If you don’t know F. Scott Fitzgerald was an alcoholic, there’s a good chance you won’t know he was also a novelist.
The double claim to fame (or notoriety - it’s dirty business being a novelist) has been there from as near to the beginning as matters. For a while, and despite an early masterpiece, Fitzgerald’s celebrity as a drunk probably exceeded that as a writer. He was barely in print, after all, at the time of his death, an abuse-inspired event, and the biographies – of the train wreck rather than the talent – outsold any of the novels by a good measure. As the Miziners and Turnbulls and Mitfords faded in the firmament, the longer term restored the balance. But the alcoholic – thanks to Edmund Wilson, Cyril Connolly, and Fitzgerald himself, among others, and their combined efforts in creating the Fitzgerald Cautionary Tale - continues to keep pace with the writer, even the writer of a work as unqualifiedly good as The Great Gatsby.
Fitzgerald had objected, in 1922, when Wilson referenced his drinking in a Bookman review. A few years later, he had overcome his objections and was introducing himself to journalists with the motto: “Don’t you know I am one of the most notorious drinkers of the younger generation?” Not too long after that, when not in full-blown denial before the psychiatrists attending his sick wife, Fitzgerald tried to rein in the reputation somewhat. “All goes serenely down here,” he wrote to Maxwell Perkins early in 1933: “Am going on the water wagon from the first of February to the first of April but don’t tell Ernest because he has long convinced himself that I am an incurable alcoholic, due to the fact that we almost always meet on parties. I am his alcoholic just like Ring is mine and do not want to disillusion him ….”
As for Ernest, he would write,
The first time I ever met Scott Fitzgerald a very strange thing happened. Many strange things happened with Scott but this one I was never able to forget ... As he sat there at the bar holding the glass of champagne the skin seemed to tighten over his face until all the puffiness was gone and then it drew tighter until the face was like a death’s head. The eyes sank and began to look dead and the lips were drawn tight and the color left the face so that it was the color of used candle wax. This was not my imagination. His face had become a true death’s head, or death mask, in front of my eyes.
“Scott,” I said. “Are you all right?”
He did not answer and his face looked more drawn than ever.
“We’d better get him to a first aid station,” I said to Dune Chaplin.
“No. He’s all right.”
“He looks like he’s dying.”
“No. That’s the way it takes him.”
All of the contemporary accounts - except Fitzgerald’s - agree with Hemingway. Fitzgerald’s standing as “one of the most notorious drinkers of the younger generation” was arrived at by not being able to drink much – a lot. He consumed a great deal by accumulation; on the specific occasion, he couldn’t hold that much liquor. Tolerance did not come naturally, and never arrived at an impressive capacity. Louis Bromfield is a typical witness: “One cocktail and he was off … Immediately he was out of control and there was only one end … that he became thoroughly drunk, and like many Irishmen, when he became drunk he usually became very disagreeable and rude and quarrelsome, as if all his resentments were released at once.”
A more recent explanation, specific to the Hemingway observation, is proposed by Tom Dardis: “Current knowledge of alcoholism would suggest that Fitzgerald had been in the midst of a drinking cycle, perhaps stretching over several days, in which he had absorbed so much alcohol into his system that it required just two or three drinks to make him unconscious and suffer a blackout.” This would fit with the Fitzgerald who would later frequently leave his guests in one room to visit the kitchen where he would swig at the gin and then get drunk on a few drinks in their company. He was convinced to the end, it is said, that no one could smell the gin on his breath.
Robert Gale’s An F. Scott Fitzgerald Encyclopedia has an entry which begins as follows:
"ALCOHOLISM IN FITZERALD: Throughout adulthood, Fitzgerald had a problem with alcohol. He drank at Princeton. He and Zelda (see Fitzgerald, Zelda Sayre) drank and misbehaved in the United States and abroad."
“Misbehaved” is priceless. It was Fitzgerald’s habit, as Clive James has noted, to “arrive late and leave early, or arrive late and leave never, or leave in an ambulance,” but he was a first-rate alcoholic, at home and everywhere else, and Zelda was his match until the obsession with “dancers and their cheap satellites” (Fitzgerald), the suicidal tendencies, and, eventually, the schizophrenia got the upper hand. “Francis Scott and Zelda Fitzgerald were coming home from a New Year’s party,” runs the joke: “It was April.” Yes, but what year was it? If it was 1930, Fitzgerald had long been off to the races, and Zelda went mad.
Once “Zelda got a sort of breakdown from overwork,” as Fitzgerald put it at first, the letters between the two read like they are comparing notes on a mutual blackout - Scott to Zelda: “In Rome we were dismal … Then we came to Prague … Finally you got well in Juan-les-Pins …;” Zelda to Scott: “There was … the strangeness and excitement of New York … We moved to 59th Street … We went to St. Raphael … and we went sometimes to Nice or Monte Carlo …” And the recriminations fly – “We ruined each other,” writes Zelda, to which Fitzgerald replies, “We ruined ourselves – I have never honestly thought that we ruined each other.” Either way, ruined was right, and support for that conclusion would not have been hard to find. As Fitzgerald wrote to Doctor Mildred Squires in 1932:
"Perhaps fifty percent of our friends and relatives would tell you in all honest conviction that my drinking drove Zelda insane – the other half would assure you that her insanity drove me to drink … These two classes would be equally unanimous in saying that each of us would be well rid of the other ..."
Such unanimity, however, even in 1932, would be “in full face of the irony that we have never been so desperately in love with each other in our lives.” The desperation is apparent enough, but otherwise this is a stretch. What follows might be delusional: “Liquor on my mouth is sweet to her; I cherish her most extravagant hallucination.”
And yet, Zelda’s most extravagant hallucinations might well have been a godsend for Fitzgerald. He was deeply vexed, of course, by discussions between Zelda and her therapists about, for example, sexuality, especially his (“Does Dr. Meyer suspect, or did Dr. Squires lead him to suspect that there were elements in the case that were being deliberately concealed? I ask this because for a month Zelda had Dr. Forel convinced that I was a notorious Parisien homo-sexual”), but hers as well (Zelda is “probably a polygamous type; and possibly she has, when not herself, a touch of mental lesbianism”). And, of course, his alcoholic habits were directly challenged, which led to some interesting flourishes - to Doctor Adolf Meyer, Spring 1933: “When you qualify or disqualify my judgment on the case, or put it on a level very little above hers on the grounds that I have frequently abused liquor I can only think of Lincoln’s remark about a greater man and heavier drinker than I have ever been – that he wished he knew what sort of liquor Grant drank so he could send a barrel to all his other generals.”
But this was a challenge he could deflect. If that half of the jury of his peers who sat in judgment against Fitzgerald on the cause of Zelda’s illness was wrong, he would be discharged of any responsibility to stop. More important, by focusing on the “dual case” analysis, even if just to give his attentions to disentangling it, he was effectively released from the much harder task of self-examination. He could not only resist any temptation to review his last-line defenses of denial, projection, rationalization, and self-delusion; he could put these defenses into overdrive.
Doctor Oscar Forel was the first psychiatrist at the scene of Zelda, and with him Fitzgerald was able to quickly establish the story he was to stick to. In the first place, it was all Zelda’s fault:
"During my young manhood for seven years I worked extremely hard, in six years bringing myself by tireless literary self-discipline to a position of unquestioned preeminence among younger American writers … My work is done on coffee, coffee and more coffee, never on alcohol. Doubtless a certain irritability developed in those years, an inability to be gay which my wife – who had never tried to use her talents and intelligence – was not inclined to condone. It was on our coming to Europe in 1924 and upon her urging that I began to look forward to wine at dinner … We went on hard drinking parties together sometimes but the regular use of wine and apperatives [sic] was something that I dreaded but she encouraged because she found I was more cheerful then and allowed her to drink more. The ballet idea was something I inaugurated in 1927 to stopper her idle drinking after she had already so lost herself in it as to make suicidal attempts. Since then I have drunk more, from unhappiness, and she less, because of her physical work – that is another story."
Second, to give up drinking would be nothing less than suicide:
"Two years ago in America I noticed that when we stopped all drinking for three weeks or so, which happened many times, I immediately had dark circles under my eyes, was listless and disinclined to work … I gave up strong cigarettes and, in a panic that perhaps I was just giving out, applied for a large insurance policy … I found that a moderate amount of wine, a pint at each meal made all the difference in how I felt."
The sensitivity, anxiety, contempt, and idealization, as he battens down the hatches, betray traces, at least, of compensatory narcissistic tendencies, and at times it sounds like he is about to address the Virginia House of Burgesses on the small matter of war:
"Now when that old question comes up again as to which of two people is worth preserving, I, thinking of my ambitions once so nearly achieved of being part of English literature, of my child, even of Zelda in the matter of providing for her – must perforce consider myself first. [He will.] I say that without defiance but simply knowing the limits of what I can do. To stop drinking entirely for six months and see what happens, even to continue the experiment thereafter if successful – only a pig would refuse to do that. Give up strong drink permanently I will. [He won’t.] Bind myself to forswear wine forever I cannot. [He got that right.] My vision of the world at its brightest is such that life without the use of amenities is impossible. I have lived hard and ruined the essential innocence in myself that could make it that possible, and the fact that I have abused liquor is something to be paid for with suffering and death perhaps but not with renunciation … I cannot consider one pint of wine at the days end as anything but one of the rights of man."
Give me liberty, or give me ...! In any case, for the sake of his calling and for the sake of Zelda’s madness, there is no way Fitzgerald is backing down on this one:
"Is there not a certain disingenuousness in her wanting me to give up all alcohol? Would not that justify her conduct completely to herself and prove to her relatives, and out friends that it was my drinking that caused this calamity, and that I thereby admitted it? Wouldn’t she finally get to believe herself that she had consented to “take me back” only if I stopped drinking? I could only be silent. And any human value I might have would disappear if I condemned myself to a life long asceticism to which I am not adapted either by habit, temperament or the circumstances of my métier."
“Does this sound like a long polemic composed of childish stubbornness and ingratitude?” he asks. No, it sounds like a long polemic composed of sentiments perfectly commonplace among active alcoholics.
Dr. Richard Hoffman, one of the few psychiatrists who saw Scott rather than Zelda, the occasion being his surfacing from a bender in 1939, decided that Fitzgerald suffered from hypoglycemia or hyperinsulinism. This would cause a craving for sugar, and, alcohol being one way to replenish the body’s sugar, Fitzgerald might well have paid good money for the diagnosis, although it had the slight drawback of being pure nonsense. All alcoholism produces hypoglycemia, but a few days without a drink and Fitzgerald’s blood sugar levels were perfectly normal. Pathologist William Ober, having examined Fitzgerald’s medical records several decades later, writes, quite sensibly:
"There is no evidence for hypoglycemia whatsoever … [Fitzgerald] did not drink because his blood sugar level was low; he drank because he was a drunkard. ‘Drunkard’ is the old-fashioned term for alcoholic and, as we know today, it is an addiction, a form of escape for people with inadequate personalities, people with deep-seated insecurities, people with unresolved intra-psychic conflicts … as well as people … who use it to drown out the still small voice of self-reproach.”
And self-reproach is something the writer who “could write and didn’t” and “couldn’t drink but did” had in abundance.
“I heard you lost a lot in the crash,” Alix, the barman, says to Charlie Wales in “Babylon Revisited.”
“I did,” and he added grimly, “but I lost everything I wanted in the boom.”
“Selling short.”
“Something like that.”
In Paris, again, hoping to get his daughter back, Charlie notes: “I spoiled this city for myself. I didn’t realize it, but the days came along one after another, and then two years were gone, and everything was gone, and I was gone.” Looking in on and upon old haunts in Montmartre as it goes about “catering to vice and waste” on “an utterly childish scale,” Charlie suddenly realizes “the meaning of the word ‘dissipate’ - to dissipate into thin air; to make nothing out of something.”
The drinker will do that, make nothing out of something, to the writer – whose goal is not far removed from making something out of nothing. For a writer as ambitious, and an alcoholic as chronic as Fitzgerald, the superego is bound to be troubled. And the trouble with the superego (William Ober again) is that it can be “defined as that portion of the personality that is soluble in alcohol.”
Friday, October 1, 2010
Monday, May 31, 2010
All Each Damned Day
John Berryman was powerless over alcohol, but he was also powerless over poetry, and that’s the pits.
I do, despite my self-doubts, day by day
grow more & more but a little confident
that I will never down a whiskey again
or gin or rum or vodka, brandy or ale.
A mere alcoholic might work to have his fatal disease arrested one day at a time, and feel an incremental, fragile confidence (or despair) grow in sobriety. For the poet it’s all despite … doubts … and more and more but a little confident … of never drinking whiskey, gin, rum, vodka, and every other drink he can sensibly fit into a poem. You can almost taste the stuff.
Nor can the poet resist the temptation to remind himself that simple is hardly a synonym for easy:
It all is, after all, very simple.
You just never drink again all each damned day.
In a field not particularly characterized by normalcy, Berryman still stands out as a special case. In addition to the poetry and alcohol, there were lifelong psychiatric issues to add to the mix: his father’s suicide when Berryman was twelve (one among many issues) is as good a starting point for the latter as any, especially since the event may have followed the threat of a different order of insanity – suicide-murder “He was going to swim out, with me, forevers/and a swimmer strong he was in the phosphorescent Gulf/but he decided on lead.” Berryman may have been spoiled for choice, then, when it came to drowning. His was a tide governed by three moons.
In Tom Shone’s version, “John Berryman sat in rehab looking like a ‘dishevelled Moses’, his shins black and blue, his liver palpitating, reciting Japanese and Greek poets and quoting Immanuel Kant. When he found out the doctors around him were serious he buckled under, declaring himself “a new man in 50 ways!” and affecting an ostentatious “religious conversion” which he proceeded to pour into a series of poems to his Higher Power (“Under new governance your majesty”). Ten days after leaving he found he needed a quick stiff one to get the creative juices flowing again and downed a quart of whisky. “Christ,” was all he could say the next morning.”
(Shone accurately captures the general picture, although he conflates several hospitalizations, and misses Berryman, in disheveled Moses form, singing Bessie Smith’s blues. Berryman wouldn’t complain about the depiction. He was hospitalized so many times, he might have been confused himself. Less forgivable, of course, is Shone’s misquoting the poetry: the Berryman persona was under new “management.”)
As the alcoholic might try the switch from liquor to beer, during a later period of abstinence Berryman tried to calm the waters by turning from poetry to prose. The result was an appropriately unfinished novel called Recovery, “an object lesson in how not to recover.” Donald Newlove: “First you hang on to all your old romances about your illness, then you suck your old grandiosity for every drop that’s still in it, you vigorously emphasize your uniqueness among the clods who might be recovering with you, and then you defend to the death your right to self-destruction … Starting afresh meant that a massive part of his work so far was self-pity and breast-beating. That was the last mask he couldn’t rip off. It was like tearing the beard from his cheeks.”
This might be unfair on Berryman, and one wouldn’t want to make too much of hearsay, especially when the source is another alcoholic writer. But Berryman himself is hardly a reliable witness. A manuscript entitled Third Alcoholic Treatment, “a summary & deluded account of the beginning of my recovery,” notes: “Alcoholism produces inevitably what are known as ‘sincere delusions.’ A sincere delusion is a lie – an affective deformation of reality – which the liar does not know to be a lie … His delusion is shared in some degree by that part of the society which is concerned with his welfare.”
Berryman was late in trying recovery, but sincere enough or sincerely deluded enough to keep on keeping on. What seem to be prayers to a power greater than John Berryman populate his last volumes. He attended meetings, many of which did not always go according to plan: on one occasion, scheduled to lead a meeting and entirely unprepared, he decided to recite (like a poem?) his Fourth Step Inventory from a paper in his coat pocket. The poetry and its prose addenda kept pace. At the tail end of 1969, he worked on a biography of Shakespeare, which he cited as “a replacement for drinking.” A few weeks later, he was back in hospital, devastatingly drunk, deathly anxious, it seems, over the quality of new poems. The tides of 1970 followed this pattern. A few days after another hospitalization in December of that year he wrote: “I feel new - so far, 10 days, okay with no trouble. I’ll be in out-patient treatment two years now, then just on maintenance of the severe daily discipline I established in hospital 5 weeks ago & have not since once relaxed. The next drink I take will probably be on my death-bed, if then.” It wasn’t.
Saul Bellow (on Recovery the novel) notes that Berryman’s inspiration “contained a death threat. He would, as he wrote the things he waited and prayed for, fall apart. Drink was a stabilizer. It reduced the fatal intensity.” The fatal intensity is not to be doubted - the Minneapolis Star reported a witness who observed that Berryman apparently “waved goodbye” just before he plunged from the Minneapolis Washington Avenue Bridge - but drink as a stabilizer is highly suspect.
In a Paris Review interview, eighteen months or so before his suicide, Berryman said:
“I have a tiny little secret hope that, after a decent period of silence and prose, I will find myself in some almost impossible life situation and will respond to this with outcries of rage, rage and love, such as the word has never heard before … I do feel strongly that among the greatest pieces of luck for high achievement is ordeal. Certain great artists can make out without it. Titian and others, but mostly you need ordeal. My idea is this: the artist is extremely lucky who is presented with the worst possible ordeal that will not actually kill him. At that point he’s in business … I think that what happens in my poetic work in the future will probably largely depend not on my sitting calmly on my ass as I think, “Hmm, hmm, a long poem again? Hmm,” but on being knocked in the face, and thrown flat, and given cancer, and all kinds of other things short of senile dementia. At that point I’m out, but short of that, I don’t know. I hope to be nearly crucified.”
