Nelson Algren was a drunk. So was Royko – but when Royko made money he joined Ridgemoor C.C. so he could get drunk in private.

Two decent books on that relationship:

The second one is more personal, but they’re both good reads on the mix of booze and the muse. The tales of Carver and Cheever in Iowa are particularly eye-opening.

On-topic — My good deed for the day, a PSA on the Sinclair Method (the treatment for alcoholism with an 80% success record, but no one has ever heard of it):

https://cthreefoundation.org/the-sinclair-method

H. P. Lovecraft was a teetotaler, but he’s an odd example to give.

Both James Ellroy and Stephen King are recovering alcoholics. I do think that the combination of being highly emotional and irregular hours are conducive to drug and alcohol abuse.

I think that you have cause-and-effect right compared to the Chicago Tribune writer. Maybe the alcohol is helpful for getting the thoughts out, and the sober fiction writers just can’t compete. Try it for a year. I’ll try it for year. This is perfect timing what with New Years resolutions being made…

James Agee was an alcoholic.

A further note on Agee; a close reading of certain passages in Now Let Us Praise Famous Men, not to mention the title, will eventually get Agee canceled by the outrage mobs. Recent anniversary pieces have begun the deletion because he wrote about white tenant farmers rather than black ones.

Could have something to do with all the demons, lost souls and hungry ghosts that find a voice via the drunk person’s body. Some of those entities might have literary talent. Or the drunk’s wordsmithery is just the tool such characters need to share their unique perspective.

O/T

A possible late entrant into the 2019 Hate Hoax listings:

https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-7834413/Anti-Semitic-graffiti-including-stars-David-9-11-scrawled-shops-cafes-London.html#reader-comments

Part of it is the culture of the time. Reading contemporary accounts of the early 20th century both before and after Prohibition show people drinking on a level we’d find staggering today. That, and the use of drugs instead of alcohol hadn’t happened yet. So drinking was far more common across society than today.

Because they couldn’t afford Cocaine.

The act of writing is violently less convivial than those which inspired it.

Is it possible that the real purpose of this article is to give newspaper writers a compliment of their own? A high rate of beat writers and sports writers are drunks (the sports writers also enjoy a high rate of excessive gambling.) They must be great writers too!

It is something “racial”, Anglo-Celtic. Not going too long in history, most very great or significant modern authors (Thomas Mann, Robert Musil, Anton Chekhov, Marcel Proust, R.M. Rilke, Mikhail Bulgakov, J.L. Borges, Pirandello, ..) were not alcoholics.

On the other hand Joyce and Beckett were drunks.

Are writers disproportionately more likely to be alcoholics than the rest of the population? What about bloggers?

Drinking more than social norms allowed is caused by anxiety and a willingness to violate social norms.

OT

From a two-part interview with an author of a new book, part of which takes on The Bell Curve, which he claims has been discredited by later research. But I recognized some boners in his debunking, like the “words heard in the household” myth that was intensively studied, and then sort of didn’t pan out. Also “blacks to go schools that preform badly” is a circular argument. Schools with dumb students perform badly. His answer to all problems is to repeal zoning and move them all to the magic dirt.

But the point by point fisking of The Bell Curve is something that hasn’t really been done and shows the recent widening of the Overton Window. The Bell Curve is usually just deplatformed and ignored.

—–

https://www.citylab.com/equity/2019/12/economic-inequality-jobs-educational-opportunities-rothwell/604099/

In his new book A Republic of Equals, Gallup senior economist Jonathan Rothwell traces the forces driving … inequality ….

Richard Florida: In the book, you revisit territory associated with the controversial 1994 book The Bell Curve. You parse the connections or lack thereof between IQ or intelligence, education, skills, opportunity and economic outcomes.

Jonathan Rothwell: Herrnstein and Murray argued that IQ is important to many outcomes in life, that IQ is mostly determined by genes, and that racial differences in social status may be at least partly genetic…. I think they are untrue — especially the last two points….

We now know that IQ — which basically means how people perform on tests of literacy and numeracy — is relevant to the labor market and the sorts of occupations people enter. But we also know that other skills are roughly as important as IQ …, like conscientiousness, extroversion, integrity, and emotional stability.

As for the genetic component of IQ, … environmental factors are now deemed the dominant source of individual variation in IQ and educational attainment….

We know that IQ and other measures of cognitive performance are strongly linked to … what they absorb through their interactions with their parents and their communities and even in their neighborhoods ….neighborhoods matter….

Likewise, evidence from adoption studies suggest that growing up in more educated households where the parents are regularly reading to the children has a big effect on cognitive performance…. And evidence from immigration shows that children move up dramatically in terms of cognitive performance and IQ measures….

When it comes to groups, there really is no evidence to suggest that genetics has any role in explaining differences….

Likewise, international evidence makes it clear that there are no groups of people who consistently outperform others….

Richard Florida: So how much does education factor in here, and by that I mean unequal access to education?

Jonathan Rothwell: Studies that allow for comparisons across school districts and communities certainly suggests that African American and Hispanic children and lower-income children generally go to schools that perform worse….

Richard Florida: To what degree is our access to education determined by where we live?

Jonathan Rothwell: I’d say the first order problem in educational inequality is unequal access to neighborhoods. Neighborhoods are separated by zoning laws….

Are sci-fi writers straightedge? Building entire worlds without needing “enhancers” is fairly creative. Or were Tolkien, Herbert, etc. boozers/druggies?

Stephen King was a notorious addict (but was doing much better work as one). Now he has turned into one of those guys that aged into looking like a lesbian.

Tom Wolfe wasn’t an abuser, was he?

I swear I don’t work for the IRS, but what usually ends up being the most popular donation method? I recently switched from check to through VDARE.

Great writers are of course verbally adept and creative. Those abilities can be used to rationalize their own indulgent behavior. Great talkers can talk themselves into anything. You see this in talk show hosts, politicians and public intellectuals, who have an embarrassing tendency to show up in rehab for things they spend all day criticizing in others. These same personalities have troubles beyond drinking: inability to maintain relationships, wasteful spending, etc.

The example set by the alcoholic Fred Trump probably changed Donald Trump from fatal excess to mere excess.

I can think of a certain ethnic group that has high verbal ability and also a great capacity for rationalizing self-destructive choices.

Don’t forget Fred Reed.

But didn’t everyone drink then? and copiously?

Isn’t it just that we’ve become tee totalers by comparison, so when we look at famous artists from the golden days of middlebrow culture in America, their social behaviors look special? But they weren’t special for those behaviors at all?

I don’t disagree that the art of writing might appeal to a personality type that also appeals to the drinker, be it the addict, the neurotic, or the melancholic. But it was common and normal to multiple drink bottles of alcohol in a week thrn. and a bottle at a sitting.

I have a personal anecdote. My husband’s grandfather was a second tier writer trying to be in the social midst of O’Neill, Miller, Williams. Also a drunk. Not quite as talented, post ww2 he went to Hollywood where he wrote for TV, living a very high life and drank all of the money away. The TV writer lifestyle was very much a good for what used to be called a manic-depressive, though with less of that delusion piece that people now mean by the bipolar diagnosis. manic binges of writing for work followed by drinking to come down, with money coming in great spurts and then running dry. It wasn’t a lifestyle built for the moderate soul.

Four quick alt’s (2 Americans 2 Brits) Tolkien, Heinlein, Clarke, Asimov. So… General fiction -> Alcohol, Fantasy SciFi -> not so much. Weird.

I was a bad southern alcoholic in my younger yrs. I still love to occasionally hit a Mexican restaurant and devour margaritas w my taco plate when I can.

I also once fancied myself a southern Kerouac sans the Buddhist nonsense.

Sadly, I remain unpublished.

Hemingway was quoted ‘write drunk, edit sober.

My theory is that drunks aren’t writers first, they’re drunks who needed something to fund their drinking or social cover or something to break up the monotony of being a drunk. A few keep at it and strike gold but most don’t. The Charles Bukowskis and Stephen Kings* are rare.

*America’s greatest schlock writer.

Eh, probably more the odd hours than anything else. Having to get to work at 9 AM is a great inducement to curtail your drinking.

Moreover, very rare indeed was the book-jacket photo of the author, absent lit cigarette between index and middle fingers of dominant hand. To me, the broader and more interesting question is one of to what extent nicotine fueled the 20th century, relative at least to the first fifth of the 21st.

They were all married?

*America’s greatest schlock writer.

… who by all appearances was also a teenage werewolf. Many issues with that one.

Drinking relaxes you, that’s why. Lets you get past your anxieties about your work. I take xanax when I have a big project, and it makes me much more efficient.

Also maybe some of them exaggerated their levels of drunkenness for a more interesting life story?

British journalists used to be notorious for drunkenness. It was one of the stereotypes of the profession. I don’t know if this is still true.

Maybe it has something to do with alcohol temporarily reducing peoples’ inhibitions thus freeing them to write stuff that they would never have done sober.

I’m a somewhat successful American novelist who stopped drinking about 16 years ago. Here are my guesses as to why so many authors drink:

1. You’re only good for a hour to three hours of writing a day. Anything you write after that is going to be lousy. So you have nothing to do for the rest of the day, besides annoy your wife, correct the previous day’s work, watch sports on TV, sit around and think about how wonderful you are.

2. Novelists especially have to go deep, deep, deep into their heads to compose. Emerging from this state into the world of reality is jarring and disorienting. Alcohol may be tried as a kind of mediator between the two states. It’s partial success leads to ever greater doses – and diminishing returns.

3. Successful authors can achieve something close to immortality. The stakes are high. Writers are ambitious for fame, money and the love of beautiful women. The enormous gap between your ambition and your reality (squalid kitchen, screaming kids, debt) invites you to sandblast that reality from your brain with whatever alcohol’s at hand.

For my part, when I think of all the dumb decisions I’ve made in my life, I can’t believe that actually made the smart decision to quit drinking, and to stick with that resolution, whatever it cost me. Nearly every physical problem I had faded away, along with all my excess weight, chronic anxiety, and headaches. I cannot overstate how great the effects of this small change have been.

Faulkner was not an alcoholic, but a binge drinker who would go on benders after completing a project. It would be difficult to maintain that kind of workload if you were constantly soused.

I do wonder how much the drunkenness of famous writers isn’t a product of their peculiar subcultures.

I frankly don’t know who the truly excellent writers are today but I don’t have the impression that alcoholism is common among the ones who might fit that description.

Alcoholism today tends to be a marker of lower class, as is smoking, so not so many writers fall into it, I’d think. Maybe other drugs take up the slack for writers?

