Years ago, I arrived a day early to Minneapolis for a funeral, and my friend whose partner had just died of a horrible but brief illness asked me if there was anything I wanted to do. It was late winter and cold. The only suggestion I could come up with was visiting the Washington Avenue Bridge that spans the Mississippi River, where the poet John Berryman, who had taught at the University of Minnesota, jumped to his death on Jan. 7, 1972, at the age of 57.
“What this book is interested in,” William Palmer writes in the introduction to his study of writers and their drinking habits, “is the effect that heavy drinking had on writers, how they lived with it and were sometimes destroyed by it, and how they described the private and social world of the drinker in their work.” Palmer’s preoccupation is the life as much as the writing of his 11 subjects – Patrick Hamilton, Jean Rhys, Charles Jackson, Malcolm Lowry, Dylan Thomas, Elizabeth Bishop, John Cheever, Flann O’Brien, Anthony Burgess, Kingsley Amis and Richard Yates – and he offers a forensic examination of both in this enjoyable exploration of an enduringly fascinating subject.
William Palmer . Robinson, 272pp, £20
By Soumya Bhattacharya. The New Statesman, July 14, 2021.
Alcohol has played a central role in the creative lives of some of the most famous authors of the last few centuries. Lewis Hyde notes in his essay Alcohol and Poetry that four of the six Americans who have won the Nobel Prize for Literature were alcoholics, namely William Faulkner, Eugene O’Neill, Ernest Hemingway and John Steinbeck.
If you
write a book about alcohol and male writers, as I did, the one question you'll
be asked more than any other is: what about the women? Are there any alcoholic
female writers? And are their stories the same, or different? The answer to the
first question is easy. Yes, of course there are, among them such brilliant,
restless figures as Jean Rhys, Jean Stafford, Marguerite Duras, Patricia
Highsmith, Elizabeth Bishop, Jane Bowles, Anne Sexton, Carson McCullers,
Dorothy Parker and Shirley Jackson. Alcoholism is more prevalent in men than
women (in 2013, the NHS calculated that 9% of men and 4% of women were
alcohol-dependent). Still, there is no shortage of female drinkers; no lack of
falling-down afternoons and binges that stretch sweatily into days. Female
writers haven't been immune to the lure of the bottle, nor to getting into the
kinds of trouble – the fights and arrests, the humiliating escapades, the slow
poisoning of friendships and familial relations – that have dogged their male
colleagues. Jean Rhys was briefly in Holloway prison for assault; Elizabeth
Bishop more than once drank eau de cologne, having exhausted the possibilities
of the liquor cabinet. But are their reasons for drinking different? And how
about society's responses, particularly in the lubricated, tipsy 20th century;
the golden age, if one can call it that, of alcohol and the writer?
In her 1987 book Practicalities, the French novelist and film-maker Marguerite Duras says many shocking things about what it means to be a woman and a writer. One of her most striking statements is about the difference between male and female drinking – or rather the difference in how the two are perceived. "When a woman drinks," she writes, "it's as if an animal were drinking, or a child. Alcoholism is scandalous in a woman, and a female alcoholic is rare, a serious matter. It's a slur on the divine in our nature." Ruefully, she adds a personal coda: "I realised the scandal I was creating around me."
She'd been an alcoholic, she figured, from the moment of her first drink. Sometimes she managed to stop for years at a time, but during her bingeing periods she'd go all-out: start as soon as she woke up, pausing to vomit the first two glasses, then polishing off as many as eight litres of Bordeaux before passing out in a stupor. "I drank because I was an alcoholic," she told the New York Times in 1991. "I was a real one – like a writer. I'm a real writer, I was a real alcoholic. I drank red wine to fall asleep. Afterwards, Cognac in the night. Every hour a glass of wine and in the morning Cognac after coffee, and afterwards I wrote. What is astonishing when I look back is how I managed to write."
What is also astonishing is how much she managed to write, and how fine most of it is, rising coolly above the sometimes dire conditions of production. Duras wrote dozens of novels, among them The Sea Wall, Moderato Cantabile and The Ravishing of Lol Stein. Her work is elegant, experimental, impassioned, incantatory and visually striking – almost hallucinatory in its appeal to the senses, its rhythmic force. A forerunner of the nouveau roman, she dispensed with the conventions of character and plot, the heavy furniture of the realist novel, at the same time retaining an almost classical austerity – a clarity of style that resulted from obsessive redrafting.
Duras's childhood was marked by fear, violence and shame: a common enough concatenation in the early life of the addict. She was born Marguerite Donnadieu (Duras is a pen name) in 1914 in what was then Saigon to French parents, both of whom were teachers. When she was seven, her father died, leaving the family in abject poverty. Her mother saved for years to buy a farm, but was cheated on the price, buying land that was regularly inundated by the sea. Both Marguerite's mother and her elder brother beat her. She remembered hunting for birds in the jungle to cook and eat, and swimming in a river that would fill with the corpses of miscellaneous creatures that had drowned upstream. At school, she had a sexual relationship – seemingly encouraged by her family for financial reasons – with a much older Chinese man. Later, in France, she married, had a son with someone else, made films, and lived and wrote with a singleminded intensity. Her drinking worsened as the decades passed, stopping and starting, gaining traction, until at the age of 68 she was diagnosed with cirrhosis and forced to dry out – a terrifying experience – at the American hospital in Paris.
Not many writers manage to get sober and those who do often suffer a decline in output: testament not so much to the power of alcohol as a creative stimulant as to its role in destroying brain function, obliterating memory and playing havoc with the ability to formulate and express thought in former alcoholics. But Duras wrote one of her best and certainly most famous novels two years after she stopped drinking. The Lover tells the story of a 15-year-old French girl in Indochina who has an erotic relationship with – yes – a much older Chinese man. Much of the book was drawn from the violence and degradation from which Duras had emerged.
As later published versions make clear, she was capable of returning again and again to this primal scene of childhood, redrawing it in an almost infinite variety of colours: sometimes erotic and romantic, sometimes brutal and grotesque. Retelling the same stories; going back repeatedly to the substance that she knew was destroying her: these repetitive acts, some generative and some profoundly destructive, made the critic Edmund White wonder if Duras was not in the grips of what Freud had called the repetition compulsion. "I'm acquainted with it, the desire to be killed. I know it exists," she once told an interviewer, and it is this intensity, this absolute and uncompromising vision, that sets her work apart. At the same time, this statement seems to shine a light on how she used alcohol: as a way of giving in to her own masochism, her suicidal ideation, while simultaneously anaesthetising herself from the savagery she saw at work everywhere, filling the world.
Duras's nightmarish childhood raises the question of origins, of what causes alcohol addiction and whether it is different for men and women. Alcoholism is roughly 50% hereditable, a matter of genetic predisposition, which is to say that environmental factors such as early life experience and societal pressure play a considerable role. Picking through the biographies of alcoholic female writers, one finds again and again the same dismal family histories that are present in the lives of their male counterparts, from Ernest Hemingway to F Scott Fitzgerald, Tennessee Williams to John Cheever.
Elizabeth Bishop is a good example. Many members of her family were alcoholics, including her father, who died when she was a baby. Bishop's life was additionally marred by the kind of loss and physical insecurity often present in the family histories of addicts. When she was five her mother was institutionalised. They never saw each other again. Instead, Bishop was parcelled between aunts, an anxious child who, as a student at the liberal women-only Smith College, in Massachusetts, gratefully discovered the use of alcohol as a social lubricant, not realising until too late that it was also a potent source of shame, isolating in its own right.
In her 1987 book Practicalities, the French novelist and film-maker Marguerite Duras says many shocking things about what it means to be a woman and a writer. One of her most striking statements is about the difference between male and female drinking – or rather the difference in how the two are perceived. "When a woman drinks," she writes, "it's as if an animal were drinking, or a child. Alcoholism is scandalous in a woman, and a female alcoholic is rare, a serious matter. It's a slur on the divine in our nature." Ruefully, she adds a personal coda: "I realised the scandal I was creating around me."
She'd been an alcoholic, she figured, from the moment of her first drink. Sometimes she managed to stop for years at a time, but during her bingeing periods she'd go all-out: start as soon as she woke up, pausing to vomit the first two glasses, then polishing off as many as eight litres of Bordeaux before passing out in a stupor. "I drank because I was an alcoholic," she told the New York Times in 1991. "I was a real one – like a writer. I'm a real writer, I was a real alcoholic. I drank red wine to fall asleep. Afterwards, Cognac in the night. Every hour a glass of wine and in the morning Cognac after coffee, and afterwards I wrote. What is astonishing when I look back is how I managed to write."
