The South's Thirsty Muse

Beyond Grits <& Gravy The South's ThirstyMuse BY BRIAN CARPENTER Long before William Faulkner declared that civilization began with distillation, southerners knew it had achieved a genial and ruddy perfection in the South widi the creation of that velvety smooth distillate of sour mash and sparkling limestone water known as bourbon. I refer not to the rot-gut, wildcat corn that every child ofcalamity ever raised to his lips in coundess southwestern tales, nor to the old "white mule," or "baldface" John Barleycorn, or even the smootii-sippin' Tennessee Blackjack that Faulkner keptwithin reachwhile he wrote, but to good "old bourbon," the Kentucky thoroughbred, the crown prince of whiskeys, and the eponymous spirit of "Old Bourbon" County, Kentucky. The distinction is not a matter of mere connoisseurship, but of tradition. It is by now a cliché that any writer who may be regarded as being connected in any way widi the Soudi— by birth or by temperament or by earnest affectation—that is, any writer whom above: North Carolina lawmen enjoy thefruits ofa raid on legally made— but illegally sold—bootlegger inventory. Courtesy ofthe North Carolina Collection, University ofNorth Carolina Library at ChapelHill. 104 we may without hesitation call "southern," must have, at the very least, a general acquaintance with, if not a genuine affection for, the peculiar charms of John Barleycorn's genteel cousin. That is, if he have not the said spirits pocketed away—presumably in Grandfadier's antique hinge-topped hip flask—somewhere on his very person right now. So goes the myth, but what of the literature? What have southern writers themselves had to say about bourbon—its history, its merits, and its restorative and aesthetic influence on the writer and his work? And whence its enduring reputation as the Soudi's thirsty muse? Between the bear hunters and boodeggers, the Johnny Rebs and dissipated gendemen, mere is whiskey enough to be found in the pages of soudiern fiction. But ofbourbon proper, one finds mosdy isolated anecdotes. Walker Percy's preference for Early Times. Twain's recollection of sharing his grandfadier's whiskey toddy (at the age of six weeks, no less), his delight at being presented six cases of bourbon during his stay at London's Savage Club, and his dismay at having to leave the last two cases behind when called back home on business. These anecdotes aside, however, there are few revelations beyond what one might himself discover at the bottom of a shot glass, julep cup, or snub-nosed botde. Bourbon, after all, if we are to cite again the common myth, is what die soudiern writer turns to when the book is finished or the words no longer come. We do find a few exceptions, however, like "Colonel" Irvin Cobb, the Kentucky humorist, whose novel RedUkker stands to this day as the only American novel to chronicle the rise and fall of Kentucky's "bourbon aristocracy," and William Alexander Percy, whose Mississippi memoir, lanterns on the Levee, includes a recipe for mint juleps guaranteed, he says, to bring about "half an hour of sedate cumulative bliss." They, like Will's nephew Walker Percy, who conducted his own personal survey on the aesdietics of bourbon drinking in the South, are among those rare southern writers who managed to set habit aside long enough to decipher the message in the botde." In 1929, a year before the Nashville Agrarians published dieir manifesto, Irvin Cobb took his own stand against die New South by writing an agrarian novel that found in bourbon's rich history the spiritual sustenance lacking in an age of doubt. Written during the era of bath-tub gin and boodeg liquor, Cobb's novel is both a celebration of good honest bourbon and an elegy for the culture that produced it. RedLikkertraces the fortunes of Colonel Attila Bird, a fictional patriarch of the bourbon belt and descendant, says Cobb, of that "big-boned, fairskinned , contentious, individualistic breed" who first sprang from the cradle of civilization deep in die heart of Kentucky. The first settlers, we are told, were the first distillers, that "hardy breed of early American argonauts" who first discovered diat a bushel of corn could make three gallons of whiskey and that those three gallons were worth more than a man could ever expect to make from corn Beyond Grits and Gravy 105 The author whose bourbon ofchoice was Early Times. Ayoung Walker Percy, courtesy ofthe North Carolina Collection, University ofNorth Carolina Library at Chapel Hill. alone. And so, we learn, bourbon became a respectable business, and die gende art ofdistilling was born. Cobb's Bird is ofthat particular species of"unregenerate " southerner, the backward-looking, progress-fearing, guardian of agrarian tradition described byJohn Crowe Ransom in /7/ TakeMy Stand. Though bourbon is his business, Bird remains a son of the soil, distilling from the corn and grains raised in his own fields and from the sparkling water taken from his own limestone springs the liquor that he mellows in barrels cut from the tall oaks at die edge ofhis property. The distillery itself, says Cobb, sits "right on [the old] home place," with the heavy scent of the sour mash wafting through the curtains ofthe family parlor. Bird knows that in the language of his Scottish forebears, whiskey was the word for "water of life," and it is through his family's "Old Blockhouse" brand of bourbon that tiieir "sanguinary flood" continues to flow "throughout the history of the land."2 History, of course, has long been part of bourbon's appeal. As Gerald Carson notes in The SodaiHistory ofBourbon, even some of the earliest distillers capitalized on national pride, manufacturing bottles in die shape oflog cabins and commemorative flasks bearing the impressions of historical figures like George Washington and "Old Rough and Ready" Zachary Taylor. After the Civil War, these same distillers sold canteen-shaped decanters to old soldiers and introduced new labels like "Rebel Yell" and "Lost Cause" (die latter, says Carson, "decorated widi a mourning border in heavy black") that traded on bourbon's Old Soudi origins. "Every brand you heard of," says Cobb, "was the 'Old' This or the Old' That brand." "A traditional reverence for what was aged or what passed for being aged or was so labeled," he continues, "came literally to be a part ofyou. Likewise and 106 southern cultures, Spring20oo : Brian Carpenter According to Irvin Cobb, thefirst settlers were distillers. Thisphoto shows the hideaway oftwentieth-century entrepreneurs who continued the tradition illegally. Courtesy ofthe North Carolina Collection, University of North Carolina Library at ChapelHill. inevitably, whenever men grew eloquent or women grew poetic, Kentucky was 'Old Kentucky,' die words being spoken with a lingering and affectionate cadence ; and Kentucky, as your mother-land, as the first-born of the Old Dominion , you were supposed to venerate and love the most of all."3 Looking back, Cobb saw that what bourbon barons like Bird were really fighting against was not prohibition but progressivism. A good example is die rhetorical "campaign of education" the colonel undertakes in the last days before prohibition . In sketching out the details ofdiis particular scene, Cobb drew upon the example of die real-life bourbon distiller, George Garvin Brown, who in 1910 published, at his own expense, a tract tided The Holy Bible Repudiates "Prohibition" diat included, says Carson, "all the verses from Genesis to Revelation containing the words 'wine' or 'strong drink'" as well as "interpretive commentary" sugBeyond Grits and Gravy 107 gesting that the drinking of alcohol, and ofgood Kentucky bourbon, in particular , was indispensable to diose seeking the revelation of Christ. Like Brown, Cobb's Bird composes his own "scriptural vindication" of bourbon, complete with "fireworksy denunciations" and references to "the Master's Miracle at the wedding-feast at Cana," though Cobb makes it clear that die colonel's "fervor" is directed not at die "jack-leg preachers" of the Temperance movement, but at the unquestioning disciples ofwhat Ransom would later call "the gospel ofProgress ." It is they, says Cobb, the generation who desires "to have the message rendered down good and snappy, like the click ofa cash-register," whom Bird singlehandedly seeks to win back to "the true faith": "the hallowed standards, . . . theories . . . [and] prejudices" of the Old South—"good land, good family, the Democratic Party, White Supremacy and Old Line Sour Mash whiskey"—things as true, says Bird, as "gospel writ." Having survived war and reconstruction, it seems a "sheer moral impossibility" that bourbon should succumb at last to die tee-totaling rhetoric ofprogress. And yet, succumb it does. The final chapters of Cobb's novel are a sober account ofBird's last days—die coming ofprohibition, his betrayal by family and friends, and his final heroic act: burning down die old distillery before the federal occupation. Now but a symbol of a heritage seemingly forever lost, the distillery is replaced by an orphanage and a farm school where, presumably, farming is taught as a science and not a way oflife. In the end, Bird's plea, says Cobb, is "a cry in the wilderness," the invocation of an old man in a dry country.4 Cobb's veneration ofbourbon and his patriotic attachment to its southern heritage place him in the same class of soudiern gendeman as William Alexander Percy, the planter's son from Greenville, Mississippi, who forever associated bourbon with the defenses ofhonor and noblesse oblige he heard as a boy. Percy was himselfa confirmed julep drinker, having acquired a taste for that "delicious mess ofice and mint and whisky" from his father and the odier "Delta sages" of his youth, who routinely gathered on the front porch of the Percy home to philosophize and debate over mint juleps. As Percy recalls in Lanterns on the Levee, those anxious moments he spent eavesdropping while waiting to drain the sweet nectar from his father's julep cup were his first exposure to the "relendess striving " and "sense ofduty" diat would later form his own character. And yet, he explains , what impressed him most when he looked back on diese occasions a