“The first glass is at half past nine. I lasted until eleven twenty-two this morning,” notes John Cheever, in one of the most visual passages in his diaries. As he records his wife’s every move in the kitchen, waiting for her to clear the space to pour herself a drink, we readers can feel her thirst: with a drink. Few scenes are more revealing of anxiety than this – in real-time – however, a large number of books of different genres (novels, short stories, essays, diaries) describe the often fatal addiction that draws writers to alcohol.
One of the most accurate descriptions of this close relationship between literature and the passion for alcohol was given by Baudelaire when he spoke of Edgar A. Poe’s addiction to alcohol: he said that his death was almost a suicide. The French poet – also fond of alcohol and other drugs, as he specifically states in Artificial Paradise – explained: «[Poe] He drank not voraciously, but barbarously, as if a murder were fulfilling his destiny. To kill something in it, a worm that it cannot kill».
Finding this worm—the addictive anxiety in artists—is what prompted writers and researchers from different eras to approach a theory.
In The Trip to Echo Spring: Why Writers Drink (Attic of Books, 2013), Olivia Laing focuses on six American writers who most embody and thematize her drunkenness: F. Scott Fitzgerald, Ernest Hemingway, Tennessee Williams, John Berryman, John Cheever and Raymond Carver. In addition to the friendship some of them have with each other, the author discovers some repetitive patterns: “Everyone lived with self-loathing and tormented by a certain sense of inadequacy,” as well as other similarities such as wanderlust, family problems, and promiscuity. This is a compelling and well-written book that goes deep enough into the subject to better understand the sincerity of the creators.
Alcohol and Literature (Menoscuarto, 2017), by Javier Barreiro, runs along this line, with the Spanish author starting with the Greeks’ relationship to alcohol and then reviewing European and American writers, including Spanish speakers. different times given to ethyl abuse. It warns that “70% of Nobel Prize-winning American writers have problems with alcohol or use alcohol as a source of inspiration.” According to Barreiro, among artists, writers suffer most often from depression and neurosis, so the incidence of alcoholism is three times higher than among painters and musicians.
destroy yourself
In both Rosa Montero’s latest book, The Dane of Men (Seix Barral, 2022), and Toni Montesinos The Wounded Letter: Suicide Writers, Drug Addicts, and the Mad (Berenice, 2022), she agrees with Barreiro and compiles a list of celebrities. dipsomaniacs who slowly self-destruct when not suicidal.
Spaniard Natalia Carrero’s latest novel, Otra (Tránsito, 2022), is a deceptively short book. Beneath the seemingly simple style and everyday scenes, not only are various levels of reflection saved, but also a poetic acupuncture filled with images: “Eye-silence continues to read”, “Sounds have many perspectives”, “I went out.” to the street with a growing heart, the strengthening of the heartbeat was heard from me». The memories of this imaginary drunkard read as if shards of glass scattered on the floor, memories of a broken glass were collected: be careful, contain sharp expressions and very sharp humor.
In recent years, new titles have been published in Spanish—some translated—from personal experiences with the problem of addiction.
“He did not separate the thirst from the desire to stun. In any case, my father, like me, was drinking to liquidate himself,” writes Argentine journalist and writer María Moreno in Black-out (PRH, 2017). “I drink a lot because I drank with my father’s mouth.” With a lively pulse, it embodies the chronology of an agonizing shift into complete darkness. It starts in childhood, hits the bottom in maturity: in the middle, the bohemian scenes and cultural actors of Buenos Aires roam the 60s and 70s, even expressing at the most critical moment of addiction: “Alcohol is a homeland. . Alcohol is a God.” Winner of the 2016 Critics’ Award and highlighted by The New York Times, Moreno’s book has become a touchstone for Spanish-speaking readers.
In Lagunas (Pepitas de calabaza, 2018), American writer Sarah Hepola writes: “I drank until I reached a place I didn’t care. [mis conflictos personales], but I would wake up a very anxious person”, like having no memory of what I said or did the night before. He explains that in the United States, it’s very common to drink until you lose consciousness and you don’t care about anything, but in this case, the alarm allowed him to react in time to get out of the circle. You drink from fear, remorse, shyness, you drink to silence the cruel self-criticism that humiliates you, you drink to let go of all control without realizing that you will collapse. This is the message.
Leslie Jamison follows something quite similar in Footprint of the Days (Anagram, 2020), in which she chronicles her struggle to free herself from drinking and examines the cases of many other writers and artists who have fallen victim to the drama. Billie Holiday or Amy Winehouse. From his first pleasurable sense of “lost” and the ensuing mental “loss of consciousness” to his entry into the creative writing program in Iowa, where great writers are ruined by drinking, to his meeting with Alcoholics Anonymous in a church basement, Jamison gives an account of what happened. The abyss she tumbled into until the never-ending recovery.
