Posted on 07/29/2009 7:51:59 AM PDT by AreaMan
Writers who drink are old hat. But what about writers who quit drinking? Tom Shone has been studying them for his new novel ...
From INTELLIGENT LIFE Magazine, Summer 2009
John Cheever was most unhappy to be picked up for vagrancy by the cops. My name is John Cheever [1]! he bellowed. Are you out of your mind? Found sharing some hooch with the down-and-outs in downtown Boston, he was promptly admitted to Smithers Alcoholism Treatment Centre on Manhattans East 93rd Street, where he shared a room with a failed male ballet dancer, a delicatessen owner and a smelly ex-sailor. The ballerina is up to his neck in bubble bath reading a biography of Edith Piaf, he noted in his journal. He spent most of his time in group therapy correcting his counsellors grammar. Displaying much grandiosity and pride, they wrote in their notes. Very impressed with self. Eventually he fell silent. Four weeks later he emerged, shaky, fragile and subdued. Listen, Truman, he told Truman Capote. Its the most terrible, glum place you can conceivably imagine. Its really really, really grim. But I did come out of there sober.
He was the first American author of his rank to do so. Much ink has been spilled [2]on the question of why so many writers are alcoholics. Of Americas seven Nobel laureates, five were lushesto whom we can add an equally drunk-and-disorderly line of Brits: Dylan Thomas, Malcolm Lowry, Brendan Behan, Patrick Hamilton, Philip Larkin, Kingsley Amis, all doing the conga to (in most cases) an early grave. According to Donald Goodwin in his book Alcohol and the Writer [3]:
Writing involves fantasy; alcohol promotes fantasy. Writing requires self-confidence; alcohol bolsters confidence. Writing is lonely work; alcohol assuages loneliness. Writing demands intense concentration; alcohol relaxes.
There is good reason to be suspicious of this: one could as easily come up with a similar list for firefighters, or nannies, the only real difference being that writers are more vocal about ittheir denial more pithily expressed. As Philip Amis said of his fathers bottle-of-whisky-a-day habit: He was Kingsley Amis and he could drink whenever he wanted because he bought it with his money, because he was Kingsley Amis and he was so famous.
In America William Faulkner [4] and Scott Fitzgerald [5] were the Paris [6] and Britney [7]of their day, caught in the funhouse mirror of fame, their careers a vivid tabloid mash-up of hospitalisations and electroshock therapies. When I read Faulkner I can tell when he gets tired and does it on corn just as I used to be able to tell when Scott would hit it beginning with Tender is the Night, said Hemingway, playing the Amy Winehouse role of denier-in-chief. He kept gloating track of his friends decline, all the while nervously checking out books on liver damage from the library; by the end, said George Plimpton, Hemingways liver protruded from his belly like a long fat leech.
In fact none of these authors would write much that was any good beyond the age of 40, Faulkners prose seizing up with sclerosis, Hemingway sinking into unbudgeable mawkishness. When Fitzgerald went public about his creative decline in Esquire, in a piece entitled The Crack Up [8]a prototype for all the misery memoirs we have todayHemingway was disgusted, inviting him to cast his balls into the seaif you have any balls left. Today, of course, The Crack Up would be shooting up the besteller lists, and Fitzgerald would be sat perched on Oprahs couch talking about his struggle and his co-dependent relationship with Ernest, proudly wearing his 90-day sobriety chip, but in the 1930s, the recovery industry, then in its infancy, was regarded by most with the enthusiasm of a cat approaching a bathtub.
AA can only help weak people because their ego is strengthened by the group, said Fitzgerald. I was never a joiner. Certainly, if what youre used to is rolling champagne bottles down Fifth Avenue beneath the light of a wanton moon or getting into the kind of barfights that make a man feel alive, truly alive, the basic facts of recovered lifethe endless meetings, the rote ingestion of the sort of clichés the writer has spent his entire life avoidingare below prosaic. Richard Yates professed to find AA meetings impossibly maudlin: Is just functioning living at all? he moped, claiming he could not write a single sentence sober. His fall was even more vertiginous, and emblematic of the 1950s; like Kerouac, he was to write one masterpiece (Revolutionary Road [9]"), then nothing.
Only the advent of rehab, in the 1960s, interrupted this fallenforced incarceration flattering the writers sense of drama, the Kafkaesque me-versus-the-system fable playing out in his head. John Berryman sat in rehab looking like a dishevelled Moses, his shins black and blue, his liver palpitating, reciting Japanese and Greek poets and quoting Immanuel Kant. When he found out the doctors around him were serious he buckled under, declaring himself a new man in 50 ways! and affecting an ostentatious religious conversion which he proceeded to pour into a series of poems to his Higher Power (Under new governance your majesty). Ten days after leaving he found he needed a quick stiff one to get the creative juices flowing again and downed a quart of whisky. Christ, was all he could say the next morning.
