Six Writers Who Battled the Bottle

Book review.

In The Trip to Echo Spring: On Writers and Drinking, author Olivia Laing’s stated goal is “to know why writers drink, and what effect this stew of spirits has had upon the body of literature itself.” To which I can only say, best of luck. The goal is impossibly ambitious; the book itself a bit digressive and loosely organized. But Laing has harvested a satisfying litany of literary anecdotes related to drinking, and throws out a few of her own.

The writers she submits to scrutiny are F. Scott Fitzgerald, Ernest Hemingway, Tennessee Williams, John Cheever, John Berryman, and Raymond Carver—all of them unambiguously alcoholic and, for most of their lives, resolutely in denial. Only two of them—Carver and Cheever—attained some measure of sobriety in their later lives. Fitzgerald died of a heart attack at 44, Hemingway and Berryman committed suicide, and Tennessee Williams either choked on a bottle cap or died of an overdose of pills. If any of that sounds deliciously romantic, than this is a book you need to read. “People don’t like to talk about alcohol,” Laing flatly states. “They don’t like to think about it, except in the most superficial of ways. They don’t like to examine the damage it does and I don’t blame them.”

Start with John Cheever, author of The Wapshot Chronicle, Bullet Park, The Falconer, and short stories, including “The Swimmer,” which begins: “It was one of those mid-summer Sundays when everyone sits around saying, ‘I drank too much last night.’”

“I cannot remember my meanness,” Cheever wrote poignantly, “because my recollections are damaged by alcohol.” It may have been literally true. Cheever suffered from aphasia, hallucinations, and seizures.  On the basis of a CAT scan from 1975, Laing makes the argument that Cheever suffered from diffuse cerebral atrophy, and possible Korsakoff syndrome, a neurological disorder seen almost exclusively in alcoholics.

Tennessee Williams, Pulitzer Prize-winning author of plays such as A Streetcar Named Desire and The Night of the Iguana, also suffered a litany of medical problems directly related to alcohol, including peripheral neuritis in his feet. “Of course I would love to believe the good doctor,” Williams wrote, “but I don’t quite believe him.”

The title of Laing’s book comes from Tennessee Williams’s Cat on a Hot Tin Roof, in which Brick, the alcoholic son, frequently takes “a little short trip to Echo Spring,” referring to the liquor cabinet containing his favorite brain of bourbon. But awareness has a way of creeping in around the edges. In an early story that foreshadowed the play, the character of Brick says, “A man that drinks is two people, one grabbing the bottle, the other one fighting him off it, not one but two people fighting each other to get control of a bottle.” 

Williams endured years of psychoanalysis and spent time in mental hospitals. He dutifully kept detailed notebooks: “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 tranquilizer whose name I do not know and a yellow one I think is called reserpine or something like that.” Now think of making it through a single day under that load of intoxicants.

F. Scott Fitzgerald, best known for his novel The Great Gatsby, wrote to his editor, Maxwell Perkins, in 1934: “I have drunk too much and that is certainly slowing me up. On the other hand, without drink I do not know whether I could have survived this time.” Laing notes that this ambivalence “could be interpreted as a refusal to see alcohol as a cause rather than a symptom of his troubles,” and in this Fitzgerald was by no means alone. For Fitzgerald, as for many others of the day, being “on the wagon” often meant restricting oneself to beer and the occasional glass of champagne. Fitzgerald, on the wagon at the rate of 30 beers a day, said that “when I swell up I switch to cokes.”

Laing provides us with a litany of these “excuse notes” from her writers: “I drink because it improves my work. I drink because I am too sensitive to live in the world without it. There are hundreds more of these,” she writes. In Ernest Hemingway’s A Moveable Feast, she finds “an example of someone flat-out denying their own disease….” My own personal favorite is Hemingway’s letter in which he claims to be amazed and chagrined that alcohol, something “I could not have lived without many times; or at least would have cared to live without; was a straight poison to Scott instead of a food.”

John Berryman, poet, Pulitzer Prize Winner, National Book Award winner, and author of The Dream Songs, also battled depression and a tendency to fall down stairs, breaking arms, legs, and wrists. He served a stint as a creative writing instructor at the University of Iowa writing program, as would John Cheever and Raymond Carver. He ended up at the University of Minnesota, where he dried out repeatedly at Hazelden and other local clinics. Even Berryman’s most ardent supporters gave up on him. His chairman at the university said of him: “I concluded that the only John one could love was a John with 2 or 3 drinks in him, no more & no less, & such a John could not exist.” Berryman killed himself by jumping off a bridge in Minneapolis.

