Some would say (certainly many members of AA) that only those who have plumbed the abyss will ever know the huge semantic gaps that lie between the simple sentences ‘I have drunk’, ‘I am drunk’ and ‘I am a drunk’. The white-coated ‘experts’ know least of all. In this area of medical research only the guinea pigs wear the white coats; they alone are expert. I myself used to drink, as they say, like a fish (except, as I understand it, fish don’t drink, any more than the maligned newt gets inebriated himself). Drink practically killed me – as it actually kills hundreds of thousands of my drunken fellow-citizens every year; cut off, many of them before their time.

It would have been of no great moment had I drunk myself to death in the early 1980s, my forties and the climacteric of my drinking career. There would have been no banner announcements or half-page obituaries in the press; no solemn minute of silence in my employing institution (although I believe, as a ‘Reader in English’, I would have warranted a day’s half-mast of the college flag at UCL. As far as the world was concerned, the demise of Sutherland would have been just another sot gone to his liquid grave. Good riddance.

Death certificates do not use the term ‘alcoholism’ as cause of death – too vague. But there are, by modest calculation, a hundred such mortalities a day (three times the daily number of deaths by road accidents; innumerably more than are stabbed, strangled or shot to death in the UK). The response of those bereaved of my presence would have been discreetly masked relief. Whatever there was to lose had been lost (passed away, as they say) years ago. Money, trust, houses, job, marriage, liver, lights and lungs. Above all – respect. There are many Shakespearean lines that resonate for drunks, but none more so than Othello’s agonised adieu to the world’s admiration:

There are, by official estimate, some 300,000 lives terminated or shortened by alcohol abuse in the UK every year. The figures vary, decade to decade – but they are invariably huge. Society at large is admirably stoical about this annual Passchendaele, as it is about the fewer (but still staggeringly numerous) citizens who wipe themselves out on the roads, day in, day out. People must travel; people must drink; fish gotta swim.

Often, of course, the two bills of mortality converge: alcohol is reckoned to be a factor in over 50 per cent of automobile crashes – particularly after the pubs and bars close and the A&E rooms move on to red-alert for the nocturnal tsunami of blood, liquor and petroleum spirit that washes into the country’s hospitals. Among those waiting for treatment will be a sizable number of sober victims of alcohol: 40 per cent of violent crime and 90 per cent of assaults in Britain are recorded as being alcohol-related. Domestic assault is, overwhelmingly, done ‘in drink’. Cheers.

By the modest estimate that ten per cent of the adult population are problem drinkers, the British census is around five million and the American four times that figure. A sombre calculation. According to Alcohol Concern’s latest spoilsport bulletins, three out of four British adults have had their lives severely disrupted by their own or someone else’s alcohol abuse. And what does that bleak Latinism ‘disruption’ mean? Blood, bruises, scratches, curses, screams.

In October 2000, the sociologist Betsy Stanko took a ‘snapshot’ of domestic violence in Britain and came up with the headline-grabbing statistic that there were, over the course of any day, an average of 600 ‘incidents’ and hour. Over half a million acts of domestic violence are reported each year in Britain, and many more, given the behind-doors nature of the offence, elude official notice. Alcohol figures in most of these invisible crimes; the sober thump is, apparently, a rarity.

It needs, as Horatio would say, no sociologist to tell us these things. Circumspice; a drink’s monuments are everywhere around us. Alcoholism is immensely destructive. And expensive. Every few months some committee or other will tot up the zillions it costs the country in road accidents, premature death, burden on the health service, family breakdown, suicide, homicide, assault, bankruptcy, homelessness, police, probation and court time.

Why do you drink? the Little Prince asks the drunkard in Saint-Exupéry’s fable. Because I am unhappy, the drunkard replies. Why are you so unhappy? Because I drink. Alcoholic logic.

In the face of this carnage and misery, society displays an amazing degree of Alcohol Unconcern. Abuse is serenely tolerated. If a pretender to the premiership boasts, as a lad, to have drunk 14 pints, or a premier’s son is found paralytic after his many pints in Leicester Square, or the third in line to the throne reels drunkenly out of a night club in the early hours of the morning, lashing out at importunate ‘paps’, it is thought of as no more than a manly rite of passage. Beer street is as wholesomely British as it was in Hogarth’s day; not so Drug Lane.

The damage to the social fabric attributable to alcohol is, however vast, a bearable cost. It is not tragedy but ‘statistics’ – as Stalin dismissively said of his millions of soldiers dying on the Eastern Front. Sticks and stones can break our bones but numbers can never hurt us. Even eight-digit numbers. The cost of alcohol is a domestic price that liberal Western democracies, for all their squeamishness about hanging murderers and priggishly ‘ethical’ foreign policies, have always been willing for their peoples to pay. Eager, even, for them to pay.

What does society get in return for the licence it grants its citizens to intoxicate and immolate themselves? At some deep Machiavellian level, the incessant, society-wide overdose of alcohol is, one presumes, prescribed (or at least condoned) by our leaders as something prophylactic. Chronic drunkenness inhibits reasoned protest, organised party resistance – even revolution, if that’s the flavour of the time. ‘Let them lick the sweet that is their poison,’ as Coriolanus says of the Roman plebeians. Rome will be that much more easily governed by the patriciate if the canaille are so occupied.

To think thus may be paranoia – as whites thought it paranoiac that African-Americans should allege that the CIA flooded big-city ghettoes with narcotics in the 1970s to exterminate Black Pride, Black Consciousness and (most effectively) Black Power. ‘Hey, Hey! You can buy your gage from the CIA’ sings the dissident West Side rapper Ice Cube. He means now.

Paranoid it may be but I do think that the government’s toleration of alcohol abuse (an ‘issue’ which they could as easily address as fox hunting) is motivated, at least in part, by Coriolanian cynicism. Let them swig the sweet that is their poison; a pissed electorate is (politically) a docile electorate, except, predictably, on Saturday nights and at big football matches – ‘hooligan’ outbursts which the Home Secretary can handle with his big stick, and, if not, let’s vote in somebody with a bigger stick. I also half-credit Ice Cube’s allegations about the CIA pushing crack to the ghetto kids in South Central. After all, vodka and acquiescence to tyranny are intimately linked in 20th-century Russian history. Picture the future, O’Brien tells Winston Smith in Nineteen Eighty-Four: a boot stamping on a human face for ever. Alcohol numbs the pain of the tyrant’s boot. For ever, it seems.

