A Couple of Cold Ones: Drinking Your Way through Literary History

_{Courtesy of literarypubcrawl.com}

You can study literary history. You can analyze it and you can write about it. It’s far better to drink your way through it, though.

That’s what I did on Saturday in New York City. On a bright, sunny afternoon, I met the Literary Pub Crawl guides at the historic White Horse Tavern, the second oldest bar in New York, for a three hour walking tour through some of the oldest taverns in the city, all hangouts for Gotham’s literary giants, such as Edgar Allan Poe, Jack Kerouac, Walt Whitman, Edna St. Vincent Millay, Dylan Thomas, Sinclair Lewis, e.e. cummings, Thomas Paine, James Fenimore Cooper, John Steinbeck, Norman Mailer, Lillian Hellman and, for good measure, both Andy Warhol and Bob Dylan at the same table.

The Literary Pub Crawl has been snaking its way through the streets and alleys of New York’s Greenwich Village since 1998, attracting crowds as large as forty people on its foray to the stoops of novelists, poets, playwrights and even a few New York politicians, starting in the 1770s and continuing into the 1970s.

On the crawl, guides Miranda Knudson and Kia Sayyadi spin dozens of marvelous anecdotes about the lives of the literary famous, from all night drinking binges to love triangles to poet Hart Crane’s three stages of drunkenness (the last one was bad, real bad).

The guides tell you all there is to know about the bars on the trip. The White Horse Tavern was home to thousands of longshoremen as well as the spot where so many writers and poets kept all-night vigils and where the Welsh poet Dylan Thomas (“Do Not Go Gentle into that Good Night”) died at 39 after sixteen drinks and an emergency visit to a nearby hospital. The Kettle of Fish is where 1950s beat generation writer Jack Kerouac (“On the Road”) and his friends hung out and where singer Bob Dylan and designer/filmmaker Andy Warhol battled for the affections of avante garde actress Edie Sedgwick.

The pub crawl attracts a variety of people. About sixty per cent are tourists and the rest are New Yorkers. “Half the people love literature and half love drinking,” laughed Eric Chase, the manager of the Literary Pub Crawl.

He said that the ages of the crawlers vary and they are from all over. On my tour there were people from Australia (they came to the New York pub crawl because they previously went to the Dublin, Ireland literary pub crawl), North Carolina and Georgia.

Pub crawlers are always struck by the huge number of legendary writers, playwrights and poets who lived in Greenwich Village or wrote their best works there. “In the 1920s, one half of all the books, plays and poems published in America were written in Greenwich Village,” added Chase.

With that knowledge, I trundled off on the tour, Saratoga Lager draft beer in hand (just one!).

The literary tour is more than just about book and theater history, though. You learn a lot about the history of New York City and State, prisons, the shipping industry, transportation and politics (the history of the gay riots at the fabled Stonewall Inn are discussed).

Who takes these tours?

“Everybody,” said Miranda Knudson, one of the guides and a very funny storyteller. “We get seniors, teenagers, young couples, people who just brought their friends along. We get people for all over the globe.”

The strangest crawls? “High school kids. That’s because you have to stage a pub crawl without going into the pubs because of the drinking age restrictions,” said Miranda.

The wildest drinkers on earth?

“Oh, that’s easy,” smiled Miranda who led the tour in her brown dress and dark sun glasses. “High school English teachers.”

Both Miranda and Kia agree that the idea of writers and drinking go together. “I think that people associate writers with drinking and there have been some famous writers who were notorious drinkers,” said Knudson. “So the idea of doing this tour by stopping into bars ties into that.”

The guides recite poetry, answer a LOT of questions and give a nice bit of city history backdrop to the crawl. Each guide has to pass a New York City exam to earn a license to be a tour guide and then read all or parts of numerous novels and poems for the literary pub crawl. It’s hard work.

“We learn a lot from our tourists, too,” said Sayyadi. “I give them information, but they tell us a lot.”

The guides never know what each walking tour through history will bring. “We get people from the same neighborhood that we walk through tell us new stories for our files on every crawl,” said Miranda. “Or a neighborhood person will yell out ‘I didn’t know that’ or tell us that she had lived there twenty years and never knew a particular writer lived across the street.”

One thing that struck me instantly was the way in which people on these walking tours really see the neighborhoods they visit. I have been through Greenwich Village hundreds of times, yet I never saw the streets and buildings the way I did on the tour, listening to the chatter of the guides. You notice the flower pots, protected trees, sidewalk cracks, the 1820s wrought iron railing porches with built in boot dirt remover bars, swinging gates, oddly named streets and refurbished buildings (and, of course, the haunted houses).

Sayyadi, a man with stringy hair and a beard whose full time job is that of an actor, thinks the haunts themselves help history’s story. “We read you poetry in the bar where some famous poet wrote the lines,” he said. “That makes it more real.”

Oh, a note for the health conscience – the guides go out of their way to tell you how young many the writers were who died of alcohol related problems as a warning on restrained drinking.

You learn a lot about literary history on the pub crawl, but you also listen to a lot of funny stories and charming anecdotes told well by the guides.

My favorite: The city of New York locked up sexpot actress Mae West in the Jefferson Market jail in the 1920s several months into her controversial, rather bawdy play Sex. She stayed there for two days until the city’s flamboyant Mayor, Jimmy Walker, returned from Cuba. Aides told him that she was in jail for her appearance in the play Sex. “Sex? I saw that play,” he answered. “I loved it. Let her go.”

And then there was the writer who had two husbands, one on the East coast and one on the West Coast.

And then there was the poet who went to the Stonewall Inn just to get a drink and suddenly the great riot broke out.

And then there was…

Well, you get the picture.

You can reach the Literary Pub Crawl folks at literarypubcrawl.com (tell them Ernest Hemingway sent you…)