July 13, 2009
Another week, another 4,000 words
No wonder I keep having this deep craving for a drink. Here’s my reading for this week.
In case you didn’t know, the Steinbeck book is there because he was an incredibly heavy drinker. He’s given his own chapter in “Alcohol and the Writer.” The book led me to the Steinbeck bio, in which you find that in one of his sojourns in Mexico, he laid back in his bunk with a bottle of gin, shooting holes in the ceiling. He said he was ridding the place of packrats.
Then there was the time he had signed into a hotel under a pseudonym. He went out drinking, came back, forgot what named he signed under. The hotel was booked up, so he went looking for his friend, but couldn’t remember what hotel he was staying at because he was too drunk to remember.
In reading up on Hemingway, Faulkner and Fitzgerald, what really impresses me is how much these guys put away. At one point, Fitzgerald was putting away at least 30 bottles of beer away in a day. The amazing thing is not that they were also writing this country’s great literature, but that they were able to write at all.
One of the surest signs of alcoholism is that the body has the ability to hold amazing amounts of liquor. This must be a cosmic joke; that the one thing that’s most likely to destroy your health, your life and your talent is the one thing you’re capable of handling in large amounts.
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