What is also astonishing is how much she managed to write, and how fine most of it is, rising coolly above the sometimes dire conditions of production. Duras wrote dozens of novels, among them The Sea Wall, Moderato Cantabile and The Ravishing of Lol Stein. Her work is elegant, experimental, impassioned, incantatory and visually striking – almost hallucinatory in its appeal to the senses, its rhythmic force. A forerunner of the nouveau roman, she dispensed with the conventions of character and plot, the heavy furniture of the realist novel, at the same time retaining an almost classical austerity – a clarity of style that resulted from obsessive redrafting.
Duras's childhood was marked by fear, violence and shame: a common enough concatenation in the early life of the addict. She was born Marguerite Donnadieu (Duras is a pen name) in 1914 in what was then Saigon to French parents, both of whom were teachers. When she was seven, her father died, leaving the family in abject poverty. Her mother saved for years to buy a farm, but was cheated on the price, buying land that was regularly inundated by the sea. Both Marguerite's mother and her elder brother beat her. She remembered hunting for birds in the jungle to cook and eat, and swimming in a river that would fill with the corpses of miscellaneous creatures that had drowned upstream. At school, she had a sexual relationship – seemingly encouraged by her family for financial reasons – with a much older Chinese man. Later, in France, she married, had a son with someone else, made films, and lived and wrote with a singleminded intensity. Her drinking worsened as the decades passed, stopping and starting, gaining traction, until at the age of 68 she was diagnosed with cirrhosis and forced to dry out – a terrifying experience – at the American hospital in Paris.
Not many writers manage to get sober and those who do often suffer a decline in output: testament not so much to the power of alcohol as a creative stimulant as to its role in destroying brain function, obliterating memory and playing havoc with the ability to formulate and express thought in former alcoholics. But Duras wrote one of her best and certainly most famous novels two years after she stopped drinking. The Lover tells the story of a 15-year-old French girl in Indochina who has an erotic relationship with – yes – a much older Chinese man. Much of the book was drawn from the violence and degradation from which Duras had emerged.
As later published versions make clear, she was capable of returning again and again to this primal scene of childhood, redrawing it in an almost infinite variety of colours: sometimes erotic and romantic, sometimes brutal and grotesque. Retelling the same stories; going back repeatedly to the substance that she knew was destroying her: these repetitive acts, some generative and some profoundly destructive, made the critic Edmund White wonder if Duras was not in the grips of what Freud had called the repetition compulsion. "I'm acquainted with it, the desire to be killed. I know it exists," she once told an interviewer, and it is this intensity, this absolute and uncompromising vision, that sets her work apart. At the same time, this statement seems to shine a light on how she used alcohol: as a way of giving in to her own masochism, her suicidal ideation, while simultaneously anaesthetising herself from the savagery she saw at work everywhere, filling the world.
Duras's nightmarish childhood raises the question of origins, of what causes alcohol addiction and whether it is different for men and women. Alcoholism is roughly 50% hereditable, a matter of genetic predisposition, which is to say that environmental factors such as early life experience and societal pressure play a considerable role. Picking through the biographies of alcoholic female writers, one finds again and again the same dismal family histories that are present in the lives of their male counterparts, from Ernest Hemingway to F Scott Fitzgerald, Tennessee Williams to John Cheever.
Elizabeth Bishop is a good example. Many members of her family were alcoholics, including her father, who died when she was a baby. Bishop's life was additionally marred by the kind of loss and physical insecurity often present in the family histories of addicts. When she was five her mother was institutionalised. They never saw each other again. Instead, Bishop was parcelled between aunts, an anxious child who, as a student at the liberal women-only Smith College, in Massachusetts, gratefully discovered the use of alcohol as a social lubricant, not realising until too late that it was also a potent source of shame, isolating in its own right.
In the poem "A Drunkard", Bishop uses incidents from her own life to create an ironic portrait of an alcoholic, keen to explain their abnormal thirst. "I had begun / to drink, & drink – I can't get enough", the narrator confesses, a line that recalls John Berryman's frank "Dream Song" statement: "Hunger was constitutional with him, / wine, cigarettes, liquor, need need need".
Shame was one of the central drivers in Bishop's drinking: first, the internalised shame she carried from her childhood and, later, the shame that followed her own appalling binges. Then, too, there was the matter of sexual identity. A lesbian in a period in which homosexuality was not sanctioned or accepted, Bishop found her greatest freedom in Brazil, where she lived with her female partner, the architect Lota de Macedo Soares. She spent her most peaceful and productive years there, though even they were interleaved with drunkenness, followed by the inevitable fights and confusions, and the frightening decline in physical health.
Shame is also a factor in the life of Patricia Highsmith, who was born Mary Patricia Plangman in 1921, her surname an unwelcome memento of the man her mother had divorced nine days before she was born. She wasn't exactly welcome herself. Her mother had drunk turpentine at four months, hoping to abort the baby. "It's funny you adore the smell of turpentine, Pat," she later said. This grim joke recalls Cheever, whose parents also used to kid about having tried to abort him. Like Cheever, Highsmith had complex feelings about her mother, and like Cheever she had a pervasive sense of being fraudulent, empty, somehow a fake. Unlike Cheever, however, she was courageous in facing up to the direction of her sexual desires, though she did have a sometimes pleasurable, sometimes troubling sense of deviance, of running counter to society's grain.
She was an anxious, guilty, tearful child – lugubrious, in her own words. By eight, she was fantasising about murdering her stepfather Stanley and at 12 she was disturbed by violent rows between him and her mother. That autumn, Patricia's mother took her to Texas, saying that she was going to get divorced and live in the south with Pat and her grandmother. But after a few weeks of this all-female utopia, Mrs Highsmith returned to New York, abandoning her daughter without explanation. Left high and dry for a whole miserable year, Patricia never got over the sense of betrayal, the belief that she had been personally rejected.
Her drinking began as a student at New York's Barnard College. In a diary entry in the 1940s, she wrote of her belief that drink was essential for the artist because it made her "see the truth, the simplicity, and the primitive emotions once more". Ten years on, she was describing days in which she went to bed at four in the afternoon with a bottle of gin before putting away seven Martinis and two glasses of wine. By the 1960s, she needed booze to keep going and as an eye-opener in the morning, lied about her drinking and lied too about all kinds of large and small details – about what a good cook and gardener she was, though her garden at the time was dried-up grass and she often lived off cereal and fried eggs.
Much of how she felt and behaved went into her work, passing fluidly into her most famous character. Tom Ripley is not always a heavy drinker but he shares with the full-blown alcoholic his paranoia, his guilt and self-hatred; his need to obliterate or escape his painfully empty, flimsy self. He is forever splitting or slithering into other, more comfortable, identities, though this in itself is shameful and often serves as the impetus for his casual and dreadful murders. In fact, Ripley's entire career as a killer mimics alcoholism in that it is driven by a need to constantly repeat an activity in order to snuff out the trouble the activity has caused. Then too there's the atmosphere of the books, the looming sense of anxiety and doom, instantly familiar from any number of alcoholic works. Consider this passage from The Talented Mr Ripley, in which Tom is in Rome, trying to convince himself he won't be caught for Dickie's murder:
“Tom did not know who would attack him, if he were attacked. He did not imagine police, necessarily. He was afraid of nameless, formless things that haunted his brain like the Furies. He could go through San Spiridione comfortably only when a few cocktails had knocked out his fear. Then he walked through swaggering and whistling.”
Cut the name, and it could be lifted directly from Charles Jackson's The Lost Weekend or almost any page of Tennessee Williams's drink-besotted diaries.
There is no doubt that personal unhappiness is part of why both men and women develop the habit of drinking, but these intimate stories leave out something larger, something less easy for any individual to challenge or address. What lives were like for women in the west for the majority of the 20th century is ably and angrily summed up by Elizabeth Young in her introduction to Plain Pleasures, the collected stories of Jane Bowles. "Up until the 1970s women were discounted and despised," she writes. "They were, en masse, classed with children in terms of capability but, unlike children, were the butt of virtually every joke in the comedian's repertoire. They were considered trite, gossipy, vain, slow and useless. Older women were hags, battle-axes, mother-in-laws, spinsters. Women were visible in the real world, the world of men, only while they were sexually desirable. Afterwards they vanished completely, buried alive by the creepy combination of contempt, disgust and sentimentality with which they were regarded."
