The Old Un’s Notes
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From the cow, I mean Cosy in my bed (It was still early), I wondered about This way of bringing life – A syringe, a man employed – it was a man. Then in spring a calf with the blackest eyes, The longest lashes and a tentative bravery, As I talk to him, or her, over the gate.
Jenny Bardwell’s memories (November issue) of Kingsley Amis, her naughty uncle, reminded the Old Un how drink makes the ink flow.
Amis, recalling how nervous he was when starting a novel, said a glass or two of Scotch helped get the show on the road. Simon Raven would spend an hour or so before going to bed, ‘alone and half drunk’, jotting down ‘ideas, paradoxes and reveries, about a third of which would stand the test of sober consideration in the morning’.
Both Amis and Raven insisted they couldn’t write properly when drunk, yet both were very heavy, routine drinkers, whom you could justifiably call ‘well-adjusted alcoholics’. Almost the last coherent words Amis uttered were ‘For God’s sake, you bloody fool, get me a drink!’
Other British writers who generally had a bottle within reach included Graham Greene (who had, says his latest biographer, ‘a Homeric tolerance for alcohol’), Henry Green, Jean Rhys and Anthony Burgess. In later life, Evelyn Waugh would start proceedings with a pint of his Noonday Reviver: gin, Guinness and ginger beer.
American writers were even thirstier during the first half of the century.
Paradoxically, this was partly a consequence of Prohibition. William Faulkner was not alone in thinking that ‘civilisation begins with distillation’. Intelligent people, in particular, felt it was their duty to break the law. Unfortunately, there were no laws to determine the quality of what they drank. Bootleg gin, which fuelled the craze for cocktails, was as lethal as the gin of Hogarth’s day.
How right Dr Johnson was to describe drink as ‘a picklock to the imagination’.
Jack Kerouac, author of On the Road (1957), was no stranger to intoxicants either. Nor was his great friend Neal Cassady, aka Dean Moriarty in On the Road.
And now, 70 years after Cassady wrote it, the epic letter he sent to Kerouac in December 1950 is finally being published – in The Joan Anderson Letter: The Holy Grail of the Beat Generation (Black Spring Press).
Cassady had an affair with Anderson in Denver in 1945. They were both 19, she was pregnant by another man and, in Cassady’s words, she was such ‘a perfect beauty of
loveliness that I forgot everything else’.
Cassady messed up the affair through drink and a spell in prison, all described in juicy, sex-crammed detail in his 15,000-word letter. ‘The greatest piece of writing I ever saw,’ Kerouac said.
The letter went missing after Cassady’s death, at the age of 41, in 1968, and Kerouac’s, at 47, in 1969 – both accelerated by drink and drugs. In 2011, the letter was rediscovered in Oakland, California.
After legal machinations, only now is it being published in full for the first time.
Pictured are the guillemots in The Oldie’s Bird of the Month column by John Mcewen.
The column is illustrated by Carry Akroyd. And now you can buy her 2021 calendar (£10 from carryakroyd.co.uk), featuring her pictures of some of Britain’s loveliest birds.
Guillemots are the ideal Christmas bird. They often return to their breeding grounds, such as Skokholm, Pembrokeshire, in December, to perform mysterious water-dances.
The locals believe they came home for Christmas celebrations.
‘I am frequently misquoted – often accurately.’
That was the winner of last year’s Wilde Wit Competition, put on by the Oscar Wilde Society with The Oldie.
The prize goes to the person who comes up with the line that sounds most like something Oscar might have said. Last year’s winning quip, above, was by Darcy Alexander Corstorphine.
We invite you to enter your own Wildean witticism for this year’s competition.
The judges from the Oscar Wilde Society committee look for wit combined with elegantly stated truth.
Three winners will receive Wildeana, a compendium of anecdotes, epigrams, asides and accounts, signed by its editor, Oscar Wilde Society patron Matthew Sturgis.
Submit as many entries as you like at oscarwildesociety.co.uk/wilde-wit by 30th November 2020.
It’s one hell of a holiday. Seven centuries after Dante’s death in 1321, the city of Ravenna in north-eastern Italy is inviting tourists to celebrate the writer who brought the underworld to life.
This Unesco-listed town is where the poet wrote The Divine Comedy and is buried under a neoclassical tomb.
Ravenna will host exhibitions of Dante-inspired work, a Dantedi (sic) Festival and The Divine Comedy
Show, which may sound like a stand-up routine but, in fact, comprises full-length, public readings of his epic poem.
The highlight of the commemorative year is a two-day walk, In Dante’s Footsteps. This self-guided tour doesn’t promise to guide you from despair to salvation. Nor is the Roman poet Virgil alongside you to show the way, as in the original epic work.
But your holiday does become hellish as you leave Ravenna for the nearby small town of San Benedetto and the Acquacheta Waterfall.
Dante compared the roar of its cascading water to the noisy Flegetonte, the river that separates the Seventh and Eighth circles of Hell.
If reminders of the afterlife are too much, there are always the local, dark-berried Sangiovese wines to drown your sorrows.