.
Of the miseries
regularly inflicted on humankind, some are so minor and yet, while they last,
so painful that one wonders how, after all this time, a remedy cannot have been
found. If scientists do not have a cure for cancer, that makes sense. But the
common cold, the menstrual cramp? The hangover is another condition of this
kind. It is a preventable malady: don’t drink. Nevertheless, people throughout
time have found what seemed to them good reason for recourse to alcohol. One
attraction is alcohol’s power to disinhibit—to allow us, at last, to tell off
our neighbor or make an improper suggestion to his wife. Alcohol may also
persuade us that we have found the truth about life, a comforting experience
rarely available in the sober hour. Through the lens of alcohol, the world
seems nicer. (“I drink to make other people interesting,” the theatre critic
George Jean Nathan used to say.) For all these reasons, drinking cheers people
up. See Proverbs 31:6-7: “Give . . . wine unto those that be of heavy hearts.
Let him drink, and forget his poverty, and remember his misery no more.” It
works, but then, in the morning, a new misery presents itself.
A hangover peaks when
alcohol that has been poured into the body is finally eliminated from it—that
is, when the blood-alcohol level returns to zero. The toxin is now gone, but
the damage it has done is not. By fairly common consent, a hangover will involve
some combination of headache, upset stomach, thirst, food aversion, nausea,
diarrhea, tremulousness, fatigue, and a general feeling of wretchedness.
Scientists haven’t yet found all the reasons for this network of woes, but they
have proposed various causes. One is withdrawal, which would bring on the
tremors and also sweating. A second factor may be dehydration. Alcohol
interferes with the secretion of the hormone that inhibits urination. Hence the
heavy traffic to the rest rooms at bars and parties. The resulting dehydration
seems to trigger the thirst and lethargy. While that is going on, the alcohol
may also be inducing hypoglycemia (low blood sugar), which converts into
light-headedness and muscle weakness, the feeling that one’s bones have turned to
jello. Meanwhile, the body, to break down the alcohol, is releasing chemicals
that may be more toxic than alcohol itself; these would result in nausea and
other symptoms. Finally, the alcohol has produced inflammation, which in turn
causes the white blood cells to flood the bloodstream with molecules called
cytokines. Apparently, cytokines are the source of the aches and pains and
lethargy that, when our bodies are attacked by a flu virus—and likewise,
perhaps, by alcohol—encourage us to stay in bed rather than go to work, thereby
freeing up the body’s energy for use by the white cells in combatting the
invader. In a series of experiments, mice that were given a cytokine inducer
underwent dramatic changes. Adult males wouldn’t socialize with young males new
to their cage. Mothers displayed “impaired nest-building.” Many people will
know how these mice felt.
But hangover symptoms
are not just physical; they are cognitive as well. People with hangovers show
delayed reaction times and difficulties with attention, concentration, and
visual-spatial perception. A group of airplane pilots given simulated flight
tests after a night’s drinking put in substandard performances. Similarly,
automobile drivers, the morning after, get low marks on simulated road tests.
Needless to say, this is a hazard, and not just for those at the wheel. There
are laws against drunk driving, but not against driving with a hangover.
Hangovers also have
an emotional component. Kingsley Amis, who was, in his own words, one of the
foremost drunks of his time, and who wrote three books on drinking, described
this phenomenon as “the metaphysical hangover”: “When that ineffable compound
of depression, sadness (these two are not the same), anxiety, self-hatred,
sense of failure and fear for the future begins to steal over you, start
telling yourself that what you have is a hangover. . . . You have not suffered
a minor brain lesion, you are not all that bad at your job, your family and
friends are not leagued in a conspiracy of barely maintained silence about what
a shit you are, you have not come at last to see life as it really is.” Some
people are unable to convince themselves of this. Amis described the opening of
Kafka’s “Metamorphosis,” with the hero discovering that he has been changed
into a bug, as the best literary representation of a hangover.
