The Cask of Amontillado by Edgar Allen Poe

A nice creepy story by Poe involving a large amount of fortified wine used as a lure to bump someone off, The Cask of Amontillado is narrated by Montresor, an Italian nobleman, who wreaks a terrible revenge on another noble, Fortunato, whom he believes has insulted him.

Montresor has gone out to the local carnival in search of his quarry. He needs to bait the line and remembers that Fortunato, a braggart and a bullshit artist, likes to think of himself as a master wine-buff:

He had a weak point—this Fortunato—although in other regards he was a man to be respected and even feared. He prided himself on his connoisseurship in wine. Few Italians have the true virtuoso spirit. For the most part their enthusiasm is adopted to suit the time and opportunity—to practise imposture upon the British and Austrian millionaires. In painting and gemmary, Fortunato, like his countrymen, was a quack—but in the matter of old wines he was sincere. In this respect I did not differ from him materially: I was skilful in the Italian vintages myself, and bought largely whenever I could.

Fortunato himself is discovered stumbling around the carnival in jester’s motley:

He accosted me with excessive warmth, for he had been drinking much. The man wore motley. He had on a tight-fitting parti-striped dress, and his head was surmounted by the conical cap and bells. I was so pleased to see him, that I thought I should never have done wringing his hand.
I said to him—"My dear Fortunato, you are luckily met. How remarkably well you are looking to-day! But I have received a pipe of what passes for Amontillado, and I have my doubts."
"How?" said he. "Amontillado? A pipe? Impossible! And in the middle of the carnival!"
"I have my doubts," I replied; "and I was silly enough to pay the full Amontillado price without consulting you in the matter. You were not to be found, and I was fearful of losing a bargain."
"Amontillado!"
"I have my doubts."
"Amontillado!"
"And I must satisfy them."
"Amontillado!"
"As you are engaged, I am on my way to Luchesi. If any one has a critical turn, it is he. He will tell me—"
"Luchesi cannot tell Amontillado from Sherry."

The bait taken, Montresor takes Fortunato back to his palazzo and then down to the cellars beneath the house. It’s cold and damp and the walls are white with nitre so he warns Fortunato, who has a terrible cough already, that it might prove injurious to his health:

"Enough," he said; "the cough is a mere nothing; it will not kill me. I shall not die of a cough."
"True—true," I replied; "and, indeed, I had no intention of alarming you unnecessarily—but you should use all proper caution. A draught of this Medoc will defend us from the damps."
Here I knocked off the neck of a bottle which I drew from a long row of its fellows that lay upon the mould.
"Drink," I said, presenting him the wine.

They knock out a couple of glasses, before setting off further into the vaults. Montresor tries one more time to time to dissuade his adversary from continuing. The unwitting victim scoffs, downs a glass of De Grâve in one go, then pretends he’s a Mason:

"The nitre!" I said: "see, it increases. It hangs like moss upon the vaults. We are below the river's bed. The drops of moisture trickle among the bones. Come, we will go back ere it is too late. Your cough—"
"It is nothing," he said; "let us go on. But first, another draught of the Medoc."
I broke and reached him a flagon of De Grâve. He emptied it at a breath. His eyes flashed with a fierce light. He laughed and threw the bottle upwards with a gesticulation I did not understand.

Montresor responds by producing his trowel from under his cloak. Unperturbed, Fortunato carries on towards the prize, the nonexistent cask of sherry. He is guided into a small niche at the back of the cellar.

It was in vain that Fortunato, uplifting his dull torch, endeavored to pry into the depths of the recess. Its termination the feeble light did not enable us to see.
"Proceed," I said; "herein is the Amontillado. As for Luchesi—"
"He is an ignoramus," interrupted my friend, as he stepped unsteadily forward, while I followed immediately at his heels. In an instant he had reached the extremity of the niche, and finding his progress arrested by the rock, stood stupidly bewildered. A moment more and I had fettered him to the granite.

The vengeful Montresor then proceeds to wall up the niche, leaving the unfortunate Fortunato immured...

Drunkard's Tales by Jaroslav Hašek

The more I read Hašek’s Drunkard’s Tales from Old Prague the more I’m convinced that he was pissed when he wrote them (he is recorded as being drunk while writing parts of The Good Soldier Švejk, and it shows in several places...) as it’s getting harder and harder to find stories for the blog that actually make sense from start to finish. That said, his boozy celebration of Czechs living in Vienna during the final years of the Hapsburg Empire is one of the more coherent offerings.