Second time around he got himself a sponsor named Ken, and tried prose, writing a novel about his recovery, called Recovery [10], which goes some way to explaining why the recent spate of bestsellers on the subject have been non-fiction. Pretentious and opaque, including a bloody philosophy of both history and Existens, almost as heavy as Tolstoy, Berrymans book remains an object lesson in how not to recover, as Donald Newlove has pointed out:
First you hang on to all your old romances about your illness, then you suck your old grandiosity for every drop thats still in it, you vigorously emphasise your uniqueness among the clods who might be recovering with you, and then you defend to the death your right to self-destruction Starting afresh meant that a massive part of his work so far was self-pity and breast-beating. That was the last mask he couldnt rip off. It was like tearing the beard from his cheeks.
The book remained unfinished; within weeks of leaving Berryman threw himself from Minneapoliss Washington Avenue bridge, his body splitting like a melon upon impact with the ground.
It may seem a little impertinent to gauge the literary merits of sobrietyyou cannot write books of any discernible quality if you are deadbut clearly, sobering up is one of the more devastating acts of literary criticism an author can face. John Cheevers alcohol counsellors noted: He dislikes seeing self negatively and seems to have internalised many rather imperious upper-class Boston attitudes which he ridicules and embraces at the same timewhich must rank among the sternest reviews he ever got.
Cheever emerged from rehab a different man, 20 pounds lighter, feeling 20 years younger. I am changed violently, he said, and so too was his work. After years of squeezing toothpaste out of an ever tighter tube, he powered his way through a new novel, finishing it within a year. It is as if our Chekhov had tucked into a telephone booth and reappeared wearing a cape and leotard of Dostoyevskys Underground Man, wrote the New York Times [11] of the resulting book, Falconer [12], a dark radiant fable about a mans escape from prison, whose frank depictions of homosexuality and addiction shocked the Book of the Month crowd expecting Cheevers usual martini-hour melancholy. It was a work of liberation in every sense.
We dont know how this would have played out, over timeCheever was to die of kidney cancer within a few yearsbut for the effects of long-term sobriety we can turn to Raymond Carver, who, after the usual pile-up of emergency rooms, courtrooms, detox centres and drying-out clinics, got sober in 1977. For a year he wrote nothing (I cant convince myself its worth doing), just played bingo and got fat on doughnuts, but then he remarried, and he went on to write some of his best workhe was nominated for a Pulitzer prize for his story collection, Cathedral [13], illuminating the downtrodden blue-collar lives he had written about before with unexpected moments of revelation and connection. He addressed this new opening up in his work in a poem entitled Gravy:
No other word will do. For thats what it was.
Gravy.
Gravy, these past ten years.
Alive, sober, working, loving, and
being loved by a good woman. Eleven years
ago he was told he had six months to live
at the rate he was going. And he was going
nowhere but down. So he changed his ways
somehow. He quit drinking! And the rest?
After that it was all gravy, every minute
of it
The radiance of late Carver is so marked as to make you wonder how much the imperturbable gloom of late Faulkner, or the unyielding nihilism of late Becketlike the cramped black canvases [14] with which Rothko ended his careerwere dictated by their creators vision, and how much they were simply symptoms of late-stage alcoholism. This suspicion is open to the counter-charge: this contentment and bliss is all very well, but readers may simply prefer the earlier, messed-up work. Charles Bukowski teased himself along similar lines when the old whore-monger found himself writing poems about his cats and little Bluebird in my heart:
I say,
stay down, do you want to mess
me up?
you want to screw up the
works?
you want to blow my book sales in
Europe?
Certainly, for those who trade a little too heavily on darkness, the Ozzy Osbournes of the literary world, the transition can be a rocky one. Stephen King says he cannot remember writing Cujo, he was so loaded; but after his family staged an intervention in 1987, emptying the contents of his garbage onto his living-room floorcocaine, beer cans, Xanax, NyQuil, Valium, marijuanahe quit, and the result was a marked slackening of tension in his work. One of the things that made The Shining such a great novel about falling off the wagon was that King didnt know that was what it was aboutit was written from inside the belly of an obsession. Once he worked out what the real monster in the closet was, his work took on a therapeutic air, more concerned with the exorcising of internal demons than supernatural ones; it became baggier too, as if the elimination of one indulgence had forced a sideways move into another: the writing became drinking by other means.
From which we can conclude that the writer who can be most grateful he never has to get sober is Salman Rushdie [15]. Minimalists tend to do better than maximalists. Flinty and workmanlike seem to win the day. (Elmore Leonard said that attending AA meetings had made him a better listener.) It is the self-proclaimed geniuses who suffer. Writers of long sentences seem to do worse than the writers of short onesFaulkners and Hemingways endless clauses being the epitome of the drunken style. Comparing yourself to Tolstoy is a bad sign. (If it has to be a Russian, Chekhov is a much better bet.) Americans do much better than Brits (a recent biography of Kingsley Amis [16] lists drinking under Activities and Interests). Americans from the north seem to do better than Americans from the South. Prose-writers fare better than poets. If you are an American poet from the South, you might as well walk into a bar right now. And dont, whatever you do, write a novel about recovery.