Berryman might have been playing to the gallery here; but he might also have been living the part he was playing. In Discovery, Alan Severance, a barely disguised John Berryman, is described as “a conscientious man. He head really thought, off and on for twenty years, that it was his duty to drink, namely, to sacrifice himself. He saw the products as worth it.”
The poet sacrificing himself to the ordeal of alcoholism for the product of poetry fits well with the public narrative. An opposite one, the drinker sacrificing himself to poetry in order that he might drink, is just as plausible. So which came first – the headless chicken or the poisoned egg?
A.A. Alvarez (The Writer’s Voice) opts for the egg:
“As a rationale for alcoholism,” he notes of Severance’s justification, “this strikes me as being as fanciful and self-aggrandizing as Severance himself. It becomes convincing only when you turn it inside out: given Berryman’s belief in the connection between art and agony, given also the public’s appetite for bad behavior in its artists (which deflect it from taking their work seriously), it may be that, for Berryman, writing poetry was an excuse for his drinking.”
Or was that the chicken?
I do, despite my self-doubts, day by day
grow more & more but a little confident
that I will never down a whiskey again
or gin or rum or vodka, brandy or ale.
A mere alcoholic might work to have his fatal disease arrested one day at a time, and feel an incremental, fragile confidence (or despair) grow in sobriety. For the poet it’s all despite … doubts … and more and more but a little confident … of never drinking whiskey, gin, rum, vodka, and every other drink he can sensibly fit into a poem. You can almost taste the stuff.
Nor can the poet resist the temptation to remind himself that simple is hardly a synonym for easy:
It all is, after all, very simple.
You just never drink again all each damned day.
In a field not particularly characterized by normalcy, Berryman still stands out as a special case. In addition to the poetry and alcohol, there were lifelong psychiatric issues to add to the mix: his father’s suicide when Berryman was twelve (one among many issues) is as good a starting point for the latter as any, especially since the event may have followed the threat of a different order of insanity – suicide-murder “He was going to swim out, with me, forevers/and a swimmer strong he was in the phosphorescent Gulf/but he decided on lead.” Berryman may have been spoiled for choice, then, when it came to drowning. His was a tide governed by three moons.
In Tom Shone’s version, “John Berryman sat in rehab looking like a ‘dishevelled Moses’, his shins black and blue, his liver palpitating, reciting Japanese and Greek poets and quoting Immanuel Kant. When he found out the doctors around him were serious he buckled under, declaring himself “a new man in 50 ways!” and affecting an ostentatious “religious conversion” which he proceeded to pour into a series of poems to his Higher Power (“Under new governance your majesty”). Ten days after leaving he found he needed a quick stiff one to get the creative juices flowing again and downed a quart of whisky. “Christ,” was all he could say the next morning.”
(Shone accurately captures the general picture, although he conflates several hospitalizations, and misses Berryman, in disheveled Moses form, singing Bessie Smith’s blues. Berryman wouldn’t complain about the depiction. He was hospitalized so many times, he might have been confused himself. Less forgivable, of course, is Shone’s misquoting the poetry: the Berryman persona was under new “management.”)
As the alcoholic might try the switch from liquor to beer, during a later period of abstinence Berryman tried to calm the waters by turning from poetry to prose. The result was an appropriately unfinished novel called Recovery, “an object lesson in how not to recover.” Donald Newlove: “First you hang on to all your old romances about your illness, then you suck your old grandiosity for every drop that’s still in it, you vigorously emphasize your uniqueness among the clods who might be recovering with you, and then you defend to the death your right to self-destruction … Starting afresh meant that a massive part of his work so far was self-pity and breast-beating. That was the last mask he couldn’t rip off. It was like tearing the beard from his cheeks.”
This might be unfair on Berryman, and one wouldn’t want to make too much of hearsay, especially when the source is another alcoholic writer. But Berryman himself is hardly a reliable witness. A manuscript entitled Third Alcoholic Treatment, “a summary & deluded account of the beginning of my recovery,” notes: “Alcoholism produces inevitably what are known as ‘sincere delusions.’ A sincere delusion is a lie – an affective deformation of reality – which the liar does not know to be a lie … His delusion is shared in some degree by that part of the society which is concerned with his welfare.”
Berryman was late in trying recovery, but sincere enough or sincerely deluded enough to keep on keeping on. What seem to be prayers to a power greater than John Berryman populate his last volumes. He attended meetings, many of which did not always go according to plan: on one occasion, scheduled to lead a meeting and entirely unprepared, he decided to recite (like a poem?) his Fourth Step Inventory from a paper in his coat pocket. The poetry and its prose addenda kept pace. At the tail end of 1969, he worked on a biography of Shakespeare, which he cited as “a replacement for drinking.” A few weeks later, he was back in hospital, devastatingly drunk, deathly anxious, it seems, over the quality of new poems. The tides of 1970 followed this pattern. A few days after another hospitalization in December of that year he wrote: “I feel new - so far, 10 days, okay with no trouble. I’ll be in out-patient treatment two years now, then just on maintenance of the severe daily discipline I established in hospital 5 weeks ago & have not since once relaxed. The next drink I take will probably be on my death-bed, if then.” It wasn’t.
Saul Bellow (on Recovery the novel) notes that Berryman’s inspiration “contained a death threat. He would, as he wrote the things he waited and prayed for, fall apart. Drink was a stabilizer. It reduced the fatal intensity.” The fatal intensity is not to be doubted - the Minneapolis Star reported a witness who observed that Berryman apparently “waved goodbye” just before he plunged from the Minneapolis Washington Avenue Bridge - but drink as a stabilizer is highly suspect.
In a Paris Review interview, eighteen months or so before his suicide, Berryman said:
“I have a tiny little secret hope that, after a decent period of silence and prose, I will find myself in some almost impossible life situation and will respond to this with outcries of rage, rage and love, such as the word has never heard before … I do feel strongly that among the greatest pieces of luck for high achievement is ordeal. Certain great artists can make out without it. Titian and others, but mostly you need ordeal. My idea is this: the artist is extremely lucky who is presented with the worst possible ordeal that will not actually kill him. At that point he’s in business … I think that what happens in my poetic work in the future will probably largely depend not on my sitting calmly on my ass as I think, “Hmm, hmm, a long poem again? Hmm,” but on being knocked in the face, and thrown flat, and given cancer, and all kinds of other things short of senile dementia. At that point I’m out, but short of that, I don’t know. I hope to be nearly crucified.”
Berryman might have been playing to the gallery here; but he might also have been living the part he was playing. In Discovery, Alan Severance, a barely disguised John Berryman, is described as “a conscientious man. He head really thought, off and on for twenty years, that it was his duty to drink, namely, to sacrifice himself. He saw the products as worth it.”
The poet sacrificing himself to the ordeal of alcoholism for the product of poetry fits well with the public narrative. An opposite one, the drinker sacrificing himself to poetry in order that he might drink, is just as plausible. So which came first – the headless chicken or the poisoned egg?
A.A. Alvarez (The Writer’s Voice) opts for the egg:
“As a rationale for alcoholism,” he notes of Severance’s justification, “this strikes me as being as fanciful and self-aggrandizing as Severance himself. It becomes convincing only when you turn it inside out: given Berryman’s belief in the connection between art and agony, given also the public’s appetite for bad behavior in its artists (which deflect it from taking their work seriously), it may be that, for Berryman, writing poetry was an excuse for his drinking.”
Or was that the chicken?
Monday, May 3, 2010
A Woman Under the Influence
What is it with Myrtle Gordon anyway? Well, it’s Cassavetes for a start.
Myrtle is an actor more acted upon than acting – she is bent out of shape by the director, the writer, and her fellow actors. Her identity is picked at by the melodrama onstage (a scene in which she is to be slapped is the cause of acute problems) and by the men (not just the men, but particularly the men) around her: the trailer (Opening Night, 1977) captures a little of the latter, with the director’s voice, talking to Myrtle, over images of Myrtle and a young female fan:
“It has nothing to do with being a woman … And you’re not a woman anyway … No, you’re a beautiful woman … You are … I was kidding … You see, you have no sense of humor, I told you that … It’s a tradition, actresses get slapped, it’s a tradition … I love you … I want you to be good … Would I hurt you? … Well then, you’re going to have to let me slap you … It won’t work if you don’t.”
Of course, it has everything to do with being a woman, and everything to do with getting older and damaged. “I’m getting old,“ her onstage co-star says: “What do we do about that?” Myrtle’s first words offstage, over the credits, are: “They wanna be loved … They have to be loved … The whole world … Everybody wants to be loved. When I was seventeen I … I could do anything. It was so easy. My emotions were so close to the surface. I’m finding it … harder … and harder … to stay in touch.” And she wants to find a way to play the part where age doesn’t matter.
“Aging is a serious problem,” says Cassavetes: “It’s a fear. Somebody reaches forty, it’s a bigger fear. They want to be thirty. Somebody’s thirty, they want to be twenty. So they can have all the access to life.”
When a young fan who had sought her autograph at the stage door is run over and killed by a car, Myrtle is visited by the specter of the younger woman, a ghost of illness, a reflection, perhaps, of her younger self. “I’m not afraid of you,” the woman says: “You’re an older woman. You’re frightened. And you’re a coward.” Threatened, Myrtle lashes out with her fists and a bottle, and then she’s lashing out at thin air.
And Myrtle drinks. She drinks hard, and all the time. In the first few seconds of the film she is making her way to the stage and taking a long swig from the bottle. She drinks throughout the film as her identity crisis, our main concern, threatens to take down the play with her. She swallows straight from bottles of J&B that appear to be everywhere, even on stage, and by the end, blind drunk but making it through to the final act, she is accompanied to her entrance by the props man who leans towards her and whispers: “I’ve seen a lot of drunks in my day, but I’ve never seen anybody as drunk as you and still able to walk. You’re fantastic.”
And so she is.
Myrtle is an actor more acted upon than acting – she is bent out of shape by the director, the writer, and her fellow actors. Her identity is picked at by the melodrama onstage (a scene in which she is to be slapped is the cause of acute problems) and by the men (not just the men, but particularly the men) around her: the trailer (Opening Night, 1977) captures a little of the latter, with the director’s voice, talking to Myrtle, over images of Myrtle and a young female fan:
“It has nothing to do with being a woman … And you’re not a woman anyway … No, you’re a beautiful woman … You are … I was kidding … You see, you have no sense of humor, I told you that … It’s a tradition, actresses get slapped, it’s a tradition … I love you … I want you to be good … Would I hurt you? … Well then, you’re going to have to let me slap you … It won’t work if you don’t.”
Of course, it has everything to do with being a woman, and everything to do with getting older and damaged. “I’m getting old,“ her onstage co-star says: “What do we do about that?” Myrtle’s first words offstage, over the credits, are: “They wanna be loved … They have to be loved … The whole world … Everybody wants to be loved. When I was seventeen I … I could do anything. It was so easy. My emotions were so close to the surface. I’m finding it … harder … and harder … to stay in touch.” And she wants to find a way to play the part where age doesn’t matter.
“Aging is a serious problem,” says Cassavetes: “It’s a fear. Somebody reaches forty, it’s a bigger fear. They want to be thirty. Somebody’s thirty, they want to be twenty. So they can have all the access to life.”
When a young fan who had sought her autograph at the stage door is run over and killed by a car, Myrtle is visited by the specter of the younger woman, a ghost of illness, a reflection, perhaps, of her younger self. “I’m not afraid of you,” the woman says: “You’re an older woman. You’re frightened. And you’re a coward.” Threatened, Myrtle lashes out with her fists and a bottle, and then she’s lashing out at thin air.
And Myrtle drinks. She drinks hard, and all the time. In the first few seconds of the film she is making her way to the stage and taking a long swig from the bottle. She drinks throughout the film as her identity crisis, our main concern, threatens to take down the play with her. She swallows straight from bottles of J&B that appear to be everywhere, even on stage, and by the end, blind drunk but making it through to the final act, she is accompanied to her entrance by the props man who leans towards her and whispers: “I’ve seen a lot of drunks in my day, but I’ve never seen anybody as drunk as you and still able to walk. You’re fantastic.”
And so she is.
Sunday, May 2, 2010
These Be The Steps
These Be The Steps
The Notebooks of Cal Chilo
In His Fourth Month of Sobriety
Norton, 120 pp., $120
A new book containing unpublished work by one of our finest living poets is a literary event. A new book containing unpublished work by Cal Chilo is something else altogether. But what, exactly?
It might be easier to start by noting what it is not: it is not, or not merely, a collection of new poems by the undeterrable author of Shit-Faced, All I Ever Want To Do (Is Drink), Two For The Road, and the thematically-related, Make That Three. However, Chilo fans shouldn’t struggle with their straitjackets and head for solid walls just yet, because the book does contain a fair amount of new poetry, albeit heavily disguised, in Chilo’s trademark style, as “fragments,” “unresolved vocabulary,” and “words that possibly rhyme.”
But These Be The Steps is bigger than poetry. Indeed, Chilo seems to have set himself a task usually reserved to literary executors with their hands on the udders of that most bovine of cash cows, the dead poet, by publishing every word, down to the last signed receipt, that has been formed by his pen. The result is a remarkable and seemingly random assemblage of verse, non-verse, prose, non-prose, thought and absent-minded doodling culled from what Chilo refers to as “spiral binders.” The witty epigraph sets the tone:
I open the bucket
And shake out the leaves
And then I think, ‘Fuck it!
This might be funny
And I need the money
What rhyme can I find for 'leaves'?
Chilo has been hailed as a universal poet, of sorts, in that his standing among the university elite perfectly reflects his standing in the insatiable mass market for poetry. While an Eliot or Stevens might shiver with distaste at the idea of a poetry deliberately conceived to be intelligible to the masses, and a Frost would evolve a style that would appeal to both the average poetry reader and, through secret equivocations, to the more discerning critic, only Chilo has so effortlessly pulled off the trick of challenging (mentally) both: “Ideally,” he noted in a recent Paris Review interview, “it will leave the former feeling they could use a drink, and transform the latter into chronic alcoholics.”
Chilo is first and foremost a student of our major poets, or, as his critics would have it, “nothing but a plagiarist.” He’s certainly not above frequent borrowing - there’s Stevens (“I placed a jar upon the bar”); Frost (“I took the bar less patronized”); and even Pound (“Damn it all! all this our South stinks peace./ You whoreson dog, Papiols, come! Let’s to the pub").
But it is evident even here that the obsession is all his own. Liz Rosenberg likens a poem to a baby, because both are “self-absorbed and containing … the universal breath, and needing constant tiny cares and adjustments.” Not surprisingly, Chilo compares it to cheap beer: “Both, at the very least, addle the brain, and, at their best, make you want to throw up.”
There’s plenty on offer here for those Chilo fans, lighters aloft, anxious for a familiar encore. In scattered jottings on drinking, alcohol, and alcoholism - to name just a few of the many topics covered - Chilo drafts poems (“Dear Santa, Bring another drunk for me”), theorizes about poetics (“The poem must have a good point as a [sic] anecdote or joke about drink”); and lists topics for later writings (“the perfect pint of Guinness” and “ale?”). Occasionally, there is a ferocious lament in which his characteristic fixation is mixed with delusions of grandeur – “Beethoven couldn’t hear,” he writes at one point, “and I can’t drink.” More typical is the regretful and regrettable Pub Going:
A drink-drinking house on drink-drinking earth it is
In whose stale air all our desired drinks meet
Are re-ordered, and poured as destinies.
And that much never can be obsolete,
Since someone (just not me!) will be surprising
A hunger in himself for much more drink-drinking,
And staggeringly heading to this ground,
Which, he once knew, was proper to grow drunk in,
If only that so many drunks lie round.
The revelation of the Notebooks, however, is that Chilo may be about to break new ground: much diminished is the trademark “desire to drink,” and gone entirely are the famous synonyms for drunkenness (“Paradise,” “Bliss,” and “The Bollocks”) as is the self-pitying brooding on the first step (“Powerless, powerless, the word is powerless/ Sometimes I wish I was drunk still and showerless”). Instead the focus is on “the quality of my sobriety (sucks)” and “How come/ As I change my thinking/ The world and its mum/ Have taken to drinking?”
Through dozens of pages we see Chilo struggle with a recurrent theme: the insanity of the second step. At first he “goes” rather than “comes” to believe that a power greater than himself can restore him to sanity and has to go back to the beginning. Then, once he has mastered the first verb, he becomes despairingly confused about the goal and is restored to vanity before realizing his error. As painful for the reader, perhaps, as for Chilo, he compounds his misery by next being restored to profanity, which he seems to enjoy enormously before it becomes painfully obvious that he has again reached a dead end. The reader will not know whether to laugh or cry as Chilo then attempts to restore his Higher Power to sanity.
The trademark “plagiarism” is here (“I saw the best livers of my generation destroyed …” begins one poem), nowhere more apparent than in the straightforward theft from Larkin with Annus Recoverus:
The second second step began
In twenty-ten A.D.
(It all seemed nuts to me) –
Between the end of the alcohol ban
And the gallons of iced tea.
Larkin is also hidden in plain sight (or plainly not hidden) in the poem that lends its title to the volume:
They fuck you up, steps two and three.
They are not meant to, but they do.