By way of illustration, she tells a story about the writer who Truman Capote, William Burroughs and Gore Vidal considered among the greatest of her age: a giant of modernism, despite her tiny output. After having an alcohol-induced stroke in middle age, Jane Bowles was sent to see a British neurologist, who patronisingly told her: "You're not coping, my dear Mrs Bowles. Go back to your pots and pans and try to cope."
This intense disregard for women, this inability to comprehend their talents or inner lives, was typical. Similar scenarios can be found in the lives of almost any 20th-century woman writer of note. Take Jean Stafford, who these days is more likely to be remembered for her marriage to Robert Lowell than for her Pulitzer prize-winning stories or her extraordinary, savage novel The Mountain Lion. This latter work was published in 1947, while she was drying out at Payne Whitney, a mental hospital in upstate New York. There, her psychiatrist was less interested in her reviews than in insisting she improve her grooming, switching her habitual baggy sweater and slacks for a blouse and skirt, with pearls for dinner, like, Stafford said wryly, "a Smith College girl".
I can think of no writer who better expresses these pressures and hypocrisies than the novelist Jean Rhys, who can hardly be described as a feminist and yet who wrote so bitterly and so bleakly about the lot of women that her work is disturbing even now. Rhys was born Gwen Williams on the island of Dominica in 1890, to a British father and Creole mother. Like F Scott Fitzgerald, she was a replacement child, conceived nine months after the death of her sister. Like Fitzgerald, she had a pervasive sense of standing outside, of not being quite real or legitimately lovable. She came to London at 16, a pretty and hopelessly ignorant girl. Her expectations of a new and glamorous life were dashed by the puddingy greyness, the bitter cold, and the competent, casually cruel people. Her father died while she was at drama school, but instead of going home she slipped away, becoming a chorus girl and changing her name to Ella Gray.
Ella Gray, Ella Lenglet, Jean Rhys, Mrs Hamer: whatever name she was travelling under, Rhys was always on the verge of drowning, always frantic to find a man who would scoop her up and lift her into the kind of safe, luxurious world she craved. Unused to love, she picked badly or perhaps was just unlucky, choosing men who left her or who were somehow incapable of providing the sort of financial and emotional security she needed. She had an abortion, married, had a baby who died and a daughter, Maryvonne (who spent most of her childhood being cared for not only by someone else but in a different country from her mother), married for a second and then a third time, and was throughout these misadventures always at the brink of destitution, the very outer edge.
Alcohol quickly became a way of dealing with this trouble and confusion, of blotting out the darker elements, temporarily filling an unbearable black hole of need. As her biographer Carole Angier puts it: "Her past tormented her so that she had to write about it, and then writing tormented her: she had to drink to write, and she had to drink to live."
But what emerged from the muddle and mess was a series of miraculously lucid novels: strange, slippery marvels of modernism, about alienated, rootless women adrift among the demi-monde of London and Paris. These books – Quartet, After Leaving Mr Mackenzie, Voyage in the Dark and Good Morning, Midnight – show the world as it appears from the vantage of the dispossessed. They are about depression and loneliness, yes, but they're also about money: money and class and snobbery and what it means if you can't afford to eat or your shoes are wearing out and you can no longer keep up the little genteel illusions, the ways of getting by, of being accepted in society. Rhys is brutal in her depiction of a world in which there is no safety net for a woman alone and getting older, running short of the only reliable currency she has.
In the magnificently unstable Good Morning, Midnight she shows precisely why such a woman might turn to drink, given limited options for work or love. At the same time, and like her near-contemporary Fitzgerald, she uses drunkenness as a technique of modernism. The novel is written in a wonderfully flexible first person, slip-sliding through Sasha's shifting moods. "I've had enough of these streets that sweat a cold, yellow slime, of hostile people, of crying myself to sleep every night. I've had enough of thinking, enough of remembering. Now whisky, rum, gin, sherry, vermouth, wine with the bottles labelled 'Dum vivimus, vivamus … ' Drink, drink, drink … As soon as I sober up I start again. I have to force it down sometimes. You'd think I'd get delirium tremens or something."
During the war, Rhys vanished yet again from public view, re-emerging in 1956 after the BBC ran an advert looking for information on the author believed to be dead. She spent the 1960s shipwrecked in the aptly named Landboat Bungalows in Devon, living with her third husband, the nervy Max Hamer, who had been in prison for fraud and was now invalided after a stroke. In this dismal period, Rhys was tormented by extremes of poverty and depression and also by her neighbours, who believed she was a witch. She was briefly put in a mental hospital after attacking one of them with a pair of scissors. The drinking continued unabated, worse than before. All the same, she was working away on a new novel, Wide Sargasso Sea, a prequel to Jane Eyre that drew on her childhood in the Caribbean, her feelings of being an outsider, left out in the cold by the icy, inscrutable English.
"No one," Diana Athill writes in Stet, "who has read Jean Rhys's first four novels can suppose that she was very good at life; but no one who never met her could know how very bad at it she was." Athill became Rhys's editor around this time, befriending her as did Sonia Orwell and Francis Wyndham, who were the protectors and guardians of her renaissance, the success that came too late and after too much hardship to make a real difference to Rhys's ravaged internal world.
In her writing about Rhys, Athill puzzles over what might be the central question of the alcoholic writer, which is how someone so very bad at living, so incapable of facing up to trouble and taking responsibility for their own mess might be so very good at writing about it, at peering directly into what are otherwise total blind spots. "Her creed – so simple to state, so difficult to follow – was that she must tell the truth: must get things down as they really were … this fierce endeavour enabled her to write her way through to understanding her own damaged nature."
This fierceness is everywhere in Rhys's work, converting self-pity into a pitiless critique. She shows how power works and how cruel people can be to those who are beneath them, revealing, too, how poverty and social mores pinion women, limiting their options until a Holloway cell and a Parisian hotel room come to seem pretty much indistinguishable. It's not by any means a triumphant kind of feminism, an assertion of independence and equality, but rather a savage, haunted account of stacked cards and loaded dice that might drive even the sanest woman to drink and drink and drink.
Olivia Laing's The Trip to Echo Spring: On Writers and Drinking is out now in paperback (Canongate, £10.99).
'Every
hour a glass of wine' – the female writers who drank. By Olivia Laing. The Guardian June 13, 2014
Recent
research suggests that Dylan Thomas might not, after all, have drunk himself to
death. What his doctor in New York took to be delirium tremens and treated with
morphine may have been bronchitis and pneumonia, which morphine injections only
made worse – after the third of them, he went into a coma. Still, there's no
doubt that Thomas had been drinking heavily in the days leading up to his
admission to hospital – indeed for large periods of his life. The previous day
he'd opened a bottle of Old Grand-Dad whiskey and offered a glass to the maid
cleaning his hotel room. Then, after more drinks with his lover Elizabeth
Reitell, he left his bed at 2am and went to a bar, telling her on his return
that he had drunk 18 straight whiskies.
Thomas was prone to exaggeration. He once bragged that he had drunk 40 pints of beer, and a character in his Adventures in the Skin Trade claims to have drunk 49 pints of Guinness straight off. According to the bartender who served him that fateful night, Thomas drank only six or at most eight whiskies, not 18. But American measures are twice the size of British ones. And his health had suffered over the years from alcohol and cigarettes: as well as having gout, emphysema and a fatty liver, he was physically exhausted through insomnia. The diagnosis on his admission to St Vincent's, alcoholic encephalopathy, might have been wrong, and with different treatment he might have recovered. But it wasn't as if he hadn't been warned.
Thomas's death is the stuff of legend, and it's no surprise to hear that a TV film, with a script by Andrew Davies, is being made about it, to coincide with the centenary of the poet's birth next year. Part of the legend, no matter how false, is that American hospitality is what killed him – the innocent from Britain goes on a lecture tour, is tempted to taste the Big Apple, then falls. Behind the Thomas story, though, is an older myth, that poetry and alcohol go together, as complementary means to achieve transcendence: "The excitement of alcohol and the excitement of fantasy are very similar," John Cheever said. You can trace the idea back to ancient Greece, where poems would be recited at drinking parties or symposia (often competitively, in a "capping game", one person following another). The idea is common to other cultures, too, including the Chinese, where in the third century AD the seven sages of the Bamboo Grove retired to the country to drink wine and compose verse: "Once drunk, a cup of wine can bring 100 stanzas," the poet Xiuxi Yin claimed. The drunker the bard, the more the words flowed.
