I’m not sure WHEN or HOW it happened, but at early age, I became drawn in, sucked in, to the books written by boozy, drug-addled authors. For me, this may have been in high school, and I didn’t even drink or smoke. At age 16-17, I probably got turned on by Stephen King’s strange, nightmarish novel about a haunted hotel, The Shining, that transported me far, far away from my dull, monotonous teenage life. Maybe this was my introduction to serious literature. The novel was huge – like 600 pages. It felt like a telephone book in my hands, but once I picked it up, I couldn’t put it down. Later, from reading Stephen K’s memoir On Writing, I found out he did so much blow when he was a young author starting out he couldn’t even remember writing a few of his first novels. Hunter S. Thompson was a brilliant writer bent on self-destruction. Here is what he wrote on the first few pages of his masterpiece Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas: “We had two bags of grass, seventy-five pellets of mescaline, five sheets of high powered blotter acid, a salt shaker half full of cocaine, and a whole galaxy of multi-colored uppers, downers, screamers, laughers... and also a quart of tequila, a quart of rum, a case of Budweiser, a pint of raw ether and two dozen amyls. Not that we needed all that for the trip, but once you get locked into a serious drug collection, the tendency is to push it as far as you can.” When I reached the last page of this book, I immediately sat down and began reading the book from Page One again.
Jim Carroll may have been the first writer I would call my own. He was a New York City high-school basketball star who wrote his own memoir, The Basketball Diaries. OMG. He was playground legend who played on All-Star teams with Lew Alcindor (later to become Kareem Abdul Jabbar) and was recruited by Hall of Fame college basketball coarch Al McGuire. He was cocky, fearless, and unstoppable on the court. As a teenager, he published his own basketball memoir. The pages focused a lot LESS on basketball and a lot MORE on pills, codeine, heroin. I was too young and inexperienced to understand the problems these writers endured away from their typewriters. It didn’t matter. Their personal lives were beyond me. I was hooked on their writing.
So this week, I read Olivia Lange’s alcoholic, drug-abuse memoir The Trip to Echo Springs - not so much for her use, but for her deep dive into the lives and writing of her most beloved and troubled authors: Ernest Hemingway, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Raymond Carver, Tenessee Williams. As a young British scholar, she toured this country by herself in trains, planes, and automobiles to explore the stories behind the stories. I read all of these authors in grad school, and I can still remember the passion and insight my professors brought to our classroom discussions. They could recite literary passages from memory. They shared their knowledge of the men behind the stories. We all laughed when they spoke of each author’s alcoholic escapades. Olivia L found the title of her book book from Tennessee Williams' play "Cat on a Hot Tin Roof." Surprise! The protagonist of the play is a hardcore drinker much like the author himself. His name is Brick. On stage when he says he’s "takin' a little short trip to Echo Spring," everyone in the theater knows he is headed to his liquor cabinet. That’s where he keeps his best scotch: Echo Spring.
I grew up with stoners and drinkers. I can’t remember if they had their own euphemisms for getting high. It was always funny to see them drink or smoke before school. When I saw them, I was probably shooting hoops at a nearby park. I say it was funny, because I couldn’t understand why or how it was so important to get high at 6:00 in the morning. I mean, these guys were the coolest guys I knew. Later in the day, the girls were going to smile at them. The guys were going to look up to them. I'm concentrating on my follow-through, and they're getting “wrecked.“ I could draw a straight line from them to Jim Carroll. I would have traded my life for one day of his. He is who I wanted to be. A guy equally adept at driving the baseline and writing beat poetry. I'm not sure what went on in his brain, but he must have turned heads wherever he went. Can you imagine the life of a NYC basketball star - thousands of people screaming your name, and all you are thinking of is getting high?