Along the same lines, The Last Cup (Del Asteroide, 2020), written by German Daniel Schreiber, describes how many of his acquaintances, including his doctor, found it unnecessary to quit drinking despite admitting to being an alcoholic. . The book is a seriously honest confession about all the mechanisms of self-deception that allow us to continue drinking in a society that has completely normalized it. Also a record of the different aids the author had to turn to to regain control over himself.
traps
Like the others mentioned here, the Englishman Lawrence Osborne hints that his alcoholism started when he stood by the elderly, the mother, and his family in this case, explaining: “The drinker is introverted and cannot resolve the situation. threads that close around it. Specialized in writing about travel and alcohol, To drink or not to drink (Gatopardo, 2020) reflects a nomadic spirit in the history of his itineraries in various cities after any drink within his reach, but also reflects a nomadic spirit in the different social and Eastern as well as Western There are religious customs around it. Between hotels and landscapes, use the opportunity to warn about the pitfalls of alcohol and the harmful effects of addiction as a stimulant.
Written in autofiction mode by Argentinian Sofia Balbuena, who was also invited to the Iowa writing program, Doce pasos hacia mí (Vinyl, 2022) interspersed her personal experience of initiating alcohol with other literary references: Laing, Jamison, and Moreno.
In The Metaphysics of the Aperitif (Periférica, 2022), French writer Stephan Levy Kuentz, after examining the favorite drinks of famous artists, “Will alcohol be the ink of the dictionary?” “The snack is a stateless center of gravity built to fend off castration slogans. That purgatory between day and night, night and death, a brain mess in which nothing quite exists… A slow-motion struggle between the person and his ideal image». Written in a charming poetic pen, it takes us to the sunset hour, when the sun sets and consciousness thins out in the dangerous solitude of drink—like purgatory. Fabulous translation.
famous dipsomaniacs
Some of the myth-classics from alcohol abuse to writing include Malcolm Lowry’s Under the Volcano; Confessions of a Drunk by British essayist Charles Lamb; The Legend of the Holy Drinker by Joseph Roth; Scott Fitzgerald’s The Crack-up; Recovery, by John Berryman; Days Without a Trace was made into a movie by Charles Jackson, by Billy Wilder. At the time of writing, Stephen King admits that he cannot remember how he wrote Cujo, the story of the killer dog who became pregnant while intoxicated.
Some extraordinary stories begin with Cheever’s debut in “The Swimmer.” Or Carson McCullers’s, The Domestic Dilemma, in which a man finds his wife drunk every day to be dangerous for her children, and The Instant of the Next Hour with her partner after a night of extremes.
Some readers will be able to recite the list of North American dipsomaniacs who have fallen in love with the most. Edgar A. Poe is followed by Jack London, Herman Melville, Dashiel Hamnet, Eugene O’Neill, Sinclair Lewis, William Faulkner, Dorothy Parker, Djuna Barnes, Thomas Wolfe, Scott Fiztgerald, Zelda Sayre, Ernest Hemingway, John Steinbeck . , Evelyn Waugh, John Fante, Tennessee Williams, William Burroughs, Saul Bellow, Carson McCullers, Charles Bukowski, Jack Kerouac, Truman Capote, Patricia Highsmith, Anne Sexton, Sylvia Plath, Lucia Berlin, Raymond Carver, Stephen King and others.
Many refer to what Gertrude Stein calls the Lost Generation, a term that became popular after the publication of Hemingway’s Paris Was a Party and includes young writers from the First World War and the famous Roaring Twenties in the United States. belonged to. .
Names from other latitudes, such as Great Britain, ring in chord: Jean Rhys, James Joyce, George Orwell, Dylan Thomas, Kingsley Amis, others ranging from English romantic poets to bloodthirsty French to Baudelaire-headed Poe fans, in addition to Alexandre Dumas, Samuel Beckett, Verlaine, Rimbaud. Just like Dostoevsky, Chekhov, Pessoa.
“I like the slowest poisons, the bitterest drinks, the strongest drugs, the wildest ideas, the most complex thoughts, the strongest emotions,” wrote Brazilian Clarice Lispector, who also relish drinks and smokes. In the Spanish-speaking region, there were not few people who drank with one hand and wrote with the other: Quevedo, Lope de Vega, Juan Carlos Onetti, Juan Rulfo, Alfredo Bryce Etchenique, Pablo Neruda, Mariano de Cavia, Juan Benet.
Marguerite Duras completely de-romanticizes the idea that getting drunk is desirable for everyone in the jarring text El alcohol included in the material La vida (1987): “To live with alcohol is to live very close to death.”