Thomas epitomised this tradition of the roistering rhymer – to the distaste of Kingsley Amis, who wrote a singularly unpleasant epitaph for him:
“They call you "drunk with words";
but when we drink
And fetch it up, we sluice it down
the sink.
You should have stuck to spewing
beer, not ink.””
Does it help writers to drink? Do they drink any more heavily than any other social group – doctors, lawyers, shop assistants or (see Mad Men) advertising executives? A famous drinker himself, Amis considers this question in his Memoirs, and – comparing writers to actors – suggests "displaced stage fright as a cause of literary alcoholism. A writer's audience is and remains invisible to him, but if he is any good he is acutely and continuously aware of it, and never more so while it waits for him to come on, to begin p.1. Alcohol not only makes you less self-critical, it reduces fear." According to Amis, a large glass can supply "that final burst of energy at the end of the day" but should be avoided any earlier: "The writer who writes his books on, rather than between, whisky is a lousy writer. He is probably American anyway."
Amis had little time for American writers, which explains the prejudice behind that last remark. But it's true that modern American literature is strewn with examples of alcoholic excess: Poe, Hemingway, Faulkner ("I usually write at night. I always keep my whiskey within reach"), Hart Crane, Tennessee Williams, Truman Capote, Dorothy Parker ("I'd rather have a bottle in front of me than a frontal lobotomy"), Ring Lardner, Raymond Chandler, O Henry, Jack London, Delmore Schwartz, F Scott Fitzgerald, ("Too much champagne is just right"), John Berryman, Jack Kerouac, Charles Bukowski, Anne Sexton, Patricia Highsmith – the list is long even without including those, such as Hunter S Thompson, more renowned for their experiments with other substances ("I hate to advocate drugs, alcohol, violence or insanity to anyone, but they've always worked for me"). In a new book, The Trip to Echo Spring, Olivia Laing looks at six American writer-alcoholics, beginning with the story of how the ageing, critically acclaimed John Cheever and an aspiring young unknown called Raymond Carver became drinking buddies while teaching in Iowa in 1973. "He and I did nothing but drink," Carver later wrote. "I mean, we met our classes in a manner of speaking, but the entire time we were there … I don't think either of us ever took the covers off our typewriters."
Laing's is a travel book as well as a series of critical biographies. Her quest takes her to some of the places where her chosen six (Hemingway, Williams, Carver, Cheever, Berryman and Fitzgerald) lived, wrote and drank. It's a journey spanning thousands of miles – New York, Chicago, Port Angeles, New Orleans, Atlanta, Key West – but it's the distance from the writing desk to the nearest bottle that preoccupies her. It's also a personal journey, as Laing grew up with alcoholism in her family and wants to make sense of the disease. To her, no romance attaches to it at all.
Thomas was prone to exaggeration. He once bragged that he had drunk 40 pints of beer, and a character in his Adventures in the Skin Trade claims to have drunk 49 pints of Guinness straight off. According to the bartender who served him that fateful night, Thomas drank only six or at most eight whiskies, not 18. But American measures are twice the size of British ones. And his health had suffered over the years from alcohol and cigarettes: as well as having gout, emphysema and a fatty liver, he was physically exhausted through insomnia. The diagnosis on his admission to St Vincent's, alcoholic encephalopathy, might have been wrong, and with different treatment he might have recovered. But it wasn't as if he hadn't been warned.
Thomas's death is the stuff of legend, and it's no surprise to hear that a TV film, with a script by Andrew Davies, is being made about it, to coincide with the centenary of the poet's birth next year. Part of the legend, no matter how false, is that American hospitality is what killed him – the innocent from Britain goes on a lecture tour, is tempted to taste the Big Apple, then falls. Behind the Thomas story, though, is an older myth, that poetry and alcohol go together, as complementary means to achieve transcendence: "The excitement of alcohol and the excitement of fantasy are very similar," John Cheever said. You can trace the idea back to ancient Greece, where poems would be recited at drinking parties or symposia (often competitively, in a "capping game", one person following another). The idea is common to other cultures, too, including the Chinese, where in the third century AD the seven sages of the Bamboo Grove retired to the country to drink wine and compose verse: "Once drunk, a cup of wine can bring 100 stanzas," the poet Xiuxi Yin claimed. The drunker the bard, the more the words flowed.
Thomas epitomised this tradition of the roistering rhymer – to the distaste of Kingsley Amis, who wrote a singularly unpleasant epitaph for him:
“They call you "drunk with words";
but when we drink
And fetch it up, we sluice it down
the sink.
You should have stuck to spewing
beer, not ink.””
Does it help writers to drink? Do they drink any more heavily than any other social group – doctors, lawyers, shop assistants or (see Mad Men) advertising executives? A famous drinker himself, Amis considers this question in his Memoirs, and – comparing writers to actors – suggests "displaced stage fright as a cause of literary alcoholism. A writer's audience is and remains invisible to him, but if he is any good he is acutely and continuously aware of it, and never more so while it waits for him to come on, to begin p.1. Alcohol not only makes you less self-critical, it reduces fear." According to Amis, a large glass can supply "that final burst of energy at the end of the day" but should be avoided any earlier: "The writer who writes his books on, rather than between, whisky is a lousy writer. He is probably American anyway."
Amis had little time for American writers, which explains the prejudice behind that last remark. But it's true that modern American literature is strewn with examples of alcoholic excess: Poe, Hemingway, Faulkner ("I usually write at night. I always keep my whiskey within reach"), Hart Crane, Tennessee Williams, Truman Capote, Dorothy Parker ("I'd rather have a bottle in front of me than a frontal lobotomy"), Ring Lardner, Raymond Chandler, O Henry, Jack London, Delmore Schwartz, F Scott Fitzgerald, ("Too much champagne is just right"), John Berryman, Jack Kerouac, Charles Bukowski, Anne Sexton, Patricia Highsmith – the list is long even without including those, such as Hunter S Thompson, more renowned for their experiments with other substances ("I hate to advocate drugs, alcohol, violence or insanity to anyone, but they've always worked for me"). In a new book, The Trip to Echo Spring, Olivia Laing looks at six American writer-alcoholics, beginning with the story of how the ageing, critically acclaimed John Cheever and an aspiring young unknown called Raymond Carver became drinking buddies while teaching in Iowa in 1973. "He and I did nothing but drink," Carver later wrote. "I mean, we met our classes in a manner of speaking, but the entire time we were there … I don't think either of us ever took the covers off our typewriters."
Laing's is a travel book as well as a series of critical biographies. Her quest takes her to some of the places where her chosen six (Hemingway, Williams, Carver, Cheever, Berryman and Fitzgerald) lived, wrote and drank. It's a journey spanning thousands of miles – New York, Chicago, Port Angeles, New Orleans, Atlanta, Key West – but it's the distance from the writing desk to the nearest bottle that preoccupies her. It's also a personal journey, as Laing grew up with alcoholism in her family and wants to make sense of the disease. To her, no romance attaches to it at all.
She takes her title from a line in Cat on a Hot Tin Roof, where one of the characters says "I'm takin' a little short trip to Echo Spring" – his nickname for the drinks cabinet and the brand of bourbon it contains. It's a resonant phrase, as Laing says, because most of her writers had a deep love for water (as she does too: her previous book, To the River, was about water, English literature and Virginia Woolf). It also suggests both the myth of Narcissus (writers are nothing if not narcissistic) and the time-honoured link between springs (and wells) and poetic inspiration. In classical legend, Hippocrene, the fountain on Mount Helicon created by Pegasus's hoof, is sacred to the Muses and inspires whoever drinks from it. Keats refers to it in his "Ode to a Nightingale", while craving something stronger:
“O, for a draught of vintage …
O for a beaker full of the warm
South,
Full of the true, the blushful
Hippocrene,
With beaded bubbles winking at the
brim,
And purple-stained mouth.
That I might drink and leave the
world unseen …””
The lines prompted Bentley's clerihew: "John Keats/Among other notable feats/Drank off a soup-tureen/Full of the true, the blushful Hippocrene." They're also among those analysed by Christopher Ricks in his book Keats and Embarrassment. "Blushful" doesn't just evoke the colour of the wine (a red or rosé), but implies its power to make our skin flush or, if drunk to excess, to make us do things we blush to remember afterwards.
