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Martini:  A Memoir

by Frank Moorhouse

Knopf, $210

Frank Moorhouse arrived in Hong Kong for the 2003 literary festival amid the Sars outbreak and the war in Iraq. He was in therapy for a breakdown, and death loomed for one of his oldest friends,  Richard Hall, former private secretary to 1970s Australian prime minister Gough Whitlam.

He writes: 'I have been to quite a few literary festivals around the world but I have never been to one where three of the four  Horsemen of the Apocalypse were also present: war, pestilence and death.'

Moorhouse had doubts about giving his festival lecture, entitled The Martini Dialogues, during such anguish.

When he said as much to the packed audience in the M at  the Fringe restaurant, Lingnan University professor  Meghan Morris stood to thank Moorhouse for providing 'an affirmation of the good life in the face of the human condition'.

The rest of  Martini: A Memoir is less solemn, although just as sensitive to the moments - dark and hearty - when a martini should be in hand.

Moorhouse,  67, hasn't told all in his memoir. Nor has he added to the self-help shelf with an etiquette guide. Martini records the history and cultural baggage of the cocktail he describes as 'one of the great narratives of modern folklore', and it candidly explores the appearance of the cocktail in his life and writing.  But the autobiography and the drink are only the botanicals  of this book. Martini is about connoisseurship.

Finding parallels with a Japanese tea ceremony, Moor-house describes 13 'aware-nesses' in the consumption of  the martini. He captures the tint of his memoir and his sensual  life in explaining that one of  these rituals involves the careful delivery 'of a brimful glass, without spillage, without theatre, but with ceremony'.

Much of the memoir is a conversation with martini aficionado  V.I. Voltz, a 'Manhattan identity' who avoids the 'chewed bone' look of olive pips by putting them in one of  the 12 pockets available to men in jacket and trousers. 'If you put the chewed pips back into your glass they really disturb the elegance of the drink,' he says.

Fussy and camp, the pair  sift life for quality. Voltz is wary  of travelling, particularly to Europe, which struggles with  the temperature and generosity required for martini ice. 'France doesn't understand ice,' he says.

This is not a  Luddite's guide  to the charms of the old world. Moorhouse and Voltz are more than the impractical sophisticates of literary stereotype. They're pragmatic, experienced and knowledgeable. Both are happy to  forgo the letter for e-mail. They're even prepared to forgive James Bond's preference for martinis shaken, not stirred. Purists  say shaking bruises the gin.

'I've always wondered if scriptwriters on the Bond films have been making subtle fun  all these years by having him make the martini the wrong way: something a Marxist French  critic would've fastened onto to deconstruct Bond's pretensions  of class,' Volt says.

You Only Live Twice has the only Bond with a predilection  for stirring, Voltz notes. 'I suspect this is because the screenplay  is by  Roald Dahl, who would know that stirring is generally  the preferred technique among purists.'

Moorhouse keeps his book from becoming a parody of  The New Yorker magazine by explaining the lesson of infinite nuance in a martini, quoting a late friend who  said that pursuing any subject, with the right approach, would bring one to  the great questions of life.

Moorhouse is devoted to learning why no two martinis taste the same. He resists becoming obsessed, but is  earnest enough to stay out of the debate over martini spin-offs in the cocktail menu.

'I do not deride the Crazy Drinks, the post-modern drinks, and I am curious enough about them to taste them when a companion orders one,' he says. 'The thing of it is this: I just haven't time enough to include them in my life. Inclusion at best is an act of appreciation, and appreciation has its sometimes tiring demands.'

The martini is the most mentioned cocktail in film  and literature, according to Moorhouse. It's a unisex drink, and the height of its popularity,  in the 1920s, coincided with the period when the social mobility of western women expanded - they could shop unaccompanied for the first time, go to a nightclub or lounge, wear make-up by day and refresh it in public, thanks to the compact mirror and lipstick tube.

Guides to manners are generally about concealing our dirty bits. Moorhouse explains the etiquette to  life. Never offer or ask for 'another' drink, he says, and everyone should have two inter-generational love affairs - one with an older person and one with a younger. Naturally, he recounts his two such flings.

Observations on taste, manners and the full life are rife in Moorhouse's most acclaimed novels,  Grand Days and  Dark Palace, which both revolve around  Edith Campbell Berry, a woman from a small Australian town who becomes cosmopolitan in manners, learning and sex while working for the League  of Nations in Geneva.

Moorhouse, a journalist for provincial Australian papers in the 1950s, was a bisexual in towns that considered a gin and tonic  a gay drink. He slowly learnt to enjoy the martini in the quiet corners of country pubs. The drink had a place in many of his relationships and affairs, and began to appear in his writing, some of which is melded into  the memoir.

Moorhouse says no evidence exists for the idea that alcohol kills brain cells. He believes in drinking as a social lubricant, 'a way of washing the blood off our togas'.

'I have found that there are those whose company brings out the truth and those who deter the truth, as there are those whose company magically increases  our vocabulary and unlocks our knowledge and our wit. When  the stimulation of good company is combined with alcohol, the alcohol itself behaves differently.'

He might have added: When a writer deliberates on his favourite cocktail, he finds it lights certain corners of his life.



Martini: A Memoir