Fifty years later, I’m reading Olivia L, and I'm finding out things I didn't really know at the time I read these authors. I mean this was before the internet. It wasn't so easy to find intimate details about writers lives. I appreciate each of these guys for their obvious dedication to their craft and their fierce discipline to get their work published. In reading Echo Spring, some may say they worked themselves to death. I think Olivia L would say 'drink themselves to death' was closer to the truth. Olivia L expresses clearly and often, there is no common denominator between creative geniuses and hopeless drunks. Some of the addiction could be attributed to brain chemistry. Other addictions may arise from childhood trauma. I don't know. My professors didn't either. They said the distance between us and them is too great. Any intelligent analysis of their trauma would be pure speculation. So we didn't talk about it. In Echo Spring, Olivia L leaves us with the haunting facts that four of the six Americans who have won the Nobel Prize for literature were alcoholic. She says, "about half of our alcoholic writers eventually killed themselves."
Hemingway rose at sunrise and got down to writing by 7 a.m. or so. This was if he had been drinking heavily or not. Because of a back injury he suffered in an African plane crash, he was forced to write standing up. He would position his typewriter chest-high on top of a bookshelf. Every day he wrote, Hemingway would record his daily output ranging from 500 to 1000 words per day. Living hard, writing from within, he famously said, then moving forward; this was the life of a writer. I don't have to tell you that drinking dominated his personal life. His drinking exploits are well documented in his own writing. At age 61, he angled a hunting rifle underneath is chin and pulled the trigger.
Currently I'm reading Tenessee Williams' The Night of the Iguana. The primary character, the reverend Lawrence Shannon, is at the end of his rope in Mexico. A defrocked priest, he's clinically depressed or alcoholic, or both. In this play, his journey takes him to a remote fishing village near Puerta Vallarta, Mexico. He is now reduced to working as a tour guide for a second-rate company. The setting is beautiful, but the water haunts him. Lawrence wants to make things right in his life, and the best option seems to be swimming to China - killing himself. In Echo Spring, Olivia L relates Tenessee's recurring fantasy to die at sea. From his home in Key West, he asked that his dead body be sewn up in a cloth sack and thrown overboard north of Havana. He wants to go down like his favorite poet, Hart Crane, who committed suicide in the same location.
My favorite part of this book comes when Olivia L links her favorite alcoholic authors with a “water” motif. I’m not sure I understand the connection, but each night Hemingway returned home after a terrible drunk, he calmed himself down by vizualizing the fishing holes of his childhood. He let his mind drop through the darkness of the cool, cool water. Raymond Carver wrote poems about the streams that tumble out of the mountains near his Yakima, Washington childhood home: “I love them the way some men love horses or glamorous women. I have a thing for this cold swift water. Just looking at it makes my blood run and my skin tingle.” John Cheever’s most famous short story, "The Swimmer,” has a drunk protagonist trying to return to his suburban home by swimming across his neighbors’ backyard swimming pools. Maybe all of these guys Olivia chose to write about saw water as a symbol to wash away their pain or dilute their sickness. I could have never recognized this metaphor way back when I was introduced to the genius of these authors.
I'm so happy to have found this book. I know I must come from a completely different background and viewpoint, but I share in the Olivia's love for her favorite authors. She grew up in a family of alcoholics. Her writing displays an intimate knowledge for their struggles. While the bulk of my experience with these authors comes from the writing itself, Olivia L brings new life to the men behind their typewriters. She strips away the glamour; she humanizes our literary heroes. When I first read Jim Carroll in high school, I would shoot baskets into the night at park near my house. Dribble, dribble, dribble. To the left or to the right. I could shoot it, from near or far. I could go to hoop with either hand. When I say 'into the night,' I mean in near total darkness. Even through the cold. The wind. I didn't stop when the rain came down. I just didn't want to go home. I wanted to be like Jim. It mean't everything to me. At a certain point in the last fifty years, my worship of basketball stars has gradually converted into a reverence for literary giants. Olivia L does us all a favor to share the personal struggles of our favorite authors.
This is what know now: for all the traits I idolized in these writers, these guys had to be more Sad and Lonely than I could ever imagine.