He begins with a quick introduction to Czech society in the imperial capital:

Viennese Czechs divide themselves into two classes, the richer and the poorer one. The poorer ones have their workers’ societies and the richer classes have their Beseda clubs. All of the Czech social life takes place in these Beseda clubs. News keeps coming to us in the Czech lands, how the Czechs in Vienna are oppressed, how 300,000 of the Czech people languish under deprivation, grief, and unhappiness in the cursed bastion over the Danube. Certainly, it would have been a sad for the Czechs if they did not have their Beseda clubs. What would inspire the Czech soul, what could support it in its struggle with the Teutons – the Czech beer in the Czech Beseda clubs! Mainly two beers fortify the gallant Vienna Czechs, two brands that gained an indisputable merit in the Czech cause in Vienna – Třeboň beer and Budějovice beer. These two beers are drunk not as an intoxicating drink, but as a greeting from the old country.

Of course, someone has to pick up the tab, and the Czechs back in Prague hold parade days to fund their compatriots’ exploits away from home. Various floats and carts, sponsored by local shops and companies, are rolled down the street, the procession ending with a tribute to the culture sustaining nectar served in the Beseda clubs:

Then follows an allegorical lorry from the Vinohrady brewery. Eight men in medieval costume sit around a barrel, waving beer mugs and shouting, “Try Vinohrady beer!” They are pretending to be drunk, which they really are. The carriage stops suddenly and the lorry driver straps the best actor to the carriage, so that he would not fall off. This allegorical float is the most popular and is greeted with the most enthusiasm.

After all this, the hat is passed around and everyone gives generously. Thousands of crowns are sent to Vienna to educate and assist their unfortunate Czech brethren. Needless to say, they’re rather popular when they turn up in person:

When a Czech tourist arrives from Prague at such a happy moment to one of the Czech Beseda clubs, it is no wonder that in the atmosphere, warmed up by 10,000 crowns, he is greeted with great affection.

And so he should be!

Not After Midnight by Daphne du Maurier

I’m plundering Daphne du Maurier’s short stories again, this time an account of an ill-fated trip to Crete.

The narrator, Timothy Grey, a teacher at a minor public school and amateur painter, beings his story with the confession that he has been brought down by an affliction that he picked up on his hols. What could it be? A dose of the clap, a skin condition?

I am a schoolmaster by profession. Or was. I handed in my resignation to the Head before the end of the summer term in order to forestall the inevitable dismissal. The reason I gave was true enough – ill-health, caused by a wretched bug picked up on holiday in Crete, which might necessitate a stay in hospital of several weeks, various injections, etc. I did not specify the nature of the bug. He knew, though, and so did the rest of the staff. And the boys. My complaint is universal, and has been so through the ages, an excuse for jest and hilarious laughter from earliest times, until one of us oversteps the mark and becomes a menace to society. Then we are given the boot. The passer-by averts his gaze, and we are left to crawl out of the ditch alone, or stay there and die.

Not giving too much away, he goes on to relate how he had gone to Crete to paint for a week. The hotel was quiet and not badly appointed, although to the unease of the staff, he insists on moving to a chalet that later transpires to have been previously occupied by a man who had drowned in the sea nearby only two weeks before. Grey is unperturbed by this and carries on with his painting. In fact, the only disruption to his peace and quiet is the presence of a loud and abusive American called Stoll and his silent wife. The man drinks like a fish, and, according to the hotel bar-man, he’s even making his own hooch in their chalet:

“The girls say he brews his own beer. He lights the fire in the chimney, and has a pot standing, filled with rotting grain, like some sort of pig swill! Oh, yes, he drinks it right enough. Imagine the state of his liver, after what he consumes at dinner and afterwards here in the bar!”

Following them into the nearby town one night, Grey is confronted by the Stoll, who is keen to extol the virtues of his home-made supply: 

“...The beer they sell you here is all piss anyway, and the wine is poison.” He looked over his shoulder to the group at the café and with a conspiratorial wink dragged me down to the wall beside the pool. “I told you all those bastards are Turks, and so they are,” he said, “Wine-drinking, coffee-drinking Turks. They haven’t brewed the right stuff here for over five thousand years. They knew how to do it then.” I remembered what the bar-tender had told me about the pig-swill in his chalet. “Is that so?” I enquired. He winked again, and then his slit eyes widened, and I noticed that they were naturally bulbous and protuberant, discoloured muddy brown with the whites red-flecked. “Know something?” he whispered hoarsely. “The scholars have got it all wrong. It was beer the Cretans drank here in the mountains, brewed from spruce and ivy, long before wine. Wine was discovered centuries later by the God-damn Greeks.” He steadied himself, one hand on the wall, the other on my arm. Then he leant forward and was sick into the pool.

Grey’s curiosity gets the better of him and he follows them again, this time to a deserted beach. It soon becomes apparent that the Stolls, keen divers and swimmers, have discovered an ancient shipwreck that has not yet been found by anyone else. In the past three years worth of holidays to the island they have stripped it bare. Thinking that Grey might be onto their game, Stoll’s wife leaves Grey an ancient rhyton (an ornate classical drinking vessel) decorated with Silenos, drunken tutor to the God Dionysus.