Here, the Notebooks give the reader a clearer indication than mere finished verse of the poet’s struggle: These Be The Steps begins life as Whose Idea Was This? and goes through numerous rewrites – notably as This Is The End and This Be The Pits – in which Chilo painfully considers the relationship between the God of his understanding and the self (which he elsewhere terms “the basket case”).
Chilo fans will delight in his experiments with some of poetry’s more esoteric forms, including the villanelle, sestina, rondeau redoublé, and the limerick:
After the alcohol tasked us,
A number of anonyms asked us
About certain powers
So much higher than ours -
There were some who suggested “Damascus!”
Chilo chooses to end the book on (or runs out of ink at) an optimistic and possibly delusional note:
I’ll be soberly full of surprises.
My steps’ll be all different sizes:
Some incredibly small,
Almost no steps at all,
And others so huge they’ll win prizes.
Few poets are as capable as Cal Chilo in testing Somerset Maugham’s belief that “the mere habit of notebook keeping might make the writer more observant.” Better suited to flipping around in rather than straight reading, perhaps, this is an essential book for the seriously demented poetry lover, who will find it a trove of Chilo’s famously earthy and yet deceptively non-existent wisdom.
The Notebooks of Cal Chilo
In His Fourth Month of Sobriety
Norton, 120 pp., $120
A new book containing unpublished work by one of our finest living poets is a literary event. A new book containing unpublished work by Cal Chilo is something else altogether. But what, exactly?
It might be easier to start by noting what it is not: it is not, or not merely, a collection of new poems by the undeterrable author of Shit-Faced, All I Ever Want To Do (Is Drink), Two For The Road, and the thematically-related, Make That Three. However, Chilo fans shouldn’t struggle with their straitjackets and head for solid walls just yet, because the book does contain a fair amount of new poetry, albeit heavily disguised, in Chilo’s trademark style, as “fragments,” “unresolved vocabulary,” and “words that possibly rhyme.”
But These Be The Steps is bigger than poetry. Indeed, Chilo seems to have set himself a task usually reserved to literary executors with their hands on the udders of that most bovine of cash cows, the dead poet, by publishing every word, down to the last signed receipt, that has been formed by his pen. The result is a remarkable and seemingly random assemblage of verse, non-verse, prose, non-prose, thought and absent-minded doodling culled from what Chilo refers to as “spiral binders.” The witty epigraph sets the tone:
I open the bucket
And shake out the leaves
And then I think, ‘Fuck it!
This might be funny
And I need the money
What rhyme can I find for 'leaves'?
Chilo has been hailed as a universal poet, of sorts, in that his standing among the university elite perfectly reflects his standing in the insatiable mass market for poetry. While an Eliot or Stevens might shiver with distaste at the idea of a poetry deliberately conceived to be intelligible to the masses, and a Frost would evolve a style that would appeal to both the average poetry reader and, through secret equivocations, to the more discerning critic, only Chilo has so effortlessly pulled off the trick of challenging (mentally) both: “Ideally,” he noted in a recent Paris Review interview, “it will leave the former feeling they could use a drink, and transform the latter into chronic alcoholics.”
Chilo is first and foremost a student of our major poets, or, as his critics would have it, “nothing but a plagiarist.” He’s certainly not above frequent borrowing - there’s Stevens (“I placed a jar upon the bar”); Frost (“I took the bar less patronized”); and even Pound (“Damn it all! all this our South stinks peace./ You whoreson dog, Papiols, come! Let’s to the pub").
But it is evident even here that the obsession is all his own. Liz Rosenberg likens a poem to a baby, because both are “self-absorbed and containing … the universal breath, and needing constant tiny cares and adjustments.” Not surprisingly, Chilo compares it to cheap beer: “Both, at the very least, addle the brain, and, at their best, make you want to throw up.”
There’s plenty on offer here for those Chilo fans, lighters aloft, anxious for a familiar encore. In scattered jottings on drinking, alcohol, and alcoholism - to name just a few of the many topics covered - Chilo drafts poems (“Dear Santa, Bring another drunk for me”), theorizes about poetics (“The poem must have a good point as a [sic] anecdote or joke about drink”); and lists topics for later writings (“the perfect pint of Guinness” and “ale?”). Occasionally, there is a ferocious lament in which his characteristic fixation is mixed with delusions of grandeur – “Beethoven couldn’t hear,” he writes at one point, “and I can’t drink.” More typical is the regretful and regrettable Pub Going:
A drink-drinking house on drink-drinking earth it is
In whose stale air all our desired drinks meet
Are re-ordered, and poured as destinies.
And that much never can be obsolete,
Since someone (just not me!) will be surprising
A hunger in himself for much more drink-drinking,
And staggeringly heading to this ground,
Which, he once knew, was proper to grow drunk in,
If only that so many drunks lie round.
The revelation of the Notebooks, however, is that Chilo may be about to break new ground: much diminished is the trademark “desire to drink,” and gone entirely are the famous synonyms for drunkenness (“Paradise,” “Bliss,” and “The Bollocks”) as is the self-pitying brooding on the first step (“Powerless, powerless, the word is powerless/ Sometimes I wish I was drunk still and showerless”). Instead the focus is on “the quality of my sobriety (sucks)” and “How come/ As I change my thinking/ The world and its mum/ Have taken to drinking?”
Through dozens of pages we see Chilo struggle with a recurrent theme: the insanity of the second step. At first he “goes” rather than “comes” to believe that a power greater than himself can restore him to sanity and has to go back to the beginning. Then, once he has mastered the first verb, he becomes despairingly confused about the goal and is restored to vanity before realizing his error. As painful for the reader, perhaps, as for Chilo, he compounds his misery by next being restored to profanity, which he seems to enjoy enormously before it becomes painfully obvious that he has again reached a dead end. The reader will not know whether to laugh or cry as Chilo then attempts to restore his Higher Power to sanity.
The trademark “plagiarism” is here (“I saw the best livers of my generation destroyed …” begins one poem), nowhere more apparent than in the straightforward theft from Larkin with Annus Recoverus:
The second second step began
In twenty-ten A.D.
(It all seemed nuts to me) –
Between the end of the alcohol ban
And the gallons of iced tea.
Larkin is also hidden in plain sight (or plainly not hidden) in the poem that lends its title to the volume:
They fuck you up, steps two and three.
They are not meant to, but they do.
Here, the Notebooks give the reader a clearer indication than mere finished verse of the poet’s struggle: These Be The Steps begins life as Whose Idea Was This? and goes through numerous rewrites – notably as This Is The End and This Be The Pits – in which Chilo painfully considers the relationship between the God of his understanding and the self (which he elsewhere terms “the basket case”).
Chilo fans will delight in his experiments with some of poetry’s more esoteric forms, including the villanelle, sestina, rondeau redoublé, and the limerick:
After the alcohol tasked us,
A number of anonyms asked us
About certain powers
So much higher than ours -
There were some who suggested “Damascus!”
Chilo chooses to end the book on (or runs out of ink at) an optimistic and possibly delusional note:
I’ll be soberly full of surprises.
My steps’ll be all different sizes:
Some incredibly small,
Almost no steps at all,
And others so huge they’ll win prizes.
Few poets are as capable as Cal Chilo in testing Somerset Maugham’s belief that “the mere habit of notebook keeping might make the writer more observant.” Better suited to flipping around in rather than straight reading, perhaps, this is an essential book for the seriously demented poetry lover, who will find it a trove of Chilo’s famously earthy and yet deceptively non-existent wisdom.
Kafka's Monster, and Mine
In 1922, Kafka turned down an invitation from his friend Oskar Baum to spend his holidays with him, and used the occasion to write to Max Brod:
“It is a fear of change, a fear of attracting the attention of the gods by what is a major act for a person of my sort.
“Last night, as I lay sleepless and let everything veer back and forth between my aching temples, what I had almost forgotten … became clear to me: namely, on what frail ground or rather altogether nonexistent ground I live, over a darkness from which the dark power emerges when it wills and heedless of my stammering destroys my life. Writing sustains me, but is it not more accurate to say that it sustains this kind of life? But I don’t mean, of course, that my life is better when I don’t write. Rather it is much worse then and wholly unbearable and has to end in madness. But that, granted, only follows from the postulate that I am a writer, which is actually true even when I am not writing, and a non-writing writer is a monster inviting madness.”
What would that make the drinker who is not drinking?
“It is a fear of change, a fear of attracting the attention of the gods by what is a major act for a person of my sort.
“Last night, as I lay sleepless and let everything veer back and forth between my aching temples, what I had almost forgotten … became clear to me: namely, on what frail ground or rather altogether nonexistent ground I live, over a darkness from which the dark power emerges when it wills and heedless of my stammering destroys my life. Writing sustains me, but is it not more accurate to say that it sustains this kind of life? But I don’t mean, of course, that my life is better when I don’t write. Rather it is much worse then and wholly unbearable and has to end in madness. But that, granted, only follows from the postulate that I am a writer, which is actually true even when I am not writing, and a non-writing writer is a monster inviting madness.”
What would that make the drinker who is not drinking?
Say What You Like
Say what you like about alcoholism, but the poster in Starbucks (on the toilet wall, no less) – “Behind every good cup of coffee there is a barista and a good story” – makes no sense at all, unless they’re talking about Guinness and bartenders.
Say what you like, but life is not acted out, doesn’t raise its voice or spill over with coffee – it barely even clears its throat, and keeps itself to itself. And baristas, for the most part, are somewhat lacking in free indirect style.
Say what you like, but life is not acted out, doesn’t raise its voice or spill over with coffee – it barely even clears its throat, and keeps itself to itself. And baristas, for the most part, are somewhat lacking in free indirect style.
Monday, April 26, 2010
Between Elephant Traps
Drinking, or alcoholic drinking, is hard work. It takes real dedication. Carver was the first I heard say it, and it was intriguing, since, if I had thought about it all, I might have concluded that nothing was lazier than drinking, and wouldn’t have imagined anything hard in laziness.
Now, up close, I hear many people say it. Sometimes it’s about hiding bottles, lying to spouses, playing shell games with colleagues, the downstream slide home from the bar, or the upstream walk to the liquor store. Other times, it might be about responsibilities silting up while a drinker is otherwise occupied.
Either way, “Drinking is hard work” is met with subtle nods of acknowledgment. It’s like a line of poetry everyone knows. The thing is, though, so is “Nothing is easier than drinking.”
Not drinking has the same resistance to measure. I’ve never heard an alcoholic say it was actually easy. Some people do say that they are “recovered.” They are no doubt lucky to feel that way. But I have no idea what it means. Alcoholism might well be a disease, but it’s not chicken pox.
(The literature does speak of recovery, of course: even those who suffer from grave emotional and mental disorders, if they have the capacity to be honest, are advised that they can recover. But it’s still not chicken pox.)
I couldn’t say whether I find not drinking easy or hard. I dread the double-shift work of “not drinking,” the obsession of it, “not drinking” as a condition. That feels like an elephant trap. On the other hand, simply pouring energy into other obsessions, spending no time at all with the thought of not drinking, feels like the trap for a larger elephant.
“Be drunk,” says Baudelaire.
You have to be always drunk. That's all there is to it—it's the only way. So as not to feel the horrible burden of time that breaks your back and bends you to the earth, you have to be continually drunk.
But on what? Wine, poetry or virtue, as you wish. But be drunk.
And if sometimes, on the steps of a palace or the green grass of a ditch, in the mournful solitude of your room, you wake again, drunkenness already diminishing or gone, ask the wind, the wave, the star, the bird, the clock, everything that is flying, everything that is groaning, everything that is rolling, everything that is singing, everything that is speaking. . .ask what time it is and wind, wave, star, bird, clock will answer you: "It is time to be drunk! So as not to be the martyred slaves of time, be drunk, be continually drunk! On wine, on poetry or on virtue as you wish."
Yeah. Right. And what happens when you run out of virtue and poetry?
Now, up close, I hear many people say it. Sometimes it’s about hiding bottles, lying to spouses, playing shell games with colleagues, the downstream slide home from the bar, or the upstream walk to the liquor store. Other times, it might be about responsibilities silting up while a drinker is otherwise occupied.
Either way, “Drinking is hard work” is met with subtle nods of acknowledgment. It’s like a line of poetry everyone knows. The thing is, though, so is “Nothing is easier than drinking.”
Not drinking has the same resistance to measure. I’ve never heard an alcoholic say it was actually easy. Some people do say that they are “recovered.” They are no doubt lucky to feel that way. But I have no idea what it means. Alcoholism might well be a disease, but it’s not chicken pox.
(The literature does speak of recovery, of course: even those who suffer from grave emotional and mental disorders, if they have the capacity to be honest, are advised that they can recover. But it’s still not chicken pox.)
I couldn’t say whether I find not drinking easy or hard. I dread the double-shift work of “not drinking,” the obsession of it, “not drinking” as a condition. That feels like an elephant trap. On the other hand, simply pouring energy into other obsessions, spending no time at all with the thought of not drinking, feels like the trap for a larger elephant.
“Be drunk,” says Baudelaire.
You have to be always drunk. That's all there is to it—it's the only way. So as not to feel the horrible burden of time that breaks your back and bends you to the earth, you have to be continually drunk.
But on what? Wine, poetry or virtue, as you wish. But be drunk.
And if sometimes, on the steps of a palace or the green grass of a ditch, in the mournful solitude of your room, you wake again, drunkenness already diminishing or gone, ask the wind, the wave, the star, the bird, the clock, everything that is flying, everything that is groaning, everything that is rolling, everything that is singing, everything that is speaking. . .ask what time it is and wind, wave, star, bird, clock will answer you: "It is time to be drunk! So as not to be the martyred slaves of time, be drunk, be continually drunk! On wine, on poetry or on virtue as you wish."
Yeah. Right. And what happens when you run out of virtue and poetry?
A Sort of Insanity
In the first chapter of Demian, Emil Sinclair describes two worlds of his youth. In the first “were straight lines and paths that led into the future … duty and guilt, evil conscience and confession, pardon and good resolution, love and adoration … To this world our future had to belong; it had to be crystal clear, beautiful and well-ordered.” In the other there were “ghost stories and the breath of scandal … a gaily colored flood of monstrous, tempting, terrible enigmatical goings-on, the slaughter-house and prison, drunken men and scolding women … tales of burglaries, murders, suicides …” Emil finds it wonderful that there is one world of “peace, order and repose” and no less wonderful “that there were other things … sinister and violent ...” The rub is that soon the youth can’t keep the worlds apart, and as he succumbs to theft in one and deception in the other, he notes:
“My life at that time was a sort of insanity. I was shy, and lived in torment like a ghost in the midst of the well-ordered peace of our house.”
“My life at that time was a sort of insanity. I was shy, and lived in torment like a ghost in the midst of the well-ordered peace of our house.”
Dead Souls
Nabokov says of Gogol:
“The peripheral characters of his novel are engendered by the subordinate clauses of its various metaphors, comparisons and lyrical outbursts. We are faced by the remarkable phenomenon of mere forms of speech directly giving rise to live creatures."
'A drowning man, it is said, will catch at the smallest chip of wood because at the moment he has not the presence of mind to reflect that hardly even a fly could hope to ride astride that chip, whereas he weighs almost a hundred and fifty pounds if not a good two hundred.'
“Who is that unfortunate bather, steadily and uncannily growing, fattening himself on the marrow of a metaphor? We shall never know – but he almost managed to gain a footing.”
Gogol had the Russian panorama to paint – following Chichikov on his mysterious journey (an awesome premise) to buy up all the “dead souls” he can find – and so moved on.
I stood at a bar day after day and let one subordinate clause after another outgrow the metaphor and wreck the narrative, which begs two questions: were the subordinate clauses, one after another, cumulative only like so many fireworks, all there was of metaphor?; and what the hell was that story, anyway?
“The peripheral characters of his novel are engendered by the subordinate clauses of its various metaphors, comparisons and lyrical outbursts. We are faced by the remarkable phenomenon of mere forms of speech directly giving rise to live creatures."
'A drowning man, it is said, will catch at the smallest chip of wood because at the moment he has not the presence of mind to reflect that hardly even a fly could hope to ride astride that chip, whereas he weighs almost a hundred and fifty pounds if not a good two hundred.'
“Who is that unfortunate bather, steadily and uncannily growing, fattening himself on the marrow of a metaphor? We shall never know – but he almost managed to gain a footing.”
Gogol had the Russian panorama to paint – following Chichikov on his mysterious journey (an awesome premise) to buy up all the “dead souls” he can find – and so moved on.
I stood at a bar day after day and let one subordinate clause after another outgrow the metaphor and wreck the narrative, which begs two questions: were the subordinate clauses, one after another, cumulative only like so many fireworks, all there was of metaphor?; and what the hell was that story, anyway?
The Absurd Hero
Sisyphus is more than a name in The Iliad, but not much more – “There is a city Ephyre in the heart of Argos, pasture land of horses, and there dwelt Sisyphus that was craftiest of men …” And that’s about it. In The Odyssey, he fares a little better, occupying several lines of verse, just enough for Odysseus to witness his torment in the Land of the Dead. Along with Tityos and Tantalus, who were also tormented in Hades for their faults, he is an early exemplar of the soon-to-be-popular proposition that everyone might suffer in the afterlife for his or her sins. (So why wait?). Tityos, Homer tells us, had raped Zeus’s mistress, Lētṓ, but Sisyphus and Tantalus are punished without word of their wrongs.