The severity of a
hangover depends, of course, on how much you drank the night before, but that
is not the only determinant. What, besides alcohol, did you consume at that
party? If you took other drugs as well, your hangover may be worse. And what
kind of alcohol did you drink? In general, darker drinks, such as red wine and
whiskey, have higher levels of congeners—impurities produced by the
fermentation process, or added to enhance flavor—than do light-colored drinks
such as white wine, gin, and vodka. The greater the congener content, the uglier
the morning. Then there are your own characteristics—for example, your drinking
pattern. Unjustly, habitually heavy drinkers seem to have milder hangovers.
Your sex is also important. A woman who matches drinks with a man is going to
get drunk faster than he, partly because she has less body water than he does,
and less of the enzyme alcohol dehydrogenase, which breaks down alcohol.
Apparently, your genes also have a vote, as does your gene pool. Almost forty
per cent of East Asians have a variant, less efficient form of aldehyde
dehydrogenase, another enzyme necessary for alcohol processing. Therefore, they
start showing signs of trouble after just a few sips—they flush
dramatically—and they get drunk fast. This is an inconvenience for some
Japanese and Korean businessmen. They feel that they should drink with their
Western colleagues. Then they crash to the floor and have to make awkward phone
calls in the morning.
Hangovers are
probably as old as alcohol use, which dates back to the Stone Age. Some anthropologists
have proposed that alcohol production may have predated agriculture; in any
case, it no doubt stimulated that development, because in many parts of the
world the cereal harvest was largely given over to beer-making. Other
prehistorians have speculated that alcohol intoxication may have been one of
the baffling phenomena, like storms, dreams, and death, that propelled early
societies toward organized religion. The ancient Egyptians, who, we are told,
made seventeen varieties of beer, believed that their god Osiris invented this
agreeable beverage. They buried their dead with supplies of beer for use in the
afterlife.
Alcohol was also one
of our ancestors’ foremost medicines. Berton Roueché, in a 1960 article on
alcohol for The New Yorker, quoted a prominent fifteenth-century German
physician, Hieronymus Brunschwig, on the range of physical ills curable by
brandy: head sores, pallor, baldness, deafness, lethargy, toothache, mouth
cankers, bad breath, swollen breasts, short-windedness, indigestion, flatulence,
jaundice, dropsy, gout, bladder infections, kidney stones, fever, dog bites,
and infestation with lice or fleas. Additionally, in many times and places,
alcohol was one of the few safe things to drink. Water contamination is a very
old problem.
Some words for
hangover, like ours, refer prosaically to the cause: the Egyptians say they are
“still drunk,” the Japanese “two days drunk,” the Chinese “drunk overnight.”
The Swedes get “smacked from behind.” But it is in languages that describe the
effects rather than the cause that we begin to see real poetic power.
Salvadorans wake up “made of rubber,” the French with a “wooden mouth” or a
“hair ache.” The Germans and the Dutch say they have a “tomcat,” presumably
wailing. The Poles, reportedly, experience a “howling of kittens.” My favorites
are the Danes, who get “carpenters in the forehead.” In keeping with the saying
about the Eskimos’ nine words for snow, the Ukrainians have several words for
hangover. And, in keeping with the Jews-don’t-drink rule, Hebrew didn’t even
have one word until recently. Then the experts at the Academy of the Hebrew
Language, in Tel Aviv, decided that such a term was needed, so they made one
up: hamarmoret, derived from the word for fermentation. (Hamarmoret
echoes a usage of Jeremiah’s, in Lamentations 1:20, which the King James Bible
translates as “My bowels are troubled.”) There is a biochemical basis for
Jewish abstinence. Many Jews—fifty per cent, in one estimate—carry a variant
gene for alcohol dehydrogenase. Therefore, they, like the East Asians, have a
low tolerance for alcohol.
