Writing and Drinking

Though this blog is more about reading than writing, I thought I’d note “When Novelists Sober Up” in the online magazine More Intelligent Life. The piece chronicles the effects of alcohol on authors. Perhaps the most sobering point in the article is the line, “Of America’s seven Nobel laureates, five were lushes—to whom we can add an equally drunk-and-disorderly line of Brits: Dylan Thomas, Malcolm Lowry, Brendan Behan, Patrick Hamilton, Philip Larkin, Kingsley Amis, all doing the conga to (in most cases) an early grave.”

I can remember a teacher in graduate school advising students in his seminar class not to lubricate the writing of term papers by drinking; he suggested that one glass of sherry could affect one’s writing. In the same vein, the article quotes Ernest Hemingway saying “When I read Faulkner I can tell when he gets tired and does it on corn just as I used to be able to tell when Scott would hit it beginning with Tender is the Night.”

The article does note a number of writers who sobered up—e.g. John Cheever (pictured above) and Stephen King. Not surprisingly, the change affected their writing. Of Cheever’s novel Falconer, written after he sobered up, the New York Times commented “It is as if our Chekhov had tucked into a telephone booth and reappeared wearing a cape and leotard of Dostoyevsky’s ‘Underground Man’.”

The Whole Five Feet

Our 10 Books… list looks easy when compared to reading project undertaken by Christopher R. Beha, who set out to read the 51 books in the Harvard “Five-Foot Shelf” of classics in a year.

Charles W. Eliot, president of Harvard University in the early part of the 20th Century, put together the collection as “a good substitute for a liberal education” for the growing middle class who could not go to college at that time. The set, published by P. F. Collier and Son between 1909 and 1917, contains many of authors one might expect-- from Plato to Thoreau, and from St. Augustine to Darwin.

Beha, 27 at the time, worked his way consecutively through each volume. The beginning of this reading project coincided with his aunt’s finding out she had skin cancer. Beha spent time reading at her bedside as the cancer spread. During his year of reading Beha came down with a case of Lyme disease. So, the consolation of philosophy played a part in his real life.

Beha decided to write a chronicle of his reading experience and produced The Whole Five Feet: What the Great Books Taught Me about Life, Death, and Pretty Much Everything Else. Check the work's website after picking up the book from the library.

There was also a good piece about The Whole Five Feet in the New York Times Sunday Book Review