The Books: At Large and At Small, “Coffee,” by Anne Fadiman

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Next up on the essays shelf:

At Large and At Small: Familiar Essays, by Anne Fadiman

Anne Fadiman opens this essay remembering her sophomore year in college, when, on a nightly basis, she would meet up with two boys who also lived in her dorm, and they would brew a pot of coffee, drink it, and talk. They would talk about literature and history and their classes, and the coffee was a huge part of the whole thing. She remembers the pot, the cups. Anne and her friends were 19, 20 years old, but the coffee ritual made her feel like a grownup. THIS was what it meant to be an adult. And so as a lifelong coffee drinker, she delves into the history of coffee (and its relationship to writing, in particular). Most of the essays have this micro- to macro structure, which elevates them from the purely personal. The personal is only the launching pad to a deeper investigation.

So Fadiman researches coffee. Where did it come from? Who figured it out? She talks about a guy in Yemen who chewed the beans and felt the speed rushing through his body – Fadiman refers to him as “the hopped-up imam”, a perfect example of what I find so funny about her writing. Fadiman researches the spread of coffee as a popular drink, and the explosion of “coffee houses” in the 18th and 19th century. These coffee houses were also related to politics and philosophy: it was a place people could gather to talk about things, argue about things, debate. A meeting-house. A democratic space. (Naturally, this is only applicable to MALES in the 18th and 19th century.) Paintings were done of these coffee houses. Fadiman looks at some of them and mentions how everyone is TALKING in said photos. Of course they’re talking. They just had their 20th cup of coffee.

My favorite part of this essay is when she talks about writers known for their coffee-drinking. Here’s an excerpt.

At Large and At Small: Familiar Essays, “Coffee,” by Anne Fadiman

Caffeine was first isolated in 1819, when the elderly Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, who had swallowed oceans of coffee in his younger days and regretted his intemperance handed a box of Arabian mocha coffee beans to a chemist named Friedlieb Ferdinand Runge and enjoined him to analyze their contents. Runge extracted an alkaloid that, as Jacob put it, “presents itself in the form of shining, white, needle-shaped crystals, reminding us of swansdown and still more of snow.” Caffeine is so toxic that laboratory technicians who handle it in its purified state wear masks and gloves. In The World of Caffeine, by Bennett Alan Weinberg and Bonnie K. Bealer, there is a photograph of the label from a jar of pharmaceutical grade crystals. It reads in part:

WARNING! MAY BE HARMFUL IF INHALED OR SWALLOWED. HAS CAUSED MUTAGENIC AND REPRODUCTIVE EFFECTS IN LABORATORY ANIMALS. INHALATION CAUSES RAPID HEART RATE, EXCITEMENT, DIZZINESS, PAIN, COLLAPSE, HYPOTENSION, FEVER, SHORTNESS OF BREATH. MAY CAUSE HEADACHE, INSOMNIA, NAUSEA, VOMITING, STOMACH PAIN, COLLAPSE AND CONVULSIONS.

Anyone who doubts that caffeine is a drug should read some of the prose composed under its influence. Many of the books on coffee that currently crowd my desk share a certain … velocity, as if their authors, all terrifically buzzed at 3:00 a.m., couldn’t get their words out fast enough and had to resort to italics, hyperbole, and sentences so long that by the time you get to the end you can’t remember the beginning. (But that’s only if you’re uncaffeinated when you read them; if you’ve knocked back a couple of cafe noirs yourself, keeping pace is no sweat.) Heinrich Eduard Jacob boasts that his narrative was “given soul by a coffee-driven euphoria.” Gregory Dicum and Nina Luttinger claim that while they were writing The Coffee Book: Anatomy of an Industry from Crop to the Last Drop, they

sucked down 85 double Americanos, 12 double espressos, 4 perfect riserettos, 812 regular cups (from 242 French press loads, plus 87 cups of drip coffee), 47 Turkish coffees, a half-dozen regrettable cups of flavored coffee, 10 pounds of organic coffee, 7 pounds of fair trade coffee, a quarter pound of chicory and a handful of hemp seeds as occasional adjuncts, 1 can of ground supermarket coffee (drunk mostly iced), 6 canned or bottled coffee drinks, 2 pints of coffee beer, a handful of mochas, 1 pint of coffee concentrate, a couple of cappuccinos, 1 espresso soda, and, just to see, a lone double tall low-fat soy orange decaf latte.