Embarrassment is a common consequence of drink. John Updike felt it on Cheever's behalf when he came to take him to a concert one day and met him standing naked outside his flat: "His costume indicated some resistance to attending the symphony but I couldn't imagine what else, and I primly concentrated on wedging him into his clothes." Equally blushful is Kingsley Amis's story of his friend Philip Larkin sitting through a school literary evening after a heavy beer-drinking session, finding himself caught short, and trusting that the absorbent qualities of his heavy overcoat would not betray him when he pissed himself – "It turned out that he had miscalculated." The fallout from constant heavy drinking is worse than mere social embarrassment: illness, insomnia, squalor, violence, misery for oneself and others. But a bohemian chic is still associated with boozy writers, especially dead American male novelists. There are websites that give you the recipes for their trademark drinks: Faulkner's mint julep, Hemingway's mojito, Chandler's gimlet, Kerouac's margarita, Fitzgerald's gin rickey.
Literature abounds with paeans to the hard stuff. Sometimes it's a matter of national pride, with ale, stout, vodka, absinthe, chianti or, in Burns's case, the peaty goodness of Scotch whisky being celebrated for their miraculous powers ("O whisky, soul o' plays an' pranks,/Accept a bardie's gratefu' thanks"). More often, as with Byron, the spirit is one of carpe diem – drink now because who knows what tomorrow will bring:
“… for the future – (but I write this
reeling,
Having got drunk exceedingly today,
So that I seem to stand upon the
ceiling)
I say – the future is a serious matter –
And so – for God's sake – hock and
soda water! “”
The positive spin put on alcohol in the Bible (with the marriage feast at Cana – "the only worthwhile miracle in the New Testament", as Christopher Hitchens called it) and in classical legend (with Dionysus the god of ecstasy and wine) is something that John Cheever puzzled over. Why is drunkenness not among the deadly sins, he wondered? Why in early religious myths and legends is alcohol presented as one of the gifts of the gods? "The belief that to be drunk is to be blessed is very deep. To die of drink is sometimes thought a graceful and natural death – overlooking wet-brains, convulsions, delirium tremens, hallucinations, hideous automobile accidents and botched suicides … To drink oneself to death was not in any way alarming, I thought, until I found that I was drinking myself to death."
Cheever was in AA when he wrote this, earnestly facing the truth of his addiction. But he's wrong to say that literature and religion are wholly indulgent of indulgence. Dionysus is also Bacchus, a dissolute lord of misrule. And there are many condemnations of heavy drinking in the Bible: "Woe to those who rise early in the morning to run after their drinks, who stay up late at night till they are inflamed with wine." (Isaiah 5:11). Then there's Homer: "[I]t is the wine that leads me on, the wild wine that sets the wisest man to sing at the top of his lungs, laugh like a fool … it even tempts him to blurt out stories better never told." Cheever surely knew his Shakespeare, too.
“”MACDUFF: What three things does
drink especially provoke?
PORTER: Marry, sir, nose-painting,
sleep, and urine. Lechery, sir, it
provokes, and unprovokes; it
provokes the desire, but it takes away
the performance. Therefore, much
drink may be said to be an
equivocator with lechery: it makes
him, and it mars him; it sets him on,
and it takes him off; it persuades him,
and disheartens him; makes him
stand to, and not stand to; in
conclusion, equivocates him in a
sleep, and, giving him the lie, leaves
him. “”
In Cheever's lifetime, there was also Malcolm Lowry's Under the Volcano (1947), about a man who destroys himself with mescal – a novel that's brilliantly insightful about the lure of alcohol written by an author who would succumb to it 10 years later. There was plenty here to have persuaded Cheever that his drinking had no historical, religious or literary endorsement. But alcoholics are never short of justifications for their addiction. Someone or something else is always to blame:
"Wine was almost a necessity for me to be able to stand her [Zelda's] long monologues about ballet …" (Fitzgerald)
"Modern life … is often a mechanical oppression and liquor is the only mechanical relief." (Hemingway)
"The writer cultivates, extends, raises and inflames his imagination. As he inflates his imagination, he inflates his capacity for anxiety, and inevitably becomes the victim of crushing phobias that can only be allayed by crushing doses of heroin or alcohol." (Cheever)
"I began to drink heavily after I'd realised that the things I'd most wanted in life for myself and my writing, and my wife and children, were simply not going to happen." (Carver)
"Why drink so, two days running? / two months, O seasons, years, two decades running? / I answer (smiles, my question on the cuff). / Man, I been thirsty." (Berryman)
Genes may lie behind a predisposition to alcohol. Childhood trauma, too: suicidal dads (Berryman and Hemingway had fathers who killed themselves with shotguns) and unmaternal mums (Cheever called Gilbey's gin "mother's milk"). But of Laing's six writers, only Tennessee Williams speaks with candour and conviction: "Why does a man drink? There's two reasons, separate or together. 1 He's scared shitless of something. 2. He can't face the truth."
As alcoholics are habitually in denial about their habits, you would think they'd be ill-equipped for the ruthless truth-telling required in autobiography. But recovery memoirs have always been a thriving genre. Of recent contributions, John Sutherland's Last Drink to LA and Rosie Boycott's A Nice Girl Like Me stand out; with most, the titles tell you all you need to know – Diary of an Alcoholic Housewife, Dead Drunk, Mother's Ruin, I'll Stop Tomorrow, Drinking: A Love Story. The narrative arc is redemptive: look-how-low-I-sank-before-I-was-saved. The author comes out of a fug to recognise the error of their way: "Their glasses were taken from them, & they saw," as Berryman puts it ("Dream Song 46"). The only mystery is why no major writer has chipped in with a memoir to rank with De Quincey's Confessions of an English Opium-Eater or William Styron's chronicle of depression, Darkness Visible.
Fiction is a better route, perhaps: the unspeakable truths can go into the mouths of made-up people. But as Kingsley Amis complained, readers tend to equate authors with their protagonists, and with good reason. In John Berryman's unfinished novel Recovery, the protagonist is called Alan Severance: despite the name, his experience of rehab isn't easily divisible from the author's. As for Fitzgerald, when he was sacked by MGM towards the end of his life, he took to writing stories for Esquire about a small-time alcoholic scriptwriter, as if to ward off the thought that this was what he had become. No one was fooled. "I cannot consider a pint of wine at the day's end as anything but one of the rights of man," he'd once said, but by now it was a pint of gin a day, and his escapades (losing his car licence, getting into fights, being thrown out of clubs, etc) were common knowledge. He reached his nadir when he got drunk with two tramps and brought them home, inviting them to help themselves to his ties, shirts and Brooks Brothers suits.
Fiction may look like the right form for alcoholics, as their dependency teaches them to be good at lying. But holding a novel in your head becomes more difficult when you're holding a glass in your hand as well. "A short story can be written on a bottle," Fitzgerald told his editor Max Perkins, "but for a novel you need the mental speed that enables you to keep the whole pattern in your head and ruthlessly sacrifice the sideshows." Many poets have written a line or two when pissed, but few of those lines stand up next day. Even poetry readings can be ruined by woozy timing and slurred pronunciation. I learned my lesson early on at a reading at the University of East Anglia with Craig Raine; we'd been treated to a generous lunch on campus by the-then writer-in-residence Paul Bailey, and in an austere seminar room at 5pm the effects were a little too discernible.
Drink is better used as the backdrop to a poem, rather than in the creation or recital of it. In "September 1st 1939" Auden's thoughts about impending war would have less force if expressed in isolation or abstractly. Instead, they're set in a particular place, "one of the dives/On Fifty-Second Street", among commuters who share his anxiety and whose boozing is a desperate effort to show an affirming flame: "Faces along the bar / Cling to their average day: / The lights must never go out, / The music must always play."
Seamus Heaney's poem "Casualty" – an elegy for a fishing acquaintance blown up in a bomb attack on a pub after defying a curfew – is similarly enriched by the portrayal of the man's taciturn independence both in a boat and at the bar: "He would drink by himself/And raise a weathered thumb/Towards the high shelf,/Calling another rum/And blackcurrant, without/Having to raise his voice,/Or order a quick stout/By a lifting of the eyes/And a discreet dumb-show/Of pulling off the top."
