Southern literature and cocktails have a storied history
William Faulkner said, “Civilization begins with distillation.” He also said, “My own experience has been that the tools I need for my trade are paper, tobacco, food, and a little whisky.”
For many writers, the pen and bottle go hand-in-hand while distilling words into stories. Southern scribes in particular have cultivated this relationship, for better or worse.
It’s not that we drink more than our northern neighbors. In fact, statistically we don’t. There just seems to be a connection that runs deeper than the shine that beckons us.
Maybe it has to do with the ground we’re steeped in. The soil, the heat, the lightning and thunder without a drop of rain. Or unique struggles with sin and shame, wrestling with the alligators and water moccasins and demons that lurk in murky waters.
Is it any wonder writers grappling with this context wouldn’t need a drink to get these stories down? To name a few: Truman Capote, the screwdriver. Carson McCullers, her signature “sonnie boy” mix of hot tea and sherry tucked in a thermos. Larry Brown, beer and whiskey. Walker Percy, bourbon. Bobbie Ann Mason, bourbon and coke.
And, of course, Faulkner, a fervent fan of whiskey and corn liquor (especially when he and Shelby Foote ventured onto Civil War battlefields of Tennessee).
So just what is the correlation between Southern writers and the bottle?
“Oh wow. That’s a big question,” muses novelist Susan Gregg Gilmore when I put the question to her. “I think Southern writing is infused with so many things, from our unique landscape to our food and to our dialect. I think it would be hard to separate spirits—or alcohol—out of that equation.”
A Nashville native who now calls Chattanooga home, Gilmore’s first novel, “Looking for Salvation at the Dairy Queen”, is rooted in family-fueled stories inspired by her grandfather, a moonshiner who stumbled into a tent revival, found the Lord and became a preacher.
“For me personally, in my everyday writing, the two are not connected,” she says. “Although at the end of day and still struggling, I have to admit a little bit of bourbon over the rocks kind of loosens the brain—I think. It kind of unlocks something.”
Although Flannery O’Connor was not known for drinking, she did have a fondness for Coca-Cola mixed with coffee.
“I must have known that because as soon as I had it—and it was going against everything I am to even try it to begin with—but the moment it hit the palate I thought, this is perfect,” says Star Lowe, owner of Star Line Books and avid Ameri-Cola drinker (cola kicked with espresso). “It’s in the blood. Now I’m hearing the peacocks calling! I wonder if Flannery ever put a lime in it. That lime twist gives it a little zing. But if she just did it as a coffee and Coke I can appreciate it as a purist.”
Like Lowe, Gilmore is a purist who pairs tastes with the seasons. When the weather is warm she tends to stick to a gin and tonic, and when the season slips into autumn and winter, it’s bourbon over the rocks. If she were to have a preferred cocktail, it would be an Old Fashioned.
“I might make it for Lee Smith,” Gilmore says. “I could see myself wanting to make one for her, maybe sit back with her and sip one and talk about all sorts of things.”
Southern porches make ideal settings for imagined conversations with past authors, especially paired with the drink that best suits the company.
“Eudora had some hooched-up non-alcoholic beer! Oh Eudora,” Lowe says of Eudora Welty, who reportedly indulged in non-alcoholic beer injected with a syringe of raw alcohol during her days in Wisconsin.
“I think about ‘A Worn Path’, that wonderful short story. I think about her and her garden and her flowers, and have to think—if I were to have a cocktail that would honor Welty—it would have to have a botanical element to it. I’m thinking something sagey and blackberry infused, something medicinal.”
Heavy drinking, like well-worn clichés, is a pitfall many writers stumble down. Some authors even eventually give up drinking, like Barry Hannah.
“I’m not going to come down on booze, because it’s done a great deal for me, frankly,” Hannah said. “It’s like scolding an old friend now that you don’t need him.”
So is booze a writer’s muse, or a writer’s mask?
“I think the classically tormented writers were tormented before they were writers, like Truman Capote,” says Katelyn Dix, an English teacher at Girls Preparatory School. “He wrote because he was compelled to write for the same reason he was compelled to drink, which was because he had all these demons in his past.”
Writing is a lonely affair. And once the sun comes up we must go out into the world—and that can be daunting.
“Then there’s the less haunted writers who didn’t necessarily have problems with alcohol,” Dix says. “Maybe it’s the solitude of writing that, when you’re being social, you need a little bit of social lubrication? It could also be that need to silence your inner monologue.”
To echo Faulkner, writing is distillation—like making whiskey.
“In fiction, you really do have to get down to the most basic elements,” Gilmore says. “It’s not sitting down one day at a blank piece of paper or laptop and this thing comes forth. There has to be so much work done before you get to that point. Thinking about the most basic needs and wants of your character, the very specifics of the land they live on, the world they inhabit.”
That process transcends but also intertwines, regardless of the Mason-Dixon Line.
“Even if you have Capote writing about New York, there is still a Southerness to it,” Dix says. “In the same way, it’s hard when you are tasting a really great whiskey and you’re not sure what it is that distinguishes it from one year from the next, or one aging method from the next. It’s hard to pin down. You start with place, you start with those things you can’t really avoid—your past, your history, your raw materials—you are starting with a foundation you can’t escape.”
Readers, when paired with a strong story, can get drunk on words and characters.
“There are books I am so in love with and so enraptured by that it’s kind of a high reading them,” Gilmore says. “You don’t want to put them down. You want to go back to them again and again. And it’s a healthier intoxication.”
As with liquor, literature has a top-shelf, as Dix notes. “I think really great prose has a stimulant effect and really great poetry has a narcotic effect,” she says. “Really outstanding description or really outstanding characters lodge in your brain through this heightened sense of possibility.”
In his essay “Chattanooga Nights”, Larry Brown composes a night cap after hanging out with fellow literary companions at The Read House.
“I mixed another drink, eased into my chair, and thought about how fine a thing it was to be able to sit with these people for a little while, these who are so much in rooms of their own, alone with their thoughts and the people who are on the page,” Brown wrote.
“I thought about how much alike we all were, whether we lived in Tennessee or Georgia, Alabama or North Carolina. What we had in common was that we loved the land and people we came from, and that our calling was to write about it as well as we could.”
Two Recipes Submitted By Katelyn Dix
Sook’s Fruitcake
for Truman Capote
- 1 oz. apple brandy
- 1/2 oz. amaretto
- 1/2 oz. triple sec
- Juice of 1/2 lemon
- Soda water
- Granulated sugar
- Freshly ground nutmeg, cloves, and cinnamon
- Candied orange peel for garnish
Grind nutmeg, cloves, and cinnamon and mix with granulated sugar. Use to coat the rim of a low-ball glass. In a cocktail shaker, combine liquors and lemon juice. Pour into glass over ice and top with soda water. Garnish with candied orange peel and attempt to mail to loose acquaintances and President Roosevelt.
Pear Tree
for Zora Neale Hurston
- 1 oz. pear brandy
- 1/2 oz. lemon juice
- 1/4 oz. simple syrup
- Prosecco
- Pear slice for garnish
In a cocktail shaker, combine brandy, lemon juice, and simple syrup with ice. Strain into cocktail glass and top with Prosecco. Garnish with a pear slice. Serve with a vague but un-comfortably explicit sense of adolescent sexual frustration.