It had the stimulus of being a student again. For three years I lived in Soho, with a cane-back chair as my wardrobe and an ensuite toilet off the scullery that meant you could scramble eggs with one hand while you reached for the toilet paper with the other. Just down the road – Broadwick Street – was where William Blake had been born (no one, my Blake-expert friends tell me, knows precisely where he is buried). Across the road was the John Snow pub. It is named after the brilliant doctor who worked out that the killing cholera epidemics of the late 1840s were not miasmic (urban ‘bad breath’) but from London’s wells being spiced with the effluvia from the city’s cesspits – getting ‘pissed’ (as topers habitually did in the John Snow) meant something more literal in 1848, when cholera nearly killed my beloved William Makepeace Thackeray along with 50,000 Londoners.
Dr Snow stopped the particularly virulent local epidemic dead, so to speak, by smashing the pump handle on the water supply 20 yards from the pub and my apartment (a multiply converted 18th-century tenement). Every morning at six the pub would toss the night’s bottles into a bin. Crashingly. Pink gentrification, was seeping up from Old Compton Street, and semi-civilising the area. Banksy’s ‘gay policeman’ was visible from the front window. Soho was not as criminal as it had once been. None the less, by night, the nocturnal ‘youthful harlot’s curse’, as Blake described it, still echoed, chillingly, through the midnight streets of London’s naughty square mile. Soho makes one feel alive. It’s why it’s still there. I was, I should add, living with the woman I would later marry. I would recommend Soho to anyone who needs a late-life jolt.
I found I could best make a living as a hack (there’s no other word for it). Being appointed chair of the Man Booker committee in a controversial year for fiction (2005) was helpful, as regards profile. The appointment was made (mischievously) by Martyn Goff, the prize’s godfather. I’d been roundly criticised (rightly, I now concede) for things I’d done last time I was a judge. Martyn had done an end run round the Booker committee. The chairman was reported as ‘spitting blood’. One prominent London literary editor, who’d been on the earlier panel, waged ceaseless war against me – and did so for years after (I rather miss him, now that he’s lost his job). I was stupid (my friends and family thought) and reckless but, perversely, felt alive. Last Drink To LA was part of the recklessness. Sometimes in life you can justify it.
I’m, if anything professionally, a literary critic – a louse on the locks of literature. The hour before the announcement was made by me to the guzzling banqueters at Guildhall, 12 October 2005, is the only moment in my career when I can honestly claim to have ‘made’ literary history. The committee was deadlocked between Ishiguro’s Never Let Me Go and John Banville’s The Sea. I cast my hitherto withheld chairman’s vote for Banville – despite having recently had a very public row with him over what I thought was his unfair review of McEwan’s Saturday (another excellent novel of that bumper year) in the New York Review of Books. ‘The goalkeeper jumped the wrong way’, Ishiguro sportingly told me, later. The Independent, called it the worst decision in the history of the prize. It was not a lone voice. Banville himself was too shell-shocked to give a coherent speech and insulted the London literary world on, finally, rewarding a novel which pinned its colours to ‘art’. He is nowadays never introduced in print, or on the speaker’s platform, without the Homeric epithet ‘Booker-winning novelist, John Banville’. I did that – or ‘clinched’ it might be the fairer description. It was an honest vote. And, by my lights, a daring act. Had it not been for the changes in my life and personality I think I might have dutifully jumped a different way, and avoided the shit-storm directed at me.
I had, until the editorial shuffles that came in with the Berliner format, a weekly column in the Guardian. ‘You have your fans,’ the editor of G2, Ian Katz, warily conceded. He was a good editor to work under (and sometimes ‘with’). I liked the autour de mon chapeau freedom to write, as Orwell put it, ‘as I please’. I hawked myself around as a reviewer. Not everyone took my offerings. Why, I asked Peter Campbell, a friend and the gifted cover artist on the LRB, did his paper no longer use me? (I had, since the magazine’s foundation in 1979, supplied any number of pieces.) His wife interjected, before Peter could find a polite reply, ‘Because the stuff you’re writing now is shit.’ He himself put it more gently – I was, he said, ‘writing around too much’, spreading whatever it was I had too thinly. Marmite. And, as is proverbial with that product, not everyone liked it.
