One’s glad that the author of Cujo (Dog from Hell) is now clean and sober and has the AA chips (13 years’ worth) to prove it. But there is a kind of grisly one-up-manship about King’s confession. This is a man who has written 30 books in 20 years, gets $40 million advances, and drinks a gallon and a half a night without even noticing. You win, Steve. Vicisti, as Proxime would say.
Famously, Dylan Thomas ended his life on his knees before a young woman he had just met, with the ejaculation: ‘I have just drunk 22 whiskies. I think that’s the record. I love you.’ He promptly died of what the autopsy called ‘insult to the brain’ (and compliment to the lady).
If Dylan had claimed a mere six Scotches, the scene would have fallen flat (although he might not have done). If William Hague (the 14-pinter mentioned above) had boasted of drinking a mere seven pints as a lad, he would still have been five times over the driving limit and well beyond the measly units permitted by the Portman Group (who presume to advise us about ‘healthy’ boozing while somewhat hypocritically being funded by those who produce booze). But ‘one under the eight’ would have seemed, you know, ‘wimpish’. (Eight pints, or an imperial gallon, was the threshold of sobriety predicated by the British army in the old days, when soldiers were men and won wars rather than ‘keeping the peace’ like counsellors in khaki.)
Many drinkers, to their last gulp, remain convinced that they are in a contest that will confirm their manliness. They notch up their drinks with the morbid pride of gunfighters. (Are not empty bottles called ‘dead men’?) Drinking lends itself to matches and tournaments. One is drinking for gold; chug-a-lugging for the Queen, my boys. It connects with that pervasive sense that drinking brings out one’s full resources of manliness. Eugene O’Neill, who before topping himself drank a bottle of Scotch, left the other dead man there with the triumphant note: ‘Never let it be said an O’Neill left a full bottle.’ Beat that, you bozos.
Alan Sillitoe’s Saturday Night and Sunday Morning opens with a fine description of a drinking match. It is Saturday night (of course) in a Nottingham pub in the 1950s. Arthur Seaton, an uppity (‘angry’, that is) young man is enjoying to the full his youth in a postwar, morally liberated England. He can afford enjoyment on the high wages (with overtime as much as £15 a week) he is getting from the Raleigh cycle factory. Arthur is challenged by a ‘loudmouthed’ sailor to prove his manhood in the traditional, drunken way:
‘What’s the most you’ve ever drunk, then?’ Loudmouth wanted to know. ‘We used to have boozing matches on shore-leave,’ he added with a wide, knowing smile to the aroused spectators. He reminded Arthur of a sergeant-major who once put him on a charge.
‘I don’t know,’ Arthur told him. ‘I can’t count, you see.’
‘Well,’ Loudmouth rejoined, ‘let’s see how much you can drink now. Loser pays the bill.’
Arthur did not hesitate. Free booze was free booze. Anyway, he begrudged big talkers their unearned glory, and hoped to show him up and take him down to his right size. Loudmouth’s tactics were skilful and sound, he had to admit that.
Having won the toss-up for choice, he led off on gins, and after the seventh gin he switched to beer, pints. Arthur enjoyed the gins, and relished the beer. It seemed an even contest for a long time, as if they would sit there swilling it back for ever, until Loudmouth suddenly went green halfway through the tenth pint and had to rush outside. He must have paid the bill downstairs, because he didn’t come back. Arthur, as if nothing had happened, went back to his beer.
Arthur drinks three more pints. He then honks voluminously over some luckless customer in the pub before going back to give his current paramour (Brenda, a married lady) a good doing. It’s a guy thing. Later in the novel, when Brenda gets royally squiffy on a bottle of warm gin, it’s to procure the abortion of Arthur’s love child – conceived in high drunkenness, of course.
