The Trip to Echo Spring: On Writers and Drinking
By Olivia Laing
3.5/5
()
About this ebook
A New York Times Notable Book of 2014
A Time Magazine Notable Book of 2014
Olivia Laing's widely acclaimed account of how writers in the grip of alcoholism created some of the greatest works of American literature
In The Trip to Echo Spring, Olivia Laing examines the link between creativity and alcohol through the work and lives of six extraordinary men: F. Scott Fitzgerald, Ernest Hemingway, Tennessee Williams, John Berryman, John Cheever, and Raymond Carver.
All six of these writers were alcoholics, and the subject of drinking surfaces in some of their finest work, from Cat on a Hot Tin Roof to A Moveable Feast. Often, they did their drinking together: Hemingway and Fitzgerald ricocheting through the cafés of Paris in the 1920s; Carver and Cheever speeding to the liquor store in Iowa in the icy winter of 1973.
Olivia Laing grew up in an alcoholic family herself. One spring, wanting to make sense of this ferocious, entangling disease, she took a journey across America that plunged her into the heart of these overlapping lives. As she travels from Cheever's New York to Williams's New Orleans, and from Hemingway's Key West to Carver's Port Angeles, she pieces together a topographical map of alcoholism, from the horrors of addiction to the miraculous possibilities of recovery.
Beautiful, captivating, and original, The Trip to Echo Spring strips away the myth of the alcoholic writer to reveal the terrible price creativity can exert.
Olivia Laing
Olivia Laing is a writer and critic. Her first book, To the River, was published by Canongate to wide acclaim and shortlisted for the Ondaatje Prize and the Dolman Travel Book of the Year. She has been the deputy books editor of the Observer, and writes for The Guardian, New Statesman, and The Times Literary Supplement, among other publications. She is a MacDowell Fellow, and has received grants from the Arts Council and the Authors’ Foundation. She lives in Cambridge, England.
Related to The Trip to Echo Spring
Related ebooks
Swimming Home: A Novel Rating: 3 out of 5 stars3/5Forty-one False Starts: Essays on Artists and Writers Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Nobody's Looking at You: Essays Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Modern American Memoirs: 1917-1992 Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5In America: A Novel Rating: 3 out of 5 stars3/5My Misspent Youth: Essays Rating: 3 out of 5 stars3/5How Should a Person Be?: A Novel from Life Rating: 3 out of 5 stars3/5Paris Trance: A Romance Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Out of Sheer Rage: Wrestling with D. H. Lawrence Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Essays One Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Everything Now: Lessons from the City-State of Los Angeles Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5The Guardians: An Elegy for a Friend Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5What Would Lynne Tillman Do? Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Debriefing: Collected Stories Rating: 3 out of 5 stars3/5Look Alive Out There: Essays Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Coventry: Essays Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5The Hard Crowd: Essays 2000-2020 Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5The Message of the City: Dawn Powell’s New York Novels, 1925–1962 Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsThe Inventors: A Memoir Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsThe End of the Novel of Love Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5The Debut Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Upstate: A Novel Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Welcome Home: A Memoir with Selected Photographs and Letters Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Mourning Diary Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5The Middle Stories Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsA Susan Sontag Reader Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Treasure Island!!! Rating: 3 out of 5 stars3/5Approaching Eye Level Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Sontag: Her Life and Work Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5
Psychology For You
101 Fun Personality Quizzes: Who Are You . . . Really?! Rating: 3 out of 5 stars3/5Self-Care for People with ADHD: 100+ Ways to Recharge, De-Stress, and Prioritize You! Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5A People's History of the United States Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5The Art of Letting Go: Stop Overthinking, Stop Negative Spirals, and Find Emotional Freedom Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Changes That Heal: Four Practical Steps to a Happier, Healthier You Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5How to Talk to Anyone: 92 Little Tricks for Big Success in Relationships Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5How to Keep House While Drowning: A Gentle Approach to Cleaning and Organizing Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5The Introverted Leader: Building on Your Quiet Strength Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsWhat Happened to You?: Conversations on Trauma, Resilience, and Healing Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Anxious for Nothing: Finding Calm in a Chaotic World Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5The Subtle Art of Not Giving a F*ck: A Counterintuitive Approach to Living a Good Life Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Feeling Good: The New Mood Therapy Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5How to Win Friends and Influence People: Updated For the Next Generation of Leaders Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5The Source: The Secrets of the Universe, the Science of the Brain Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5The Art of Witty Banter: Be Clever, Quick, & Magnetic Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Lost Connections: Uncovering the Real Causes of Depression – and the Unexpected Solutions Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Laziness Does Not Exist Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Running on Empty: Overcome Your Childhood Emotional Neglect Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Nonviolent Communication: A Language of Life: Life-Changing Tools for Healthy Relationships Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5Maybe You Should Talk to Someone: the heartfelt, funny memoir by a New York Times bestselling therapist Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Unfu*k Yourself: Get Out of Your Head and into Your Life Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5The Covert Passive Aggressive Narcissist: The Narcissism Series, #1 Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5How Am I Doing?: 40 Conversations to Have with Yourself Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5Adult ADHD: How to Succeed as a Hunter in a Farmer's World Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Personality Types: Using the Enneagram for Self-Discovery Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Why We Sleep: Unlocking the Power of Sleep and Dreams Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5