Unlike other opiates of the people, alcohol does not tranquillise – but is does deaden reason (listen to the late-night conversation in any bar). Drunkenness stimulates violent but wholly thoughtless action. The routine red-mist/blackout defence in alcoholic crimes of passion is: ‘I don’t know what came over me.’ It’s usually true. ‘Why are you looking for your keys here when you dropped them over there?’ the policeman asks the drunk. ‘Because here is where the streetlamp is,’ replies the drunk. The alcoholic mind at work.

The other signal difference between alcohol and narcotics is that drinking to drunkenness and incapability (unlike the high that comes with a heroin hit or cocaine snort) takes several hours to be successfully achieved. And, unlike hard drugs, it can be continued for decades at toxic levels of intake before the organism gives way. Drinking gives the people (particularly young, dangerous males) something to do with their leisure time and most rebellious years. Until, that is, they become civilised. Or, at least, tired and law-abiding.

Because of what it does to their brains and their reputations, drinkers (unlike, say, people with Aids or even pot-heads) are never capable of organising themselves as a lobby or interest group. No one speaks for them (although many speak at and about them – the madwomen of Mothers Against Drunken Drivers (MADD) and the prigs at Alcohol Concern, for example). ‘Petrol protests’, however illogical, selfish and thoughtless about the global environment, can attract moral support form the amoral majority, righteously indignant at stealth taxes. But to protest at the sky-high (and rising) ‘sin tax’ on alcohol is to argue oneself sinful. (I have always believed that the dramatic revival of the Scottish National Party’s fortunes in the 1970s had much to do with the party’s rash promise at that time to lower the price of a bottle of whisky to 60p. I’m not sure that Alex Salmond would ever have honoured that Bacchanalian promise of his forebears.)

Every month or so newspapers dust off their ‘alcohol epidemic’ story or column. It invariably takes the same shock-horror form. Typically, the tone is gothic, designed to reassure the drinking reader that he/she is not so far gone and never will be.

I take the following, at random, from the Independent, 11 November 2000. Fergal Keane (a BBC special correspondent) is writing an op-ed piece about the drink ’n’ drugs death of the celebrity Paula Yates (the result of a ‘foolish’ overdose, the coroner declared):

Powerful stuff. But who are ‘we’, Fergal? As the same edition of the Independent proudly records, its daily circulation has risen to 240,407 (the highest figure for three years – it’s now, sadly, in 2014, a quarter of that figure). Surveys routinely reveal that in advanced and prosperous Western societies, some ten per cent of the population – irrespective of class – will be damaged by their drinking practices; whether habitual, recreational or occasional. This means (assuming, conservatively, two readers a copy) some 48,000 of ‘us’ Independent readers (AD 2000) were up there every dawn with the blood-pissers. Enough to fill an Olympic-sized swimming pool and do one’s morning laps.

That ten per cent of ‘vulnerables’ is food for thought, if we cared to think about it. It means that every tenth person you pass on the street (or, terrifyingly, every tenth person who streaks past you in the fast lane) will be a ‘problem drinker’ (another strange locution; if only one could drink one’s problems, eat one’s debts and excrete moderation).

As Dylan Thomas (drunk to death a year short of 40) wisecracked, an alcoholic is someone you don’t like who drinks as much as you do. For the British press, an alcoholic is someone who drinks even more than you, but of whom – like the Pharisee – you can (just about) say, ‘Thank God I am not as that man is; well, not quite as that man is.’

To shock without being a killjoy requires a delicate professional hand. Fortunately, the practising (but denying) alcoholics who read the newspapers are as adept at wilful doublethink as journalists are in skilful doublespeak. Alcoholic Calibans specialise in not seeing their own image, but that of an ugly other Caliban, in the hand-mirror. It goes with those other alcoholic skills; what in AA-speak is called ‘powerful forgetting’ (convenient repression of uncomfortable facts) and ‘screwy thinking’ (paranoia, typically, but sometimes compulsive obsessive disorder, the flavour-of-the-month malady in the US, or suicidal melancholia).

Journalists are, of course, like publicans and service men, an ‘at risk’ profession. But so are most professions. Some social groups and nationalities seem less prone than others to problem drinking: the Irish, Scots and Scandinavians are notoriously prone; Jews and Sikhs less so. But, as any AA group witnesses, alcohol, like cancer, is a great leveller and can leap any class and ethnic boundaries.

Its leaps are getting longer. AA members used to be middle-aged by and large. ‘It takes a lot of years to get sober’ was the grey-headed wisdom of the meetings (AA is as addicted to the pithy proverb as to stewed coffee). Nowadays, the fellowship is typically younger; particularly in metropolitan America. The reasons? The erosion of licensing laws and unenforced age limits; huge amounts of disposable income released into young pockets by the bullshit 1990s stock market, the economic boom and the IT revolution; stronger beers; the vogue for liquor-based cocktails (as in that other ‘roaring’ decade, the 1920s); and, above all, multi-drug abuse.

Using, say, marijuana, cocaine or, most explosively, methamphetamine (‘crystal meth’) in combination with alcohol produces an accelerator effect. It may be chemical or a consequence of social disinhibition (using an illegal substance plausibly encourages less controlled use of the legal substances). Who knows? But, observably, two-fisted addicts fall faster and harder.

There are, it has to be said, nobler reasons for drinking than that of Saint-Exupéry’s sad sack and his whingeing ‘because I’m unhappy’. My favourite apologia pro vita alcoholica sua is Jack London’s in John Barleycorn. He drank, the wolf-lover loftily proclaimed, to make other (sober) people interesting. It’s a gallant thought. Nor is it uncommon, hollow as London’s gallantry may ring in the sober ear. The film star George Sanders, a sad and sodden late-life drunk, topped himself – after a long career playing drawling ennuyés – with the bleak suicide note for posterity, ‘You bore me so.’ Let’s hope he’s having a livelier time in drunks’ heaven, that big rock-candy mountain in the sky.