halfcentury later was not what his elders discussed there, but how they discussed it, sipping their juleps, he says, like the "patriarchs ofChartres," with his mother in her summer dress "shedding immortal grace" over them all like "the Queen of Sheba."' What Percy learned was that die "die steady simple wisdom ofdie Soudi" was as much in its manners as in its morals. Manners were morals in Percy's world, and "fundamental," he says, "as truth." Like the childhood playmates and die other 108 southern cultures, Spring20oo : Brian Carpenter In i9io George Garvin Brown argued thatThe Holy Bible repudiatedProhibition. Unfortunatelyfor the moonshiners behindthese large stills, North Carolina state law enforcement didn't share a similar view, destroying and confiscating all evidence oftheir illegal brew. Courtesy ofthe North Carolina Collection, University ofNorth Carolina IJbrary at ChapelHill. Arcadian youths of Percy's early reminiscence, whose "manners," he says, revealed more to him than "their other qualities," the defeated knights-errant who held court on the family porch endowed die julep widi a mythic significance that transcended its humble origins. Hence the family's traditional julep recipe becomes in Percy's memoir a kind of liturgy detailing the julep's precise preparations , from the proper way to powder the ice (a tricky procedure involving a towel and a wooden mallet) down to die last dash of nutmeg. The novice takes first the cup—presumably ofsolid silver, bearing his father's initials or, better yet, the family crest—and then the sacraments: a spoonful of sugar dampened with a drop ofcold springwater; a sprig or two offresh mint hand-picked from the garden behind the house; dien the ice powdered dry and packed tight to the brim to Beyond Grits and Gravy 109 To WilliamAlexander Percy, his recipefor thejulep was proofthat the "austerities ofliving are not incompatible with the courtesy andsweetness oflife." soak up the whiskey—not Scotch, not rye, says Percy, but good Kentucky bourbon , "the older the better," its superior pedigree lending to die mixture that particular refinement ofcharacter that instills in die julep drinker a "calm rapture" of contentment not to be confused with the sort of "Dionysiac frenzy" that once sent his drunken gardener somersaulting over the side ofdie levee in die master's new car. To waver from the ritual, to add a slice of orange or lemon, or "one of those wretched maraschino cherries," would be, he says, a "sacrilege," as sure a sign of deficient breeding as if you had stumbled in the presence of ladies with liquor on your breath. As Irvin Cobb once said ofhis friend H. L. Mencken: "Any guy who'd put rye in a mint julep and crush the leaves, would put scorpions in a baby's bed."6 By reenacting the ritual of the julep, Percy hoped to recapture a taste of that elusive recipe that had given his ancestors "strength and direction" and could still, he says, "give sustenance to die undernourished of diese times." In an age when, he complained, most men had "turned lotus-eaters," relying more on the arts of escape than on die social arts of living, the julep must have seemed a civilizing influence and a necessary tonic for those who still bore the weary burden of noblesse oblige, albeit mosdy in the form of council meetings and Rotary Club luncheons. Whywas the julep invented, Percy seems to ask, ifnot to ease the burden of squires like himself, whose days, his diary tells us, were frittered away resolving the complaints ofdie local peasantry. The entry for Saturday, 5:30 reads, "Whipped down.Julep widi Tom and Roy. Helps"—this after an afternoon given to dispensing train fare and bail money and wise counsel on everything from gardening to senior poetry theses when all the old gendeman really desired was no southern cultures, Spring 2000 : Brian Carpenter to weed his Bermuda grass in peace before retiring to the porch for a julep and conversation. However unpalatable Percy's old recipe proved to his contemporaries , it remained for him proof that die "austerities ofliving are not incompatible with the courtesy and sweetness oflife." In the julep's sweet sustenance, Percy found at last an antidote for the bitter "gar-broth" of betrayal that had poisoned his fadier's kind so many years before and a remedy for that "rueful liquor" melancholy, which had undone die best and the brightest of the Percy clan for generations.7 In the novels of Walker Percy, Will's nephew and literary successor, the julep myth is litde more than a tired cliché perpetuated by the social-climbing nouveaux riches who bought the old home-place and paid cash, dead set on restoring the South to a glory it never knew and a grandeur that never was. Yet so pervasive is this mydi diat even a proper southern gent might submit to its charms, much like Percy's Lancelot Lamar, who drinks juleps only because his west Texas wife thinks he should—Lamar being ofthat peculiar "kind ofgendeman planterwithout [a] plantation," who despite his genteel upbringing finds himself"playing up to die role" and stopping on occasion, he says, "to pour a whiskey from crystal