WRITERS AND RUM

[Jazzy]

“Writers in this office used to drink,” a grizzled veteran of these corridors once said sternly to a couple of pup reporters, whom he had discovered taking turns trying on a good-looking cashmere jacket in another cubicle. The moral, abashing if not shaming, was that in the halls where once real men had roamed, or drank in peaceable closets, now mere jacket-fanciers wandered. Certainly, it’s impossible to turn the past pages of this magazine, or the pages of American literary history, for that matter, without being reminded of how inextricable the drinking life and the writing life—or, to put it more bluntly, alcoholism and art—once were. From St. Clair McKelway to Dorothy Parker and James Thurber, and from Ernest Hemingway to F. Scott Fitzgerald to Sinclair Lewis and beyond, it was not long ago that if you wrote you drank, and if you weren’t drinking it was because you were drying out.

The critic Olivia Laing has just published a good, sad book on this subject called “The Trip To Echo Spring: On Writers And Drinking,” which tells at length the mostly familiar but still melancholy stories of the drinking lives of Fitzgerald and Hemingway and Tennessee Williams and John Berryman and John Cheever and Raymond Carver, complete, it sometimes feels, with tipped-in napkin stains from each of their favorite bars. Oddly fixated, for a Brit, who surely has plenty of scribbling drinkers in her own country, on this one—a reviewer in the Times claims that she “romanticizes the vast American landscape as a place made for rumination,” though rum-ination seems more like it—she entangles the story of these gifted men with tales of her own alcoholic family. We attend an A.A. meeting in her presence, and then are off to Key West, where Hemingway downed many and Tennessee Williams even more. Tender and sympathetic though she is to her subjects’ compulsions, and difficult though it is to be completely immune to the appeal of dissolute lives in our timid time, it mostly makes for depressing reading, which was, perhaps, her point.

I’m just old enough to be able to have seen the tail end of that literary culture of really big drinkers—and a real culture it was, as Laing understands. It may be hard to believe that it was so, when nowadays we mostly ingest our drugs from prescription bottles, early in the morning or late at night—but it existed, and was as alluring as it was utterly toxic.

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Interesting article and the book sounds interesting as well.