Intoxicated with words

As a young man with literary pretensions loose in London in the early seventies, I frequently came across a curious sub-group of saloon-bar bore. In almost every pub in Soho, Bloomsbury, and Fitzrovia there was The Man Who Lent Dylan Thomas a Fiver. Just as Elizabeth I must have changed beds every night of her life and Mary, Queen of Scots, dragged a library onto the scaffold, Thomas must have died a very rich man. Such is the power of myth.

Literary giants - and even poets and novelists slightly above average height - attract myth, especially, it seems, when they do things to excess. As they tend to be obsessive characters, this is often the case. Prodigious feats of drinking and fornication - activities mutually exclusive only if attempted simultaneously - are attributed to them. Many have a basis in reality. Tales grow in the telling. If you got drunk with Hemingway and lived to tell the story, then some of the heroics you report rubs off, especially if you carried him home. 'Heroics' seems to be the right word for the way the abusive drinking of famous writers is recorded. Not that total unknowns are marked out by their sobriety: for every Nobel prizewinner sustaining his self-image with the whisky bottle, there is the drunk who would have written the novel of the century had he just got round to it or if the philistine conspiracy of publishers had not thwarted him (thank God!).

Let us get one thing straight right away: nobody ever wrote better stuff because they were drunk. There are, of course, thousands who will tell you differently, just as there are still those sad characters who insist that a few drinks improve their driving or performance in bed or family life. This is called denial. It may well be that, in the brief period when inhibitions are relaxed by alcohol, inspiration seems to come, in the same way that a youth, emboldened by a couple of beers, gains the courage to talk to an attractive girl. More alcohol is consumed and drivel pours onto the page like vomit onto the girl's lap. But so many great writers, and not just the chronic alcoholics amongst them, say that booze helps them compose. Why? Because it seems to. There is interesting research being done which suggests that, to some degree, drunken behaviour is learned or conditioned by circumstance. Stone-cold sober, the writer looks at the empty page; he takes a drink and something happens which triggers an idea. There was a chess grand master who claimed that, if stuck, he would leave the table, drink a glass of brandy, and return with a solution to the problem. Was it the brandy itself that stimulated him or was it because he believed it would do so? I offer no easy answer, merely the unhelpful observation that alcohol is cunning, powerful, and baffling. Like the weird sisters in Macbeth, it appears to be a useful tool in making you believe what you want to believe.

Simone de Beauvoir, says John Booth in the Introduction to Creative Spirits: A Toast to Literary Drinkers, "claimed that intoxication breaks down the controls and defences that normally protect people against unpalatable truths, forcing them to face reality." De Beauvoir began the day with vodka and moved on to scotch, Johnny Walker Red Label, Mr Booth tells us. This might be a sensible move for someone in love with Jean-Paul Sartre, but it is bizarre to see it as a gateway to reality. Existentialist to the end, she refused to moderate her intake when experiencing death from cirrhosis of the liver. Anyone at Mlle de Beauvoir's level of dependency has no freedom of choice. She was a wonderful writer but, like all drunks, said some very silly things. And it was an act of barbarism on her part to keep whisky in the fridge.

John Booth had a good idea when he sat down to write. The book contains a lot of amusing anecdotes, but it falls between a number of stools and is curiously mealy-mouthed. Stools first. There are writers who drink a lot, there are writers who write about drink, and there are alcoholic writers. It is as well to differentiate but Mr Booth blurs the distinctions, much as booze blurred the talent of, say, Ernest Hemingway. There is room in a volume about literary drinkers for both Brendan Behan and Ronald Tolkien but the reader should not be left with the impression that we are talking about different ends of the scale. The same thing was not happening. A convivial evening in an Oxford pub, chuckling at dirty jokes in Old Norse, is one thing, drinking to oblivion, by way of a few punch-ups in McDaid's bar, a stopover on the road to an early grave, is quite another.

This would be a better book if the nature of different writers' drinking, and the consequences for his work, were discussed. It is easy to condemn a book for not being the one you would have written yourself, but the point is important. Mr Booth himself stresses how central alcohol has been in the creation of literature: "It is surely unarguable that drink has been as powerful an influence on creative writing as love, philosophy, desire for fame or any other form of inspiration." Having made this deeply depressing statement, he proceeds to be mealy-mouthed. It is interesting to look at instances of fine writing about alcohol. Just like cricket, sexual intercourse, and politics it has inspired some good prose, but, again like them, it had produced a lot of embarrassing tosh. Nowhere in the book does Mr Booth look at the detrimental effects of lcohol on literature. He seems to think that even when Thomas is vomiting, Behan fighting, or Hemingway making life a misery for those around him, literature is being served. Nowhere does he consider the possibility that avoidance of alcohol might have greatly improved some writers' output. The worst excesses of drunken writers are treated as a kind of naughtiness, excusable because of their artistic nature and because many of them contrived to be amusing at some stage of intoxication. The author is as reticent about the grosser effects of alcohol as he is about the fact that de Maupassant "suffered from his enthusiasm for women." Good God! the man was confined to an asylum with syphilitic dementia.