As for hangover
remedies, they are legion. There are certain unifying themes, however. When you
ask people, worldwide, how to deal with a hangover, their first answer is
usually the hair of the dog. The old faithful in this category is the Bloody
Mary, but books on curing hangovers—I have read three, and that does not
exhaust the list—describe more elaborate potions, often said to have been
invented in places like Cap d’Antibes by bartenders with names like Jean-Marc.
An English manual, Andrew Irving’s “How to Cure a Hangover” (2004), devotes
almost a hundred pages to hair-of-the-dog recipes, including the Suffering
Bastard (gin, brandy, lime juice, bitters, and ginger ale); the Corpse Reviver (Pernod,
champagne, and lemon juice); and the Thomas Abercrombie (two Alka-Seltzers
dropped into a double shot of tequila). Kingsley Amis suggests taking Underberg
bitters, a highly alcoholic digestive: “The resulting mild convulsions and
cries of shock are well worth witnessing. But thereafter a comforting glow
supervenes.” Many people, however, simply drink some more of what they had the
night before. My Ukrainian informant described his morning-after protocol for a
vodka hangover as follows: “two shots of vodka, then a cigarette, then another
shot of vodka.” A Japanese source suggested wearing a sake-soaked surgical
mask.
Application of the
hair of the dog may sound like nothing more than a way of getting yourself
drunk enough so that you don’t notice you have a hangover, but, according to
Wayne Jones, of the Swedish National Laboratory of Forensic Medicine, the
biochemistry is probably more complicated than that. Jones’s theory is that the
liver, in processing alcohol, first addresses itself to ethanol, which is the
alcohol proper, and then moves on to methanol, a secondary ingredient of many
wines and spirits. Because methanol breaks down into formic acid, which is
highly toxic, it is during this second stage that the hangover is most
crushing. If at that point you pour in more alcohol, the body will switch back
to ethanol processing. This will not eliminate the hangover—the methanol
(indeed, more of it now) is still waiting for you round the bend—but it delays
the worst symptoms. It may also mitigate them somewhat. On the other hand, you
are drunk again, which may create difficulty about going to work.
As for the
non-alcoholic means of combatting hangover, these fall into three categories:
before or while drinking, before bed, and the next morning. Many people advise
you to eat a heavy meal, with lots of protein and fats, before or while
drinking. If you can’t do that, at least drink a glass of milk. In Africa, the
same purpose is served by eating peanut butter. The other most frequent
before-and-during recommendation is water, lots of it. Proponents of this
strategy tell you to ask for a glass of water with every drink you order, and
then make yourself chug-a-lug the water before addressing the drink.
A recently favored
antidote, both in Asia and in the West, is sports drinks, taken either the
morning after or, more commonly, at the party itself. A fast-moving bar drink
these days is Red Bull, an energy drink, mixed with vodka or with the herbal
liqueur Jägermeister. (The latter cocktail is a Jag-bomb.) Some people say that
the Red Bull holds the hangover at bay, but apparently its primary effect is to
blunt the depressive force of alcohol—no surprise, since an eight-ounce serving
of Red Bull contains more caffeine than two cans of Coke. According to fans, you
can rock all night. According to Maria Lucia Souza-Formigoni, a psychobiology
researcher at the Federal University of São Paolo, that’s true, and dangerous.
After a few drinks with Red Bull, you’re drunk but you don’t know it, and
therefore you may engage in high-risk behaviors—driving, going home with a
questionable companion—rather than passing out quietly in your chair. Red
Bull’s manufacturers have criticized the methodology of Souza-Formigoni’s study
and have pointed out that they never condoned mixing their product with
alcohol.
When you get home, is
there anything you can do before going to bed? Those still able to consider
such a question are advised, again, to consume buckets of water, and also to
take some Vitamin C. Koreans drink a bowl of water with honey, presumably to
head off the hypoglycemia. Among the young, one damage-control measure is the
ancient Roman method, induced vomiting. Nic van Oudtshoorn’s “The Hangover
Handbook” (1997) thoughtfully provides a recipe for an emetic: mix mustard
powder with water. If you have “bed spins,” sleep with one foot on the floor.