The next day they are gone. Grey is about to depart himself, but the Stolls have left him one last present in the care of the bar-keep:

He bent down and brought out a small screw-topped bottle filled with what appeared to be bitter lemon. “Left here last evening with Mr Stoll’s compliments,” he said. “He waited for you in the bar until nearly midnight, but you never came. So I promised to hand it over when you did.” I looked at it suspiciously. “What is it?” I asked. The bar-tender smiled. “Some of his chalet home-brew,” he said. “It’s quite harmless, he gave me a bottle for myself and my wife. She says it’s nothing but lemonade. The real smelling stuff must have been thrown away. Try it.” He had poured some into my mineral water before I could stop him. Hesitant, wary, I dipped my finger into the glass and tasted it. It was like the barley-water my mother used to make when I was a child. And equally tasteless. And yet... it left a sort of aftermath on the palate and the tongue. Not as sweet as honey nor as sharp as grapes, but pleasant, like the smell of raisins under the sun, curiously blended with ears of ripening corn.

With a few hours to kill before he has to drive back to the port, he decides to check on the deserted cove once again. Realising he’s dying of thirst, he takes another swallow of the home-brew, this time drinking from the rhyton. Taking the boat back, he looks into the water and spots the wreck that the Stolls have looted. Pinned under the anchor is the husband who has definitely had his last drink. Terrified, Grey throws the rhtyon into the waves:

It did not sink immediately but remained bobbing on the surface, then slowly filled with that green translucent sea, pale as the barley liquid laced with spruce and ivy. Not innocuous but evil, stifling conscience, dulling intellect, the hell-brew of the smiling god Dionysus, which turned his followers into drunken sots, would claim another victim before long. The eyes in the swollen face stared up at me, and they were not only those of Silenos the satyr tutor, and of the drowned Stoll, but my own as well, as I should see them soon reflected in a mirror. They seemed to hold all knowledge in their depths, and all despair.

So Grey’s curse is Dipsomania, brought upon him by the poisoned beer... Or has the shock of seeing Stoll’s murdered body under the water tipped him into madness and alcohol dependency? As in the previous story, Don’t Look Now, du Marier leaves the supernatural elements of the tale delightfully ambiguous...

Don’t Look Now by Daphne du Maurier

Death in Venice again. Daphne du Maurier’s haunting novella was famously turned into a film with Donald Sutherland and Julie Christy but the source material is well worth checking out as well.

British couple Laura and John are on holiday in Venice, a hastily arranged break that takes place after the death of their daughter. Laura is withdrawn and consumed by grief, John unable to reach her. At lunch at the end of their stay, they notice two old ladies watching them, one of whom claims she is psychic and that she can see their little girl’s spirit sitting between them...

John reckons it’s all bunkum, but the change in his wife is instantaneous and her misery lifts. Unwilling to break the spell, John goes along with her, up to a point. He also decides that they ought to go out and enjoy themselves. He suggests a restaurant and pooh-poohs the idea of eating in the hotel:

“God, no!” he exclaimed. “With all those rather dreary couples at the other tables? I’m ravenous. I’m also gay. I want to get rather sloshed.”

They find a restaurant in a part of Venice they don’t know, reached by a tortuous route. When they get to their table, the first thing he does is order a drink:

“Two very large camparis, with soda,” John said. “Then we’ll study the menu.”

Over Laura’s shoulder he sees the two old ladies again. Convinced that they’re being followed, he tries to distract her, but she sees them and goes for another long confab about the astral plane. For John, the evening is ruined:

“All right,” thought John savagely, “Then I will get sloshed,” and he proceeded to down his campari and soda and order another, while he pointed out something quite unintelligible on the menu as his own choice, but remembered scampi for Laura. “And a bottle of Soave,” he added, “With ice.” The evening was ruined anyway, what was to have been an intimate, happy celebration would now be heavy-laden with spiritualistic visions, poor little dead Christine sharing the table with them, which was so damned stupid when in earthly life she would have been tucked up hours ago in bed. The bitter taste of the campari suited his mood of sullen self-pity, and all the while he watched the group at the table in the opposite corner, Laura apparently listening while the more active sister held forth and the blind one sat silent, her formidable sightless eyes turned in his direction... He began on his second campari and soda. The two drinks, taken on an empty stomach, had an instant effect. Vision became blurred. And still Laura went on sitting at the other table, putting in a question now and again, while the active sister talked. The waiter appeared with the scampi, and a companion beside him to server John’s own order, which was totally unrecognisable, heaped with a livid sauce. “The signora does not come?” enquired the first waiter, and John shook his head grimly, pointing an unsteady finger across the room. “Tell the signora,” he said carefully, “Her scampi will get cold.”

Cold scampi is the least of their problems. The psychic sisters warn John that they must leave Venice as his life is in danger. Advice that he fatally chooses to ignore...