Drink also comes in handy as a device for novelists and playwrights. It's not just a prop (like the whisky decanter that's the staple of British middle-class drama from Rattigan to Pinter), but a way to advance plot – "for accelerating the story, making someone throw a pass or insult somebody else sooner, more outrageously, etc, than they might when sober", as Kingsley Amis said. He might have been thinking of the scene in Lucky Jim where the hero, Jim Dixon, makes his escape from a boring madrigals evening, gets drunk at the pub, and then burns a hole in the bedsheets at his boss's house. Less comically, there's Othello, in which Iago usurps Cassio by getting him drunk and into a brawl and thereby dismissed from Othello's affections: "O god, that men should put an enemy in their mouths to steal away their brains!"
In Russian literature, the drink that steals away men's brains is vodka. Tolstoy, repenting his youthful follies ("lying, thieving, promiscuity of all kinds, drunkenness, violence, murder"), founded a temperance society called the Union Against Drunkenness, and designed a label – a skull and crossbones, accompanied by the word "Poison" – to go on all vodka bottles. In the event, the health warning wasn't adopted but Tolstoy's views on vodka seep into his fiction, as do Dostoevsky's in The Devils ("The Russian God has already given up when it comes to cheap booze. The common people are drunk, the children are drunk, the churches are empty"). Chekhov was more ambivalent. As Geoffrey Elborn shows in his new cultural history, The Dedalus Book of Vodka, he was torn between his knowledge as a doctor and his understanding of human nature. Two of his brothers were alcoholic, and he denounced vodka companies as "Satan's blood peddlers". But he sympathised with the Russian peasantry, for whom vodka was nectar. And in his stories and plays, those who drink excessively – like the army doctor Chebutykin in The Three Sisters – are portrayed with humour and compassion.
Attitudes to alcohol are an index of character; the capacity for it too. One of Hemingway's complaints against Fitzgerald was that he got drunk too easily; whereas to him, Hem, downing the hard stuff was healthy and normal and "a great giver of happiness and well-being and delight" (and even helped his shooting), to Fitzgerald it was poison. There's a macho subtext to this: holding one's drink as a proof of manhood. Hemingway and Cheever liked to boast that they could drink anyone else under the table, as though their failure to become intoxicated was a mark of strength rather than part and parcel of addiction.
Alcoholism isn't easily disentangled from mental-health problems. "Madness & booze, madness & booze,/Which'll can tell who preceded whose?" says Berryman in one of his Dream Songs. But altering one's mindset is vital to creativity, and booze can help with that, Bukowski claimed – "it yanks or joggles you out of routine thought and everydayism." Hemingway thought so too: "What else can change your ideas and make them run on a different plane like whiskey?" They have a point. There's a window between the first and second drink, or the second and third, when the unexpected sometimes happens – an idea, an image, a phrase. The problem is getting it down before it's lost; if you're in company, that means disappearing with your notebook, which takes resolve or self-regard. The Amis principle – a glassful to relax with at your desk when most of the writing has been done – is fine for those with will power. But there's the cautionary example of Jack London, who used to reward himself with a drink when he'd done half his daily quota of 1,000 words, then found himself unable to get started without one. The man takes a drink, then the drink takes the man. Liberation becomes stupor. "Write drunk; edit sober" is Hemingway's much-quoted advice. But the rat-arsed aren't capable of writing. After a point, the crutch becomes a cudgel.
Why do writers drink? Why does anyone drink? From boredom, loneliness, habit, hedonism, lack of self-confidence; as stress relief or a short-cut to euphoria; to bury the past, obliterate the present or escape the future. If Olivia Laing's entertaining book fails to come up with a simple answer, that's because there isn't one. To the literary biographer, binges and benders are a godsend – a chance to recount lurid anecdotes under the guise of earnest psychoanalytic enquiry. But for the rest of us, the words on the page are what matter. And most of them get there despite the drinking, not because of it. "Drank like a fish, wrote like an angel," would make a pleasing epitaph. "Drank like a fish, wrote like a fish" is more likely.
Why do writers drink? By Blake Morrison. The Guardian, July 20, 2013.
In the small hours of 25 February 1983, the playwright Tennessee Williams died in his suite at the Elysée, a small, pleasant hotel on the outskirts of the Theatre District in New York City. He was 71: unhappy, a little underweight, addicted to drugs and alcohol and paranoid sometimes to the point of delirium. According to the coroner's report, he'd choked on the bell-shaped plastic cap of a bottle of eyedrops, which he was in the habit of placing on or under his tongue while he administered to his vision.
The next day, the New York Times ran an obituary claiming him as "the most important American playwright after Eugene O'Neill", though it had been two decades since his last successful play. It listed his three Pulitzer prizes, for A Streetcar Named Desire, Cat on a Hot Tin Roof and Night of the Iguana, adding: "He wrote with deep sympathy and expansive humour about outcasts in our society. Though his images were often violent, he was a poet of the human heart."
He was also a kind, generous, hard-working man, who rose at dawn almost every morning of his life, sitting down at his typewriter with a cup of black coffee to produce what would amount to well over 100 short stories and plays. At the same time, he was a lonely, depressed alcoholic who managed by degrees to isolate himself from almost everyone he loved. A sample entry from his diary in 1957 reads: "Two Scotches at bar. 3 drinks in morning. A daiquiri at Dirty Dick's, 3 glasses of red wine at lunch and 3 of wine at dinner. Also two seconals so far, and a green tranquillizer whose name I do not know and a yellow one I think is called reserpine or something like that" – an itemisation made more troubling by the fact that he was in rehab at the time.
Things got worse in 1963, when Williams's long-term partner Frank Merlo, nicknamed the Little Horse, died of lung cancer. After that, he was far gone and out, barely perpendicular against the current, buoyed on a diet of coffee, liquor, barbiturates and speed. Hardly any wonder he found speech difficult, or kept toppling over in bars, theatres and hotels. Each year he put on a new play, and each year it failed, rarely lasting a month before it closed.
Two years before he died, Williams was interviewed in the Paris Review. He talked about his work and the people he had known, and he touched too, a little disingenuously, on the role of alcohol in his life, saying: "O'Neill had a terrible problem with alcohol. Most writers do. American writers nearly all have problems with alcohol because there's a great deal of tension involved in writing, you know that. And it's all right up to a certain age, and then you begin to need a little nervous support that you get from drinking."
While not all of this statement is wholly to be believed, it's true that Williams was by no means the only alcoholic writer in America, or anywhere else for that matter. Ernest Hemingway. F Scott Fitzgerald. William Faulkner. John Cheever. Patricia Highsmith. Truman Capote. Dylan Thomas. Jack London. Marguerite Duras. Elizabeth Bishop. Jean Rhys. Hart Crane. These are among the greatest writers of our age, and yet, like Williams, their addiction to alcohol damaged their creativity, ravaged their relationships and drove many of them to death.
Why do writers drink? Discussing Edgar Allan Poe, Baudelaire once commented that alcohol had become a weapon "to kill something inside himself, a worm that would not die". In his introduction to Recovery, the posthumously published novel of the poet John Berryman, Saul Bellow observed: "Inspiration contained a death threat. He would, as he wrote the things he had waited and prayed for, fall apart. Drink was a stabiliser. It somewhat reduced the fatal intensity." In Cat on a Hot Tin Roof, Williams explains the desire even more succinctly. Towards the end of the play, Brick, the former football hero, tells his father that he needs to keep drinking until he hears "the click…This click that I get in my head that makes me peaceful. I got to drink till I get it." Horrified, Big Daddy grabs his son's shoulders, exclaiming: "Why boy, you're alcoholic."
I was 17 when I first read that sentence, and already well acquainted with alcoholism. My mother's partner for a decade, Diana, had been a drinker, and our time together had recently ended in disaster, when the police came to our home and arrested her after a violent altercation. It wasn't just the fights that had frightened me, but rather the terrifying sense that someone was no longer inhabiting consensual reality. I was traumatised, I suppose, and it's hard to express the relief I experienced when I opened up my pale green copy of Cat and found within its pages a brave, brazen account of the role alcohol can play within a family; a house. Ever since that afternoon, I've been preoccupied by what writers have to say about drinking, especially those who have been drinkers themselves.
Over time, I grew most interested in six American writers whose lives intersected in odd, sometimes uncanny ways. All but one had – or saw themselves as having – that most Freudian of pairings, an overbearing mother and a weak father. All were tormented by self-hatred and a sense of inadequacy. Three were profoundly promiscuous, and almost all experienced conflict and dissatisfaction with regard to their sexuality. Most died in middle age, and the deaths that weren't suicides tended to be directly related to the years of hard and hectic living. At times, all tried in varying degrees to give up alcohol but only two succeeded, late in life, in becoming permanently dry.
