Begin in Milan, at the mega-swank Town House Galleria. 6:10 pm, Osborne is in his element, in the lounge, having a gin and tonic:
In Milan that summer, as the temperature reached almost ninety-five every day in the deserted streets and squares around the hotel, I forced myself to stop dreaming of the fjords of Norway and the ice hotels of the Arctic Circle and, gritting my teeth, went instead to the lounge where gin and tonics were served to the guests of the Town House Galleria from a moving tray equipped with buckets of ice, lemon rinds, and glass stir sticks. I liked to go at an hour when I knew the place would be empty, and this movable bar would be for me and me alone. The tall windows would be opened an inch, the gauze curtains flapping, the flowers wilting on the restaurant tables. The drinks trolley had stoppered crystal flagons of unnamed cognac, a bowl of marinated olives, Angostura bitters, and bottles of Fernet. It was like being in a luxury hospital where, because you are paying so much, you are entitled to drink yourself to death privately. You go right ahead, because you are human and drink is sweet.
I love that passage. It’s the book’s opening paragraph. What an opener! I love its celebration of drink. I love its celebration of pleasure. Osborne is a hedonist. His god, as he says later, is Dionysus – “god as summer’s light itself.”
What happens when a Dionysian travels in the Muslim world? How does he respond to prohibition? Where does he find a drink? Does he find a drink? These are the questions that drive Osborne’s narrative. In his view, the relevant dichotomy isn’t East/West; it’s Wet/Dry. He struggles to comprehend Dry. At one point, remembering a time when he was in the religious city of Solo, in Java, he says, “Six hundred thousand people, I kept thinking, and not a single bar. It seemed like a recipe for madness.”
The Wet and the Dry consists of fifteen chapters. Each one tells about a particular trip and a particular drinking experience. For example, chapter 2, delectably titled “A Glass of Arak in Beirut,” finds Osborne in his natural element – a bar. This one is in the Bristol Hotel, Beirut. He writes,
At Le Bristol, as soon as I am alone and the lights have come up, I order a vodka martini shaken and chilled with a canned olive speared on a stick – being shaken in the Bond manner, the drink is actually less alcoholic in its effects because more of the ice passes into the concoction. I am resolutely solitary at the hotel bar at ten past six, and the international riffraff have not yet descended upon its stools. It is l’heure du cocktail, and I am content.
Osborne likes drinking alone. Later in the book, he approvingly quotes Luis Buñuel’s definition of the perfect bar: “The bar is an exercise in solitude. Above all else, it must be quiet, dark, very comfortable – and, contrary to modern mores, no music of any kind, no matter how faint. In sum, there should be no more than a dozen tables, and a clientele that doesn’t like to talk.”
Sipping his vodka martini at the bar in the Bristol, Osborne is content: “I light a cigarette and wonder if it is still allowed – even here in Beirut – and then I melt like a raindrop into the vodka martini itself. Vodka and smoke go well together, they seem to have been conjured out of the same essence.”
Wherever he is, whatever city he’s visiting – Milan, Beirut, Abu Dhabi, Dubai, Muscat, Islamabad, Istanbul, Cairo – Osborne seeks bars. “One needs a bar almost as much as one needs oxygen,” he says. Some are mentioned just in passing, others are fondly described in detail. Here, for example, is his depiction of the Windsor bar in Cairo:
The Windsor is my favorite bar in the Middle East. It is, when you first enter it, still an officer’s mess equipped with all the expected decorations of a male space: dozens of large and small antlers protrude from its walls, some so small they are like bones of tiny extinct species unique to the Sahara. The chandeliers are rings of enmeshed antlers. Antelopes, gazelles, ibex, dark wood, low bookcases, shaded lamps, and bar shelves filled with dusty bottles of Omar Khayyam wine and Stella, the Egyptian national beer. It is a perfect anachronism. It must have been one of the bars of Fermor and Durrell in 1942.
He goes on:
The Windsor sits unnoticed within the backstreets of Cairo’s downtown, the core of the nineteenth-century city that has for decades decayed like compost until it is almost unrecognizable as the downtown that was once magnificent, the city of King Farouk and Omar Sharif and Om Kalthoum. A city of Parisian boulevards and balconied apartment blocks lifted from the Rue Réaumur. The city of the Café Riche and wondrous hotel bars and a life of flaneurs rarely inconvenienced by religion. The Paris of the East, pace Beirut.