Camus picks up on the “humanity” of Sisyphus, borrowing from “other traditions” the description of Sisyphus’ return from Hades to chastise his wife for obeying his instructions, so contrary to human love, in casting his body into the middle of the public square, as well as the small matter of his refusal to go back to Hades once he had enjoyed water and sun, warm stones and the sea. But it is his unspeakable punishment, “in which the whole being is exerted towards accomplishing nothing,” which makes him – “you will have already grasped,” Camus says generously – “the absurd hero.”
In The Myth of Sisyphus Camus asks how a life that has no meaning can best be lived, and considers the possibility of suicide – the “one truly serious philosophical problem” – in the context of “an absurd sensitivity” with its infirmity, ignorance, irrationality, nostalgia, and conflation of truth and falsehood. Reason is not much help here, and religion is worse than useless, but not to worry: suicide is an act of bad faith, an attempt to simply a problem by avoiding it, and “even within the limits of nihilism it is possible to find the means to proceed beyond nihilism.” And thank goodness for that.
Camus concludes his essay with the bold metaphor of Sisyphus, the absurd hero who has won himself an appalling penalty. It is tempting to say that Camus begins to craft the metaphor as follows: “The Gods had condemned Sisyphus to ceaseless alcoholism.” But, given that his hero comprehends his fate – “If the myth is tragic, that is because its hero is conscious” – perhaps it would better begin, “The Gods had condemned Sisyphus to ceaseless sobriety.”
Camus picks up on the “humanity” of Sisyphus, borrowing from “other traditions” the description of Sisyphus’ return from Hades to chastise his wife for obeying his instructions, so contrary to human love, in casting his body into the middle of the public square, as well as the small matter of his refusal to go back to Hades once he had enjoyed water and sun, warm stones and the sea. But it is his unspeakable punishment, “in which the whole being is exerted towards accomplishing nothing,” which makes him – “you will have already grasped,” Camus says generously – “the absurd hero.”
In The Myth of Sisyphus Camus asks how a life that has no meaning can best be lived, and considers the possibility of suicide – the “one truly serious philosophical problem” – in the context of “an absurd sensitivity” with its infirmity, ignorance, irrationality, nostalgia, and conflation of truth and falsehood. Reason is not much help here, and religion is worse than useless, but not to worry: suicide is an act of bad faith, an attempt to simply a problem by avoiding it, and “even within the limits of nihilism it is possible to find the means to proceed beyond nihilism.” And thank goodness for that.
Camus concludes his essay with the bold metaphor of Sisyphus, the absurd hero who has won himself an appalling penalty. It is tempting to say that Camus begins to craft the metaphor as follows: “The Gods had condemned Sisyphus to ceaseless alcoholism.” But, given that his hero comprehends his fate – “If the myth is tragic, that is because its hero is conscious” – perhaps it would better begin, “The Gods had condemned Sisyphus to ceaseless sobriety.”
Death and Taxes, 2010
Benjamin Franklin was speaking of the United States Constitution and its promise of permanency when he added that “in this world nothing can be said to be certain, except death and taxes.” The alcoholic has additional certainty on both accounts.
Taxes conjured up by the sober souls at the Alcohol and Tobacco Tax and Trade Bureau are fixed dollar amounts per unit of beverage. Beer is taxed at $18 a barrel (31 gallons) or $0.05 per 12 ounce can. Taxes on wine depend on alcohol content, ranging from $1.07 per wine gallon ($0.21 per 750 ml bottle) for wine with 14% alcohol or less to $3.15 per gallon (0.62 per bottle) for wine with up to 24% alcohol. The scale for distilled spirits slides according to percentage proof: 100 proof liquor (50% alcohol) is taxed at $13.50 per proof gallon and this tax is adjusted, depending on the percentage of alcohol in the product.
In addition, there is the state sales tax which, as of February 1, 2010, depending on where you happen to be, might be zero (Alaska, Montana, New Hampshire, and Oregon), 8.25% (California), or something in between (everywhere else). And then there are the specific state taxes on spirits, table wine, and beer. The only real common denominator here is that all states tax by the gallon.
If you only drank on credit cards, or in the highly improbable event that you have perfect recall, you can work out quite easily the additional sums you reserved for alcohol. At the national level, alcohol taxes accounted for 0.5 percent of federal revenues, down from over 5 percent in 1950, so even the heaviest drinkers might be surprised to find that it’s a relatively small part of the account, although the account itself, for some, might as well be the size of the federal budget.
That tab aside, and certainty applying to the darker part of Franklin’s formulation, how much has been paid towards that other inevitable levy?
Taxes conjured up by the sober souls at the Alcohol and Tobacco Tax and Trade Bureau are fixed dollar amounts per unit of beverage. Beer is taxed at $18 a barrel (31 gallons) or $0.05 per 12 ounce can. Taxes on wine depend on alcohol content, ranging from $1.07 per wine gallon ($0.21 per 750 ml bottle) for wine with 14% alcohol or less to $3.15 per gallon (0.62 per bottle) for wine with up to 24% alcohol. The scale for distilled spirits slides according to percentage proof: 100 proof liquor (50% alcohol) is taxed at $13.50 per proof gallon and this tax is adjusted, depending on the percentage of alcohol in the product.
In addition, there is the state sales tax which, as of February 1, 2010, depending on where you happen to be, might be zero (Alaska, Montana, New Hampshire, and Oregon), 8.25% (California), or something in between (everywhere else). And then there are the specific state taxes on spirits, table wine, and beer. The only real common denominator here is that all states tax by the gallon.
If you only drank on credit cards, or in the highly improbable event that you have perfect recall, you can work out quite easily the additional sums you reserved for alcohol. At the national level, alcohol taxes accounted for 0.5 percent of federal revenues, down from over 5 percent in 1950, so even the heaviest drinkers might be surprised to find that it’s a relatively small part of the account, although the account itself, for some, might as well be the size of the federal budget.
That tab aside, and certainty applying to the darker part of Franklin’s formulation, how much has been paid towards that other inevitable levy?
L’esprit de l’escalier
Borges, discussing translations of The Thousand and One Nights, prefers the Spanish adjective milyunanochesco to milyunaochero (“too Argentine”) and milyunanocturno (“overly variant”). It’s more than tempting to imagine that Borges made up all three in order to prefer one over the others. In any case, when someone asked me about the years I had spent between one meeting and another, that liquid phase between first thinking I might want to stop drinking and knowing I had to, I wish I’d had milyunanochesco – “thousand-and-one-nights-esque” – on hand.
Tuesday, April 20, 2010
Long With This Whistle
In 1897 (Burns and His Times), J.O. Mitchell, LL.D., wisely noted, “I cannot recall any allusion by Burns to water as a drink …” Milk is mentioned only in connection with porridge, tea as a cause of war, a source of taxation, and as a beverage for “leddies.” Coffee and chocolate were around but not common enough to merit a poet’s attention. “Of strong drink,” however, “we have more than enough.”
Port receives modest attention, and brandy (which “Twins monie a poor, doylt, drucken hash/O’ half his days”) does not stand the patriotism test, as the drinking of it sends “auld Scotland’s cash” to its worst enemies. Claret features as the weapon of choice in the battle for ‘The Whistle,’ a real-life bacchanalian contest between Captain Riddle, Sir Robert Lawrie of Maxweltown, and Mr. Ferguson of Craigdarroch for possession of an ebony whistle brought to Scotland from Denmark specifically, it seems, as a trophy for drinking bouts, and blown by Norwegians until finally the match was met:
Till Robert, the Lord of the Cairn and the Scaur,
Unmatch'd at the bottle, unconquer'd in war,
He drank his poor godship as deep as the sea,
No tide of the Baltic e'er drunker than he.
“Six bottles a-piece had well wore out the night” before the drinking got competitive, but claret – like port and brandy – is an exception to the general rule that drink is beer or whisky.
An interesting observation by Mitchell on whisky, however, was that, a century before he was writing, it was not yet “fully naturalized” in the parts of the country in which it took strong root: “The poisonous exotic came down on us from the Highlands – the cruel avenger of the wrongs of the Celt.” In Burns, therefore, it appears as “a Highland gill,” “Usquebae,” “Ferintosh,” or “that dear Kilbagie.” And it was in beer – the “penny wheep,” the “tippeny,” the “nappy,” the “yill,” the “reaming swatsh” – that comradely pledges were made:
An’ surely ye’ll be your pint stowp,
An’ surely I’ll be mine.
“Burns represents alcohol as the great resource in sorrow, and, indeed, at all times and on all occasions, sorrowful or joyous, at kirk or at market, among all sorts and conditions of men, rich or poor, lay or clerical, in moderation or not - mostly not.”
From his late-nineteenth-century vantage, and his reading of Burns, Mitchell reasons that, while “the general abuse of strong drink” was not any worse a century before, it is nevertheless clear “that drunkenness was rife then where it would not now be tolerated.” He is talking about the drinking bouts among the gentry, for ebony whistles and such, for which a man of “rank” “who should join such an orgie … would [by Mitchell’s pleasant time] be expelled from society.” With Burns boasting of having been “bitch fou’ ‘mang godly priests,” he is also talking about the alcoholic habits of the ministers of religion, and the example set to the likes of Tam O’ Shanter, who “at the Lord’s house, e’en on Sunday/ … drank wi’ Kirkton Jean till Monday.”
“Our lairds took to drinking last century,” Mitchell continues, “because the rise in rents found them with no better way of spending their money than on the pleasures of the table.” By 1837, better pleasures, apparently, had appeared. Mitchell cites with great approval the facts of “the most notable political demonstration ever held in Scotland” in January of that year: “though port and sherry wines were served out without limit from 1,217 cut-glass decanters, yet no more than two or three out of the 3,293 noblemen and gentlemen were tipsy, and these two or three were got quietly away.” The pleasures of the working classes would parallel this development: “With the growth of higher tastes their drinking is on the wane, and it will die out in the one class as it has died out in the other.”
Mitchell is an admirable opponent of imposing higher tastes, or at least removing lower ones, by the tyrannical route: “Coercion to save grown men from making fools of themselves, or from reaping the fruits of their folly … often fails of its immediate end, and it never fails to curtail harmless liberty, and to weaken the selfreliance which has been the making of us.” But he’s not much of a prophet. Burns was far nearer the mark:
I sing of a whistle, a whistle of worth,
I sing of a whistle, the pride of the North,
Was brought to the court of our good Scottish king,
And long with this whistle all Scotland shall ring.
Port receives modest attention, and brandy (which “Twins monie a poor, doylt, drucken hash/O’ half his days”) does not stand the patriotism test, as the drinking of it sends “auld Scotland’s cash” to its worst enemies. Claret features as the weapon of choice in the battle for ‘The Whistle,’ a real-life bacchanalian contest between Captain Riddle, Sir Robert Lawrie of Maxweltown, and Mr. Ferguson of Craigdarroch for possession of an ebony whistle brought to Scotland from Denmark specifically, it seems, as a trophy for drinking bouts, and blown by Norwegians until finally the match was met:
Till Robert, the Lord of the Cairn and the Scaur,
Unmatch'd at the bottle, unconquer'd in war,
He drank his poor godship as deep as the sea,
No tide of the Baltic e'er drunker than he.
“Six bottles a-piece had well wore out the night” before the drinking got competitive, but claret – like port and brandy – is an exception to the general rule that drink is beer or whisky.
An interesting observation by Mitchell on whisky, however, was that, a century before he was writing, it was not yet “fully naturalized” in the parts of the country in which it took strong root: “The poisonous exotic came down on us from the Highlands – the cruel avenger of the wrongs of the Celt.” In Burns, therefore, it appears as “a Highland gill,” “Usquebae,” “Ferintosh,” or “that dear Kilbagie.” And it was in beer – the “penny wheep,” the “tippeny,” the “nappy,” the “yill,” the “reaming swatsh” – that comradely pledges were made:
An’ surely ye’ll be your pint stowp,
An’ surely I’ll be mine.
“Burns represents alcohol as the great resource in sorrow, and, indeed, at all times and on all occasions, sorrowful or joyous, at kirk or at market, among all sorts and conditions of men, rich or poor, lay or clerical, in moderation or not - mostly not.”
From his late-nineteenth-century vantage, and his reading of Burns, Mitchell reasons that, while “the general abuse of strong drink” was not any worse a century before, it is nevertheless clear “that drunkenness was rife then where it would not now be tolerated.” He is talking about the drinking bouts among the gentry, for ebony whistles and such, for which a man of “rank” “who should join such an orgie … would [by Mitchell’s pleasant time] be expelled from society.” With Burns boasting of having been “bitch fou’ ‘mang godly priests,” he is also talking about the alcoholic habits of the ministers of religion, and the example set to the likes of Tam O’ Shanter, who “at the Lord’s house, e’en on Sunday/ … drank wi’ Kirkton Jean till Monday.”
“Our lairds took to drinking last century,” Mitchell continues, “because the rise in rents found them with no better way of spending their money than on the pleasures of the table.” By 1837, better pleasures, apparently, had appeared. Mitchell cites with great approval the facts of “the most notable political demonstration ever held in Scotland” in January of that year: “though port and sherry wines were served out without limit from 1,217 cut-glass decanters, yet no more than two or three out of the 3,293 noblemen and gentlemen were tipsy, and these two or three were got quietly away.” The pleasures of the working classes would parallel this development: “With the growth of higher tastes their drinking is on the wane, and it will die out in the one class as it has died out in the other.”
Mitchell is an admirable opponent of imposing higher tastes, or at least removing lower ones, by the tyrannical route: “Coercion to save grown men from making fools of themselves, or from reaping the fruits of their folly … often fails of its immediate end, and it never fails to curtail harmless liberty, and to weaken the selfreliance which has been the making of us.” But he’s not much of a prophet. Burns was far nearer the mark:
I sing of a whistle, a whistle of worth,
I sing of a whistle, the pride of the North,
Was brought to the court of our good Scottish king,
And long with this whistle all Scotland shall ring.
Step The First
This loss that you might beggingly contest
Is all too deeply known by its rewards
For you to right or be the beggar less,
No matter what you fight to find in words.
Sam Capodini
Is all too deeply known by its rewards
For you to right or be the beggar less,
No matter what you fight to find in words.
Sam Capodini
Monday, April 19, 2010
Rat-Catching
Among the myriad delights of Robert Sullivan’s Rats is the following piece of wisdom imparted by George Ladd, proprietor of the Bonzai de Bug company, and rat-catcher extraordinaire:
“They had a rat in a fancy-ass building on the Upper West Side, and we couldn’t even think about traps or bait or anything. We had to get ’em, period. So I went to the store and I bought Hershey’s bars, nuts - they love nuts - anchovies, beer. They drink beer and they like it, but they drink a lot and then they can’t throw up.” Deploying his materials in the fancy-ass building, George caught the rat on the first night.
A study in 2002 at the Department of Psychology at the University of Sidney, published in the Journal of Psychopharmacology, tested the consequences of beer consumption in rats, and reported “acute anxiolytic and ataxic effects and withdrawal-induced anxiety.” Specific findings included:
“Rats drinking 4.5% beer approached a predatory cue significantly more than those given near-beer, indicating an anxiolytic effect. In experiment 2, rats drinking 4.5% beer displayed less anxiety-like behaviour in the elevated plus maze and emergence tests but not in the social interaction test. Rats given 4.5% beer fell off the rotarod significantly faster than rats given near-beer, indicating an ataxic effect. Rats previously given 4.5% beer drank significantly less near-beer the following day, suggesting a moderate aversion the day after beer consumption. In experiment 3, rats denied access to 4.5% beer showed significantly less social interaction and took longer to emerge into an open field than controls.”
The results proved for the first time that rats “will consume beer at levels that produce clear effects on anxiety and on motor-co-ordination.” George Ladd may have known this from experience, but in addition to any anxiety paralysis or the rat’s inability to scuttle and chew gum at the same time, the success of the Bonzai de Bug plan also depended on a large wooden board covered with glue.
“They had a rat in a fancy-ass building on the Upper West Side, and we couldn’t even think about traps or bait or anything. We had to get ’em, period. So I went to the store and I bought Hershey’s bars, nuts - they love nuts - anchovies, beer. They drink beer and they like it, but they drink a lot and then they can’t throw up.” Deploying his materials in the fancy-ass building, George caught the rat on the first night.
A study in 2002 at the Department of Psychology at the University of Sidney, published in the Journal of Psychopharmacology, tested the consequences of beer consumption in rats, and reported “acute anxiolytic and ataxic effects and withdrawal-induced anxiety.” Specific findings included:
“Rats drinking 4.5% beer approached a predatory cue significantly more than those given near-beer, indicating an anxiolytic effect. In experiment 2, rats drinking 4.5% beer displayed less anxiety-like behaviour in the elevated plus maze and emergence tests but not in the social interaction test. Rats given 4.5% beer fell off the rotarod significantly faster than rats given near-beer, indicating an ataxic effect. Rats previously given 4.5% beer drank significantly less near-beer the following day, suggesting a moderate aversion the day after beer consumption. In experiment 3, rats denied access to 4.5% beer showed significantly less social interaction and took longer to emerge into an open field than controls.”
The results proved for the first time that rats “will consume beer at levels that produce clear effects on anxiety and on motor-co-ordination.” George Ladd may have known this from experience, but in addition to any anxiety paralysis or the rat’s inability to scuttle and chew gum at the same time, the success of the Bonzai de Bug plan also depended on a large wooden board covered with glue.