Related categories
Reviews for The Trip to Echo Spring
11 ratings12 reviews
- Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5A REALLY good look at alcholism. interesting, informative
- Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5I requested a copy of this book for review through Goodreads First Reads because I was intrigued by its title. When I received the book I felt the title combined with the cover artwork conveyed a sense of depth of and immersion in the subject of writers and their drinking, signalling a well written and thoughtful book.In the introduction, the author set out how she intended to research and write the book and what she hoped to discover. She touched on her own personal life experiences that led her to write a book of such a specific nature. This seemed to me to be a primary motivating force behind the book's inception. I was particularly interested in this and felt that it was deserving of more space, however I found more detail later in the book.The author provides a brief look at alcoholism as a diagnosable condition and explains that no one knows exactly how it develops but that it affects all classes. The author states, that she wants to follow the life journeys of the authors she is covering, physically by retracing their footsteps and metaphorically through the stages of alcoholism, in an effort to gain some insight into the effects of alcohol on these great writers and further insight into her own background. The story starts as the author is landing in New York and I my interest is piqued. Are there links between creativity and destruction as two necessary and yet seemingly contradictory forces in life? How do these link with the uses and abuses of alcohol? Will I find useful insights in this book? In any case, the writing and storytelling are excellent, so I settle back to enjoy the journey.The text provides well observed insights into the lives of these writers and how they developed their own particular problems with alcohol. The author looks at their early development and provides links to interesting research that may help to predict relatively accurately the likelihood of their developing problems. With a subject area as complex as this there probably is no definitive answer, simply a pointer to tendencies. In this respect, I was surprised at how well the author did in looking at possible predictors.What I enjoyed most of all other than the specific subject matter itself was the prose, the author's ability to tell stories, one grand overarching story with the different writer's lives intersecting and interweaving.I learnt more about each writer than I had previously known and felt enriched by the experience. It did not answer all my questions, but then, how could it? I enjoy good writing and was on the lookout for new authors and new approaches. This book satisfied me in all these areas.
- Rating: 2 out of 5 stars2/5While the subject matter totally grabbed me and enticed me to read this book, I'm afraid the content didn't live up to my expectations. I wasn't that interested in the author's that were chosen to analyze, which is my own issue, and the secondary story about Laing's journey across America i found not that riveting. It just wasn't for me, but I'm sure others will enjoy it.
- Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5This is one of those "think I'll read a few pages of this" books that pulled me in and captivated me from start to finish. There's no easy way to categorize this book, as it includes literary criticism, biography, memoir, reflections on addiction and recovery...and much more that I'm not thinking of right now. Laing expertly weaves all this together, looking at the role of addiction in the lives and works of six writers (F. Scott Fitzgerald, Ernest Hemingway, Tennessee Williams, John Berryman, John Cheever, Raymond Carver), She never talks down to the reader, nor does she trivialize her subjects; she doesn't oversimplify, but neither does she needlessly complicate matters when a direct approach is needed. She is willing to call out cowardice in these writers' lives and she is also generous in pointing out courage. The book is not only about recovery; it is as if she has internalized the twelve steps within the writing itself, seeking what is true as best she can, behind all of our posturing and all of our justifications and all of our excuses (speaking as an addict in recovery myself). Nicely done.
- Rating: 3 out of 5 stars3/5Olivia Laing recounts her travels around the United States, visiting places associated with six American authors (she apologises that they are all dead white males: Scott Fitzgerald; Ernest Hemingway; Tennessee Williams; John Cheever; John Berryman; Raymond Carver) who all had problems with alcohol.This is not biography or literary criticism, although it contains some of both. This is an enjoyable literary travelogue about alcoholism and American authors, with some reflections on Laing’s own life. Laing’s style has an easy familiarity, even when quoting technical medical jargon about alcoholism, and although the potted biographies, literary criticism and travelogue don’t seamlessly blend together, there is plenty to enjoy.I had not read any Tennessee Williams prior to this book, although aware of the plays, and only had name awareness of Berryman, but this didn’t particularly reduce my interest in the book. However it was a shame that Laing didn’t write about Carson McCullers.
- Rating: 2 out of 5 stars2/5I couldn't finish this book. It sounded good but I was bored. Didn't make it through the second chapter before I sent it back to the library.
- Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5I don't have anything to add. This is a wonderful tale, well told The author held it together better than I would with all those weeks on the road. I could close my eyes and see the sights from the observation car - every railroad town looks like the same, run down disaster from the tracks.