These sound like tragic lives, the lives of wastrels or dissolutes, and yet these six men – Tennessee Williams, Ernest Hemingway, F Scott Fitzgerald, John Cheever, John Berryman and Raymond Carver – produced between them some of the most beautiful writing this world has ever seen. As the novelist Jay McInerney once commented of Cheever: "There have been thousands of sexually conflicted alcoholics but only one of them wrote The Housebreaker of Shady Hill and The Sorrows of Gin." I wanted to know how their writing and drinking had intertwined, and so in 2011 I took a trip across America. Over the course of a month I travelled by plane and train across the country, drifting from New York to New Orleans, Key West, St Paul and Port Angeles. I chose these places because they seemed to serve as staging posts, in which the successive phases of alcohol addiction had been acted out. By travelling through them in sequence, I thought it might be possible to build a kind of topographical map of alcoholism, tracing its developing contours from the pleasures of intoxication through to the gruelling realities of the drying-out process.
I went to New York in search of first drinks. Tennessee Williams took his at sea in the summer of 1928: a green crème de menthe, somewhere on the greyish Atlantic between Manhattan and Southampton. He was still called Tom back then, a skinny, shy boy of 17, travelling with his grandfather and a party of parishioners on a grand tour of Europe. Afterwards he was violently sea sick, later confiding in a letter to his mother that though his grandfather was lapping up the cocktails, his own preference was for Coca-Cola and ginger ale. The pleasures of abstinence soon palled. By the time they reached Paris, he'd discovered champagne.
Tom had been a sickly, delicate boy, and as a teenager began to suffer the panic attacks that would dog him until the very last days of his life. At first he used to self-medicate by pacing the streets of St Louis or swimming frantic lengths in a nearby pool. But as he grew older and moved to New York, sex and alcohol became his preferred methods of managing stress. In his autobiography, Memoirs, he remembered how after drinking wine "you felt as if a new kind of blood had been transfused into your arteries, a blood that swept away all anxiety and all tension for a while, and for a while is the stuff that dreams are made of".
He was by no means the only writer who used alcohol in this way. The same trick was employed by John Cheever, one of the greatest short-story writers of his or any century. Cheever fascinated me because he was, in common with many alcoholics, a helpless mixture of fraudulence and honesty. Though he feigned patrician origins, his upbringing in Quincy, Massachusetts was both financially and emotionally insecure, and while he eventually attained all the trappings of the landed Wasp he never managed to shake a painful sense of shame and self-disgust.
He was an almost exact contemporary of Williams, and though they weren't friends, their worlds in New York often overlapped. In fact, Mary Cheever first realised her husband wasn't entirely heterosexual when they attended the first Broadway production of A Streetcar Named Desire. According to Cheever, Blake Bailey's beautiful biography, there was a leitmotif associated with Blanche DuBois's dead homosexual husband and this tune lodged in Mary's head and led to some kind of underwater realisation that her husband's sexuality was not as she'd assumed, though this wasn't a thought she shared with him.
Cheever's problem, as anyone familiar with his journals will know, is that the same gulf between appearance and interior that makes his stories – "The Enormous Radio", "The Day the Pig Fell into the Well", "Goodbye, My Brother" – so beguiling was also at work in his own life. Despite an increasingly command performance as an upstanding member of the bourgeoisie, Cheever couldn't shake the sense of being essentially an impostor among the middle classes. Writers, even the most socially gifted and established, must be outsiders of some sort, if only because their job is that of scrutiniser and witness. All the same, Cheever's sense of double-dealing seems to have run unusually deep.
This burden of fraudulence, of needing to keep some lumbering secret self forever under wraps, was not merely a matter of class anxiety. Cheever lived in the painful knowledge that his erotic desires included men, that these desires were antagonistic and even fatal to the social security he also craved, and that as such "every comely man, every bank clerk and delivery boy was aimed at my life like a loaded pistol". During this period, his sense of failure and self-disgust could reach such agonising heights that he sometimes raised in his journals the possibility of suicide.
Who wouldn't drink in a situation like that, to ease the pressure of maintaining such intricately folded double lives? He'd been hitting it hard since he first arrived in New York, back in 1943. Even in the depths of poverty he managed to find funds for nights that might, head-splittingly, take in a dozen Manhattans or a quart apiece of whiskey. He drank at home and in friends' apartments, in the Brevoort, the Plaza and the Menemsha Bar on 57th Street, where he'd pop in after collecting his daughter from school and let her eat maraschino cherries while he attended to his needs. Though not all these scenes were exactly civilised, alcohol was an essential ingredient of Cheever's ideal of a cultured life, one of those rites whose correct assumption could protect him from the persistent shadows of inferiority and shame.
Instead, it did just the opposite. By the late 1950s, Cheever was using the word alcoholism to describe his behaviour, writing grimly: "In the morning I am deeply depressed, my insides barely function, my kidney is painful, my hands shake, and walking down Madison Avenue I am in fear of death. But evening comes or even noon and some combination of nervous tensions obscures my memories of what whiskey costs me in the way of physical and intellectual wellbeing. I could very easily destroy myself. It is 10 o'clock now and I am thinking of the noontime snort."
In order to understand how an intelligent man could get himself into such a dire situation, it's necessary to understand what a glass of champagne or shot of scotch does to the human body. Alcohol is both an intoxicant and a central nervous depressant, with an immensely complex effect upon the brain. A single drink brings about a surge of euphoria, followed by a diminishment in fear and agitation caused by a reduction in brain activity. Everyone experiences these effects, and they are the reason alcohol is such a pleasurable drug; the reason why, despite my history, I too love to drink.
But if the drinking is habitual, the brain begins to compensate for these calming effects by producing an increase in excitatory neurotransmitters. What this means in practice is that when one stops drinking, even for a day or two, the increased activity manifests itself by way of an eruption of anxiety, more severe than anything that came before. This neuroadaptation is what drives addiction in the susceptible, eventually making the drinker require alcohol in order to function at all.
Not everyone who drinks, of course, becomes an alcoholic. The disease, which exists in all quarters of the world, is caused by an intricate mosaic of factors, among them genetic predisposition, early life experience and social influences. As it gathers momentum, alcohol addiction inevitably affects the drinker, visibly damaging the architecture of their life. Jobs are lost. Relationships spoil. There may be accidents, arrests and injuries, or the drinker may simply become increasingly neglectful of their responsibilities and capacity to provide self-care. Conditions associated with long-term alcoholism include hepatitis, cirrhosis, gastritis, heart disease, hypertension, impotence, infertility, various types of cancer, increased susceptibility to infection, sleep disorders, loss of memory and personality changes caused by damage to the brain. More stress, of course: to be drowned out in turn by drink after drink after drink.
This is where the black stories start. This is where you find the bloated, feuding Hemingway of the later years, his liver so swollen it protruded from his gut like a long leech. This is where you find F Scott Fitzgerald, washed up in Baltimore in the mid-1930s, his wife in an asylum, writing bad stories drunk and crashing his car into town buildings. And this is where you find the poet John Berryman, esteemed professor, breaking his bones and vomiting in strangers' cars.
I hate these stories. They're true and they're also untrue, and profoundly distorting. What I discovered as I travelled was how ambiguous and contradictory the issue of writers and alcohol really is. On the one hand, there's dissolution and degradation, and on the other there's dogged labour, compulsive honesty and the production of enduring art. Reading Tennessee Williams's diaries while he was writing Cat on a Hot Tin Roof reveals a man in crisis, so profoundly addicted to alcohol that he carried a flask of whiskey wherever he went. And yet the play he produced is a miracle of truth-telling. It seems impossible that in the midst of such confusion and self-harm, Williams was able to produce a play like Cat, with its uncompromising portrayal of the drinker's urge to evade reality. And yet he retained in some unobliterated part of himself the necessary clarity to set down on paper a portrait of the self-deceiving nature of the alcoholic.
He was not the only one, by any means. From Berryman's Dream Songs to Fitzgerald's Tender Is the Night and Hemingway's For Whom the Bell Tolls, there exist dozens of works of art in which an alcoholic writer reflects on their own disease; a disease, furthermore, that is hallmarked by distortions in thinking, particularly denial. When I travelled to Key West to visit Hemingway's house, I kept thinking in particular about a line in For Whom the Bell Tolls that compares alcoholism to "a deadly wheel… it is the thing that drunkards and those who are truly mean or cruel ride until they die."
