Modus Bibendi

"Will Someone Take me to a Pub?" So ran the refrain of one of G. K. Chesterton's happiest ballades. I have often quoted it to myself when the Madame Secretary of a lecture club has displayed for my admiration the cultural and civic ornaments of the community whose elite I am to address that afternoon. The library, the swimming pool, the oratorium, the cathedral, the park are potent proofs, no doubt, of a high standard of industry and social consciousness, but I should get a clearer insight into her fellow citizens if she would take me to a saloon and I could observe how they relaxed.

A nation reveals itself in its drinking habits. The various airlines -- American, Asian, European -- vie with one another in their advertisements to explain what is that "little something," that treasured secret that makes them different from and superior to all other lines. I have flown by most of them, and they are all the same; identical in service and routine, with the quality of the meals and comfort determined by the class you travel -- first, tourist or economy. In one respect only have I found any difference among them: the kinds of drinks they serve and the way in which they serve them. In no other way, if I were taken onto an aircraft blindfolded, could I guess under which flag I flew.

A trim, brisk hostess is at your elbow with an order list. "Would you like anything to drink before your lunch? Beer, gin and tonic, sherry?" Britain is taking care of you. A small tumbler is put upon your table, a trolley is wheeled down the aisle. "Cinzano, Dubonnet, St. Raphael?" Where else but in France could you be? A highly salted herring canapé bites your palate, a small cold glass smelling of aniseed is set before you. Ah, Scandinavia! There is the rattle of ice on aluminum. "Martini or manhattan, sir?" This is the U.S.A. The invariable "delicious, complimentary meal" will follow, but you have your map reference.

We are the products of our soil and climates -- mentally, emotionally and socially; our natures are determined by the degree of latitude on which we live; so are our drinking habits, which are the expressions of those natures. There are basic differences among the Latins who are wine producers, the English and Germans who are beer producers, and the northerners -- the Scandinavians, the Scots, the North Americans -- who hit back against the cold with spirits. Wine drinkers as a general rule drink during meals; whereas the advocates of beer and spirits drink before and after meals. The sidewalk cafés of France and Italy are expressive of a wine drinker's way of life, just as the Third Avenue saloon fulfills the demands of the man who escapes shivering from Arctic cold, throws quickly upon his stomach a short sharp shot of fire, then as warmth revives him looks round for company among other orphans of the storm.

Between the beer drinkers of Germany and England there is a difference imposed by climate. The German summer is very hot; its winter is very cold and its rooms are appropriately heated. England, the beneficiary as she is the victim of the Gulf Stream, is neither frozen in winter nor baked in summer. Central heat is for the most part a superfluity, and tropical-weight clothes are rarely needed. Clammy is the definitive epithet, and English draft beer is an admirable antidote to that. Indeed, only in England could it be drunk at all. It is flat and tepid and American GIs were very properly warned against it when they crossed the ocean. But in England it is rarely hot enough for one to need cold beer. On the few occasions when it is, tepid beer can be exceedingly unpleasant, particularly during austere periods of rationing when the brew is denied its fair share of malt. I remember returning to England from America in the summer of 1948. It happened to be a torrid day. There was (continued on page 134) Modus Bibendi (continued from page 117) a cricket match at Lord's and I went straight to it. I was thirsty. I ordered a half pint of bitter: its lukewarm bouquet was redolent of chaff and dust: only the dignity of my surroundings prevented me from spitting it upon the floor. But on a winter's day, seated before a fire, in a taproom, there is little better than a tankard of draft beer that has been cooled but not chilled in a publican's cellar; nor is there anything much better on a bland August evening, under an apple tree, in a garden. Anyhow, it suits England.

The difference between the English and Germans is illustrated not only by the taste of their different beers but by the atmospheres within their inns. The Germans are intensely musical: they also like being organized: they relish athletic rallies and massed parades. The English are competitive individualists. Where the Germans sit round a table, emptying steins and singing songs, the English enjoy quiet games like darts, shove ha'-penny and dominoes. The atmosphere of a German beer garden is faithfully reproduced in the East 80s in New York, and an extremely cosy atmosphere it is, too. In January 1939, feeling certain that war was imminent. I returned to Europe from New York by a German ship, the Hansa, long since sunk. I wanted to remind myself before the curtain fell of how many pleasant things there were in Germany. One evening there was a Bavarian party, with the crew dressed in the national costume. It was very gay; it was hard to believe that within seven months friendship between a German and a Briton would have become impossible.