- Rating: 3 out of 5 stars3/5Olivia Liang's book "The Trip to Echo Spring: On writers and drinking" had a fantastic concept -- delving into the reasons why so many successful writers have a problem with alcohol -- but I didn't care for the way the book was written. Liang spends a lot of time talking about herself and her travels, and she also spends a lot of time jumping around in the stories about various writers such as John Cheever, Earnest Hemingway, F. Scott Fitzgerald in a super jarring way.I found the stories about John Cheever to be the most interesting part of this book (so much so that I'll likely search for a biography of him at some point.) Echo Spring felt like a lost opportunity to put together something great.
- Rating: 3 out of 5 stars3/5I'm of two minds about this book. On the one hand, author Olivia Lang is an excellent writer and literary critic. On the other, if one is going to write a biography about alcoholic writers and how their alcoholism affected their work, I would hope that the author could refrain from writing long, meandering pages about her own experiences with the disease. Lang explores the links between creativity and alcohol by exploring the work and lives of six writers: John Chever, Tennesee Williams, Ernest Hemingway, F. Scott Fitzgerald, John Berryman and Raymond Carver. Lang grew up in an alcoholic family and, trying to make sense out of her own life, took a journey (by amtrak no less) across America visiting the haunts of these writers while examining their lives and their works. She seems to be most enamored with Williams and Cheever. Her description at the beginning of the book of Cheever and Carver, racing to what appears to be an early morning pre-appointment with a liquor store owner to stock up on their daily supply of scotch gave me an image that won't quickly be erased from my brain. Likewise her critique of Cheever's story, "The Swimmer" made me want to go back and read the story again. Williams is handled with the most sympathy. While she shows all the others in the depths of alcoholic degradation, she cuts him the most slack, painting the most sympathetic portrait in the book. She ls likewise fairly sympathetic to Fitzgerald, as opposed to Hemingway, although the story of the two of them careening back to Paris in an open car and drinking bottles of wine under trees during a rain storm is vivid, indeed. Berryman and Carver get less attention (perhaps because they are less known?), but the descriptions of Berryman's alcoholic excesses are probably the most disturbing in the book. All of this is wonderful, but then Lang inserts herself in the narrative with pages and pages on her own unhappy childhood and her mother's alcoholic lesbian partner, along with rather pedantic discourses covering the clinical theories on the disease and ponderous paragraphs about Alcoholics Anonymous, none of which add to the book. Note to biographical writers: stick to your subject & save your personal traumas for another book.
- Rating: 3 out of 5 stars3/5I thought I would love The Trip to Echo Spring. It was billed as an examination of the dark secrets and self-destructive tendencies of six major 20th century authors (F.S. Fitzgerald, E. Hemingway, T. Williams, J. Berryman, J. Cheever and R. Carver), with an eye toward answering the eternal question: why are so many great writers also alcoholics? In keeping with current trend towards genre-blending, the narrative also included the author's memoirs of her dysfunctional childhood, scientific information on the neurobiology of alcoholism, and even travel writing, as the author described her visits to locations associated with the six authors she profiled. It sounded like this book would be right up my alley.The reality was disappointing. I found The Trip to Echo Spring difficult to stay with and filled with self-consciously lyrical writing that failed to move me. The narrative was annoyingly diffuse; perhaps its lack of focus was the result of trying to cover so much literary ground, summarize so many plots, and encompass so many genres. The stories of all six men have been better told elsewhere.
- Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5The Trip to Echo Spring: On Writers and Drinking was a totally fascinating read. I was spellbound by stories from the lives of the great writers whose relationship with drinking is discussed by author Olivia Laing in the book: John Berryman, Raymond Carver, John Cheever, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Ernest Hemingway & Tennessee Williams. Also, the book surveys all sorts of viewpoints, including scientific theories, about alcoholism's development as Laing meanders across the broad, rich territory of her topic. While I may not have realized as much as I read it, Echo Spring not only interested me intellectually but resonated with me deeply on an emotional level because it is such an unabashedly and intensely personal work. It almost felt like reading a memoir. Laing's interest in the topic is deeply rooted; her childhood was shaped by experiences with alcoholism in the family. Unsurprisingly, Laing's sensitivity to the complexities of alcohol abuse in different people's lived experience (rather than as an abstract phenomenon or one examined clinically or at all coldly) is an essential element of the framework of the book -- coming through in each vignette about one of the great writers discussed as well as in the structure and style of the text overall. Furthermore, the author's curiosity about the psychology of this addiction is extremely palpable throughout.It may be worth pointing out that any weaknesses in this work -- or rather, elements that may be found less appealing by many readers -- stem from the source of the book's originality and many strengths -- that is, the author's personal relationship to her material. For example, I have noticed other reviews express some disappointment at the lack of narrative focus and the structure. In my own case, I was rubbed the wrong way a little bit by the particular emphasis placed on AA's 12 steps as the path to sobriety for people afflicted. This is of course a completely understandable authorial choice. I definitely recommend purchasing and reading this unique look at some great writers and a widespread, longstanding problem faced by human beings.
- Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5A sad, beautiful, and important book. Many critics and biographers have speculated, pontificated or poked fun at the symbiosis between writers and the bottle, but Olivia Laing delves into their psyches in a quest to truly understand.Focusing on six well-known writer-alcoholics—Hemingway (of course!), Scott Fitzgerald (of course!), Tennessee Williams, John Cheever, John Berryman and Raymond Carver—Laing, a British author and critic with a background in science, set out on a trip around the USA to visit the places these men inhabited, read through mountains of letters and journals, and speak to surviving relatives, while poring through their published works, trawling for clues, aching for answers. Two committed suicide; two knowingly drank themselves to death. Laing strips the romance and the condemnation from their life stories and paints a picture of six troubled, not particularly likeable, artists.The book, then, is mostly biography, part journalism about the physiology and psychology of alcoholism, part literary criticism, tied together with interludes of travelogue and memoir, the latter to reveal her deep personal motivations behind the project. The strongest writing is in her descriptions of place, in which the language soars, and Laing discovers meaning in the way the writer’s own setting affected his soul, as well as her own.It’s almost an involuntary reaction to question the author for focusing on six American white men of Christian background. I’m not sure if it was her intention, but it seems to me that narrowing her enquiry to writers with certain similarities of background was necessary in this first foray toward finding a common answer to the question of the subtitle—Why Writers Drink. Does she find the answer? Maybe not, but she does find many surprising things in common in their own private probing in their journals, which she shares with the reader. Most of all, she achieves a certain intimacy with each writer, by distilling their excuses and behaviors into literary liquor which is both absorbing and disturbing to read. There is a certain danger in plumbing the souls of erudite alcoholics—a deep, liquid sadness permeates every page, which lingers for days after finishing. I have to say that my admiration for these writers was knocked off its pedestal, but I’m left with a gut-wrenching empathy for each of them.If you are a writer, or know one, or care about writers, I strongly, wholeheartedly urge you to read this outstanding book.
Book preview
The Trip to Echo Spring - Olivia Laing
1
ECHO SPRING
HERE’S A THING. IOWA CITY, 1973. Two men in a car, a Ford Falcon convertible that’s seen better days. It’s winter, the kind of cold that hurts bones and lungs, that reddens knuckles, makes noses run. If you could, by some devoted act of seeing, crane in through the window as they rattle by, you’d see the older man, the one in the passenger seat, has forgotten to put on his socks. He’s wearing penny loafers on bare feet, oblivious to the cold, like a prep school boy on a summer jaunt. In fact you could mistake him for a boy: slight, in Brooks Brothers tweeds and flannel trousers, his hair immaculately combed. Only his face betrays him, collapsed into hangdog folds.
The other man is bigger, burlier, thirty-five. Sideburns, bad teeth, a ragged sweater open at the elbow. It’s not quite nine a.m. They turn off the highway and pull into the parking lot of the state liquor store. The clerk’s out front, keys glinting in his hand. Seeing him, the man in the passenger seat yanks the door and lurches out, never mind the car’s still moving. ‘By the time I got inside the store,’ the other man will write, a long time later, ‘he was already at the checkout stand with half a gallon of Scotch.’
They drive away, passing the bottle back and forth. Within a few hours they’ll be back at the University of Iowa, swaying eloquently in front of their respective classes. Both are, as if it isn’t obvious, in deep trouble with alcohol. Both are also writers, one very well known, the other just cresting into success.
John Cheever, the older man, is the author of three novels, The Wapshot Chronicle, The Wapshot Scandal and Bullet Park, as well as some of the most miraculous and distinctive stories ever written. He’s sixty-one. Back in May, he was rushed to hospital with dilated cardiomyopathy, testament to the almighty havoc alcohol wreaks upon the heart. After three days in the Intensive Care Unit he developed delirium tremens, becoming so violently disturbed he had to be secured with a leather straitjacket. The job at Iowa – a semester teaching at the famous Writers’ Workshop – must have seemed like a passport to a better life, though it isn’t quite panning out that way. For various reasons he’s left his family behind, living like a bachelor in a single room at the Iowa House Hotel.
Raymond Carver, the younger man, has also just joined the faculty. His room is identical to Cheever’s, and immediately beneath it. The same painting hangs on both their walls. He’s come alone too, leaving his wife and teenaged children in California. All his life he’s wanted to be a writer, and all his life he’s felt circumstance set hard against him. The drinking’s been going on for a long while, but despite its depredations he’s managed to produce two volumes of poetry and to build up quite a clutch of stories, many of them published in little magazines.
At first glance, the two men seem polar opposites. Cheever looks and sounds every inch the moneyed Wasp, though closer acquaintance reveals this to be a complex kind of subterfuge. Carver, on the other hand, is a millworker’s son from Clatskanie, Oregon, who spent years supporting his writing with menial jobs as a janitor, a stockboy and a cleaner.
