“The Trip to Echo Spring: On Writers and Drinking” by Olivia Laing

Paperback, 384 pages
Published in 2013 Picador
ISBN-10 ‏ : ‎ 9781250063731 | ISBN-13 ‏ : ‎ 978-1250063731
Date Finished: Nov 16, 2021
How strongly I recommend it: 6/10
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One of my enduring fascinations is the myth of the tortured artist who needs drugs to produce their art. The author, Olivia Laing, takes a look at the drinking lives of five famous authors and leaves us thoroughly disabused that this even remotely true.

My Notes:

Most alcoholics become more irritable; they have a heightened sensitivity to anything vaguely critical.

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.

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 midsummer Sundays when everyone sits around saying, “I drank too much last night.’”

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.’

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’.

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’).

my old 1992 Merck Manual announces baldly: ‘The cause of alcoholism is unknown.’

Discussing Poe, Baudelaire once commented that alcohol had become a weapon ‘to kill something inside himself, a worm that would not die’.

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.’

seems to catch at a deeper and more resonant aspect of alcohol addiction than the socio-genetic explanations that are in currency today.

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.

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.

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.

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”.’

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.

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.

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.’

O’Neill had a terrible problem with alcohol. Most writers do. American writers nearly all have problems with alcohol because there’s a great deal of tension involved in writing, you know that.

I was beginning to think that drinking might be a way of disappearing from the world, or at least of slipping one’s appointed place within it, though if you’d seen Tennessee blundering through the hallway, pie-eyed and legless, you might think conversely it made one all too painfully impossible to miss.

In order to understand how an intelligent man could end up in such a place, it’s necessary first to know what a shot of Smirnoff or Scotch does to the human body. Alcohol, also known as ethanol, is both an intoxicant and a central nervous depressant, with an immensely complex effect upon the brain. In simple terms, it works by interfering with the activity of neurotransmitters, the chemicals by which the nervous system relays information around the body.

The realisation that alcohol is capable of alleviating anxiety means that for susceptible individuals it can quickly become the preferred method of managing stress.

As it gathers momentum, alcohol addiction inevitably affects the drinker’s physical and social selves, visibly damaging the architecture of their life. Jobs are lost. Relationships spoil. There may be accidents, arrests and injuries, or the drinker may simply become increasingly neglectful of their responsibilities and capacity to provide self-care.

This disease, which exists in all quarters of the world, is caused by a multitude of factors, among them genetic predisposition, early life experience and social influences.

It is well established that the hereditability of alcoholism is around 50%

Dr. Petros Levounis, the Addiction Institute’s director,

Little wonder that alcoholism was once characterised as a failure of will. The frontal lobes weigh right and wrong, apportion risk; the limbic system is all greed and appetite and impulse, with the hippocampus adding the siren’s whisper: how sweet it was, remember?

No one knows for sure how AA works. It was from the very beginning a gamble, a shot in the dark. It was established in the 1930s by a doctor and a failed stockbroker, Dr. Bob and Bill W., both of whom suffered from alcoholism themselves.

His experience of New York was ‘constant suspense and nerve-wracking excitement, which I evaded with drink and with sex’. For the rest of his life, these would remain his preferred methods of escaping difficult or stress-inducing situations, from failed love affairs to problems with the production of his plays.

The disadvantage of alcohol as an antidote to these unpleasant states was that it interfered with his ability to work.

Only one or two drinks a day, when very low, and a calm endurance of moods instead of a mad flight into intoxication and social distraction.’

learning how to live without either the sorrows or the consolations of gin.

he never managed to shake a painful sense of shame and self-disgust.

In fact, Mary Cheever first realised her husband wasn’t entirely heterosexual while they were at the first Broadway production of A Streetcar Named Desire.

Also, he avoids not only the common clichés but the uncommon cliché, over which I trip,

Showing a flash of his mother’s enterprising spirit, he wrote a story about what he cannily reframed as his expulsion and sent it off to the New Republic.

Cheever lived off milk, stale bread and raisins, spending his days with the drifters and down-and-outs in Washington Square, bundled up against the chill and talking obsessively about food. He worked at odd writing jobs, publishing occasional stories and précising novels for MGM, but none of these endeavours added up to anything like a steady income.

A few weeks later Cheever received his first cheque from the New Yorker for ‘Buffalo’, initiating one of the most constant associations of his life.

Despite an increasingly command performance as an upstanding member of the bourgeoisie, Cheever couldn’t shake the sense of being essentially an impostor among the middle classes.

An oft-repeated anecdote from the Sutton Place years has Cheever taking the elevator each morning: a dapper little figure in suit and tie, indistinguishable from the other hard-working, well-scrubbed men who crowd in on every floor. But while they stream out of the lobby, rushing off to workplaces across the city, he descends to the basement, strips to his underwear, and settles at his typewriter, emerging, suited once more, in time for pre-lunch drinks.

Writers, even the most socially gifted and established, must be outsiders of some sort, if only because their job is that of scrutiniser and witness.

This burden of fraudulence, of needing to keep some lumbering secret self forever under wraps, was not just a matter of class anxiety.

