, I know, draw horrid pictures of his stomach and his hobnailed liver. I refuse to get excited over his stomach and his liver. What interests me is his brain, for the brain — as near as we can come to it — is the man. It is the organ (and the only one)

through which I can get in touch with that strange thing, your Ego — or you with mine. There it is I get vaguely at the thing that makes you Ethelbert de Courcy (if you are Ethelbert de Courcy) and not Vance Thompson. It is in the brain that alcohol produces the effects whereof there has been something written — the social gayety and freedom, the memory blinded to the unpleasant facts of life, the courage and all the rest of it. So my interest (and yours, I trust) is in what alcohol does to this essential part of man.

Alcohol is intoxicating; that is why men drink it — and for no other reason; and he who would get at the root of intoxication — its pleasure and pain, its peril and penalty — must study the physiological effects of alcohol on the brain. There he may read its story and its mystery. It is the beginning of the entire problem and — no matter how far afield one fares into matters civic and economic— its end.

Science, not yet omniscient, is content to look upon the brain as being made up of millions of cells, each cell having two nerve-fibers — one bringing to it nerve motion and the other conducting energy from it. Certain of these cells, having found they had similar work to do, have formed a kind of communistic society. They group themselves and work together. Endlessly doing the same thing, they become identified with one kind of work. So you have the speech-group, for instance, which attends to the mechanism of talking. These groups are not all of the same age. They were developed little by little as the varying needs arose. The modern physiologist thinks of them as layer upon layer; this is the theory of Functional Levels. They have been divided into three great levels or planes.

It is easy to understand if you bear in mind that the oldest bodily habits — which have now become automatic — belong to the lower plane. Digestion, growth, breathing, blood-circulation and the like are old established functions. The nerve-groups that control them are buried deep in the nervous system — so deep the will cannot reach them. There, too, lie the groups that feed the muscles. For example: —

I dip my pen in the ink. The muscles, as I have said, and their nutrition, have their nerve-groups on the lowest plane. The movement — the nicely adjusted muscular action with which I dip the pen — has its groups on the middle plane. But the conception of the movement, the idea of pen and ink and the written page before me, have their home on the highest level.

It is clear, is it not?

The higher functions are on the higher level, the highest on the highest. This upper plane was the most recently acquired in evolution. Therefore, it is the least stable. It is still within the sphere of the will. You may think of it, if you please, as the physical basis of character; and it is not difficult to see how delicately complex — how easily thrown out of order — are these nervous processes which are concerned in right conduct. The older groups of nerve-cells which attend to " the automatic mechanism of the vital functions " are buried deep in the lower level and are not easily perturbed. Those on the highest plane, more recently acquired, still swayed by the will, delicate and complex, are always in peril.