Raymond Carver, the ‘American Chekhov’ managed to give up drinking after the publication and success of What we talk about when we talk about love and said that he would rather take poison than live through his youth again.
This makes Carver one of American literary history’s escapees from alcohol: there aren’t too many of them.
The Thirsty Muse is an examination of the phenomenon of alcoholism among American writers,
it succeeds in making it impossible to view drinking and alcoholism as anything other than absolutely central to the truncation of their creative careers.
As the author, Dardis points out, Faulkner had finished his best work by the time he was 44 (Go Down Moses), Fitzgerald by the time he was 38 (Tender is the night) and Hemingway 41. O’Neill was the one who got away: he became teetotal at 37 and, in The iceman cometh and Long Day’s Journey into Night, wrote two great plays about addiction.
Here is an illustartion how writers of a certain generation viewed alcohol.
In one passage Hemingway sends the Hemingway-figure, the charismatic, disillusioned, illusionless warrior Colonel Cantwell, on an evening out in Venice. Before going to dinner, Cantwell drinks a gin and Campari, three extra-dry martinis, another gin and Campari and three montgomerys (a kind of super-ultra-mega-dry martini). At dinner with Renata, his aristocratic teenage girlfriend, the Colonel shares a bottle of Capri Bianco, two bottles of Valpolicella, a bottle of champagne (Roederer brut ’42) and another bottle of champagne (Perrier-Jouet, vintage unspecified). He takes a bottle of Valpolicella along when he and Renata go off to have sex (twice) in a gondola, and when he gets back to his hotel he has a nightcap swig of the Valpolicella which the waiter has thoughtfully left
The telling detail is that Hemingway finds nothing out of the ordinary in the Colonel’s drinkathon, in the course of which, back-of-envelope arithmetic inform, he sconsumes upward of forty units of alcohol during a single evening – the equivalent of 20 pints of beer or six bottles of wine or a bottle-and-a-bit of spirits. The reason this level of consumption appeared normal to Hemingway is that it was a fairly accurate transcription of the amount of booze he was quotidianly ingesting: it’s no wonder that his responses had coarsened, or that his feeling for ordinary life-as-it-is-lived had gone wonky.
Though Hemingway’s constitution never quite collapsed from drinking in the same way that Fitzgerald’s and Faulkner’s did – he took tremendous comfort in monitoring the disintegration of the other two writers, and claimed he could tell straight away when they had been writing ‘on corn’ –
Foir Hemingway, alcohol was vital in the process by which he became a hollowed-out caricature of himself.
His son’s memoir includes a gruesome account of a day spent with his father, the first time they had spent together since Jack became an adult. Hemingway père and fils went up on the roof of Hemingway’s work-room, armed with shotguns, in order to kill some of the local buzzards. Hemingway got his servant to bring up a pitcher of martinis: after three pitchers (and many buzzard deaths) they went downstairs to watch Hemingway’s print of Casablanca. ‘Isn’t the Swede beautiful? I mean truly, truly beautiful,’ Hemingway said of Ingrid Bergman. His son agreed. The two men started weeping uncontrollably over Bergman’s beauty. This was in 1955, with six years of decline to go.
Hemingway’s slogan, ‘good writers are drinking writers,’ could easily have been spoken by Faulkner, who instead used to say: ‘Isn’t nothing Ah got whiskey won’t cure.’ This turned out not to be the case – though if any writer can claim to have made effective use of alcohol, it was Faulkner during his heroic period. All his life he drank while writing, ‘keeping the whiskey within reach’ after starting the day with a whiskey-and-water, a procedure which seemed to be serving him well (The Sound and the Fury, As I lay dying, Light in August were all written like this), until it started to serve him less well, and the long history of collapses, black-outs and hospitalisations began. His first hospitalisation was in 1936, and there were to be very many more before his death in 1962; he survived seizures of an intensity that might well have been expected to be fatal; he had a blackout that lasted for two entire days. He also had accidents, like the time he fell back against a steam pipe in the bathroom and was too drunk to realise that he was sustaining third-degree burns on his back, or the time that he nearly crashed his aeroplane. ‘You can’t drink and fly, Bill,’ a friend sagely counselled. It’s a remarkable testimony to the strength of Faulkner’s constitution and character that he lived so long.
