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 cafés 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 83 double Americanos, 12 double espressos, 4 perfect ristrettos, 812 regular cups (from 241 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-trimethylxanthine.) 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 driveaway 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 Huxley, 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 becomes 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 47 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.”
When I was fifteen, I went to Paris myself. I didn’t realize it at the time, but that summer I stood at a fateful crossroads. One way led to coffee, the other to liquor.
I was a student on a high school French program in an era when the construction of in loco parentis was considerably looser than it is now. I began each day with a café au lait at a local patisserie and ended it with a crème de menthe frappé at a bar. One afternoon, after we had left Paris and were traveling through southern France, the director of the program invited me to lunch at a three-star restaurant in Vienne, where we shared pâté de foie gras en brioche, mousse de truite Périgueux, turbot à la crème aux herbes, pintadeau aux herbes, gratin dauphinois, fromages, gâteau aux marrons, petits fours, and a Brut Crémant ’62. I’d never drunk half a bottle of wine before. Afterward, en route to Avignon in Monsieur Cosnard’s Mercedes, I was asked to help navigate, a task that appeared inexplicably difficult until I realized I was holding the map upside down.
The conclusion was clear: Why would anyone want to feel like this? Although I never became a teetotaler, I knew—especially when I woke up the next morning with a hangover—that I would cast my lot with caffeine, not with alcohol. Why would I wish my senses to be dulled when they could be sharpened? Why would I wish to forget when I could remember? Why would I wish to mumble when I could scintillate? Of course, since even in those days I was a loquacious workaholic who liked to stay up late, you might think I’d pick a drug that would nudge me closer to the center of the bell curve instead of pushing me farther out on the edge—but of course I didn’t. Who does? Don’t we all just keep doing the things that make us even more like ourselves?
As I lay in bed with a godawful headache, sunlight streamed through the open window, and so did the smell of good French coffee from the hotel kitchen downstairs.
Heinrich Eduard Jacob called coffee the “anti-Bacchus.” By the middle of the seventeenth century, when it had filtered westward from the Middle East and begun to captivate Europe, its potential consumers were in dire need of sober
ing up. “The eyes, the blood-vessels, the senses of the men of those days were soused in beer,” observed Jacob. “It choked their livers, their voices, and their hearts.” The average Englishman drank three liters of beer a day—nearly two six-packs—and spent a lot of time bumping into lampposts and falling into gutters. Coffee was hailed as a salubrious alternative. As an anonymous poet put it in 1674, “When foggy Ale, leavying up mighty trains / Of muddy vapours, had besieg’d our Brains, / Then Heaven in Pity… / First sent amongst us this All-healing Berry.”
Between 1645 and 1750, as coffeehouses sprang up in Paris, Vienna, Leipzig, Amsterdam, Rome, and Venice, the All-healing Berry defogged innumerable Continental brains. But until tea gained the upper hand around 1730, the English were the undisputed kings of coffee. By the most conservative estimates, London had five hundred coffeehouses at the turn of the eighteenth century. (If New York City were similarly equipped today, it would have nearly eight thousand.) These weren’t merely places to drink the muddy liquid that one critic likened to “syrup of soot or essence of old shoes.” In the days when public libraries were nonexistent and journalism was in its embryonic stages, they were a vital center of news, gossip, and education—“penny universities” whose main business, in the words of a 1657 newspaper ad, was “PUBLICK INTERCOURSE.”
