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Ernest Hemingway and his wife Mary at home in Cuba in the 1950s.

(AP file photo)

Olivia Laing opens her new book "The Trip to Echo Spring: On Writers and Drinking" with two men in a car in Iowa in 1973. They're driving to a liquor store in "a Ford Falcon convertible that's seen better days." When they arrive, the older man jumps out while the car is still running and goes inside. By the time the younger man is in the store, the older man is "at the checkout stand with a half-gallon of Scotch." They drive back to the University of Iowa, passing the bottle between them.

The older man is John Cheever and the younger is Raymond Carver. They’re both masterful short story writers, two of the best this country has produced, and they were both alcoholics. Cheever was 61 at the time, famous but in serious physical decline, drinking heavily just a few months after being rushed to an intensive care unit with dilated cardiomyopathy and delirium tremens. Carver was 35, on the crest of success and completely staggered by the alcoholism that was destroying his family.

"He and I did nothing but drink," Carver told the Paris Review about his time at Iowa with Cheever. "I mean, we met our classes in a manner of speaking, but the entire time we were there … I don't think either of us ever took the covers off our typewriters."

The hook is set, and Laing goes straight from this anecdote into an explication of Cheever’s great story “The Swimmer,” how it opens with a classic Cheever line (“It was one of those mid-summer Sundays when everyone sits around saying, ‘I drank too much last night.’ “) and ends with its hero crying in the dark for a life lost in the bottom of a glass.

“The Trip to Echo Spring” is set up as a road trip, a narrative journey from New York to North Carolina to Miami and Key West and New Orleans and up to Chicago and St. Paul, ending at Carver’s grave in Port Angeles, Wash. Along the way Laing visits places important to her six subjects – Carver, Cheever, Ernest Hemingway, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Tennessee Williams and John Berryman – places where they wrote and drank and tried to drown or stay one step ahead of the beast within themselves. Her aim is to explore “the same dark trajectory” Cheever did in “The Swimmer.”

“I wanted to know what made a person drink and what it did to them,” she writes. “More specifically I wanted to know why writers drank, and what effect this stew of spirits has had upon the body of literature itself.”

Laing doesn’t succeed in reaching those unattainable goals, but that doesn’t mean “The Trip to Echo Spring” isn’t a success. It’s beautifully written, a deep dive into the underwater world of creative genius, where everything is dark and lovely and nothing is as it seems. Scientific proof of a causal link between alcoholism and creativity remains elusive, and after a couple of interviews with doctors and citation of studies Laing gets down to what’s really real for her: what these guys wrote and what they said.

There's a personal connection, of course. Laing -- an English writer and critic whose first book, "To the River," traces the Ouse, where Virginia Woolf drowned, from source to sea -- "lived in a house under the rule of alcohol" as a child. She read "Cat on a Hot Tin Roof" at 17 and for the first time "found the behavior I'd grown up amid not only named and delineated but actively confronted." From that moment she was preoccupied with writers and alcohol and attempted to make sense of it "by investigating the residue they'd left behind in their books."

Residue is the right word. The writers Laing loves (and love is definitely the right word) had plenty to say about alcohol and what it did to them but alcoholics are expert dissemblers and excuse-makers and storytellers. Writers are all that, and then some. Laing quotes an academic who in discussing Hemingway made some piquant points about everyone before and after him:

“It is not unnatural that the best writers are liars. A major part of their trade is to lie or invent and they will lie when they are drunk, or to themselves, or to strangers. They often lie unconsciously and then remember their lies with deep remorse. If they knew all other writers were liars it would cheer them.”

Williams, the writer Laing most admires, wrote a memoir that was even more conflated and compressed than Hemingway’s “A Movable Feast.” Cheever, sexually confused, wrote that he made it his mission “to insinuate myself into the middle class, like a spy, so that I would have an advantageous position of attack, but I seem now and then to have forgotten my mission and to have taken my disguises too seriously.” Fitzgerald told a friend that drinking “heightens my emotions and I put it into a story … Drink is an escape. … All sensitive minds feel it.”

Hemingway, accurate about others but not himself, repeated those same excuses while saying of Fitzgerald that alcohol “was a straight poison to Scott instead of a food.”

They thought they needed alcohol to create, or to decompress, or to keep the demons at bay. “The Giant Killer,” Hemingway called it. The connection seems inescapable – four of the six American winners of the Nobel Prize for Literature were alcoholics – and so does the disease to those who suffer from it. But it’s not. Jay McInerney, discussing Cheever, pointed out that “there have been thousands of sexually conflicted alcoholics, but only one of them wrote ‘The Housebreaker of Shady Hill’ and ‘The Sorrows of Gin.’” Hemingway and Berryman had clinically depressed fathers who committed suicide and did the same terrible thing themselves. Carver and Cheever had depressed fathers too and managed to stop their slow, drink by drink death spiral.

“The Trip to Echo Spring” takes its title from a line in “Cat on a Hot Tin Roof,” where Brick tells Big Daddy that’s where he’s going. He means the liquor cabinet, and to Laing it “sets off another echo,” to what Carver called “this cold swift water. Just looking at it makes my blood run and my skin tingle.” Williams was an obsessive swimmer; Hemingway was never happier than on a trout stream or in the Gulf Stream about the Pilar. They went under, all of them, bravely and at enormous cost, and brought back new ways of seeing the world. Those who judge them as drunks and liars should read them afresh and see them as Cheever saw Hemingway.

“He put down an immense vision of love and friendship, swallows and the sound of rain.”

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-- Jeff Baker

Reading: Laing reads from "The Trip to Echo Spring" at 7:30 p.m. Jan. 15 at Powell's City of Books, 1005 W. Burnside St.