Mr Booth's choice of quotation is odd. He includes the scene from Brideshead Revisited where Charles and Sebastian make themselves free of Lord Marchmain's cellar. Waugh is a great writer whose work abounds in passages about drink and its effects, both happy and baleful. It seems a pity that the only example we get is the one of tiresome undergraduate affectation, however tongue in cheek the young men are being. The principal interest in Waugh's portrait of Sebastian Flyte is his descent into alcoholism. Carefree drunkenness, largely indistinguishable from that of his fellows, changes into solitary and morose drinking. His emotional turmoil and dysfunctional family are delineated with consummate skill and subtlety by Waugh and is probably one of the bleakest descriptions of dependency in literature. Only his faith, frail though it is, saves Sebastian from ultimate despair, the deadliest sin. Mr Booth does Evelyn Waugh a disservice in selecting this particular passage, but it is in line with his view that the inevitable horror of abusive drinking be excluded from the book. But Mr Booth does not know much about Waugh (nor, for that matter, the meanings of the words 'boor' and 'snob'). He says: "A lifetime of heavy drinking does not seem to have ruined his palate or affected his appreciation of wine." In the last decade of his life, Waugh sold his large cellar of clarets because he was no longer able to enjoy their taste.

It is difficult to avoid the suspicion, perhaps harsh, that not a lot of research went into Creative Spirits. Some of the extracts chosen for inclusion read like they were selected from memory during a good lunch. "Isn't there a bit in Brideshead where the narrator and whatsisname learn about wines?" "Omar Khayyam's got plenty of bits about booze." "How about Gibbon on German beer drinking?" I am all for Horace but not sure why he is quoted so extensively or to what end. It is a kindness, however, not to identify his translator.

If the quotations tend to be idiosyncratic, the choice of anecdote occasionally defies understanding. Behan said a lot of funny things, so why embarrass his memory with the feeble joke he allegedly made when asked the purpose of his visit by a Canadian immigration official? "To drink Canada Dry", a witticism which must have been coined moments after the advertising slogan was first suggested. Speaking of jokes, to remark that "(Housman) was a classic don" is to commit a pun best left to schoolmasters in the privacy of their own classrooms.

When, as Prince of Wales, Edward VII appeared in the witness box over the Tranby Croft Affair, he roundly condemned gambling as a curse of the lower orders. He did concede that a gentleman might have the occasional wager. The same attitude is often applied to alcohol (Dr Stuttaford of The Times , in his recent book on the joys of booze, says that the effects of abusive drinking are felt in the pokey homes of the poor whereas they might be avoided with ancestral halls to roll about in - see Alert, December, 1997). The implication is here in Mr Booth's book. In L'Assommoir, Zola paints a vivid picture of the horrible results of drunkenness in the sordid bars of the slums. Degas' L' Absinthe (opposite) captures the scene. Contrasted to this, but with no particular irony, are the lavish dinners given by Zola to his literary circle when there were seven glasses to a guest. De Goncourt may have gently mocked these occasions in his diary, but no doubt he relished each wine whilst joining his host in deprecating the effects of rot-gut among the proletariat.

This is really the problem with the book. It fails to get to grips with the subject. I do not mean that it should have been a mean-spirited polemic against the evils of drink, I simply mean that it should have given a more accurate account of the effects of alcohol on literature. Behan, Thomas, Hemingway, Fitzgerald, countless lesser figures, died sordid deaths after destroying their talent. "Living out a legend", as Mr Booth describes Dylan Thomas, sounds attractive, alcoholic incontinence does not, and the purpose of the book seems to be to romanticise the drunken author, in effect, to enshrine the myth.

This book has some amusement value, but the feeling is always there that it should have been much funnier. There are no insights which will help the reader better understand the work of the writers mentioned . It would have been useful if the book had got the message across that a writer with a skinful is no more admirable than a football fan in his cups and about as creative, but the sad thing is that an impressionable young person with the ambition to earn a living by his pen will put down Creative Spirits with the suspicion that it would help to be a drunk. One or two might make it, the rest will be found in The Coach and Horses, thinking up ideas for potboilers and telling the story of how they borrowed a tenner from Martin Amis.

Andrew Varley