Writers And Alcohol

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Some writers, (not just in the SF & fantasy genres) like other creative artists, have had a legendary relationship with the bottle and the bars that serve it. Kingsley Amis, Iain M Banks, Ernest Hemmingway, Patricia Highsmith, John Keats, Jack London, Eugene O’Neill, John Steinbeck, Dylan Thomas, etc. Some writers could barely get through a day without a full bottle of their favourite spirits. Truman Capote – Vodka. William Faulkner – Whiskey. F Scott Fitzgerald – Gin. Ian Fleming polished off a bottle of Vodka every day until his doctor recommended Bourbon would be healthier for him. ??? Edgar Alan Poe consumed Brandy and home made Eggnog. For Oscar Wilde in the years after his release from Reading Gaol, it was Champagne and sometimes Absinthe. Stephen King consumed so much beer in the 1980’s that he has no recollection of writing one of his best known novels, Cujo, at all. There were and are many teetotal writers including Isaac Asimov, Arthur C Clarke, Franz Kafka, and H P Lovecraft. The imagination is not totally dependent on artificial stimulants (including alcohol, tobacco, nicotine, cocaine, LSD, etc.). The reasons why so many writers do drink can vary enormously. The obvious reason is simply an enjoyment of alcohol, and the company found in a favourite public bar. Up to the arrival of the motor car, writers travelling to meet publishers or read their work to their fans stayed at inn and hotels. Many bars provided performance space for poetry recitals and readings to audiences too small for full theatre hire. Inevitably, drinks would be shared, offered and purchased. Charles Dickens gave readings and took up accommodation in many inns and hotels in Britain and the US. Pubs are full of characters, each with stories to tell. A few drinks lower inhibitions and release deeper truths. Many writers entered pub in the interest of research, not from the drink, but from sitting quietly, people watching. H G Wells made much use of this practice. Writing is often described as a lonely profession, and it can be for an author struggling with writer’s block and looming deadlines. Depression, or a desire to lubricate the Muse can easily slip into dependency on what British comedian Mike Harding once described as ‘The Milk Of Amnesia’. For some authors, the switch from happy to depressed that can kick in as a beer’s cheerful buzz gives way to intense melancholia and inability to function is a shift they want to inject into their writing in itself. Stephen King frequently makes the unhappy writer the central character in his work. Misery, The Shining’s Jack Torrance struggles as much with the booze as with the more ghostly spirits of the Overlook Hotel. The Dark Half features another writer struggling with himself. Many SF groups meet in pubs, and a science fiction convention without a real ale bar strikes many as unthinkable. I am a drinking and thinking writer myself of course. My love of beer and pubs goes back to childhood. As my father worked in bars of evenings and weekends I often got in them, and even served beers from the age of fourteen onwards. My first drink was a can of Guinness given to me by my parents who expected me to find it tasted vile when I was about eight. When I loved it and refused to give the bottle back unemptied they realized they had created a monster. Though I do visit pubs and clubs frequently, my control of my alcohol intake is quite discreet. I rarely get smashed out of my head. I generally drink at an unrushed pace and I know I have had enough when I feel tired. Some nights I have been first in the pub and still the last to leave. A friend recently commented that while he sees me drinking a lot he rarely if ever sees me drunk. In my pub sign studies I often walk round the outsides of 50 pubs or more in a single day. I can go for weeks without actually entering a pub. My writing is an addiction in ways that beer never was. I often wake up in the early hours of the morning burning with thoughts for ongoing or fresh writing projects. I have to write them down there and then to remember them later and to get myself back to sleep. Arthur the writer and Arthur the drinker are detached from one another, though both exist. I have met alcoholics, in my family and among friends. In a few cases the bottle has led the drinkers to an early grave, broken relationships, and ill-health. With others, a trip to the pub is a much happier and more relaxed event. A few people assume that my beer Bromance makes me an alcoholic. I have even been handed flyers for AA meetings. There are nights when I have drunk way beyond the recommended units the medical profession appreciates of me. On other occasion I have gone so dry I probably qualify as temporarily teetotal. Generally I am a social drinker. I rarely drink alone at home, when writing or doing anything else. There are writers who might never have penned their masterpieces sober. Others might never have taken up a pen without have a bottle of a 70 % proof in their blood-stream. Alcohol affects different people different ways. There are the quiet drinkers who feel ill after two glasses of wine, the funny, talkative, happy drunks who fall asleep in a corner if they don’t heed the warnings to chill out and go home soon enough, and the drinkers who want to start a brawl for the slightest excuse. Writers, like anyone else can be anywhere on this spectrum. I think I am actually among those down the shallow end. I drink, and the drink does not drink me. Arthur Chappell