LIQUOR AND LIT

A Portrait of the Writer as a Drunk

by Charles Deemer

(originally published in Oregon Magazine)

Like many writers of my generation, I studied in the

school of liquor and lit. Previous generations of

American writers pointed the way. My literary heroes

when I was learning the craft in the 1960s were (or

had been) hard drinkers if not outright drunks:

O'Neill and Saroyan and Williams, Faulkner and

Steinbeck and Hemingway, Mailer and Baldwin and

Cheever, James Agee. The hard-drinking American writer

was a figure of mythic proportions, and by the time I

graduated from UCLA I was eager to join his ranks.

But I came both to literature and to drinking

relatively late. In high school I was one of those

science nerds who didn't date and got A's. My idea of

a good time was to get up at three in the morning to

look through my telescope and fulfill my obligations

as one of the country's younger members of the

American Association of Variable Star Observers. It

took Uncle Sam to give me an appreciation for liquor

and lit.

I joined the Army at the end of a cycle of confusion,

a major life crisis at 20. I went from high school to

Cal Tech as a math major, but none of my previous math

and science teachers had informed me that I wasn't a

genius. When I discovered the truth by sitting next to

an authentic genius or two at Cal Tech, I was crushed.

I wanted to be "a pure mathematician" more than

anything else (the mathematician as artist), maybe an

astronomer next; I learned that I didn't have the

brains to be a pure mathematician and that

professional astronomers rarely look through

telescopes. I didn't want to become an engineer, but

this appeared to be my destiny if I stayed at Cal

Tech. I left with a B average in the middle of my

sophomore year and transferred to Berkeley, telling

myself I was now a philosophy major.

Berkeley in 1959 was like the Internet in 1994, full

of dazzling, chaotic energy. I became a street person

in no time at all, finding the street life much more

exciting than classes, and for a while I even lived in

a tree house I'd built in Strawberry Canyon. I was

beginning to drink beer and wine regularly and, for

the first time, to read literary books that weren't

required in a class.

I ended up joining the Army because I was broke -- and

because the draft was hanging over my head. An Oakland

recruiter decided I would make an excellent spy, and

so he put me in the Army Security Agency. After doing

well on a battery of tests, I was assigned to the Army

Language School in Monterey, where I was trained as a

Russian linguist. This proved to be a major turning

point in my life and a strong push toward a career in

liquor and lit.

Assigned to a company of Russian linguists in Germany,

I found myself surrounded by former graduate students

with Masters degrees in Literaure and History and

Philosophy, majors that would not give them deferments

to escape the draft as they worked on their

doctorates. They'd joined the Army to avoid being a

foot soldier, and they became my tutors. As one of

three odd-balls in the company who didn't have a

college degree, I became a sort of intellectual

mascot, and my colleagues fought among themselves to

influence me, one trying to turn me into an historian,

another into a psychologist, still another into a

writer.

I was still drinking in the minor leagues at the time.

My fellow Russian linguists, most of them five years

older than I, inspired me to try out for the majors.

Shy by nature, but looking up to these older, bright

colleagues and wanting to join their drinking clique,

I discovered a capacity to belt shot for shot with the

best of them, far into the night. I may be younger and

less well-read, but they couldn't drink me under the

table!

And so my Army career was highlighted by heavy

drinking and heavy reading in the most stimulating

intellectual environment of my life.

When I was discharged and returned to finish college,

I majored in English at UCLA. I was drinking regularly

by then, although I didn't really consider the one or

two six-packs I consumed daily to be "drinking."

Drinking was consuming hard liquor, which usually I

reserved for weekends. I was a student, after all,

with books to read and papers to write. Beer was what

you drank along the way because it tasted better than

water. A six-pack a day didn't keep me from graduating

with honors, Phi Beta Kappa.

After UCLA, I went off to graduate school at the

University of Oregon, where more than ever liquor and

lit were the engines that drove my considerable

energy. I was "someone to keep an eye on" in the

English Department, already publishing book reviews in

national journals and short stories in literary

magazines by the time I arrived. Although my first

marriage had failed, I quickly met my second wife, a

brilliant graduate student who liked to brag that she

had never met a man who could drink her under the

table. Then she met me, and it must have been love at

the seventh or eighth pitcher.

