Bernard DeVoto (1897–1955)

Shaking your head over “martinis” which are mere sugary cocktails in martini glasses? Or worse yet, *gasping* in horror over belly shots? Looking forward to that first civilized sip of whiskey as you put a harried work day to an end? I highly recommend the intoxicating writing of Bernard Devoto’s “The Hours: A Cocktail Manifesto.” Originally published in 1948, this slim volume, now in reprint (with an excellent forward by Daniel Handler), is an absolute delight.

A Pulitzer Prize show more and National Book Award winner, Mark Twain expert, writer for many years for Harper’s Magazine, and a curmudgeon to the core, Devoto has crafted an elegant paean to “the violet hour,” “an hour of diminishing, of slowing down, of quieting” to sip a gin martini – one of only two cocktails he countenances (the other a slug of whiskey.) Discussing his favorites, Devoto is truly rhapsodic – “art’s sunburst of imagined delight becoming real” – and offers suggestions for the place (“a martini is a city dweller, a metropolitan”) as well as what to hum as one mixes the first batch (“neither barbershop nor jazz, between the choir and the glee club.”)

Equally quotable is his skewering of his dislikes: “Nothing can be done with people who put olives in martinis, presumably because in some desolate childhood hour someone refused them a pickle;” “Hot drinks are for people who have had skiing accidents, though it is an open question whether anyone who skis is worth giving liquor to or his life worth saving;” or on the topic of Daiquiris –“Mainly it is drunk as all sweet liquors are, in a regressive fantasy, a sad hope of regaining childhood’s joy at the soda fountain.”

Some question the extent to which this is satire. Bernard Devoto’s wife, Avis, was a good friend of Julia Child. I am in the midst of reading the women’s correspondence in "As always, Julia," Joan Reardon, editor. Upon first meeting, Julia won Bernard’s admiration after drinking down two or three of his martinis without turning a hair. On the other hand, Avis notes that Bernard is quite the oenophile, being very good at the parlor game of identifying the vineyard and the year. I believe The Hour was written in good fun. You’ll have as much fun or more when you read it. show less

Sharp wit and unassailable truths about the civilized practice of observing the cocktail hour with a perfect martini, or a "slug of whiskey". No other so-called cocktail can be considered, in his opinion, and boyhowdy, does he tell you why. Lots of fun, and a bit of nostalgia for this household where the once-beloved cocktail hour has, of health-related necessity, become a sweet memory.

QUOTE: "...nothing can be done with people who put olives in martinis, presumably because in some desolate show more childhood hour someone refused them a dill pickle..." show less

The cover of my paperback copy of Letters from the Earth boasts "new uncensored writings by Mark Twain" with a little more significance than such labels usually hold. The contents of this volume were the very first to be edited for posthumous publication by the Twain literary estate, but Twain's daughter Clara Clemens' misgivings denied publication to the book until 1962, after the editor's own death! By then, several of the individual texts included had seen individual publication in show more periodicals and a book of Twain scholarship.

Although she gave as her motive the concern that the book's contents would misrepresent Twain's actual ideas as she understood them, a reader will readily infer that Clara's fear was chiefly about offending against conventional piety. Nearly half of the book consists of satires grounded in biblical mythology: the title piece (largely in the voice of the angel Satan), the "Papers of the Adam Family" thus organized and titled by editor Bernard DeVoto, and the brief "Letter to the Earth." The first of these, and apparently the most finished in Twain's own manuscript, is clearly modeled on Montesquieu's Persian Letters, in which a traveler from a distant land reports back to his own people on the bewildering and exotic features of the culture shared by the reader and the actual author of the text.

"Letters from the Earth" at one point refers to sex as "the Supreme Art. They practiced it diligently and were filled with contentment. The Deity ordered them to practice it. They obeyed, this time. But it was just as well it was not forbidden, for they would have practiced it anyhow, if a thousand Deities had forbidden it" (25). Satan supplies a sober and accurate appraisal of the Christian revelation: "... as the meek and gentle Savior he was a thousand billion times crueler than ever he was in the Old Testament--oh, incomparably more atrocious than ever he was at the very worst in those old days!" (46)

The "Papers of the Adam Family" treat antediluvian society with attention to the premise that the long lifespans of characters in Genesis--even assuming that they waited a few extra decades before parenthood--made for a society many living generations deep, and thus strangely dense and hierarchical. Several of these "translations from the Adamic" are in the voice of Eve, "the Most Illustrious, Most Powerful, Most Gracious, Most Reverend, her Grandeur, the Acting Head of the Human Race" (91-2). There is also a focus on the early tenth century as clocked from Eden, consisting mostly of thinly-veiled satire on Twain's own time, which certainly had catastrophe imminent.

A number of short pieces include a whimsical cat-focused story (where Twain in passing vaunts his own "conscience torpid through virtuous inaction," 113), a merciless criticism of the prose style of James Fenimore Cooper, a reasonably funny parody of etiquette instructions, some travelogue from England, and a few other essays.

The book concludes with its longest and strangest item. "The Great Dark" (title furnished by the editor) is a horror story that hinges on its protagonist's efforts and failures to assign reality to his actual circumstances after being subjected to a dream-world of simulation. Latter-day readers might see this piece as a precocious Matrix sort of story. (Who needs wetware and full-body VR when you have a Victorian microscope?) But of course the central conundrum goes back to Chuang Tzu and probably to the dawn of reflective thought. show less

America's greatest satirist takes on the not so Holy Bible and thumps it. Imagine the hymn to constipation sung on the Ark. Brilliant, laugh out loud sarcasm unleashed. Completely understandable that he left instructions for this not to be published until after his passing. The only ding is on this particular edition - no lettering on the spine and no page numbers But it was the only edition I could find readily available (I had lost a better edition years ago) and is still required reading. show more Highly recommended. show less