Not The Same Man At All
The Philip Marlowe perspective:
"If the rules mean anything at all anymore, they mean you don’t pick a roomful of people as the spot to threaten a man and hit him across the face with a glove when your wife is standing right beside you and you are practically accusing her of a little double time. For a man still shaky from a hard bout with the hard stuff Wade had done all right. He had done more than all right. Of course I hadn’t seen him drunk. I didn’t know what he would be like drunk. I didn’t even know that he was an alcoholic. There’s a big difference. A man who drinks too much on occasion is still the same man as he was sober. An alcoholic, a real alcoholic, is not the same man at all. You can’t predict anything about him for sure except that he will be someone you never met before."
Chandler, The Long Goodbye
"If the rules mean anything at all anymore, they mean you don’t pick a roomful of people as the spot to threaten a man and hit him across the face with a glove when your wife is standing right beside you and you are practically accusing her of a little double time. For a man still shaky from a hard bout with the hard stuff Wade had done all right. He had done more than all right. Of course I hadn’t seen him drunk. I didn’t know what he would be like drunk. I didn’t even know that he was an alcoholic. There’s a big difference. A man who drinks too much on occasion is still the same man as he was sober. An alcoholic, a real alcoholic, is not the same man at all. You can’t predict anything about him for sure except that he will be someone you never met before."
Chandler, The Long Goodbye
Monday, April 12, 2010
After Kafka
Fellowship
We are twelve friends. One day we came out of a house one after the other: first one came and placed himself beside the gate, then the second came, or rather he glided through the gate like a little ball of quicksilver, then came the third, then the fourth, and so on. Finally we all stood in a row. People began to notice us, they pointed us out and said: Those twelve just came out of that house. Since then we have been living together; it would be a peaceful life if it weren’t for a thirteenth one continually trying to interfere. He doesn’t do us any harm, but he annoys us, and that is harm enough; why does he intrude where he is not wanted? We don’t know him and don’t want him to join us. There was a time, of course, when the twelve of us did not know one another, either; and it could be said that we still don’t know one another, but what is possible and can be tolerated by the twelve of us is not possible and cannot be tolerated with this thirteenth one. In any case, we are twelve and do not want to be thirteen. And what is the point of this continual being together anyhow? It is also pointless for the twelve of us, but here we are together and will remain together; a new combination, however, we do not want, just because of our experiences. But how is one to make all this clear to the thirteenth one? Long explanations would almost amount to accepting him in our circle, so we prefer not to explain and not to accept him. No matter how he pouts his lips we push him away with our elbows, but however much we push him away, back he comes.
We are twelve friends. One day we came out of a house one after the other: first one came and placed himself beside the gate, then the second came, or rather he glided through the gate like a little ball of quicksilver, then came the third, then the fourth, and so on. Finally we all stood in a row. People began to notice us, they pointed us out and said: Those twelve just came out of that house. Since then we have been living together; it would be a peaceful life if it weren’t for a thirteenth one continually trying to interfere. He doesn’t do us any harm, but he annoys us, and that is harm enough; why does he intrude where he is not wanted? We don’t know him and don’t want him to join us. There was a time, of course, when the twelve of us did not know one another, either; and it could be said that we still don’t know one another, but what is possible and can be tolerated by the twelve of us is not possible and cannot be tolerated with this thirteenth one. In any case, we are twelve and do not want to be thirteen. And what is the point of this continual being together anyhow? It is also pointless for the twelve of us, but here we are together and will remain together; a new combination, however, we do not want, just because of our experiences. But how is one to make all this clear to the thirteenth one? Long explanations would almost amount to accepting him in our circle, so we prefer not to explain and not to accept him. No matter how he pouts his lips we push him away with our elbows, but however much we push him away, back he comes.
Thursday, April 8, 2010
The Heirs of Anacreon
Henri Estienne, Parisian printer and classical scholar, published the Anacreontea in 1554, believing himself to be recovering a lost poet, Anacreon, long considered doomed to hearsay and a few fragments. In fact, Anacreon remains doomed to hearsay and a few fragments, and some of the poems in the Anacreontea were likely written as late as the eight or ninth century CE. The earliest poems in the collection, however, could possibly be assigned to as early as the third century BCE (still three hundred years after Anacreon wrote). These were no mere forgeries: Anacreon had been venerated by Horace, and the Anacreontea proved that he had many imitators. Not quite the simple “drinking songs” they are often claimed to be, they are, nevertheless, songs, and the recurrent themes include the joys of love and wine:
Fruitful earth drinks up the rain;
Trees from earth drink that again;
The sea drinks the air, the sun
Drinks the sea, and him the moon
Is it reason then, d’ye think
I should thirst when all else drink?
Anacreon lives on in the style of verse – Anacreontics (the seven-syllable line)– that bears his name. He lived on for a while, too, in The Anacreontic Society, a social club of "Peers, Commoners, Aldermen, Gentlemen, Proctors, Actors, and Polite Tradesmen" dedicated to “mirth and music, wit and wine.” The members of the club would call up the poet as their presiding figure pledging themselves as ‘Sons of Anacreon’ with a group recitation of The Anacreontic Song. The music for the song was written by John Stafford Smith, a society member, who also wrote the music to which The Star-Spangled Banner was set. In fact, it was the same music. Thus the tune that accompanies “O! say, does that star-spangled banner yet wave/O’er the land of the free and the home of the brave?” originally accompanied:
And long may the sons of Anacreon intwine
The myrtle of Venus with Bacchus' vine
This doesn’t prove anything, of course – but it’s something to take to the ball game.
Fruitful earth drinks up the rain;
Trees from earth drink that again;
The sea drinks the air, the sun
Drinks the sea, and him the moon
Is it reason then, d’ye think
I should thirst when all else drink?
Anacreon lives on in the style of verse – Anacreontics (the seven-syllable line)– that bears his name. He lived on for a while, too, in The Anacreontic Society, a social club of "Peers, Commoners, Aldermen, Gentlemen, Proctors, Actors, and Polite Tradesmen" dedicated to “mirth and music, wit and wine.” The members of the club would call up the poet as their presiding figure pledging themselves as ‘Sons of Anacreon’ with a group recitation of The Anacreontic Song. The music for the song was written by John Stafford Smith, a society member, who also wrote the music to which The Star-Spangled Banner was set. In fact, it was the same music. Thus the tune that accompanies “O! say, does that star-spangled banner yet wave/O’er the land of the free and the home of the brave?” originally accompanied:
And long may the sons of Anacreon intwine
The myrtle of Venus with Bacchus' vine
This doesn’t prove anything, of course – but it’s something to take to the ball game.
One of Three
Henry Nelson Coleridge thought highly enough of Samuel Taylor Coleridge to write down just about every word the latter said to him (Table Talk). Henry Nelson may have had a lot to thank the other Coleridge for – he was his nephew, his first and frequent editor, and married to his daughter – but he appears to have found nothing that was said unworthy of notation. Samuel Taylor Coleridge was wise in many matters, but pontificated on everything. Maybe he felt he had to, since his nephew was following him around with pen and paper.
September 2, 1833, is a typical evening at the table, and this, on Greek particles, is a typical example of the talk: “It is worth particular notice how the style of Greek oratory, so full, in the times of political independence, of connective particles, some of passion, some of sensation only, and escaping the classification of mere grammatical logic, became, in the hands of the declaimers and philosophers of the Alexandrian era, and still later, entirely deprived of this peculiarity.” Also pronounced upon this long September night are Propertius (“I cannot quite understand the grounds of the high admiration …”); Tibullus (“ … is rather insipid to me”); Lucan (“I think Satius a truer poet than Lucan, though he is very extravagant sometimes); Silias Italicus (“I am ashamed to say I have never read …”); and the Characteristic Temperament of Nations:
“The English affect stimulant nourishment – beef and beer. The French, excitants, irritants – nitrous oxide, alcohol, champagne. The Austrians, sedatives – hyoscyamus. The Russians, narcotics – opium, tobacco, and beng.”
This is strongly opinionated learning you might want to leaf through in the corner chair, but, as table talk, it’s insufferable. For God’s sake, Samuel, pass the stimulant nourishment!
Coleridge’s preferred “stimulant nourishment” - there’s no other mention of beer or beef in Table Talk - was laudanum, an opium-alcohol tincture. He wasn’t alone in the preference: Thomas de Quincey had written the book on it (Confessions of an English Opium Eater); Keats, Byron, and Shelley (“I never part from this”) merely begin a long list of other poets with the inclination; and laudanum use was common enough among the laboring poor to be considered a working class habit. (Its medicinal properties exempted it from taxes imposed on alcohol, and this, along with the happy expansion of the British Empire into India, made it cheap - cheaper, in fact, than gin).
Kubla Khan was allegedly written as Coleridge woke from a laudanum-induced dream, and, famously, it remained “a fragment” as the writing was interrupted by a “Person of Porlock,” most likely Coleridge’s doctor, delivering more laudanum. For The Rime of the Ancient Mariner, he went through four pints a week.
“There was a ship,” quoth he, and off the Ancient Mariner goes, holding the Wedding Guest from his purpose by means of a story which he “cannot choose but hear.” The Wedding Guest, caught by the Mariner’s glittering eye, is impatient, bemused, frightened, then terrified of the tale told by the “plagued” old man who shot the albatross and, for his sins, had it hung around his neck.
Wordsworth, after the poem had been poorly received, gloated: over the author’s objections, he was happy to support re-publication, but happier still to note its “great defects,” chief among them “that the principal person has no distinct character, either in his profession of Mariner, or as a human being who having been long under the control of supernatural impressions might be supposed himself to partake of something supernatural …” He also didn’t like the fact that the Mariner “does not act, but is continually acted upon,” the arbitrary nature of the events in the poem, and the “laboriously accumulated” imagery. (“On the other hand, Samuel, I like your use of the word “quoth” and thought the title particularly strong.”)
Charles Lamb was more generous, and addressed the following rebuke to Wordsworth: “For me I was never so affected with any human tale ... I totally differ from your idea that the Mariner should have had a character and a profession … [He] undergoes such trials as overwhelm and bury all individuality or memory of what he was— like the state of a man in a bad dream, one terrible peculiarity of which is, that all consciousness of personality is gone.”
This sounds like an opportune vehicle for a metaphor on alcoholism: “such trials as overwhelm and bury all individuality or memory …” But that wasn’t my drunk. The Mariner might not act so much as be acted upon, but he did at least get to shoot an albatross and carry it around his neck; he witnessed Death and Nightmare Life-In-Death (“Who thicks man’s blood with cold”) casting dice for the souls of his shipmates; and even when his ship was held “[a]s idle as a painted ship/Upon a painted ocean,” the Mariner stood, in fact, on a real ship in a real ocean. My drunk was more the painted boat and water.
There’s a metaphor here, nevertheless. It’s right there at the beginning:
It is an ancient Mariner,
And he stoppeth one of three.
`By thy long grey beard and glittering eye,
Now wherefore stopp'st thou me?’
It is curious that Wordsworth and Lamb are both only concerned with the character of the Mariner, at least in this regard: whenever I have heard the Ancient Mariner used metaphorically, it is the perspective of the Wedding-Guest, the man detained from his purpose, which has been invoked. Of the bore, the pontificator, anyone or anything that slowed or obstructed your way to somewhere else, you might say it was Ancient Mariner time. It was the amusement, the inconvenience, the horror, or the absurdity of being waylaid. And drinking did have that characteristic. The plan was to go somewhere else. I got held up.
Of the Wedding-Guest (me, you, the reader), the critics have nothing to say, although, at the end, it is he who is the "sadder and wiser man." The Mariner even offers a reason why this Wedding Guest was stopped while the other two passed on to the festivities:
I pass, like night, from land to land;
I have strange power of speech;
That moment that his face I see,
I know the man that must hear me:
To him my tale I teach.
The moment that my face he saw. Straight away, perhaps, I showed my appetites. I had the face for it.
September 2, 1833, is a typical evening at the table, and this, on Greek particles, is a typical example of the talk: “It is worth particular notice how the style of Greek oratory, so full, in the times of political independence, of connective particles, some of passion, some of sensation only, and escaping the classification of mere grammatical logic, became, in the hands of the declaimers and philosophers of the Alexandrian era, and still later, entirely deprived of this peculiarity.” Also pronounced upon this long September night are Propertius (“I cannot quite understand the grounds of the high admiration …”); Tibullus (“ … is rather insipid to me”); Lucan (“I think Satius a truer poet than Lucan, though he is very extravagant sometimes); Silias Italicus (“I am ashamed to say I have never read …”); and the Characteristic Temperament of Nations:
“The English affect stimulant nourishment – beef and beer. The French, excitants, irritants – nitrous oxide, alcohol, champagne. The Austrians, sedatives – hyoscyamus. The Russians, narcotics – opium, tobacco, and beng.”
This is strongly opinionated learning you might want to leaf through in the corner chair, but, as table talk, it’s insufferable. For God’s sake, Samuel, pass the stimulant nourishment!
Coleridge’s preferred “stimulant nourishment” - there’s no other mention of beer or beef in Table Talk - was laudanum, an opium-alcohol tincture. He wasn’t alone in the preference: Thomas de Quincey had written the book on it (Confessions of an English Opium Eater); Keats, Byron, and Shelley (“I never part from this”) merely begin a long list of other poets with the inclination; and laudanum use was common enough among the laboring poor to be considered a working class habit. (Its medicinal properties exempted it from taxes imposed on alcohol, and this, along with the happy expansion of the British Empire into India, made it cheap - cheaper, in fact, than gin).
Kubla Khan was allegedly written as Coleridge woke from a laudanum-induced dream, and, famously, it remained “a fragment” as the writing was interrupted by a “Person of Porlock,” most likely Coleridge’s doctor, delivering more laudanum. For The Rime of the Ancient Mariner, he went through four pints a week.
“There was a ship,” quoth he, and off the Ancient Mariner goes, holding the Wedding Guest from his purpose by means of a story which he “cannot choose but hear.” The Wedding Guest, caught by the Mariner’s glittering eye, is impatient, bemused, frightened, then terrified of the tale told by the “plagued” old man who shot the albatross and, for his sins, had it hung around his neck.
Wordsworth, after the poem had been poorly received, gloated: over the author’s objections, he was happy to support re-publication, but happier still to note its “great defects,” chief among them “that the principal person has no distinct character, either in his profession of Mariner, or as a human being who having been long under the control of supernatural impressions might be supposed himself to partake of something supernatural …” He also didn’t like the fact that the Mariner “does not act, but is continually acted upon,” the arbitrary nature of the events in the poem, and the “laboriously accumulated” imagery. (“On the other hand, Samuel, I like your use of the word “quoth” and thought the title particularly strong.”)
Charles Lamb was more generous, and addressed the following rebuke to Wordsworth: “For me I was never so affected with any human tale ... I totally differ from your idea that the Mariner should have had a character and a profession … [He] undergoes such trials as overwhelm and bury all individuality or memory of what he was— like the state of a man in a bad dream, one terrible peculiarity of which is, that all consciousness of personality is gone.”
This sounds like an opportune vehicle for a metaphor on alcoholism: “such trials as overwhelm and bury all individuality or memory …” But that wasn’t my drunk. The Mariner might not act so much as be acted upon, but he did at least get to shoot an albatross and carry it around his neck; he witnessed Death and Nightmare Life-In-Death (“Who thicks man’s blood with cold”) casting dice for the souls of his shipmates; and even when his ship was held “[a]s idle as a painted ship/Upon a painted ocean,” the Mariner stood, in fact, on a real ship in a real ocean. My drunk was more the painted boat and water.
There’s a metaphor here, nevertheless. It’s right there at the beginning:
It is an ancient Mariner,
And he stoppeth one of three.
`By thy long grey beard and glittering eye,
Now wherefore stopp'st thou me?’
It is curious that Wordsworth and Lamb are both only concerned with the character of the Mariner, at least in this regard: whenever I have heard the Ancient Mariner used metaphorically, it is the perspective of the Wedding-Guest, the man detained from his purpose, which has been invoked. Of the bore, the pontificator, anyone or anything that slowed or obstructed your way to somewhere else, you might say it was Ancient Mariner time. It was the amusement, the inconvenience, the horror, or the absurdity of being waylaid. And drinking did have that characteristic. The plan was to go somewhere else. I got held up.
Of the Wedding-Guest (me, you, the reader), the critics have nothing to say, although, at the end, it is he who is the "sadder and wiser man." The Mariner even offers a reason why this Wedding Guest was stopped while the other two passed on to the festivities:
I pass, like night, from land to land;
I have strange power of speech;
That moment that his face I see,
I know the man that must hear me:
To him my tale I teach.
The moment that my face he saw. Straight away, perhaps, I showed my appetites. I had the face for it.
Wednesday, April 7, 2010
As Good As Dead
In 1883, Doctor T.S. Clouston lectured at the University of Edinburgh on The Effects of the Excessive Use of Alcohol On the Mental Functions of the Brain:
“We know as a statistical fact that from fifteen to twenty per cent. of the actual insanity of the country is produced by the excessive use of alcohol. In that case, as we have about one person to every three hundred in the population insane, it follows that one person in every two thousand of our people, counting men, women, and children, become insane, and deprived of their reason, of their power of action, of their power of enjoyment, and of their personal liberty from this cause. This makes about 17,500 persons at any given time in the British Empire who are so incapacitated by reason of mental alienation, produced through the excessive and continuous use of alcohol. These people are as good as dead while they are insane; they do no work for the world or in the world, and all that makes life worth having for them, they are deprived of …”
It is unclear whether Doctor Clouston’s figures refer to British people in the British Empire or about one quarter of the world’s population. Either way, the numbers hardly seem alarming, unless, as good as dead anyway, he was proposing to round them up ... Then again, the numbers cited were only “those so well known as to be available for statistics,” which is to say “registered persons who have been so ill as to have been sent to asylums through the excessive use of alcohol.”