Now to the sorrows of
the morning. The list-topping recommendation, apart from another go at the
water cure, is the greasy-meal cure. (An American philosophy professor: “Have breakfast
at Denny’s.” An English teen-ager: “Eat two McDonald’s hamburgers. They have a
secret ingredient for hangovers.”) Spicy foods, especially Mexican, are
popular, along with eggs, as in the Denny’s breakfast. Another egg-based cure
is the prairie oyster, which involves vinegar, Worcestershire sauce, and a raw
egg yolk to be consumed whole. Sugar, some say, should be reapplied. A reporter
at the Times: “Drink a six-pack of Coke.” Others suggest fruit juice. In
Scotland, there is a soft drink called Irn-Bru, described to me by a local as
tasting like melted plastic. Irn-Bru is advertised to the Scots as “Your Other
National Drink.” Also widely employed are milk-based drinks. Teen-agers
recommend milkshakes and smoothies. My contact in Calcutta said buttermilk.
“You can also pour it over your head,” he added. “Very soothing.”
Elsewhere on the
international front, many people in Asia and the Near East take strong tea. The
Italians and the French prefer strong coffee. (Italian informant: add lemon.
French informant: add salt. Alcohol researchers: stay away from coffee—it’s a
diuretic and will make you more dehydrated.) Germans eat pickled herring; the
Japanese turn to pickled plums; the Vietnamese drink a wax-gourd juice.
Moroccans say to chew cumin seeds; Andeans, coca leaves. Russians swear by
pickle brine. An ex-Soviet ballet dancer told me, “Pickle juice or a shot of
vodka or pickle juice with a shot of vodka.”
Many folk cures for
hangovers are soups: menudo in Mexico, mondongo in Puerto Rico, işkembe
çorbasi in Turkey, patsa in Greece, khashi in Georgia. The
fact that all of the above involve tripe may mean something. Hungarians favor a
concoction of cabbage and smoked meats, sometimes forthrightly called “hangover
soup.” The Russians’ morning-after soup, solyanka, is, of course, made
with pickle juice. The Japanese have traditionally relied on miso soup, though
a while ago there was a fashion for a vegetable soup invented and marketed by
one Kazu Tateishi, who claimed that it cured cancer as well as hangovers.
I read this list of
food cures to Manuela Neuman, a Canadian researcher on alcohol-induced liver
damage, and she laughed at only one, the six-pack of Coke. Many of the cures
probably work, she said, on the same distraction principle as the hair of the
dog: “Take the spicy foods, for example. They divert the body’s attention away
from coping with the alcohol to coping with the spices, which are also a toxin.
So you have new problems—with your stomach, with your esophagus, with your
respiration—rather than the problem with the headache, or that you are going to
the washroom every five minutes.” The high-fat and high-protein meals operate
in the same way, she said. The body turns to the food and forgets about the
alcohol for the time being, thus delaying the hangover and possibly alleviating
it. As for the differences among the many food recommendations, Neuman said
that any country’s hangover cure, like the rest of its cultural practices, is
an adaptation to the environment. Chilies are readily available in Mexico,
peanut butter in Africa. People use what they have. Neuman also pointed out
that local cures will reflect the properties of local brews. If Russians favor
pickle juice, they are probably right to, because their drink is vodka: “Vodka
is a very pure alcohol. It doesn’t have the congeners that you find, for
example, in whiskey in North America. The congeners are also toxic, independent
of alcohol, and will have their own effects. With vodka you are just going to
have pure-alcohol effects, and one of the most important of those is
dehydration. The Russians drink a lot of water with their vodka, and that
combats the dehydration. The pickle brine will have the same effect. It’s
salty, so they’ll drink more water, and that’s what they need.”