London had a coffeehouse for everyone (as long as you were male). If you were a gambler, you went to White’s. If you were a physician, you went to Garraway’s or Child’s. If you were a businessman, you went to Lloyd’s, which later evolved into the great insurance house. If you were a scientist, you went to the Grecian, where Isaac Newton, Edmund Halley, and Hans Sloane once staged a public dissection of a dolphin that had been caught in the Thames. If you were a journalist, you went to Button’s, where Joseph Addison had set up a “Reader’s Letter-box” shaped like a lion’s head; you could post submissions to The Guardian in its mouth. And if you were a man of letters, you—along with Pope, Pepys, and Dryden—went to Will’s, where you could join a debate on whether Milton should have written Paradise Lost in rhymed couplets instead of blank verse. These coffeehouses changed the course of English social history by demonstrating how pleasant it was to hang out in a place where (according to a 1674 set of Rules and Orders of the Coffee House) “Gentry, Tradesmen, all are welcome hither, / and may without affront sit down together.” And they changed the course of English literature by turning monologuists into conversationalists. A 1705 watercolor that now hangs in the British Museum depicts a typical establishment, a high-ceilinged room dominated by a huge black coffee cauldron that simmers over a blazing fire. The periwigged patrons are sipping coffee, smoking pipes, reading news-sheets, and scribbling in notebooks, but most of all—you can tell from their gesticulations—they are talking.
Looking back, I see that my evenings in Dunster House were a penny university in miniature. It therefore saddens me to report that these days my coffee-drinking is usually a solitary affair, a Balzacian response to deadlines (though in smaller doses) rather than an opportunity for publick intercourse. Time is scarcer than it used to be; I make my coffee with a disposable paper filter stuffed into a little plastic cone, not in a cafetière à piston. My customary intake is only a cup or two a day—still with milk and sugar—though I ratchet up my consumption when I’m writing. In the spirit of participatory journalism, every word of this essay has been written under the influence of 1,3,7-trimethylxanthine, in quantities sufficient to justify the use, after a respite of thirty years, of the mug with the polka-dotted pig.
My coffee is in every way a weaker brew than it once was, but I could never give it up entirely. This is not just a matter of habit, sentiment, or taste; it is more akin to the reasons that, long ago, the Galla people of Ethiopia ate ground coffee mixed with animal fat before they went off to fight, or that the night before every battle of the Civil War, you would have seen hundreds of campfires flickering in the darkness, each surmounted by a pot of thick, black, courage-inducing coffee.
I remember a morning five years ago when I took a dawn flight to Fort Myers, Florida. My father had just been hospitalized with what looked like—and in fact turned out to be—terminal cancer, and the task of dealing with doctors, nurses, and hospice workers had fallen to me. I’d been up all night, and I stumbled off the plane so bleary I could hardly walk. There, shimmering like a mirage at the end of the jetway, in the midst of what on my last visit had been a wasteland of Pizza Huts and Burger Kings, stood a newly opened Starbucks.
I know, I know. Heartless corporate giant. Monster of coast-to-coast uniformity. Killer of mom-and-pop cafés. But that’s not what I thought at that moment. I thought: I’m going to order a grande latte with whole milk. I’m going to pour in two packets of Sugar in the Raw, and stir really well so there are no undissolved crystals at the bottom. I’m going to sit down and drink it slowly. Then I’m going to drive to the hospital.
As I walked toward the counter, I said to myself: I can do this.
UNDER WATER
was an impatient child who disliked obstructions: traffic jams, clogged bathtub drains, cat-sup bottles you had to bang. I liked to drop twigs into the stream that ran through our backyard and watch them float downstream, coaxed around rocks and branches by the distant pull of the ocean. If they hit a snag, I freed them.
When I was eighteen, rushing through life as fast as I could, I was a student on a month-long wilderness program in western Wyoming. On the third day of the course we went canoeing on the Green River, a tributary of the Colorado that begins in the glaciers of the Wind River range and flows south across the sagebrush plains. Swollen by warm-weather runoff from an unusually deep snowpack, the Green was higher and swifter that month—June of 1972—than it had been in forty years. A river at flood stage can have strange currents. There is not enough room in the channel for the water to move downstream in an orderly fashion, so it collides with itself and forms whirlpools and boils and souseholes. Our instructors decided to stick to their itinerary nevertheless, but they put in at a relatively easy section of the Green, one that the flood had merely upgraded, in the international system of whitewater classification, from Class I to Class II. There are six levels of difficulty, and Class II was not an unreasonable challenge for novice paddlers.
