Our Lady of the Typists...

One of the great pleasures of putting PST out on the Web has been the great correspondences it brings me. I have never met the charming gentleman from Germany who writes me on behalf of The German Proust Society, nor have I met Miss Leslee from New York, who has contributed a piece to this issue, or Our Lady of the Typists, whose first two emails appear in our letters column. I don't know their faces yet, but I have learned enough about them to know that these people are friends.

Late one night I answered a message from Our Lady, telling her that our last issue had gone up on the Net at midnight. My friends who were there to make it happen proposed that we toast the event. When I searched the kitchen for a suitable beverage of toast, all I could find was a bottle of aquavit in the freezer, left over from Dean Gustafson's last birthday party. In my message to Our Lady, I mentioned that we had pulled out the aquavit for the occasion. She wrote me this letter in response:

Funny you should mention aquavit! We have a thing for aquavit here:

During the last bout of Olympics (I lose track) the ONLY story on tv about the event that interested me was Charles Kuralt's colorful account of the history of aquavit. He told how it was made from caraway seeds (people will make alcohol out of anything!) and how it had to be carried in a ship twice(!) across the equator and how every bottle has a map of the path of the ship and the points at which the equator was crossed.

I HAD to have some! So I searched, in a desultory way, for a few years. I only go in a liquor store once or twice a year. Finally I found it.

Well it sucks.

SO--cause we have to unload this gigantic bottle purchased in my poetic enthusiasm--we started taking the bottle with us whenever we were invited anywhere. Always I do a dramatic exposition of the story, making people peer at the map on the back of the label. I get them all excited and then they can't wait for a LARGE shot. (They never ask for seconds). It's tough cause you can't make the same group of people drink it TWICE...so always we are on the look-out for aquavit virgins.

My husband's and my secret fantasy is that one dark and stormy night a car will break down in our neighborhood and they will come to us for aid. They will be Norwegian. We will offer Aquavit. They will be astounded! And our secret fear is that, ten years from now when we have managed to empty the bottle, the same car will break down and we will NOT be able to offer Aquavit.

So--you can see that your mention touched a nerve (nay, an obsession).

The moral of the story: NEVER watch sports on tv. No telling how it will change your life.

What's the story behind your bottle?

So I told her this story. Every year, for the last four years, we have celebrated Dean Gustafson's birthday at Proust HQ. Five years ago, at a Cacophony Meeting at the Edinburgh Castle, I told him about the aquavit parties we had lived through in Los Angeles during my college years, and how much fun they were, and so in honor of this extraordinary Swede, I proposed an aquavit party for his birthday.

We gathered 20 of our much-loved mutual friends in the redwood drawing room of my house, and I set out long dining tables with a place for each guest. Down the middle of the table, garlands of herbs and red and yellow cherry tomatoes surrounded the classic aquavit munchies: flatbread, herring, roasted potatoes, lefse (potato tortillas), cheeses and meats, cucumber salad. The guests brought the bottles, except for one that I froze in a cylinder of flower-filled ice. When everyone had arrived, the drinking began in the fine Scandinavian tradition.

Max Von Sydow demonstrates the proper way to skol

A shot was poured for each guest. A first toast was offered, every guest looked into the eye of every other while a piece of flatbread was chewed to absorb the upcoming shot. Everyone said "Skol!", tinked glasses and downed it, then quickly covered the taste with a bite of herring. We resumed the convivial chatting, then, about half an hour later, a second shot was poured, toasted, skolled, covered up with herring and the effect became known. Everyone was in a suddenly fabulous mood. By the third shot we all understood how Scandinavians get through those dark winters. By the fifth everyone was hugging and kissing, and by the seventh or eighth, several hours later, we ran out, and everyone got horizontal somewhere in the crumbling mansion for a sleep-over, and there wasn't a hang-over in the house when we rose at noon.

The next year everyone was anxious to repeat that memorable night of fun. It had been a bad year for a lot of us, financially, romantically, legally, or fraught with major problems of the family sort. Everyone brought aquavit this time, and plenty of beer and wine to enhance the effect. We gathered once again around the long tables and downed that first shot with great hopes, and got to the second one about 15 minutes later. Feeling a little better, we went on to repeat the magical ritual quite often, quite quickly, with a little vino rosso poured between anxious toasts. Within a few hours two of the guests were sword-fighting on the roof and everyone was queasy. The bathroom closest to the scene became a vomitorium, and Dean disappeared quietly into the night, being too polite to throw up in someone else's house. His roommate stayed behind, however, unable to get off the floor of my roommate Kevin's room, and threw up repeatedly on the carpet for about 12 hours. The carpet was taken out that afternoon. We had all learned the lessons of aquavit: it doesn't mix with wine, and must be consumed very slowly.

The third year we had an ice-cream social instead, but last year we regained our nerve and tried it again. Everyone drank with complete reserve. Several people refused to touch the stuff ever again, others got reasonably tipsy. No one threw up, or brought swords to the roof. Our Lady read my story and sent back this message:

I think this story casts yet another light on the Proustian revels (late 20th century style.)

It would certainly convince any doubters that you are not a bunch of languishing effetes (I never met an effete myself.)

What say you put it in the next Proust Said That? The hook being, how do you celebrate celebrating Proust on the world wide web... We could see aquavit sales skyrocket (or at least increase slightly my chances of getting anyone to have a drink from said doomed--and as you point out--twinned aquavit bottle).

Fortunately the pharaohs were mummified in aquavit (or is it aquavelva) so there is no chance of it "going bad."

I am laughing hard at the thought of it "going bad."

Aquavit, I must say, begins bad, requiring two food substances to make it palatable. In spite of this, we may have set some sort of minor trend, as it becomes harder and harder to find it in the local liquor stores, and when found, it is twice as expensive as it was 4 years ago. We at Proust HQ, however, are glad to have proven that we are not languishing effetes, and can leave the left-overs in the freezer, waiting for a Scandinavian's vehicle to break down in a storm at our door.

"...he came to regret every pleasure that he tasted in her company, every new caress of which he had been so imprudent as to point out to her the delights, every fresh charm that he found in her, for he knew that, a moment later, they would go to enrich the collection of instruments in his secret torture chamber." -Swann's Way

P Segal