The sun never set on the British Empire. Apparently the bars never closed either.
“We know as a statistical fact that from fifteen to twenty per cent. of the actual insanity of the country is produced by the excessive use of alcohol. In that case, as we have about one person to every three hundred in the population insane, it follows that one person in every two thousand of our people, counting men, women, and children, become insane, and deprived of their reason, of their power of action, of their power of enjoyment, and of their personal liberty from this cause. This makes about 17,500 persons at any given time in the British Empire who are so incapacitated by reason of mental alienation, produced through the excessive and continuous use of alcohol. These people are as good as dead while they are insane; they do no work for the world or in the world, and all that makes life worth having for them, they are deprived of …”
It is unclear whether Doctor Clouston’s figures refer to British people in the British Empire or about one quarter of the world’s population. Either way, the numbers hardly seem alarming, unless, as good as dead anyway, he was proposing to round them up ... Then again, the numbers cited were only “those so well known as to be available for statistics,” which is to say “registered persons who have been so ill as to have been sent to asylums through the excessive use of alcohol.”
The sun never set on the British Empire. Apparently the bars never closed either.
Comrades In This Planting
More on the demon drink, from Alex Gustafson, The Foundation of Death, A Study of the Drink-Question (1887), citing Dr. J. Hamburger and Colin de Plancy on Jewish and “Mussalman” traditions, respectively, and the difference between a lamb and a peacock:
Hamburger: “As Noah was occupied planting the vine, Satan drew near. ‘What do you plant there?’ he asked. ‘A vine,’ said Noah. ‘Of what kind ?’ ‘Its fruit is sweet,’ replied Noah,’ whether fresh or dried, and it also gives wine which rejoices the heart of man.’ ‘So ! Let us be comrades in this planting,’ said Satan. ‘So be it,’ answered Noah. Satan then went away and returned with a lamb, a lion, a pig, and an ape, which he killed one after another so that the vine should be drenched with their blood. Then turning to Noah he said, ‘These are the signs of the power of wine. We see man before he has taken wine as innocent as the lamb; but soon after enjoying it, he is subjected to various changes. The temperate enjoyment of wine makes him brave as a lion, the intemperate use of it turns him into a pig.’”
Colin de Plancy: “When Ham had set out the vine, Satan brought and poured upon it a peacock's blood. When its leaves began to appear he poured over them the blood of an ape; when the grapes began to form he watered them with the blood of a lion, and upon the ripe fruit he spilled the blood of a pig. The vine thus nurtured with the blood of these four animals has acquired these properties: the first glass of wine animates the drinker so that his vivacity is great and his colour heightened; in this condition he resembles the peacock. When the fumes of the liquor rise to his head, he becomes as gay and full of antics as an ape. When he has become drunken he rages as the lion, and in the height of this condition he falls and grovels like the pig sprawling out in heavy slumber.”
Hamburger: “As Noah was occupied planting the vine, Satan drew near. ‘What do you plant there?’ he asked. ‘A vine,’ said Noah. ‘Of what kind ?’ ‘Its fruit is sweet,’ replied Noah,’ whether fresh or dried, and it also gives wine which rejoices the heart of man.’ ‘So ! Let us be comrades in this planting,’ said Satan. ‘So be it,’ answered Noah. Satan then went away and returned with a lamb, a lion, a pig, and an ape, which he killed one after another so that the vine should be drenched with their blood. Then turning to Noah he said, ‘These are the signs of the power of wine. We see man before he has taken wine as innocent as the lamb; but soon after enjoying it, he is subjected to various changes. The temperate enjoyment of wine makes him brave as a lion, the intemperate use of it turns him into a pig.’”
Colin de Plancy: “When Ham had set out the vine, Satan brought and poured upon it a peacock's blood. When its leaves began to appear he poured over them the blood of an ape; when the grapes began to form he watered them with the blood of a lion, and upon the ripe fruit he spilled the blood of a pig. The vine thus nurtured with the blood of these four animals has acquired these properties: the first glass of wine animates the drinker so that his vivacity is great and his colour heightened; in this condition he resembles the peacock. When the fumes of the liquor rise to his head, he becomes as gay and full of antics as an ape. When he has become drunken he rages as the lion, and in the height of this condition he falls and grovels like the pig sprawling out in heavy slumber.”
Tuesday, April 6, 2010
In the Alcoholic Sense
Carver and Cheever found themselves teaching together for the fall semester at the Iowa Writers’ Workshop. This was in 1973, when each was at his peak – not of writing, but of drinking. Whose bright idea was this?
“I used to feel that the classical libation was very much part of life,” Cheever said later. “I drank very happily until I found that I was an alcoholic. I never wrote when I had been drinking. But then there were fewer and fewer days that I could write.”
It's perfectly possible that there were no writing days at all in the fall of 1973. The writers met their classes, Carver says, “in a manner of speaking,” but neither removed the cover on his typewriter.
The introduction was auspicious, in the alcoholic sense: Cheever (“a pleasant little man in a tweed jacket, flannel trousers, and penny loafers”) arrived at the door to Carver’s room holding out a glass, saying, “Pardon me. I’m John Cheever. Could I borrow some Scotch?”
When in residence, they drank mainly in Cheever’s room, because Cheever was afraid of getting mugged in the hallway.
Cheever didn’t have a car, so Carver took him to the state-run liquor store twice a week. Cheever noted in his journal that Carver was “a very kind man,” perhaps for this very reason.
A tire on Carver’s car had an “aneurism,” and once they drove on a flat tire.
Another day, a cold one, Carver found Cheever pacing in the lobby well before they had arranged to meet, wearing loafers without socks. They got to the store as “the clerk was just unlocking the front door [and] John got out of the front door before I could get it properly parked. By the time I got inside the store, he was already at the checkout stand with a half-gallon of Scotch.”
Carol Sklenicka, a biographer of Carver’s, notes, “The Carver-Cheever trips to the liquor store seem to be the most vivid image others have of those two together.” This makes sense, in the alcoholic sense of sense.
“I used to feel that the classical libation was very much part of life,” Cheever said later. “I drank very happily until I found that I was an alcoholic. I never wrote when I had been drinking. But then there were fewer and fewer days that I could write.”
It's perfectly possible that there were no writing days at all in the fall of 1973. The writers met their classes, Carver says, “in a manner of speaking,” but neither removed the cover on his typewriter.
The introduction was auspicious, in the alcoholic sense: Cheever (“a pleasant little man in a tweed jacket, flannel trousers, and penny loafers”) arrived at the door to Carver’s room holding out a glass, saying, “Pardon me. I’m John Cheever. Could I borrow some Scotch?”
When in residence, they drank mainly in Cheever’s room, because Cheever was afraid of getting mugged in the hallway.
Cheever didn’t have a car, so Carver took him to the state-run liquor store twice a week. Cheever noted in his journal that Carver was “a very kind man,” perhaps for this very reason.
A tire on Carver’s car had an “aneurism,” and once they drove on a flat tire.
Another day, a cold one, Carver found Cheever pacing in the lobby well before they had arranged to meet, wearing loafers without socks. They got to the store as “the clerk was just unlocking the front door [and] John got out of the front door before I could get it properly parked. By the time I got inside the store, he was already at the checkout stand with a half-gallon of Scotch.”
Carol Sklenicka, a biographer of Carver’s, notes, “The Carver-Cheever trips to the liquor store seem to be the most vivid image others have of those two together.” This makes sense, in the alcoholic sense of sense.
Barrel Fever
Benjamin Franklin’s The Drinkers Dictionary, actually a thesaurus, contained several hundred words for drinkers, drinking, and intoxication – his head is full of bees; he’s cherubimical; he’s killed his dog; he’s got a brass eye; he’s got the glanders; he’s double-tongu’d; he’s half seas over; the King is his cousin, to mention a few.
My name is Anon., and I am a killer of dogs.
For what we now call alcoholism, however, there was only the word drunkenness.
The Washingtonians, an early society of alcoholics founded in Baltimore in 1840, referred to themselves as confirmed drinkers, drunkards, hard cases, inveterate cases, sots, tipplers, and inebriates.
My name is Anon., and I am a hard case.
The Swedish physician Magnus Huss – Alcoholismus Chronicus: A Contribution to the Study of Dyscrasias Based on my Personal Experience and the Experience of Others – sought to correct and replace the German term "methylism" with the new term “alcoholism.” This was half-way through the nineteenth century, but it wouldn’t catch on until the next one.
Dr. Norman S. Kerr, the English-speaking world’s addiction expert at the time, contended that the focal point of the compulsion was “the state of intoxication” rather than “the intoxicating agent.” In his 1865 book Inebriety, he made the pitch for intoxication mania or narcomania.
My name is Anon., and I am a narcomaniac.
Alcoholism would win out, but, in the interim, inebriety and dipsomania were the terms most frequently used. Others included habitual drunkenness, ebriosity, the liquor habit, and barrel fever.
Alcoholics, before they were alcoholics, were drunks, boozers, rumsuckers, stiffs, rummies, souses, and winos.
My name is Anon., and I am a rumsucker.
My name is Anon., and I am a killer of dogs.
For what we now call alcoholism, however, there was only the word drunkenness.
The Washingtonians, an early society of alcoholics founded in Baltimore in 1840, referred to themselves as confirmed drinkers, drunkards, hard cases, inveterate cases, sots, tipplers, and inebriates.
My name is Anon., and I am a hard case.
The Swedish physician Magnus Huss – Alcoholismus Chronicus: A Contribution to the Study of Dyscrasias Based on my Personal Experience and the Experience of Others – sought to correct and replace the German term "methylism" with the new term “alcoholism.” This was half-way through the nineteenth century, but it wouldn’t catch on until the next one.
Dr. Norman S. Kerr, the English-speaking world’s addiction expert at the time, contended that the focal point of the compulsion was “the state of intoxication” rather than “the intoxicating agent.” In his 1865 book Inebriety, he made the pitch for intoxication mania or narcomania.
My name is Anon., and I am a narcomaniac.
Alcoholism would win out, but, in the interim, inebriety and dipsomania were the terms most frequently used. Others included habitual drunkenness, ebriosity, the liquor habit, and barrel fever.
Alcoholics, before they were alcoholics, were drunks, boozers, rumsuckers, stiffs, rummies, souses, and winos.
My name is Anon., and I am a rumsucker.
Saturday, April 3, 2010
Emily Dickinson, Drunk
The bar closed twice before its close;
It yet remains to see
If this the Happy Hour unveil
A third event to me,
So huge, so hopeless to conceive,
As these that twice befell.
Blackouts are all we know of heaven,
And all we need of hell.
It yet remains to see
If this the Happy Hour unveil
A third event to me,
So huge, so hopeless to conceive,
As these that twice befell.
Blackouts are all we know of heaven,
And all we need of hell.
Friday, April 2, 2010
Dead Poet Society
Roughly twenty-four hours before he was admitted to St. Vincent’s Hospital in a coma, Dylan Thomas got out of bed to go for a drink, at two in the morning, and came back an hour-and-a-half later claiming, “I’ve had eighteen straight whiskies. I think that’s the record.” The proprietor of the White Horse Tavern in Greenwich Village subsequently estimated that it was probably more like six or eight whiskies.
Later that day, November 4th, 1953, Thomas felt he was "suffocating" and only managed a couple of beers at the White Horse. His doctor saw him three times and, on the third, prescribed morphine. The medical notes, summarized for the New York Medical Examiner’s Office, described his arrival at St. Vincent’s early next morning as follows: “Patient brought into hospital in coma at 1.58 a.m. Remained in coma during hospital stay. History of heavy alcoholic intake. ½ grain of M.S. shortly before admission … Impression on admission was acute alcoholic encephalopathy, for which patient was treated without response.”
John Berryman went back and forth to the deathbed. Ralph Ellison remembered Berryman saying that if Thomas died, poetry would die with him. He also remembered hearing Berryman “relieve himself of a rather drunken recital of Do Not Go Gentle Into That Good Night.”
Berryman later wrote that “Dylan murdered himself w. liquor, tho it took years.” But he also said that “[i]t must be remembered … that his weaknesses were often played on in order to get him into positions where he could be insulted with impunity; liquor was poured into him, and women not only threw themselves at him but were sometimes encouraged to do so by their academic husbands – I have myself seen this happen.”
The word “insulted” here is interesting because the cause of Thomas's death was, in fact, recorded as “insult to the brain.” This description, as Thomas’s biographer Constantine FitzGibbons noted, is “equally meaningless in British and American medical parlance.” But perhaps we know, nevertheless, exactly what the good doctors meant.
When Berryman heard that his reaction to Thomas’s death had been called “hysterical dramatizing” by a man at the BBC, he took it very personally, and went on a four-day binge.
Later that day, November 4th, 1953, Thomas felt he was "suffocating" and only managed a couple of beers at the White Horse. His doctor saw him three times and, on the third, prescribed morphine. The medical notes, summarized for the New York Medical Examiner’s Office, described his arrival at St. Vincent’s early next morning as follows: “Patient brought into hospital in coma at 1.58 a.m. Remained in coma during hospital stay. History of heavy alcoholic intake. ½ grain of M.S. shortly before admission … Impression on admission was acute alcoholic encephalopathy, for which patient was treated without response.”
John Berryman went back and forth to the deathbed. Ralph Ellison remembered Berryman saying that if Thomas died, poetry would die with him. He also remembered hearing Berryman “relieve himself of a rather drunken recital of Do Not Go Gentle Into That Good Night.”
Berryman later wrote that “Dylan murdered himself w. liquor, tho it took years.” But he also said that “[i]t must be remembered … that his weaknesses were often played on in order to get him into positions where he could be insulted with impunity; liquor was poured into him, and women not only threw themselves at him but were sometimes encouraged to do so by their academic husbands – I have myself seen this happen.”
The word “insulted” here is interesting because the cause of Thomas's death was, in fact, recorded as “insult to the brain.” This description, as Thomas’s biographer Constantine FitzGibbons noted, is “equally meaningless in British and American medical parlance.” But perhaps we know, nevertheless, exactly what the good doctors meant.
When Berryman heard that his reaction to Thomas’s death had been called “hysterical dramatizing” by a man at the BBC, he took it very personally, and went on a four-day binge.
Behind Books
“Man first of all exists, encounters himself, surges up in the world - and defines himself afterwards.” He can formulate this understanding, even write it out in French, and still find himself hiding booze around the house. As remembered by Simone de Beauvoir:
One Sunday morning at the beginning of March Arlette [Sartre’s adopted daughter] found [Sartre] lying on the floor with a dreadful hangover. We learned that he got his various young women, who knew nothing of the danger, to bring him bottles of whiskey and vodka. He hid them in a chest or behind books. That Saturday night … he had got drunk. Arlette and I emptied the hiding places, I telephoned the young women asking them not to bring any more alcohol, and I scolded Sartre vehemently … I could not understand the return of this passion for drinking. It did not square with his apparent mental balance. He put my questions aside, laughing. “But you’re fond of drinking too,” he said.
One Sunday morning at the beginning of March Arlette [Sartre’s adopted daughter] found [Sartre] lying on the floor with a dreadful hangover. We learned that he got his various young women, who knew nothing of the danger, to bring him bottles of whiskey and vodka. He hid them in a chest or behind books. That Saturday night … he had got drunk. Arlette and I emptied the hiding places, I telephoned the young women asking them not to bring any more alcohol, and I scolded Sartre vehemently … I could not understand the return of this passion for drinking. It did not square with his apparent mental balance. He put my questions aside, laughing. “But you’re fond of drinking too,” he said.
Being Branwell Brontë
No one has wanted to grow up to be Branwell Brontë, not even Branwell Brontë. The famous group portrait of his famous sisters, which he painted, contained a strange blank mass of off-color paint separating Emily and Charlotte: as it faded, a ghostly image emerged from the mass, that of Branwell Brontë, who had been hastily erased from the family portrait, most likely by Branwell Brontë. Self-portraits with greater staying power include the “lurid fantasies” sketched in the accounts of Sowerby Bridge railway station, where he briefly held a position as assistant clerical secretary: “He was particularly keen on pen portraits of himself,” Terry Eagleton notes, “hanged, stabbed or plunged into eternal perdition.”
“It can’t have been easy to have been the brother of those sisters,” Eagleton also says, and he’s far from the first to say it; but it can’t have been that hard either, even for someone, like Patrick-called-Branwell, so fully burdened with the weight of unfulfilled literary ambition. In the early years, Charlotte was unfaltering in praising her brother as the genius of the family, and to the bitter end she and her sisters played down their superior talents to the extent of not bothering him with the painful fact that their works were being published.
In a letter to Elizabeth Gaskell, Charlotte wrote: “ … about Mr. Branwell Brontë the less said the better. He never knew Jane Eyre was written although he lived for a year afterwards …” To her publisher, she was clear as to motive: “My unhappy brother never knew what his sisters had done in literature … he was not aware that they had ever published a line. We could not tell him of our efforts for fear of causing him too deep a pang of remorse for his own time misspent, and talents misapplied. Now he will never know.”
