Soaked Through
Have read The Trip to Echo Spring by Olivia Laing. Its about writers, mainly American ones, who were alcoholics. Its a wonderful and terrifying book. Like Laing's later book The Lonely City it detail's the author's physical journey as she links together a chain of artists marked by their isolation and loneliness. In Echo Spring these artists - all writers, all men, all American - are strung together by varying degrees of alcoholism, though that in itself is manifestly wrong. There are just alcoholics and in this book there are just alcoholics who died of it, who killed themselves or who gave up drinking. None of them stopped being alcoholics, none of them got better or managed their condition: they stopped drinking or they died.
This is a book of devastation as drink tears through, tears up the lives of these men. Fitzgerald is here and Hemingway, famous literary drunks. And there's Tennessee Williams and John Cheever, their sexuality and the prevailing social mores of the times tied up in their desperate self-annihilation. John Berryman killed himself after the books most dizzying descent into debasement, helter-skeltering into oblivion. Raymond Carver believed he would have died by the age of 40 if he didn't stop drinking. He finally stopped aged 39.
There stories are all different but all similar as all alcoholics stories are the same: the self-pity, the delusion, the grandiosity, the blaming of others, the agonising moments of clarity. There is the blurring of memory, the seduction of being engulfed, the broken relationships, the broken bones, the poisoned families suffering through generations. The only thing different between their stories and those of other alcoholics is that they were famous men at a time when that was the only thing that mattered: they were indulged more, they were given more chances. They were artists too and aggressive boozing was part and parcel of being an out there, crazy, on the edge 20th Century artist. They were looked after. They were babied. But there was a commonality of behaviour with every one else ravaged by this disease. All drunks are the same.
It made me think about my own drinking. I drink too much. Sometimes I don't drink too much, but that's deliberate. I have to will that to happen. Otherwise drinks appear magically in my hand. It creeps up. Its boringly habitual. And its corrosive and expensive and dull. If drinking doesn't make you drunk, if its not communal, if its not a celebration, then what is it for?
A lot of my friends drink far more than me so it makes me think about them too. But then there is that Dylan Thomas line: An alcoholic is someone you don't like who drinks as much as you do. But then he would know.
I had some delicious wine on my birthday but I've not drunk since. Three days without an incident.
Watch this space.
This is a book of devastation as drink tears through, tears up the lives of these men. Fitzgerald is here and Hemingway, famous literary drunks. And there's Tennessee Williams and John Cheever, their sexuality and the prevailing social mores of the times tied up in their desperate self-annihilation. John Berryman killed himself after the books most dizzying descent into debasement, helter-skeltering into oblivion. Raymond Carver believed he would have died by the age of 40 if he didn't stop drinking. He finally stopped aged 39.
There stories are all different but all similar as all alcoholics stories are the same: the self-pity, the delusion, the grandiosity, the blaming of others, the agonising moments of clarity. There is the blurring of memory, the seduction of being engulfed, the broken relationships, the broken bones, the poisoned families suffering through generations. The only thing different between their stories and those of other alcoholics is that they were famous men at a time when that was the only thing that mattered: they were indulged more, they were given more chances. They were artists too and aggressive boozing was part and parcel of being an out there, crazy, on the edge 20th Century artist. They were looked after. They were babied. But there was a commonality of behaviour with every one else ravaged by this disease. All drunks are the same.
It made me think about my own drinking. I drink too much. Sometimes I don't drink too much, but that's deliberate. I have to will that to happen. Otherwise drinks appear magically in my hand. It creeps up. Its boringly habitual. And its corrosive and expensive and dull. If drinking doesn't make you drunk, if its not communal, if its not a celebration, then what is it for?
A lot of my friends drink far more than me so it makes me think about them too. But then there is that Dylan Thomas line: An alcoholic is someone you don't like who drinks as much as you do. But then he would know.
I had some delicious wine on my birthday but I've not drunk since. Three days without an incident.
Watch this space.
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