The Spirits #121: The Casino

Or: how Dostoevsky quite literarily saved my life.

~ THE CASINO ~

45ml gin
20ml maraschino
10ml lemon juice
10ml orange juice
A drop of orange flower water

Add everything to the shaker with copious ice. Shake hard. And… strain into a dainty glass. Cherry garnish! But I was fresh out. In such circumstances, use lemon.

Notes from the Casino:

1) The Casino was first listed by Hugo Ensslin in Recipes for Mixed Drinks (1917). Ensslin is also credited with the Aviation; you will notice this is a variation thereupon. The original: 60ml old tom gin, 1 barspoon lemon juice, 1 barspoon maraschino liqueur, 2 dashes orange bitters

2) David Embury, revered cocktail amateur (and thus my spiritual forebear) also listed a Casino in his Fine Art of Mixing Drinks (1948). Only he demanded orange juice as opposed to orange bitters. His version an austere: 8 parts gin, 1 part lemon juice, 1 part orange juice, 1 part maraschino.

3) The thing is, I detest orange bitters. I have the Fee Brothers version and it ruins every drink it comes into contact with, I find. As for orange juice, it always underwhelms in a cocktail context. And Embury (a tax accountant by trade) tended to apply the same mathematical formula to every cocktail willy-nilly, with little thought to the specifics of each ingredient. His version is rather unbalanced.

4) So I used the chassis of Takumi’s Aviation and meanwhile subbed the orange bitters for orange flower water, which has a similar bloom to the creme de violette in an Aviation but is actually way nicer. I added the orange juice more for the colour than the taste and I was well satisfied.

WELCOME BACK. OH NO I DON’T MIND AT ALL IF YOU SIT AT THE BAR.

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DOSTOEVSKY saved my life this week. I don’t mean that I experienced some sort of spiritual conversion at the hands of the great Russian novelist. Nothing so immaterial as that. I mean that literally, without Fyodor Mikhailovich Dostoevsky, I would have died. Or at the very least, ended up in a pool of my own blood with significant head trauma. Let me explain.

I was making the short walk from my car to the Clifton Lido, listening to an audiobook, when I found my path obstructed by a van making a delivery to the pub on the corner. The hatch down to the beer cellar was open and the van took up so much of the rest of the pavement, I had to turn back and walk around it. As I did so, I noticed the driver unloading something - one of those estate agent billboards, a sheet of corrugated plastic on a thick wooden fencepost. He didn’t notice me, however. Quite suddenly, he threw the post up and over his shoulder. The thick, blunt, heavy wooden end swung up - and fell, like Raskolnikov’s axe, onto the top of my skull. The sound, as it landed on me, was terrifying.

“ARGHH!” I cried. “Watch what you’re doing, man!”

These were my exact words. I was surprised even at the time that I didn’t emit an incoherent string of curses and howls. There is something absolutely enraging about a blow to the head! The man looked at me, surprised - and even kind of annoyed.

“You just whacked me on the head with that pole!” I elaborated, suddenly aware that everyone was looking at me - including the pub landlord, emerging diabolically from his cellar, beetle-black beard, mocking eyes.

“Sorry,” the van man said eventually. And it really was more of a teenager’s resentful sorr-y - as if I was way over-reacting.

“JESUS!” I cried in pain and confusion.

Then I must have sized up the fact that interacting with this gormless individual - the van man, I mean, not Jesus - would bring me no satisfaction. And perhaps on some level, I felt that I deserved to be brained by a FOR SALE sign. Wasn’t I guilty of the crime of distraction? Hadn’t I been totally absorbed in my audiobook: Dostoevsky in Love by Alex Christofi? Or perhaps the mechanical part of my brain took over and returned me to what I was doing before I was so violently interrupted. It always unnerves me, what our brains do to us when we lose conscious control.

But what mine did was this: it stumbled me into the lido where I waited for the pain to hit - much as Dostoevsky did when he faced mock execution with the Petrashevsky circle in 1849.

But the pain did not hit. “Lucky you were wearing a hard hat!” said a woman, who had seen it all unfold. As I reached upwards, I realised that the sign had swung down onto my headphones. I still have the cumbersome plastic kind - and, as in the Bjork song, they had saved my life. Woah.

Then, as I stumbled into the changing room and attempted to relate this thrilling incident to my wife via WhatsApp - I realised it was actually even more poetic than that.

As I swam my lengths, I couldn’t stop thinking about how unlikely all of this was. I don’t normally wear headphones in the street. I have longed viewed the practise with suspicion, ever since the novelist Naomi Alderman observed that ubiquitous private headphone use actually constitutes a Matrix-esque virtual reality hellscape, all of us alone in our private worlds; we just don’t think about it that way as it’s aural separation not visual separation. I certainly don’t usually feel compelled to put my headphones on for a one-minute walk, as I had done on this occasion. It has to be a really compelling listen for me to do that. It has to be Dostoevsky in Love. The author, Christofi, had the excellent idea of retelling Dostoevsky’s extraordinarily novelistic life in novelistic form, by interpolating a pleasingly to-the-point biography with all the autobiographical bits from his fiction (say, the firing squad scene in The Idiot). So it’s as close as you’re going to get to the memoir Dostoevsky never get around to writing. It’s great. (Although, trigger warning to Slavonicists: if you download the audiobook, beware, the narrator makes a point of pronouncing every single Russian name slightly wrong - up to and including “Fyodor”).