Many hangover
cures—the soups, the greasy breakfast—are comfort foods, and that, apart from
any sworn-by ingredients, may be their chief therapeutic property, but some
other remedies sound as though they were devised by the witches in “Macbeth.”
Kingsley Amis recommended a mixture of Bovril and vodka. There is also a
burnt-toast cure. Such items suggest that what some hungover people are seeking
is not so much relief as atonement. The same can be said of certain non-food
recommendations, such as exercise. One source says that you should do a
forty-minute workout, another that you should run six miles—activities that may
have little attraction for the hung over. Additional procedures said to be
effective are an intravenous saline drip and kidney dialysis, which, apart from
their lack of appeal, are not readily available.
There are other
non-ingested remedies. Amazon will sell you a refrigeratable eye mask, an
aromatherapy inhaler, and a vinyl statue of St. Vivian, said to be the patron
saint of the hung over. She comes with a stand and a special prayer.
The most widely used
over-the-counter remedy is no doubt aspirin. Advil, or ibuprofen, and
Alka-Seltzer—there is a special formula for hangovers, Alka-Seltzer Wake-Up
Call—are probably close runners-up. (Tylenol, or acetaminophen, should not be
used, because alcohol increases its toxicity to the liver.) Also commonly
recommended are Vitamin C and B-complex vitamins. But those are almost home
remedies. In recent years, pharmaceutical companies have come up with more specialized
formulas: Chaser, NoHang, BoozEase, PartySmart, Sob’r-K HangoverStopper,
Hangover Prevention Formula, and so on. In some of these, such as Sob’r-K and
Chaser, the primary ingredient is carbon, which, according to the
manufacturers, soaks up toxins. Others are herbal compounds, featuring such
ingredients as ginseng, milk thistle, borage, and extracts of prickly pear,
artichoke, and guava leaf. These and other O.T.C. remedies aim to boost
biochemicals that help the body deal with toxins. A few remedies have
scientific backing. Manuela Neuman, in lab tests, found that milk-thistle
extract, which is an ingredient in NoHang and Hangover Helper, does protect
cells from damage by alcohol. A research team headed by Jeffrey Wiese, of
Tulane University, tested prickly-pear extract, the key ingredient in Hangover
Prevention Formula, on human subjects and found significant improvement with
the nausea, dry mouth, and food aversion but not with other, more common
symptoms, such as headache.
Five years ago, there
was a flurry in the press over a new O.T.C. remedy called RU-21 (i.e., Are you
twenty-one?). According to the reports, this wonder drug was the product of
twenty-five years of painstaking research by the Russian Academy of Sciences,
which developed it for K.G.B. agents who wanted to stay sober while getting
their contacts drunk and prying information out of them. During the Cold War,
we were told, the formula was a state secret, but in 1999 it was declassified.
Now it was ours! “HERE’S ONE COMMUNIST PLOT AMERICANS CAN REALLY GET BEHIND,”
the headline in the Washington Post said. “BOTTOMS UP TO OUR BUDDIES IN
RUSSIA,” the Cleveland Plain Dealer said. The literature on RU-21 was
mysterious, however. If the formula was developed to keep your head clear, how
come so many reports said that it didn’t suppress the effects of alcohol?
Clearly, it couldn’t work both ways. When I put this question to Emil Chiaberi,
a co-founder of RU-21’s manufacturer, Spirit Sciences, in California, he
answered, “No, no, no. It is true that succinic acid”—a key ingredient of
RU-21—“was tested at the Russian Academy of Sciences, including secret
laboratories that worked for the K.G.B. But it didn’t do what they wanted. It
didn’t keep people sober, and so it never made it with the K.G.B. men.
