Intoxication down the ages
The pleasure of the micro-history is the chance to view the complex chaos of the past through a narrow lens. In A Short History of Drunkenness, Mark Forsyth takes the tendency to endearing extremes: The very origin of the species, he reports, comes down to our love for hooch. The first primates that swung down from the forest canopy may have been in search of fermented fruit, kickstarting evolution. Ten million years later, humans turned to agriculture “because we wanted booze” and needed to grow barley. Writing? The ancient Mesopotamians came up with it after using a symbol for kash, or beer, on trading IOUs pressed in clay. Fast-forward a few millenniums and we find that Christianity was such a hit because it used communal wine in its rites. In modern times, George Washington launched his political career by handing out free booze to voters and succeeded on the field after he doubled his men’s rations of the hard stuff. The Russian Revolution occurred because the czar banned vodka in 1914: Since the beloved spirit was a state-run business, the treasury went broke in World War I. Why stop there? Perhaps a sequel might suggest that Adolf Hitler’s teetotalism put him in a tetchy mood; a relaxing glass of schnapps might have kept him out of Poland.
But a little hyperbole is all part of the fun on this entertaining bar-hop through the past 10,000 years. The tone evokes a cheeky Oxford professor regaling us over a pint of stout in the pub, and Mr Forsyth revels in his Britishisms as much as any P G Wodehouse character.
As it happens, far from a crusty don, Mr Forsyth isn’t much over 40, according to his bio, and is best known in Britain as a witty etymologist. Another pertinent detail we learn on Page 1 is that the author is — unsurprisingly — not averse to a tipple.
This cheerful acceptance of the bottle may strike more abstemious American readers as another very “British” element. Unlike the hand-wringing that has shadowed the drinking life in the United States, the Brits still tend to have an indulgent attitude to bingeing. This, Mr Forsyth explains, makes them one of history’s “wet cultures,” in such good company as the Vikings, as opposed to the “dry cultures,” whose mildly buzzed denizens drink in “Continental” style, sipping for hour after hour, but in moderation. (Full disclosure: I was raised in Australia, a land so wet it’s practically drowning. Down Under gets its very own chapter on its liquor-addled origins as a penal colony, when rum was currency and even inspired a military coup, the Rum Rebellion. It gives one a patriotic glow!)
In the best pop-history tradition, Mr Forsyth also guides us on step-by-step tours of the legendary drinking joints of the past. We learn how to behave in the rowdy taverns of ancient Ur (“the perfect place for the craft-ale snob”) and at a Greek Symposium, where the wine poured from the krater bowl was closely regulated by the host, although with mixed success. (The guests might end up running deliriously through the streets, shouting and causing mayhem, in a komos.) We visit a medieval English alehouse and discover that our image is largely culled from romantic novels and cheesy Robin Hood films. Fans of Westworld will be distressed to learn, however, that Old West saloons had no swinging batwing doors, while the working girls usually provided nothing saucier than conversation.
The pub crawl can get a little exhausting, and the reader can get bloated on the relentless whimsy. Some will prefer to dip into chapters at random, jumping from the Old Testament Bible to Ivan the Terrible. But there is always some serious history slipped in with the joking. Almost every human society, Mr Forsyth shows, has created an elaborate web of rules around drinking and drunkenness. Even Attila the Hun had strict protocol at his feasts, with guests toasting one another in order of rank. And those taboos and rituals reveal a great deal about the broader culture.
One appealing side effect is to suggest how odd our own drinking rules might look to visitors from other eras. The Aztecs encouraged pregnant women to drink a vitamin-rich brew called pulque, and for most of history, a liquid breakfast was considered healthy. In the Middle Ages, it was downright dangerous not to drink beer all day, since the water supply was contaminated. Every possible attitude to inebriation has been tested over the ages. The only constant, perhaps, is that alcohol is a disruptive force that by its very nature defeats efforts to control it, from ancient Roman bans on the debauched Bacchic rites in the first century B.C. to the great American experiment, Prohibition.
The bottom line, Mr Forsyth concludes, is that boozy revelries are here to stay, and we might as well embrace them. As the philosopher William James (an American, no less) put it: “Sobriety diminishes, discriminates, and says no; drunkenness expands, unites, and says yes.” A SHORT HISTORY OF DRUNKENNESS How, Why, Where, and When Humankind Has Gotten Merry From the Stone Age to the Present Mark Forsyth Three Rivers Press 243 pages; $18