Oddly, the cult of heroic drinking to toxic excess accompanies a frequent reluctance to speak plainly about the damage it patently does. Sillitoe nowhere suggests that the exuberant Arthur is pre-alcoholic (as any young fellow who drinks routinely 13 pints and seven gins of a Saturday night clearly is). There is a strange unwillingness to call drunks drunks and thus demystify the wonderful adventure of drinking. Take the following from Jon Stallworthy’s (excellent) life of Louis MacNeice. The poet is approaching the end of his short and chronically confused life. He is on the brink of ‘retiring’ (i.e. he has been discreetly let go) from the BBC – a sinecure which at least occupied some of his wakeful hours (or ‘drinking time’). The South African novelist, John Cope, met him on the evening of 26 April 1961 in the foyer of Broadcasting House. It was time for the evening ‘session’. MacNeice, of course, had primed the pump with a lunchtime session:
MacNeice proposed a drink with friends, followed by a curry supper in an excellent place he knew. Hedli [one of MacNeice’s troupe of lovers] was in the George but he avoided her, telling Cope he was worried that she might make a scene over ‘another young woman’ in his life. Drinks followed in quickfire succession. BBC people rolled in and out with the tide. Plans were made and unmade…
From the George they went by taxi to another pub and another and another. Cope kept reminding MacNeice of the promised curry supper. ‘Yes – any minute,’ he would unconvincingly reply. By the time they reached the Load of Hay on Haverstock Hill, Cope estimated he had drunk a dozen beers and MacNeice more than double that. It was close to closing time, and the Irishman (who was still steady on his feet, as the South African was not) ordered a row of drinks and a half-jack of whisky to tide him over the rest of the evening. He then went to the telephone ‘to whistle up some girls’, but only managed to contact Nancy Spender, who must have heard the alcohol in his voice and declined to join them. When time was called, he emptied the last glass and, with his bottle, swayed out into the cold night.
A short walk brought them to a door at which MacNeice knocked. It was opened by his doctor, Jerry Slattery, and his wife Johnny, who took Cope into the kitchen and cut some sandwiches, which he ate gratefully. MacNeice looked at them, winced, finished his bottle of whisky, and fell asleep. The Slatterys told Cope this was a fairly common occurrence. MacNeice was almost living on alcohol and would sometimes go without food for days on end.
One may question whether the tally here is correct (any more than Thomas’s ‘22 whiskies’, which has been plausibly disputed by the poet’s biographers). The human frame, particularly one as debilitated as MacNeice’s, could surely not sustain something around 30 beers, and half a bottle of whisky, on top of a lunchtime intake and a chronically empty stomach.
None the less, MacNeice certainly drank a lot; a fatal amount, as it turned out. He died two years later, of what the biography euphemistically calls ‘viral pneumonia’, aged 56. He had, one assumes, pickled himself to extinction 20 years before his time. Alcohol killed him as indisputably as consumption killed Keats. But Stallworthy nowhere says that Louis MacNeice was an alcoholic – which he manifestly was. The biography delicately skirts the issue. MacNeice’s life and talent, for all its wonderful creativeness, was – much of it – squandered; pissed away. Why not admit it?
Much the same might be said of Kingsley Amis. Huge offence was caused to the novelist’s surviving family by Eric Jacobs’s account of Amis’s last days in hospital, sold for a huge (reportedly) amount of money, to the Sunday Times. Jacobs, a retired and evidently hard-drinking journalist, had formed his friendship with Amis over convivial lunches in the Garrick Club to which they both belonged. Jacobs visited his clubmate as he died, painfully, in hospital, and composed from his visits a picture of the novelist on his deathbed – a death surely accelerated by, if not directly attributable to, decades of very heavy drinking. Jacobs’s eyewitness testimony represented a massive breach of good taste (and true friendship, one might think). But nowhere in his article or his earlier biography does Jacobs come out and say that Amis was alcoholic.
‘Amis himself’, Jacobs reports, always reject
ed the A-word ‘as a term of abuse, not a diagnosis of clinical significance.’ Amis’s second wife, Elizabeth Jane Howard, was more forthright on the matter. At the time of the couple’s separation, in 1980, ‘she said she would return on certain conditions, the principal one being that Amis should give up drinking – not just his moderate intake or cut down a bit but stop completely and for ever. Drink, Jane argued, had been her husband’s main problem, the chief reason why he had become unbearable and she could no longer live with him.’