I think this has little to do with writing, and everything to do with Northern Europeans. Writers are famous, and so become famous drinkers. Joe Nobody may drink himself to death and it’s not news. Anyway, you will not find any Southern Italians on that list. You will not find any Jews, either (David Mercer is the only exception I have found, and it stuck to my memory precisely for being so atypical).

I am not saying Northern Europeans are morally inferior. I am saying their bodies react less badly to alcohol ingestion, and so they drink more. Eventually that becomes a habit, and a problem.

Here is a link concerning Jews:

https://forward.com/scribe/359475/are-jews-less-likely-to-be-alcoholics/

And one about Italians:

https://academic.oup.com/alcalc/article/51/3/347/2888209

Stephen King says he doesn’t even remember writing ‘Christine.’ But that’s not an example of great American writing, obviously.

Cormac McCarthy is touted as the greatest living American fiction writer.

https://www.independent.co.uk/arts-entertainment/cormac-mccarthy-1383419.html
………….
In the meantime, he married, had a son and quickly divorced. He married a second time – an English singer called Annie DeLisle. They lived in Europe, then went back to Tennessee. There was a period of heavy drinking.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cormac_McCarthy
……………..
In a 1992 interview from The New York Times, Richard B. Woodward wrote that “McCarthy doesn’t drink anymore – he quit 16 years ago in El Paso, with one of his young girlfriends – and Suttree reads like a farewell to that life. ‘The friends I do have are simply those who quit drinking,’ he says. ‘If there is an occupational hazard to writing, it’s drinking.’”

I’ve always had the impression that “drunk American writer syndrome” was a post-1890s phenomenon. After all, the list of canonical American male writers in the 19th century who didn’t have a problem with booze is rather impressive:Hawthorne, Emerson, Thoreau, Longfellow, James Fenimore Cooper, Washington Irving, Henry James, William Dean Howells, Whitman, Mark Twain*.Indeed, prior to the 1890s, I can only think of two first-tier male American authors who struggled with the demon drink, Poe (of course) and Melville.

*Twain was a heavy drinker, but not an alcoholic.

At least in the beginning of the drinking career, alcohol is like a shot of sugar to the system. It provides instant energy with a creative slant to it. Same for drugs with our well known rock musicians of the 60s-80s. Cocaine gave them some spurts of genius in the beginning. But once again, their health declines or their system gets used to the lift and the payoff diminishes. And can even lead to very bad health consequences, same as alcohol.

“My guess is that for poets and fiction writers, alcohol tends to make the world temporarily look once again glowing and luminous the way it did when you were a young writer of rhapsodic and lyric poetry.”

A bittersweet and balladic take on what can be a grinding process. The clichéd maxim of 5% inspiration and 95% perspiration still applies. The writers I know tend to be more stoney than drunkard. Although a few beers helps in dealing with the business weasels. And speaking of business: Good news for the E. Till 2.0 Tour. Tee-Hee Coates is laying out the red carpet for the Brooklyn stop. Tee-Hee, as you know, has monarchical powers in that magical borough and has promised he will provide refrigerated space for E. when it, er, he is not at the podium.

Couldn’t it just be that people who are less disposed to a normal life end up as better writers since they can focus all their efforts and time into it. Consuming lots of alcohol might well go along with being unconsciousness, a bad habit of occasional boredom or coping mechanism from having too much free time or being isolated as much as it being due directly to biological susceptibility to alcoholism.

If you’re more predisposed or find yourself having a more normal structured life you might give up on your writing dreams when your life becomes caught up in a job, relationships and a family. Great literature, like history, is written by those who show up.

Some great writers might have sought out such a life, some may have had such a life thrust upon them.

This is the question, did they just find themselves drinking a lot out of opportunity or boredom or were they actual alcoholics.

I’ve always had the impression that “drunk American writer syndrome” was a post-1890s phenomenon.

Yes, it seems it is mostly something during the first half of the 20th century, being less pronounced before and after. Alcoholism seems to be less common in writers after the “lost generation”, although, are there any great American writers who were born after 1950? Even DeLillo and Pynchon were born in the 1930s.

Alcoholism today tends to be a marker of lower class, as is smoking, so not so many writers fall into it, I’d think. Maybe other drugs take up the slack for writers?

Cocaine in the 80s, legal marihuana and vaping now? I don’t know.

Also (going back to the previous thread), this affects mostly Anglos, Jewish writers are less prone to be alcoholic, for genetic reasons I believe. Although Dorothy Parker (née Rothschild) was one.

They enjoyed more immediate access to the Holy Spirit so had less need of the liquid variety.

Stephen King was also a raging cokehead for many years.

Many evangelical preachers claim that they grew up in homes with an alcoholic father, so I have often wondered whether their readiness to commit themselves to religion had something to do with seeking a substitute Father who was loving and omnipotent to replace the weak and erratic figure known from childhood.

Billy Graham was 14 when Prohibition ended in December 1933, and his father forced him and his sister Katherine to drink beer until they became sick. This created such an aversion that Graham and his sister avoided alcohol and drugs for the rest of their lives. No word on whence came his father’s extreme aversion to alcohol.

Oh mother, tell your children
Not to do what I have done
Spend your lives in sin and misery
In the House of the Rising Sun

Writers have often been social misfits of one kind or another, and in the early twentieth century a lot of social life and entertainment, legally and illegally, revolved around alcohol and drugs. Successful writers who made a great deal of money will have had plenty of leisure time and plenty of money to spend and will often have chosen to live in leisure industry locations rather than industrial cities or country estates.

I suspect that most of these writers were also smokers and that a high percentage of their contemporaries who were not writers were alcoholics.

One might also ask why so many great jazz musicians were addicted to heroin.

1. It is true that religion is often one of the ways addicts (of any sort) kick the habit.

2. Religion opposing alcohol is more of a Protestant thing; remember Chesterton on the Pipe, the Pint, and the Cross?

3. That was actually pretty funny.

Walker Percy wrote about this brilliantly in “Lost in the Cosmos,” but it’s been 30 years since I read it, so I don’t want to paraphrase.

Dorothy Parker: “I’m not a writer with a drinking problem, I’m a drinker with a writing problem.”

Raymond Carver used to hang out at Traylors on the east side of PA. It wasn’t a dive bar. But truckers, millworkers loggers and fishermen used to eat there. There were better places to eat in port Angeles but Traylors wasn’t bad.

It’s well known that people who write things like advertising copy or business sales material often say they can churn it out faster with a few drinks in them. Writing isn’t that much different from talking.

Steve, it’s America, why stay sober? LOL. I contributed a while back. Am glad of it. Your style deserves attention, as I’ve mentioned before. There are very few critics in America who can demonstrate skill in both mathematical analyses of populations, and cultural criticism. How few? I can think of two. You’re one. You’re in a lonely place, dude.

I hope you get a good response to your latest appeal. God bless, buddy.

My grandmother would sometimes see Faulkner clearly in his cups by 10 am in a rumpled suit barefoot riding a horse down the street.

Fiction writers and poets tend to drink a lot for the same reason house painters tend to drink a lot. Think about it, man.

So the fiction writers from that list who are still widely read today were all heavy drinkers. Thanks.

Well, in the last 50+ years our Nobel Prize Winners in Literature have been four Jewish guys and one black woman from a Methodist Episcopalian background. But a lot of people say Dylan is hooked on pills, so.

I always wondered which pop writers like King will get more respect as the centuries drag on. Tolkien and Lovecraft’s stars seem to have risen (probably due to the economic heft of nerd culture), whereas you never seem to hear about Phillip Roth or Henry Miller anymore. (Politics plays a role in those two as hetero male sexuality is now Evil, of course, but you could think of others.)

Stephen King did his share of drinking but mainly preferred cocaine.

My theory is that drunks aren’t writers first, they’re drunks who needed something to fund their drinking

Oh dude, totally. Nothing like fiction-writing to bring home the big bucks. Except maybe writing poetry. And any palooka can do it!

I’m a pretty heavy drinker myself. Maybe if I just, you know, toss off a quick novel or two, I’ll be rich enough to fund the habit through my forties.

If Roth and Miller are examples, well, you can see “hetero male sexuality is now Evil.”

Tolkien and Lovecraft built universes—in Tolkien’s case, to an extreme unparalleled in fiction — Tolkien invented complete languages and histories before he began the tales of the Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings.

If King has an overarching mythos he might rise in value. I’ve heard the monster in It is opposed by some galactic good turtle or something like that and that all the monsters in his books draw from the same dark energy source. Or something. If its a viable, true overarching mythos King will last.

Jewish critics made Roth and Miller. Roth was pumped up because he was Jewish and his books are updated classic tales of Jews v. assimilation. Miller pumped up because Jews like sexually perversions.

In reality, neither Roth nor Miller is a very good writer, and that’s why they get forgotten if critics aren’t trumpeting them constantly. I’ve read Goodbye, Columbus and related Roth tales and they are either alien to me as a non-Jew and pretty depressing overall; Roth really writes for Jews and doesn’t reach out to explain things to those not in the club.

All artists – writers, musicians, painters – ride an emotional roller coaster. They have to seek the highs and lows to get the good stuff for our entertainment.
Writers and poets are essentially religious, even when they are atheist (Wallace Stevens). As religious visionaries they also seek the extreme highs and lows.
Look at documentaries of Elvis on-stage and singing with his posse after the shows. The energy of the stage performance had him in orbit. I understand why he became a pill user.
Writers go into orbit to produce their work. Re-entry to normal life is difficult. Drinking gets them back to earth.
Walker Percy wrote a good essay on this – writers in orbit and their re-entry strategies. Alcohol was one of the strategies.

My own theory is that it has to do with the right-brain left-brain split. Most people have their verbal knowledge command center in their left brain, in Broca’s region. The left-brain is also the precise, logical side. However, studies of the brain when it’s composing literature indicate that an area in the right brain, which happens to be the mirror opposite of Broca’s region geographically, becomes very active in the process of creative writing. The right brain is your creative, intuitive side. So that right brain region becomes the controller when you’re composing literature.

However, I think naturally left-brained dominant people have trouble activating that right brain region. They can’t make their left brain lose its dominance easily, so they resort to alcohol to artificially impair it and make it less active. Alcohol makes you lose some of your verbal fluency, but it relaxes you and loosens you up. It lets the more primitive side of your personality come out. Studies of painters indicate that they go into a mental mode in which they dampen much of their brain activity except for the regions that control the visual parts. Most people, to be creative, have to ‘cut out the noise’ from the rest of their brain.

Personally, I’m mixed-brained dominant and cannot imagine writing while drunk. Being mixed-brain impairs my verbal abilities because I get verbal input from both sides, and I’m always waffling over which one to pick. I always think of more than one way to write every sentence I produce, but I have zero problems switching into creative mode at will.