Their book contains only 196 pages and doesn’t look as if it took very long to write; that decaf latte aside, the authors’ caffeine quota per day must have been prodigious. (But note their exactitude: coffee makes you peppy, but it doesn’t make you sloppy.)

The contemporary master of the genre is Stewart Lee Allen, known as “the Hunter S. Thompson of coffee journalism,” whose gonzo masterwork, The Devil’s Cup, entailed the consumption of “2,920 liters of percolated, drip, espresso, latte, cappuccino, macchiato, con panna, instant and americana.” (It isn’t very long either. By the time Allen finished, his blood must have been largely composed of 1,3,7-trimethylzanthine.) Following the historical routes by which coffee spread around the globe, Allen gets wired in Harrar, San’a, Istanbul, Vienna, Munich, Paris, Rio de Janeiro, and various points across the United States, attempting to finance his travels and his coffee habit with complicated transactions involving forged passports and smuggled art. He ends up on Route 66, in search of the worst cup of coffee in America, in a Honda Accord driveway filled with every form of caffeine he can think of: Stimu-Chew, Water Joe, Krank, hi-caf candy, and a vial of caffeine crystals (scored from an Internet site that features images of twitching eyeballs) whose resemblance to cocaine occasions some exciting psychopharmacological plot twists when a state trooper pulls him over in Athens, Tennessee.

But in the realm of twitching eyeballs, even Stewart Lee Allen can’t hold a candle to Honoré de Balzac, the model for every espresso-swilling writer who has followed in his jittery footsteps. What hashish was to Baudelaire, opium to Coleridge, cocaine to Robert Louis Stevenson, nitrous oxide to Robert Southey, mescaline to Aldous Hu xley, and Benzedrine to Jack Kerouac, caffeine was to Balzac. The habit started early. Like a preppie with an expensive connection, he ran up alarming debts with a concierge who, for a price, was willing to sneak contraband coffee beans into Balzac’s boarding school. As an adult, grinding out novels eighteen hours a day while listening for the rap of creditors at the door, Balzac observed the addict’s classic regimen, boosting his doses as his tolerance mounted. First he drank one cup a day, then a few cups, then many cups, then forty cups. Finally, by using less and less water, he increased the concentration of each fix until he was eating dry coffee grounds: “a horrible, rather brutal method,” he wrote, “that I recommend only to men of excessive vigor, men with thick black hair and skin covered with liver spots, men with big square hands and legs shaped like bowling pins.” Although the recipe was hell on the stomach, it dispatched caffeine to the brain with exquisite efficiency.

From that moment on, everything became agitated. Ideas quick-march into motion like battalions of a grand army to its legendary fighting ground, and the battle rages. Memories charge in, bright flags on high; the cavalry of metaphor deploys with a magnificent gallop; the artillery of logic rushes up with clattering wagons and cartridges; on imagination’s orders, sharpshooters sight and fire; forms and shapes and characters rear up; the paper is spread with ink.

Could that passage have been written on decaf?

Balzac’s coffeepot is displayed at 57 rue Raynouard in Paris, where he lived for much of his miserable last decade, writing La Cousine Bette and Le Cousin Pons, losing his health, and escaping bill collectors through a secret door. My friend Adam (who likes his espresso strong but with sugar) visited the house a few years ago. “The coffeepot is red and white china,” he wrote me, “and bears Balzac’s monogram. It’s an elegant, neat little thing, almost nautical in appearance. I can imagine it reigning serenely over the otherwise-general squalor of his later life, a small pharos of caffeine amid the gloom.”

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2 Responses to The Books: At Large and At Small, “Coffee,” by Anne Fadiman

  1. Sylvia says:

    I love that you do these excerpts, Sheila. I’ve just put this book into my Amazon cart for when I need that “extra” book to get me the free shipping!

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