Actually, it does improve your condition a little. In Russia, I’ve seen people
falling under the table plenty of times—they drink differently over there—and
if they took a few of these pills they were able to get up and walk around, and
maybe have a couple more drinks. But no, what those scientists discovered,
really by accident, was a way to prevent hangover.” (Like many other O.T.C.
remedies, RU-21 is best taken before or while drinking, not the next morning.)
Asians love the product, Chiaberi says. “It flies off the shelves there.” In
the United States, it is big with the Hollywood set: “For every film
festival—Sundance, the Toronto Film Festival—we get calls asking us to send
them RU-21 for parties. So it has that glamour thing.”
Most cures for hangover—indeed,
most statements about hangover—have not been tested. Jeffrey Wiese and his
colleagues, in a 2000 article in Annals of Internal Medicine, reported
that in the preceding thirty-five years more than forty-seven hundred articles
on alcohol intoxication had been published, but that only a hundred and eight
of these dealt with hangover. There may be more information on hangover cures
in college newspapers—a rich source—than in the scientific literature. And the
research that has been published is often weak. A team of scientists attempting
to review the literature on hangover cures were able to assemble only fifteen
articles, and then they had to throw out all but eight on methodological
grounds. There have been more studies in recent years, but historically this is
not a subject that has captured scientists’ hearts.
Which is curious,
because anyone who discovered a widely effective hangover cure would make a
great deal of money. Doing the research is hard, though. Lab tests with cell
samples are relatively simple to conduct, as are tests with animals, some of
which have been done. In one experiment, with a number of rats suffering from
artificially induced hangovers, ninety per cent of the animals died, but in a
group that was first given Vitamins B and C, together with cysteine, an amino
acid contained in some O.T.C. remedies, there were no deaths. (Somehow this is
not reassuring.) The acid test, however, is in clinical trials, with human
beings, and these are complicated. Basically, what you have to do is give a
group of people a lot to drink, apply the remedy in question, and then, the
next morning, score them on a number of measures in comparison with people who
consumed the same amount of alcohol without the remedy. But there are many
factors that you have to control for: the sex of the subjects; their general
health; their family history; their past experience with alcohol; the type of
alcohol you give them; the amount of food and water they consume before,
during, and after; and the circumstances under which they drink, among other
variables. (Wiese and his colleagues, in their prickly-pear experiment,
provided music so that the subjects could dance, as at a party.) Ideally, there
should also be a large sample—many subjects.
All that costs money,
and researchers do not pay out of pocket. They depend on funding
institutions—typically, universities, government agencies, and foundations.
With all those bodies, a grant has to be O.K.’d by an ethics committee, and
such committees’ ethics may stop short of getting people drunk. For one thing,
they are afraid that the subjects will hurt themselves. (All the studies I read
specified that the subjects were sent home by taxi or limousine after their
contribution to science.) Furthermore, many people believe that alcohol abusers
should suffer the next morning—that this is a useful deterrent. Robert
Lindsey, the president of the National Council on Alcoholism and Drug
Dependence, told me that he wasn’t sure about that. His objection to
hangover-cure research was simply that it was a misuse of resources: “Fifteen
million people in this country are alcohol-dependent. That’s a staggering
number! They need help: not with hangovers but with the cause of
hangovers—alcohol addiction.” Robert Swift, an alcohol researcher who teaches
at Brown University, counters that if scientists, through research, could
provide the public with better information on the cognitive impairments
involved in hangover, we might be able to prevent accidents. He compares the
situation to the campaigns against distributing condoms, on the ground that
this would increase promiscuity. In fact, the research has shown that free
condoms did not have that effect. What they did was cut down on unwanted
pregnancies and sexually transmitted disease.