Peter has since died (pancreatic cancer – the most unyielding of the crab enemy). I would like to think the Campbells’ verdicts were too harsh. But if they said it to my face, others must have been saying, or thinking, it behind my back. But the truth was, I liked hackery: the deadlines, dashing off a suddenly demanded piece in hours, the angry letters (they mainly were). And, later, the abusive posts under the published piece. I liked writing books without voluminous endnotes which made me a little money and were read outside the academic village. Books like this one, I suppose. Or I’d like to think.
I’ve published three books in the last nine months. The most favourably reviewed has been the one on the famous elephant, Jumbo. The LRB did not review it. Just as well for my peace of mind, perhaps. The TLS swished it aside in their ‘Brief Notices’ section. The Daily Mail loved it, and serialised it. Top of the world, or top of the dung-heap? I console myself that if there is such a thing as higher journalism there’s also something one could call higher hackery. Whatever, I enjoyed it.
I have now been sober for longer than I was a drunkard. Life without hangovers, that cringing morning shame of dim memory, is a daily comfort to me. As said, I remarried, and that side of things is going well so far (so far being nearly ten years). I’m happy, in a word. But, there is a tiny rift in my lute. Something missing – like the amputee’s lost limb, which still itches. ‘Get drunk!’ instructed Baudelaire. ‘So as not to be the martyred slaves of Time, get drunk; get drunk without stopping! On wine, on poetry, or on virtue, as you wish.’
I’ve lost my attraction to every sort of drunkenness bar one. Somehow, with sobriety, I lost the capacity for getting drunk on novels. I’m not a creative writer. I’ve tried, but as has been politely explained to me by publishers, literary agents and friends there’s no point in my trying. It’s not in me. Like dogs and algebra. But I am, I like to think, creatively responsive to literature, particularly fiction. I have, after all, been paid a very adequate salary for 50 years, and am now pensioned to do nothing but read the books (novels, mainly) that I like to read and write about them. And it’s been the most consistent of my pleasures. It was Beaumarchais, I think, who said that heaven would be a sofa and an endless supply of new novels. If so, I’ve had a foretaste.
But the thrill of that response has ebbed palpably. The thrill that carries you to what you feel is an inner understanding of what you’re reading when you ‘touch’ the author. I comprehend as well as ever, but I no longer vibrate, like a tuning fork, when I read a really good novel. It’s not the kind of affliction that you could expect heart-felt sympathy for, but it means something to me.A little bit of my sensibility has gone dead. I’m still used as a professional responder to fiction (most recently on The Times). And I think my reviews are professionally up to the mark. But, as I say, like my hearing (the upper registers of which are shot) the thrill has gone.
In 2013 Olivia Laing wrote a well-received book, The Trip to Echo Spring. (I was one of the approving receivers.) It centred on the question: why do writers whom we admire drink so much? Why are empty bottles and pools of vomit the décor of so much great literature? Laing’s chosen writers were Tennessee Williams, Ernest Hemingway, Scott Fitzgerald, John Cheever, John Berryman and Raymond Carver. All American, all male, all self-destructive boozers, all geniuses. What is the connection? Laing undertook a pilgrimage to the places associated with their drinking to think it through. So why did these guys drink? Arguably, Laing suggests, because it made them better writers, or
, at least, the writers they felt they had to be. Does drink also, judiciously ‘taken’, make you a better – or, at least, more creative – reader of literature? Who knows. It’s not an experiment I’m prepared to try to add a little layer of icing to my critical efforts. I can live with the ailment.
I have now outlived two of my three closest friends (one of whom was accelerated into the crematorium fires by drink). It’s odd. You feel lucky, irrationally guilty, and doomed at the same time, like that superstition about the third cigarette from the same ‘lucifer’ in the trenches.
I’ve had cancer and am officially registered as ‘PWC’, a person with cancer, and shall be so until I die, whatever it may be that carries me off. Interestingly, the NHS assumes you never get cured, any more than AA assumes you do. Healthy living, both institutions believe, is a long remission – if you’re lucky. I’ve been lucky. ‘Recovering’, AA calls it, with the implication that you’ll never get to the end of that particularly yellow brick road.