Finding your sober semblables and frères so boring that they drive you to drink is the last high ground left to the drunk. They (we) are so dull. It’s not very elevated but, like blind Gloster’s hillock in King Lear, any eminence will do for alcoholic suicide. (Jack London killed himself – impulsively, and with a narcotic; unable to put up any longer with the intolerable boredom of life among the sober, presumably.)

In A Drinking Life, Pete Hamill’s tough, but sensitive journalist’s memoir of alcoholism and recovery (sans AA, allegedly), he discovered the root reason he drank when he saw Norman Mailer, drunk and pathetic, make a fool of himself at a riotous party. Unable to stand the sight of his hero being laughed at, Hamill rushed out into the New York Street:

There are other, equally riddling replies to the Little Prince’s question. ‘Why do you drink?’ – ‘I drink to forget.’ ‘To forget what?’ – ‘I can’t remember.’ One takes refuge in smart replies because straight answers are extremely hard to come up with.

Most drunks have been asked, typically amid some spectacular wreckage of their lives: why the hell do you do it? At such desperate moments, the teenage killers Leopold and Loeb’s defiantly Nietzschean answer appeals: ‘Because I damn well want to.’

But many don’t want to. Like D.H. Lawrence’s horse on the verge of bolting, they have two wills; and the will to drink is stronger than that to stop. After a certain point, internal resistance crumbles. The drunk can no more stop drinking destructively than the suicide who has thrown himself out of a skyscraper can stop falling. The best he can manage is the falling man’s jaunty ‘so far so good’. Optimists that they are, AA alcoholics like to picture their descent as more like sinking gently through fathoms of water like Ferdinand’s father; when the bottom is touched, they will rise again to the air – DV. The bard himself, folklore has it, died of drink.

A few are saved; most are destroyed or badly damaged. The odds against healthy survival are no secret. Why then drink to destruction? Every swallow is a willed, deliberate act. Very little alcohol is given away (never enough for the serious drinker). Alcoholism is the sum result of millions of voluntary decisions and purchases. It’s mysterious. Particularly so at the beginning of a drinker career, when one still has choices and can clearly foresee outcomes and plan one’s game. Why, as Cassio plaintively asks in Othello – amid the debris of his ruined army career – do men put thieves in their mouths to steal out their brains? Why do they pay to do it; not just with money, but (if push comes to shove) with every possession that can be pawned to get more to drink? The answer that many drunks would be inclined to give, if it didn’t seem flippant, is that it feels good and seems right at the time. Or, as the more mature drunk, further into his career, might say: ‘It used to feel good, and I want – I need – that feeling again.’

Alcoholic pleasure is described as something erotic – orgasmic, even – in Caroline Knapp’s hypersensitive journalist’s memoir, Drinking: A Love Story.

The primal bliss about which Knapp rhapsodises is short-lived and not, alas, easily recaptured. And, with time (as ‘tolerance’ builds), the intake required for what Tennessee Williams, in Cat on a Hot Tin Roof, calls the ‘click’ is so numbingly high that feeling anything other than a persistent ache in the bladder (and later the head) is a daunting challenge. But one chases it, ignis fatuus, or not, until the swamp closes over one’s head.

Tolerance initially feels good: you can ‘hold your drink’ (more importantly, hold your job, hold your marriage together). To drink and never get drunk is the mid-career drunk’s proudest achievement – paradoxical as it seems. One of my favourite scenes of this alcoholic chauvinism is in the not very distinguished 1961 film The Comancheros (directed by Michael Curtiz). John Wayne (white hat) and Lee Marvin (black hat) are, for their respective ends, both pretending to be staggering drunk. Both have consumed, we apprehend, many shots (bottles, even) of rotgut whisky (no sarsparilla for these tough guys). In fact, they are both stone-cold sober, testing each other out.

For alcoholics (ten per cent of the audience, to be tediously repetitious), the reassuring element in the drinking-but-not drunk scene is that ‘serious drinkers’, manly drinkers like our heroes (and ourselves), can ‘hold’ the booze. Bacchus wins no easy victory over these topers. Or us. Off-stage, in real life, both actors were known to be heroic drinkers; something that added savour to the scene on-screen.

Marvin died wretchedly from this disease. Wayne was saved from a wet death by the lung cancer which suffocated him (heroic in everything, the Duke claimed to have smoked 100 cigarettes a day and, after having one dead lung removed, declared that he had ‘licked cancer’).

Tolerance, alas, does not last. After a few years of being steeped in it, alcohol (like other addictive drugs) reverses on you. Damn it. It’s not that you feel good when you imbibe; you feel bad when you don’t. At the very end of the line you need drink medicinally to allay the pains of abstinence (‘withdrawal’). Sobriety, not over-indulgence, has now become your ailment. Intoxication is the only cure for the toxin of alcohol. Alcoholism, in its final stages, is quaintly homeopathic. You need a ‘hair of the dog’: antidote alcohol to counteract the poison, which is – alcohol, of course.

Tolerance wilts, in the last stages of alcoholism, under the grossly anaesthetic amount of drink needed to keep the pain at bay. And, at the end of the road, tolerance goes altogether. One drink will do what a bottle used to. One is back where one started; but without the primal joy that kicked the whole cycle off. It is no longer a ‘love story’.

I daresay some ingenious alcoholic has set up an IV drip to maintain the alcohol level in the blood during sleep. But most drunks – however far along the arc – abstain when unconscious, setting in train the torments of withdrawal – hangover, as it is called.

All alcoholics start the day with headaches, nausea and anorexia. Enough to take the sober citizen immediately to the casualty ward. One of the sharpest descriptions of hangover that I know is in the neglected novel, The Morning After, by Jack Wiener. The hero, a Los Angeles PR man, Chuck Lester, wakes in a hotel after a night on the razzle. He has asked for an early call – he has an important morning meeting:

Wiener’s description of the condition is so painfully accurate that one could assume he may be a fellow-sufferer. He is also clearly a Los Angeles man. I looked up hopefully for him at every meeting I went to where a speaker said: ‘My name is Jack. I’m an alcoholic.’ No luck.