There was something sickening about that image. I imagined what it might be like to ride such a wheel: the confusion, the gathering sense of entrapment. Impossible not to think of what lay ahead for Hemingway: the long depression, ECT at the Mayo Clinic, the loss of his home in Cuba, his manuscripts and letters, his beloved boat Pilar. He said it was as if he'd lost his life, and on 2 July 1961 he shot himself in Idaho, 19 days before his 62nd birthday. John Berryman, too, who after several failed cycles of treatment for alcohol addiction caught the morning bus to the Washington Avenue bridge in St Paul on Friday 7 January 1972. He climbed the railing and let himself go, falling 100 feet on to a pier and rolling partway down the embankment of the Mississippi river, where his body was later identified by a blank cheque in his pocket and the name on his broken glasses.
These stories weigh on me, and yet an alcoholic can stop drinking. I knew it from my own childhood, and I knew it from my reading. My mother's ex-partner got dry at a treatment centre she still describes as a hellhole, and came back into our lives sober. John Cheever also managed it. "I came out of prison 20 pounds lighter and howling with pleasure," he wrote in a letter to a Russian friend on 2 June 1975, a few weeks after his release from the Smithers Alcohol Treatment and Training Centre in New York City, and though no cure had been found for his loneliness or sense of sexual confusion, he never drank again. Even when he was dying of cancer, even when all but one of his doctors said he might as well go back on the bottle, he elected to stay dry. For the last seven years of his life he was stone cold sober: still depressed, still at the mercy of his erections, but also in possession of his wit, and the old, magical capacity for being unsprung by joy.
The writer whose sobriety most interested me, however, was Raymond Carver. I'd come across his poems long ago, and been struck by the praiseful way he wrote about his second life: the one in which alcohol was no longer the dominating force. When I'd first thought of taking a trip to America, I knew immediately I wanted to end in Port Angeles, the town on the Olympic Peninsula that had nourished his sobriety.
It's almost impossible to overestimate the hardship of Carver's early adulthood, in which he struggled to educate himself and get food on the table while stealing every spare minute in which to write. In such straitened circumstances, it's not difficult to understand why alcohol might have begun to seem like an ally, or else a key to a locked door. His father had drunk to escape the monotony of work and to ease the pressures of survival. For Ray, there was also bitterness to choke back; bitterness and self-reproach and a sense of spoiling time. These are the sort of things that can sour in your head if you're still working as a janitor at 27, swabbing corridors in Mercy hospital. And these are the sort of things you might try to soothe in the Fireside Lounge on H Street, knocking back a boilermaker at the end of the night shift, readying up for another day with your own exhausting children.
There's no doubt the odds were stacked against him; but nor is there much doubt that he became, six days out of seven, his own worst enemy. The things Carver did seem so senselessly self-destructive. One Raymond – Good Raymond, I suppose – would get on to a master's programme, or find a decent job, and the other Raymond, the perverse, malevolent one, would somehow conspire to mess it up. He published three volumes of poems during his drinking years, and wrote almost 40 short stories, among them "Will You Please Be Quiet, Please?", "Tell the Women We're Going", "Dummy" and "So Much Water So Close to Home". At the same time he was unreliable, paranoid and violent; by his own description a bankrupt, a cheat, a thief and a liar. As for creativity, as he approached the nadir of his drinking he could barely write at all.
Good Raymond emerged from the wreckage slowly, like a man struggling from a sm ashed car. He spent a long time shuttling through recovery, getting dry and then going straight back out to drink. Early on, during the bad years in California, he had a seizure on the floor just as he was about to leave a treatment centre, smashing his forehead open. The doctor warned him that if he ever drank again he risked becoming a wet-brain, a graphic term for alcoholic brain damage. According to his wife, he spent that evening "sucking brandy from a bottle as if it were Pepsi, his stitches concealed under a bandage, indifferent to the doctor's warning".
In 1976 his first volume of stories, Will You Please Be Quiet, Please?, was published. That same year he checked into Duffy's, a private treatment centre in Napa that was later the setting for "Where I'm Calling From". The programme consisted of frequent AA meetings and controlled withdrawal by way of hummers, progressively weaker shots of rotgut bourbon in water, doled out every three hours for three days. Shortly after his release, he announced that he understood he could never drink hard liquor again, and would in future stick to André champagne.
Unsurprisingly, he was back again weeks later, checking himself in on New Year's Eve. It was his last pass through formal treatment. That spring he left his family and rented a house alone, overlooking the Pacific. For the next few months he went to AA meetings and tried, not always successfully, to maintain his balance on the wagon. The turning point came in May, when he was offered an advance of $5,000 for a novel. He was in the midst of a bender at the time, but four days later took his final drink in the Jambalaya bar. "June 2nd 1977", he remembered in the Paris Review. "If you want the truth, I'm prouder of that, that I've quit drinking, than I am of anything in my life. I'm a recovered alcoholic. I'll always be an alcoholic, but I'm no longer a practising alcoholic."
Slowly, over the next two years, he backed away from his family, whose ongoing troubles he felt certain were capable of scuttling his recovery. For a while he barely wrote, and then the new stories started coming; stories infused with "little human connections"; stories he'd "come back from the grave" to write. In the summer of 1978, he fell in love with the poet Tess Gallagher, the protector and companion of his second life. At the time, she'd just built a house in her home town of Port Angeles, and at the tail end of 1982 Ray moved in. It was in this period that he produced – though he might have preferred caught – clutch after clutch of poems, slippery and pristine as the dream salmon he sometimes encountered on his nights in town.
I'd read one of them so many times I'd almost worn a track in it. It's called "Where Water Comes Together With Other Water". "I love creeks and the music they make," the narrator begins, and then lists, exultantly, all the other waterways he knows, and the enlarging effects they have on his heart. He describes how barren his life was 10 years back, and ends with a characteristically heartfelt, sawn-off sentence, a kind of credo or manifesto: "Loving everything that increases me."
You could live like that all right, especially if you'd once felt, as he did, that every action you took was poisoning further the wellsprings of your life. It could be read, in fact, as a kind of boiled-down, idiosyncratic version of the third step of Alcoholics Anonymous – Made a decision to turn our will and our lives over to the care of God as we understood Him. It has the same faith in enlargement, in the possibility of benediction from oblique and unexpected sources.
On my last day in Port Angeles, I went out to Ocean View cemetery to visit Carver's grave. There were pines at the edge of the field, and beyond them the land dropped away, falling 400 feet or so to the water beneath. I could hear the waves moving very softly, a lush, lulling, impossibly rich sound. In September 1987 Carver was out there on his boat with a friend when they looked up and saw a group of people on the bluff. "I think they're planting somebody up there," he said, and turned his attention back to the sea. He'd been coughing all month but wouldn't know for another few weeks that there were malignant tumours in his lungs.
The sky was glazed with clouds, like curds and whey. I saw his headstone immediately. I recognised it from photographs: black marble, with the poem "Late Fragment" carved on it. It's a poem about love and self-acceptance; about gratitude and miracles. Carver once said he didn't believe in God, "but I have to believe in miracles and the possibility of resurrection. No question about that. Every day that I wake up, I'm glad to wake up."
I stood by that grave for a long time, thinking about alcohol, and the trouble it brings. There's a saying in AA that addiction isn't your fault but recovery is your responsibility. It sounds simple enough but making that step is about as easy as standing up and dancing on a sheet of black ice. In Cat on a Hot Tin Roof, Brick says to his dying father: "It's hard for me to understand how anybody could care if he lived or died or was dying or cared about anything but whether or not there was liquor left in the bottle."
Imagine feeling like that. And then imagine sitting down at your typewriter every morning, day after day, year after year. It was Cheever's words I thought of then. In 1969, when he was still in the thickets of his own addiction, he was asked if he felt godlike at the typewriter. What he answered seemed to me to sum up the ambiguity of writers and alcoholism, the difficulty of passing judgment on lives at once so troubled and so blessed. "No, I've never felt godlike," he said. "No, the sense is of one's total usefulness. We all have a power of control, it's part of our lives: we have it in love, in work that we love doing. It's a sense of ecstasy, as simple as that… In short, you've made sense of your life."
This is an edited extract from The Trip to Echo Spring, published by Canongate.
What drives writers to drink? By Olivia Laing. The Guardian, July 28, 2013