The cancer that touched me with its cold claw had its quaintly allegorical aspect. I had wondered, as do all men, I suspect, which of my organs would be most vulnerable to the ‘crab’. Would it be the demon rum’s revenge – his dish eaten 30 years cold? Would it, that is, go for my liver, kidneys, or mind (late-onset ‘wet brain’, masquerading as Alzheimer’s)? No, it was clearly my early sexual misdemeanours that were at the top of the Reaper’s charge sheet. Prostate cancer. A chunk of my genitalia was removed by a robotic surgical machine, called by some joker ‘the Da Vinci apparatus’. I have a DVD of the operation. I am currently in remission. I can be a bore on the subject.
For practising alcoholics, life is a battery of short-term problems: where am I going to get my next drink, how can I hide the fact I’ve been drinking, how long can I keep my job and marriage if I go on like this? For the abstinent alcoholic, over a certain age, whose contemporaries are dropping away, the questions are vaguer and more morbid. Specifically, from which direction will the executioner come, and where will the bastard aim his killing blow?
Around the same time I wrote Last Drink To LA, I interviewed Edward Upward, the 1930s novelist (one of W. H. Auden’s ‘gang of five’ – Spender, Isherwood and John Lehmann being the others), for the biography. Natasha had done her usual proficient set-up by phone. Upward was living, as he had been for half a century, in a stately house on the Isle of Wight. He’d been a school teacher and, when he’d bought it, on retirement, such properties could be had for a song.
Edward was now close to his Queen’s telegram – 97 (he would in fact live to get it and last five years longer). His housemaid brought us some tea and superannuated cakes. There was an atmosphere of mothballs and deferred rigor mortis in the room – but a quiet dignity about Upward himself, wearing tweed on what was a baking-hot day.
How had Stephen died? he suddenly asked, out of nowhere. They had not been close latterly. It was Sunday, I said, he was writing a lecture he was due to give at Oxford, the following week, on Robert Graves. His wife, Natasha, called him for lunch. He went to the lavatory, suffered a sudden cardiac arrest, and was probably unconscious, his pacemaker still ticking pointlessly, before he hit the floor. He did not recover. ‘Ah, yes,’ said Upward musingly, ‘he was always lucky.’ He too, I believe, was lucky – slipping away, on the midnight with no pain, in 2009.
One can’t guarantee a ‘lucky’ death, as Upward called it – a death that does not embarrass, or impossibly burden, loved ones (all that sanitary incompetence), or render one a human vegetable. These are problems which I’m glad to have survived long enough to worry about from time to time. They certify the fact that my last drink was, indeed, my last drink. If I relapsed, I suspect, I wouldn’t last months. Now, by actuarial statistic, I may have many years. Good years, with luck.
I’ve been very lucky, and am, at the moment, happy – always remembering to add the AA mantra that such things as luck and happiness, like sobriety, are to be measured ‘one day at a time’. Tomorrow, as the lady in the novel says, is another day. Who knows. My luck may hold. Thank you for reading. And if you purchased this book, double thanks from me and all the brilliant editorial team (headed by Rebecca Nicolson) at Short Books. Cheers. Whatever.
J. Sutherland – 18 October 2014
31 years, 9 months and 23 days sober
About the Author
John Sutherland is Lord Northcliffe Professor Emeritus at UCL – a retired academic and a retired drinker. In his sobriety he has written many books, including recently, Jumbo (Aurum Press, 2014), the biography of an elephant who also had a giant-sized drink problem.
Copyright
First published in 2001 by Short Books
Unit 316, ScreenWorks, 22 Highbury Grove, N5 2ER
This ebook edition first published in 2015
All rights reserved
© John Sutherland 2001
The right John Sutherland to be identified as author of this work has been asserted in accordance with Section 77 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988
This ebook is copyright material and must not be copied, reproduced, transferred, distributed, leased, licensed or publicly performed or used in any way except as specifically permitted in writing by the publishers, as allowed under the terms and conditions under which it was purchased or as strictly permitted by applicable copyright law. Any unauthorised distribution or use of this text may be a direct infringement of the author’s and publisher’s rights, and those responsible may be liable in law accordingly.
ISBN: 978–1–78072–229–0
Cover design: Andrew Smith
Last Drink to LA Page 9
