Give me women, wine and snuff
Until I cry out “hold, enough!”
You may do so sans objection
Till the day of resurrection;
For bless my beard they aye shall be
My beloved Trinity.
—John Keats
This must have been written when John Keats was young and a bit of a rowdy. Underneath each old poet wherever he goes is an immense reservoir of sentimentality about his life as a young poet. When I was nineteen in Greenwich Village one stew bum bar to the east of Bleecker past MacDougal offered a glass of simple red for a quarter. On a possibly morose day this single glass was capable of producing literary ecstasy. Occasionally in extremis my nifty budget was a dollar a day for food, another for wine, and the last was for my seven-dollar-a-week room without a window. This austerity did not quell my obsession at the time for Rimbaud and Keats, the latter being the most singular lyric poet in English letters. As a mediocre student I wasn’t in the least interested in critical assessments and more than fifty years later still am not. I was drawn to what made my heart sing in what my father called “this vale of woe.” This meant wine and poetry.
Wine crawls in the window of your life and never leaves. A young poet is at a loss because his calling has set him outside so many comforting boundaries the culture offers and wine easily offers itself as a liquid fuel, making him think he might belong in this hostile country. Even Virgil’s father chided him about becoming a poet, saying, “Homer died broke.” Of course any young geek can think of himself as a dark orphaned prince from another country. Whatever works to keep the ego inflated without evidentiary fuel. One invariably becomes a poet long before writing actual poems. It begins with a general reverence for life and its intensely detailed existence, for women, trees, fish, dogs, rivers, birds, and of course for wine. As the great philosopher Wittgenstein said, “The miracle is that the world exists.”
Li Po, perhaps the grandest of all Chinese poets, said,
lf the heavens were not in love with wine,
There’d be no Wine Star in the sky.
And if earth wasn’t always drinking,
There’d be nowhere called Wine Spring.
Only yesterday did the circle of wisdom close more completely with a science factoid from NPR. We are genetically related to yeast! One would have thought so. We are fermented and naturally enough we ferment. The gods slipped us this gift in prehistory, noting our hardships, our cold and hunger and our battles with wild beasts. “Oh no, another glacier is headed our way, let’s drink some wine,” one imagines them saying. Way back then in southern France in the locale of many great present vineyards there were one-ton bears running around at top speed on their hind legs, an unattractive fact.
It has been said by anthropologists that perhaps the Neanderthals lost out to our species because they drank too much. Alcohol presents obvious dangers. The guards of ancient Scandinavian kings had to be half bear and when drunk would errantly kill a king in their enthusiasm. Just recently there was a convention of seventy thousand AA members in San Antonio who must have been a disappointment to local restaurateurs whose profit margins depend on alcohol. Of course, one cannot question the legitimacy of an organization that saves so many from dying. Of my many poet friends, many have died from drink, though predominantly from hard liquor. One friend, the luminous Nebraskan poet Ted Kooser, for two years our poet laureate, told me he had to quit drinking decades ago so that he’d stop falling down stairs. This seems a valid reason indeed. I had to moderate in my mid-forties so that I wouldn’t have to quit. I had a fine cellar at the time and the thought of not drinking it was unbearable. I also didn’t want to spend the rest of my life not doing something. As the French poet Gérard de Nerval said, “One must drink or someone will drink in their place.” Obviously, though, one must give up a beautiful woman if you are abusing her.
Ikkyū, the renowned Zen master of the fifteenth century, was a bit unorthodox in saying that the Buddha can also be discovered in wine and in brothels. He wrote:
Dead winter but our poetry glows:
Drunk after downing cup after cup.
Years since I enjoyed such sweet love play.
The moon disappears, dawn breaks, yet we hardly notice.
For a number of years in my late teens and early twenties I worked on a horticulture farm and part of my duties involved pruning grapevines. Pruning time is usually cold, wet, and muddy but in a vineyard you become intimate with the mystery of wine. The vines and soil look dead and half frozen and you doubt the future of everything, including yourself. But then spring comes and the vines leaf out and you are lucky enough to have a girlfriend who likes to drive with you into the countryside with a blanket and a bottle of seventy-cent Gallo red and make love in a pasture or grain field. The wine, however cheap and it’s what you can afford to carry in your 1947 Dodge, allows you to ignore the mosquitoes.
Wine produces memory. If I drink a Brouilly in Montana, the wine inevitably reproduces my sitting at Le Select on Montparnasse in Paris dozens of times drinking the same wine trying to recover from a day of interviews on a Paris book tour. When I drink a bottle of Domaine Tempier Bandol in our casita near the Mexican border, I invariably revisit my many meals cooked by Lulu Peyraud in Bandol in southern France. My memory helps me eat them again. If I drink a Bouzeron on a warm summer evening, I’m able to revisit some of the best trout fishing of my life on a lovely river when we would finish our floating on the last mile of river or so by opening a bottle of Bouzeron. We are delightfully trapped by our memories. I can’t drink a bottle of Châteauneuf-du-Pape Vieux Télégraphe without revisiting a hotel bistro in Lucerne, Switzerland, where I ate a large bowl of a peppery Basque baby goat stew. A sip and a bite. A bite and sip. Goose bumps come with the divine conjunction of food and wine.
An initial glass of whiskey might be helpful after a cold October day of bird hunting but I’ve tended to stick to wine in my hunting and fishing. Also, the sudden jolts offered by hard liquor lessen the possibility of making a good dinner, while the gradual all-suffocating warmth of wine tends to increase one’s cooking attention.
More than thirty years ago I wrote a “Drinking Song” that begins with:
I want to die in the saddle. An enemy of civilization
I want to walk around in the woods, fish and drink.
I’m presenting this not necessarily as an article of faith but close to it, like Keats’s Trinity of wine, women, and snuff. Sad to say, Keats died at age twenty-eight of tuberculosis, a disease that cheated the world of many potential glories. I close with a glorious note on Claret from his letters.
I never drink now above three glasses of wine—and never any spirits and water. Though by the bye, the other day Woodhouse took me to his coffee house—and ordered a Bottle of Claret—now I like Claret, whenever I can have Claret I must drink it,—’t is the only palate affair that I am at all sensual in. Would it not be a good speck [speculation] to send you some vine roots—could it be done? I’ll enquire—If you could make some wine like Claret to drink on summer evenings in an arbour! For really ’t is so fine—it fills one’s mouth with a gushing freshness—then goes down cool and feverless—then you do not feel it quarrelling with your liver—no, it is rather a Peacemaker, and lies as quiet as it did in the grape; then it is as fragrant as the Queen Bee, and the more ethereal Part of it mounts into the brain, not assaulting the cerebral apartments like a bully in a bad-house looking for his trull and hurrying from door to door bouncing against the wainstcoat [wainscot], but rather walks like Aladdin about his own enchanted palace so gently that you do not feel his step. Other wines of a heavy and spirituous nature transform a Man to a Silenus: this makes him a Hermes—and gives a Woman the soul and immortality of Ariadne, for whom Bacchus always kept a good cellar of claret—and even of that he could never persuade her to take above two cups. I said this same claret is the only palate-passion I have—I forgot game—I must plead guilty to the breast of a Partridge, the back of a hare, the backbone of a grouse, the wing and side of a Pheasant and a Woodcock passim. Talking of game (I wish I could make it), the Lady whom I met at Hastings and of whom I said something in my last I think has lately made me many presents of game, and enabled me to make as many. She made me take home a Pheasant the other day, which I gave to Mrs. Dilke; on which tomorrow Rice, Reynolds and the Wentworthians will dine next door.
—John Keats, from Letter to George and
Georgiana Keats, February 18, 1819