Losing Battles

Of the seven American recipients of the Nobel Prize for Literature, five have been alcoholics. This striking fact has not gone unnoticed. Scholars and medical professionals have been writing about the connection between alcohol and literary creativity for some time now, usually in a dryly (so to speak) clinical way. In her book, The Trip to Echo Spring, Olivia Laing takes a different livelier approach. Laing is a young British author who has spent enough time in this country to know the territory. She examines the careers and losing battles with alcohol of six famous American writers of the last century, and she does so by visiting the places where they lived and wrote. Her idea was, literally and figuratively, to breathe the air they breathed. The six writers, all male, are Tennessee Williams, Ernest Hemingway, F. Scott Fitzgerald, John Berryman, John Cheever, and Raymond Carver. There have been female literary boozers too, of course—Elizabeth Bishop, Lillian Hellman, Mary McCarthy, and Dorothy Parker—but they don’t figure here.

Laing traveled mainly by bus and by train; she wanted to see and smell the landscape, she says. And, besides, she was operating on a tight budget. The book’s title derives from something Brick says in Williams’s Cat on a Hot Tin Roof. Speaking to Big Daddy at one point, Brick says he needs to “take a little short trip to Echo Spring,” by which he means his liquor cabinet. Echo Spring is the label of a middling brand of whisky contained there. Echo Spring thus becomes a metonym for what Laing’s writers suffer from. What were the commonalities that she found among them? “Most of this six had—or saw themselves as having—that most Freudian of pairings, an overbearing mother and a weak father.” She also cites “a mysterious constellation of factors” often to be found among alcoholics: “personality traits, early life experiences, societal influences, genetic predisposition and abnormal chemistry of the brain.”

Hemingway and Fitzgerald receive only cursory attention in the book, perhaps because their lives have been overstudied. It is Williams, Cheever, and Carver who most interest Laing. She attends the Tennessee Williams Centenary Festival in New Orleans and soaks up the rich humid atmosphere of that Delta city. Williams had been shy and vulnerable as a boy and had grown up in a quarrelsome unhappy home. Drinking enabled him to come out of his shell. He had become famous overnight as a result of the Broadway success of The Glass Menagerie. After that he could have all the liquor and all the drugs he wanted, any time he wanted them. He swam for exercise, and he once listed for an interviewer “liquor, swimming and Miltown [a popular anti-anxiety drug]” as the three things that kept him going. Both Williams and Cheever were tortured by their own homosexuality, living and writing as they did at a time when homosexual acts were still considered shameful by many and were illegal in most places. John Cheever and John Berryman spent a lot of time in detox wards and psychiatric hospitals, and both became a bit megalomaniacal in captivity (“Don’t you know who I am?”). Closeted until late in his career, Cheever came to terms with his sexual urges and gave up drinking at roughly the same time; but, if there was any causal connection between the two, Laing doesn’t dwell on it.

She does, however, give considerable space to a San Diego study that documents the connection between childhood trauma and addiction. Called “The Adverse Childhood Experience Study” and conducted in 1995–97, it examined 17,000 middle-class Americans of diverse ethnic backgrounds. “The results were staggering,” writes Laing. “In every condition, from nicotine addiction to heart disease, there was an unambiguous relationship between the percentage of sufferers and the degree of childhood trauma.” One of the study’s authors wrote in his conclusion that their work “shows addiction to be a readily understandable although largely unconscious attempt to gain relief from well-concealed...