London Tales by David Edward

Another wander into the library and another title picked on a whim, this time London Tales; a collection of short stories and little vignettes from the city, which are thought provoking and troubling at the same time.


In the story Adult Education, a conversation takes place between a young woman, Sabrina, and her employer, Lindsay. Lindsay, in her thirties and a heavy drinker, is just about to go away and Sabrina is finishing her last day at work, although the nature of that work is never made clear:

The living room door opens and Lindsay walks in with her handbag sandwiched under her arm and dragging two wheeled suitcases behind her. Sabrina watches in silence as she leaves the cases in the middle of the room and steps over to the wine rack in the corner... Lindsay examines the label on a bottle of wine. It’s the third she’s opened in a couple of hours.

Lindsay appears to have acquired the drinker’s habit of putting the world to rights, and she decides to tell Sabrina how things tick:

“Thirty-five years old. Three ex-husbands in six years; childless; a tendency to drink more that any sensible person should – take more risks than any sensible person should. But one thing I do know – one thing I’ve found...” “OK, here it comes.” “...is that, while constancy to causes may be a good thing, sometimes – just sometimes – constancy to individuals, especially young guys, seldom leads further than the bottom of a JD bottle. That’s all I’m going to say.”

Divorced and currently single, Lindsay needles Sabrina about her relationship with her boyfriend Cyrus. Lindsay it seems, is hedging her bets on the bottle:

Lindsay gives up on the selection in the wine rack and heads into the kitchen. She returns with a bottle of vodka in one hand and a full glass in the other. She slumps on to the sofa and, with her free hand, she opens up her handbag.

She is now determined that Sabrina should join her on a last night out together before she leaves. While Sabrina tells her that she won’t go, Lindsay bets that if she were alone with Cyrus, she could seduce him in seconds:

“You started drinking too early. I’d better go.” Sabrina rises to her feet. “Yep. Best to run perhaps.” Sabrina checks her phone and lets it fall into her leather tote bag. She moves slowly to the door. “You seriously think you can get my Cyrus to go for you?” she asks, with a teasing lilt in her voice and casually turning to Lindsay. Lindsay gives her a fixed stare. “That’s clear.” “What’s clearer is that you’ve been on the sauce too long.”

Sabrina reluctantly agrees to put her boyfriend to the test and sends him a text message to tell him to come around to Lindsay’s house. She leaves Lindsay, looking like a geriatric stripper as she ladles out the snorts, and hides in the back room. Cyrus arrives and is offered a drink by an over accommodating Lindsay:

She says nothing for a while, but saunters back to him, glass poised between her fingers. “The moment’s all we have in life,” she eventually says. “Just the moment.” She hands him back his drink, this time with ice. “You’ve got to grab it.”

He certainly makes a grab for it. And as Sabrina comes into the room to remonstrate, things get more than a little out of control...

Drunkard’s Tales by Jaroslav Hašek

Hašek’s book of boozy stories is a nice stop-gap when the book I’m supposed to be reading sends me into fits of narcolepsy on the train. (The current offender is Iris Murdoch, a brilliant writer, but one seemingly unsuited to public transport.) He is a great chronicler of drunken misfortune: one who sees the pleasures, perils and pains of drinking all in the same glass.

In his story Captured by Carthagians, Hašek has just come out of a rowdy political meeting where he and his party have won a decisive moral victory by being duffed up by the opposition. Nursing a shiner, he is accosted by someone in the street:

It was my friend Ladislav Hájek-Domažlický, whom I haven’t seen for two years, and who is a good friend of mine since that memorable day when he didn’t betray me in Hradčany, at the pub under the arcades where they serve beer from the Volseký imperial brewery.

While Hašek doesn’t go on to explain exactly what happened in the pub under the arcades in Hradčany, he does go on to relate another tale from back in 1902, when finding themselves on their uppers, they decide to tap a wealthy relative of Hájek’s for some cash. Uncle Hájek is now in a monastery, but they reckon he should be good for fifty crowns, so they write a long letter explaining how Hájek has fallen ill and has had to borrow money from Hašek to buy medicines:

We had styled the letter in the pub, where we had come moneyless, since the rich Strahov monastery was like a promised land. We had a great time, we drank, smoked, and at half past three I went to see the philanthropic priest, the uncle of my friend Hájek, in Strahov. When I had arrived, they informed me that the reverend vicar Hájek is at the evensong and will come back within the hour. I went back to the pub and again we ate, drank, smoked and played billiards. “On such a happy day we have to have wine,” said Hájek, “my uncle is an angel.”

Hašek finally gets an audience with the uncle, who listens patiently to his story before giving him an envelope that clearly contains a note. Hašek hurries back to the boozer and they rip it open, expecting to find cash. Unfortunately, Uncle Hájek appears to have got wise to their scheme:

You crooks! I saw you going into the pub! When I went to the evensong you were still there. Be ashamed! Vicar Hájek

This doesn’t auger well, considering that they’ve run up quite a tab in the pub:

And so we sat there imprisoned by the innkeeper, in a foreign atmosphere, far from friends, desperate, and outdoing each other in generosity, since each of us maintained that he’ll be the one to go down to the city and come back with money to pay the bill.