But it must not be forgotten that Germany is even more famous for its wines than for its beers; we make a mistake in thinking of Germany exclusively in terms of its beer gardens. There is the Weinstube, too, those dark little rooms, with a grape sign hanging over the door, where in the twilight of a paneled peace you sip cool, clean wine out of long-stemmed glasses. For close now on a century, the world has been distraught by the contrast between what we love and what we hate in Germany; would it be too fanciful to suggest that all we cherish most in Germany, her poetry, her music, her philosophy, spring from the Weinstube and that the noise, the regimentation, the ostentation spring from the beer garden, dearly though, at its best, we love it? The beer garden and the Weinstube -- is there a conflict there? Perhaps that is stretching an argument too far. But is any country more divided within itself than Germany, and does any country present two such different ways of drinking?

In France there is no equivalent for the Weinstube; the French take wine with their meals and they take their meals at home. It is a general custom for a man to go home to lunch. There was no restaurant in Paris before 1765; and restaurants did not begin to flourish until the revolution made the supply of servants scanty. The sidewalk café, a result of the introduction of coffee into France in the middle of the 17th Century, was essentially a place where you drank coffee. Until then, France had only known the auberge, the traveler's inn. Coffee appealed to the French temperament, but Louis was distrustful of the café; he feared it as a center of sedition, just as Charles II across the Channel, in spite of Catherine of Braganza's addiction to tea, regarded the coffee-house with suspicion.

Both the café and the coffeehouse survived their monarchs' strictures and their separate fates are indicative of the difference between France and England. The sidewalk café has retained its pristine character. The French go to cafés before and after meals; to drink coffee and eat a pastry in the afternoon, to sip an aperitif before dinner, to take a cordial with their coffee after dinner. The café became an extension of the home, or rather, an alternative to the home. The Frenchman's home is a moated fortress; it is easier for a stranger to gain admittance into a Turkish harem. Without the café, life would be very dreary for the Frenchman; he must have somewhere to sit and watch life drift by. Socially, in the 19th Century it developed into an ancillary of the salon, each café having its own clientele, each café becoming the center of its own political and esthetic creeds. George Moore, arriving in Paris in the 1880s, found his university, his education -- emotional and artistic -- in the Place Pigalle, in the Nouvelle Athènes; the young American today finds his equivalent in Montparnasse, in La Rotonde and Les Deux Magots.

The fate of the coffeehouse in England was very different. The Englishman's home may be his castle, but its doors stand open. While the English inn has always attempted to be a home from home, the London coffeehouses became clubs, White's and Brooks' and Boodle's, where far less coffee was drunk than port and brandy, where cards were played for extravagantly high stakes -- and did not Max Beerbohm write in his essay A Club in Ruins, "It had been more than a home; it had been a refuge against many homes; it had been a club"?

The English pub, on the other hand, has retained its pristine character as a home from home. The history of the English pub is indeed the history of England. It was not until the dissolution of the monasteries that inns spread over England -- although it was from an inn that Chaucer's pilgrims set off for Canterbury. Before Henry VIII's quarrel with the Pope, country inns were not needed, travelers put up in monasteries. But under Elizabeth, road travelers needed safety and comfort for the night. Monarchy was concerned that the inn should retain that essential status, and not become a shelter for the spread of dangerous, heretical ideas. Charles II enjoined in his Tippling Act that the inn should be "a place for the receit, relief, lodging of wayfaring people; it is not meant for the entertaining and harboring of lewd and idle people to spend and consume their time and money in lewd and idle manner." But the inn survived, fulfilling an essential need of the English character.

The urban pub, in particular the London pub, has become a microcosm of English life, which logically combines democracy with class distinctions. We, Britons, are all subjects and equal under the Crown, but we recognize differences between ourselves, differences that are exemplified by the English pub. In a Public House there are three bars -- in order of status, public, private and saloon -- catering to men and women of different income groups and different social standing. The prices and amenities are different. You enter by separate doors, but the wooden divisions between the bars do not reach the ceiling; the same roof is over all and the publican and his staff move without hindrance round the inner circle from one bar to the next.

