Writing (and Reading) Under The Influence

The association between writer’s and drinking is infamously a part of our literary heritage. Hemingway, Fitzgerald, Faulkner, Bukowski, Kerouac… The list goes on and on. Reading these legendary sots and of their equally legendary exploits, you wonder how anyone of them ever got any writing done. In The Thin Man, Dashiell Hammett’s hardboiled tale of Murder in Manhattan, Nick Charles, the novel’s narrator and protagonist is drunk more than he’s sober. He rises around noon, declares that eleven AM is too early for breakfast, and wouldn’t think of starting his day without a drink. You get the idea that Hammett’s weaving a little personal experience into his work.

My favorite novel of Hemingway’s is The Sun Also Rises. I can, and have, read it again and again but it’s not a novel for proponents of sobriety. These characters roam around from Paris to Spain in a drunken spree where the party never ends. Or rather it crescendos into a boozy bullfighting brawl and then ebbs back in quiet, stunned retreat, but though the drinking may slow it never disappears altogether.

The characters of these novelists all drink, a lot. They drink because their creators drank. In Old Havana there is a classic bar, The Floridita, where Hemingway spent many an hour, hoisting his favored double daiquiris. Hemingway, like me, preferred a seat at the end of the bar with his back to the wall where he could watch the entire floor, and where he only had to concentrate in one direction when holding conversation. Hemingway’s barstool is now preserved behind a velvet rope. No one else is going to take Papa’s place, not ever again.

I’m in the bar business. I know all about drinking. For me, it started in high school because I wanted to do things I wasn’t supposed to do, and because I was so stifled by the back-ass ignorance and lack of imagination of my little town. My friends were my buddies that I played football with; for the most part they didn’t have much imagination either, but they knew how to party. My other drinking companions were a family that became my close friends, the sons of our local doctor. We all drank. None of us had much money then, so our drinking was limited to cases of cheap beer consumed in basements and while roaming about the country roads in our cars. Today, we’d probably all be in jail, for drinking and driving, and the good doctor as well, for casting a blind eye when a group of teenagers were grouped around the keg in his basement. Today you can go to jail for leaving your kid in the car when you run into the store for a gallon of milk. I get the dangers of all the above but society’s gone a little overboard. The people who make laws forget what it was like to be a kid. We weren’t delinquents, we were just killing time, waiting to escape to the rest of our lives.

In those days drinking was fun, a part of the exuberance of being young. And it was also a counter to the frustration of being hemmed in by small minds that led small lives and tried to impose their beliefs on me. But as time goes by it’s not as much fun as it used to be, or not often. As the saying goes, what once were vices now are habits.

Alcohol’s a funny thing. Since I’m not much for drugs, I don’t know of anything else that can pick you so far up and then drop you so far down the next morning. Hemingway called it the giant killer. I think I know what he meant. Writers spend a lot of time in solitary contemplation. If you let yourself really think about the big issues that the world faces, and about how brief our time is here, it’s hard not to get overwhelmed or feel a little despair. You need something to take the edge off. Like Frank Sinatra famously said, “I feel sorry for people that don’t drink; when they wake up that’s the best they’re going to feel all day.”

Standing at various bars I’ve amassed a stock of stories that I mine in my own fiction. Drinkers are good storytellers and they get themselves into situations that are, although perhaps not at the time, good fodder for comedy and drama. Part of the whole journey is being able to laugh at ourselves. Drinkers tend to give themselves plenty of opportunity.

Why is hitting the bottle the theme of this installment? At Columbia College, Chicago, I met a lot of good people. And I bent many an elbow with them, talking about our projects and bitching about this and that. A few years ago, a group of those people got together and formed a group, Reading Under The Influence, dedicated to celebrating all things literary and alcoholic. On the first Wednesday of every month, you’ll find them at my bar, Sheffield’s, reading themed selections from various authors and original works, and chasing it all back with a shot or two. You can learn all about the event by clicking through to their website. R.U.I. is an event that some of the storied drinkers of yore would be proud of. And it’s a good way to spend an evening among people who know their way around a bar. If you’re in the neighborhood stop by and check it out. And since you’re there, you might as well have a couple of drinks.

— Ric Hess, Oct 29, 08:20 AM

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