Let’s let Raymond Carver—poet, short story writer, and legendary drunk— have the last word. In a 1982 poem, he wrote:

And then…something: alcohol—

What you’ve really done

And to someone else, the one

You meant to love from the start.

Books By Addicts: A Collection

The Up and the Down.
 
(Click titles for full review)

Steve Earle and the Ghost of Hank Williams: I’ll Never Get Out of This World Alive

Musician Steve Earle made a solo name for himself with "Guitar Town" and "Copperhead Road" after playing in legendary country and bluegrass bands as a young prodigy. He was nominated for a Grammy, his reputations soared, he added rock and roll to his range—until 1991, when Earle put out the aptly named live album, Shut Up and Die Like An Aviator. Shortly thereafter, he was dropped by his record label for long-standing drug problems, and landed in prison with a heavy sentence for possession of heroin….






When Did I Become the Junkie Auntie Mame? Courtney Love tells her tangled tale in a new e-book.

Maer Roshan, author of Courtney Comes Clean: The High Life and Dark Depths of Music’s Most Controversial Icon, logged a dozen “exhilarating and exhausting” sessions with the widow of Nirvana’s Kurt Cobain over the course of a year, pulling together a definitive look at Love’s drug addictions and other demons. Roshan taped countless hours of interviews, and received additional written material from the “Tolstoy of texting,” as Love refers to herself. The book is highly readable, almost, one is tempted to say, addictively so. Sure, it’s tabloid stuff—let he or she who has never peeked at Gawker or Jezebel cast the first stone….





Mike Doughty Talks About The Book of Drugs: Former Soul Coughing front man on sobriety and life as a solo artist.

Over the phone, Mike Doughty doesn’t have much to say about his former band, Soul Coughing. When I mention it, he gives out a low growl as a warning. He said it all in The Book of Drugs, and it doesn’t sound like he had much fun. Although the avant-garde rock band created music that was spiky and sneaky and immensely popular, topped off by Doughty’s monotonic but strangely penetrating vocal delivery on such classics as “Super Bon Bon,” “True Dreams of Wichita,” and “Circles,” Doughty was drug-dependent and miserable….






Writers On The Edge: A compendium of tough prose and poetry about addiction

Here’s a book I’m delighted to promote unabashedly. I even wrote a jacket blurb for it. I called it an “honest, unflinching book about addiction from a tough group of talented writers. These hard-hitters know whereof they speak, and the language in which they speak can be shocking to the uninitiated—naked prose and poetry about potentially fatal cravings the flesh is heir to—drugs, booze, cutting, overeating, depression, suicide. Not everybody makes it through. Writers On The Edge is about dependency, and the toll it takes, on the guilty and the innocent alike.”






Book Review of Drunken Angel: A hipster gets his shit straight—sort of.

Addiction memoirs remain one of the most popular forms of autobiography on the shelves. But now, when considering a new addition to the genre, it’s impossible not to wonder whether the claims being made by the author are genuine. Since serious drunks often end up visiting the lower circles of hell during the course of their disease, hair-raising and improbable scenes are lamentably common—that is part of the genre’s charm, if that is the right word for it. But how are we to react now? The answer is, you can’t know, and you never really could, that bastard James Frey notwithstanding....






Addiction Fiction: Coming-of-Age Drug Novels

Call it “addiction fiction.” In the past few years we have seen a blossoming of this genre, where the private eye goes to 12-Step meetings, and one day your sponsor may just save your life by gunning down a rival in the street. Or, where the wise-beyond-their-years prep school drug addicts engage in Brett Easton Ellis-style sex and ennui….








Addiction Noir: The Next Right Thing

To date, I’ve only reviewed one novel here at Addiction Inbox—Steve Earle’s I’ll Never Get Out of This World Alive, featuring the ghost of Hank Williams standing in for the addictive pleasures that musicians are heir to. Now comes The Next Right Thing by Dan Barden, an exemplar of a new literary genre I am going to call addiction noir….