When one wakes with a real hangover, forget coffee. Only a ‘phlegm-cutter’ (George V. Higgins’s wonderfully graphic term) will still the shakes, calm the morning panic, keep at bay the terrors. Delirium tremens, the final collapse of consciousness into hallucination under the stress of withdrawal, is, typically, a disease of the early morning.

DTs is nothing like the ‘pink elephant’ fantasia in Walt Disney’s film, Dumbo. A graphic description is given by Charles Jackson in The Lost Weekend (it was somewhat tidied up in Billy Wilder’s film version; Wilder also latched an optimistic ending on to Jackson’s bleakly pessimistic fable of the drinking life). Don Birnam, in the novel’s presentation, has come to the end of a long drunk. He is now dry and in terminal withdrawal. A small friendly mouse (as he perceives) has burrowed its way out of the wall and is looking at him. He feels, like Robbie Burns, a fellowship with the poor cowering beastie. Suddenly a bat flutters past and springs on to the mouse:

One of the more ingenious literary treatments of the DTs is in Kingsley Amis’s ghost story, The Green Man. Amis’s hero, Maurice Allington, suffers from alcohol-induced jactitation (convulsive twitching) and hypna-gogic hallucinations (as did Amis). But, at the same time, Maurice is haunted. Which is the supernatural and which the alcoholic spectre? Suppose Macbeth (like too many other Scots) was a heavy drinker: what would one make then of the dagger he sees before him? (‘Cut back on the usquebaugh, laddie.’)

My own brush with the DTs was more banal. On one occasion, I was convinced that there was someone (it might, in point of fact, have been a giant toad), just outside my field of vision, about to pounce. On another, I recall turning a number of pictures to the wall to stop them staring. Nothing quite as horrific as what Birnam/Jackson evidently experiences.

The pictures also, as I recall, spoke to me. ‘Voices’ are a less florid hallucination, which afflicts terminal drunks in extreme withdrawal. Typically, the voices are less heard than dimly overheard – coming out of cold-water taps, through the central heating, or (in my case) electric kettles and hanging pictures. And, typic-ally, they are overheard saying bitchy things about one (eavesdroppers, of course, never hear good things about themselves). Sometimes as strangers pass in the street, they will be ‘heard’ – by the deluded alcoholic ear – muttering some barely audible insult. Many a pointless brawl has been started that way.

Evelyn Waugh, an alcohol and chloral abuser, wrote an amusing novel around these voices (which the author had experienced himself, during a spectacular late-life breakdown). In The Ordeal of Gilbert Pinfold (or ‘Portrait of the Artist in Middle-Age’), the hero (Waugh to the life) embarks on an ocean cruise to recover his health. He hears a series of conspiratorial conversations, relayed – as he deludedly thinks – through the ship’s air vents: ‘I don’t say he’s an actual card-carrying member of the Communist Party,’ one voice says, ‘but he’s certainly mixed up with them.’ ‘Most Jews are,’ another voice answers. And so it goes – Kurt Vonnegut’s catchphrase, a writer who has clearly done research into the rituals of AA to judge by the ‘Serenity Prayer’ with which he chose to conclude Slaughterhouse-Five.

Once the drinker has experienced DTs and heard those vaguely persecuting voices, madness (‘wet brain’) and other kinds of serious organic decay are imminent. The end is nigh. Drink and die, or stop. Most don’t.

None the less, the quest for joy remains to the end. There was a time – now long forgotten – when even the skid-row drunkard drank because it made him merry and life look good. That mirage is pursued. Even as the last months of their pathetic lives run out, you see a group of winos in the park: men (usually) who have manifestly lost everything. They are disgustingly unkempt and can be smelled at ten paces if you are injudicious enough to get that close. They have not, probably, long to live and that little time will be uncomfortable. All that holds their posse comitatus together is the brown-bagged bottle, or can, which they pass and swig (unwiped) from hand to mouth to hand to mouth. Passers-by will hear their rambling, slurred, periodical ranting or lachrymose, too-loud discourse punctuated by gales of raucous laughter.

What do these wrecks have to laugh about? Being relieved of the need to work – and the disturbing fact that (as Steve Martin wryly pointed out) they tend to have good heads of hair – is all that makes these deadbeats enviable to their sober, industrious, world-fearing fellow-citizens. (On the hair: is never shampooing the secret, as Martin muses? Or are the moulting strands stuck to their heads by the adhesive goo that oozes from their scalps?) Whatever the weather, park drunks seem, like the monkeys in the zoo, to be having fun; at least intermittently. No one else in the park is laughing uproariously.

Alcohol, viewed objectively, is no fun whatsoever. The social life of the far-gone drunk is Sartrean in its loneliness. Alcohol abuse features, often as the primary cause, in many divorce cases. But the alcoholic will probably be disjoined from more than the bone of his bone, flesh of his flesh. At the end of the road, he has no colleagues, no fidus achates, no ‘community care’. If he has a dog to share his blanket, or his cardboard box, one has to wonder at canine irrationality (as when Bull’s Eye follows his psychopathic master, Bill Sykes, to destruction). But at least four-legged friends are not so irrational as to drink (the only alcoholic dog I know of in literature is Rum Dum in Nelson Algren’s Man with the Golden Arm). Drunkenness is the main cause of ‘homelessness’ – as street destitution and vagrancy are euphemistically called. At least lepers had colonies. The homeless sleep as solitary as Crusoe on his island.

Lonely as the sufferer will be, alcoholism is, in its effect, the least self-contained of afflictions. Cancer, even HIV, you can keep to yourself, but not diseases of the bottle. Sooner or later, you will be outed and cast out by your sober fellows. ‘Secret drinker’ is, for career drinkers, a contradiction in terms. The habit, once it takes hold, cannot be kept under wraps. The domestic fallout of alcoholism can trickle down for generations in the form of financial, social or emotional ruin. Grossly unfair as it is, the innocent partners and offspring of the drunkard will share the stigma; social, moral and psychological. George Cruikshank’s The Drunkard’s Children is, with its innocent victims, a more pathetic series of plates by far than his The Bottle. The alcoholic’s thoughtless bequest to his loved ones rivals anything a sadist might invent.