The architectural heyday of the pub came in the middle of the 19th Century. The Victorian gin palace, with its efflorescence of applied ornament, its elaborate brass rails with their triple gas burners, the decorated plate glass softening the glare, the embossed wallpaper, the Corinthian capitals, the rich mahogany was for the slum dwellers of the day what the movie palaces were to be to a later generation. The "home from home" had become grander than anybody's home. In a higher degree than ever before the heavy swells of the day could, under the incrusted ceiling, preserve their anonymity -- the small half-opened windows, pivoting on vertical axes, the mahogany framework of the saloon bar protecting the perpendicular drinker from impertinent scrutiny.

The old English inn was essentially an alehouse; and that it has remained, in spite of the changes that have been forced upon English habits by the caprices of their rulers' foreign policies. During the 14th and 15th centuries England owned Aquitaine, and the noble wines of Bordeaux flowed onto English tables. Then there was a change toward the sweet heavy fortified wines of Spain and of Madeira, which proved an effective antidote to the chill, damp climate. The age of port began when William of Orange's hatred of Louis XIV of France encouraged him to place exorbitant taxes on French wines and spirits and lower the tariff on wines from Portugal. But beer has always been the national drink in England.

It was beer for the most part that the American GI drank during his exile across the water, and in spite of its unexpected taste most ex-GIs, when they return with their families to England, make straight for the nearest village inn. More than one of them on his return from the wars, when asked about the English, replied, "There can't be anything too wrong with a country that has an institution like the village pub." It is the answer that most Englishmen would soonest hear; a Frenchman would equally like to hear it made about the sidewalk café and a German about the Weinstube and the beer garden. We are content to stand or fall by the congeniality of our drinking habits.

The foreign countries that I have loitered in are as vivid in my memory for their drinking habits as for their landscape, architecture, climate, ways of dress. I recall Martinique as much for its rum punches as for its green and towering mountains, over one of which there always seems to be a rainbow curving, and for the long flowing dresses of its womenfolk, the scarf over the shoulder, the handkerchief knotted into the hair in points. Rum is the staple drink of the West Indies; every punch is made on the classic formula "one of sour, two of sweet, three of strong and four of weak," but the basic taste of each island's rum is different. My personal belief in the superiority of Martinique rum is founded on the fact that its punches are prepared more simply, require less sophistication, than those of any other island except Barbados. In Fort-de-France, you sit at a rickety wooden table in the shade, looking out across the savanna to the white statue of Josephine, with its sentinel royal palms; you order a punch, specifying that you want old not white rum; a waitress will set before you a bottle of rum, a couple of limes, a glass of syrup, a red-brown earthenware pitcher that has cooled, through evaporation, the water it contains. You mix your punch yourself, by the classic formula; the lime, the syrup, the rum, the water. Two punches sipped slowly send you to lunch in an anapaestic mood. Whenever I travel in a French ship, I order a rum punch at noon. The flavor of that rich, sweet, powerful liquid carries me back to Martinique.

Japan is the country of formal courtesies. On my first day in Tokyo, I asked the director of the British Council against the committal of which solecisms, which breaches of etiquette, I should be most on my guard. He replied, after deliberation, "Never be impatient, never be angry. Impatience and bad temper are things which the Japanese do not understand." The drinking habits of the Japanese confirm this excellent advice. To most tourists, possibly, the traditional tea ceremony serves as a symbol of the country's way of life. It is certainly elaborate and picturesque, but it is lengthy, and I found the thick green fluid that I was eventually invited to sip most unpalatable. I felt about the tea ceremony in Japan much as I felt about the kava ceremony in Fiji.

That, too, is an experience no visitor should miss. I doubt if any male, other than a Fijian, could be stimulated physically by a Fijian belle. Her shoulders are broad, her ankles thick, her features heavy and her black hair sticks up on end as though it had been trained by a topiarist. Yet when she is arrayed for the kava ceremony, in bright clothes with her face painted, she does not have the bizarre attraction of a Mardi Gras grotesque. And the ceremony itself is not unimpressive, with the chief dipping something that looks like hemp into a bowl of water and wringing it out into another bowl which he proffers with formal courtesy to his guests. But the brew itself has a dirty, gritty taste; moreover, it is completely unalcoholic. The Fijians themselves find it as invigorating as the English housewife does her morning cup of tea, but I suspect that the lack of warmth I felt for the people of Fiji was the result of my inability to appreciate their kava. Indeed, had Japan had nothing more invigorating than its tea ceremony to offer, I am very sure that I should not have returned there within 13 months. Mercifully it had a great deal more to offer: its sake and its geishas.