As most adults can testify (given the universality of the disease), drunks die badly. Society none the less conspires with the alcoholic to suggest that the drunkard’s death can be beautiful; an apotheosis. A notable example is the Oscar-winning film, Leaving Las Vegas. It narrates the last hours of an addicted boozer and gambler, played by Nicolas Cage. Having ruined himself at the tables, he is drinking himself to death (‘the shortest way out of Las Vegas’, as the grim old joke about Manchester and drink used to put it). The film ends, incredibly, with a Liebestod. Despite having drunk himself to the lintel of death’s door, Cage’s character conquers his alcoholic impotence to have it off with a beautiful showgirl, who, in the few hours that they have known each other, surrenders to his fuddled glamour. His brewer’s droop miraculously suspended, he rides out on the crest of the drunkard’s priapic dream, a death fuck. He dies, erect, magnificent and prepotent. Dream on.
The hopeful myth that alcoholism does not diminish sexual attractiveness is (to take one of innumerable examples) reiterated in another film, 28 Days (that being the period of time required for minimal detox in American sanitoriums). Sandra Bullock is shown in the early, pre-recovery phase of her story, disarrayed, falling-down drunk but eminently attractive (more so, one might think, for the moral recklessness of her incap-able state; the appetitiveness of rattlesnakes comes to mind). Paul Newman – who must, I think, have an interest in problem drinking since he so often chooses alcoholic roles – is similarly unblemished by advanced alcoholism in The Verdict (or in any of his parts, going back through Hud to the closeted gay alcoholic Brick in Cat on a Hot Tin Roof). Regarded in its totality, the career of Newman is a defiant assertion that ‘alcoholic stud’ and ‘alcoholic glamour’ are not contradictions.
The assertion is raised to absurd heights in the biopic of Charles Bukowski, Barfly. As played by Mickey Rourke (an off-screen ‘hell-raiser’, of course), the cultish post-Beat writer is shown dissipating himself relentlessly. He is filthy. His breath could peel paint. None the less, he can fight like a champ, he can effortlessly seduce beautiful (sober) women. Above all, he can write like an angel. Take heart, drinkers of the world.
Not Drinking: Alcoholics Anonymous
Society is rarely keen on constructive measures to help alcoholics. Aid is expensive and grossly intrusive (alcoholism is, I think, the only non-infectious physical disease for which you can be sectioned or locked away for the good of society). There are no votes in it as there are, say, in breast cancer, child leukaemia, or even – after Leah Betts, killed by injudicious intake of Ecstasy – adolescent pill-popping. The condition is notoriously intractable and drunks are (as most think) a wholly lost cause by the time that medical intervention becomes an issue. Say ‘cure’ to an alcoholic and he will see in his mind’s eye incarceration and the straitjacket, not the happy-ever-after of a sober life.
Society uses an arsenal of blunt instruments to keep drinking in check. Licensing was brought in – after some dramatic explosions – during the First World War to stop munitions workers (flush with all the overtime pay) drinking before and during work. In T.S. Eliot’s 1922 poem, the call ‘Drink up, please, it’s time’ was as topically new as ‘I did not have sexual relations with that woman’ was in 1998. The law has been gradually relaxed, and licensing, after 100 years, is virtually a dead-letter in the UK. In metropolitan areas, the dedicated drinker can find a sales outlet at any hour of the day or night. There remain some vexatious anomalies (sometimes you have to buy a meal, or pay a membership fee to some fictional club; there are price hikes for drinking at anti-social hours). It may be a good thing. Informed opinion suggests that licensing actually exacerbates problem drinking, encouraging as it does ‘bouts’, ‘binges’ and ‘Time, ladies and gentleman, please!’ gulping.
Excise duty on drink is one of the oldest and most easily collected forms of taxation (it can be traced back to the Anglo-Saxon period). As a ‘sin tax’, it has the added attraction that it can be raised to astronomical levels (as it has been in Scandinavian countries) without effective protest. Indeed, this can be seen by the official mind as a form of taxation that is actually good for the taxpayer. Of course, it never works that way. It is astonishing what other comforts of life drinkers will do without to carry on drinking. Excise is the one source of income the Exchequer can always rely on: boom or slump. (I have always thought it significant that the Chancellor traditionally sips whisky and water while delivering his annual Budget statement.)
