Meditations on the Martini – Frank Moorhouse

The esoteric discussions and stories and folklore around the martini cocktail are a pathway.

They are a pathway into conversation with a stranger in a bar – the martini sponsors fellowship, and fellowship and storytelling are the only solace from existential terror.

I once asked my friend Voltz whether the martini can ever be drunk ironically.

He replied that the martini was quarantined from irony because there had to be one part of our lives which was exempt from irony. He’d chosen the martini.

“Sure, there’re martini jokes,” he said, “but why waste time talking about it ironically? The rest of the world can be talked about ironically. That’s enough. And another thing, if you tried to talk about the martini ironically, it would enfold the irony.”

I have given my meditations on the martini – at the Sydney Writers’ Festival, at the Darwin Wordstorm Festival, at M-on-the-Bund in Shanghai, and two at the Hong Kong International Literary Festival.

I have been to quite a few literary festivals around the world but I have never been to one where three of the four horsemen of the apocalypse were also present—war, pestilence, and death—they were there at the Hong Kong Festival.

On the day the festival began there was news of a ‘killer flu’ – called at first atypical pneumonia and later, SARS, which had hit hundreds of people in Hong Kong and about which WHO had issued a world-wide alert.

Having just checked in, I headed for the Sonata bar, a high rise bar in Hong Kong overlooking the bay and the glittering, teeming life of Hong Kong. With some sense of calamity—it was the first time I had been caught in a plague—I took with me the newspapers full of news of this mystery illness sweeping the island and perhaps sweeping the world.

I ordered myself a martini, discussed the making of it with the barman, and went to a table.

Nearby, I saw a man, sitting, head in his hands in the Sonata bar with a martini in front of him. I guessed that he might be also a guest at the festival and, because of the martini, I asked him. He was.
We joined up and as I sat down, he said, “I see you have stuffed olives in the martini. Don’t you find that the capsicum is a little too, how should I say, colourful? That red spot in the glass?”

‘Oh God,’ I thought, ‘it’s Voltz’s brother.’ And then I thought, ‘It’s the red blood spot of the plague.’ I told him and we laughed. 

We exchanged names and it wasn’t Voltz’s brother. It was Jon Cannon and he rang through to his wife, the novelist Lui Hong—Startling Moon—and she and their three-year-old, Ann, came up to the bar and she also ordered a martini.

Together in the high-rise bar, looking out over Hong Kong bay, over the whole world, and drinking our martinis, we joked with bravado about the plague sweeping the island, recalling Thomas Mann’s Death in Venice where the authorities try to keep the news of the plague a secret so as not to spoil the tourist season – ‘There is no plague in Venice.’

Lui and Jon had to make a decision whether to stay or go and decided that the flight out on the aircraft might present more of a risk.

Given my private, low state of mind, it didn’t seem to matter whether I stayed with the plague or left. My old mate, the remarkable Richard Hall, historian, former private secretary to Gough Whitlam when he was Prime Minister, was dying in Royal Prince Alfred hospital and I was back in therapy.

Next day, there were people in the streets wearing masks.

The news now was that hundreds were infected and dying.

Ten writers had cancelled.

I was on the program to give my lecture titled The Martini Dialogues and on the night of my first appearance, the American invasion of Iraq began and people at the festival talked of a new world war – ‘the clash of civilisations’.

I said to the audience that it could be seen as extraordinarily decadent to be talking about the right way to make a martini in the midst of a plague surrounded by, who knew how many, dead and dying and in the midst of a war of unknown magnitude and implication. And myself in therapy again. And Richard Hall dying.

I did, however, know that the bon vivant, Richard Hall, although not himself a martini drinker, would approve of my giving the talk.

The internationally famous Dr Meghan Morris, a professor in cultural studies at Lingnan University, rose from the audience and said that she considered my willingness to talk about the martini and the presence of a full house to hear it in the famous M-on-the-Fringe restaurant was, ‘an affirmation of the good life in the face of the human condition.’ The audience applauded her.

And the audience were jolly despite the collapsing world outside. When I was in China in the 1980s as a cultural ambassador, the themes of the visit were Brotherhood and Peace and International Friendship which my Chinese hosts toasted in many speeches with many glasses of rice wine. As remarkable as Chinese cuisine is, it is limited in its combination of alcohol with food – no wines, no martinis (I once said this to a Chinese communist apparatchik and it sent her into a rage). But, now, at least, I was able to help correct that. Here I was, back in China, teaching them how to mix a martini. Maybe I was a tipping point in the history of China and would tip them into decadence. 

Together, then, that night the audience, the four horsemen of the apocalypse and I pondered the mysteries of the martini.

A week later, after the last performance of my martini lecture in Shanghai, the Consul-General, Sam Gerovich, took me aside and said they had received news that Richard Hall had died that day but had kept it for me until after my lecture.

I thanked him and then, alone, I took my martini out on the balcony of the restaurant and looked down on the river and the moving lights of its interminable river traffic and remembered Richard and all the drinking, dining, and arguments we had shared since we were seventeen.

I recalled two things Richard taught me. When we were young cadet journalists we were talking about sex. He was a Catholic and I an atheistic socialist. I do not know what sexual experience he’d had and although I’d had very little it was, well, already varied. I remember him saying, “Sex is a tangible expression of the intangible.” I liked that. I was to learn that it is sometimes the tangible expression of the tangible and that that’s fine, too.

Later in our lives after he’d gone into politics, we were talking about government funding of the arts. I was interested in how we could convince people and politicians that the arts were important and worth funding. We looked at arguments about being the ‘memory of the nation’ and that avant-garde art taught people how to think creatively, that it was important for a culture to ‘have its own stories’. 

At the end of the discussion, he said, “I’m afraid a belief in the value of the arts is a matter of faith,” and then he laughed, “Tell that to Caucus. Tell that to the electorate.”

Richard did tell them. And they did believe him.

Richard did not drink spirits at any time in his life. He believed that by sticking to beer and wine he would not become an alcoholic. He died of medical complications aggravated and almost certainly caused by alcohol but his mind was in great shape through to the end.

My last meeting with him was in hospital just before I left for Hong Kong and Shanghai. He wanted to piss. I said that I would get a nurse but he mumbled, “You do it.”  I found the urine bottle and pulled down the bedding, pulled down his pyjamas, and put his penis into the bottle. I said, “After this, I will get you a copy of Playboy and we can do the other thing.”

He laughed, in a sick, constricted way, “Don’t make me laugh; it hurts.”

Richard was a very traditional male. He and I had never shaken hands, put our arms around each other’s shoulder, hugged, let alone cheek-kissed affectionately even in that new male way we were supposed to do in the days of liberation back in the 1970s.

The holding of his penis and putting it in the urine bottle, is, I think, the only physical contact I ever had with him during nearly fifty years of knowing him as a close friend.

I went back inside to the milling crowd, and had another martini.
Excerpt from Martini: a Memoir by Frank Moorhouse (Random House, Australia, 2005)