The Japanese are experts at manufacturing articles that resemble their American and European originals. They produce whiskey and champagne that look as though they had come from the Highlands and from Epernay, and which if used in moderation have no deleterious effects. But the hot rice wine, sake, is the true vin du pays. The small white-and-blue decanters in which it is presented and the small shallow white-and-blue cups out of which it is sipped are in accordance with the customs of its people. Sake is very light. It is not a distilled spirit. You can drink a great deal with impunity. A glass holds very little. This allows the ritual of innumerable refillings to be performed without trepidation. I attended my first geisha party in Osaka. I was warned before it began that on no account must I fill my own glass myself; though I might refill those of my hosts and fellow guests. I was also warned that before I drank I must raise my cup to whomsoever had filled it for me. For several hours a number of elegant creatures attended to my needs. The final memories of a geisha party are, or should be, vague, but I know that I felt well next morning, and I still carry in my luggage the small white-and-blue sake cup to remind me of the happy hours I spent in Tokyo, Kyoto and Osaka.

There is a kinship between the drinking habits of the Japanese and Danes, though no two drinks could be less alike than aquavit and sake. My memories of Copenhagen are very warm. I spent the whole of a recent winter there. Hotels are empty then, but though January and February are not tourist months, for Copenhageners that is "the season," when the ballet and opera are in residence and the court is at Amalienborg. There are no friendlier people than the Danes. In London, New York and Nice, I manage to half lose my temper three or four times a week; someone or something contrives to irritate me, but after I had been a month in Denmark I realized that I had not lost my temper once. It was not that I had become gentler-natured, but that the lighthearted tempo of Danish life precluded irritation.

In some ways the Danes are a formal people. There are certain courtesies that you must not neglect. You should never arrive as a guest without flowers in your hand or without having sent flowers earlier in the day. And when you next meet your host and hostess, you must not forget to thank them for their hospitality almost before you have said anything else, charming and gracious rules that it is well to absorb young till they become second nature. Equally gracious are their drinking customs. Beer and schnapps are the country's produce. Schnapps is taken at the beginning of the meal with a highly flavored hors d'oeuvre, raw herring preferably. It is very strong, so strong that it must be drunk ice cold. Two small glasses will suffice. You must never drink schnapps unless you are toasting someone or being toasted, but you must never toast your hostess; injudicious or ill-intentioned guests might force her to drink more than she might consider prudent. The toasting in schnapps is a half stage in gallantry; you raise the glass; your eyes meet a lady's; you smile and you say "Skoal!"; you sip; then, as you lower your glass, your eyes again meet hers in a smile. Every newcomer to Copenhagen is given a lesson in the ritual of drinking schnapps. For me the heart of Denmark is in that ritual.

If one is out of sympathy with the drinking habits of a country, one is unlikely to feel in tune with it. Fiji was an unlucky place for me not only because of the kava ceremony. Hospitably though I was cherished during my three weeks in Suva, persistently though I was taken round the clubs and round the bars, by the end of the third day I was beginning to wonder why I had met so few women; in club after club I had found males, young and elderly and old, standing coatless at a bar, pouring cold beer down their gullets. I inquired if there was a dearth of marriageable females on the island. No, no, I was assured; most of the men, even the youngest ones, were married. Times had changed in the islands. Malaria had been stamped out; phrases like the white man's exile and the white man's grave applied no longer. Air conditioning and air transport had solved a hundred problems. Men married young and brought their wives out with them.

"Where are those wives?" I asked.

"At home; cooking, looking after the children."

"Don't they ever come here?"

"Not often."

I was puzzled for a little, then I understood. Fiji is administered by the British Colonial office in Whitehall, but its white population is mainly from Australia and New Zealand, and the custom of "the hour's swill" had been imported. It is a custom unique to Australia. Bars open early there, at 10:30. They remain open through the afternoon, but they shut at six. Males, therefore, when their offices close at five, go straight to their favorite bar and, standing shoulder to shoulder, gulp cold beer that has a nine-percent alcoholic content, hastening the pace and volume of consumption as six o'clock approaches. They then stagger out into the cool evening air. In New South Wales the custom has recently been modified and bars reopen at 7:15, so that a wife has been given a sporting chance of getting her claws into her husband's shoulder.

