Writers drink. There’s no way around that. They do. It’s one of the main perils of writing. Writers as a class probably drink less than they once did, but they can still hold their own against most any professional group, no matter how bibulous. They do drugs too and for all sorts of reasons. But why do they? And should you?
Alcohol is a mystery drug. We don’t really know what it does for the imbiber, either on the psychological level or the physiological. If there is a more puzzling everyday mystery than what happens when people get high (a little or a lot) on alcohol, I’m not sure what it is. I do think, though, that we can say something general about what happens when you take in smallish amounts of booze: one drink, two, or (if you happen to possess a stevedore build) maybe three. But probably not three. No, probably not. The poet George Herbert tells us to avoid the third glass and there’s almost certainly something in what he says.
It’s hard to avoid the third glass, though, especially when you use alcohol the way I think many writers do. They use it to relax. All day they’ve been using and overusing a muscle, their minds. And rather than getting looser, as bodily muscles will, the muscle that is (metaphorically) the mind seems to have a tendency to grow tighter with focused (and often profitable) use. The basketball jock and the tennis player exhaust the muscles of their bodies and when they’re done, so long as they haven’t pushed themselves too far, feel pretty good. They get what people like to call “deliciously tired.” They sprawl out on the old gray overstuffed and they listen to some music or watch TV or read a book or simply claim a benignly vegetative state. This according to many is happiness.
Mental exertion seems a bit different. If you’ve figured out your entry protocols—your meditation, your drink of choice, your nonfattening chocolate bar (which someone should invent soon)—then your initial feeling on sliding into your work is loose and easy. You’re on the field; you’re warmed up and ready to play. And play it can be. When the ideas are rolling out and somehow the (approximately) right words are appearing and forming (roughly) the right order, then you feel a little like you’re flying. And even if you’re not flying or even gliding yet, there’s still a sense of untapped energy. The wind is in your sails, and all that.
This goes on. The wind lasts for different lengths of time for different people. For a given individual it may vary day to day. While the breeze blows it’s all lovely. But then, imperceptibly, the breeze cuts back a little and you have to start rowing. Rowing strains the back and the legs and the gut, but the craft is still sliding forward and all’s well. But then it gets hard. It gets very hard. You taste the sweat on your face and the oar blisters your hand. You’re puffing. And so it can be with writing. You’re sailing, but then in time you have to push it. You have to row.
Even if you have the sense to quit before you melt down completely, you’ve still tired out your mind and probably your spirit, too. And there you encounter one of the catches of writing: it doesn’t always relax the mind the way physical exertion relaxes the body. The elastics get tighter and tighter rather than loosening. Why this is I’m not sure.
No doubt there are writers who finish a pair of sessions in a day and feel cleansed and pure and ready to go off and do complex math in their heads. But I’m guessing not. What comes after the writer’s play and work is often painful mental compression. Writing can intensify the tensions in the mind to a potent degree.
Writer’s tension doesn’t only come from exertion it seems to me. There’s also the pressure of doubt. Is this any good? Should I keep working on it? Am I wasting my time? For the novelist, this must be an especially tough issue. For novelists, practiced as they might be, are always liable to make wrong turns. Suddenly the love interest’s car veers off the road and into the ditch—ambulance, emergency room, doctor, body cast. Body cast! Body cast? Was that really such a good idea? A body cast has the power of inhibiting a plot as well as anything. But I’ve gone twenty pages down the body-cast path. To backtrack or not to backtrack? There’s cause for a headache.
Now add some financial insecurity to your mind fatigue and artistic worry. You’re hearing the ping of e-bills as you write. Add a daughter with a high-mucus cold and a son whose proclivity to share toys at day care by flinging them at other kids has been revealed only yesterday afternoon. Enough said.
