And perhaps jealousy leavened by schadenfreude is also a factor. And if substance abuse is thought of as self-medication for emotional problems, a body of research indicating dramatically higher rates of unipolar depression and bipolar disorder in those who create words for a living backs up anecdote with data. A high rate of mood problems is particularly evident in poets, playwrights and, to a slightly lesser extent, novelists.
Interestingly, it is far less dramatic in nonfiction writers, leading some to hypothesize that reportage is a neuropsychological activity distinct from master story telling and that it is the ability to fantasize for a living that in some yet unexplained way, correlates with affective dysregulation. A danger exists in assuming that the link between writing fiction and alcoholism is inevitable and, worse, a prerequisite for literary success. Quite the opposite. 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.
Alcohol not only makes you less self-critical, it reduces fear. 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. 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 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.
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.
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. More often, as with Byron, the spirit is one of carpe diem — drink now because who knows what tomorrow will bring:.
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? 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. 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.
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 , 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:. 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.
Genes may lie behind a predisposition to alcohol. Rhys converts self-pity into pitiless critique and wrote the truths, unvarnished and unadorned. Elizabeth Bishop, who was poet laureate of the United States from to and a Pulitzer prize winner for poetry, was also a binge drinker, negotiating being a lesbian in a period where it was at odds with society.
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