Manufacturers of
O.T.C. remedies are sensitive to the argument that they are enablers, and their
literature often warns against heavy drinking. The message may be unashamedly
mixed, however. The makers of NoHang, on their Web page, say what your mother
would: “It is recommended that you drink moderately and responsibly.” At the
same time, they tell you that with NoHang “you can drink the night away.” They
list the different packages in which their product can be bought: the Bender
(twelve tablets), the Party Animal (twenty-four), the It’s Noon Somewhere
(forty-eight). Among the testimonials they publish is one by “Chad S,” from
Chicago: “After getting torn up all day on Saturday, I woke up Sunday morning
completely hangover-free. I must have had like twenty drinks.” Researchers
address the moral issue less hypocritically. Wiese and his colleagues describe
the damage done by hangovers—according to their figures, the cost to the U.S.
economy, in absenteeism and poor job performance, is a hundred and forty-eight billion
dollars a year (other estimates are far lower, but still substantial)—and they
mention the tests with the airplane pilots, guaranteed to scare anyone. They
also say that there is no experimental evidence indicating that hangover relief
encourages further drinking. (Nor, they might have added, have there been any
firm findings on this matter.) Manuela Neuman, more philosophically, says that
some people, now and then, are going to drink too much, no matter what you tell
them, and that we should try to relieve the suffering caused thereby. Such
reasoning seems to have cut no ice with funding institutions. Of the meagre
research I have read in support of various cures, all was paid for, at least in
part, by pharmaceutical companies.
A truly successful
hangover cure is probably going to be slow in coming. In the meantime, however,
it is not easy to sympathize with the alcohol disciplinarians, so numerous, for
example, in the United States. They seem to lack a sense of humor and, above
all, the tragic sense of life. They appear not to know that many people have a
lot that they’d like to forget. In the words of the English aphorist William
Bolitho, “The shortest way out of Manchester is . . . a bottle of Gordon’s
gin,” and if that relief is temporary the reformers would be hard put to offer
a more lasting solution. Also questionable is the moral emphasis of the
temperance folk, their belief that drinking is a lapse, a sin, as if getting to
work on time, or living a hundred years, were the crown of life. They forget
alcohol’s relationship to camaraderie, sharing, toasts. Those, too, are moral
matters. Even hangovers are related to social comforts. Alcohol investigators
describe the bad things that people do on the morning after. According to
Genevieve Ames and her research team at the Prevention Research Center, in
Berkeley, hungover assembly-line workers are more likely to be criticized by
their supervisors, to have disagreements with their co-workers, and to feel
lousy. Apart from telling us what we already know, such findings are
incomplete, because they do not talk about the jokes around the water
cooler—the fellowship, the badge of honor. Yes, there are safer ways of gaining
honor, but how available are they to most people?
Outside the United
States, there is less finger-wagging. British writers, if they recommend a
cure, will occasionally say that it makes you feel good enough to go out and
have another drink. They are also more likely to tell you about the health
benefits of moderate drinking—how it lowers one’s risk of heart disease,
Alzheimer’s, and so on. English fiction tends to portray drinking as a matter
of getting through the day, often quite acceptably. In P. G. Wodehouse’s Jeeves
and Wooster series, a hangover is the occasion of a happy event, Bertie’s
hiring of Jeeves. Bertie, after “a late evening,” is lying on the couch in
agony when Jeeves rings his doorbell. “ ‘I was sent by the agency, sir,’ he
said. ‘I was given to understand that you required a valet.’ ” Bertie says he
would have preferred a mortician. Jeeves takes one look at Bertie, brushes past
him, and vanishes into the kitchen, from which he emerges a moment later with a
glass on a tray. It contains a prairie oyster. Bertie continues, “I would have
clutched at anything that looked like a life-line that morning. I swallowed the
stuff. For a moment I felt as if somebody . . . was strolling down my throat
with a lighted torch, and then everything seemed suddenly to get all right. The
sun shone in through the window; birds twittered in the tree-tops; and,
generally speaking, hope dawned once more. ‘You’re engaged,’ I said.” Here the
hangover is a comedy, or at least a fact of life. So it has been, probably,
since the Stone Age, and so it is likely to be for a while yet.
.