Fitzgerald was different: if ever there was someone who simply should not have drunk at all, it was Fitzgerald. He would become paralytic on tiny amounts of alcohol – once, to Hemingway’s amazement, on a third of a bottle of champagne – but that did not, as in the classic alcoholic pattern, prevent him from carrying on drinking, with predictable results on his health, creativity and marriage. The power, and the destructiveness, of the idea of the-writer-as-drinker is very clear in Fitzgerald’s case: his drinking was bound up with the then widespread sense that alcohol was a necessity to writers, and with his admiration for Hemingway. Dardis points to the importance of Prohibition as a glamoriser and mythologiser of drink: the spectacle of women drinking in public only became socially acceptable, Dardis notes, after alcohol was declared illegal
There had been a particular ferocity and desperation about the way O’Neill drank: once, after a dry period, he went down to the cellar to taste some cider with Hart Crane and Malcolm Cowley, who had dropped around to his house in Connecticut. His wife found him in New York a week later. On another occasion, he took a half-empty bottle of a Prohibition spirit called Tiger Piss – brand names were less misleading in those days – urinated in it, and drank it. This was in order to demonstrate his willingness to drink literally anything. When, after the death (from alcoholism) of his brother, O’Neill came to give up drink. Lucky O'Neill!
All these 'greats' lived under the under the cloud of a cultural zeitgeist, (if you were unlucky enough to
live under the smoking era (My Dad smoked 80 a day and h e lived till he was 85 etc)
then one had little choice in contracting lung cancer.
These great figure of American Literature had a weltannschung (world view) that alcohol was a perfectly acceptable must for any self-respecting writer.
That is the room they lived in but in reality they were underneath the floorboards.
This makes Carver one of American literary history’s escapees from alcohol: there aren’t too many of them.
The Thirsty Muse is an examination of the phenomenon of alcoholism among American writers,
it succeeds in making it impossible to view drinking and alcoholism as anything other than absolutely central to the truncation of their creative careers.
As the author, Dardis points out, Faulkner had finished his best work by the time he was 44 (Go Down Moses), Fitzgerald by the time he was 38 (Tender is the night) and Hemingway 41. O’Neill was the one who got away: he became teetotal at 37 and, in The iceman cometh and Long Day’s Journey into Night, wrote two great plays about addiction.
Here is an illustartion how writers of a certain generation viewed alcohol.
In one passage Hemingway sends the Hemingway-figure, the charismatic, disillusioned, illusionless warrior Colonel Cantwell, on an evening out in Venice. Before going to dinner, Cantwell drinks a gin and Campari, three extra-dry martinis, another gin and Campari and three montgomerys (a kind of super-ultra-mega-dry martini). At dinner with Renata, his aristocratic teenage girlfriend, the Colonel shares a bottle of Capri Bianco, two bottles of Valpolicella, a bottle of champagne (Roederer brut ’42) and another bottle of champagne (Perrier-Jouet, vintage unspecified). He takes a bottle of Valpolicella along when he and Renata go off to have sex (twice) in a gondola, and when he gets back to his hotel he has a nightcap swig of the Valpolicella which the waiter has thoughtfully left
The telling detail is that Hemingway finds nothing out of the ordinary in the Colonel’s drinkathon, in the course of which, back-of-envelope arithmetic inform, he sconsumes upward of forty units of alcohol during a single evening – the equivalent of 20 pints of beer or six bottles of wine or a bottle-and-a-bit of spirits. The reason this level of consumption appeared normal to Hemingway is that it was a fairly accurate transcription of the amount of booze he was quotidianly ingesting: it’s no wonder that his responses had coarsened, or that his feeling for ordinary life-as-it-is-lived had gone wonky.
