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July 29, 2009
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Morning jolt
My morning tours through the news are frequently numbing, distracted affairs. The prose I find on my tour of articles and newspapers and blogs is so flat, and there is so much of it. The life has gone out of the language, which is only fitting because, in many cases, the life has gone out of the subject matter, too. Now and again, though, something fresh and lively and inspiringly readable just shimmers forth, as it did this morning.
John Cheever was most unhappy to be picked up for vagrancy by the cops. "My name is John Cheever!" he bellowed. "Are you out of your mind?" Found sharing some hooch with the down-and-outs in downtown Boston, he was promptly admitted to Smithers Alcoholism Treatment Centre on Manhattan's East 93rd Street, where he shared a room with a failed male ballet dancer, a delicatessen owner and a smelly ex-sailor. "The ballerina is up to his neck in bubble bath reading a biography of Edith Piaf," he noted in his journal. He spent most of his time in group therapy correcting his counsellor's grammar. "Displaying much grandiosity and pride," they wrote in their notes. "Very impressed with self." Eventually he fell silent. Four weeks later he emerged, shaky, fragile and subdued. "Listen, Truman," he told Truman Capote. "It's the most terrible, glum place you can conceivably imagine. It's really really, really grim. But I did come out of there sober."He was the first American author of his rank to do so. Much ink has been spilled on the question of why so many writers are alcoholics. 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. According to Donald Goodwin in his book "Alcohol and the Writer":
Writing involves fantasy; alcohol promotes fantasy. Writing requires self-confidence; alcohol bolsters confidence. Writing is lonely work; alcohol assuages loneliness. Writing demands intense concentration; alcohol relaxes.
There is good reason to be suspicious of this: one could as easily come up with a similar list for firefighters, or nannies, the only real difference being that writers are more vocal about it--their denial more pithily expressed. As Philip Amis said of his father’s bottle-of-whisky-a-day habit: "He was Kingsley Amis and he could drink whenever he wanted because he bought it with his money, because he was Kingsley Amis and he was so famous."In America William Faulkner and Scott Fitzgerald were the Paris and Britney of their day, caught in the funhouse mirror of fame, their careers a vivid tabloid mash-up of hospitalisations and electroshock therapies. "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'," said Hemingway, playing the Amy Winehouse role of denier-in-chief. He kept gloating track of his friends' decline, all the while nervously checking out books on liver damage from the library; by the end, said George Plimpton, Hemingway's liver protruded from his belly "like a long fat leech".
Gloriously, there's more. And whether you care or not about writers, or drinking, or drunk writers, no matter. The prose here is so alive that it could be about anything and it would be good.
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Comments:
Gee, my reaction has been almost the opposite...I've been very impressed with how many bloggers can write very well...some of them writing professionally or semiprofessionally, but many of them in professions in which writing is not the main event, if it's important at all. Of course, there are plenty of bloggers who are mediocre writers, but there are plenty of mediocre anything.
Newspaper and magazine writers are another story...many of them write in a strange style, using words & phrases that seem to be specific to their breed. For example, I recently saw an articl somewhere that referred to Wall Street people and bankers as "swells." When is the last time anyone (other than a journalist) referred to someone as a "swell?" 1935?
Also, I find many professionally-done book and movie reviews to be virtually unreadable, again partly because of odd stylistic conventions (A "ripping story?" Who talks that was in the US?) and generally skip right to the reader review, some of which are awful and some of which are useful.
David -- Agreed the blogs can be much better than the papers. Some of the policy-oriented ones, though, can be punishingly dry.
In *Tastes of Paradise: A Social History of Spices, Stimulants and Intoxicants*, Wolfgang Schivelbusch (one of my favorite social historians) describes the effects of tobacco and coffee on Western and Northern Europe beginning in the 17th century. Early proponents of coffee saw it as a source of individual mental clarity and speed over against the macho group-centered culture surrounding taverns and alcohol. Schivelbusch asks us to consider the effects of such stimulants in the creation of the Enlightenment culture.
It would be interesting to examine writers and artists in terms of their stimulants and intoxicants. I've been revisiting David Lynch's work this summer, and it's clear that he is not an alcohol sort of man. Watching him direct, though, he always has a cigarette in his mouth. And *Twin Peaks* tells us he appreciates a damn fine cup of joe. Frank Zappa would be another example of an artist who worked best with cigarettes and coffee. Though he clearly enjoyed his beer, he was an avid non-alcoholic and non-drug user. Jarmusch's *Coffee & Cigarettes* does an excellent job of capturing the aesthetics of those stimulants.
I wonder what the aesthetics of the total square would be. What comes to mind is the puritanical straight-edge hardcore music scene, bands like Minor Threat and Fugazi.
My husband laughs about my blog and other writings sometimes - "You used 'churlish' in a sentence!" But I use "churlish" when I talk, too, sometimes, and "forlorn" and "vouchsafe" and other great words. You have to use words like that, or they'll go into a decline and we won't have them anymore.
The finance guy at the car dealership the other day noted that my daughter doesn't talk much. I agreed that she is terse. He didn't know the word "terse". Or "laconic".
My kid has uncharitably remarked of Fitzgerald and Samuel Beckett that they should have stuck to drinking. She had to read The Great Gatsby and "Waiting for Godot" in high school. Not her cup of tea.
Always a Golden Age.... I'm with David Foster on this one, delighted with the variety and quality of so much of what I read on the web. Of course there's also dreck everywhere, but then again the good old days were not exactly a field of clover. For every Mencken there were probably a thousand hacks, not to mention a Thorstein Veblen or two.