Everyone, or at least everyone worth knowing, was

hanging out at Maxie's tavern near campus, and when it

closed many would come over to our house for

nightcaps. Literary talk was loud and heated, at least

until the guitars and auto harp came out, and a few of

us sang folk music as others passed around joints and

mellowed out. My generation was too young to be

beatniks and too old to be hippies but we prided

ourselves on being academic bohemians all the same,

seasoned students in the school of liquor and lit.

When I graduated with an MFA in Playwriting in 1974, I

had a growing list of publications, the first awards

and productions of a playwriting career, and a thirst

for alcohol more insatiable than ever. But something

was beginning to change. The dark side of alcohol

consumption was beginning to reveal itself.

I don't have to tell you what happened next. You

already know. Alcohol is our culture's official, legal

drug, and everyone knows someone who has abused it.

What happened to me over the next twenty years is more

or less what happens to every alcoholic. The Japanese

have put the progression of the drinking life more

succinctly than anyone: first the man takes the drink;

then the drink takes the drink; then the drink takes

the man.

But why didn't I know about the dark side of liquor

and lit when I bought into the curriculum? What was so

attractive about the hard-drinking literary life in

the first place? Why were so many writers of my

generation (and earlier ones) such big boozers?

I first began to look closely at these questions

during the year I spent as an in-patient in a VA

treatment program. Assigned to work in the medical

library, I had a lot of time on my hands and read as

much as I could about alcoholism. I found two books

about the curious marriage of writing and alcohol

abuse in American culture and I devoured each, looking

for answers.

In "The Thirsty Muse: Alcohol and the American Writer"

(1989), Tom Dardis begins with fascinating statistics:

"Of the seven native-born Americans awarded the Nobel

Prize in literature, five were alcoholic. The list of

other twentieth-century American writers similarly

affected is very long; only a few of the major

creative talents have been spared."

Dardis points out that similar statistics do not hold

true for European writers, suggesting the affiliation

between writers and booze is a particularly American

phenomenon (and perhaps one that happened at a certain

time as well).

So what's the explanation? Dardis makes no real

attempt to find out. Instead he gives us detailed

chapters on the sordid drinking lives of Faulkner,

Fitzgerald, Hemingway and O'Neill, telling horror

stories similar to those one can hear in any AA

meeting anywhere in the land.

Dardis concludes: "All four of the writers discussed

here suffered tremendous physical and spiritual pain

through their heavy drinking. Three of them found

their creativity irreparably demaged by their

alcoholism; only one escaped from the grip of the

disease to discover that its very nature would become

his greatest subject." The latter is O'Neill, of

course, who sobered up and went on to write his two

masterpieces, "Long Day's Journey Into Night" and "The

Iceman Cometh."

Donald W. Goodwin is much more helpful in "Alcohol and

the Writer" (1988). Although he, too, explores the

drinking lives of a number of writers -- Poe,

Fitzgerald, Hemingway, Steinbeck, Simenon, Faulkner,

O'Neill, Lowry -- he boldly attempts to explain why

such "an epidemic" happened in America in the

twentieth century. His chapter "Notes on an Epidemic"

even has a subchapter entitled "Causes."

Goodwin lists three reasons why alcohol and the writer

go so well together. I'll relate each to my own

experience.

"1. The hours are good." No doubt about it, the

writing life (especially on a freelance basis)

provides considerable time for drinking. Most of my

life I've written to deadlines, paid by the project,

which gave me lots of wiggle room for fitting in a

binge or two. I'd get an assignment or a grant and not

expect to be seen for weeks at a time. No one cared if

I wrote at three in the morning or three in the

afternoon. All that mattered was that I deliver the

product by the deadline. And, to use alcoholic

double-speak, I never missed a deadline I didn't get

extended.

"2. It is expected." I've already confessed to buying

into the myth of the hard-drinking American writer.