In the bohemian Village of the 1930s and 40s, alcohol was still the omnipresent lubricant of social exchange, and even in the depths of poverty, he’d managed to find the funds for nights that might, head-splittingly, take in a dozen manhattans or a quart apiece of whiskey. He drank at home and in friends’ apartments, at Treetops (his wealthy wife’s family estate in New Hampshire), in the Breevort Hotel, the back room at the Plaza or in the Menemsha Bar on 57th Street, where he’d pop in after collecting his daughter from school and let her eat maraschino cherries while he attended to his needs.

another manifestation of the escapist urge that fuelled his drinking.

In the interests of thriftiness I’d decided that since the journey only took thirty hours I’d do without a cabin, sleeping instead in what was promisingly described as a ‘wide, comfortable reserved coach seat’.

writing in his journal three hours after arrival: ‘Here surely is the place that I was made for if any place in this funny old world.’

Sleeplessness, as Keats put it, breeds many woes. That maggoty word breeds is exactly right, for who lying awake at three or four or five in the morning hasn’t felt their thoughts take on an insectile life, or experienced a minute crawling of the skin? Sleep is magically efficacious at smoothing out the tangles of the day, and a shortage makes one agitated to the point of lunacy.

According to a paper by Kirk Brower entitled ‘Alcohol’s Effects on Sleep in Alcoholics’, sleep problems are more common among alcoholics than the population at large.

Both F. Scott Fitzgerald and Ernest Hemingway suffered from insomnia, and their writing on the subject is full of submerged clues about their drinking.

Writing in praise of Fitzgerald years later, John Cheever observed that his genius lies in the provision of details. Clothes, dialogue, drinks, hotels, incidental music: all are precisely rendered, plunging the reader into the lost world of the Riviera or West Egg or Hollywood or wherever it is we are.

‘I was drinking, intermittently but generously.’ Intermittently implies that one can stop; generously that there is pleasure, perhaps even largesse in the act. Neither was exactly true. For a start, Scott didn’t at the time count beer as alcohol. Not drinking might mean avoiding gin, but consuming instead perhaps twenty bottles of beer a day.

‘No hard liquor. Only beer. When I swell up I switch to cokes.’) As to liquor, the Baltimore novelist H.L. Mencken, a friend at the time, recalled it made Scott wild, capable of knocking over dinner tables or smashing his car into town buildings.

and no longer possesses its consolatory magic.

Men Without Women and Winner Takes Nothing,

Hemingway had published a bestselling novel, A Farewell to Arms, two collections of short stories, Men Without Women and Winner Takes Nothing, and two non-fiction books, Death in the Afternoon and Green Hills of Africa.

An alcoholic might be understood in fact to live two lives, one concealed beneath the other as a subterranean river snakes beneath a road. There is the life of the surface – the cover story, so to speak – and then there is the life of the addict, in which the priority is always to secure another drink.

Another time, according again to Mencken, he shocked a Baltimore dinner party ‘by arising at the dinner table and taking down his pantaloons, exposing his gospel pipe’.

People used to speak of someone being refined by suffering, and that’s the sense one carries away from Turnbull’s account.

He was also trying to stop drinking, for the sake of his lungs if nothing else, though what that meant in practice was the usual heroic consumption of beer.

At some point that summer he told Laura: ‘Drink heightens feeling. When I drink, it heightens my emotions and I put it in a story. But then it becomes hard to keep reason and emotion balanced. My stories written when sober are stupid – like the fortune-telling one. It was all reasoned out, not felt.’ It’s hard not to read this as justification, particularly since he was already bitterly regretting the necessity of writing so much of Tender drunk.

He was trying to get to the bottom of his old friend’s difficulties with life and, almost as an afterthought, jotted down: ‘Also alcohol, that we use as the Giant Killer, and that I could not have lived without many times; or at least would have cared to live without; was a straight poison to Scott instead of a food.’

in Macbeth, which ends, ‘much drink may be said to be an equivocator with lechery: it makes him, and it mars him; it sets him on, and it takes him off; it persuades him, and disheartens him; makes him stand to, and not stand to; in conclusion, equivocates him in a sleep, and, giving him the lie, leaves him’.

I have drunk since I was fifteen and few things have given me more pleasure. When you work hard all day with your head and know you must work again the next day what else can change your ideas and make them run on a different plane like whisky? . . . The only time it isn’t good for you is when you write or when you fight. You have to do that cold. But it always helps my shooting. Modern life, too, is often a mechanical oppression and liquor is the only mechanical relief.

Right to the end of his life, when he was keeling under the combined weight of depression and alcoholism and a string of head injuries, the complex inheritance of a life lived at full tilt, he maintained an unshakeable belief in alcohol’s essential beneficence, its ability to nourish and uplift.

(two more inches and they’d be normal, an unpleasant word that underlines Hemingway’s persistent, increasingly crude attempts to make himself the yardstick).

Fitzgerald’s inability to tolerate alcohol evidently both puzzled and disgusted Hemingway.