John Berryman and the Poetry of “Irresistible Descent”: The penal colony’s prime scribe

A year before he committed suicide by jumping off a Minneapolis bridge in 1972, Pulitzer Prize-winning poet John Berryman had been in alcohol rehab three times, and had published a rambling, curious, unfinished book about his treatment experiences. Recovery is a time capsule. If you think we have little to offer addicts by way of treatment these days, consider the picture in the 60s and 70s. In Recovery, treatment consists almost entirely of Freudian group analysis, and while there is regular talk of alcoholism as a disease, AA style, there is no evidence that it was actually dealt with in this way, after detoxification....

John Berryman and the Poetry of “Irresistible Descent”

“The penal colony’s prime scribe.”

“Will power is nothing. Morals is nothing. Lord, this is illness.”
—John Berryman, 1971

A year before he committed suicide by jumping off a Minneapolis bridge in 1972, Pulitzer Prize-winning poet John Berryman had been in alcohol rehab three times, and had published a rambling, curious, unfinished book about his treatment experiences. Recovery is a time capsule. If you think we have little to offer addicts by way of treatment these days, consider the picture in the 60s and 70s. In Recovery, treatment consists almost entirely of Freudian group analysis, and while there is regular talk of alcoholism as a disease, AA style, there is no evidence that it was actually dealt with in this way, after detoxification.

Best known for “Dream Songs,” Berryman taught at the University of Minnesota, and was known as a dedicated if irascible professor. Scientist Alan Severence, Berryman’s stand-in persona in the book, comes into rehab hard and recalcitrant, despite his previous failures: “Screw all these humorless bastards sitting around congratulating themselves on being sober, what’s so wonderful about being sober? Great Christ, most of the world is sober, and look at it!” And he is suffering from “the even deeper delusion that my science and art depended on my drinking, or at least were connected with it, could not be attacked directly. Too far down.”

Berryman was a difficult man, and knew it. He quotes F. Scott Fitzgerald: “When drunk, I make them pay and pay and pay and pay.”

Alcoholics, writes Berryman, are “rigid, childish, intolerant, programmatic. They have to live furtive lives. Your only chance is to come out in the open.” Berryman catches the flavor of group interaction after too many hours, too much frustration, and too much craving. One inpatient lashes out: “You’re lying when you say you do not do anything about your anger. You get bombed. It is called medicating the feelings, pal. Every inappropriate drinker does it. Cause and effect. Visible to a child. Not visible to you.”

Berryman was a shrewd observer, a singular writer, and, after all, a poet. He is extraordinary on the subject of alcoholic dissociation: “I found myself wondering whether I would turn off right towards the University and the bus home or whether I would just continue right on to the Circle and up right one block to the main bar I use there, and have a few. Wondering. My whole fate depending on pure chance…. as if one were not even one’s own actor but only a spectator.”

Berryman puts it all together in a horrific capsule description of the “irresistible descent, for the person incomprehensibly determined.”

Relief drinking occasional then constant, increase in alcohol tolerance, first blackouts, surreptitious drinking, growing dependence, urgency of FIRST drinks, guilt spreading, unable to bear discussion of the problem, blackout crescendo, failure of ability to stop along with others (the evening really begins after you leave the party)… grandiose and aggressive behavior, remorse without respite, controls fail, resolutions fail, decline of other interests, avoidance of wife and friends and colleagues, work troubles, irrational resentments, inability to eat, erosion of the ordinary will, tremor and sweating… injuries, moral deterioration, impaired and delusional thinking, low bars and witless cronies….

Berryman had no illusions about his failed attempt to hide behind the mask of a social drinker: “It seems to be loss of control. Unpredictability. That’s all. A social drinker knows when he can stop. Also, in a general way, his life-style does not arrange itself around the chemical, as ours does. For instance, he does not go on the wagon…”

In the end, he was "pleading the universal case of hope for abnormal drinkers, for all despairing and deluded sufferers fighting for their sanity in a world not much less insane itself and similarly half-bent on self-destruction…”

As the head nurse in the facility tells the group: “You are all suffering from the lack of self-confidence… often so powerful that it leads to consideration of suicide, a plan which if adopted will leave you really invulnerable, quite safe at last.”

And as Saul Bellow wrote in the introduction to Recovery: “At last there was no more. Reinforcements failed to arrive. Forces were not joined. The cycle of resolution, reform and relapse had become a bad joke which could not continue.” Berryman agreed. Toward the end, he wrote: “I certainly don’t think I’ll last much longer.”

“There’s hope until you’re dead,” a woman tells him during his final stay in rehab. Sadly, that hope ended a few months later.


Photo posted by Tom Sutpen for the series: Poets are both clean and warm