Though Hemingway’s constitution never quite collapsed from drinking in the same way that Fitzgerald’s and Faulkner’s did – he took tremendous comfort in monitoring the disintegration of the other two writers, and claimed he could tell straight away when they had been writing ‘on corn’ –
Foir Hemingway, alcohol was vital in the process by which he became a hollowed-out caricature of himself.
His son’s memoir includes a gruesome account of a day spent with his father, the first time they had spent together since Jack became an adult. Hemingway père and fils went up on the roof of Hemingway’s work-room, armed with shotguns, in order to kill some of the local buzzards. Hemingway got his servant to bring up a pitcher of martinis: after three pitchers (and many buzzard deaths) they went downstairs to watch Hemingway’s print of Casablanca. ‘Isn’t the Swede beautiful? I mean truly, truly beautiful,’ Hemingway said of Ingrid Bergman. His son agreed. The two men started weeping uncontrollably over Bergman’s beauty. This was in 1955, with six years of decline to go.
Hemingway’s slogan, ‘good writers are drinking writers,’ could easily have been spoken by Faulkner, who instead used to say: ‘Isn’t nothing Ah got whiskey won’t cure.’ This turned out not to be the case – though if any writer can claim to have made effective use of alcohol, it was Faulkner during his heroic period. All his life he drank while writing, ‘keeping the whiskey within reach’ after starting the day with a whiskey-and-water, a procedure which seemed to be serving him well (The Sound and the Fury, As I lay dying, Light in August were all written like this), until it started to serve him less well, and the long history of collapses, black-outs and hospitalisations began. His first hospitalisation was in 1936, and there were to be very many more before his death in 1962; he survived seizures of an intensity that might well have been expected to be fatal; he had a blackout that lasted for two entire days. He also had accidents, like the time he fell back against a steam pipe in the bathroom and was too drunk to realise that he was sustaining third-degree burns on his back, or the time that he nearly crashed his aeroplane. ‘You can’t drink and fly, Bill,’ a friend sagely counselled. It’s a remarkable testimony to the strength of Faulkner’s constitution and character that he lived so long.
Fitzgerald was different: if ever there was someone who simply should not have drunk at all, it was Fitzgerald. He would become paralytic on tiny amounts of alcohol – once, to Hemingway’s amazement, on a third of a bottle of champagne – but that did not, as in the classic alcoholic pattern, prevent him from carrying on drinking, with predictable results on his health, creativity and marriage. The power, and the destructiveness, of the idea of the-writer-as-drinker is very clear in Fitzgerald’s case: his drinking was bound up with the then widespread sense that alcohol was a necessity to writers, and with his admiration for Hemingway. Dardis points to the importance of Prohibition as a glamoriser and mythologiser of drink: the spectacle of women drinking in public only became socially acceptable, Dardis notes, after alcohol was declared illegal
There had been a particular ferocity and desperation about the way O’Neill drank: once, after a dry period, he went down to the cellar to taste some cider with Hart Crane and Malcolm Cowley, who had dropped around to his house in Connecticut. His wife found him in New York a week later. On another occasion, he took a half-empty bottle of a Prohibition spirit called Tiger Piss – brand names were less misleading in those days – urinated in it, and drank it. This was in order to demonstrate his willingness to drink literally anything. When, after the death (from alcoholism) of his brother, O’Neill came to give up drink. Lucky O'Neill!
All these 'greats' lived under the under the cloud of a cultural zeitgeist, (if you were unlucky enough to
live under the smoking era (My Dad smoked 80 a day and h e lived till he was 85 etc)
then one had little choice in contracting lung cancer.
These great figure of American Literature had a weltannschung (world view) that alcohol was a perfectly acceptable must for any self-respecting writer.
That is the room they lived in but in reality they were underneath the floorboards.
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