They draw straws as to who is to go back into Prague to get the money. Hašek gets left behind as the deposit:

At ten o’clock, when in desperation I doubled the bill, Hájek appeared and said, “Kill me! I borrowed six crowns off your uncle, and stopped in one pub. They were playing cards there, I wanted to double our fortune, I lost, and I am skint.”

As the author drily points out:

The old Roman hero, Regulus, came voluntarily back from Rome to Carthage in captivity, only to be tortured to death.

Never Trust A Rabbit by Jeremy Dyson

The non-performing member of the League of Gentlemen, Jeremy Dyson’s collections of short stories are dark, quirky morality tales dabbling in the supernatural and bizarre. Even the title of his first collection is gloriously obscure, coming from a Hungarian proverb that warns us “Never trust a rabbit. They may look like a child’s toy but they eat your crops.”

In the brilliantly creepy A Visit From Val Koran, Jason Feddy is a middle aged bar owner in Mdina on the island of Malta. He doesn’t make much money and seems to live a quiet, if lonely life, pining after his long dead girlfriend Miranda. However, his peace is rudely disturbed by news that someone has dropped by looking for him which gives Feddy a nasty attack of the heebie-jeebies.

Deciding to look his best for the meeting with a man who he describes as his executioner, he visits the barber for a shave and a quick trim:

“Ah, Mr Feddy, A pleasant surprise.” Shiloh the barber put down his broom and went to shake Feddy’s hand. “A drink for you, sir.” He reached behind a pile of pomade jars and brilliantine tins, producing a labelless bottle of what was presumably whisky.” “I won’t if you don’t mind.” “Oh yes you will.” He was already filling a teacup. “I hear you have had a visitor.”

In a town with no secrets and nowhere to hide, there is no avoiding his meeting with Koran, who appears at Feddy’s bar later that day. The barman provides the drinks, then leaves them alone together:

Aldi came out with a bottle of brandy, two large glasses and a small porcelain jug of water. He stole a quick look at Koran before scurrying back inside.

A former colleague of Feddy’s when he was a lecturer at university back in the late 1960s, Koran was Miranda’s lover before Feddy stole her from him. A practitioner of dark arts and black masses, Koran hasn’t seen Feddy since he kissed Miranda goodbye thirty years before. Four week’s later, Miranda had died, covered in a rash spreading from the spot where Koran had placed his lips, and Feddy went on the run, ending up in Malta. Still, it seems that Koran just wants to invite Feddy to join him in a visit to the catacombs in Rabat the next day. Even so, his departure leaves Feddy worried further still:

He poured himself more brandy. When he returned the bottle to the tray he noticed that his hand was shaking.

In the catacombs Koran makes Feddy drink a potion he has concocted, telling him that it is a curse. Feddy is now incapable of nostalgia, all his memories are perfect recollections of events and the narrative that he has built up around his life, and his lost love, is gone forever. He never really loved Miranda, he had stolen her from Koran simply because he could.

The following day Feddy sat outside the bar, cradling a glass of brandy... he knew these memories were the truth. He knew he had constructed something else around them, a structure he had built and built over many years. That structure had now had its foundations removed. It had collapsed silently around Feddy leaving him exposed and cold. He drained the glass and called for Aldi to fill it once more. Perhaps later he would go for a walk. Perhaps he would visit the catacombs and stare at the bones. It was going to be a long afternoon and an even longer night.

It looks like he’s going to need that drink...

The Black House by Patricia Highsmith

Patricia Highsmith’s short stories deal with her usual stock in trade of dysfunctional families, misanthropic young men and ugly crimes, but as ever the writing is a joy to read and her insight into the human psyche is as sharp as in her full length novels.

In I Despise Your Life, twenty-year-old Ralph is coming home to his father’s house to tap him for cash. Living with the hip set in New York City, he needs to get $100 together for the rent on their loft apartment, the dump, but his father says no and tells him to get a job, despite first offering him a beer:

“Sit down, boy. What brings you here? ... Like a beer?” “Yeah, sure. Thanks.” Ralph was at that moment feeling a little fuzzy in the head. He had been a lot sharper less than an hour ago, higher and sharper, when he had been smoking with Cassie, Ben and Georgie back at the dump... Meanwhile a beer was what they called socially acceptable. Ralph took the cold can that his father extended.

Ralph retorts by telling his father that he thinks that his life is junk and storms off, although a letter from his old man a couple of days letter tries to mollify the situation, insisting that he’s free to do what he wants with his life. Ralph sulks because he feels he’s been cut off.