After the snobs die, I predict great praise for The Dead Zone. That’s a really well-constructed book.

Nabokov claimed that he had never been drunk in his life. Unusual claim for both an American and a Russian writer.

“I drink to smother my sensitivity for a while so I won’t stare away
I drink to reduce my seriousness so a certain spurious charm
can appear and win its flickering little victory over noise
I drink to die a little and increase the contrast of this questionable moment
And then I am going home, purged of everything except anxiety and self-distrust
Now I will say it, thank god I knew you would”

— Frank O’Hara, “Joe’s Jacket”

Likewise Love in the Ruins.

To me, the broader and more interesting question is one of to what extent nicotine fueled the 20th century, relative at least to the first fifth of the 21st.

That is an interesting question. Has anyone written about it?

P.S. A great deal of information about nicotine and its effects: https://www.gwern.net/Nicotine

Writers, like everyone else, are social and need to talk and laugh with other people physically present. But writers are brighter by far than almost everyone they meet, so they use drink as an equalizer. Being drunk makes the people around you less unbearable.

It also makes the kinds of things that people write about in stories actually happen—Orwell and Kingsley Amis wrote a lot about drinking and obviously got great mileage recounting things that never would’ve happened without the stuff.

If you don’t have a family, the bar is a place to go so you’re not puttering around the house alone all night.

Interesting. Thanks. Hope you stick around and comment more.

I once did a paper identifying nearly fifty phrases/themes from LotR which had remarkably similar parallels in scripture. Things like Jonathan’s arrow and the Oath of Eorl. You can see the inspiration more clearly in the Hebrew.

LotR will be remembered long after Lovecraft and the present madness. It was built to last.

Maybe its loneliness combined with the lack of professional oversight (ie. no boss or colleagues). Writers work, and live, alone. They have no structure to control their behaviors. Noone to dress up to spend the day around, etc. No safety limitations (not driving, or operating a forklift, or even sophisticated software).

My sense that radio disc jockeys are largely college kids who didn’t quite have what it takes to graduate (work ethic, essentially-often stymied by the same casual drugs or alcohol), so end up in a similar job-alone, no direct oversight, no colleagues to go out to lunch with,no women to meet, no machinery to crash or hurt oneself on, and so on.

Drugs and a lack of adult oversight are a tough combination.

joe

The writer has one deep source for originality, which is the language he writes in. But after some time God showed up on the scene and declared, that the poets language stems from an absurdly rich and powerful tradition, which had been started by him, God, himself at the very beginning of everything.

Since writers of a certain quality became well aware of these constraints they all began to weep and complain.

God saw that it was indeed unfair for later writers to have to struggle with all kinds of shimmering traditions and brilliant predecessors. Since God did not want to destroy tradition altogether he offered alcohol as compensation. The writers and other creative folk accepted this deal with God in good spirits, not least because everything else would have been ungrateful with regard to the big problem, God had indeed solved with the help of alcohol.

From this day on, serious writers lacked nothing but serious money. As the Jewish saying goes, the lack of money is caused by the Phoenicians, who did indeed invent money, but not enough of it.

In later years, donations were invented, to compensate for the Phoenicians’ shortsightedness.

Happy spendings everybody!

“To me, the broader and more interesting question is one of to what extent nicotine fueled the 20th century, relative at least to the first fifth of the 21st.”

Nicotine and caffiene fueled far more than the 20th. The Turks made a fatal error in bringing their coffee to the siege of Vienna.

https://www.wien.gv.at/english/culture-history/viennese-coffee-culture.html

why stay sober?

Same reason Trump, Ali, and Bradman do/did. To be the best.

That was actually pretty funny

https://www.britannica.com/topic/The-Divine-Comedy

My thoughts too. Sitting in an attic waiting for the muse to arrive must be pretty boring at times.

so I have often wondered whether their readiness to commit themselves to religion had something to do with seeking a substitute Father who was loving and omnipotent to replace the weak and erratic figure known from childhood.

If I’m not mistaken, sociological studies of religious practice indicate its frequency is inversely associated with troubled father-son and father-daughter relations. Paul Vitz has written on this question.

Anything you can do with this??

From the “Journal of Industrial Ecology”

https://phys.org/news/2019-03-white-people-habits-greenhouse-gases.html

An academic study that combines two obviously flawed disciplines that function today at about the same level of medieval alchemy: Climate Science and Nutrition.

https://www.vox.com/2016/1/14/10760622/nutrition-science-complicated

Best wishes for 2020, Steve.

It was true for a long time

https://www.ft.com/content/864c3a96-fbf1-11e5-b5f5-070dca6d0a0d

After reading this interview with Nigel Farage in the FT it seems its no longer the case, if the FT journalist can’t keep up with Farage over launch, I can only wonder what might happen if he was to have a few pints with Farage on a Friday or Saturday night, SAD

My guess is that for poets and fiction writers, alcohol tends to make the world temporarily look once again glowing and luminous the way it did when you were a young writer of rhapsodic lyric poetry. Whether it help you convert your vision into text, however, is a different question.

There is probably a brief period of time in the early stages of drunkenness when intellect and memory are still unimpaired that might inspire high minded thoughts, but the euphoria inevitably turns into a dull stupor. Maybe writers brain-storm at the start of a bender, taking notes, then develop their booze soaked vision into prose when they are sober. In time, however, inveterate drunks loose the ability to feel euphoria and can only feel numb. At that point the bottle probably ceases to be a muse.

You’re late.

Lovecraft is cancelled even from the popular/genre fiction world now (they just finished renaming the awards and veiling the busts) and he never really made it into academic literary study, because his work is interestingly racist. Pound and Céline were the last to get away with that; all the other great writers and critics of their generation (and the next one) admired them too much to push them into the memory hole, but that’s where they are now.

A few quasi-outsiders like Houellebecq and Burroughs have loved Lovecraft and made unabashed intellectual cases for him, but even his nearest literary descendants like Gaiman and King do the loudly-condemn/softly-praise/loudly-condemn-again dance now. Find an academic paper about HPL published in the last thirty years that isn’t about how he’s a racist or, more recently, incel (with a wife). You can’t.

King, despite his one-of-the-good-ones Twitter posturing, won’t ever make the canon because only a tiny fraction of his work (Different Seasons, Night Shift, …?) isn’t sense-stunningly shitty, and there’s no identity hook to lift it by. He’s a drunk white guy like the rest, just with more money—and money alone would redeem him to musicology, which is just institutionalized corporate bootlicking now, but that attitude hasn’t yet overcome Lit world, and if it ever does it’s gonna be YA/girl-porn only.

And also King’s a racist, if being the inventor of the modern Magic Negro “trope” counts (which it will if needed).

Late, late, late. Our world is never going to recover. It’s going to be more like it is, and then even more so. We don’t talk about Roth and Miller because we’re not smart enough to talk about them anymore, and we never again will be.

Right after black savages (neither white nor virgins) hacked at a rabbi’s family with a machete in New York, and shortly after they (neither white nor virgins) shot orthodox Jews in New Jersey, a masked man entered a church in Texas with a shotgun (which nobody is talking about banning) and shot at people until stopped by armed security.
https://streamable.com/m8sly
…
So, in the news today, we meed to come together against white supremacy, talk about banning assault rifle magazines that can hold bullets, and attack traditional religion in the name of men in dresses who will later commit suicide anyway.

1. Writers work in isolation and so lack the outlet of camaraderie.
2. Domineering mother leads to a neurosis that is the incubator of both creativity and drinking.
3. Jewish writers are alcoholism-exempt, due to dehydrogenase gene + cultural factors; compulsive eating provides a substitute.

Jewish critics made … Miller. … Miller [was] pumped up because Jews like sexually perversions.

Is that really true? One of the first paeans to Miller was by George Orwell in his 1935 essay “Inside the Whale,” in which he describes Tropic of Cancer as “a novel of outstanding value,” and compares Miller to Walt Whitman.
When Miller’s novels began to become available in America in 1959, Kenneth Rexroth raved over them, asserting it was “a wonderful thing” that they were being published here, describing Miller as a writer “of and for the people.” About the sexual perversions, as you describe them, that Miller wrote about, Rexroth said, “There is a rank, old-fashioned masculinity about his world which shocks the tender-minded and self-deluded. It is far removed from the Momism of the contemporary young American male.”
“Momism.” A word still useful today. It can be applied equally to the attitudes and opinions of a certain type of man as to a certain type of woman.

“The man bent over his guitar,
A shearsman of sorts.
The day was green.

They said: You have a blue guitar,
You cannot play things as they are.
The man replied: Things as they are,
Are changed upon the blue guitar.

And they said then: Well, play you must.
A tune beyond us, yet ourselves.
A tune upon the blue guitar,
Of things EXACTLY as they are.”

— Stevens, The Man With the Blue Guitar

Drinking is still commonplace in 2019(soon to be 2020). The president may be one of the first teetotalers the US has had in a long time.

King’s a completely different writer since getting clean and the stock criticism of him is that he was good high and is riding the reputation.

With regards to children’s writers, at 103, Beverly Cleary is not an alcoholic.

I would say it is more an Anglo thing.

Wine belt/beer belt/whiskey or vodka belt….

Simply, if you enjoy life, you’ll drink wine (and sometimes beer in a jolly company). But if you want to get wasted, then it’s whisky, vodka, whatever…

The Origins of Religious Disbelief: A Dual Inheritance Approach

https://psyarxiv.com/e29rt/

Do you consider Jonathan Franzen and the late David Foster Wallace to be great?

General fiction -> Alcohol,

Fantasy SciFi -> not so much. Weird.

Not in the least. The fantasists don’t need the crutch of an artificially-induced imagination. They were either born with one, or developed one along the way.

A goodly number of similarly imaginative writers seem to have been asexual, or close to it– Andersen, Carroll, Barrie, Lear, Shaw, Ruskin, Gorey…

Shifting to science, Newton and Erdös as well.

Stephen King says he doesn’t even remember writing ‘Christine.’

And I don’t remember reading it.

Fiction writers and poets tend to drink a lot for the same reason house painters tend to drink a lot. Think about it, man.

They get thirsty working outdoors in a hot sun and spend a lot of time perched on ladders.

I suspect nerd culture was always less into drug use than literary culture–the personality types are more physically risk-averse at least.

There was that joke about literary writers dying at forty in the arms of their fourth wife, and scifi writers dying at eighty in the arms of their first wife. (Theodore Sturgeon?) The point was that their lives were less personally destructive, though Roissy might argue that just proved they were beta-males who could only pull one woman. Most likely, of course, it is both…

Benchley and Kerouac died of drink. O’Hara would’ve died if had kept drinking and the same is true of Hammett. Capote died of pills/drink. There are far fewer English Drunk authors. And also American Jewish writers aren’t big drinkers.

