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Pond Scum: A Writer Walks Into A Bar…
By Steve Finbow
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After a serious illness two years ago, I was told I wasn't allowed to drink alcohol for at least a year; seeing as I wasn’t allowed to eat or drink water – I swilled it around and spat it back out again – for two months previous to this announcement, it didn't seem too much of an imposition and although I missed the camaraderie of the pub – if sitting in the corner reading and trying to ignore every other person is a definition of camaraderie (it's not, I just looked it up) – I didn't really miss alcohol; I definitely didn't miss spirits; on a trip to Italy I had a hankering for some crisp white wine but substituted that for a fresh lemon drink; and I must admit that after the climb down from Ravello to Atrani the sight of the sun glistening through glasses of golden Peroni had me salivating, but I resisted and made it through the year alcohol-free; even when the doctor told me I could have the "odd" beer (and we do have odd beers in the UK – Bishop's Armpit, Hermit's Canker, Choir Boy's Winky), I didn't rush out and get hammered on wife-beater (Stella Artois). But slowly, over the year, I reawakened my thirst and now enjoy the odd and even even beer.
Art By Nicholas Allanach
In that year, when I wasn't drinking, I got a lot of writing done. So does that mean...Oh, I've come over all Carrie Bradshaw... alcohol influences the quality and quantity of writing? Or is it a muse, a means, an aid? And as an aside, who can hold their drinks better – the Brits or the Yanks?
Laydeez and gennulmun: On the undercard in the Red Kite corner Niall Griffiths, author of Stump; and in the Blue Star corner Augusten Burroughs, author of Dry. And for our main event: in the Watney’s Red Barrel corner Patrick Hamilton, author of Hangover Square; and in the Pabst Blue Ribbon corner Charles Jackson, author of The Lost Weekend.
Stump is a brilliant novel about loss, amputeeism, addiction, recovery from addiction, the dispossessed; it is tender, moving, and very funny. Griffiths’ one-armed alcoholic main character narrates the novel in demotic Scouse – the accent sounds like a hymn sung through a dodgy carburettor or a nightingale racked with emphysema. Stump’s struggle with alcohol and recovery from addiction provides an insight into the lives of the disenfranchised. Beautifully written, Stump is an important novel – please read it. Augusten Burroughs’ Dry is a memoir – sound of gnashing teeth – but it is funny and not maudlin or solipsistic (well, not much). Far from being a member of the disenfranchised, the main character works in advertising in Manhattan. Forced to go into detox and attend AA meetings by his disgruntled workmates, the narrator fights temptation (both alcoholic and sexual), deprivation and depravation.
Patrick Hamilton’s Hangover Square is a minor masterpiece of sleaze and longing. The novel is sordid, slangy, and sociopathic. Hamilton was a writer of and on the margins of society – the rain-sodden streets of his world, filled with smoke-filled boozers, held menace and desperation, similar to Graham Greene’s contemporaneous Ministry of Fear. Charles Jackson’s semi-autobiographical The Lost Weekend is a descent into solitary hell. Don Birnam is a writer and an alcoholic and in an auto-arm-wrestling match, the pisshead side would always win. Birnam, surrounded by enablers – unlike the interventionists in Dry – searches desperately for money in order to buy alcohol and succumbs to horrific delirium tremens. Hangover Square and The Lost Weekend, both made into films in 1945, chronicle the ontological horror of alcoholism and attendant madness and/or murder and, along with Malcolm Lowry’s Under the Volcano, are exquisite yet unyielding portraits of men stripped bare by addiction. Out of the four books above, only Dry will look like it hasn’t received Myles na Gopaleen’s Le Traitement Superbe.
I spent the last week re-reading Hangover Square and The Lost Weekend and didn’t have much time to go to the pub but when I did, I sat at a table reading John Berryman’s Recovery and listening to Geoffrey. Geoffrey is our local pub eccentric; he is in his seventies, dresses immaculately in gentleman-farmer tweeds, white panama hat, brogues, and a superb array of pastel cravats; he sits at the bar drinking strong lager and whiskey. His voice is a rolling mumble, interspersed with loud outbursts and swear words, which leads me to think he has a mild case of Tourette’s; however, his odd sentence illuminates the drinking night. He says things like, “I remember when the IRA invaded Canada,” and “Oliver Cromwell established the first synagogue in India.” These sayings, obviously grounded in memory, relate an alternate history or a form of the “new sentence” as practised by Gertrude Stein and Ron Silliman. Yeah, right – they’re just drunken bullshit. Geoffrey’s main subject is war, mainly World War II, and I’m wondering… bloody Carrie Bradshaw again… is there a link between war and the increase in alcoholism in the public as a whole and in writers in particular? We can take for example: Malcolm Lowry 1909 –1957, Under the Volcano published 1947; Charles Jackson 1903-1968, The Lost Weekend published 1944; Patrick Hamilton 1904-1962, Hangover Square published 1941 – there’s a PhD in there somewhere.
So, who’s more crapulent? USA: Edgar Allen Poe, Jack London, Dashiell Hammett, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Ernest Hemingway, John Steinbeck, William Faulkner, John Cheever, Jack Kerouac, Truman Capote, Raymond Carver, Charles Bukowski – and they’re just the prose writers – we can also add Hart Crane, John Berryman, and Frank O’Hara. UK: Evelyn Waugh, Malcolm Lowry, Dylan Thomas, Julian Maclaren-Ross, Kingsley Amis – hmm, not really a match, unless we add the Irish writers, James Joyce, Brendan Behan and Flann O’Brien.
I'm not romanticising alcoholic writers. Patrick Hamilton died of cirrhosis of the liver and kidney failure. Malcolm Lowry's "death by misadventure" had a lot to do with booze and blues. Edgar Allen Poe, found in a gutter, delirious, died from "congestion of the brain". Some writers, like John Cheever and Raymond Carver, were successful in giving up the bottle. I don’t think there’s a definite answer to whether or not writers use alcohol as a creative enabler, a relaxant, a means to conquer fear, or a way to battle neuroses. Writers work alone for the most part – that could be one reason – but not all writers turn to drink. If there is a higher incidence of alcoholism amongst writers, it is for a similar reason that doctors and lawyers are prone to alcohol abuse – stress. Alcoholism, like an Irish dwarf, isn’t big and it isn’t clever. But this isn’t hair of the dogma – I’m off down the rub-a-dub for a pint of Gary Glitter.
Click here to read previous Pond Scum columns.
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Steve Finbow writes out of London, England. He has worked for the poet Allen Ginsberg, the writer Victor Bockris, and the artist Richard Long. His fiction, essays, and short plays appear, or will appear, in Eyeshot, 3am Magazine, Yankee Pot Roast, uber, Locus Novus, InkPot, Dicey Brown, The Guardian Online, and Pindeldyboz. He is currently working on a novel (Yeah, right). He can be contacted here.
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