They met on the evening of 30 August 1973. Cheever knocked on the door of room 240, holding out a glass and announcing, according to Jon Jackson, a student who was present at the time: ‘Pardon me. I’m John Cheever. Could I borrow some Scotch?’ Carver, elated to meet one of his heroes, stutteringly held out a vast bottle of Smirnoff. Cheever accepted a slug, though he turned his nose up at the embellishments of ice or juice.
Sensing a dual intersection of interests, the two men immediately bonded. They spent much of their time together in the Mill bar, which only served beer, talking about literature and women. Twice a week they drove out in Carver’s Falcon to the liquor store for Scotch, which they drank in Cheever’s room. ‘He and I did nothing but drink,’ Carver reported later, in the Paris Review. ‘I mean, we met our classes in a manner of speaking, but the entire time we were there … I don’t think either of us ever took the covers off our typewriters.’
What’s odd about this wasteful year, not to mention all the disasters that followed on its heels, is that Cheever predicted it, in a manner of speaking. A decade earlier, he wrote a short story published in the New Yorker on 18 July 1964. ‘The Swimmer’ is about alcohol and what it can do to a man; how conclusively it can wipe out a life. It begins with a characteristically Cheeverish line: ‘It was one of those mid-summer Sundays when everyone sits around saying, I drank too much last night.
’
One of those people is Neddy Merrill, a slender, boyish man with an attractive air of vitality about him. Trotting out into the sunshine for a morning dip in his host’s pool, he’s struck by a delightful idea: that he will make his way home by way of a ‘string of swimming pools, that quasi-subterranean stream that curved across the county’. He names this secret road of mixed waters Lucinda, in honour of his wife. But there’s another liquid path he also follows: a chain of drinks taken on neighbours’ terraces and yards, and it’s this more perilous route that leads him downwards by degrees to the story’s uncanny and tragic end.
High on his marvellous plan, Neddy swims through the gardens of the Grahams and the Hammers, the Lears, the Howlands, the Crosscups and the Bunkers. As he passes on his self-appointed way he’s plied with gin by ‘natives’ – whose customs, he thinks to himself disingenuously, ‘would have to be handled with diplomacy if he was ever going to reach his destination’. The next house he reaches is deserted, and after he’s crossed the pool he slips into the gazebo and pours himself a drink: his fourth, he calculates vaguely, or perhaps his fifth. A great citadel of cumulus has been building all day, and now the storm breaks, a quick paradiddle of rain in the oaks followed by the pleasurable smell of cordite.
Neddy likes storms, but something about this downpour changes the tenor of his day. Sheltering in the gazebo, he notices a Japanese lantern that Mrs. Levy bought in Kyoto ‘the year before last, or was it the year before that?’ Anyone can lose their footing in time, can misstep a beat or two of chronology. But then there’s another queer flicker in temporality. The rain has stripped the maple, and the red and yellow leaves lie scattered on the grass. It’s midsummer, Neddy thinks robustly, and so the tree must simply be blighted, but this sign of autumn gives him an unpleasant shot of melancholy.
The sense of foreclosure deepens. At the Lindleys, the jumping ring is overgrown and the horses seem to have been sold. Worse, the Welchers’ pool has been drained. The Lucinda, that magical, abundant river, has run dry. Neddy is staggered, and begins seriously to doubt his command of time. ‘Was his memory failing or had he so disciplined it in the repression of unpleasant facts that he had damaged his sense of the truth?’ He pulls himself together though, rallying enough to cross Route 424, a portage more effortful and exposing than he’d expected.
Next he braves the public baths, with their whistles and murkish water. No pleasure there, but he’s soon up and out, clambering through the woods of the Halloran estate towards the dark, dazzled gold of their springfed pool. But here comes another offbeat, a sense that the world Neddy is travelling through is somehow strange to him, or he to it. Mrs. Halloran asks solicitously about his poor children, muttering something too about the loss of his house. Then, as he walks away, Neddy notices his shorts are hanging around his waist. Is it possible, he wonders, that he’s lost weight over the course of a single afternoon? Time is slopping around like gin in a glass. It’s still emphatically the same day, but now the warmth of midsummer has dissipated and the smell of wood smoke is articulate in the air.
From the Hallorans Neddy travels to their daughter’s house, hoping to beg a glass of whiskey. Helen greets him warmly enough, but her house is dry and has been for three years. Bewildered, chilled to the bone, he heaves his way across the pool and cuts through the fields to the Biswangers. From the roar of voices it’s evident a party is in full swing. He wanders in, still almost naked. But now, mysteriously, it’s twilight, and the water on the pool has ‘a wintry gleam’. Mrs. Biswanger, who has angled for Neddy as a guest for years, has apparently suffered some change of heart. She greets him rudely, and when his back is turned can be heard saying: ‘They went for broke overnight – nothing but income – and he showed up drunk one Sunday and asked us to loan him five thousand dollars.’ Then the bartender rebuffs him, confirming his sneaking sense that some social loss of grace has occurred, and been remembered and recorded.