decanter into silver jigger, the way Southern gents do in die movies."8 Percy's last word on the subject comes in a briefessay simply tided "Bourbon" that addresses, he says, the "aesthetics ofBourbon drinking in general and in particular ofknocking it back neat." Written at the close ofdie Cronkite era, "Bourbon " is an existential appraisal of that breed of audientic bourbon drinker for whom "drinking Scotch is like looking at a picture of Noel Coward." Today's bourbon drinkers, Percy says, are the sons of die Sun Belt, die residual gentry of the South, languishing in the suburbs of Memphis and Montclair where they return each day at 5:30 to nurse their feelings of transcendental homelessness with a shot of"Kentucky sunshine." They are not necessarily connoisseurs, says Percy; on the contrary, they may drink bourbon only "because too many Houston oilmen drink Scotch." But the pleasure they derive from knocking it back "neat"— beyond die obvious anesthetizing effect of that "litde explosion ... in die cavity of die nasopharynx"—owes less to the "sedate cumulative bliss" diat inspired Will Percy's rhapsodies in Lanterns on theLevee than to what Walker calls that "evocation oftime and memory" that induces in the drinker the realization ofa "kind of aesdieticized religious mode of existence."9 IfWiIl Percy's ode on a julep cup inadvertentiy parodied the Delta sages diat it was meant to revere, Walker's essay, with its pharmacological formulae (showing the comparative benefits of five shots of 80-proof Early Times to four shots of 100-proof Old Fitzgerald) and references to pop culture and Kierkegaardian existentialism , is a deliberate satire of the sort of convoluted erudition diat obscured his earlier foray into semantic theory, TheMessage in a Bottle. A concession to the old soudiern rage against abstraction that he himself had once raged Beyond Grits and Gravy in A headline that raises the question: whosefans sneakedmore snorts during the I9J9 Duke-Carolinafootball game—the delirious TarHeelsupporters orthe vanquishedBlue Devils? Courtesy ofthe North Carolina Collection, University ofNorth Carolina Library at Chapel Hill. against, Percy's postmodern panegyric comes as close as any attempt to explain bourbon's enduring mystique among writers who consider themselves southern. Turning back the botde, says Percy, one imagines William Faulkner post-Absalom, Absalom!, "drained, written out, . . . hunkered down in the cold and rain after the hunt," flat-footing a "third ofa pint ofbourbon" and shivering, he says, "but not from the cold." Bourbon, in effect, becomes a catalyst for the "recovery of [the] selfand die past from the fogged-in disoriented Westernworld." For Percy, bourbon evoked memories ofsneaking a snort from a "proper concave hip flask" at a UNC-Duke football game; ofthe "prolonged and meditative tinkle ofsilver spoon against crystal" resonating from Uncle Will's sunporch on late summer afternoons ; and of his late father, "aging his own bourbon in a charcoal keg" in the garage oftheir suburban home "next to the number-6 fairway ofthe New Country Club." What his survey tells us, in the end, is that even in dus, the same Soudi that defeated Cobb's agrarian dreams and exasperated Will Percy's noble pretensions , one might still find cause to invoke die amberish spirits of that "real uncorrupted essence, the true and uncontested fruitage ofthe corn," whose soul, as Colonel Bird reminds us, "goes on perpetuating itself, and reincarnating itself, world widiout end."10 NOTES i. See walker Percy, "Bourbon," in Signposts in a Strange Land, ed. Patrick Samway (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1991), 103-4; Mark Twain, TheAutobiography ofMark Twain, ed. Charles Neider (Harper, 1959), 3; Gerald Carson, The Social History ofBourbon: An UnhurriedAccount of Our 112 southern cultures, Spring 2000 : Brian Carpenter Star-SpangledAmerican Drink (University Press of Kentucky, 1963), 210; William Alexander Percy, Lanterns on the Levee: Recollections ofa Planter's Son (Louisiana State Press, 1973), 66. 2.Irvin S. Cobb, RedLikker, (Cosmopolitan, 1929), 12, 21, 75; John Crowe Ransom, "Reconstructed but Unregenerate," /'// TakeMy Stand: The South andtheAgrarian Tradition (Louisiana State Press, 1977). 3.Carson, SocialHistory, 54; Cobb, Red IJkker, 86. 4.Cobb, RedIakker, 121, 21 3—1 5, 210—1 1, 93, 213; Carson, SodaiHistory, 92; Ransom, "Unregenerate ," 7. 5.William Alexander Percy, Lanterns on the Levee (Louisiana State Press, 1973), 66, 7)—7J. 6.Percy, Lanterns, 75, 286, 101, 66, 303, 65; Carson, SocialHistory, 21 5. 7.Percy, lanterns, 74, 343, 328, 75, 66. 8.Walker Percy, lMncelot ( Paladin, 1977), ioj—6. 9.Percy, "Bourbon," 102, 103—4. 10.Ibid., 105, 104, 216; according to Mark Vaughan, "many [distillers] use [yeast] strains dating back a century or more. . . . The Maker's Mark culture dates back to the original TW. Samuels distillery founded in 1842." See "The Spirits of Kentucky: Small Batch and Single Barrel Bourbons Revive the Good Old Days of Whiskey," CigarAficionado (Autumn, 1993). 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