Sinclair Lewis wasn’t really an alcoholic, since he stopped drinking for long periods of his life. He just loved to drink, and drank to help himself write, and to celebrate AFTER he’d written. Also, to relax in social situations and forget he was incredibly ugly. People would remark he was much funnier when semi-plastered. There’s a difference between a heavy drinker and someone who must drink. Hemingway considered himself the former, but after 40 he was obviously in the latter category.

I always figured it was self-medication for depression. Artists have been known to be prone to mood disorders for centuries. If you aren’t much affected by anything, you’re going to have a hard time producing intense emotions you’ve never felt in your work.

There’s also the fact that an itinerant life where you drift through a lot of different jobs is great for a writer (because you can see a lot of different people’s lives) but horrible for any other career.

Alcohol just isn’t the drug of choice anymore. I remember reading in National Review the eighties were largely driven by cocaine and the nineties by heroin (thus grunge, etc.).

Tolkien, C.S. Lewis (Narnia, Perelandra), and their circle weren’t alcoholics on the level of American writers. More like, on the level of American SCOTUS judges–i.e., they liked beer,and they drank in typical English fashion in an Oxford pub. My impression is that Tolkien, the family man and linguist of the lot, was less interested in drinking than Lewis, and his world is more intricately built than Lewis’s. But their interests in beer come through in their books, which feature beer-drinking.

FWIW, George Lucas strikes me as a teetotaler-type, although his work is more about re-packaging other people’s ideas.

Another American sci-fi writer in the re-packaging business was Joseph Smith, who reportedly drank, but not excessively. L. Ron Hubbard–a world-builder to compete with Joseph Smith–was reportedly an addict.

Not sci-fi, but I believe it was Evelyn Waugh who said he wanted to make just enough money to be able to drink a good bottle of wine every day.

Another famous English author and drunk was Ian Fleming. He developed heart failure, and his cardiologist recommended he switch from gin to bourbon (or bourbon to gin, I don’t remember) as a treatment–advice which shows the state of cardiology in previous decades. Fleming’s routine at GoldenEye was morning ocean swimming, followed by a few hours of writing, and then drinking. I always thought heart disease was a good price to pay for living that lifestyle. Plus, if he hadn’t been a smoker, his heart probably would been much better.

Related to the general topic, I think the relationship of alcohol to writing might have something to do with escape. Speaking as alcoholic with an interest in books, I find reading is one of the few activities more pleasurable than drinking, and the pleasure of both, I think, is in diverting the mind, which might apply to writing as well.

That strikes me as a deeply Southern bit of verisimilitude, even if it is real.

Maybe it has something to do with alcohol temporarily reducing peoples’ inhibitions thus freeing them to write stuff that they would never have done sober.

That would be my educated guess too. The creative part needs free reign, but editing needs sobriety. I would expect writers to have experimented with a variety of psychadelics in a quest to produce more interesting works (like song composers).

It’s funny to think that in the competitive world of coming up with the greatest creative content it’s a no-holds-barred free-for-all when it comes to PEDs, almost like Pride FC. Oh, you wrote Sgt Pepper or Pet Sounds while stoned out of your gourd? I’m sorry, but we have a court order to take that off the shelves and forget about appearing in Rolling Stone’s list of greatest albums, lol.

Nicotine gives a temporary boost to verbal adeptness and thinking in general. Something like caffeine but without the blinkers on. The half life is short though.

I find that after a day of mild nicotine use I am vague and struggle to find words as my body comes down from the effect. I am not sure if writers dose nicotine like a PED (easy to do with a lozenge) by cycling only when needed or if it becomes a habit. Inhaling nicotine by cigarette is famously fast to hit the bloodstream, so builds the addiction feedback loop very well.

Since God did not want to destroy tradition altogether he offered alcohol as compensation.

A rather cynical twist on Franklin. I can see why he distrusted Germans.

“Behold the rain which descends from heaven upon our vineyards, and which incorporates itself with the grapes to be changed into wine; a constant proof that God loves us, and loves to see us happy.”

https://www.thespruceeats.com/beer-is-proof-that-god-loves-us-and-wants-us-to-be-happy-353267

I remember reading in National Review the eighties were largely driven by cocaine and the nineties by heroin…

…with the NR staff following along, after a decade or so lag.

What the artist wants is “…fame, money and the love of beautiful women”.

I read this quote years ago but couldn’t remember to whom it was attributed. Jung or Freud?

Now, now… All your physical problems went away, but you stopped drinking and lost weight.

Fox News reporting on what /pol/ knew about Seth Rich years ago.
https://twitter.com/AnonMonkeyMan1/status/1211325750713954305?s=19

She lived down the street from him, during his “Count No’Account” period- the mid 20’s to early 30’s. She said that behavior faded out after he started getting some Hollywood work and a bit of rep. My favorite story was how Faulkner’s friend’s drugstore was the only place in town that would carry his notorious book Sanctuary and sold it in a paper bag. She and her sister got someone to buy it for them and sat in the woodlot behind his house reading it and trying guess who in town had to be the inspiration for Temple Drake.

This was all before the internet and video games, right?

I’m not certain but both Lawrence Block and James Lee Burke seem to be recovering alcoholics as well to judge from their most famous characters in their novels.

I can’t actually classify Bukowski as a writer. To me, he was just a drunk who somehow managed to get published.

Thanks. I hadn’t seen Gwern’s Nicotine page before, but I also experimented with Nicotine non-tobacco products as stimulants with success. Gwern uses the gum, due mainly to the low per-unit cost. I have the patches, which are a little more expensive.

I first experimented using a stack of nicotine gum, Sudafed, caffeine pills, and aspirin when I was working all night and needed to attend university classes wirhout sleep. Effective but made me feel sweaty and sick.

The patch gives a much less intense buzz than the gum. I use it now if I have to stay up late working.

As for addictiveness, I have a box of patches sitting in my closet that I haven’t used in months and never think about. Compare to cigar-smoking: I haven’t smoked a cigar in 7 years, previously did so only about once every 3-4 months, but I think about cigars at least bi-weekly and have done so since the very first one. No explanation for that; but Gwern says it’s MAOIs.

I haven’t read Roth and probably won’t now. I remember starting in on Miller at 19 or 20 and being completely disappointed. I almost hate to say it, but good Hemingway is very very good. Some of his short stories, especially, are excellent. Right up there with some of Joyce’s. Truly excellent writing is vanishingly rare though. I would say that O’Brien’s achievement with the Aubrey/Maturin novels is the greatest achievement with which I’m familiar.
Happy New Year to all.

Binge drinkers are alcoholics, no less than any other sort of alkie.

OT: Have you written about the Intersectionality Calculator, Steve?

How can I improve my score?
Unfortunately, you are born with most of your intersectional factors. However, you can make some improvement to your score by getting more involved with Islam or Judaism, donate all excess wealth to charity, or explore the wild side of your sexuality.

https://intersectionalityscore.com

I remember reading in National Review the eighties were largely driven by cocaine and the nineties by heroin…with the NR staff following along, after a decade or so lag.

… (and) while standing wobbly athwart history yelling “STOP.”

Lovecraft, like Enid Blyton, isn’t a great stylist, to put it mildly, yet his gloomiverses are far more interesting than the clever, crafted prose of, say, Updike.

Who really cares if Piet Hanema bonks another of his friends’ wives ? Whereas we do want to see Randolph Carter return home from his search for Kadath.

https://postimg.cc/tZHLQ2GT

Many evangelical preachers claim that they grew up in homes with an alcoholic father, so I have often wondered whether their readiness to commit themselves to religion had something to do with seeking a substitute Father who was loving and omnipotent to replace the weak and erratic figure known from childhood.

Preachers are a kind of salesman, and salesmen tell all kinds of white lies to close the sale. I expect men of the cloth are no exception. What’s a fib or two compared to eternal salvation for the flock?

Except here.

I suspect that the reference was to the Tar Heel Wolfe, and not the Virginian one.

Tolkien and Lovecraft built universes…

Speaking of Tolkien, the cover of “Fool on the Hill” that Björk recorded when she was eleven translates as “Elf Out of the Hollow”. Or “Hill”, if you honor the accent, but that makes less sense.

Nabokov was balding.

Alcoholics seem to retain a good head of hair.

A relative did this.

It is brilliant!

Mordecai Richler switched the brand of scotch imbibed (in great quantities) by his lead characters to McCallan’s at some point mid-ouevre. Apparently this only cost McCallan’s one or two cases of 18-year old product per annum. I would guess that Richler drank just the right amount.

Similarly, if you look at a list of those writers who are regarded as the greatest children’s authors of all time, from Dr. Suess to Beatrix Potter to Kay Thompson to Maurice Sendak to Margaret Wise Brown to the Roys-the married couple who wrote the Curious George books, to Herge, the author of Tinitin. (and you can add Lewis Carroll and H.C. Anderson to the list as well)

the one thing they all had in common was that they had no children.

Where any of those writers that good? Serious question. Now that I’m older I can be honest and say they bored me.

I don’t think they had anything special to say about the human condition. Nothing about their plots was that interesting. They simply reflected the sensibilities of critics, who are a grumpy bunch of neurotics.

RE: Drinking , creativity, and science fiction:

You could make an argument for being just drunk enough, I suppose.Lots of writers have commented on the “golden moment,” that beautiful interval between stone cold sobriety and being falling down drunk, when the words flow smoothly.The problem, though, is that that equipoise is hard to maintain.Most writers seem to inevitably tip over into the pure alcoholism phase, where good work cannot be done.

Interestingly, Gregory Benford (both a physicist and a Science Fiction writer) has commented that STEM academics (especially mathematicians) of his acquaintance tend to drink very little, and many are teetotal.Conversely, Humanities types tend to drink a lot (something that I can confirm from firsthand experience; I don’t drink, which makes me a huge standout at English faculty parties).Benford attributes this dichotomy to the fact that drinking doesn’t assist in mathematical/scientific work, but it can serve as a spur to writing.

I think this topic is Steve’s way of telling us he welcomes crates of whiskey in the post.

Exactly!

When I was a freelance writer decades ago, I would often write drunk one day, and edit while hungover the next.

The drunk writer me was bold, aggressive, free-associating all sorts of new links and parallels between seemingly unrelated ideas. The hungover editor me was sour and mean, unafraid to ruthlessly slash and burn. Sometimes, it was as if I were editing stuff written by a stranger I didn’t much like.