Cassie, Ben and Georgie decide to hold a party with $3 entry to get the rent money together. Ralph, in an inspired moment invites his dad to the bash, although when the day itself dawns he realises that this might have been of questionable wisdom. The house is decked out with tape hanging from the rafters and a phallic display of fruit (two oranges, banana) on the food table. There’s enough to drink, if you like wine:

Ralph tossed back a paper cupful of distasteful red wine. Why was he drinking the stuff? He preferred beer any time.

Oh well. His father arrives and Ralph tries to impress him:

“My dad!” Ralph yelled on a note of pride. “Is there a beer?” “Beer, hah!” said a fellow with a little brown bottle in his hand, waggling the bottle upside down to show it was empty. “Up yours!” Ralph retorted unheard, and lunged forward and upward, unsettling at least two standing girls, but the girls didn’t mind, only giggled. Ralph was acutely aware of his father, standing more or less in the doorway, and aware also of other people’s surprised expressions upon seeing an older man among them. But Ralph found what he was after, Ben’s precious beer cache behind the fridge, tepid, but still one small beer. Only one had been left there, and Ralph told himself to replace it tomorrow, otherwise Ben would be annoyed. He found an opener and go the top off. The paper cups were already gone. “A beer!” said Ralph, proudly handing his father the bottle.

His father is a fish out of water with all these bright young things wandering around, clearly bombed out of their gourds. He makes his excuses after running into Ralph’s housemate Cassie who is coked up and talking utter nonsense. Ralph sinks into a boozy torpor. When he comes round he feels nauseous:

Ralph felt like throwing up, surely due to the wine. Best to get to the bathroom, the toilet of course, and Ralph at once headed for the bathroom. The door was not locked, though a fellow and a girl were in there, leaning against the basin, and suddenly Ralph was angry and yelled for both of them to get out. He heard his own voice yelling, and kept on, until with startled faces they slowly made their way out, and then Ralph slid the bolt on the door. He did not have to throw up, though he recalled that this had been his intent.

He keeps his supper, but ends up slashing his wrists and wakes up in hospital the next day. Once again, it’s back to his father for money, this time to pay a $500 medical bill...

I Despise Your Life is no more than a vignette, but Highsmith skewers her characters to the page so well that it’s a miniature masterpiece on the generation gap, a highly astute study in father son relationships.

Drunkards Tales by Jaroslav Hašek

I felt that it was time to return to Hašek’s book of short stories. A notorious toper himself, Hašek seems to have little time for the practice of abstinence and attempts to give up the sauce usually meet in failure in this collection. Take, for example, the case of Professor Dr. Sahula in Fighting Against Alcohol:

Professor Dr. Sahula used to be a severe alcoholic in his youth. He used to drink up to thirty beers a day. Then he got kidney disease, an expansion of the stomach, fat around the heart and the result was, that he stopped drinking beer, spirits and wine, and began drinking mineral water.

Unfortunately, Sahula develops a prodigious appetite for Geisshübel saltzer and starts corroding his stomach with that instead. Finally forgoing restaurants as well, he has no choice but to apply himself to his studies, where he consumed learning just like alcohol before, with zest, with vigour and in unusually large quantities.

After several unorthodox treatments for insanity are patented, (the Sahula system sees a madman locked in a cell for three months with a sane man: when released the madman is sane, the sane man is mad. Repeat ad infinitum...) he turns his attention to his old nemesis, alcohol:

...at first he based his attempts on a principle that alcohol must be despised. He carried with him a small bottle of some loathsome liquid for retching, and went around to pubs and bars. There he treated all drunks and secretly dripped his poison into their glasses. They drank it like water and when he was discovered, one even begged, “Give us a drop as well, it gives me a devil of a thirst.”

Seeing that the emetic doesn’t work, Sahula investigates the side effects of booze:

According to his discoveries, alcohol works like radiation at a distance. Therefore, a photographer taking pictures of some drunken group cannot be sure that his children will not be born stupid. His book “About the Effects of Alcoholism” is a colourful collection of interesting documents showing the rampages of alcohol from a distance. An example, An eight-year-old son of a cooper fell into an unfinished barrel. When they pulled him out, he had a red nose.

His book lists 116 illustrations similar to the above, but what he really wanted was a live audience on the lecture circuit:

He managed to obtain a typical example of acute alcoholism. A man with a red nose stands in front of him, with a swollen face and shaking hands. “You are an alcoholic Bezděk.” “You bet!” says Bezděk happily. “Are you married?” “Somewhere in the Hradčany area,” replies Bezděk...

Now all he needs is the wretched man’s family. Mrs Bezděk makes an appearance with five kids and Sahula is ready to test his theory on the offspring of a man who drank up to two litres of slivovitz daily, and was able to stand fifty beers and five litres of wine at the same time. Sadly, his hypothesis never gets off the ground. Mrs Bezděk hasn’t seen her husband in twenty years and the kids are someone else’s. Sahula gives up:

When professor Dr. Sahula was crossing the square on his way home from the lecture, people walking behind him heard him pound the pavement and mutter, “I am going to get smashed tonight.”

