They drank because it’s what alkies are wired up to do - authors and all

Olivia Laing combines a journey around the States with close reading of six American male alcoholic writers (Fitzgerald, Hemingway et al) and an examination of her own experience. She writes so well that this deconstructed way of pursuing a story works brilliantly, says David Sexton
JACK NICHOLSON & JOE TURKEL Character(s): Jack Torrance & Lloyd the Bartender Film 'THE SHINING' (1980) Directed By STANLEY KUBRICK
1 August 2013

The Trip to Echo Spring: Why Writers Drink
by Olivia Laing
(Canongate, £20)

Olivia Laing’s first book, To the River, published in 2011, was a meditative, allusive but also deeply private account of a meandering walk down the River Ouse in Sussex, in company with the spirit of Virginia Woolf (who drowned herself in this river in 1941) and other writers. This debut was rapturously reviewed and widely compared to the work of WG Sebald.

In The Trip to Echo Spring, Laing applies a similar method, combining a journey, this time around the States, with close reading, this time of six interconnected American male alcoholic writers (Fitzgerald, Hemingway, Tennessee Williams, John Berryman, John Cheever and Raymond Carver), and intimate examination of her own experience. Such a venture could easily have turned into a self-indulgent road trip to nowhere. But Laing writes so well, so seductively in fact, that this deconstructed way of pursuing a story works brilliantly again, even if she doesn’t come to many definite conclusions.

She opens with a grim sketch of Cheever and Carver, drinking together in 1973 while supposedly teaching at the University of Iowa, before turning back to examine Cheever’s tremendous story, The Swimmer, written a decade earlier, which “catches in its strange compressions the full arc of an alcoholic’s life”, and in a sense thus predicted his own plight.

Laing declares her aim to be to understand not only why these great writers drank but “what those who struggled with and were sometimes destroyed by it thought alcohol had meant for them” — to find the literary expression of alcoholism, whatever that may be, then.

Her interest, she admits, comes from having grown up in an alcoholic family herself — although this turns out to have been for a relatively limited time, however traumatic, when, after the break up of her parents’ marriage, her mother took up with a partner called Diana whom she had met through the personal ads in Time Out, who became an aggressive drunk.

So Laing flies in to New York, to stay where Tennessee Williams died, to drink where Cheever drank, and to sit in on an AA meeting, while skilfully interweaving the stories of these writers. On she goes by train to New Orleans, and then on again to Key West, in pursuit of Hemingway and for herself swimming in the ocean, for water and immersion is one of her themes here as in her first book: “The dream of letting go into water is prevalent in the work of alcoholic writers… these little fantasies of cleanliness, purification, dissolution and death”.

Finally, she crosses right back across America, telling the terrible story of John Berryman’s life en route, to arrive, for her 34th birthday, in Port Angeles in Washington, where Raymond Carver lived his final years after he had stopped drinking, and she visits his grave, engraved with his lovely poem Late Fragment (“And did you get what you/ wanted from this life, even so?”).

There, looking at the messages other readers have left, she pays tribute to all those “putting their faith in stories, in the capacity of literature to somehow salve a sense of soreness, to make one feel less flinchingly alone”.

And she comes to a moral conclusion, for herself as well as for her readers: “At some point, you have to set down the past. At some point, you have to accept that everyone was doing their best. At some point, you have to gather yourself up, and go onward into your life.”

She exclaims about Berryman: “Why, then? Why did a man of such prodigious intelligence, such gifts, return over and over to a substance that was destroying the fabric of his life?” Effectively she is asking that of all these writers and ends up not getting a reply specific to them as writers, however much she wants to find one.

For Laing is an astute and unsparing critic of even these writers she loves so much and she doesn’t credit for a minute any of the phoney arguments that drinking actually helped them. “I drink because it improves my work. I drink because I am too sensitive to live in the world without it. There are hundreds more of these excuse notes,” she says. She’s sharp about Carver, for example, displaying “an alcoholic cast of mind: a tendency to blame external factors rather than fronting up to one’s own role in kindling trouble”, even after he had been five years dry.

However, being high-minded in her literature, she doesn’t mention that another alcoholic author, Stephen King, discussed this subject even more forcefully in his book On Writing: “The idea that creative endeavour and mind-altering substances are entwined is one of the great pop-intellectual myths of our time… Hemingway and Fitzgerald didn’t drink because they were creative, alienated, or morally weak. They drank because it’s what alkies are wired up to do. Creative people probably do run a greater risk of alcoholism and addiction than those in some other jobs, but so what? We all look pretty much the same when we’re puking in the gutter.”

You can’t put it more clearly than that. And yet, and yet… The novels Stephen King wrote when he was a drunk — The Shining, Misery, The Tommyknockers, Cujo, etc — do have a wild intensity, a scary affinity to madness, that he has never quite recaptured sober.

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