Life After Booze

Much ink has been spilled on the question of why so many writers are alcoholics. Of America’s seven Nobel laureates, five were lushes—to 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”: 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.

But what happens when a writer stops drinking? asks Tom Shone in Intelligent Life Magazine. Does the writing become pedestrian, lose its vigour? He looks at the careers of some of the greatest American authors - F Scott Fitzgerald, John Cheever, Hemingway. Raymond Carver stands out as the writer who eventually gave up the bottle after a long struggle and realised a new creative vitality :

For a year he wrote nothing (“I can’t convince myself it’s worth doing”), just played bingo and got fat on doughnuts, but then he remarried, and he went on to write some of his best work—he was nominated for a Pulitzer prize for his story collection, “Cathedral”, illuminating the downtrodden blue-collar lives he had written about before with unexpected moments of revelation and connection.

That Old Depression ...

Nicholas Hughes’s mother, and mine, succumbed to the exhaustion of unrelenting depression. They self-destructed. And we grew up in the wreckage of their catastrophe. Their deaths took away from him and his sister, Frieda, and from me and my sister, Joyce, the solace of a mother’s love. And worse, all four of us, I imagine, had to live with the knowledge that our mothers had quite willfully abandoned us.

Following the suicide of poet Sylvia Plath's son, Nicholas, Linda Grey Sexton shares her own experience of living with a tortured inheritance the The New York Times. Her mother, Anne Sexton (left) killed herself in 1974.

Staying, for the moment, on the depressing topic of depression (!), novelist Margaret Drabble writes very candidly in The Guardian about how she wards off her own bouts :

I write at least in part to investigate, to ward off, to understand these recurrent dark periods. Maybe depression fulfils a useful function, maybe it has an evolutionary benefit. In the year of Darwin, this is a question that I haven't yet seen posed. How early in pre-history, how many millennia before Hamlet, did man and woman begin to suffer in the mind as well as in the body, and what good did it do the human race?... Many other writers have prophylactic motivations similar to mine, and some admit to them, though others strongly deny any connection between writing and self-therapy, just as they tend to deny links between alcoholism and workaholism.

Drabble reads from her new autobiography The Pattern in the Carpet here.

When the Spirit Moves a Nobel Winner

The modern American canon would not exist without all this madness and alcohol ...

says Micheal Carolan (left) in The Amhearst Bulletin. Carolan is teaching a course at the University of Massachusetts entitled Dionysus Hitting Bottom: The Alcoholic Narrative in Film and Literature.

Those who ponder the fact that Malaysian authors aren't winning Nobel Prizes might like to think about this :

... of eight native-born Americans awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature, five were alcoholics, including Sinclair Lewis and Eugene O'Neill. ... (And) Alcohol is a factor if not the central focus of the three top modern novelists - Hemingway, Faulkner and Fitzgerald. ... As novelists they were addressing how man lived in the 20th century, and the answer was, through drinking.

And yet, says Carolan, authors' alcoholism has been ignored or denied in literary criticism.

This looks set to change with the growth of :

... the relatively new area of inquiry known as "addiction studies," a multidisciplinary field that combines literary criticism with sociological and historical perspectives. ... Carolan said his class also brings together fields of addiction medicine, film studies, psychology, sociology, cultural and gender studies.

(Story found via Literary Saloon.)

Billy the Bard on the Booze?

This probably won't wash with purists who like to think of Billy the Bard as unassailably perched atop his pedestal, but it seems that some of the crappiest lines might have been written while he was hung over! Dominic Dromgoole, artistic director of the Globe reckons that there are "Monday morning lines" in Shakespeare's masterpieces.

So which lines were probably written under the influence? John Sutherland has a whole list of candidates in the Guardian.

More discussion of Shakespeare the Boozer on Michael Prescott's blog.

And I love this poem pete the parrot and shakespeare by humourist DonMarquis which depicts our Bill sobbing on Ben Johnson's shoulder down at the Mermaid Tavern, lamenting about how all he wants is to be a poet when he has to keep churning out plays. There could be some truth in it.