Not a good lifestyle.

What proportion of literary heavy drinkers were also heavy pukers?

Who’s on y’alls bucket list?

Proof of the Power Of Positive Drinking.

That sounds like an interesting paper.

I think the reputation of Tolkien will last a long time – it would be awful difficult for any writer to create something as connected to the past as the works of Tolkien are, even if the writer is more talented than Tolkien, and so I don’t foresee any writers eclipsing him in the field he shone in —-but I also think that, for almost all the writers we now think of as great, the most likely outcome is that all but two or three of them will, within a few hundred years, be as unremembered as the people who built all those wonderful parish churches in rural England in the period before the Reformation.

Some of the churches will have a few more visitors, some a few less, but there is not likely to be any one who is an expert on which churches deserve to be more popular, because nobody will care. There will be no extended arguments over the ranking of various novelists and poets from our day. There will just be a general feeling – benevolent and condescending at the same time – that somewhere out in the country there are a lot of charming parish churches.

And since that is the ultimate fate of almost every writer, it is far better for them to renounce alcohol, try to be the sort of person other people consider likeable and worthy of friendship, and live lives of friendship and companionship with their contemporaries, rather than to drink a little extra for just a little improvement in their “art” ….

Nabokov claimed that he had never been drunk in his life. Unusual claim for both an American and a Russian writer.

From the hysterical comedy, “Comrade Detective.”

BARTENDER: Get you a drink?

DETECTIVE ANGHEL: No, I stopped drinking.

BARTENDER: Vodka, then?

DETECTIVE ANGHEL: Sure. Make it a double.

Jews aren’t big drinkers. Aside from, like, fictional ones like Benya Krik.

LotR will be remembered long after Lovecraft and the present madness. It was built to last.

Just wait until the stars are right and the Elder Gods return….

Everything by Walker Percy is worth reading.

Dialog between wife and husband from Blue Valentine:

Cindy: I’d like to see you have a job where you don’t have to start drinking at 8 o’clock in the morning to go to it.

Dean: No, I have a job that I can drink at 8 o’clock in the morning. What a luxury, you know? I get up for work, I have a beer, I go to work, I paint somebody’s house – they’re excited about it. I come home, I get to be with you. Like, this is the dream.

If you were Beckett you’d be a drunk too. It’s as if the entirety of Christendom fell on him alone.

Agree. Bukowski appeals to the same crowd who like Wm. Burroughs, who think that being a vile drunk asshole is, like, Real man.

Kerouac is a good example, I think. That is, of a great “American” writer who got lost in the sauce.

Ti Jean Kerouac wrote “As I became older I became a drunk. Why? Because I love ecstasy of the mind.” From memory. Was that in Sartori in Paris? As a kid in university I used to think that was cool, but now I see his error(s). A prof tried to tell me of that pitfall in 1985. But of course I knew better.

And considering modern American writers, don’t many of today’s headlines sound as if they were written by Raymond Carver?

(BTW, there are interesting facts about Carver and his works — editing especially — that have recently come to light. I know.)

Just 24 bottles a year! Light weight!

Many years ago, some psychologists looked at AA members and concluded that most of them were “childish, emotionally sensitive and grandiose.” Fifties psychologists and stopped clocks are right twice a day, and that sounds like the type of guys who wrote most of the 20th century’s great books.

LotR is boring as hell. Unlike Lovecraft which is why so many writers rip him off. Look at Stranger Things.

At writing,or just in general?

Maybe that explains all those ads with the loving black husbands doing laundry,buying insurance and being gifted with Lexus SUVs?

Jazz great?! He couldn’t carry Kenny G.’s jockstrap!

I can’t actually classify Bukowski as a writer. To me, he was just a drunk who somehow managed to get published.

The earlier Bukowski set down a track of readable good lines but later began to portray himself in a formulaic manner. Try his Crucifix in a Deathhand, especially if you can get a copy in the handsome first edition.

Rothwell is a pathological liar. Everything he said was either the diametric opposite of the truth or, as you observed, circular.

Boredom is a state of mind with which I am unfamiliar.

I’ll leave Lovecraft to the naive.

Molon labe.

Bukowski was a drunk and WSB was a junkie and a pervert, but a gentleman junkie pervert, if one can imagine such.

In principle he was a misogynist and generally openly disliked women, but there were those he got along with very well. He never expressed any interest in me as far as I could see but there were several boychiks, not gay, but some local (either Lawrence townies or Johnson County or Westport hipsters that were there a lot) Scott Baio, Jackson Browne, young Iggy Pop type guys that girls fawned over, usually rumored or known to be bejingled (i.e., have a dig bick) I knew who said that he’d come on to them. One of the guys who worked at Ben (brother of MTM show Ed) Asner’s record store comes to mind.

Most were more, ahem, ‘honored’ than offended or angered and most just turned him down politely and he didn’t bother them again. He was usually accompanied by a huge, and repudedly homosexual, assistant/bodyguard/whatever named Grauerholtz who acted as a buffer for him and the outside world.

Both writers had a literary output that could be called…….drivel. At least to me it was.

I’ll opt for the parish church in Ufford, Suffolk, because it has the tallest font cover in all of England:

http://wikimapia.org/26223590/Church-of-St-Mary-Ufford#/photo/2927708

It’s 20 feet tall.

I don’t think Philip Roth and Tom Wolfe were drinkers, which is probably why their careers lasted so long.

Here’s another, The Thirsty Muse:

I feel as though I must have reviewed it back in the day, although I can’t be sure…for some reason…

I am an alcoholic. At low to medium degree of intoxication, there is no doubt that I am more creative and even, perhaps, smarter (better play chess, memorize more). That’s how it probably started – ethanol as a stimulant. My dad was the same way. Some brains are different from others…

For the reasons gave, I don’t believe there is any clear relationship between alcoholism and writing success.

Though I was never a drunk, shortly after my 13th birthday, I became a heavy drinker, and could drink half of the ex-cons in my neighborhood under the table. At 13-and-a-half, I blacked out on New Year’s Eve, and didn’t drink a drop for a couple of weeks thereafter. I started seriously cutting back when I was 15. However, I’d never completed a single piece of writing, save for possibly letters home from sleepaway camp, till I was 17.

On the other hand, the late Jimmy Breslin seems to have lost his ability to write, once he went on the wagon.

Tiny sample, I know.

Life looks better when viewed through the prism
Of liquor, hence alcoholism.
What drink got Capote
Lightheaded and floaty?
Not gin or vermouth, it was j—.

Sinclair Method works for no more than 25%. I’ve done it for 2.5 years, religiously. http://www.thesinclairmethod.com/community/ is a good starting point (I still have a login that is needed to post there but haven’t visited in four years). For me, the only thing that naltrexone ever did was to make drinking somewhat less pleasant. This, plus a will to succeed, has allowed me to keep it to about a bottle of wine a day, most days. But there was never a trend down from this level (I kept records and made graphs). The 78% rate is false – the claim is based on a single non-blinded short-term study that nobody was ever able to reproduce in a controlled setting. I’ve followed all literature and clinical studies on naltrexone and alcoholism and my conclusion was that naltrexone, with or without Sinclair modification, is about as effective as most other interventions. That is, it works – but only on a small subset of patients.

In the end, even though naltrexone has helped me to moderate, I had to give it up: the opioid receptor upregulation from chronic naltrexone was too dangerous (I am at high risk of being given opioids in ER, resulting in an accidental overdose). YMMV.

‘… I can’t believe that actually made the smart decision to quit drinking, and to stick with that resolution, whatever it cost me. Nearly every physical problem I had faded away, along with all my excess weight, chronic anxiety, and headaches. I cannot overstate how great the effects of this small change have been.’

How has it affected your writing?

Dunno. I haven’t read Franzen. I read some very nice short pieces by Wallace, I liked particularly his short non-fiction works (essays and journalism), but could not get through more than the first pages of Infinite Jest. Maybe I will try again one day.

Bulgakov was opioid-dependent for quite a while. His powerful short story “Morphine” is autobiographical. Russian greats poets Esenin and Blok were notorious drunks. Russian Nobel winner Sholokhov was definitely an alcoholic to the same degree his American counterparts.

But Nabokov wasn’t Jewish.

Nabokov was quite eccentric, so I believe him. He got his kicks by chasing butterflies.

No alcoholic worth his salt wastes his time with beer, wine, etc. As Ray Milland in Billy Wilder’s “The Lost Weekend” put it, you drink whatever gets you drunk faster.

Ah, yes, that’s right. Not Jewish. The ultimate Shabbos goy.

Plenty of people try to rip off Tolkein, but Tolkein studied and taught mythology, taught himself Finnish when younger to be able to read the Kalevala, and justified the entire modern fantasy genre with his Beowulf lecture, so it doesn’t work.
Just tonight I came across the letter to the editor in a story anthology magazine which is all but definitely from HPL and establishes him as an Edgar Rice Burroughs fan. It’s so good the only if is if it were a good hoax. Right initials, time, place, most of all that nerd-caricature style.
In praising ERB, he bemoans that the Barsoom stories got the number of days in the Martian year wrong by about nineteen. Lovecraft loved astronomy from an early age, built his own telescope, and corresponded with a nearby observatory. He would actually know that.

https://www.erbzine.com/mag11/1137.html

Any other lifelong teetotalers here? I’ve never taken so much as one sip of alcohol.

(Presumably, this means that I am not to be trusted.)

Because engineers, architects, chemists, historians, biologists, etc. don’t spend their days nights writing about it.

Of the ten million or so alcoholics in the US, I doubt that 3 percent would be writers.

Charles Bukowski

Crucifix In A Deathhand

yes, they begin out in a willow, I think
the starch mountains begin out in the willow
and keep right on going without regard for
pumas and nectarines
somehow these mountains are like
an old woman with a bad memory and
a shopping basket.
we are in a basin. that is the
idea. down in the sand and the alleys,
this land punched-in, cuffed-out, divided,
held like a crucifix in a deathhand,
this land bought, resold, bought again and
sold again, the wars long over,
the Spaniards all the way back in Spain
down in the thimble again, and now
real estaters, subdividers, landlords, freeway
engineers arguing. this is their land and
I walk on it, live on it a little while
near Hollywood here I see young men in rooms
listening to glazed recordings
and I think too of old men sick of music
sick of everything, and death like suicide
I think is sometimes voluntary, and to get your
hold on the land here it is best to return to the
Grand Central Market, see the old Mexican women,
the poor . . . I am sure you have seen these same women
many years before
arguing
with the same young Japanese clerks
witty, knowledgeable and golden
among their soaring store of oranges, apples
avocados, tomatoes, cucumbers –
and you know how these look, they do look good
as if you could eat them all
light a cigar and smoke away the bad world.
then it’s best to go back to the bars, the same bars
wooden, stale, merciless, green
with the young policeman walking through
scared and looking for trouble,
and the beer is still bad
it has an edge that already mixes with vomit and
decay, and you’ve got to be strong in the shadows
to ignore it, to ignore the poor and to ignore yourself
and the shopping bag between your legs
down there feeling good with its avocados and
oranges and fresh fish and wine bottles, who needs
a Fort Lauderdale winter?
25 years ago there used to be a whore there
with a film over one eye, who was too fat
and made little silver bells out of cigarette
tinfoil. the sun seemed warmer then
although this was probably not
true, and you take your shopping bag
outside and walk along the street
and the green beer hangs there
just above your stomach like
a short and shameful shawl, and
you look around and no longer
see any
old men.