Save yourself is the bleak advice usually given to those with an unregenerate drunk in the family. Pack your bag, scoop up the kids, raid the piggy-bank, leave and don’t look back. There are few more pathetic 12-step gatherings than those of the Adult Children of Alcoholic Parents, Al-Anon (for partners and family), or Al-Ateen (for adolescent children of alcoholics). Those who have stayed on, cohabiting with a drunk out of residual love, loyalty or financial dependency, have a hard time of it. Like syphilis in an Ibsen play, it poisons families incurably, generation after generation.

The favoured prescription in American counselling circles now is the ‘early intervention’ – a ‘nipping in the bud’, ‘stitch in time saves nine’ measure. Intervention normally takes the form of an ultimatum, delivered ensemble by the drinker’s family. Typically, the alcoholic is surprised by the confrontation. You come home, perhaps after a night on the batter, turn on the light, and the room is full of friends and family shouting, ‘The party is over.’ They are rehearsed and have a script. You are off-guard and dumbfounded.

Former President George W. Bush admitted having drinking problems in the past. From guarded newspaper revelations it seems that he was successfully ‘intervened’. As best one can put it together, the 43rd President of the Union went on an epic bender in July 1986, culminating in his 40th birthday party. He had, one apprehends, been drinking heavily for at least ten years (he was 30 when he picked up the drunk-driving charge that threatened to scupper his presidential prospects, when it was divulged five days before the poll, in November 2000). Reportedly, his wife Laura had told him, ‘maybe 50 times’, that ‘It’s me or Jack Daniels’. George chose Jack: 50 times. At the same time, 1986, Dubya’s father George was Vice President and, one may assume, he did not want a son with a drink problem embarrassing his upcoming campaign for the White House. Barbara, like any mother, was worried about her wild boy.

The Bush parents arranged for their son to meet one-on-one with Billy Graham in 1986 at the family compound at Kennebunkport (this lends credence to the ‘intervention’ hypothesis). It was Billy’s old-time religion – and the ultimatums of his family – that rescued young George from the demon drink. The free world may live to be grateful that the faith-based intervention worked. If it didn’t work, we may not have lived to be grateful for anything. Would you have wanted a dry-knuckle drunk (as Martin Sheen called Dubya) with his finger on the red button?

Ideally intervention, with its presentation of a Faustian choice to the drinker, needs to be done (as with George W.) when there is still much to lose, still people to care, and still a future career to live for. (‘You can still be President, Son’ – ‘Naw! Do you think so, Dad?’) Middle-class ‘respectable’ drunks with caring families seem to respond best. The remedy seems to work most effectively with those who, like the Bush family, believe in ‘faith-based cures’ and the ‘Jesus factor’.

All careers end badly, Enoch Powell famously declared, as his own went down the toilet. None more badly than that of the career drinker. Even in a secular age, most of us would like to end well: like Addison, if we are really high-minded, who summoned young people to his deathbed, that they might witness the full dignity of a Christian’s quietus.

Drunkards’ deaths are awful; enough to drive you (and them) to drink. Worst of all are the deaths of drunken women. Their bodies are not made for hard drinking. Anthony Burgess, himself a problem drinker by his own account, dragged his wife down into a terrible alcoholic decline. He describes her last binge with self-mortifying, polysyllabic exactitude in the second volume of his autobiography, You’ve Had Your Time:

Zola, with his usual naturalistic unfeelingness, gives a vivid report of the female alcoholic’s last infirmities in the description of poor Gervaise’s degradation in L’Assommoir. As usual, the alcoholic woman is even more of an object of moral contempt than her male partner:

Even Zola, for whom the human species was no more than a bacillus under the novelist’s eyeglass, can scarcely bear to linger, it seems, and gives the description of Gervaise’s last days in fast-forward mode.

Only some celestial audit could work out whether the fleeting happiness of inebriation is balanced by the terminal wretchedness of alcohol addiction. From the first glass of the blushful Hippocrene, with beaded bubbles winking at the brim, to the dog turd eaten for ten sous and the liver bursting like an over-distended plastic rubbish bag: how does it stack up? Good deal, bad deal? One would need a gigantic Benthamite pleasure-pain calculus: all those ‘happy hours’ in one pan; a seething mass of blood, broken bones, irritable bowels, foul breath and morning hangovers in the other.

For drinkers, the reckoning always nags. ‘What are you paying for this?’ Most drunks could say, contemplating the glass in front of them, what Charlie Parker liked to quip about his glassine sachet of junk: ‘There’s my Steinway, my portfolio of stocks, my Cadillac.’ Alcoholic remorse (‘hangover’) is universal. But one of the oddities of alcoholism is that few recovered alcoholics sincerely regret having suffered the disease (if disease is what it is). The Steinway, and portfolio are well lost; all for drink, as the dramatist might say.

The willingness to accept a manifestly bad bargain is one of the many paradoxes of alcoholism. It comes up at AA meetings frequently. Given their lives, most of the poor saps suffocating in tobacco smoke and sipping sour coffee out of dixie cups aver they would do it all again – but stop a bit sooner. Before, that is, the really bad things began (and, what is rarely admitted to, before the need for coming to these damn AA meetings and drinking this awful brew). There was, they nostalgically recall, a kind of adventure in it. A voyage to the end of one’s night. At worst, alcoholism (for the ‘recovering’, at least) is a felix culpa: forbidden fruit worth eating, despite the curse (death, madness or, ultimate horror, lifelong sobriety!) that inevitably follows. Many drunks, even those surrounded with their life’s wreckage, like to strike a Baudelairean pose: this mal has its fleurs.

And what, precisely, are they? Drunkenness, it is protested, can be an educational experience – a spiritual or philosophical quest, even. It was only in the ‘White Desert’ of his alcoholic despair that Jack London was able to have his Schopenhauerian dialogues with what he calls in John Barleycorn the ‘noseless one’, Death. The Reaper would have disdained conversation with a sober interlocutor. Drunks cleave tenaciously to the illusion that drunkenness connects you with the inner truths of the universe, enables you to look God in the face. This is vino’s ultimate veritas.

Many can trip off a quatrain or two of The Rubáiyát of Omar Khayyám, the best known of Anacreontics, in support of the boozer’s grand illusion:

As they used to say of LSD, drink can be a trip. And if you don’t take it, you’ll never know.

