NONFICTION - Dec. 24, 1995

THE COCKTAIL: The Influence of Spirits on the American Psyche by Joseph Lanza. (St. Martin’s Press: $18.95; 162 pp.) The terminology is strangely compelling: Did the word cocktail originate with George Washington, when one of his soldiers drank a toast to a feather in his cap, or during a battle between the southern branch of the American Army and Mexico’s King Axolotl VIII? Did the Volsted Act of 1920, known coyly as prohibition, accelerate, like adultery, the general sexiness of the cocktail and the culture of the nightclub/speak-easy in this country? Does the role of alcohol in the Hollywood romance really have any enduring allure? Is it still glamorous to get completely sloshed? Or is this all so much nostalgia, like the giant champagne glass in the honeymoon suite somewhere in the Poconos? Maybe it’s the ‘90s. You start out fascinated and end up grumpy, like H.L. Mencken in this passage about the New York nightclub scene in the 1930s: “The same sad youths laboring the same jazz. The same middle-aged couples bumping and grunting over the dance floor like dying hogs in a miasmic pen. The same interludes of dismal professional entertainment, with the same decayed vaudevillians. The same crooners, male and female, bawling maudlin jingles into the same mikes.”