And, as all writers know, there is an elixir that can relax those tensions with a few swallows, then a few more. It really is something like magic. Writing long and hard the mind becomes aching and taut. But then, a little like Alice on her journey through Wonderland, we come upon a magic bottle that says DRINK ME. (Actually we know very well where the bottle is.) We do, and the iron hand that’s been squeezing our brain relaxes its hold a little. I’m not always sure why the Greeks made devious Hermes a god; and jealous Hera can be exasperating, always running down Zeus to spoil his fun. But two or three swallows of red wine after a hard day’s writing and I am ready to contribute to the building of a local temple for Lord Dionysus.
Damn is red wine good stuff. (Recast that sentence using your own drink of choice and see how well it works.) I even like the red wine that comes in flagon-sized bottles and that’s what I drink most of the time. Twelve bucks’ worth—lasts me three nights—no it lasts four, five, honest. But I don’t need prime vintage. I’m with that character in Iris Murdoch who had only one thing—one thing only—against a dear friend. She introduced him to high-priced, grand-tasting red wine, which made his day-to-day vintage (the vintage he could afford) seem dull. It’s red wine itself that’s wonderful and Lord Bacchus be praised for even its modest manifestations. As to the top-shelf stuff, I’ll drink it from time to time. Good wine is my default celebration flourish. But really, I’m always most happy to return to backbench, down-home, plain and simple red. Lord Bacchus, be praised one more time!
The drug is magic. It does what the imaginary label says it is supposed to do. It makes calm what was turbulent; it makes soft what was steel; it slacks the ropes and lets drift the craft. If any drug was ever concocted for the weary writer it must be wine. It’s as though Bacchus, a junior god, made a kind offering to his older brother, Apollo, lord of arts and artists. This is for all, Bacchus might have said, but especially for your children, children of the reed. (Or pen.) What Apollo gave in return I’m not sure, but it could not have been small.
Wine (or beer or whatever) loosens the screws, and they can get awfully tight. That’s one glass. That’s two. But then the peril.
One glass, two—it gives you more than relaxation. It gives you something just as important. Wine (or whatever) gives you a dose of self-acceptance.
Let’s say—along with Freud and Plato and plenty of other thinkers—that human beings are not unified in their inner lives. Let’s say we’re made of relatively separate pieces, relatively separate agencies. Freud called them the I, the over-I, and the it. Plato called them mind, spirit, and appetite. At the very least, almost everyone who has seriously considered the question understands human beings to be creatures split at least in two. The dualists see us as divided between nature and culture or between nature and God. Plato and Freud are more complicated (and for my money, more illuminating). To most who have paused to think hard about it, we are not united creatures. We want more than one thing at a time and those wants collide to create confusion (Plato) and anxiety (Freud). Division hurts. In Freud the I wants to survive, the over-I wants perfection, and the it wants all the pleasure it can get. One can readily see the problems that inevitably arise. We’re three-headed beings clamoring (and sometimes whispering and sometimes scheming) for three (at least three) different objectives.
It’s not surprising that we seek unity. For in unity we find calm. Plato says the exercise of reason can bring us such calm, but admits there are few who exercise reason terribly well. Freud says calm is the exception, not the rule and we have to learn to live with internal discomfort. Being human means accepting a measure of anxiety. Writers tend to be lively, even turbulent spirits—hungry for life, hungry for the perfection of their work, and aware (sometimes) of their need to get on in the world. The agitators in the machine can seem to churn without ceasing.
A passionate nature, the fatigue of writing, and the desire for some resolution and calm: no wonder writers and artists of all types (as well as people who think the first step in becoming an artist is to get messed up a lot) are prone to drink. And—marvel of marvels—it works. One glass of wine, then another (or the equivalent), sipped slowly creates a soft sea of tranquility. As my former teacher David Lenson describes the experience of being a little buzzed in his great book On Drugs: “What is simply is.” But when we have the couple of cups, we are (to get a little high flow about it) like a Moses who has seen the promised land and maybe stepped foot inside. We want to stay there. We want to abide forever in the sphere of self-acceptance and calm. And then our troubles begin. Gore Vidal expresses the hunger for inebriation trenchantly, if darkly enough. In Michael Mewshaw’s Sympathy for the Devil, Vidal speaks of the desire “to sink myself into whiskey where one’s sense of time is so altered that one feels in the moment immortality—a long luminous present which, not drinking, becomes a fast-moving express train named … Nothing.” Did Vidal bemoan the fact that he was always a godfather never a god? It seems that drink made him feel just a bit more deific.