Drunkards Tales by Jaroslav Hašek

I began this blog with Hašek’s most famous work, The Good Soldier Švejk, but he also wrote a prodigious amount of short stories, some of which are collected in Drunkard’s Tales From Old Prague.


Appropriately enough most of them revolve around the pub, although the first story An Attempt at a Temperance Social or a Yankee Do starts the other way entirely. Fresh back from America where she had married a high preacher of some religious sect, newly widowed Mrs. Piccknown has come home with a fervour for abstinence and is determined to hold a social event sans drink to show the townspeople how they can enjoy themselves without getting drunk.

Her choice of venue is provocative to say the least:

...the town was filled with indignation, best summed up by the somewhat harsh declaration of the retired old forester Mr. Polívka, “Such a thing does not belong in the pub, why don’t they take it to some clearing in the woods.” Bandleader Vořech went further and said in the railway station pub, “I am going to go there and get pissed as a parrot.”

Everyone ends up at the hall in the back of the pub and Mrs. Piccknown berates them for drinking, urging them to give up the sauce and read the bible instead. The men aren’t impressed:

A few individuals wanted to slip out and go the taproom for some liquid refreshments, but were apprehended at the door and sent back by Mrs. Chief Railway Auditor, who guarded the exit, but all in vain, since several gentlemen popped across to garden through a window, from there to the kitchen, from the kitchen to the taproom.

Once inside, the men drink as quickly as they can before the ‘games’ begin back at the social:

The participants poured it into themselves at such a pace never before seen in the town. Before a new game started one gentleman – who usually drank four glasses of beer a day at the outside, drank half a bottle of spirits and in his intoxicated state almost burned down the pig sty at the courtyard, while looking for the hall’s entrance with a lighted match in the daytime.

Needless to say, the event turns into a farce and the hall gets trashed. Still, it isn’t all bad news. The barkeeper notes that after all the excessive drinking between the games, the teetotal night actually turned a large profit:

Mr. Vašata, despite the damage he suffered at the end of the last chapter, declares publicly, that the bad financial showing of the public establishments can be improved only by holding temperance socials and Yankee dos.

Hašek wisely declines to say whether there is a moral to this story or not...

Getting Even edited by Mitzi Szereto

Described as the book for anyone who has ever been betrayed, Szereto has gathered together a range of new and established authors in a glorious celebration of revenge, proving that it’s not only unfaithful husbands who should beware. The stories in Getting Even avoid easy categorisation, including psychotic dolls and murder by cakes and kindness, along with the more usual jilted spouses, and alcohol certainly plays its part in some of the stories. However, it’s the particularly ingenious method of removing an abusive husband using drink in Tony Fennelly’s How To Kill An Aries that prompted me to pop it into a post.


Fiery, pig headed bigot Ronald treats his wife Myra like a slave while he drinks his life away. Although he’s successful at work, Myra effectively does everything for him:

When he filled out our tax forms, in the blank labelled ‘Spouse’s Occupation’, my husband always identified me as a ‘housewife’. But what I really was is what rehabilitative counsellors call a ‘co-alcoholic’. That is, a faithful helpmeet who enables her partner to spend all his leisure time drinking, without care or interruption.

She reminisces about when they met; how he wowed her when she was aged seventeen when he rode up on his fast red motorbike. Thirty three years later, his good looks have gone, the once-handsome face was bloated after decades of heavy drinking, and Myra is truly sick to the back teeth with him. Unable to leave without being cut off without a cent, she looks to the stars and realises that his sign, Aries, is just about to come up.

Myra begs some money from her sister in California, then goes out to buy Ronald a surprise present to celebrate their anniversary. First things first, though; she has to feed him his supper and get his beer when he comes home from work:

I served him small portions of the food but kept the beers coming.

Once his tanked up with booze, she takes him to the garage to show him his special gift. It’s a motorbike. A red one. Faster and more powerful than the one that he had when they met. Sadly, there isn’t a helmet to go with it, although Ronald isn’t bothered. Myra tells him not to take it out for a spin, but it’s a red rag to a bull, or Aries:

“And most important, you can’t go out riding after you’ve been drinking.” “Don’t try to tell me what I can’t do. I ride better when I’m drinking because I’m more careful.”

Needless to say, the inevitable happens and Myra reaches the nirvana of widowhood. And Ronald? Well his heart goes on to save someone’s life, but as Myra remarks to herself, I shouldn’t think the good doctors would like the liver much.

Tales of the Unexpected by Roald Dahl

I have a prickly relationship with Dahl. Once a childhood favourite (I devoured Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, James and the Giant Peach et al back in the day) I found myself reappraising him unfavourably in later years, particularly after reading his Uncle Oswald stories, which I thought repellent. While mulling over titles for the blog, I recalled that one of his Tales of the Unexpected centres on a bottle of wine, so I decided to give him another go.