Being drunk makes the people around you less unbearable.

That, plus drink will calm down a mind that seems to run constantly.

THE MARK E SMITH GUIDE TO WRITING GUIDE

https://www.dailyreckless.com/sasb/music/mes.htm

Hello I’m Mark E Smith and this is The Mark E Smith Guide To Writing guide

Day by day breakdown
Day One : Hang around house all day writing bits of useless information on bits of paper
Day Two : Decide lack of inspiration due to too much isolation and non-fraternisation. Go to pub. Have drinks.
Day Three : Get up and go to pub. Hold on in there a style is on it’s way. Through sheer boredom and drunkenness, talk to people in pub.
Day Four : By now, people in the pub should be continually getting on your nerves. Write things about them on backs of beer mats.
Day Five : Go to pub. This is where true penmanship stamina comes into it’s own as by now, guilt, drunkenness, the people in the pub and the fact you’re one of them should combine to enable you to write out of sheer vexation. To write out of sheer vexation.
Day Six : If possible stay home. And write. If not go to pub.

Using this method this is a poem I wrote called

Manchester

Dear TV Times,

Your majesties, I have concocted, through the noble invention and Blarney-craft of the humble Northerner, a system whereby constant annoyance by the telephone can be erased. This entails explosive charges left to me by a dead sailor from Bury being wired-up under every window sill in close proximity to my ears. When phones ring and are inconvenient to the ears, I just press table-lamp-like button next to my bed and they blow up. I got the idea from a book.

Yours sincerely,

Mr Reg Varney

Once you get a bit of pain I was splitting meself.
Them ‘illybillies!
Manchester is Manchester ship, cringing for punishment

The Gurkhas keep on advancing
The old cronies babble on TV
The leaders of the kids are drinking whisky with the rich
While the sparks fly in the plaza
Where the workers mass together

I got the idea from a book
I got the idea from a book
Them ‘illybillies!
Them ‘illybillies!

This brilliant album is entirely about that:

Yes, but what about A.A. Milne, Kenneth Grahame, Tolkien, Rudyard Kipling, Richard Adams, George MacDonald, Bill Peet, or (stepping away from strict written literature) Walt Disney? All made major contributions to “children’s” fiction, and all had kids of their own.

At writing.

Franzen has an essay collection called How To Be Alone. It has good pieces on the incompetence of the Post Office and life in the supermax prison in Colorado.

The question is a very protestant one, a judeo-christian one. It’s posited with the assumption that the greatest crime against humanity is an addiction to alcohol.

Why the great antipathy towards alcohol singled out from among ALL the great smorgasbord of sins?

Why not usury? Why not an addiction to enslaving entire populations throughout generations to unrepayable debt? What is it with the great american antipathy towards alcohol? Is it because a love of wine or beer produces in a man the catalyst of a sequence of events we call introspection upon a commonality of all people which runs counter to enslaving all people to compound interest?

Has drunkenness had half the effect of perpetual enslavement to compound interest rates?

Where the great American outcry against payday loans!?

Instead the faux morality, the bleating concern, insincere brotherhood, sanctimonious pretend cries out to heaven for vengeance.

Alcohol made Enkidu human. Usury enslaved Esau and all his heirs.

As the late great R. H. Tawney said of Judaic inspired English capitalists: your heaven is to be no better than fat earthworms moving about in a heap of manure.

Kenny G does not need a jockstrap.

Even bread contains small amounts of alcohol. You are in denial.

Yes:

I am lying on the floor drinking warm Tang to which two duck eggs have been added plus two ounces of vodka plus a dash of Tabasco.

‘Similarly, if you look at a list of those writers who are regarded as the greatest children’s authors of all time, from Dr. Suess to Beatrix Potter…’

Hey. I still read the Blessed Beatrix, and I’m in my sixties.

Anything worth knowing can be found in The Tale of a Fierce Bad Rabbit.

Great, great comment. I’m going to use that quote for sure.

When I run across Stephen Kong’s tweets about Trump, I ask myself how recovered is he? It’s one thing to have an opinion, another to express one’s self in the manner of a college sophomore with a blood alcohol of 0.2 %.

Novelists especially have to go deep, deep, deep into their heads to compose.

Thanks for the insightful post.

George Orwell, a tea tottler though a heavy smoker, escaped to isolated Barnhill on the Scottish Hebrides island of Jura in 1947 – 48 when writing 1984.

Sadly, tuberculosis would take him in 1950, something virtually unheard of today in the West.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Barnhill,_Jura

Many of the father’s in my family’s social orbit back in the 1950s-mid-60s had their photographed portraits (black and white by Bachrach) made with them looking thoughtful, in a business suit, holding a lighted cigarette. My Dad quit cold-turkey his pack-a-day Pall Mall habit and then 7 mos later despaired over his photo in my brother’s wedding album showing his tuxedo cummerbund protruding out of his once trim figure!

I entered college in 1963 where almost all of us girls smoked and had since we were 15. Our weekly room clean-up inspectors checked for washed ashtrays, not just dumped out into the hallway’s fireproof metal cans provided for this purpose. Smoking cigarettes is what you did between classes, having coffee and chatting with friends and professors, who also were smoking cigarettes. I can still remember the brands my friends smoked fifty years ago! A couple of kids had fancy gold Dunhill lighters that they carried to dinner in the dorm dining room, on top of their pack of cigs. No smoking allowed there, though, but after dinner there would be demi-tasse in the parlor and lots of bridge games going strong. Background music provided by a pianist classmate. Between the players sitting cross-legged on the rug with skirts (had to wear them at dinner) tucked between legs and crotch were heavy glass ashtrays with cigarettes a-light in the grooved corners. Our dates mostly smoked, too, unless they were on the crew at their college. The bars with music that we went to were definitely “smoke-filled” rooms.

The thing I want to say loud and clear is that there were no FAT women back then, unless that person was ill and institutionalized. You wore clothes that FITTED you. People smoked instead of ordering french fries or “snack cakes” and all the other garbage we eat today. Indulged in moderately — less than a pack a day or when pregnant — I think that our health is worse off for having abandoned nicotine. Yes, smoking has become a marker for lower-class life — along with the horror of the junk-food diet with children being raised on the stuff. This will not end well.

Hunter S. Thompson could write.

From “Fear and Loathing”:

“The trunk of the car looked like a mobile police narcotics lab. We had two bags of grass, seventy-five pellets of mescaline, five sheets of high-powered blotter acid, a salt shaker half full of cocaine, and a whole galaxy of multi-colored uppers, downers, screamers, laughers, and also a quart of tequila, a quart of rum, a case of Budweiser, a pint of raw ether and two dozen amyls. Not that we needed all that for the trip, but once you get locked into a serious drug-collection, the tendency is to push it as far as you can.”

https://www.theguardian.com/lifeandstyle/2016/mar/27/the-night-i-spent-drinking-with-hunter-s-thompson-ruaridh-nicoll

I see you are still posting OT rubbish which involve your pet obsessions.

That same crowd includes the libtards who flock into modern jazz venues and pretend to like it, as though it’s actually coherent music. I see it as the Emperor’s New Clothes syndrome. Pretending to like something for fear of being thought uncool seems to be the basis of that syndrome.

” That is, of a great “American” writer who got lost in the sauce. ”

You misplaced the scare quotes there, didn’t you? They belong around the word “great”.

Joe Sweet wrote: ” Or the drunk’s wordsmithery is just the tool such characters need to share their unique perspective.”

I suspect that Winston Churchill was just such a character . . .

https://www.thedrinksbusiness.com/2013/02/famous-and-funny-alcohol-quotes/3/

Why the great antipathy towards alcohol singled out from among ALL the great smorgasbord of sins?

Historically alcohol has inflicted devastation on populations. In London from 1720-1750 the effects of gin on a population used to nothing stronger than beer was equivalent to the effects of crack cocaine on inner cities in the US.

At the time of the Prohibition Amendment, there was a fair amount of support due to the frequency of drunkenness and related crime and violence, child abuse, liver disease, fetal alcohol syndrome and so on. It was not actually made illegal to drink alcohol. You could make wine at home and drink it. Unfortunately Prohibition fueled organized crime, and didn’t work out too well.

In today’s America, gluttony, which was formerly one of the seven deadly sins, is given a pass, and pride has been reclassified as self esteem.

Yep. In fact Breslin seems to have lost his sense of humor once he got off the sauce. That brain event he had in ’96 or thereabouts didn’t have nearly the effect on his writing ability that getting sober has.

Just Trump. You know he’s a lurker here.

Not lifelong, but I’ve recently sworn the stuff off. I come from a family that probably does have a genetic predisposition to addiction, and my own mental chemistry sharpens that. Alcohol is the most common, though far from the only substance. That didn’t lead to the decision, but it helped support it.

The key was realizing it after the resolution to quit, not before or during it, and I suspect that’s the case for most. If you focus on unfortunate twists and turns in your life too early, you risk taking your focus off personal responsibility and free will, and whatever you do, you can’t do that, all the moreso because you are going against pretty much everything modern US culture will imply. An addict has precious little staying power in the beginning: it’s a beautiful, but fragile thing, when the junkie is genuinely, truly ready to change. If he’s to succeed, he can’t lose that monomaniacal focus on taking charge of his life early on, and he’s going up against a lot. That’s why being surrounded by the right people can make it so much easier.

But if you incorporate it afterwards as a secondary, supplemental thing, you’ll be better able to handle the cravings to relapse because you won’t think you are a complete piece of crap. You’ve got to remember there’s a point to changing, that you don’t necessarily have to be in the future what you’ve become now.

On the creativity thing: booze can lower your inhibitions, the right kind of drug-cocaine or speed-can increase your processing power. I’m sure I could think of tons of interesting things about physics or code at supercharged levels in that mental state, in a way that I wouldn’t otherwise. But the cost comes in terms of long-term preservation of your brain.