The Green River did not seem dangerous to me. It seemed magnificently unobstructed. Impediments to progress—the rocks and stranded trees that under normal conditions would protrude above the surface—were mostly submerged. The river carried our aluminum canoe high and lightly, like a child on a pair of broad shoulders. We could rest our paddles on the gunwales and let the water do our work. The sun was bright and hot. Every few minutes I dipped my bandanna in the river, draped it over my head, and let an ounce or two of melted glacier run down my neck.
I was in the bow of the third canoe. We rounded a bend and saw, fifty feet ahead, a standing wave in the wake of a large black boulder. The students in the lead canoe were attempting to avoid the boulder by backferrying, slipping crabwise across the current by angling their boat diagonally and stroking backward. Done right, back-ferrying allows paddlers to hover midstream and carefully plan their course instead of surrendering to the water’s impetuous pace. But if they lean upstream—a natural inclination, as few people choose to lean toward the difficulties that lie ahead—the current can overflow the lowered gunwale and flip the boat. And that is what happened to the lead canoe.
I wasn’t worried when I saw it go over. Knowing that we might capsize in the fast water, our instructors had arranged to have our gear trucked to our next campsite. The packs were safe. The water was little more than waist-deep, and the paddlers were both wearing life jackets. They would be fine. One was already scrambling onto the right-hand bank.
But where was the second paddler? Gary, a local boy from Rawlins a year or two younger than I, seemed to be hung up on something. He was standing at a strange angle in the middle of the river, just downstream from the boulder. Gary was the only student on the course who h
ad not brought sneakers, and one of his mountaineering boots had become wedged between two rocks. The instructors would come around the bend in a moment and pluck him out, like a twig from a snag.
But they didn’t come. The second canoe pulled over to the bank and ours followed. Thirty seconds passed, maybe a minute. Then we saw the standing wave bend Gary’s body forward at the waist, push his face underwater, stretch his arms in front of him, and slip his orange life jacket off his shoulders. The life jacket lingered for a moment at his wrists before it floated downstream, its long white straps twisting in the current. His shirtless torso was pale and undulating, and it changed shape as hills and valleys of water flowed over him, altering the curve of the liquid lens through which we watched him. I thought: He looks like the flayed skin of St. Bartholomew in the Sistine Chapel. As soon as I had the thought, I knew that it was dishonorable. To think about anything outside the moment, outside Gary, was a crime of inattention. I swallowed a small, sour piece of self-knowledge: I was the sort of person who, instead of weeping or shouting or praying during a crisis, thought about something from a textbook (H. W. Janson’s History of Art, page 360).
Once the flayed man had come, I could not stop the stream of images: Gary looked like a piece of seaweed. Gary looked like a waving handkerchief, Gary looked like a hula dancer. Each simile was a way to avoid thinking about what Gary was, a drowning boy. To remember these things is dishonorable, too, for I have long since forgotten Gary’s last name and the color of his hair and the sound of his voice.
I do not remember a single word that anyone said. Somehow we got into one of the canoes, all five of us, and tried to ferry the twenty feet or so to the middle of the river. The current was so strong, and we were so incompetent, that we never even got close. Then we tried it on foot, linking arms to form a chain. The water was so cold that it stung. And it was noisy, not the roar and crash of whitewater but a groan, a terrible bass grumble, from the stones that were rolling and leaping down the riverbed. When we got close to Gary, we couldn’t see him. All we could see was the reflection of the sky. A couple of times, groping blindly, one of us touched him, but he was as slippery as soap. Then our knees buckled and our elbows unlocked, and we rolled downstream, like the stones. The river’s rocky load, moving invisibly beneath its smooth surface, pounded and scraped us. Eventually the current heaved us, blue-lipped and panting, onto the bank. In that other world above the water, the only sounds were the buzzing of bees and flies. Our wet sneakers kicked up red dust. The air smelled of sage and rabbitbrush and sunbaked earth.