There have been many fine observations about getting high—that is, elevating ourselves over the human landscape of bumps and ruts, sorrow and pain, and then cruising along as if on wings. But there is none in my view to touch a line by George Carlin, which I’ll adapt to the subject at hand. Glass of wine, great stuff. Makes a new man out of you. Only one problem: new man wants a glass. (New woman does too.) Once we’ve touched the promised land of peace and plenty, we want to stay there, or go deeper inside and so the perils begin. The only paradises are lost paradises the man says. And a booze buzz makes us feel that we are returning to some life of fullness and plenty (in the womb, in Mom’s arms?) that we’ve lost. New woman wants a drink. New man does, too.
And if your inner life is especially active, if the weather front tends to shift four or five times a day, then no doubt a little release feels fine. And then it fades and you go running after what you had like a kid who’s lost his grip on the tail of a gorgeous kite of many colors. Trouble begins.
And the trouble can continue on a long way. Booze gives us a dose of happy consciousness, and that’s not so easy to find. But booze can also deliver smashed dishes, smashed cars, smashed marriages. Booze has been compared to rope, for which there are many fine uses. You can use it to secure ship to shore; you can use it to tie the load on tight; you can have a high-spirited tug of war with it, too. But you can also put a hangman’s noose in your rope and throw it over a branch or a beam. And then what happens does. As Lenson says in On Drugs, “Beneath alcohol’s icons and institutions lie its familiar wastes: broken glass, a body in the gutter, the wreckage of cars, promises, families, and dreams.”
Booze creates all sorts of troubles, from great to small, starting of course with the hangover. One glass extra, two or three too many and you begin waking up with mild and not so mild symptoms of flu. You’ve got a dose of what they used to call the ague. Tired, sore, dry throat, sluggish, irritable—there you are. Does your husband have to jam so many of those loud consonants into his sentences? Does your wife need to sing with so much gusto? Ah, the hangover—a subject in itself, but for another time.
One might only say this. As grievous as a hangover can be, it has its advantages. It tends to make you hypersensitive, critical, suspicious, mildly annoyed at the world, and maybe a little more than mildly annoyed at yourself. It’s the perfect state, in other words, to experience a certain difficult pleasure. It’s the perfect state in which to revise your work.
Like many other facts of the midgame writer’s life, drinking is a double-edged matter. At extremes it can quicken and it can kill; in moderation it can brighten a sallow world. But even in moderation booze is a complicated business, with all the twists and loops of a demon’s tail.
Writing is full of glorious oases that turn out to be alive with toothy monsters, and those sites that appear to be nothing but woe can often yield unexpected possibilities. You’re alone all the time—and that’s often a trial. But when you get in the habit, and cultivate it well, loneliness can morph into deep pleasure at being alone. You have to change your ways of reading from complete and joyous immersion to something more detached, and that too can have its long-run satisfaction. As a spy in the world of the normal and the ostensibly nice, you’ll sometimes be compelled to silence. But you’ll be able to redeem that silence when you get back to your desk.
And the immediately good things about writing can have a dark underside. That book of yours that sells and sells can taint your mind in strange ways; that beautiful new word processor, your personal genie, can maim your possibilities as a writer but good.
The writer’s middle distance is a land of ambiguities. There are no pleasures but a little pain comes along to salt them. Almost no losses but they have their salutary side.
The key, I think, is to develop a double vision that sees both dimensions of life and never to be terribly surprised when the sweet suddenly goes a note sour; and never to be shocked when what seems the worst turn reveals some expanding possibilities. To be a successful midgame writer, you have to master the art of what the poet of Hibbing, Minnesota, once claimed was the only thing he really knew how to do: keep on keeping on. (Like a bird that flew.)