I sure hope that no one here is dumb enough to treat the Nobel Prize in Literature with any seriousness.

It was Freud.

Has not affected my writing, as far as I can tell, although it would be hard to separate out the effect from other life changes.

I don’t think Orwell was a teetotaler. He wrote fondly of his favorite pub with cream china beer mugs, and generally regarded teetotalers as cranks.

In Down and Out in London and Paris he describes deliberately getting drunk so that he could be arrested.

? The authors in the text mentioned?

Alright, write, say, names of the 8-10 authors you consider to be good/very good, and we’ll see what your criteria are….

Sigh… As someone completely uninterested in any kind of alcohol (my body-mind complex actually repels even beer)- I sympathize. My antipathy toward liquor is probably as natural as your “sympathy”.

It’s genetic, I guess…

If I recall correctly, Balzac said that every man wants love & fame.

Freud said something like this: the meaning of life is in love and work.

He left the drinking to his protagonists.

You describe that social circle well. My grandfather smoked for sixty years, and seemed never to have a cigarette out of either his hand or his lips (he was a well-known and much photographed man in his day, and those photos prove it). He was also notably trim. At about 70 he was told that he had the beginnings of throat cancer, so he quit from one day to the next, and the cancer was thwarted. He lived a further 15 years, but his physique did suffer a bit. His wife smoked too – the epitome of sophistication I always thought, but a languid drawl and a haughty look are an essential part of the brew. There must, in other words, be nothing furtive about it.

And you are so right about weight. Strain as I might I can think of precisely no one of either sex of my or my siblings age group who were anything other than fit, slim and good-looking. Tennis, swimming, boating, and riding all had something to do with it, but gyms were either unheard of or thought very infra dig. Ugliness, fatness, and narrow- and rounded- shoulderness were phenomena we saw only in films, and wondered at. We did hear that it existed on the other side of the tracks, but were warned never to go there. The one time I did, I saw that the warners were right, and have not been back since.

Why would I need to though, with shambling ugliness everywhere now and something like the norm?

Why wouldn’t you drink if you don’t have to wake up early in the morning and go to work? Asking why a great writer drinks is like asking why a dog performs autofellatio.

I see it as the Emperor’s New Clothes syndrome. Pretending to like something for fear of being thought uncool seems to be the basis of that syndrome.

Those words describe Modern Art as well.

Hunter S. Thompson’s daily routine transcribed:

3:00 p.m. rise

3:05 chivas Regal with the morning papers, Dunhill cigarette

3:45 cocaine

3:50 another glass of Chivas, Dunhill

4:05 first cup of coffee, Dunhill

4:15 cocaine

4:16 orange juice, Dunhill

4:30 – cocaine

4:54 cocaine

5:05 cocaine

5:11 coffee, Dunhills

5:30 more ice in the Chivas

5:45 cocaine

6:00 p.m. grass to take the edge off

7:05 Woody Creek Tavern for lunch-Heineken, two margaritas, two cheeseburgers, two orders of fries, a plate of tomatoes, coleslaw, a taco salad, a double order of fried onion rings, carrot cake, ice cream, a bean fritters, Dunhills, another Heineken, cocaine, and for the ride home, a snow cone (a glass of shredded ice over which is poured three or four jig­gers of Chivas)

9:00 starts snorting cocaine seriously

10:00 drops acid

11:00 Chartreuse, cocaine, grass

11:30 cocaine, etc, etc.

12:00 midnight, Hunter S. Thompson is ready to write

12:05-6:00 a.m. Chartreuse, cocaine, grass, Chivas, coffee, Heineken, clove cigarettes, grapefruit, Dunhills, orange juice, gin, continuous pornographic movies.

6:00 the hot tub-champagne, Dove Bars, fettuccine Alfredo

8:00 Halcyon

8:20 sleep

Mid-century writers were “combination platter” junkies.

Ayn Rand wrote her entire fictional corpus while chain smoking cigarettes and popping amphetemines. When she gave them up for health reasons, she wrote no more fiction and stuck to crab ass essays.

Norman Mailer’s early works were fueled by benzedrine and alcohol; either he got the idea from Jack Kerouac or Kerouac cribbed it from Norman. Kerouac famously said he wrote On The Road on a teletype role while knocking down Jack Daniels and staying awake with dexadrine. Witnesses say he wrote on the drugs and used scotch to unwind, which sounds more likely.

William Burroughs was a junky, of course, but when he “cleaned up” he stuck to vodka. One of Timothy Leary’s relatives, in fact, stated that all the famous druggies were in fact juicers. They might have used drugs to garner ideas, but Demon Rum got their writing done.

Samual Taylor Cooleridge used opium, smoked or ingested with barley water a fine source of magical induction. His writings show it: The ancient mariner tale is a head trip par excellance.

This all goes way back. The ancient Sybiline Oracles were composed in a cave now known to be shot full of ergot, a primitive psychedelic. From the Illiad to Beowolf there are echos of chemically induced muses firing the minds of our ancient ancestors. But honestly, they felt the gods spoke to us on a higher plain and there ain’t too many ways for a human to reach that apart from pharmacology.

The 2014 movie Noah shows Methusalah slipping some shrooms into Noah’s drink to jog his thinking. I have no doubt the story derives from something like that.

And yet, it’s not even as big a joke as the Nobel Peace Prize.

Faulkner often went months between drinks. When you have full control over your drinking, you cannot be described as an alcoholic.

This is pretty easy, Steve. Drinking lowers ones inhibitions. You simply don’t give a fuck, and the unvarnished truth comes out. Writers, especially talented ones, get to say things in print they’d be arrested and/or assaulted for in public.

What’s that saying from the recent movie?

“Truth is like poetry, and most people hate poetry”

Future? Impossible to predict. Romain Rolland & Anatole France, both significant writers & Nobelists, virtually vanished. Upton Sinclair, too. Pearl Buck?

I don’t care for fantasy genre, but Tolkien appeal seems to be an authentic one (though I find him so boring I didn’t even try). He probably attracts readership of people distinguished by strong visionary imaginative faculty & the need (or impulse) to escape or see through the dreary world of commonplace vulgarity & quotidian run-of-the-mill existence which would not satisfy Helen Keller: Life is either a daring adventure or nothing at all.

Great traditional novelist Roger Martin Du Gard, has, despite the Nobel, almost vanished (which is a shame), as did his friend Andre Gide.
Popular writers tend to wane. I read most of Zane Grey, but he seems to be out of place & time now; French mesmerizing super-villain Fantomas is also a figure of yesteryear.

On the other hand, Jack London survived as a mixture of middle-brow readability & rough atavism (three cheers for Darwin & Nietzsche).

I truly don’t see the recipe. Maybe some will last, maybe not. It depends. Who reads scientific romances by Wells, put alongside Heinlein, Clarke, Lem, Sturgeon, Asimov, Le Guin,…

Show me a Tolkien rip off and I’ll show you the Fantasy section of the book store.

My best guess is that we’re living through the Akallabêth as we speak. The great and enduring Tolkien is The Silmarillion and it may well be, as with Shakespeare and Bach, that we’re not yet to the point where it can be fully appreciated.

http://tolkiengateway.net/wiki/Akallab%C3%AAth

see through the dreary world of commonplace vulgarity & quotidian run-of-the-mill existence which would not satisfy Helen Keller: Life is either a daring adventure or nothing at all.

There is that aspect but I think you’re missing Tolkien’s own adoration of the quotidian and commonplace embodied in The Shire and his hero Samwise. That will continue to win him a broad and enduring readership not available to most writers of this age, with their facile and groundless, if unwitting, snobbery.

Sinclair is still taught, and may find new currency now that a whole swath of the population is newly motivated to see what he saw.

From what I’ve read, I’ve gotten the sense that the popular narrative of brilliant writers writing brilliant writing WHILE drunk is largely fiction. Hemingway, for instance, did not actually say, “Write drunk, edit sober.”

From an old article about Hemingway:

“Jeezus Christ!” Papa was incredulous. “Have you ever heard of anyone who drank while he worked? You’re thinking of Faulkner. He does sometimes—and I can tell right in the middle of a page when he’s had his first one. Besides,” he added, “who in hell would mix more than one martini at a time, anyway?”

I’ve seen studies that concluded that one or two drinks can help spark creativity, but after that it’s a hindrance. There are exceptions to everything, and I’m guessing freak-of-nature alkies like Bukowski probably wrote a fair amount while drunk. Then again, he isn’t a top-tier literary scribe.

It’s been said that a lot of great writers drank to excess when they weren’t writing because the process of leaving the creative dream state and living in reality was too jarring.

https://twitter.com/L0m3z/status/1211678277796089856

It’s not just a river in Egypt, is it?

But, yeah, I’m pathologically boring. No booze, no drugs, no wild parties, no sex orgies. (In my youth, I used to sneak out of the house in the middle of the night to go to … 7-Eleven.) When I wake up, I always remember what I did the night before.

That being said, most of my relatives are drunks. Quite a few of them are hopeless alcoholics. (My mother is a rabid teetotaler; I take after her.)

Most of my friends and acquaintances are drunks; a couple of them are addicts. One in particular started mixing coke and Adderall in college and never stopped. He’s on the road twenty days a month and rarely stops to catch his breath. He routinely goes 24, 36, even 48 hours without sleep. (He’s aging fast – I’m in my mid-30s and he’s in his late 20s, but most people think it’s the other way around.) Another makes frequent jaunts to Amsterdam. But they’re all functional people. The cocaine/Adderall guy is a sales executive at a sporting-goods company; the Amsterdam guy is a doctor.

Why would I want to hang out with them? Honestly, because they’re more interesting than I am. My own life has been somewhat dreary and uneventful, so I live vicariously through their (apocryphal) tales of hedonistic excess.

In some ways, I’ve had the worst of both worlds in life – I’ve lived (relatively) irresponsibly and I haven’t really accomplished anything, and I haven’t even had any real fun. I’ve suffered all of the restrictions and constraints of being tied down without enjoying any of the benefits. My mother and my grandmother guilt-tripped me into wasting my youth serving as their errand boy, and I’ll always resent them (and myself) for it.

My friends aren’t any more responsible than I am, and they concede that the craziness has left them empty and unfulfilled on a spiritual level. But at least they’ve accumulated some interesting memories. Unlike me, they regret the things they’ve done, not the things they haven’t done.

Maybe just on very specific threads, or threads where certain commenters have shown up (NOT Stephen Dodge, by the way).