Struggling on, he passes next through the garden of a former mistress, though he can’t remember precisely when or in what mood he broke it off. She isn’t wholly pleased to see him either, and is likewise fretful about the possibility that he wants money. Leaving, he catches on the cooling air an autumnal smell, not quite placeable but ‘strong as gas’. Marigolds? Chrysanthemums? Looking up, he sees the winter constellations have taken up their stations in the night sky. Flooded with uncertainty, he begins, for the first time in his life, to cry.
There are only two more pools to go. He flails and gasps through the final laps before walking in damp trunks up the drive to his own house. But now the hints about a downturn in his fortunes begin to clarify, for the lights are out, the doors are locked, the rooms are empty and nobody, it is clear, has lived here for a long while.
* * *
‘The Swimmer’ had come into my mind because I was plummeting through the sky above New York, where the land breaks apart in a clutter of islands and marshes. There are some subjects one can’t address at home, and so at the beginning of the year I’d left England for America, a country almost entirely unknown to me. I wanted time to think, and what I wanted to think about was alcohol. I’d spent the winter upcountry, in a cottage in New Hampshire, and now it was spring and I was moving south.
Last time I’d passed over here the earth was white all the way up to the Arctic, and the Connecticut River turned through dark bars of forest frozen the metallic blue-grey of the barrel of a gun. Now the ice had melted, and the whole landscape was ablaze. It reminded me of Cheever’s line – that to live ‘in a world so generously supplied with water seemed like a clemency, a beneficence’.
‘The Swimmer’, which I would judge among the finest stories ever written, catches in its strange compressions the full arc of an alcoholic’s life and it was that same dark trajectory I wanted to pursue. I wanted to know what made a person drink and what it did to them. More specifically I wanted to know why writers drink, and what effect this stew of spirits has had upon the body of literature itself.
John Cheever and Raymond Carver are hardly the only writers whose lives were made desolate by alcohol. Alongside them come Ernest Hemingway, William Faulkner, Tennessee Williams, Jean Rhys, Patricia Highsmith, Truman Capote, Dylan Thomas, Marguerite Duras, Hart Crane, John Berryman, Jack London, Elizabeth Bishop, Raymond Chandler – the list staggers on. As Lewis Hyde observes in his essay ‘Alcohol and Poetry’, ‘four of the six Americans who have won the Nobel Prize for literature were alcoholic. About half of our alcoholic writers eventually killed themselves.’
Alcoholism is not a simple condition to define. According to the American Society of Addiction Medicine, its essential features are ‘impaired control over drinking, preoccupation with the drug alcohol, use of alcohol despite adverse consequences, and distortions in thinking, most notably denial’. In 1980, The Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders dropped the term ‘alcoholism’ entirely, replacing it with two interrelated disorders: alcohol abuse (defined as ‘repeated use despite recurrent adverse consequences’) and alcohol dependence (defined as ‘alcohol abuse combined with tolerance, withdrawal and an uncontrollable drive to drink’).
As to what causes it, the jury remains out. In fact, under the heading ‘Etiology’, my old 1992 Merck Manual announces baldly: ‘The cause of alcoholism is unknown.’ In the intervening years there have been thousands of research programmes and academic studies, and yet the consensus remains that alcoholism is caused by some mysterious constellation of factors, among them personality traits, early life experiences, societal influences, genetic predisposition and abnormal chemistry of the brain. Listing these possible causes, the current edition of the Merck Manual concludes, a little dispiritedly: ‘However, such generalizations should not obscure the fact that alcohol use disorders can occur in anyone, regardless of their age, sex, background, ethnicity, or social situation.’
Unsurprisingly, the theories writers tend to offer lean more towards the symbolic than the sociological or scientific. Discussing Poe, Baudelaire once commented that alcohol had become a weapon ‘to kill something inside himself, a worm that would not die’. In his introduction to Recovery, the posthumously published novel of the poet John Berryman, Saul Bellow observed: ‘Inspiration contained a death threat. He would, as he wrote the things he had waited and prayed for, fall apart. Drink was a stabiliser. It somewhat reduced the fatal intensity.’
There’s something about these answers and the mixed motives they reveal that seems to catch at a deeper and more resonant aspect of alcohol addiction than the socio-genetic explanations that are in currency today. It was for this reason that I wanted to look at writers who drank, though God knows there’s barely a section of our society that’s immune to alcohol’s lures. After all, it’s they who, by their very nature, describe the affliction best. Often they’ve written about their experiences or those of their contemporaries, either transposed into fiction, or in the letters, memoirs and diaries they’ve used to mythologise or interrogate their lives.
As I began to read through these rafts of papers, I realised something else. These men and women were connected, both physically and by a series of repeating patterns. They were each other’s friends and allies, each other’s mentors, students and inspirations. In addition to Raymond Carver and John Cheever in Iowa, there were other drinking partnerships, other vexed allegiances. Hemingway and Fitzgerald tippled together in the cafés of 1920s Paris, while the poet John Berryman was the first person at Dylan Thomas’s bedside when he died.