All my heroes drank heavily, so why shouldn't I? I

think the association between writing and drinking has

changed in our culture -- or maybe just been

transferred. Perhaps in the sixties the hard-drinking

writer became the hard-drugging rock star. Same myth,

different characters. I look around today and find

more coffee shops than bars; maybe that's where young

writers meet. I hope so.

"3. Writers need inspiration." I don't buy this one.

Alcohol never inspired me. I couldn't write drunk and

didn't even try. I wrote with a hangover, of course,

but whatever "inspiration" may have come to me while

drinking I forgot by morning, and I always wrote in

the morning as soon as I could function. I'm one of

those writers who believe in perspiration more than

inspiration. But writers as distant as Fitzgerald and

Stephen King are quoted by Goodwin in support of

alcohol's ability to enhance creativity. Not with this

kid.

Goodwin next has a subchapter heading called "The

Loner Theory." He quotes an interpretation by

historian Gilman Ostrander:

"Alcoholism is basically a disease of individualism.

It afflicts people who from early childhood develop a

strong sense of being psychologically alone and on

their own in the world. This solitary outlook prevents

them from gaining emotional release through

associations with other people, but they find they can

get this emotional release by drinking. So they become

dependent on alcohol in the way other people are

dependent on their social relationships with friends

and relatives."

I almost fell out of my chair when I read this. This

described my life to the letter. A Navy brat raised

primarily by my mother, I became good at math because

I learned arithmetic as early as I learned to talk.

Mother took me everywhere and kept me quiet by giving

me pages of arithmetic problems to do, which I

obediently and quietly solved. In my teens I was

obsessed with using my telescope, a solitary activity

that usually happened at hours when everyone around me

was asleep. Shy by nature, I became gregarious only

when under the influence of alcohol (also part of the

loner theory), and the barroom became the center of my

social universe.

Goodwin goes on to argue that writing and alcohol

share something important:

"Writing and alcohol both produce trancelike states. A

gift for creative writing may involve an innate

ability to enter trancelike states. Being a loner --

shy, isolated, without strong personal ties -- may

facilitate trancelike states when it is time to write

and encourage drinking to overcome the shyness and

isolation when it is time to relax." This described my

working-drinking rhythm perfectly.

The loner theory, more than anything else I've found,

best explains to me why I was attracted to the

drinking life and why drinking fit so well with the

writing life. Maybe this doesn't describe the

experience of other writers. I'm not making a

universal claim for this theory (as Goodwin does), but

it describes my own experience as a hard-drinking

writer very well.

A former hard-drinking writer, I must add. Today I

hold up the model of Eugene O'Neill, who quit in time

to do his best work later in life. I hope I have the

same luxury.

I consumed my last alcoholic beverages on June 13,

1993, at Jazz de Opus in Portland. I went there on the

night before I entered treatment at the VA. I went

there with a credit card and a plan.

I sat at a table near the bar and spent the next

several hours saying goodbye to some old campanions. I

began with a glass of Guinness. I next had a light

beer with a shot of Jameson's Irish on the side. I

added a double shot of Stolichnaya on the rocks before

the beer was gone. I switched to a house Gin and

Tonic, a breather. Then I ordered a Bombay Blue

Saphhire martini, which tasted so good I had another.

Maybe the waitress thought I'd finally made up my mind

because I stayed with the Blue gin until I was ready

to go home.

For a nightcap, I ordered a special drink for old

times, a farewell toast to a way of life, a moment I

expected to remember forever -- and have. I ordered a

B-52. Its layers reminded me of the different

periods of my life -- the high school science nerd,

the confused mathematician, the Berkeley street

person, the linguist-spy-mascot, the ambitious grad

student, the less ambitious playwright -- each period

clearly set apart from the others. When I raised the

small, narrow glass and tipped it, the fragile

spectrum dissolved as each color ran into its neighbor

to become a drab concoction of spirits, suddenly dark

and dreary, just as the periods of my life finally had

succumbed to one all-encompassing description, which

had become more meaningful than any colorful

distinctions between them: I was living the life of a

drunk. I belted down the B-52, paid my

considerable tab, and left.

One B-52 pilot on one final mission. Over and out.

(But somehow I lived to tell the tale.)