Opening story Taste sees wealthy stock-broker Mike Schofield inviting professional gourmet Richard Pratt to a swanky dinner party where the host does his best to impress his guests with fine wine and choice cuts of meat. Pratt has been a couple of times before and has used his expertise to win a couple of cases of claret off Schofield by being able to give the name and vintage of the wine without seeing the label on the bottle. Schofield, convinced that he has found a claret so obscure that Pratt won’t ever be able to guess the vineyard where it comes from, foolishly allows himself to bet the hand of his daughter in marriage if his guest gives him the correct name.

From the off, it’s clear that Pratt is a ghastly human being:

...when discussing wine, he had a curious, rather droll habit of referring to it as though it were a living being. ‘A prudent wine,’ he would say, ‘rather diffident and evasive, but quite prudent.’ Or, ‘A good-humoured wine, benevolent and cheerful – slightly obscene, perhaps, but none the less good-humoured.’

Schofield has produced a fine Moselle to start the meal, and gives a long explanation as to why this is the perfect aperitif to claret. Pratt isn’t listening; he’s too busy eyeing up his host’s daughter, but when the time comes to clear the plates away, he turns his attention to his entrée:

...he reached for his glass, and in two short swallows he tipped the wine down his throat and turned immediately to resume conversation with Louise Schofield.

Put out, but not put off, Schofield goes on to produce the wine of the evening, and makes his rather extravagant wager, much to the horror of his daughter and his wife. Pratt makes a real song and dance about the tasting, a process that lasts for several pages:

Slowly he lifted the glass to his nose. The point of the nose entered the glass and moved over the surface of the wine, delicately sniffing. He swirled the wine gently around in the glass to receive the bouquet... For at least a minute, the smelling process continued; then, without opening his eyes or moving his head, Pratt lowered the glass to his mouth and tipped in almost half the contents. He paused, his mouth full of wine, getting the first taste; then, he permitted some of it to trickle down his throat and I saw his Adam’s apple move as it passed by. But most of it he retained in his mouth. And now, without swallowing again, he drew in through his lips a thin breath of air which mingled with the fumes of the wine in the mouth and passed on down into his lungs. He held the breath, blew it out through the nose, and finally began to roll the wine around under the tongue, and chewed it, actually chewed it with his teeth as though it were bread. It was a solemn, impassive performance, and I must say he did it well. ‘Um,’ he said, putting down the glass, running a pink tongue over his lips. ‘Um – yes. A very interesting little wine – gentle and gracious, almost feminine in the aftertaste.’

He has Schofield’s full attention after this little piece of am-dram. Then he starts homing in on the vintners:

‘There it is again,’ he cried. ‘Tannin in the middle taste, and the quick astringent squeeze upon the tongue. Yes, yes, of course! Now I have it! The wine comes from one of those small vineyards around Beychevelle...’

Of course, in the end he guesses correctly! Surely he hasn’t done something dastardly like cheat? Now that would be unexpected...

Most of Us Are Here Against Our Will by David Levinson

I picked up the habit of choosing books by their titles far too long ago for me to shake it now and Most of Us Are Here Against Our Will originally fell into that category, but this remarkable collection of short stories made me wonder if there was some sense in the practice after all.

A parade of perpetually disappointed characters gives plenty of scope for self destruction, and among all the other tribulations Levinson throws at his cast, alcohol pops up enough times for an inclusion here.

In A Perfect Day for Swimming, Kate Burnett travels down from New York to Austin to see her father, now living with his partner Howard and Howard’s two young sons. Kate, fleeing from the wreckage of a relationship that she’s just destroyed, decides that Sun, margaritas, and a heart-shaped swimming pool are just what she needs to recuperate. Sadly, her hard working and harder drinking father promptly derails that.

Thrown out of his home by Howard, Kate’s father eventually reappears after midnight on Christmas Eve, his truck abandoned on the highway where it’s run out of petrol. She finds him swimming naked in the pool, drinking Chivas Regal from the bottle.

He took a swig and passed me the bottle. I took one, too, a healthy gulp. The flavour of it, strong and medicinal, exploded in my mouth.

An expedition to get glue for a broken Christmas decoration gets hijacked as well:

“How about we stop for a teensy-weensy little drink to celebrate my daughter’s brilliance,”... Once inside it became clear my father was a regular.

But it is Christmas, so the barman gives them each a shot of peppermint schnapps:

We lifted our glasses, clinked in succession, and downed the schnapps, which tasted corrosive, like fermented mouthwash. I asked for a glass of water and a beer while my father ordered a scotch, neat...

As her father abandons her at the bar while he dances with a man no older than her, Kate reflects that they made it look so easy. It never is, of course, and Levinson’s controlled prose describes these little tragedies so well...