He also listened an awful lot to George Carlin – listen to the inflection in Carlin’s famous rant against the rich and powerful people who run America, which is probably Carlin’s most listened to Youtube clip, then listen to Trump on the same subject – the pauses and the inflections are almost exactly the same, and Trump probably listened to Michael Savage more than 9999 out of 10,000 Americans.

Actually, probably more than 99,999 out of 100,000 Americans.

Absolutely. Regarding music, I remember a scene from “The Sopranos” in which some guy who had picked Tony from a photo array as one of the men in a car leaving the scene of a murder saw a newspaper headline that gave the name of the man he had picked: Tony Soprano. He freaked out, of course. He was a typical libtard type and was sitting with his wife at home listening to some ridiculous, atonal piano piece that consisted of randomly struck keys.

People who buy recordings of that kind of crap are the same types who will buy something that looks like a painter’s dropcloth and pretend that it’s a painting.

Going on a binge is not a demonstration of full control. Faulkner had to abstain completely between binges. A single drink would send him on a binge that he couldn’t stop without help. Binge drinking is just one example of alcoholic behavior. There are others.

Well, as for Hemingway – I think he was only drunk a few hours a day when writing his early novels, and he was completely sober most of the time when writing the short stories that are most remembered. He was also probably completely sober for The Old Man and the Sea, but spending lots of money on fun recreational fishing, and getting drunk every night after writing for a while.
When he wrote “Over the River” and that Bells novel he was probably a barely functional alcoholic.

Fitzgerald was not a natural alcoholic, but he had an internal dialogue every hour of the day,drunk or sober, lots of what he wrote was thought up when he was sober and put down sober, the Great Gatsby was written mostly sober, but he never outwrote the Great Gatsby because he probably thought the good parts were associated with hedonism and drink. He did not live long enough to grow up.

Faulkner was not an alcoholic, he self-medicated by binging. Lots of his bad novels have dozens of pages he typed and did not later properly revise which show that he was not at his best, one guesses he lied a little about how much he drank.

Wallace Stevens was rarely drunk, he would go to Key West once a year and live the life of a single guy who drinks with his lawyer pals for a couple weeks, then take the train back to Connecticut and drink very little and write poems that were, he thought, inspired. He was often right.

Wodehouse was almost always excited by the next cup of tea, laughter with friends, cigars, that sort of thing.
That being said, rather than getting drunk to get drunk, he used to get drunk to analyze what it feels like to be drunk, and how to mine any humorous ore there might be therein. His drunk scenes, the best of which were written later in his life, are the best drunk scenes since Dickens.

Sylvia Plath and Edna Saint Vincent Millay are hard to figure out. Robert Frost probably did not drink much. Philip Dick was a whole different writer after he had a partially drug-fueled experience of God, and I seriously doubt that he could read his earlier novels, after that experience, with any patience at all.

Tolkien only drank for the purpose of a slight diminution of shyness, with friends who wanted to have a good conversation, and Gene Wolfe, as far as I know, never got drunk.

Flannery O’Connor was too sick to drink with pleasure, and Walker Percy was too smart to lose any of his skills to stimulants.

I could be wrong about any of this, of course.

When you have full control over your drinking, you cannot be described as an alcoholic.

Not necessarily. There are degrees of this stuff.

Creative people are usually highly intelligent, highly intelligent people have a much higher rate of depression than people who are of lower intelligence (eg: whites vs blacks). The traditional way to deal with depression is with alcohol, hence higher alcoholism rates in writers and creative people in general. I think that the hard drinking writer was also ingrained into the American literary culture and as many writers were also journalists, the hard drinking culture pervaded this profession also.

Sounds like a recipe for writing nothing of consequence for the last 30 years of your life.

Is it possible that there is some deeply seated neurological connection between high verbal intelligence and linguistic creativity and susceptibility to alcohol use disorder?

Kerouac is a great American author not because of his writing skills, but because of what he was able to convey about America in On the Road and The Subterraneans, IMHO. He got into Columbia on a football scholarship if memory serves. No fancy lad, he.

On the Road has bits that recall Dostoyevsky. And we know that K. rightfully respected F.M.D. Kerouac couldn’t compete with Fyodor Mihailovich D. in terms of literary talent (no one can), but he showed that he understood Dostoyevky’s genius and aesthetics.

In On the Road there’s a scene where Dean Moriarity is suffering under a bare lightbulb, holding up a bandaged thumb or something up to a bare-bulb light (disclaimer: last read it 25 years ago, so forgive details). If that’s not Dostoyevskian “salvatian through suffering,” I’ll eat my Lederhosen.

I’m mostly a Hemingway fan, but the Old Man and the Sea is just terrible.

Excellent, thought-provoking post.

Alcohol brings communities together. Helps you get to know your neighbors and makes you more likely to participate in festivals, cultural traditions like Mardi Gras/May Day etc.

Simple human bonding/connection is not beneficial to the economy or financial institutions.

… (and) while standing wobbly athwart history yelling “STOP.”

No, lying supine beneath History pleading “Be gentle.”

(Another commenter said that here some time ago.)

Put some of it up on the Internet. I’m sure some iStevers will take a look at it.

De gustibus non disputandum est. OMatS was the only one I could ever finish.

A question: How much more likely is it for writers to drink, than for any other random collection of bums, eg. internet commenters.

I finished them all, but I’ve never risen much above the middlebrow, I’m afraid.

Wells at least survives as a boy’s writer like Jack London, which is not at all a bad fate.

It’s interesting, Wells was born in 1866 and died in 1946, and during that considerable span he produced a large quantity of work (Kipps, Tono-Bungay, Ann Veronica, etc) but the things that that survive (i.e., stuff that is read by the general reader) were mostly produced prior to 1902: The Time Machine, The War of the Worlds, The Invisible Man, The Island of Dr Moreau,and The First Men in the Moon….

Welp, now what?

A necessary condition for writing is to keep the ass in the chair. And a bottle does not dance away.

I know what you mean, but Tolkien’s appeal in this region is that of the idyll- it is not a “real”, Darwinian life we associate with naturalists of the French school or their Anglo-American disciples (Dreiser, Bennett, Norris, Crane, Gissing,..). Tolkien is a great fantasist, and literal (not just literary) fantasist at that (unlike more down-to- earth fantasists like Dickens or Meredith); also, he excels in that specific English social fantasy of the idyll, which can be traced to the Renaissance of Sidney & Shakespeare (this state of mind has disappeared in the country of origin, Italy, and never quite took hold in France, Germany and Russia).

Tolkien’s strength lies, among other things, that he is- while being quite English in his peculiarities & sensibilities – he is almost non-English in his literary, fiction focus, which in the case of the dominant English (and to some degree American) imaginative literature discourse lies in the realms we could describe by means of sociology, ethnography or perhaps economy.

You say this probably because you’re a marlin.

Now, this is not about drink, but about imaginative literature of the 19th (perhaps late 18th C) & 20th C. Will they last? Are they satisfactory? For whom?

It depends.

When it comes to stories, novels & dramas, it is all about depiction of life (I’ll put aside more aesthetic authors like Pater, Wilde, or even Nabokov). English-language 19th C fiction is mostly, from my point of view- unsatisfactory. We could say that novelists write mostly either as sociologists; or as psychologists (which could be further subdivided in moral psychologists & those describing sensibilities- and those whose field is Freudian field of drives: sex, eros, death, power, fear of death, destructive element,..); or-and this is the category apart, a small area of metaphysicians (Melville, Dostoevsky). Of course, those renditions of life overlap.

Most classical English fiction writers (Dickens, Trollope, Thackeray, even Meredith,..) belong to the sociology company, some of them (Dickens, Meredith) possessing genuinely poetic mind; Hardy is a clumsy fiction writers, basically a poet; and most satisfactory authors remain women (Brontes, Eliot,.. and Hawthorne & James, with their sensibilities & ethical anguishes), while Melville is a world apart, a spiritual writer like Dostoevsky (who, unlike Dostoevsky, didn’t care for psychology).

French are much more satisfactory, because the best of them (Stendhal, Balzac, Flaubert, Zola,…) have both sociology & existential (sex, power, death) psychology; and Russians are doubtless the pinnacle -they got sociology (less developed because of a more primitive level of the Russian society), but their dominant trait is strong mix of existential psychology & metaphysics, something intoxicating.

Basically, you got literature as the manifestation of Schopenhauer’s, Marx’s, Nietzsche’s, Freud’s, Jung’s and Adler’s speculations (which may be an indicator why 19th C German fiction so sadly falls short of achieving permanent works).

“Why the great antipathy towards alcohol singled out from among ALL the great smorgasbord of sins?”

Because at the nexus of all other ills, you have mentioned and more – alcohol is the most prominant variable.

Teetotaler was too strong a term. To say he believed in ‘moderation’ regarding alcohol would of been more accurate.

While he did drink alcohol on occasion it seems (as with many a Brit) that tea was his favorite drink of all.

I’ve read stuff sober I’ve written while drunk and it’s real crap. On the other hand when I read my stuff while drunk that I’ve written while sober, it’s wonderful.

Yep, Carlin and Norman Vincent Peale are an odd pairing, but nonetheless representative of the current electorate.

The (largely successful) push for mass (what would become the) working class literacy (and not “informational texts” either) in the preceding generations.

Always interesting to see what Physics envy can inspire so far afield (see also: Systematic Theology) but man, you’re a veritable Linnaeus here. Guess you drop a half mil on a MacGuffin might as well get your money’s worth. At least you aren’t using your superpowers for evil.

LOL. The Old Man was bad enough but the shark was really putting the boot in. Sorry for the spoiler.

There’s an anecdote about a 19th century French poet ( Mallarmé?) who, when asked why he didn’t try his hand at the novel, said that the genre was simply too mundane for him, that he could never lower himself to a form of writing that necessitated sentences like “the count walked across the room and picked up his mail.”

There was a real golden age of popular fiction around 1890: that’s what the League of Extraordinary Gentlemen is about: all these amazingly popular characters like Sherlock Holmes who were introduced in the English language in the last 20 years or so of the 19th Century.

To borrow a phrase used by Orwell, it was the era of the good bad book, “the kind of book that has no literary pretensions but which remains readable when more serious productions have perished”: Owen Wister’s The Virginian, Haggard’s King Solomon’s Mines, Stoker’s Dracula, Jacques Futrelle’s Professor Augustus S. F. X. Van Dusen (AKA The Thinking Machine), Anthony Hope’s The Prisoner of Zenda, O. Henry’s short stories (“A Retrieved Reformation,” “The Gift of the Magi,” “The Ransom of Red Chief”), etc.

https://www.orwellfoundation.com/the-orwell-foundation/orwell/essays-and-other-works/good-bad-books/

It was Paul Valery.