Some years ago, John Sutherland, former professor of English and now self-styled literary hack, wrote a memoir about giving up drinking.
Titled Last Drink to LA, it was written less as a cautionary tale than as a philosophical exercise, or what Sutherland calls "some thinking about drinking". Inevitably, however, it acts as a warning, given the stories and scenes it relates, not all of them from his own life. In fact, more of the horror of his depiction of alcoholism comes from drinkers who make his own excesses look minor, his intake that of a minnow compared to a handful of legendary whales.
Now reissued (Short Books, £7.99), updated and with an epilogue that is almost as sobering as the preceding book, this is a timely publication. As January unfolds, the resolve many of us made not to touch a drop until February was but a memory before the hangover of Hogmanay had even faded. It is an uncomfortable fact, that Sutherland repeats to make sure it does not go unheeded, that ten percent of the readers of his book will have an alcohol problem. As he tells us, 300,000 lives are terminated or shortened by alcohol abuse in the UK every year - an "annual Passchendaele". If one adds to this his belief that certain nations are particularly prone to heavy drinking - Scotland is up there with Scandinavia and Ireland - then not everyone who picks up this book will be entirely dispassionate about what it reveals.
That, however, is incidental, at least for the purposes of these pages. What strikes the reader forcibly is how many famous 20th-century writers were alcoholic, and died directly as a result of their addiction. It is a terrible thought. Whenever one reads Hemingway or Scott Fitzgerald, you can almost smell the spirits rising from the page. Hemingway sneered at Scott Fitzgerald, for being a "cissy " drinker, than which there was no greater insult. For a long time the myth of the hard- drinking novelist carried a hint of glamour that only reinforced the writer's determination to self-destruct. Those thinking to follow them could do no better than read Anthony Burgess's revoltingly vivid and guilt-stricken description of his wife Lynne's fatal binging, her alcoholism encouraged, he believed, by him expecting to match him drink for drink. It takes a strong stomach, as do the scenes in Zola's novel L'Assommoir, where Gervaise's drinking finally kills her: "She died like a pig in a sty".
The list of literary figures who could not let go of the bottle is painful to read: Jack London, Louis MacNeice, Dylan Thomas, John Cheever, John Berryman, Eugene O'Neill, Raymond Chandler - who dried out - Evelyn Waugh and Kingsley Amis who, if not alcoholics, were dedicated imbibers. One can't help wondering if alcohol addiction is something to which writers are particularly vulnerable. Does it, as some have suggested, allow them to write better by releasing their inhibitions and allowing them to disengage with reality? Do creativity and drink go hand in hand? One doctor certainly seemed to think so when treating one of jazz's maestros, as Sutherland relates: "When Charlie Parker's common-law wife asked physicians to cure her glutonously addictive husband - by the sledgehammer therapies of ECT or lobotomy if necessary - she was asked: 'Mrs Parker, what do you want? A husband or a genius?' "
No doubt there are instances where drink is necessary for someone to fill the page, or take to the stage, but I suspect they are far fewer than those where a talent is destroyed, and an ouvre cut short, by the same impulse. Too common, too, are those who, having typed away in their cups, return to their work when sober, and realise it is worthless.
Since good fiction is often written by people more sensitive, or receptive, or more imaginative than most of us, perhaps it's not surprising that literary history is littered with empty bottles. But that figure of the annual 300,000 helped into the grave by their fondness for drink suggests the problem goes far deeper than having a poetic soul. One presumes it is part of the human condition, its reach as wide and random as that of any other affliction.
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