Sometimes drunks can even persuade the sober world that their drunkenness is something grander than mere self-indulgence. When Charlie Parker’s common-law wife asked the physicians to cure her gluttonously addictive husband – by the sledgehammer therapies of ECT or lobotomy, if necessary – she was asked: ‘Mrs Parker, what do you want? A husband or a genius?’ A Strindberg spouse would have opted eagerly for mutilation, willing to apply the electro-pads to her man’s forehead herself, if allowed to, if only for the pleasure of seeing the selfish bastard jump. Mrs Parker didn’t, earning the eternal gratitude of jazz fans. She might have retorted, however, that a sober genius would have been welcome round the house at the kids’ bedtime. ‘Bird’ died in his thirties (the surgeon who conducted the autopsy assumed the musician was in his sixties).

If not geniuses, most alcoholics feel special and believe that pathological drinking is a mark of their specialness. Like epilepsy in primitive societies, it is a kind of holy affliction. I suppose I, too, am grateful for alcohol – despite the wretchedness it brought me (and still does when I look back at all those years of waste and shame). It was, in its way, a solution.

I was, from childhood, afflicted with crippling shyness: my light, for what it was, could never shine out from under the bushel of my social nervousness. It’s easy (now) to see why I was awkward. I had been brought up an only child in wartime; there were no siblings; no role models; no dominant males against whom I could define myself. Thanks to German bombers, I went to seven schools before I was 11. And thanks to British bombers (in one of which my father was burned alive) I would never enjoy the cosy stability of the postwar nuclear family. I was disadvantaged, but in no material way deprived (‘pampered’ and ‘spoiled’ were words I heard often when I displeased some elder; which, frankly, I did less often than most children). I wanted for nothing except normal boyhood society. My best relationships were with books. If Victor Frankenstein wanted to create an alcoholic in his laboratory, he could do worse than follow the preceding blueprint.

In adolescence, I needed some magic potion to help me connect with my male peers and – most urgently (given what was happening to my body) – with women. The romances of Rider Haggard and Dennis Wheatley (which I devoured from the ages of 11 to 13) no longer satisfied. I now wanted the real thing. Breaking the ice that kept the sexes apart was difficult in the 1950s; even for those possessed of style, good looks, quick wit, bravado and a winning line of ‘chat’. I enjoyed none of those assets.

It would have been aeons before I took to the dance-floor sober (more so given the new steps that were coming in: jive had given way to the ‘creep’; Victor Sylvester’s sedate rhythms were drowned out by Bill Haley’s caterwaul; it was the end for the rituals of ballroom and ushered in frightening new anarchies). And never, had I waited till the end of time, would I have dared to place my hand on those forbidden zones of a young woman’s body (well guarded as they were in those days with brassières that could have served as medieval armour and the impenetrably elastic ‘roll-on’; I learned about lingerie hands-on, like other young males of my generation).

What emboldened me, and timorous youths like me, to the necessary pitch of sexual recklessness was gallons (literally) of bitter beer. Indulgence on this swinish scale did not make for urbane manners. The trick was to get the woman – who could be persuaded to drink ‘shorts’, as something more sophisticatedly feminine than ‘pints’ – even drunker, more ‘incapable’, than oneself (this, incidentally, was where the pre-alcoholic’s tolerance sometimes came in handy). Acquiescent intercourse was the best that could be hoped for. Truly consensual sex in this pre-Pill era was something to be found only in the fantasies of Hank Janson, the leading pornographer of the day. What, one wondered, was a nymphomaniac? She was rarer than the unicorn in the Essex town of Colchester in the 1950s.

In their hearts, most drunks feel they were most truly alive in those days when they were most drunken. There is a husk-like dryness to the ‘recovered’ life, however fiercely joy in sobriety and pride in serenity are protested. Nor, having tasted the pleasures of excess, does moderation satisfy. Few alcoholics really want to return to ‘social drinking’ (a mistake that the medical profession often makes). Even now, with many years of sobriety behind him, Stephen King declares that social drinking ‘would be like kissing my sister’. There is no juice or kick in it.

Raymond Chandler, a literary hall-of-fame alcoholic, eloquently describes the wasteland of post-alcoholic sobriety:

For men, excessive drinking, despite medical evidence that it shrinks the penis and withers the scrotum, is intimately connected with the peacock displays of manhood. ‘A man does not exist until he is drunk,’ Hemingway declared. In his study Hemingway vs Fitzgerald, which depicts relations between the writers as a decades-long drinking match, Scott Donaldson records that the most shaming thing for Fitzgerald – the thoroughly bested contestant – was the fact that, compared to macho ‘Papa’, he drank ‘like a girl’; when it came to booze, he was ‘a cissy’.

On his part, Hemingway drank like a man – even inventing his own ‘poison’ for posterity to remember him by: the ‘daiquiri’. (Michael Palin solemnly imbibes one of the syrupy concoctions, with the reverence of a communicant, in his popular pilgrimage book, Hemingway’s Adventure.) Manly to the end, Hemingway died a madman, convinced, in the sodden wreckage of his alcohol-ruined mind, that the IRS and FBI were pursuing him for unpaid taxes. All those daiquiris down the hatch led to the shotgun barrel in the mouth at six o’clock in the morning in July 1961. (It was Hemingway’s proud boast that he’d ‘been drunk 1,547 times in his life but never in the morning’; he was clear-headed when he blew his head off.)

There is, as all adolescent drinkers know, something grand about excessive drinking. People tot up (and exaggerate) their tots because excessive drinking is, like sporting or athletic prowess, something that it is important to record. Norman Mailer, who has clearly veered into heavy drinking during ‘Irish’ periods of his career, notes as a matter of pride that he has done more damage to his brain with drink than he sustained from blows to the head in his boxing days – which were also, of course, his drinking days.

This masculine-competitive drinking ethos (‘drinking like a man’) goes back to those old days in the wassail hall that we read about in Beowulf. After a day’s slugging it out in the marsh with Grendel’s mother, they would go back, sit on the ‘yelping bench’ in the wassail hall and get wasted on their filthy Anglo-Saxon ale, mead and wine. There is a particularly hilarious passage in the epic where, as the verse makes clear, a legless Beowulf – collapsed under his heroic intake of drink – is talking from the floor to a standing companion.

