Why writers drink

The drunk guy. What are you going to do with the drunk guy? A bucket of cold water might answer. Or a Vulcan nerve pinch. Because not only are writers very tricky—viciously down on themselves, impossibly in love with this or that, squirting little shafts of bile or ambrosia from secret writer glands—they also have language.

Their drunk-guy monologues will not, unfortunately, be without interest. They might even be—as lights flutter out in the brain—somewhat creative. Mank was brilliant; Thomas was a genius. Drunk guys that they frequently were, neither man, to put it mildly, was without insight. What can they teach or impart to us about writing and booze?

Read: Why a movie about s Hollywood resonates today. His towering, tottering drunk-guy scene comes in a late flashback to a dinner party given by William Randolph Hearst—the model, of course, for Charles Foster Kane in Citizen Kane —at which Mank silences the company with dreadful drunk-guy truth-jokes, nearly sets himself on fire lighting a cigarette, and finally throws up.

Thomas, as played by Rhys Ifans in Last Call , is rufous and libidinous; he is verbal and suicidal; from his bar stool emanates a huge and florid self-absorption, like a spreading stain.

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. 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.

To read these novels is to get an insight into the difficult life of a woman who has fallen through the normal societal net, adrift in bohemia, looking for love and security in a cruel snobbish world. She is a must-read for the fierceness of her life force. 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.

To comment you must now be an Irish Times subscriber. Please subscribe to sign in to comment. Please update your payment details to keep enjoying your Irish Times subscription. Anne O'Neill. More from The Irish Times Books. Home energy upgrades are now more important than ever. The Dublin start-up making the future better with an appreciation for innovation.

Commenting on The Irish Times has changed. The account details entered are not currently associated with an Irish Times subscription. You should receive instructions for resetting your password. When you have reset your password, you can Sign In. Please choose a screen name. This name will appear beside any comments you post. Your screen name should follow the standards set out in our community standards.

Screen Name Selection. Only letters, numbers, periods and hyphens are allowed in screen names. Please enter your email address so we can send you a link to reset your password. Your Comments.