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’.”
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’.”
Sometimes altered states can be helpful, I guess, until they become destructive. My mother used to say "Everything in moderation and you can do it a lot longer."
ReplyDelete