By all accounts a gifted child, Branwell’s inability to match his sisters’ literary endeavors was not for want of trying, but his profligacy was as precocious as any artistic ability he may have had. He was, in Mrs. Gaskell’s version of events, “thrown into chance companionship with the lads of the village – for youth will to youth, and boys to boys,” which is to say, he quickly found and developed a seemingly unquenchable thirst for the service at the Black Bull pub in Haworth.
For the most part, Branwell (in Valentine Cunningham’s charming summary) “dragged out his dismal progress as provincial rake mainly in the Yorkshire of his birth.” In 1835, however, he struck out for London, apparently with the aim of attending the Royal Academy as an art student, and with some assistance from those oppressive sisters, since Charlotte left home to work as a governess to help pay his fees. (The sisters were, of course, “portionless” daughters of a parson, and expected, therefore, to marry or make their own way. Branwell was a bonus.) The letters of introduction he carried went unused and the money he had was spent in a pub in Holborn. He returned home with an unlikely story of being mugged.
Branwell continued to write, and to bring his writing to the attention of anyone who would listen. The death of James Hogg, a regular contributor to Blackwood’s Magazine, inspired him to write to Blackwood’s suggesting a replacement. That letter included the following gems:
"SIR, - Read what I write.
"And would to heaven you could believe it true, for then you would attend to and act upon it.
"I have addressed you twice before, and now I do it again. But it is not from affected hypocrisy that I commence my letter with the name of James Hogg; for the writings of that man in your numbers … when I was a child, laid a hold on my mind which succeeding years have consecrated into a most sacred feeling ...
"Now, sir, to you I appear writing with conceited assurance; but I am not; for I know myself so far as to believe in my own originality, and on that ground I desire of you admittance into your ranks. And do not wonder that I apply so determinedly: for the remembrances I spoke of have fixed you and your magazine in such a manner upon my mind that the idea of striving to aid another periodical is horribly repulsive ...
"Now, sir, do not act like a commonplace person, but like a man willing to examine for himself. Do not turn from the naked truth of my letters, but prove me – and if I do not stand the proof, I will not farther press myself on you. If I do stand it – why – You may have lost an able writer in James Hogg, and God grant you you may gain one in Patrick Branwell Brontë."
Harold Orel (The Brontës: Interviews and Recollections) kindly notes that “the final paragraph of this letter … may have been considered too brash to warrant an answer.”
Branwell also forwarded a substantial sample of his poetry to William Wordsworth:
"Now, to send you the whole of this would be to mock upon your patience; what you see does not even pretend to be more than the description of an imaginative child. But read it, sir; and, as you would hold a light to one in utter darkness – as you value your own kind-heartedness – return me an answer, if but one word, telling me whether I should write on, or write no more."
The word never came. It is possible that he did not help his cause by opining to Wordsworth that, “Surely, in this day, when there is not a writing poet worth a sixpence, the field must be open, if a better man can step forward.”
Back on Earth, Branwell had greater success with his other writing, letters to friends who would extend him credit for gin. With some aplomb, at more or less the same time, he was briefly secretary of the local Temperance Society. And he tried his hand at portrait painting in Bradford, but (Eagleton again) “spent most of his time engaged in raffish carousals with louche artists in Bradford’s George Hotel.”
To overcome his replenishable capacity for disappointment, he embarked on opium addiction to improve upon his hardening alcoholism, and ran up considerable debts. To address the debts, he took the Sowerby Bridge railway job, from which, after a year, he was fired for, among other derelictions of duty, embezzling over eleven pounds. Next up was a post as tutor, where, unhelpfully, he fell in love with the pupil’s mother. He was sent packing from the property by the father, who also amended his will to cut off the wife’s inheritance, should she ever decide to marry Branwell Brontë. In June 1846, Branwell wrote to his friend: “Through the will she is left quite powerless … The Executing Trustees detest me, and one declares that if he sees me he will shoot me.” This letter was accompanied, as was now his custom, by a full-page pen-and-ink sketch entitled “Myself” showing a bulky male figure with wrists bound, tied to a stake, in the midst of flames.
That was about it for Branwell, who took to bed. Three more years of regular opium and drink at every opportunity, mixed with pathological brooding on lost love, saw him out. His final written words, shortly before his death in September 1848, were a brief note to his father’s sexton, John Brown, which began: “Dear John, I shall feel very much obliged to you if you can contrive to give me Five pence worth of Gin in a proper measure.”
Robert Collins laments the note: “When put into words, one man’s agony quickly becomes his contemptible folly in the eyes of others. How could the dying Branwell Brontë have known that his desperate plea … would somehow survive to blacken him for almost a hundred and forty years after …” The desperation is real, but Collins somewhat misses the point by confining it to Branwell’s final request for gin. You can shuffle the pages of the biography and draw one at random, and there’s poor Patrick, being Branwell Brontë all over again.
SIR, - Read what I write. And if the fear of insanity or death does not give you a reason to choose sobriety, God grant you you may gain one in Patrick Branwell Brontë.
“It can’t have been easy to have been the brother of those sisters,” Eagleton also says, and he’s far from the first to say it; but it can’t have been that hard either, even for someone, like Patrick-called-Branwell, so fully burdened with the weight of unfulfilled literary ambition. In the early years, Charlotte was unfaltering in praising her brother as the genius of the family, and to the bitter end she and her sisters played down their superior talents to the extent of not bothering him with the painful fact that their works were being published.
In a letter to Elizabeth Gaskell, Charlotte wrote: “ … about Mr. Branwell Brontë the less said the better. He never knew Jane Eyre was written although he lived for a year afterwards …” To her publisher, she was clear as to motive: “My unhappy brother never knew what his sisters had done in literature … he was not aware that they had ever published a line. We could not tell him of our efforts for fear of causing him too deep a pang of remorse for his own time misspent, and talents misapplied. Now he will never know.”
By all accounts a gifted child, Branwell’s inability to match his sisters’ literary endeavors was not for want of trying, but his profligacy was as precocious as any artistic ability he may have had. He was, in Mrs. Gaskell’s version of events, “thrown into chance companionship with the lads of the village – for youth will to youth, and boys to boys,” which is to say, he quickly found and developed a seemingly unquenchable thirst for the service at the Black Bull pub in Haworth.
For the most part, Branwell (in Valentine Cunningham’s charming summary) “dragged out his dismal progress as provincial rake mainly in the Yorkshire of his birth.” In 1835, however, he struck out for London, apparently with the aim of attending the Royal Academy as an art student, and with some assistance from those oppressive sisters, since Charlotte left home to work as a governess to help pay his fees. (The sisters were, of course, “portionless” daughters of a parson, and expected, therefore, to marry or make their own way. Branwell was a bonus.) The letters of introduction he carried went unused and the money he had was spent in a pub in Holborn. He returned home with an unlikely story of being mugged.
Branwell continued to write, and to bring his writing to the attention of anyone who would listen. The death of James Hogg, a regular contributor to Blackwood’s Magazine, inspired him to write to Blackwood’s suggesting a replacement. That letter included the following gems:
"SIR, - Read what I write.
"And would to heaven you could believe it true, for then you would attend to and act upon it.
"I have addressed you twice before, and now I do it again. But it is not from affected hypocrisy that I commence my letter with the name of James Hogg; for the writings of that man in your numbers … when I was a child, laid a hold on my mind which succeeding years have consecrated into a most sacred feeling ...
"Now, sir, to you I appear writing with conceited assurance; but I am not; for I know myself so far as to believe in my own originality, and on that ground I desire of you admittance into your ranks. And do not wonder that I apply so determinedly: for the remembrances I spoke of have fixed you and your magazine in such a manner upon my mind that the idea of striving to aid another periodical is horribly repulsive ...
"Now, sir, do not act like a commonplace person, but like a man willing to examine for himself. Do not turn from the naked truth of my letters, but prove me – and if I do not stand the proof, I will not farther press myself on you. If I do stand it – why – You may have lost an able writer in James Hogg, and God grant you you may gain one in Patrick Branwell Brontë."
Harold Orel (The Brontës: Interviews and Recollections) kindly notes that “the final paragraph of this letter … may have been considered too brash to warrant an answer.”
Branwell also forwarded a substantial sample of his poetry to William Wordsworth:
"Now, to send you the whole of this would be to mock upon your patience; what you see does not even pretend to be more than the description of an imaginative child. But read it, sir; and, as you would hold a light to one in utter darkness – as you value your own kind-heartedness – return me an answer, if but one word, telling me whether I should write on, or write no more."
The word never came. It is possible that he did not help his cause by opining to Wordsworth that, “Surely, in this day, when there is not a writing poet worth a sixpence, the field must be open, if a better man can step forward.”
Back on Earth, Branwell had greater success with his other writing, letters to friends who would extend him credit for gin. With some aplomb, at more or less the same time, he was briefly secretary of the local Temperance Society. And he tried his hand at portrait painting in Bradford, but (Eagleton again) “spent most of his time engaged in raffish carousals with louche artists in Bradford’s George Hotel.”
To overcome his replenishable capacity for disappointment, he embarked on opium addiction to improve upon his hardening alcoholism, and ran up considerable debts. To address the debts, he took the Sowerby Bridge railway job, from which, after a year, he was fired for, among other derelictions of duty, embezzling over eleven pounds. Next up was a post as tutor, where, unhelpfully, he fell in love with the pupil’s mother. He was sent packing from the property by the father, who also amended his will to cut off the wife’s inheritance, should she ever decide to marry Branwell Brontë. In June 1846, Branwell wrote to his friend: “Through the will she is left quite powerless … The Executing Trustees detest me, and one declares that if he sees me he will shoot me.” This letter was accompanied, as was now his custom, by a full-page pen-and-ink sketch entitled “Myself” showing a bulky male figure with wrists bound, tied to a stake, in the midst of flames.
That was about it for Branwell, who took to bed. Three more years of regular opium and drink at every opportunity, mixed with pathological brooding on lost love, saw him out. His final written words, shortly before his death in September 1848, were a brief note to his father’s sexton, John Brown, which began: “Dear John, I shall feel very much obliged to you if you can contrive to give me Five pence worth of Gin in a proper measure.”
Robert Collins laments the note: “When put into words, one man’s agony quickly becomes his contemptible folly in the eyes of others. How could the dying Branwell Brontë have known that his desperate plea … would somehow survive to blacken him for almost a hundred and forty years after …” The desperation is real, but Collins somewhat misses the point by confining it to Branwell’s final request for gin. You can shuffle the pages of the biography and draw one at random, and there’s poor Patrick, being Branwell Brontë all over again.
SIR, - Read what I write. And if the fear of insanity or death does not give you a reason to choose sobriety, God grant you you may gain one in Patrick Branwell Brontë.
Thursday, April 1, 2010
The Hereditary Aspect
In a letter from July, 1968, John Cheever wrote:
“Some of my difficulties with Time may have been inherited. My brother had three alcoholic breakdowns in his fifties and Time for my father was a tragedy. At one point he was thought to have killed himself. I went to claim the body and found him instead, dead drunk, riding the roller-coaster. A large crowd had gathered to watch the old gentleman.”
He could have added that his grandfather’s death certificate recorded, as the cause of death, “alcohol and opium – del. Tremens.” But the grandfather is one thing. The father is the point.
Cheever himself got sober, seven years later, at the Smithers Alcohol Rehabilitation Center on East 93rd Street in Manhattan. “I am changed violently,” he said. But for most of his life it was touch and go. There was the struggle to hold off on the drink until noon; the vodka for breakfast; and the small matter of a month in hospital with alcoholism-induced pulmonary edema. The latter was in 1972, and, as a result, Cheever quit drinking for six weeks – ten, if you count the weeks in hospital. In the four or five year period around this, he was averaging one short story a year.
At some point in all of this, Cheever was bedridden and he hit his son, Benjamin, for refusing to bring him a drink. He told him: “You’ve always been a disappointment to me as a son.” Thanks, Dad.
In the early 1970s, Cheever attended some A.A. meetings, finding them neither to his taste nor his sense of occasion: “The long speech I have prepared seems out of order and I simply say that I am sometimes presented with situations for which I am so poorly prepared that I have to drink …” Occasionally, when pressed, he would speak with disdain of the “Christers.”
He entered Smithers on April 9, 1975 – “It’s the most terrible place you can conceivably imagine,” he told Truman Capote. “It’s really, really, really grim.” – and left on May 7, never to drink again. Detoxification did not, as he’d imagined, kill him dead, and he took to attending A.A. meetings after all, three times a week.
“I knew about Alcoholics Anonymous early on,” his daughter Susan wrote in 2008, “because it had saved my father’s life and given us all wonderful years of family experience after he got sober.” This is not bad for a man not long before branded a narcissist by any number of therapists and of whom even the Smithers’ counselors noted: “Display[s] much grandiosity and pride,” and, “Very impressed with self.”
Benjamin Cheever edited and published a selection of his father’s letters in 1988. The volume was released with all grammatical errors and spelling mistakes intact. Under the circumstances, this might be a rather modest form of revenge. In the letter quoted above, for example, Cheever wrote some of his difficulties with Time may have been “inheirited.” And it is not perfectly clear, until “the old gentleman” is mentioned, whether he is talking about his father or his brother. It’s the father of course. The father is the point.
“Some of my difficulties with Time may have been inherited. My brother had three alcoholic breakdowns in his fifties and Time for my father was a tragedy. At one point he was thought to have killed himself. I went to claim the body and found him instead, dead drunk, riding the roller-coaster. A large crowd had gathered to watch the old gentleman.”
He could have added that his grandfather’s death certificate recorded, as the cause of death, “alcohol and opium – del. Tremens.” But the grandfather is one thing. The father is the point.
Cheever himself got sober, seven years later, at the Smithers Alcohol Rehabilitation Center on East 93rd Street in Manhattan. “I am changed violently,” he said. But for most of his life it was touch and go. There was the struggle to hold off on the drink until noon; the vodka for breakfast; and the small matter of a month in hospital with alcoholism-induced pulmonary edema. The latter was in 1972, and, as a result, Cheever quit drinking for six weeks – ten, if you count the weeks in hospital. In the four or five year period around this, he was averaging one short story a year.
At some point in all of this, Cheever was bedridden and he hit his son, Benjamin, for refusing to bring him a drink. He told him: “You’ve always been a disappointment to me as a son.” Thanks, Dad.
In the early 1970s, Cheever attended some A.A. meetings, finding them neither to his taste nor his sense of occasion: “The long speech I have prepared seems out of order and I simply say that I am sometimes presented with situations for which I am so poorly prepared that I have to drink …” Occasionally, when pressed, he would speak with disdain of the “Christers.”
He entered Smithers on April 9, 1975 – “It’s the most terrible place you can conceivably imagine,” he told Truman Capote. “It’s really, really, really grim.” – and left on May 7, never to drink again. Detoxification did not, as he’d imagined, kill him dead, and he took to attending A.A. meetings after all, three times a week.
“I knew about Alcoholics Anonymous early on,” his daughter Susan wrote in 2008, “because it had saved my father’s life and given us all wonderful years of family experience after he got sober.” This is not bad for a man not long before branded a narcissist by any number of therapists and of whom even the Smithers’ counselors noted: “Display[s] much grandiosity and pride,” and, “Very impressed with self.”
Benjamin Cheever edited and published a selection of his father’s letters in 1988. The volume was released with all grammatical errors and spelling mistakes intact. Under the circumstances, this might be a rather modest form of revenge. In the letter quoted above, for example, Cheever wrote some of his difficulties with Time may have been “inheirited.” And it is not perfectly clear, until “the old gentleman” is mentioned, whether he is talking about his father or his brother. It’s the father of course. The father is the point.
Quixote, de la Mancha
At Harvard, late 1967, in a lecture on “The Riddle of Poetry,” Borges said of the Historia del hidalgo ingenioso Don Quijote de la Mancha:
“The word hidalgo has today a peculiar dignity all its own, yet when Cervantes wrote it, the word hidalgo meant ‘a country gentleman.’ As for the name ‘Quixote,’ it was meant to be a rather ridiculous word, like the names of many of the characters in Dickens: Pickwick, Swiveller, Chuzzlewit, Twist, Squears, Quilp, and so on. And then you have ‘de la Mancha,’ which now sounds noble in Castilian to us, but when Cervantes wrote it down, he intended it to sound perhaps (I ask the apology of any resident of that city who may be here) as if he had written ‘Don Quixote of Kansas City.’ You see how these words have changed, how they have been ennobled. You see a strange fact: that because the old soldier Miguel de Cervantes poked mild fun at La Mancha, now ‘La Mancha’ is one of the everlasting words of literature.”
If this were an essay, Borges would be underestimating his readers here, perhaps, since they would likely know some of these things if they were reading Borges. But the emphasis makes sense in a lecture at Harvard. And that peculiar dignities can grow from the once ignoble is a good point to remember.
On a different subject, then, “The Riddle of Alcoholism,” the word drunk can come to have a peculiar dignity all its own, like a healed wound or the well-told drama of how it came about. In the color of context, it can be tinged with humor, sadness, the absurd. So there is always the danger that it can come to mean something other than what it meant when you were just a drunk looking for a way to stop drinking. At meetings you can hear the funniest things, as well as the saddest, and many things in between about what it is to be a drunk. But most people do not forget - and work at not forgetting - exactly what it meant when alcohol had the better of them. Maybe it helps that every so often a new Don Quixote de la Mancha, or Kansas City Doña, walks through the door, quite exhausted, to rest on a chair set out for the purpose.