In Europe then we thought of wine as something healthy and normal as food and also as a great giver of happiness and well-being and delight . . . I would not have thought of eating a meal without drinking wine or cider or beer . . . and it had never occurred to me that sharing a few bottles of fairly light, dry, white Macon could cause chemical changes in Scott that would turn him into a fool.

Normal as food.

Very little of this analysis is accurate. For a start, alcohol is a poison. One unit contains 7.9 grams of ethanol, a depressant of the central nervous system that has considerable short– and long-term effects on the human body. Large amounts consumed rapidly can cause respiratory depression, coma and death, while a chronic consumption damages the liver and many other organs, among them the peripheral nervous system, heart, pancreas and brain.

Hemingway’s tolerance to liquor was legendary. In a letter written a few weeks after the Lyon trip he boasted about being able to ‘drink hells any amount of whiskey without getting drunk’. What he didn’t know, at least back then, is that tolerance is one of the defining symptoms of alcoholism, and that high tolerance tends to be accompanied by profound physical dependence.

The maladaptive pattern of drinking that constitutes alcohol abuse may begin with a desire to reach a state of feeling high. Some drinkers who find the feeling rewarding then focus on repeatedly reaching that state.

Here’s the rub. As we have seen, a drink, whether it’s a nice good lovely glass of wine or whiskey or one of those little yellow plum liqueurs taken in Gertrude Stein’s sitting room in Paris, affects the central nervous system, creating that euphoric surge of what Hemingway described as well-being and happiness and delight, followed by a diminishment in fear and agitation. But then, as one becomes dependent on it, the brain begins to compensate for alcohol’s inhibitory effects by producing an increase in excitatory neurotransmitters. What this means is that when one stops drinking, even for a day or two, the increased activity manifests itself by way of an eruption of anxiety, more severe than anything that came before.

The falling light made the room ideal for morning writing, a habit Tennessee stuck to in even the most dissipated phases of his life. He’d get up just after dawn and come to the table with a cup of black coffee, sitting at his typewriter beside a picture of Hart Crane.

possesses the ‘charm of that cool air of detachment that people have who have given up the struggle’.

Things are not always explained. Situations are not always resolved. Characters don’t always “progress”.’ Two days later, in his suite at the Beverly Hills Hotel, he elaborated this gut instinct into..

Why does a man drink: in quotes ‘Drink’. There’s two reasons, separate or together. 1. He’s scared shitless of something. 2. He can’t face the truth about something.

What most troubles me is not just the lifeless quality of the writing, its lack of distinction, but a real confusion that seems to exist, nothing carried through to completion but written over and over, as if a panicky hen running in circles. Some structural change in my brain? An inability to think clearly and consecutively? Or simply too much alcohol?

the next few nights were purgatorial.

(‘After all, what older friend than anxiety do I have? Or should I say acquaintance? Yes, I should!’)

When I think back to my childhood what I see most often is a set of brass monkeys my granny kept on her mantelpiece, their hands clamped down over eyes, ears and mouth. Hear no evil, see no evil, speak no evil: the holy trinity of the alcoholic family.

It wasn’t just the fights that frightened me, but rather the terrifying sense that someone was no longer inhabiting consensual reality.

He suckles like an infant, the bottle as much of a nursery prop as the bear he totes around. Drunk, he even talks like a child.

And yet in her memoir Home Before Dark, Susan Cheever recalled that it had become ‘clearer and clearer that my father was the worst kind of alcoholic. He seemed intent on destroying himself.’

my hands shake, and walking down Madison Avenue I am in fear of death. But evening comes or even noon and some combination of nervous tensions obscures my memories of what whiskey costs me in the way of physical and intellectual well-being. I could very easily destroy myself.

Blackouts, which are common especially in those who drink too fast or on an empty stomach, fall into two categories: fragmentary (partial loss) or en-bloc (total loss). After an en-bloc episode, the drinker will be unable to recall anything that happened during intoxication, no matter how coherent or engaged they appeared at the time.

Research suggests that drinking suppresses hippocampal activity by making the cells responsible for memory formation both less active and less responsive to external signals.

As such, though short-term memories are still formed, their translation into long-term memories is prevented.

This kind of patchiness of memory – an uncertainty as to what exactly did transpire the night before – had been afflicting Cheever for decades, making mornings in particular a time of blurry and uncertain guilt (‘I cannot remember my meanness,’ he wrote in 1966, ‘because my recollections are damaged by alcohol’).

their insistence on making heavy weather out of even the most innocent of his dreams.

Both men felt an acute, and in Cheever’s case physically scrotum-tightening sense of shame about their origins.

Both were unpopular children: unsporty and painfully conscious of being among the poorest boys at private school, though each also possessed a compensatory gift for telling stories that could spellbind a room.

It’s everything I’ve forgotten – all the complicated dark mixture of my youth and infancy that made me a fiction writer instead of a fireman or a soldier

‘The tonic or curative force of straightforward narrative is inestimable,’

He said that he’d become a writer ‘to give some fitness and shape to the unhappiness that overtook my family and to contain my own acuteness of feeling’.

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