Prohibition in Western societies is nowadays imposed by age qualification (the ‘RU 16?’ query in British pubs, ‘carding’ in American bars where the age of permission is, in many states, an absurd 21). Ever since the ‘noble experiment’ failed in America, total banning of drink – a war on alcohol equivalent to the war on drugs – has not been attempted in a Western society (there is a persuasive revisionist reading of American Prohibition, which argues that it did, for a short period, produce a healthier if unhappier population).
Over the last 50 years, savagely punitive strategies have been selectively applied, partly in response to pressure from such groups as MADD and moral panics about football hooligans. Drunks are more likely, nowadays, to find themselves in prison (or walking to work). Paradoxically, there has been at the same time greater social tolerance for skid-row destitution. Time was, 50 years ago, that street inebriates would be moved on or arrested as drunk and incapable. Now, in most Western cities (unless there is some great public event, like the Olympic Games), they are permitted to lie in the gutters and doss in doorways unhindered.
Sex and drug education is a big deal in schools. But not alcohol education. Bizarrely, in Britain, serious instruction on ‘sensible drinking’ is outsourced to the suppliers of drink, through such bodies as the Portman Group (a lobby subsidised by the brewers and distillers; foxes and hen-coops come to mind).
In America, bottles and containers carry warnings (especially for pregnant women); but not in the UK. Education of the young – incorporating practical experiments in the classroom – might well be a very effective way of training the young to handle a risky product, as they'll be bombarded with advertising for it every day of their adult lives. But no political party is going to risk electoral suicide by advocating seminars on controlled boozing in schools. The unofficial drinking schools that form in university union bars are notoriously reckless: nurseries for alcoholism ten years down the road.
The cures which the medical profession has devised for alcoholism have their vogue, only to be replaced with more voguish successors. All seem to say more about the period in which they originate than the nature of the condition. What they have in common is a general tendency not to work. The one remedy which does (perhaps) work is Alcoholics Anonymous.
AA was the invention of two men. Robert Smith (‘Dr Bob’), a proctologist, stolid by nature, and a heavy drinker (at least, given his specialism, he never had to breathe in his patients’ faces), had, despite his habit, contrived to hold down his professional job and family in the middle-sized mid-American town of Akron, Ohio. In 1935, when he touched bottom, the other man, William Wilson (‘Bill W.’), was a failed stockbroker and a fully-fledged dipsomaniac. At a Faustian moment in Akron’s Mayflower Hotel – poised between the bar and the telephone – Wilson had the happy thought that talking to another drunk might stave off another disastrous session. One thing led to another: clandestine meetings, the invention of the ‘anonymity’ gimmick, the Big Book, ‘12 steps’, ‘12 traditions’, worldwide expansi
on.
AA had some obvious historical precursors (notably the Washington Temperance Society). And one can speculate plausibly about supra-personal, socio-historical forces that combined to form AA at this particular time: the Roaring Twenties, Prohibition, the 1929 crash (which ended Wilson’s good times), and the 1930s cult of heroic drinking (which led to AA’s cult of heroic abstention), celebrated in the work of such contemporaries as Scott Fitzgerald and Ernest Hemingway.
From the apostolic few who gathered in the basement of King School in Akron, Ohio, in June 1935, AA has grown into the largest secular self-help organisation for sick people in the Western world. It’s bigger than the Masons, Oxfam, the Rotarians, the Elks, the Trades Union Congress, the White Aryan Resistance, the Samaritans, the Ku-Klux Klan, the Women’s Institute, and – in terms of dutiful weekly attendance – the Church of England.
AA is big. So is alcoholism. But the fellowship’s corporate grandeur rests on mysterious foundations. Given the inviolable ‘tradition’ of anonymity (‘the spiritual foundation of all our traditions, ever reminding us to place principles before personalities’), no one actually knows how effective the ‘Program’ is therapeutically. Estimates vary from the 75-per-cent success rate claimed in the fellowship’s more optimistic promotional material to the bleak word-of-mouth wisdom (current in LA meetings) that ‘only one in 30 makes it to a six-month chip’.
Last Drink to LA Page 4
