Sober look at myth of drunken writers
The other day, while listening to a podcast from “Selected Shorts,” the public radio program where actors read short fiction before a live audience, I caught Leonard Nimoy reading Raymond Carver’s dazzling, heartbreaking story “What We Talk About When We Talk About Love.” The four characters sit around a kitchen table drinking endless glasses of gin and talking about love. And a lot more.
Carver, often regarded as one of America’s greatest short story writers. was also a legendary drunk. He sobered up the last 10 years of his short life, dying at 50 from lung cancer.
It got me thinking about alcohol and its complex role in American literary history. Undeniably brilliant, creative work has been written by dipsomaniacs. And just as undeniably, many a potentially brilliant piece of writing has been derailed by too much booze.
When I came of age as a reader, many of the revered writers were heavy drinkers (the term alcoholic wasn’t widely applied at the time): Ernest Hemingway, Jean Rhys, Truman Capote, Patricia Highsmith, John Cheever, Dorothy Parker. I swallowed the romantic image of the outrageous, ruledefying, largerthanlife creative genius, glass of whiskey in hand, cigarette dangling out of the corner of the mouth, entertaining everyone in the bar until it was time to go home and write gorgeous prose.
Many years later, I understand that picture wasn’t accurate. While many wellregarded writers started out drinking hard, if their consumption progressed as they aged, everything went south — their health, their relationships, and, yes, their writing.
I first understood this reading Tom Dardis’ 1989 book “The Thirsty Muse.” Dardis writes about the drinking careers of four classic American writers: Hemingway, William Faulkner, F. Scott Fitzgerald and Eugene O’Neill. No happy endings here.
As Susan Cheever, daughter of John and herself a recovering alcoholic, notes in “Drinking in America,” “In the midtwentieth century, five of the seven Americans who won the Nobel Prize were alcoholics — Sinclair Lewis, Eugene O’Neill, William Faulkner, Ernest Hemingway and John Steinbeck. (A proud tally.) And those are the ones who made it to the top. Lots of other great writers who didn’t receive the Nobel laurel were just as pieeyed.”
And then there are books by alcoholic writers about alcoholism. John Berryman’s posthumously published “Recovery,” an unfinished autobiographical novel based on his experiences in treatment, is a grimly realistic novel about alcoholism. Berryman’s own life, sadly, ended with suicide.
For a lot of of us, the film version of “The Lost Weekend,” starring Jane Wyman and Ray Milland, was our first glimpse of a movie about an alcoholic that, far from glamorizing the addiction, focused on the grimy daytoday minutiae of being an alcoholic. The book on which it was based was written by Charles R. Jackson, himself an alcoholic. Following publication of his novel, Jackson got sober.
Thankfully, especially for young, upandcoming writers, the myth of the alcoholic writer seems decades out of date. It’s hard to think of a single prominent writer glorified for alcoholism today. Rather, there’s a flood of recovery memoirs including work by Denis Johnson, Mary Karr, David Carr and Bill Clegg.
One of the more recent is Leslie Jamison’s “The Recovery: Intoxication and Its Aftermath.” Jamison fell in love with the myth of the alcoholic creator while attending the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, hallowed ground for aspiring writers. She got drunk in the same bars as Cheever, Raymond Carver and Berryman, associating their prodigious drinking with creativity.
Jamison describes her greatest fear about recovery is that it — and the stories she could tell as a sober person — would be boring. With “The Recovery,” her goal is to tell a story of recovery that is as powerful as the fictional representations of alcoholism in literature. (I’m not quite sure it fully succeeds; train wrecks are more entertaining than safe journeys.)
Acclaimed Marin writer Anne Lamott, who got sober in 1986, says she published her first three books (”Hard Laughter,” “Rosie” and “Joe Jones”) while still drinking. “Alcohol gave me a lot of confidence, and a great sense of community and belonging. But I was very hungover every morning, and had a lot of shame about my behavior, and drinking that much dims your vision and your capacity as a storyteller and a truth teller,” Lamott says.
“I was absolutely positive I would never write again if I stopped drinking, because I so believed that drinking gave me my creative inspiration and release. Drinking was my favorite thing about life — drinking with family and close friends, and with all the creative types at Tosca and Enrico’s, Gino and Carlo. The other lushes were such brilliant, amazing people and being a part of all that energy was thrilling.
“I couldn’t write for nine or 10 months after I got sober, and then felt like my windows had been washed. I could see in color again. My first sober book was ‘All New People,’ and it was not awful!”
Rick Moody on his website, www.rick moodybooks.com, responds to the question “How can I write now that I’m sober?”
“I quit drinking in the middle of my first novel,” he writes, “and you can see the difference, the dark, selfcentered, romantic selfdestruction of the first half (of “Garden State”), and the beginningtoseethelight of the second half.”
He concludes: “I would not trade the nakedness before human consciousness of sobriety now. I cherish it. And if it means that I am not as great an artist in the public sense of the thing, by not taking part in the romantic mythology of the great selfdestructive artists, then I am okay with that.”