"for whom the booze tolls"

It was a local blacksmith who introduced a young Ernest Hemingway to the world of drinking, giving him a glass of hard cider. From that humble introduction Hemingway went forth to engage the wide world of alcohol. Like nearly all the great drunks, Hemingway was a wide-ranging omnivore when it came to the booze. While a young man in Europe he absorbed enough wine, cognac, brandy, grappa and absinthe to start thinking himself something of an expert. He didn’t consider a meal a meal unless wine was served and sometimes that meant six bottles. Glassware be damned, he was not above drinking straight from the bottle—he compared it to “a girl going swimming without her swimming suit.”

On safari he claimed he was never inebriated, though his hunting companions testified his first drink arrived with the dawn and that around the camp “his drinking would have killed a less tough man.”

While covering WWII from the front lines, he kept his canteen filled with gin and personally liberated (with the help of his private army) the Cambon Bar of Paris’ Ritz Hotel.

In Cuba Hem cranked up his game. On a typical evening he “Started out with absinthe, drank a bottle of good red wine with dinner, shifted to vodka in town then battened it down with whiskeys and sodas until 3am.” Although Hemingway was fond of telling visiting interviewers that he rose at 4:30am and never drank before noon, a journalist who actually observed him in action at his Cuban home reported that upon rising Hemingway “usually starts drinking right away and writes standing up, with a pencil in one hand and a drink in the other.”

“I suppose he was drunk the whole time but seldom showed it,” friend Denis Zaphiro said. “Just became merrier, more lovable, more bull-shitty. Without drink he was morose, silent and depressed.”

True Story: Contrary to popular myth, it was not the booze that drove Hemingway to shoot himself. He pulled the trigger after three months of forced abstinence. In lieu of alcohol, he was force-fed a steady diet of shock treatments and promises he would never be allowed to drink again. Hem’s son wrote, “He might have survived with alcohol, but could not live when deprived of it.”

From Modern Drunkanrd Magazine