I keep intending to write something ‘summery’. Summer reading for instance, and whether anybody would ever choose to read eg Barnaby Rudge in July. But outside is the sort of weather, uncertain yet insistent, which doesn’t make me feel inclined to celebrate it, so I shall carry on as if this were a nondescript month like February.
Not long ago I had my first bad encounter on Substack (I don’t count the occasional annoying comment whose subtext is ‘I could have done this better’). It was not that bad, but a bit of a shock as most people on here are so notably generous and courteous. I was accused, in a note, of promoting pubs (as of course I do), and told that I should be deeply ashamed of myself as they are drug dens selling a killer substance etc etc. Ironically the accusation was so incoherent as to suggest that the writer was slightly drunk.
It always amazes me that anybody would take anything that I write so seriously (I’m sure others will know what I mean). It amazes me still more that anybody would take pubs so seriously, as I have always seen a good pub as a beacon of sanity in a disordered world. As I wrote in my book The Last Landlady, the pub was not a perfect entity, but ‘its very imperfection was honest’.
Anyway: I deleted the note and here we all are again, in the world of normal humankind.
But possibly I was inspired by this minor (frankly chihuahua-size) attack, because I have been thinking about the writers whom I most admire, and the fact that most of them liked a drink. By which I don’t mean that they liked a glass of good wine with their dinner; I mean that alcohol - and drinking establishments - were part of their literary landscape.
An exception to my ‘liked a drink’ rule is Agatha Christie, whose favourite cocktail was a glass of half-milk half-cream (although intriguingly I was told by one of her nephews that she didn’t drink because it made her ‘weepy’; from which I inferred, possibly over-inferred as is a flaw of mine, that she did not wish to threaten her hard-won peace of mind after the trauma of her first marriage - the one that ended so badly and led to her so-called ‘disappearance’. Sobriety, in other words, was safer). Another exception to the rule is Nancy Mitford, who lived moderately - impossible to imagine her drunk - and who, I think not jokingly, wrote this to Evelyn Waugh about Graham Greene’s The End of the Affair: ‘All that public house life, like poor people.’
But my beloved Elizabeth Taylor greatly enjoyed a gin, and especially enjoyed drinking it in a pub… Alone, if possible, having agreed with her husband that they should do this separately. She lived down the road from The Crown at Penn, in Buckinghamshire (an establishment that I visited not long ago in homage; I get the feeling that it is much changed). She would emerge from her charming middle-class home, the one in which she played wife and mother to serene perfection; walk down the curving road, solitary and imaginatively unencumbered; then sit with her drink and listen to the rhythms of pub talk, which insinuated themselves into her narratives like glinting absurdist threads.
Her best pub, to my mind, is in the 1947 novel A View of the Harbour, which is set not in the Home Counties but in a coastal village. Oh that pub. So ordinary, just a fact of life, almost like the sea. As pubs once were, it is a place that vaguely unites: what today would be called a community, but then had no need to be thus described. Into it in the evenings comes Lily Weston, a young war widow, who lives in a terrible dusty waxwork museum and whose day is built around the brief span when she can have a glass of port among people. One night she thinks that her loneliness, which weighs upon her like an ancient tombstone, might be alleviated… a sailor appears two evenings running, stands next to Lily and causes the barmaid to give her a wink, as if to say, here we go…
After a while she and the sailor resumed their contemplation of one another, which, as they drank, became more explicit, less veiled.
But the sailor just wants to sell Lily a bottle of scent that he has brought back from Paris.
It is a casual glancing blow, yet in the reading one feels the pain of it. Lily should have kept her hopes down, really, because the sailor did not offer to buy a drink: an unforgivable breach of the pub code, as Elizabeth Taylor would have been all too aware. I bet her friend Kingsley Amis kept her glass full to overflowing when they met for a jolly.
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