The Remains of the Day and Samuel Smith's Oatmeal Stout

Today, I finished re-reading Kazuo Ishiguro’s The Remains of the Day. I first read this 1988 book in college and I’m re-reading it now for an alumni book group. Though the group is usually partial to non-fiction, we chose this novel to celebrate Ishiguro’s recent Nobel Prize.

The narrator of The Remains of the Day is Mr. Stevens, an old-school butler who has spent decades serving Lord Darlington. Stevens is incredibly buttoned-up, takes his profession very seriously, and has unshakable loyalty, so it’s difficult to get a sense of what truly goes on at Darlington Hall. Ishiguro reveals Stevens’s life-story over six days of Stevens’s memories as he “motors” through England on uncharacteristic leave from work. His thinly veiled purpose is to pay a visit to Miss Kenton, the head housemaid with whom he worked at Darlington many years ago. She has recently written him to say that she’s unhappy with her marriage and uncertain about her future.

Stevens spends the first hundred pages or so ruminating on the ontology of “dignity” and on which other characteristics make a butler legendary. By the last half of the book, though, we begin to see glimpses of his true self. He is proud to recount the “turning point” of his career: when he maintained his “dignity” while serving an important dinner as his father suffered a stroke and passed away upstairs. In his narration of this night, Stevens does not comment directly on his grief. He does, however, remember Lord Darlington saying, “You look as though you’re crying" (105). Stevens responds by “taking out a handkerchief, quickly wip[ing] [his] face” and answering, “I’m very sorry, sir. The strains of a hard day” (105). The way that Stevens concludes this passage tells us so much about his values:

Of course, it is not for me to suggest that I am worthy of ever being placed alongside the likes of the ‘great’ butlers of our generation, such as Mr Marshall or Mr Lane - though it should be said that there are those who, perhaps out of misguided generosity, tend to do just this. Let me make clear that when I say the conference of 1923, and that night in particular, constituted a turning point in my professional development, I am speaking very much in terms of my own more humble standards. Even so, if you consider the pressures contingent on me that night, you may not think I delude myself unduly if I go so far as to suggest that I did perhaps display, in the face of everything, at least in some modest degree a ‘dignity’ worthy of someone like Mr Marshall - or come to that, my father. Indeed, why should I deny it? For all its sad associations, whenever I recall that evening today, I find I do so with a large sense of triumph (110).

Though Never Let Me Go is my favorite Ishiguro novel (because I am a dystopia nut), Ishiguro's mastery is on show in this passage, and with this narrator as a whole. As I read the book, I thought, “No one need ever write another English butler.” What a difficult task: to write from the perspective of someone whose job is to be even-keel, buttoned-up, and passive - a ghostly presence, a cipher. And, man, does Ishiguro nail it.

Immediately after finishing (oof - the ending is a heartbreaking punch to the gut), I strolled down to my favorite Pittsburgh bottle shop, Bierport, to seek out the perfect British ale to accompany Mr. Stevens. Stevens spends a lot of the book lamenting the loss of England’s nobility and its old ways, doing his best to respect the new American owner of Darlington Hall, Mr. Farraday. But his respect for tradition is strong. To pair Stevens and The Remains of the Day with anything other than a thoroughly British ale would be anathema.

Ideally, I’d pair him with a beer from Burton-on-Trent or with a “real ale.” Burton-on-Trent would be perfect because, though once a landmark of British beer, it has rather disappeared as such, just like the old ways that Stevens misses are now gone. As The Oxford Companion to Beer puts it, “By the end of the 19th-century, Burton-on-Trent (28 miles north-east of Birmingham) was to become the ‘brewing capital of Britain,’ and its beers were highly prized and much-copied” (193). Since then, though, Coors has bought Burton-on-Trent’s most famous output, Bass, and established a headquarters in Burton-on-Trent. Stevens is pretty jazzed to pass through the town where his favorite British silver polish (now defunct) was once produced, so you can imagine how Stevens would lament the loss of Burton-on-Trent to this American conglomerate.

From my new favorite book, The Oxford Companion to Beer. Garrett Oliver, FTW.

“Real ale,” too, is a cause celebre to return to “the way things were.” The Campaign for the Revitalization of Ale, or CAMRA, started in 1973, called for a return to cask-conditioned ale. You may have seen sitting "real ale" sitting on a bar looking like this:

Here's a cask of ale from Troegs, a Pennsylvania brewery.

But alas, such “real ale” is tough to find sitting around in Pittsburgh beer bars.

So: Samuel Smith it is. Samuel Smith’s Old Brewery was born in 1758 “in the Yorkshire town of Tadcaster, where beer has been produced since the 14th century with the aid of water pumped up 85 feet from an underground lake of limestone water. The importance of the water supply gave Tadcaster the nickname of ‘the Burton of the North’” (Oxford Companion to Beer 714). As close as I could get to Burton-on-Trent for old Mr Stevens. Samuel Smith still delivers what beer it can on horse-drawn flats and ferments in slate Yorkshire squares rather than the modern stainless-steel that everyone else uses. I think Stevens would also like the radical move Samuel Smith made after the turn of this century when they cleared their trucks and pubs of all logos and branding.