Picture Credit: Kathryn Rathke
(Tom Shone [17] is a former film critic of the Sunday Times. His novel about recovery, In the Rooms [18], was published on July 7th by Hutchinson.)
Links:
[1] http://www.moreintelligentlife.com/blog/poor-john-cheever
[2] http://www.moreintelligentlife.com/blog/qa-blake-bailey-literary-biographer
[3] http://www.amazon.com/Alcohol-Writer-Donald-W-Goodwin/dp/0140126554
[4] http://www.moreintelligentlife.com/story/william-faulkner-perfect-coen-brothers-hero
[5] http://www.moreintelligentlife.com/blog/defense-not-reading
[6] http://www.moreintelligentlife.com/story/cover-mass-intelligence
[7] http://www.moreintelligentlife.com/blog/big-top-britney
[8] http://www.esquire.com/features/the-crack-up
[9] http://www.amazon.com/Revolutionary-Road-Richard-Yates/dp/0375708448
[10] http://www.amazon.com/Recovery-John-Berryman/dp/1560254793
[11] http://select.nytimes.com/gst/abstract.html?res=F50611F9385B167493C4A91788D85F438785F9
[12] http://www.amazon.com/Falconer-John-Cheever/dp/0679737863
[13] http://www.amazon.com/Cathedral-Raymond-Carver/dp/0679723692
[14] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Untitled_(Black_on_Grey)
[15] http://www.moreintelligentlife.com/blog/good-old-bad-days-are-here-again
[16] http://www.nytimes.com/2008/06/04/books/04garner.html
[17] http://www.moreintelligentlife.com/authors/Tom-Shone
[18] http://www.amazon.co.uk/Rooms-Tom-Shone/dp/0091926041/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1248106580&sr=1-1
only up at the cabin... :)
IMHO, just blanking out the “To” field is the best and quickest method for a general comment on the thread or article.
Yeah, I do that myself when I specifically don’t want to get someone’s hackles up over something I’ve said. But a lot of times I think people just post and don’t think too much about it if they post to the one who originally published the thread. I don’t know if kattracks or JohnHuang2 still post dozens of news threads every day but I used to try to imagine what their ‘my comments’ page must look like...
LOL! Right you are, and inasmuch as I have just popped another cap on a particularly good IPA I'll make a shtab at it...
I think I get it, I really do, although I'm not a writer on the order of a Nabokov or a drinker on the order of Amis. But what they're looking for is The Zone, and alcohol helps them get there and stay there. Other stuff does too, but tends to be too severe for longevity (i.e. King's cocaine, and, well, we'll get there).
It isn't just writing - musicians, especially improvisational musicians such as jazz or rock musicians, know all about The Zone. It's where the self and the mechanics sort of fade and what comes out seems only to have muscle memory between whatever dark recesses of the brain from which it bubbled up and the chosen instrument. When you're in it stuff just comes out, and later if you're reading it or listening to it you tend to say "Wow, that's good, who was that?"
With musicians it's alcohol and especially heroin. I don't know why but I can make a case from the artists who have died from those temptations, (and the not inconsiderable number who conquered them and ended up dying in some sort of aircraft crash afterward, but that's a topic for another day). If you're a real ego-head you assume The Zone is you and your talent, but it isn't, it's only a place you visit if you're really on. And it can be hard to find, as a lot of superb writers find out to their utter devastation - Hemingway, for one, who blew his brains out over it. You drink, or you shoot up, because it helps you find The Zone, or later, tragically, because it makes you think that you have when you haven't.
That isn't to say that anything like alcohol is required for brilliant writing, or music, or whatever. But if you start to think that it is, it is. And coming out of it means that the individual involved feels that he or she must choose between a life of mediocrity or a another taste of artistic achievement that turns out to cost the artist that life, even if by then the achievement is only illusory. It's a double addiction, and a profound misplacement of self, and it's a little frightening to contemplate.
Fortunately for those of us not cursed with that sort of evanescent talent, there's still beer. (Sound of BtD falling off his chair and snoring on the carpet).
IMHO, just blanking out the To field is the best and quickest method for a general comment on the thread or article.
. . . especially when making a late reply on the thread.Not that anyone would necessarily ever read it . . .
Vincent Price at his priceless best! The man was not a “star” nor was he a “celebrity”, but an actor who enjoyed acting. I loved watching the old ham in those 60s era horror flicks just for the pure enjoyment Price brought to his parts, playing the villain with such gusto.
Yeah, well, EVERYONE who has a cabin has lived through that, LOL! The first cabin my Grandparents owned (late 1950’s) had an outhouse.
They moved to a cabin with plumbing when I came along. Grandma was afraid I’d fall down the pit, LOL!
.BUtterfield 8 (It’s a phone number; it’s spelled correctly)
= = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = =
Wonder how many times you will have to explain that???
Like ‘party line’ as to a phone..
Just showing age here<: <: <:
- - - -
BTW this string ‘morphs’ into John Cheevers and a cabin. Sounds like it would make a good Sienfeld episode.
Then again most things in life can turn into a Sienfeld..
Yeah, I know what you mean.
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