It was (and is) a warrior thing. The man who aspires to be a hero, wrote Samuel Johnson (an abstinent alcoholic in later life), must drink brandy: the ‘infuriator’. The fact is that all drinking – if done to admirable success – is heroic (I’m not entirely sure of Babycham). The illusion is timeless – look at Ibiza Uncovered, that fascinating TV-verité record of young British animals at play. It is a repetitive round of competitive drinking, competitive shagging, ‘Madama’ gang-banging (drunk girls orally ‘servicing’, on camera, a long line of young men for more drink) and (usually off-camera) fighting. Imagine Ibiza Undrunken or Saudi Uncovered, or Madama in the new Caliphate of Isis. The imagination strains, and fails.

The long list of British ‘hell-raisers’ – from the Earl of Rochester to Oliver Reed – is a drunkards’ line-up. Reed is an exemplary case. The years of his acting fame were decades of spree. Reed’s preferred company was Beowulfian: club-rugby players, manual workers. His social life, in the high-earning years, was one of continuous, boisterous, glass-breaking knockabout: bawdy sing-song, press-up competitions, prick-measuring contests. He played compère and led the drunken charge. Reed relished the brutal camaraderie of the post-match piss-up in the public bar. He holds a kind of hell-raising record: 90 pints in three days, an orgy of swilling.

Oliver Reed died during the shooting of the movie Gladiator (the film is dedicated to him). In Ridley Scott’s screenplay he has the part of an old lion, a veteran of the arena, Proxime. On-screen, Reed’s character suffers a nobly Roman death, holding his rude – the wooden sword that commemorated the manumission granted him by the emperor – as he is cut down by a pack of lesser swordsmen.

Off-screen, Reed toppled to his death off a bar stool in Malta, where Gladiator was being shot on location. It was the finale (morituri te salutamas) to a squalid session, during which he had drunk, it was reported, the equivalent of two bottles of Scotch. For all the awe and affection in which he was held, it is impossible not to regard Reed’s career as one of wantonly wasted ability. His single talent was not buried, but drenched to extinction.

One knows, as a matter of course, precisely how much Reed consumed (wow!) on this last bender. Quantitative exactitude is an odd feature of excessive drinking. I do not think that spliff-puffers, or needle-toting addicts calibrate their overdoses as proudly as drinkers do their skinfuls. How many puffs did Clinton not inhale? How many grams of coke did Don Simpson (the Hollywood film producer) take on his last toot? Who’s counting? They ‘used’; that’s all. How much is an ‘OD’? How long is a piece of string?

Drinkers count neurotically (and not just volume; beer is, I think, the only intoxicant that can be consumed by the ‘yard’ from those peculiar tubular drinking vessels that one occasionally sees in traditional pubs). In his 1999 book On Writing (it’s really about his drinking), Stephen King records that he knew he had a problem with alcohol when he calculated that he was ‘drinking a case of 16oz tallboys a night’. A case is one up from a six-pack – 12 one-pint cans. With this regular nocturnal intake, King turned out a blockbuster, Cujo, ‘that I barely remember writing at all’. It went straight to the top of the New York Times’s bestseller list; that he remembers.

One’s glad that the author of Cujo (Dog from Hell) is now clean and sober and has the AA chips (13 years’ worth) to prove it. But there is a kind of grisly one-up-manship about King’s confession. This is a man who has written 30 books in 20 years, gets $40 million advances, and drinks a gallon and a half a night without even noticing. You win, Steve. Vicisti, as Proxime would say.

Famously, Dylan Thomas ended his life on his knees before a young woman he had just met, with the ejaculation: ‘I have just drunk 22 whiskies. I think that’s the record. I love you.’ He promptly died of what the autopsy called ‘insult to the brain’ (and compliment to the lady).

If Dylan had claimed a mere six Scotches, the scene would have fallen flat (although he might not have done). If William Hague (the 14-pinter mentioned above) had boasted of drinking a mere seven pints as a lad, he would still have been five times over the driving limit and well beyond the measly units permitted by the Portman Group (who presume to advise us about ‘healthy’ boozing while somewhat hypocritically being funded by those who produce booze). But ‘one under the eight’ would have seemed, you know, ‘wimpish’. (Eight pints, or an imperial gallon, was the threshold of sobriety predicated by the British army in the old days, when soldiers were men and won wars rather than ‘keeping the peace’ like counsellors in khaki.)

Many drinkers, to their last gulp, remain convinced that they are in a contest that will confirm their manliness. They notch up their drinks with the morbid pride of gunfighters. (Are not empty bottles called ‘dead men’?) Drinking lends itself to matches and tournaments. One is drinking for gold; chug-a-lugging for the Queen, my boys. It connects with that pervasive sense that drinking brings out one’s full resources of manliness. Eugene O’Neill, who before topping himself drank a bottle of Scotch, left the other dead man there with the triumphant note: ‘Never let it be said an O’Neill left a full bottle.’ Beat that, you bozos.

Alan Sillitoe’s Saturday Night and Sunday Morning opens with a fine description of a drinking match. It is Saturday night (of course) in a Nottingham pub in the 1950s. Arthur Seaton, an uppity (‘angry’, that is) young man is enjoying to the full his youth in a postwar, morally liberated England. He can afford enjoyment on the high wages (with overtime as much as £15 a week) he is getting from the Raleigh cycle factory. Arthur is challenged by a ‘loudmouthed’ sailor to prove his manhood in the traditional, drunken way:

Arthur drinks three more pints. He then honks voluminously over some luckless customer in the pub before going back to give his current paramour (Brenda, a married lady) a good doing. It’s a guy thing. Later in the novel, when Brenda gets royally squiffy on a bottle of warm gin, it’s to procure the abortion of Arthur’s love child – conceived in high drunkenness, of course.