No one is certain whether this regulation was imposed out of deference to the puritans, the publicans or the politicians. The puritans for obvious reasons; the publicans because of the cost of labor, the reluctance to run a second shift; the politicians because they wanted to get the manual laborer to work on time and fit next morning. The hour's swill is, for the uninitiated, an intimidating experience. It is something that he should not miss; but its transportation, even in a modified form, even as a corollary, did not heighten my enjoyment of Fiji. I should have preferred more females at the bars and fewer males.

I spent two thirds of World War II in the Middle East -- in Egypt, in Lebanon, in far Baghdad, mostly among Moslems, to whom the use of alcohol is forbidden. But in Lebanon, Moslems and Christians alike drink arrack. Arrack is a generic label. The Lebanese variety is distilled from grapes; it is white with a tinge of blue; it clouds when you pour water on it. It tastes of aniseed -- it was in Beirut that I acquired a taste for Pernod. An insidious drink, it was forbidden to troops during the war, and Arab street vendors made high profits out of the sale of spiked oranges, into which arrack had been injected. If you do not eat while you are drinking arrack, you become quickly drunk; that is where its danger lies. It must be handled with circumspection. Moreover, it leaves a coating of powder round the stomach. You may wake in the morning after an arrack evening, thinking yourself recovered but feeling thirsty. You gulp a tumblerful of water and you are drunk again. The water has mixed disastrously with the powder, on an empty stomach.

Arrack demands leisurely drinking. There lies its charm. In cafés it is served with mezé, four or five dishes of hors d'oeuvres, olives, cheese, ham, radishes. At an arrack evening with a Lebanese family, you will spend three or four hours consuming four or five glasses of arrack, with fresh dishes of hot appetizers, sausages, cheeses, small birds, being presented every half hour or so. More than once, at an arrack evening, I have been too interested in the conversation to eat enough. At Western cocktail parties, out of regard for my weight, I am careful to ration my consumption of pre-prandial canapés. In Beirut, chattering away, lifting my glass periodically, I have become suddenly and alarmingly aware of the ceiling revolving to meet the floor. But a couple of quick mouthfuls of food have restored my equilibrium.

The tempo of arrack sipping is in admirable accord with the leisurely tempo of the Levant. Lebanon has been for many years a French sphere of influence; the vine has been tended carefully and many sound pleasant wines have been produced there, but for me arrack is the key to the country. I spent a congenial winter and early spring there in 1942, and it was a happy day for me in 1950 when I landed early on a May morning at the Damascus airport and drove across the Bekáa valley to Beirut. I was surprised at first and disconcerted by the number of new buildings that I saw around me; would I find it very changed, too changed? Then in an unredeemed slum area, acrid upon my nostrils, came the stale smell of last night's arrack. My heart exulted: I was home again.

From Lebanon in 1942 I crossed the desert to Baghdad. Engaged there in counterespionage, one of my chief problems was my ignorance of the Arab way of life. I needed to understand the kind of man whose activities I was watching. Speaking no Arabic, I resorted to a familiar practice. Wearing civilian clothes, I would sit in an Arab café, watching, over the top of my newspaper, the hooded Moslems, who would sit motionless for hours, upright in their hard rectangular wooden settles, sipping at their coffee; alone or silent for the greater part, but when they talked, elaborating what they had to say with graceful, evocative, deliberate gestures. Dignified, impassive, unhurried, they appeared to be utterly detached from the radio that blared above their heads and from the traffic of the street outside; but the movements of their hands suggested mastery, power, firmness when they did resort to action. The men who were names to me upon a file became less strange, less foreign when I was back in my office reading an agent's report on them.

Whenever I go to a new country, one of my first requests to the friend or guide who is showing me the sights has been, "Please take me to the equivalent of an English pub." How I wish that in the days when I was a publisher I had commissioned an anthropologist to compile a study of the world's drinking habits. What a valuable book it would have been; what a pleasant assignment, too, for him. How he would have enjoyed his research. Now and again you run into a fight in a bar, but for the most part human beings are at their best there. Did not a poet say --

Whoe'er has travell'd life's dull round, Where'er his stages may have been, May sigh to think he still has found His warmest welcome at an inn.

But is that a cause for sighing? And need the round be so dull, if there is an inn to round it off?