IT’S ENOUGH TO DRIVE YOU TO DRINK!
Mark Forsyth’s insistence on a ‘jokeathon’ of boom-boom moments ruins an otherwise fascinating book on our love affair with booze A Short History Of Drunkenness Mark Forsyth Viking €15.95
Stephen Hawking started it, back in 1988, when he gave us A Brief History Of Time. Since then, publishers have issued Brief Histories galore. There have been Brief (or Short) Histories of, to list just a few: Globalisation, Ireland, Canada, Japan, the Future, Fantasy, renting in Ireland, Humankind, Feminism, Neo-Liberalism, Truth, Thought, Opera, the Dead, Progress, the Motorcycle, Christianity, Atheism, Slavery, Islam, London, Irish Traditional Music, Disease, Medicine, Mozambique and the Middle Ages.
It can’t be long before there’s a Brief History Of Brief Histories. Until that moment comes, why not a Short History Of Drunkenness? Mark Forsyth wrote an unexpected bestseller a few years ago, The Etymologicon, a jokey book about words, and now he has written a jokey book about drunkenness.
Forsyth’s jokes are snappy and well delivered. Unlike most comical writers, he never falls into the trap of confusing long-windedness with irony. He has a sharp sense of timing, and virtually every sentence feels that it might end with ‘Boom! Boom!’
The trouble is that A Short History Of Drunkenness is not just jokey, it’s incessantly, relentlessly, almost claustrophobically jokey. ‘The Ancient Egyptians were a funny lot,’ is the way his Ancient Egypt chapter begins. Likewise, his Bible chapter begins: ‘Noah planted a vineyard. It was the first thing he did after the flood, and to be fair he probably needed a drink.’
Reading it reminded me of listening to a raucous best man’s speech at a wedding. For a few minutes you sit back and enjoy the gags, but soon it dawns on you that the speech will consist of nothing but gags, and that they will stifle anything more interesting or heartfelt.
Where does a joke end and the truth begin? Humorous exaggeration tends to muddy the division. Jokes can also blunt compassion, or any sort of feeling. For instance, in his chapter on drunkenness in Russian history, Forsyth says of Ivan the Terrible: ‘The punishments were imaginative to say the least. Ivan had a roguish way about him of raping and killing (and occasionally releasing hungry bears on to unsuspecting monks, which does sound rather fun).’
Well, I suppose it does if you think it didn’t really happen, or if you think that anything that happened 500 years ago is so distant in time that it doesn’t really matter to us now. This is history for gigglers, or history for people who would prefer to be reading anything other than history. And this is a shame, because drunkenness is a very interesting subject, and Forsyth’s writing is charged with energy. If only he had calmed down a bit, he might have produced a fascinating work; instead, he has produced something closer to a Horrible History for grown-ups: a succession of wisecracks in search of a book.
Yet the material is all there. Take his Russian chapter, for example. He starts by wondering whether Tsar Nicholas II’s decision to outlaw the sale of vodka in 1914 led to his overthrow. Did the loss of what amounted to a quarter of the country’s revenue hinder the Russian forces in the Great War? Did enforced sobriety sharpen working-class minds to the way they were being treated? These are fascinating questions, and though Forsyth raises them, he is too fidgetily humorous to answer them, forcing any approaching seriousness to make way for the next joke.
One of the problems with humour is that it’s promiscuous, and wants to get its hands on everything. ‘The name Stalin always comes up in discussions of Russia, which is funny really as he wasn’t Russian and Stalin wasn’t his name.’ Faced with this endless gabble of ho-hos, you begin to think: ‘Oh, just get on with it!’
Without wishing to be a killjoy or a sober-
sides, I’d also argue that Forsyth’s strict regime of humour forces him to laugh off the darker aspects of alcohol. In a chapter on the 13 years of Prohibition in America, he writes of bootleg liquor: ‘This was very low-quality stuff. A lot of it was made with stolen industrial alcohol and a lot of people got very ill. But even worse than the medical consequences was the taste.’
But it didn’t just make people very ill: it killed them. The true story – which Forsyth leaves out – is that US authorities were determined to eradicate the misuse of industrial alcohol (designed for embalming, and antifreeze, and so on) so they decided to add strychnine to it. As a result, 11,700 US citizens died in 1927 alone, poisoned by their own government.
Now, either Forsyth didn’t know this fact, or he did know it and judged it too unfunny for inclusion. Throughout A Short History Of Drunkenness he fails to mention the misery of alcoholism, unless it is located so deeply in the past that he judges it permissible to transform it into comedy. Perhaps I am being too harsh on him. After all, the book is blokishly subtitled ‘How, why, where and when humankind has got merry from the Stone Age to the present’, so I suppose that grants him the right to concentrate on alcohol’s happier side.
With this aim in mind, he ropes in many strong advocates. Benjamin Franklin, for instance, thought that the existence of wine was ‘proof that God loves us, and loves to see us happy’. He also argued that the placing of the elbow showed that human beings were designed for drinking wine: ‘If the elbow had been placed nearer the hand, the part in advance would have been too short to bring the glass up to the mouth.’
The great William James, philosopher brother of the novelist Henry, was another unlikely cheerleader for alcohol, regarding it as a bulwark against the stuffy negativity of puritanism. ‘Sobriety diminishes, discriminates, and says no,’ he wrote. ‘Drunkenness expands, unites and says yes.’ A visionary, might William James have been thinking ahead a century or more to the diminishing, discriminating, negative age of the teetotal President Trump?
Forsyth’s whistle-stop tour of different cultures in history – Ancient Egypt, the Romans, the Dark Ages, the Wild West – inevitably works best when the subject is as comic as his treatment of it. Personally, I found his items about the effect of alcohol on animals very funny, though others, more animal-minded than I, might disagree. Judge for yourself: on an island off Panama, monkeys regularly feast off the fallen fruit of the astrocaryum plant, which is 4.5% proof. ‘They get boisterous and noisy, and then they get sleepy and stumbly, and then sometimes they fall out of the trees and injure themselves,’ notes Forsyth.
‘If you adjust their alcohol intake for body weight, they can get through the equivalent of two bottles of wine in 30 minutes.’ Charles Darwin also found the sight of drunken apes amusing and was intrigued by the way natives in north-east Africa caught baboons by providing them with pots of beer, which then caused them to have terrible hangovers.
‘On the following morning they were cross and dismal,’ wrote Darwin. Needless to say, he drew from this sorry spectacle evolutionary links between apes and mankind. ‘They held their aching heads with both hands and wore a most pitiable expression… An American monkey, an Ateles, after getting drunk on brandy, would never touch it again, and thus was wiser than many men. These trifling facts prove how similar the nerves of taste must be in monkeys and men.’
‘The US government put strychnine in industrial alcohol, killing 11,700 people during Prohibition’