Oddly, the cult of heroic drinking to toxic excess accompanies a frequent reluctance to speak plainly about the damage it patently does. Sillitoe nowhere suggests that the exuberant Arthur is pre-alcoholic (as any young fellow who drinks routinely 13 pints and seven gins of a Saturday night clearly is). There is a strange unwillingness to call drunks drunks and thus demystify the wonderful adventure of drinking. Take the following from Jon Stallworthy’s (excellent) life of Louis MacNeice. The poet is approaching the end of his short and chronically confused life. He is on the brink of ‘retiring’ (i.e. he has been discreetly let go) from the BBC – a sinecure which at least occupied some of his wakeful hours (or ‘drinking time’). The South African novelist, John Cope, met him on the evening of 26 April 1961 in the foyer of Broadcasting House. It was time for the evening ‘session’. MacNeice, of course, had primed the pump with a lunchtime session:

MacNeice proposed a drink with friends, followed by a curry supper in an excellent place he knew. Hedli [one of MacNeice’s troupe of lovers] was in the George but he avoided her, telling Cope he was worried that she might make a scene over ‘another young woman’ in his life. Drinks followed in quickfire succession. BBC people rolled in and out with the tide. Plans were made and unmade…

From the George they went by taxi to another pub and another and another. Cope kept reminding MacNeice of the promised curry supper. ‘Yes – any minute,’ he would unconvincingly reply. By the time they reached the Load of Hay on Haverstock Hill, Cope estimated he had drunk a dozen beers and MacNeice more than double that. It was close to closing time, and the Irishman (who was still steady on his feet, as the South African was not) ordered a row of drinks and a half-jack of whisky to tide him over the rest of the evening. He then went to the telephone ‘to whistle up some girls’, but only managed to contact Nancy Spender, who must have heard the alcohol in his voice and declined to join them. When time was called, he emptied the last glass and, with his bottle, swayed out into the cold night.

A short walk brought them to a door at which MacNeice knocked. It was opened by his doctor, Jerry Slattery, and his wife Johnny, who took Cope into the kitchen and cut some sandwiches, which he ate gratefully. MacNeice looked at them, winced, finished his bottle of whisky, and fell asleep. The Slatterys told Cope this was a fairly common occurrence. MacNeice was almost living on alcohol and would sometimes go without food for days on end.

One may question whether the tally here is correct (any more than Thomas’s ‘22 whiskies’, which has been plausibly disputed by the poet’s biographers). The human frame, particularly one as debilitated as MacNeice’s, could surely not sustain something around 30 beers, and half a bottle of whisky, on top of a lunchtime intake and a chronically empty stomach.

None the less, MacNeice certainly drank a lot; a fatal amount, as it turned out. He died two years later, of what the biography euphemistically calls ‘viral pneumonia’, aged 56. He had, one assumes, pickled himself to extinction 20 years before his time. Alcohol killed him as indisputably as consumption killed Keats. But Stallworthy nowhere says that Louis MacNeice was an alcoholic – which he manifestly was. The biography delicately skirts the issue. MacNeice’s life and talent, for all its wonderful creativeness, was – much of it – squandered; pissed away. Why not admit it?

Much the same might be said of Kingsley Amis. Huge offence was caused to the novelist’s surviving family by Eric Jacobs’s account of Amis’s last days in hospital, sold for a huge (reportedly) amount of money, to the Sunday Times. Jacobs, a retired and evidently hard-drinking journalist, had formed his friendship with Amis over convivial lunches in the Garrick Club to which they both belonged. Jacobs visited his clubmate as he died, painfully, in hospital, and composed from his visits a picture of the novelist on his deathbed – a death surely accelerated by, if not directly attributable to, decades of very heavy drinking. Jacobs’s eyewitness testimony represented a massive breach of good taste (and true friendship, one might think). But nowhere in his article or his earlier biography does Jacobs come out and say that Amis was alcoholic.

‘Amis himself’, Jacobs reports, always rejected the A-word ‘as a term of abuse, not a diagnosis of clinical significance.’ Amis’s second wife, Elizabeth Jane Howard, was more forthright on the matter. At the time of the couple’s separation, in 1980, ‘she said she would return on certain conditions, the principal one being that Amis should give up drinking – not just his moderate intake or cut down a bit but stop completely and for ever. Drink, Jane argued, had been her husband’s main problem, the chief reason why he had become unbearable and she could no longer live with him.’

As most adults can testify (given the universality of the disease), drunks die badly. Society none the less conspires with the alcoholic to suggest that the drunkard’s death can be beautiful; an apotheosis. A notable example is the Oscar-winning film, Leaving Las Vegas. It narrates the last hours of an addicted boozer and gambler, played by Nicolas Cage. Having ruined himself at the tables, he is drinking himself to death (‘the shortest way out of Las Vegas’, as the grim old joke about Manchester and drink used to put it). The film ends, incredibly, with a Liebestod. Despite having drunk himself to the lintel of death’s door, Cage’s character conquers his alcoholic impotence to have it off with a beautiful showgirl, who, in the few hours that they have known each other, surrenders to his fuddled glamour. His brewer’s droop miraculously suspended, he rides out on the crest of the drunkard’s priapic dream, a death fuck. He dies, erect, magnificent and prepotent. Dream on.

The hopeful myth that alcoholism does not diminish sexual attractiveness is (to take one of innumerable examples) reiterated in another film, 28 Days (that being the period of time required for minimal detox in American sanitoriums). Sandra Bullock is shown in the early, pre-recovery phase of her story, disarrayed, falling-down drunk but eminently attractive (more so, one might think, for the moral recklessness of her incap-able state; the appetitiveness of rattlesnakes comes to mind). Paul Newman – who must, I think, have an interest in problem drinking since he so often chooses alcoholic roles – is similarly unblemished by advanced alcoholism in The Verdict (or in any of his parts, going back through Hud to the closeted gay alcoholic Brick in Cat on a Hot Tin Roof). Regarded in its totality, the career of Newman is a defiant assertion that ‘alcoholic stud’ and ‘alcoholic glamour’ are not contradictions.

The assertion is raised to absurd heights in the biopic of Charles Bukowski, Barfly. As played by Mickey Rourke (an off-screen ‘hell-raiser’, of course), the cultish post-Beat writer is shown dissipating himself relentlessly. He is filthy. His breath could peel paint. None the less, he can fight like a champ, he can effortlessly seduce beautiful (sober) women. Above all, he can write like an angel. Take heart, drinkers of the world.