More than that, the profile of the beer itself shares characteristics with Stevens. It is near-black - obscure but for some garnet glimmers. It is initially as heady as Stevens can come across as pompous. That head, though, ultimately dissipates, revealing what’s beneath. By the book’s end, Stevens never completely lets down his guard, but we come to see enough of his interior, real self to thoroughly empathize with what “remains of his day.” Our heart goes out to him when he finally recognizes that he gave his life to a master who was likely a Nazi sympathizer, for whom he may have sacrificed his one shot at love, with Miss Kenton all those years ago.

Wheee a time-lapse video of the head dissipating. This actually took more like 20 seconds to happen.

I must’ve first had this beer way back in the early 2000s, when I lived in Brooklyn. New as I was to craft beer then, my memory of it doesn’t match my experience of it now. This echoes my experience re-reading this book, which I first read in college. The "you" that you bring to a text and its narrator is always changing, so that no book is ever static, especially those with which you identify closely. (Another reason that it feels right to always write about literature in the present tense.) These days, I think of oatmeal as an adjunct that, to me, mostly affects mouthfeel, making the beer more smooth and velvety. I must’ve had a lot of oatmeal stouts that ticked just that box for me, but my experience of this beer, today, did not. It must be just the same beer, as Sam Smith has been brewing for centuries, I just know more now, and so I come to this beer with different expectations and experiences that, just for me, change the beer itself.

Similarly, Stevens is not as my twenty-year-old self remembers him. Back then, in college, I over-simplified him, thinking him a pretty serious prick to start. By book’s end, I thought that he kind of got the lonely end-of-life that he deserved. Honestly, I still don’t really buy that Miss Kenton would harbor a secret love for this man, but I do empathize with him much more now. He outlasted his profession, and the world left behind the ideals he had been groomed to preserve. I left academia six years ago and high-school teaching last year. When I was growing up, a life as a college professor was tenable; today, 75% of college instructors are adjuncts and hundreds of PhDs apply for every job opening in the humanities. I think teaching the noblest calling, but it's hard to make a life of it these days in a country that seems to value education and teachers less and less. 

Back to the beer. On the tongue, there’s the toffee and chocolate that I remember, the sweet notes that come from the darker specialty malts that make this beer a stout. There’s also some raisin, a fruit with some astringency that balances the sweetness. It’s bittersweet, just like Stevens’s final thoughts in The Remains of the Day. [I hope that suggests that I am about to give some major spoilers. If you haven't yet read the book, skip the next 2 paragraphs: jump down to the next indented quotation and pick up again there.]

In the novel’s final pages, Miss Kenton ruminates, “[T]hat doesn’t mean to say, of course, that there aren’t occasions now and then - extremely desolate occasions - when you think to yourself: ‘What a terrible mistake I’ve made with my life.’ And you get to thinking about a different life, a better life you might have had. For instance, I get to thinking about a life I may have had with you, Mr Stevens” (239). Does she just mean that she regrets not being able to continue her profession? Or did she love Stevens and wish they had married? Whatever she means, Stevens responds with feeling: “[I]t took me a moment or two to fully digest these words of Miss Kenton. Moreover, as you might appreciate, their implications were such as to provoke a certain degree of sorrow within me. Indeed - why should I not admit it? - at that moment, my heart was breaking” (239). Aw, Stevens.

He recovers quickly enough, in a way that breaks my heart. Perfect for Valentine’s Day, perhaps? The perfect day for a sweet, chocolaty beer with a bit of bite and a bit of darkness? Stevens casts aside his heartbreak for the life he could have had with Miss Kenton; he returns to the only love he’s ever known: his dying profession. In the book’s final paragraph, he marvels at a group of people behind him who are charming each other with small-talk and thinks:

It occurs to me, furthermore, that bantering is hardly an unreasonable duty for an employer to expect a professional to perform. I have of course already devoted much time to developing my bantering skills, but it is possible I have never previously approached the task with the commitment I might have done. Perhaps, then, when I return to Darlington Hall tomorrow - Mr Farraday will not himself be back for a further week - I will begin practising with renewed effort. I should hope, then, that by the time of my employer’s return, I shall be in a position to pleasantly surprise him (245).

Aw, Stevens! Poor guy. So maybe it’s right that the oatmeal stout isn't quite as smooth as I remember it. This book - especially its denouement - is hard to swallow. So Happy Valentine’s Day! Treat yourself to some chocolate-y Oatmeal Stout from Samuel Smith. And if you want to shed a few tears of heartbreak, check out The Remains of the Day. (You can even cheat and watch the movie! Trailer below.)

Another holiday option, this one for the love-averse! Also available at Bierport.