Anyway. My near-calamity coincided with the section where Dostoevsky is in Baden-Baden, 1863, convinced he has come up with a foolproof strategy for winning at roulette. Naturally I began calculating the odds of my own survival. What if I had been listening on earphones instead of headphones? What if the post had fallen five centimetres either side? My nose would have been cleaved off (more of a Gogolian injury), or else, the back of my head stoved in!

And what if I had downloaded a less compelling book and hadn’t been moved to keep listening? I replayed the events that led me to download this particular volume. I have been writing a long article on gambling, so naturally, I had been looking for quotes to make me seem more intelligent. I came upon: “Blessed are those who do not gamble and look upon roulette with disgust, as the most idiotic thing there is!” - F. Dostoevsky. Also, David Runciman had talked prophetically about Dostoevsky on his recent podcast about Turgenev’s Fathers & Sons (excellent), prompting me to head to Audible to download The Demons. Only, Dostoevsky in Love came up in the search and happened to be free. So that’s what I downloaded.

None of these things need have happened - the article, the podcast, the free download, etc - and then, I would have been walking down the street with no protective equipment whatsoever. Still, I reflected, the most improbable thing of all was the van driver hurling his post in such an eccentric manner in the first place. What I mean is, my stroke of good fortune (my happenstance Russian literature-themed hardhat) only makes sense within a broader context of misfortune (the falling pole). And then, I suppose, there is the much greater fortune that I should be at libery to swim in the middle of the day.

Life is really, terrifyingly, unavoidably a series of spins of the roulette wheel, each one following on from the other, each one potentially cataclysmic - and the only way to make sense of such randomness is to impose some sort of retrospective structure on it. In other words, to turn it into a story. To arrange the signs and symbols into some sort of pattern.

I always used to think of this as the Nabokovian approach. Vladimir Nabokov maintained that the “true purpose of autobiography” is following the “thematic designs” of one’s life, as if it were a piece of literature. The casino theme… the landlord in his cellar … the FOR SALE sign (or was it TO LET?).

Then again, Nabokov famously despised Dostoevsky. In fact, Nabokov’s monumental disdain is one reason I took so long to read Dostoevsky properly. Now, I find, the older I get, the more pernickety and petulant Nabokov seems to me, and Dostoevsky all the more endearing and human. Moreover, the knowledge (via Christofi) that the Tsarist officer who sentenced Dostoevsky to death that day in 1849 was none other than Vladimir’s great-great uncle Ivan casts Nabokov’s aristocratic disdain in a more sinister light. You know how these things filter into the family chatter. (“Well, you know what uncle Ivan always said about the time he interrogated that Dostoevsky…”). I can’t help suspecting that Nabokov didn’t like Dostoevsky because he was common.

And so, emerging into the spring air I felt determined to find a more Dostoevskian denouement.

“[Was] I not a hairsbreadth away from death, and now I am living again!” wrote Dostoevsky to his brother Mikhail, a few hours after the mock execution of 1849. “I am being reborn in another form.” From now on, he would live properly, he vowed:

“When I turn back to look at the past, I think of how much time has been wasted, how much of it lost in misdirected efforts, mistakes, and idleness, in living the wrong way; and, however I treasured life, how much I sinned against my heart and spirit—my heart bleeds now as I think of it. Life is a gift, life is happiness, each minute could be an eternity of bliss.”

But this was before Dostoevsky developed his catastrophic roulette addiction. There is the revelation - and then there is the real world.

As for me, I marvelled at the fresh spring air and my still functioning body before returning to my phone. I remembered with a pang of pleasure that I was yet to do that day’s Wordle. And you’ll never guess who I found, winking up at me, from the bottom of the castle.

Further reading: How Dostoevsky Predicted ‘True Crime’; Nabokov on Dostoevsky; The Occult Power of Wordle

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PLAYLIST

This is just like old times, isn’t? I’m probably not going to do one of these each week (I’ve a slightly different musical scheme in mind) but the Casino theme lends itself to a playlist so well. So here are some songs about chance, luck, recklessness, devils - and even one inspired by Fyodor Mikhailovich himself.

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WHAT I’VE BEEN READING

I was delighted to be mentioned in Jimi Famurewa’s restaurant review this week - and in such an on-brand context too: “Richard, who manfully accepted the challenge of drinking for three…”. The restaurant was Camille in Borough Market, by the sexy people behind Duck Soup in Soho (one of my all-time London faves). Jimi extols its virtues more eloquently (and soberly) than I can. (Standard)

Clive Martin - one of the true British journalistic greats imho - reminisces about the glory days of Vice UK and the idiots that fucked it all up. (New Statesman)

James Marriott is excellent on how celebrity authors are muscling out authors who might be there through talent alone: “Indeed, talent is a positive affront to the spirit of our time. Because talent is unequally distributed through the population, it offends the progressive notion that everybody’s self-expression is equally valuable… [Where] influencers and celebrities would once have felt some humility about the limits of their powers, they all now feel entitled to the prestige of creativity. To object would be elitist. Everyone’s voice matters.” (The Times)

I have found, what with the death of social media and the death spiral of the old media, almost all my reading comes via my inbox these days. I loved this essay on Harry Potter and fandom by recovering Potterphile, Laurie Penny. “The more that human beings living in the acute crisis phase of late-stage capitalism become more isolated, alienated and exhausted, the more it feels like the canon of our common social reality is disputed, the more important fandom becomes.” (Penny Red)

WHAT I WILL NOT BE READING

The Guardian’s new dedicated Taylor Swift newsletter. Oh no, that made me sound very middle-aged and curmuedgeonly didn’t it?

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🖊️I am Richard Godwin.
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