Then there were the echoes. I’d grown most interested in six male writers, whose experiences seemed to dovetail and mirror each other. (There were many women writers I could have chosen too, but for reasons that will become apparent their stories came too close to home.) Most of this six had – or saw themselves as having – that most Freudian of pairings, an overbearing mother and a weak father. All were tormented by self-hatred and a sense of inadequacy. Three were profoundly promiscuous, and almost all experienced conflict and dissatisfaction with regard to their sexuality. Most died in middle age, and the deaths that weren’t suicides tended to be directly related to the years of hard and hectic living. At times, all tried in varying degrees to give up alcohol, but only two succeeded, late in life, in becoming permanently dry.
These sound like tragic lives, the lives of wastrels or dissolutes, and yet these six men – F. Scott Fitzgerald, Ernest Hemingway, Tennessee Williams, John Cheever, John Berryman and Raymond Carver – produced between them some of the most beautiful writing this world has ever seen. As Jay McInerney once commented of Cheever: ‘There have been thousands of sexually conflicted alcoholics, but only one of them wrote The Housebreaker of Shady Hill
and The Sorrows of Gin
.’
If I stopped a minute, I could picture each of them in turn. I saw Fitzgerald in a Guards tie, his blond hair slicked back, quietly certain about the merits of The Great Gatsby: a kind man, when he wasn’t whisking you into a waltz or boiling your watch up in a pot of soup. Ernest Hemingway I always pictured at the helm of a boat, or out hunting in the clean upland air, entirely focused on the task at hand. And then later, at his desk in glasses, making up the Michigan of the Nick Adams stories, making up corridas and cities, trout streams and battlefields, a world you can almost smell.
Tennessee Williams I saw in Ray-Bans and safari shorts, sitting unobtrusively at the rehearsal of one of his own plays: A Streetcar Named Desire, say, or Suddenly Last Summer. It’s not locked yet, and so he fixes sections on demand, braying his donkey’s laugh at all the saddest lines. Cheever I liked to think of riding a bicycle, a habit he took up late in life, and Carver I always imagined with a cigarette, big-shouldered but walking softly. And then there was John Berryman, the donnish poet and professor, light gleaming on his glasses, his beard enormous, standing in front of a class at Princeton or the University of Minnesota, reading Lycidas and making the whole room see how marvellous it was.
There have been many books and articles that revel in describing exactly how grotesque and shameful the behaviour of alcoholic writers can be. That wasn’t my intention. What I wanted was to discover how each of these men – and, along the way, some of the many others who’d suffered from the disease – experienced and thought about their addiction. If anything, it was an expression of my faith in literature, and its power to map the more difficult regions of human experience and knowledge.
As to the origins of my interest, I might as well admit I grew up in an alcoholic family myself. Between the ages of eight and eleven I lived in a house under the rule of alcohol, and the effects of that period have stayed with me ever since. Reading Tennessee Williams’s play Cat on a Hot Tin Roof at seventeen was the first time I found the behaviour I’d grown up amid not only named and delineated but actively confronted. From that moment on I was preoccupied by what writers had to say about alcohol and its effects. If I had any hope of making sense of alcoholics – and my life as an adult seemed just as full of them – it would be by investigating the residue they’d left behind in books.
There was a line from Cat in particular that had stayed with me for years. Brick, the drunkard, has been summoned by his father. Big Daddy is on a talking jag and after a while Brick asks for his crutch. ‘Where you goin’?’ Big Daddy asks, and Brick replies: ‘I’m takin’ a little short trip to Echo Spring.’ Physically, Echo Spring is nothing more than a nickname for a liquor cabinet, drawn from the brand of bourbon it contains. Symbolically, though, it refers to something quite different: perhaps to the attainment of silence, or to the obliteration of troubled thoughts that comes, temporarily at least, with a sufficiency of booze.
Echo Spring. What a lovely, consoling place it sounds. It set off another echo, too. By coincidence or otherwise most of these men shared a deep, enriching love for water. John Cheever and Tennessee Williams were passionate, even fanatical swimmers, while Hemingway and Fitzgerald shared an abiding fondness for the sea. In Raymond Carver’s case, his relationship with water – particularly those freezing bottle-green trout streams that tumble out of the mountains above Port Angeles – would eventually come in some deep way to replace his toxic need for alcohol. In one of his late, wide-open poems, he wrote:
I love them the way some men love horses
or glamorous women. I have a thing
for this cold swift water.
Just looking at it makes my blood run
and my skin tingle.