Interestingly, in a book drenched in alcohol, one of its most transfixing parts has nothing to do with drink. It’s an account of Osborne’s visit to the Nurettin Cerrah Tekkesi, a little-known dervish school in the back streets of Istanbul. Osborne’s friend Sébastien de Courtois, a French scholar of Islam, takes him there. Osborne writes,
Sébastien took me through the first of the prayer rooms. It was crowded on a Thursday night, the men all in white skull caps, listening to a recitation in the Arabic of the Koran relayed through the adjoining rooms by small speakers. The walls were covered with gilded framed Koranic verses, with the slightly crazed faces of former leaders caught by ancient cameras long ago. The men began to kneel and incline forward in prayer. Sébastien and I moved into other rooms until we were in a kind of salon next to the main prayer room. Into this heavily embellished salon the practitioners were flowing as they tried to press their way into the room beyond. An imam read there before a wall of dark blue Iznik tiles, amid lamps fringed with green glass beads.
Eventually, Osborne and Sébastien move into the main prayer room where they witness an astonishing event:
A series of circles had formed, the men holding hands. They turned slowly clockwise, their heads still turning to left and right, dipping, the bodies bending slightly to the right as they uttered the same words. In the salon, the old men seated on the sofas made the same motions with their heads, their eyes closed. They were inducted into the same trance. The sema, the ceremony. Drummers had appeared, in white turbans. At the center of the circle stood a single dervish in his tall camel-hair sikke hat symbolizing the tombstone of his ego. He was younger than the leaders conducting the chants, the mustache carefully trimmed.
The chanting ebbed and flowed, changed rhythm and speed. The men began to sweat and half-dance as they turned. Something had clicked between them, and they were now fused into a single whole. The man in the sikke began to rotate in the center of the space. His arms wide, dressed in white, he spun like a sycamore seed falling: an expression of pure intoxication.
Osborne is an excellent describer. In the book’s final chapter, “Twilight at the Windsor Hotel,” there’s a long extraordinary passage that takes us deep into Cairo’s back alleys. Here’s an excerpt:
In downtown once can keep moving from baladi to baladi, because they have not yet been closed down, but you have to know where they are: using them requires a casual street knowledge that can be picked up only orally or through incessant trial and error. None of them are advertised. Most lie at the bottom of narrow unlit alleys and passageways, and no city is more a labyrinth than Cairo. Off 26th July, again, but closer to Tahrir Square, there is a strange place called the Nile Munchen, with its outdoor restaurant closed in all sides by the backs of tenements and its ground floor belly-dance bar. There is the touristy El-Hourreys, where the foreign journalists like to pose, and the seedier and more heartfelt Cap d’Or off Abd El-Khalik Tharwat, a den of dark varnished wood paneling and glaring light, where men pass between the all-male tables selling pistachios.
There is the splendid gloom of the Horris, a bar elevated above 26th July by a flight of steps and concealed behind anonymous glass doors, and the lofty hotel bar of the Odeon near Marouf, with its decayed oil paintings and terrible food and a terrace where sooty winds embrace the drinker.
I go one night to the Greek Club and find that it has closed. I go to the finely named Bussy Cat or to Estoril – a barman in a neat white turban – and hang about inside them like a fly that cannot quite decide where to alight; then, with a sort of desperation born of indolence, I push on to other even grimmer holes: the Alf Leila wa Leila off El Gomhoreya, the excruciating Rivera, the Victoria Hotel, or the Hawaii on Mohammed Farid. A whole evening can be spent in this misanthropic pursuit, wandering from places like Stella Bar to Carol and on to the Bar Simon or the Gemaica. But as often as not, I will come back to the calm sanity of the Cap d’Or, a bar that is not signposted and that is entered through a side door, where one can sit unmolested for hours without music or harassment, doing what one does in a bar: contemplating death and the inconsequential things that come just before it.
I love the tables here piled with nutshells, the smell of dogs and oily ful, and the sinister bar with its filthy bottles. The floors crunchy with the same pistachio shells. The men disheveled and worn-down looking in their cheap leather jackets and woolly hats. There is no question that Cap d’Or is a great bar of a certain kind because there is no sexuality, no women, no flirting, no frivolity, no beauty, no cuisine on the side, no clocks, no well-dressed bohemians and pretty young men with nothing to do. It’s a place of quiet but pungent pessimism, where the drinker at best can divert himself with a backgammon board but where he usually sinks sweetly into his own meditations.
Osborne worries that bars like Cap d’Or are endangered by the Muslim Brotherhood’s rise to power. This is the issue that haunts his book. What if religious fundamentalism becomes the norm, not just in the Middle East, but across the world? For him, bars represent freedom.
In future posts, I’ll explore this remarkable book further. My next post in this series will be on structure.
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