“The word hidalgo has today a peculiar dignity all its own, yet when Cervantes wrote it, the word hidalgo meant ‘a country gentleman.’ As for the name ‘Quixote,’ it was meant to be a rather ridiculous word, like the names of many of the characters in Dickens: Pickwick, Swiveller, Chuzzlewit, Twist, Squears, Quilp, and so on. And then you have ‘de la Mancha,’ which now sounds noble in Castilian to us, but when Cervantes wrote it down, he intended it to sound perhaps (I ask the apology of any resident of that city who may be here) as if he had written ‘Don Quixote of Kansas City.’ You see how these words have changed, how they have been ennobled. You see a strange fact: that because the old soldier Miguel de Cervantes poked mild fun at La Mancha, now ‘La Mancha’ is one of the everlasting words of literature.”
If this were an essay, Borges would be underestimating his readers here, perhaps, since they would likely know some of these things if they were reading Borges. But the emphasis makes sense in a lecture at Harvard. And that peculiar dignities can grow from the once ignoble is a good point to remember.
On a different subject, then, “The Riddle of Alcoholism,” the word drunk can come to have a peculiar dignity all its own, like a healed wound or the well-told drama of how it came about. In the color of context, it can be tinged with humor, sadness, the absurd. So there is always the danger that it can come to mean something other than what it meant when you were just a drunk looking for a way to stop drinking. At meetings you can hear the funniest things, as well as the saddest, and many things in between about what it is to be a drunk. But most people do not forget - and work at not forgetting - exactly what it meant when alcohol had the better of them. Maybe it helps that every so often a new Don Quixote de la Mancha, or Kansas City Doña, walks through the door, quite exhausted, to rest on a chair set out for the purpose.
Sunday, March 28, 2010
He Doesn't Know Why
From Where I‘m Calling From:
“So she and J.P. saw some movies together. They went to a few dances. But mainly the courtship revolved around their cleaning chimneys together. Before you know it, J.P. says, they’re talking about tying the knot. And after a while they do it, they get married. J.P.’s new father-in-law takes him in as a full partner. In a year or so, Roxy has a kid. She’s quit being a chimney sweep. At any rate, she’s quit doing the work. Pretty soon she has another kid. J.P.’s in his mid-twenties by now. He’s buying a house. He says he was happy with his life. “I was happy with the way things were going,” he says. “I had everything I wanted. I had a wife and kids I loved, and I was doing what I wanted to do with my life.” but for some reason - who knows why we do what we do? - his drinking picks up. For a long time he drinks beer and beer only. Any kind of beer - it didn’t matter. He says he could drink beer twenty-four hours a day. He’d drink beer at night while he watched TV. Sure, once in a while he drank hard stuff. But that was only if they went out on the town, which was not often, or else when they had company over. Then a time comes, he doesn’t know why, when he makes the switch from beer to gin-and-tonic. And he’d have more gin-and-tonic after dinner, sitting in front of the TV. There was always a glass of gin-and-tonic in his hand. He says he actually liked the taste of it. He began stopping off after work drinks before he went home to have more drinks. Then he began missing some dinners. He just wouldn’t show up. Or else he’d show up, but he wouldn’t want anything to eat. He’d filled up on snacks at the bar. Sometimes he’d walk in the door and for no good reason throw his lunch pail across the living room. When Roxy yelled at him, he’d turn around and go out again. He moved his drinking time up to early afternoon, while he was still supposed to be working. He tells me that he was starting off the morning with a couple of drinks. He’d have a belt of the stuff before he brushed his teeth. Then he’d have his coffee. He’d go to work with a thermos bottle of vodka in his lunch pail.”
“So she and J.P. saw some movies together. They went to a few dances. But mainly the courtship revolved around their cleaning chimneys together. Before you know it, J.P. says, they’re talking about tying the knot. And after a while they do it, they get married. J.P.’s new father-in-law takes him in as a full partner. In a year or so, Roxy has a kid. She’s quit being a chimney sweep. At any rate, she’s quit doing the work. Pretty soon she has another kid. J.P.’s in his mid-twenties by now. He’s buying a house. He says he was happy with his life. “I was happy with the way things were going,” he says. “I had everything I wanted. I had a wife and kids I loved, and I was doing what I wanted to do with my life.” but for some reason - who knows why we do what we do? - his drinking picks up. For a long time he drinks beer and beer only. Any kind of beer - it didn’t matter. He says he could drink beer twenty-four hours a day. He’d drink beer at night while he watched TV. Sure, once in a while he drank hard stuff. But that was only if they went out on the town, which was not often, or else when they had company over. Then a time comes, he doesn’t know why, when he makes the switch from beer to gin-and-tonic. And he’d have more gin-and-tonic after dinner, sitting in front of the TV. There was always a glass of gin-and-tonic in his hand. He says he actually liked the taste of it. He began stopping off after work drinks before he went home to have more drinks. Then he began missing some dinners. He just wouldn’t show up. Or else he’d show up, but he wouldn’t want anything to eat. He’d filled up on snacks at the bar. Sometimes he’d walk in the door and for no good reason throw his lunch pail across the living room. When Roxy yelled at him, he’d turn around and go out again. He moved his drinking time up to early afternoon, while he was still supposed to be working. He tells me that he was starting off the morning with a couple of drinks. He’d have a belt of the stuff before he brushed his teeth. Then he’d have his coffee. He’d go to work with a thermos bottle of vodka in his lunch pail.”
Down Among the Big Boys
In Peter McDougall’s television play, Down Among the Big Boys, a man walks in to a bar and asks for a whisky and a half pint please, pal. The whisky is quickly served from the optics, and he downs it in one while the barman pours the half pint. As the barman rings up the drinks, the half pint is in the process of being downed as well. One-sixty four. The man confesses that “Mate, ah canny pey fur this … Ma heid was burstin and a wis desperate. …” The barman steps round the bar – by now everyone else there is watching – and, after a pause for expected violence, rips the jacket off the man: “When you can pay for your drink, you can have your jacket back.” At which point another customer shouts, “Ho, mate. Ah’ll have a large vodka then, eh?” and throws his denim jacket over the bar.
Friday, March 26, 2010
A Country For Old Men
William McIlvanney (in Surviving the Shipwreck) recounts the following:
“It’s just after 11:30 on a dull weekday morning. Mick Murphy, alias Beef, alias several other people he claims to be, stands at the bar contemplating the remaining two-thirds of his pint of McEwan’s. Already pushing 70, Mick has good reason to regret the way age arranges its remorseless ambushes. His gammy leg is giving him severe trouble and he’s due in Kilmarnock Infirmary at noon. The possibility of amputation makes it seem like High Noon. What remains for a man in the bleakness of such moments? Mick finds it. He glances at the clock and says to the manager, ‘Joe, keep yer eye on that pint. Ah’m goin’ up tae get ma leg aff.”
I don’t know Mick Murphy (or rather I didn’t, since he eventually “died a two-legged death,” which - and maybe it's just me - would seem to undermine somewhat the anecdote above) but I know the pub McIlvanney eulogizes as “the resort of people with the true grain of character still showing through them in a time of plastic personalities,” and not only didn’t think much of it but couldn't stand the place. This might have been something of a first at the time but, having by now been many times around that particular block, I have come across many pubs I didn’t like, well hidden as they were among the many more I did like.
McIlvanney admits it doesn’t look much, having been “by-passed by the recent juggernaut of bad taste that has hit so many pubs and moved on,” notes that “the most significant furnishings are people,” and presents a few cameos to illustrate the point: the man who talks to the water-bottle; the “incomprehensibility in stereo” of Jimmy and Danny; the electrician who is writing the life of Cervantes; and the brickie who quotes from the updated Scottish version of Candide that he is writing. And, well, that's about it, apart from Mabel, who works at the bar and doubles as a bouncer, and the stranger who thinks he's Henry VIII ("I had terrible trouble with that Ann Boleyn").
He could go on, “but if you don’t get the picture by now, you never will, at least not from me.” The picture “is that this is how a pub can sometimes be, not a plastic factory for liquefying money but a place where people can prospect casual conversation for mutual nuggets of unexpected gold, explore small dreams, admit who they are or pretend to be who they’re not and know it won’t be used against them.”
As I say, I know the G________ (at the foot of B______ Street, near the J _____ Bridge, as the old Russians might have put it). And I’ve had a drink or two – enjoyable enough – with several of the people mentioned above. I didn’t mind drinking there, but it really is a watering hole of last resort. It’s the last pub in the town you grew up in, the town you left and only occasionally forget that you couldn’t wait to escape, and by last pub I don't mean the last pub standing but the last one you would go into.
This is not to knock McIlvanney’s estimate of the place (which might well be different, for various reasons, were he not writing a book that sells in stores around the corner from it). I appreciate the anecdotes, “the benign eccentricity of many people … gathered over the years into an unofficial history of ordinary lives.” But imagine the bleakness (as you come in soaked through with the rain and cold to the bone) of a pub with no fire, no gantry, no covered bulbs, no actual wood, no actual air, no larger a crowd on Saturday night than on Tuesday morning, and, save for Mabel, no women. It’s not that bleak, of course: it’s much bleaker.
I would guess that McIlvanney is letting his nostalgia talk here. And my own nostalgia is stirred elsewhere. So, keep yer eye on that pint. Ah’m away up tae get ma heid aff.
“It’s just after 11:30 on a dull weekday morning. Mick Murphy, alias Beef, alias several other people he claims to be, stands at the bar contemplating the remaining two-thirds of his pint of McEwan’s. Already pushing 70, Mick has good reason to regret the way age arranges its remorseless ambushes. His gammy leg is giving him severe trouble and he’s due in Kilmarnock Infirmary at noon. The possibility of amputation makes it seem like High Noon. What remains for a man in the bleakness of such moments? Mick finds it. He glances at the clock and says to the manager, ‘Joe, keep yer eye on that pint. Ah’m goin’ up tae get ma leg aff.”
I don’t know Mick Murphy (or rather I didn’t, since he eventually “died a two-legged death,” which - and maybe it's just me - would seem to undermine somewhat the anecdote above) but I know the pub McIlvanney eulogizes as “the resort of people with the true grain of character still showing through them in a time of plastic personalities,” and not only didn’t think much of it but couldn't stand the place. This might have been something of a first at the time but, having by now been many times around that particular block, I have come across many pubs I didn’t like, well hidden as they were among the many more I did like.
McIlvanney admits it doesn’t look much, having been “by-passed by the recent juggernaut of bad taste that has hit so many pubs and moved on,” notes that “the most significant furnishings are people,” and presents a few cameos to illustrate the point: the man who talks to the water-bottle; the “incomprehensibility in stereo” of Jimmy and Danny; the electrician who is writing the life of Cervantes; and the brickie who quotes from the updated Scottish version of Candide that he is writing. And, well, that's about it, apart from Mabel, who works at the bar and doubles as a bouncer, and the stranger who thinks he's Henry VIII ("I had terrible trouble with that Ann Boleyn").
He could go on, “but if you don’t get the picture by now, you never will, at least not from me.” The picture “is that this is how a pub can sometimes be, not a plastic factory for liquefying money but a place where people can prospect casual conversation for mutual nuggets of unexpected gold, explore small dreams, admit who they are or pretend to be who they’re not and know it won’t be used against them.”
As I say, I know the G________ (at the foot of B______ Street, near the J _____ Bridge, as the old Russians might have put it). And I’ve had a drink or two – enjoyable enough – with several of the people mentioned above. I didn’t mind drinking there, but it really is a watering hole of last resort. It’s the last pub in the town you grew up in, the town you left and only occasionally forget that you couldn’t wait to escape, and by last pub I don't mean the last pub standing but the last one you would go into.
This is not to knock McIlvanney’s estimate of the place (which might well be different, for various reasons, were he not writing a book that sells in stores around the corner from it). I appreciate the anecdotes, “the benign eccentricity of many people … gathered over the years into an unofficial history of ordinary lives.” But imagine the bleakness (as you come in soaked through with the rain and cold to the bone) of a pub with no fire, no gantry, no covered bulbs, no actual wood, no actual air, no larger a crowd on Saturday night than on Tuesday morning, and, save for Mabel, no women. It’s not that bleak, of course: it’s much bleaker.
I would guess that McIlvanney is letting his nostalgia talk here. And my own nostalgia is stirred elsewhere. So, keep yer eye on that pint. Ah’m away up tae get ma heid aff.
The Most Illiberal Vice
Gibbon, citing Tacitus, Plutarch, and Jean-Baptiste Dubos, on “the state of Germany till the invasion of the Barbarians, in the time of the Emperor Decius:”
“Strong beer, a liquor extracted with very little art from wheat or barley, and corrupted (as it is strongly expressed by Tacitus) into a certain semblance of wine, was sufficient for the gross purposes of German debauchery. But those who had tasted the rich wines of Italy, and afterward of Gaul, sighed for that more delicious species of intoxication. They attempted not, however (as has since been executed with so much success), to naturalize the vine on the banks of the Rhine and Danube; nor did they endeavor to procure by industry the materials of an advantageous commerce. To solicit by labor what might be ravished by arms was esteemed unworthy of the German spirit. The intemperate thirst of strong liquors often urged the barbarians to invade the provinces on which art or nature had bestowed those much envied presents. The Tuscan who betrayed his country to the Celtic nations, attracted them into Italy by the prospect of the rich fruits and delicious wines, the productions of a happier climate. And in the same manner the German auxiliaries, invited into France during the civil wars of the sixteenth century, were allured by the promise of plenteous quarters in the provinces of Champagne and Burgundy. Drunkenness, the most illiberal, but not the most dangerous, of our vices, was sometimes capable, in a less civilized state of mankind, of occasioning a battle, a war, or a revolution.”
Beer corrupted into a semblance of wine “sufficient for the gross purpose of German debauchery” even as the lucky few “sighed for that more delicious species of intoxication” is good, and at last we have a historian willing to pronounce that drunkenness was – and presumably is – capable of “occasioning a battle, a war, or a revolution.” Cleopatra’s nose, my arse! Offended Germans might find consolation in the fact that Decius’ reign was short of three years long.
“Strong beer, a liquor extracted with very little art from wheat or barley, and corrupted (as it is strongly expressed by Tacitus) into a certain semblance of wine, was sufficient for the gross purposes of German debauchery. But those who had tasted the rich wines of Italy, and afterward of Gaul, sighed for that more delicious species of intoxication. They attempted not, however (as has since been executed with so much success), to naturalize the vine on the banks of the Rhine and Danube; nor did they endeavor to procure by industry the materials of an advantageous commerce. To solicit by labor what might be ravished by arms was esteemed unworthy of the German spirit. The intemperate thirst of strong liquors often urged the barbarians to invade the provinces on which art or nature had bestowed those much envied presents. The Tuscan who betrayed his country to the Celtic nations, attracted them into Italy by the prospect of the rich fruits and delicious wines, the productions of a happier climate. And in the same manner the German auxiliaries, invited into France during the civil wars of the sixteenth century, were allured by the promise of plenteous quarters in the provinces of Champagne and Burgundy. Drunkenness, the most illiberal, but not the most dangerous, of our vices, was sometimes capable, in a less civilized state of mankind, of occasioning a battle, a war, or a revolution.”
Beer corrupted into a semblance of wine “sufficient for the gross purpose of German debauchery” even as the lucky few “sighed for that more delicious species of intoxication” is good, and at last we have a historian willing to pronounce that drunkenness was – and presumably is – capable of “occasioning a battle, a war, or a revolution.” Cleopatra’s nose, my arse! Offended Germans might find consolation in the fact that Decius’ reign was short of three years long.
Death By Whiskey
Jefferson said that “laws and institutions must go hand in hand with the progress of the human mind.” The death, by whiskey, of a Missouri slave gave the Supreme Court of that state occasion to show how little the minds of its Justices had progressed by 1850.
Skinner et al vs. Hughes, penned by the Honorable William B. Napton, discussed the liability of a person selling intoxicating liquors to a slave without permission from his “master, owner, or overseer” and the principal-agency relationship between a sales clerk and store owner. Liability, as the Court discussed, was based not on remote and consequential damages resulting from an act, but those which are its natural and proximate consequences.
It is surprising to read of death as the natural consequence of the sale of a bottle of whiskey. It is unsurprising – but no less horrific – to read the following:
“The sale of whisky to the negro was unlawful, but that does not constitute the source of responsibility. The defendants might have sold the negro a rope, with which he immediately went out and hanged himself. The distinction between such a sale and a sale of intoxicating liquors is obvious. The former, though a breach of law, was not likely to be attended with injurious consequences, without a concurrence of circumstances and co-operation of acts on the part of the slave, not to be expected in the usual course of events. The latter is like placing noxious food within the reach of domestic animals.”
Skinner et al vs. Hughes, penned by the Honorable William B. Napton, discussed the liability of a person selling intoxicating liquors to a slave without permission from his “master, owner, or overseer” and the principal-agency relationship between a sales clerk and store owner. Liability, as the Court discussed, was based not on remote and consequential damages resulting from an act, but those which are its natural and proximate consequences.
It is surprising to read of death as the natural consequence of the sale of a bottle of whiskey. It is unsurprising – but no less horrific – to read the following:
“The sale of whisky to the negro was unlawful, but that does not constitute the source of responsibility. The defendants might have sold the negro a rope, with which he immediately went out and hanged himself. The distinction between such a sale and a sale of intoxicating liquors is obvious. The former, though a breach of law, was not likely to be attended with injurious consequences, without a concurrence of circumstances and co-operation of acts on the part of the slave, not to be expected in the usual course of events. The latter is like placing noxious food within the reach of domestic animals.”
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