Why do writers drink? Why, you may ask yourself after reading William Palmer’s engrossing group biography of literary pissheads, would anybody drink? John Cheever’s son is quoted remembering his father at the Thanksgiving table: “Why does the man . . . have an open wound on his forehead? Why is his face swollen? He’s trying to eat a forkful of peas. His hand is shaking so violently that the peas fall off the fork before he gets it to his mouth.” It is a standout scene of abject domestic horror in a book that’s hardly short of grim details.
Jean Rhys was a violent drunk. Patrick Hamilton (the author of Hangover Square and Gas Light) soused his way through the equivalent of £40,000 a year thanks to his heavy spirits habit. Flann O’Brien used drink to stave off the threat of late-career fame when the comic brilliance of At Swim-Two-Birds began to win belated recognition: a TV crew came to his home at 8.30am to have a chance of catching him sober but he outfoxed them by downing a bottle of whisky in his bathroom and ensured that the interview was unbroadcastable. Piles, vomiting and delirium tremens are recurring themes.
So, with all this ruin, why do writers drink? For the same reason as anybody else: because, at least initially, they like it and they choose to. Palmer is cagey about invoking addiction alone as an explanation for drinking — he points out that there are some prodigious boozers who never seemed to develop a dependency, and even when dependency arrives it has to have been cultivated by a long series of choices to drink rather than not drink. “Alcoholism,” Palmer writes of Malcolm Lowry (who said “I love hell. I can’t wait to go back there”), “is in part, at least, and for some people, a willed affliction.”
The mistake is to think that there’s anything unique about the way writers will themselves into it, although that’s a mistake writers have often encouraged. Lowry’s totemic novel Under the Volcano celebrates drunkenness as a state of ecstasy (there’s a less romantic version of it in one of his letters: “I drank a lot of whisky with Charlotte Haldane last night . . . and was nearly sick in her mouth”). Hard-drinking writers have cultivated the idea that hard drinking and writing go together but there is no reason to see this as anything other than one of the many sly self-justifications by which the drinker keeps themselves drunk.
For some this mythology proved absolutely destructive. Dylan Thomas made himself the archetype of the boozy poet, even though (as Palmer claims) he “probably drank less than any of the other writers considered in this book”. Fans pressed more alcohol on him even as he visibly deteriorated, eager to have their own bar story with the famous drunk, and this helped to kill him. Yet Thomas’s best work, Palmer says, was done in sober interludes: “It’s time that the self-generated legend of the ‘drunkest man in the world’ was put aside in favour of what is unique and valuable in his work.”
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Thomas’s beer habit does indeed seem quaint compared with some of the drinking here. It is alarming and also surreally funny to read of Kingsley Amis embarking on a driving tour from the US to Mexico with his car provisioned against the horrible prospect of running dry: a travelling bar kit included “bottles of tequila, gin, vodka and Campari as well as . . . Tabasco, knives, a stirring spoon and glasses” and the first cocktail hour arrived at 11.30am. Or there’s the bleak scene of the poet Elizabeth Bishop resorting to surgical spirits in her private war against sobriety and ending up in hospital.
But attempts to analyse drinking as a specifically writerly phenomenon — such as that made by Olivia Laing in her similar 2013 book The Trip to Echo Spring: Why Writers Drink — are doomed because writers are as disparate as any collection of drunks. Some might drink to douse trauma, although Palmer considers that, of all his subjects, only Bishop truly had an unhappy childhood. Some are drowning a sense of inadequacy (it is suggested that Lowry’s drinking helped to mask anxiety about his small penis) and others are driven by shame, such as Cheever with his seething mix of bisexuality and homophobia.
And while drinking devastated some of the talents here, for others alcohol was a stimulant to productivity. Of Anthony Burgess, Palmer writes that “far from being a debilitating influence, it seems to have energised him”. Palmer is unsparing about the misery caused by alcohol (in his introduction he briefly mentions having seen three friends die through drink) but understands its pleasures too: its liberating, lubricating influence; the dawn interludes of clarity before the hangover bites; and the dangerous, enabling intimacy that exists between drunks.
He’s especially good on the particularly British (and now dying) institution of the pub, as lovingly recorded by Hamilton, by Amis and especially by Burgess, in whose novels Palmer sees “a public bar lack of respectability and a knock-about rambunctiousness . . . that is very heartening”. It is delightful to encounter this version of Burgess rather than the prissy and stern figure his reputation tends to emphasise. A book such as this could have diminished its subjects, reducing art to a symptom, but Palmer’s approach always finds more in the work, whether that’s by setting Burgess within the social history of the public house or redeeming Thomas from his own clichés.
Because although there may not be one defining reason why writers drink, they do all share the fact that they write and it is the writing that really interests Palmer. He is a critic not a fan and perfectly happy to accuse O’Brien of pickling his talents or Lowry of degenerating to self-parody; but his enjoyment of the good parts is infectious. It is an achievement to take on this subject and succumb to neither puritanism nor romanticising. In Love With Hell will send you not to the drinks cabinet but back to your bookshelves to rediscover the brilliance that Palmer’s writers couldn’t quite drown.
In Love With Hell: Drink in the Lives and Work of Eleven Writers by William Palmer, Robinson, 262pp; £20
‘He lay sprawled, too wicked to move’
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Possibly the best description of a hangover was written by Kingsley Amis in Lucky Jim:
“Dixon was alive again. Consciousness was upon him before he could get out of the way; not for him the slow, gracious wandering from the halls of sleep, but a summary, forcible ejection. He lay sprawled, too wicked to move, spewed up like a broken spider-crab on the tarry shingle of the morning. The light did him harm, but not as much as looking at things did; he resolved, having done it once, never to move his eyeballs again. A dusty thudding in his head made the scene before him beat like a pulse. His mouth has been used as a latrine by some small creature of the night, and then as its mausoleum. During the night, too, he’d somehow been on a cross-country run and then been expertly beaten up by secret police. He felt bad.”