The word trip also seemed important. Many alcoholics, including the writers I was interested in, have been relentless travellers, driven like uneasy spirits across their own nations and into the other countries of this world. Like Cheever, I had a notion that it might be possible to plot the course of some of these restless lives by way of a physical journey across America. Over the next few weeks, I planned to take what is known in AA circles as a geographical, a footloose journey across the country, first south, through New York, New Orleans and Key West, and then north-west, via St. Paul, the site of John Berryman’s ill-fated recovery, and on to the rivers and creeks of Port Angeles, where Raymond Carver spent his last, exultant years.
Looked at on a map, this itinerary seems haphazard, even a little masochistic, particularly since I’d resolved to travel largely by train. Like many things to do with the subject, though, its real meaning was encoded. Each of these locations had served as a way station or staging post in which the successive phases of alcohol addiction had been acted out. By travelling through them in sequence, I thought it might be possible to build a kind of topographical map of alcoholism, tracing its developing contours from the pleasures of intoxication through to the gruelling realities of the drying-out process. And as I worked across the country, passing back and forth between books and lives, I hoped I might come closer to understanding what alcohol addiction means, or at least to finding out what those who struggled with and were sometimes destroyed by it thought alcohol had meant for them.
The first of the cities was fast approaching. While I’d been gazing out of the window, the seatbelt sign had switched to green. I fumbled for the pin and turned again to the glass. Outside, the ground was rising swiftly through the colourless miles of air. Now I could see Long Island, and beyond the ruffled waters the runways of JFK. Silhouetted behind it were the skyscrapers of Manhattan, rising like iron filings into the pale sky. ‘These stories seem at times to be stories of a long-lost world when the city of New York was still filled with a river light,’ John Cheever once wrote wistfully about the city he most loved. It did indeed seem to shine, an island citadel bounded by water, the Atlantic flashing pewter as we hedged in above the waves.
2
THE COFFIN TRICK
MONTHS AGO, BACK IN ENGLAND, when I was just beginning to think down into the subject of alcohol, I became certain that whatever journey I was making would begin in a hotel room on East 54th Street, ten minutes’ walk from Broadway. I don’t know why this, of all possible locations, seemed the necessary place to start, but the story of what had happened there worked its way inside me, as certain stories will.
In the small hours of 25 February 1983, Tennessee Williams died in his suite at the Elysée, a small, pleasant hotel on the outskirts of the Theater District. He was seventy-one, unhappy, a little underweight, addicted to drugs and alcohol and paranoid sometimes to the point of delirium. According to the coroner’s report, he’d choked on the bell-shaped plastic cap of a bottle of eyedrops, which he was in the habit of placing on or under his tongue while he administered to his vision. As a child he’d been poked in the eye with a stick, and in his twenties this damage manifested itself as a greyish cataract that covered his left pupil. Eventually it was cut away, but the sight in that eye was never good and eyedrops were among the extensive medical paraphernalia he took on all his travels.
The next day, the New York Times ran an obituary claiming him as ‘the most important American playwright after Eugene O’Neill’. It listed his three Pulitzer Prizes, for A Streetcar Named Desire, Cat on a Hot Tin Roof and The Night of the Iguana, adding: ‘He wrote with deep sympathy and expansive humor about outcasts in our society. Though his images were often violent, he was a poet of the human heart.’
Later, after carrying out chemical tests, the city’s chief medical officer, Dr. Eliot M. Grosse, amended the autopsy report to add that the barbiturate secobarbital was in Williams’s system when he died. Much later, various friends and acquaintances claimed the choking story was a cover-up to stop the press from delving into Tennessee’s numerous addictions, though the official cause of death remains asphyxia.
It wasn’t the death he’d hoped for, either way. In Memoirs, his wandering, anti-lucid memoir, he wrote that he wanted to die on a letto matrimoniale, a wedding bed, surrounded by contadini, farmers, their faces puzzled and full of sweetness, holding out in their shaking hands little glasses of vino or liquore. He wanted it to happen in Sicily, where he’d been happiest, but if that wasn’t possible he was willing to settle for the big brass bed at Dumaine Street, his house in New Orleans, where the clouds always seemed just overhead.
There should be nothing more arbitrary than the place where someone dies, on their way from one thing to the next, and yet it’s telling, too, that a man who was forever on the move should finish up in a hotel room, surrounded by pills and paper, two bottles of wine open on his nightstand. We die as we live, disordered, and while the manner of his death was accidental to the point of grotesqueness, its location exposes that cast of vagrancy that was, though it sounds a funny thing to say, one of the most certain things about him.
He kept all sorts of roosts in New York, though he never stayed in them for long. For years he had an apartment around the corner on East 58th Street that he shared with his partner, Frank Merlo: Frank with his sad horse face and ready charm, Frank the protector, the aide-de-camp, who died of lung cancer in 1963, inaugurating the very worst period of Williams’s Stoned Age. Later, he took an apartment in the Manhattan Plaza, the residential complex designed for performing artists. He’d been lured there by the promise of a swimming pool, but the partyish atmosphere didn’t suit him and even before he’d given up the lease he generally stayed in a suite at the