With New Year's Eve comes celebration, followed by a vengeful hangover and that first bitter, fragile resolution: I will never do this to myself again. When it comes to literature and alcohol, there is an embarrassment of riches. All of Charles Bukowski's work, for example. Drinking figures prominently in the lives and books of Hemingway, Fitzgerald and Faulkner, of John Cheever, Norman Mailer and Jim Harrison. It is the animating spark in Frederick Exley's trilogy, in William Kennedy's magnificent Ironweed, in Malcolm Lowry's humid, dissolute Under the Volcano. From Falstaff to Barney Panofsky, alcohol is a literary fixture.
You can, with a little licence, trace an arc in 20th-century drinking literature that follows the act of drinking itself. In Hemingway's work, the drinking was never-ending, and often celebratory when it wasn't the weary duty of the lost generation. Hangovers were left largely undescribed, something that could be walked off in the clear air of the Pyrenees, or washed off in a fine and true Michigan trout stream. You can open almost any Hemingway book at random and revel in a drinking scene. In Death in the Afternoon (Scribner, 1932), his non-fiction account of bullfighting, there is this enticing, slightly parodic sentence about a duck dinner among friends. "We ate him later, stuffed and roasted; and many other dishes, with the wine of that year and the year before that and the great year four years before that and other years that I lost track of while the long arms of a mechanical fly chaser that wound by clock work went round and round and we talked French."
For decades, young men read sentences like that and thought: Maybe I should put off dental school for a year and go to Europe and drink. Few writers related the glorious communion that came from all those bottles of Meursault and Petrus as effectively as Hemingway. Who wouldn't want to join that moveable feast, to drink and talk late into the night about the nobility of bulls and the impossibility of love? Or in the case of Hemingway's characters, not really to talk about these things, but to silently embody them as they drank.
In the 1950s and '60s, alcohol was still in the picture, though a more suburban pleasure, as seen in John Cheever's stories. All that Westchester angst, all that gin. It still fuelled society, though to less purpose. They weren't drinking to forget unhealable wounds, or to celebrate their waning youth. They were filling the emptiness that comes with old love and new lawnmowers. The Swimmer featured a tired parade of cocktails, a sense that the party was over, but miraculously, they were still serving.
Cheever's most telling document remains his posthumously published journals. The Journals of John Cheever (Knopf, 1991) chronicles his lengthy relationship with the bottle, and is one of the most elegiac works on alcoholism; a rigorously honest self-portrait rendered in that gorgeous prose. "Looking around me I seem to find an uncommon amount of misery and drunkenness. We are not cold, poor, hungry, lonely, or miserable in any other common way, so why should so many of us struggle to forget our happy lot? Is it the ineradicable strain of guilt and vengefulness in man's nature?"
Cheever recounts taking the train to Manhattan and enjoying a smart cocktail in autumn, or drinking in Rome in an elegant bar. But underpinning this civility is his fight to keep from mixing a martini at 9:30 a.m. It's a fight that he loses, and he finally enters the grey embrace of Alcoholics Anonymous.
By the 1980s, the communal aspect of drinking seems to be little in evidence, replaced almost entirely by the hangover. Tom Wolfe's The Bonfire of the Vanities was a hangover novel of sorts, recounting the long morning when the United States woke up and found that its junk bonds were, as advertised, junk. There was a memorable hangover scene, a British journalist waking up to the exploding ring of his phone. "The pounding blood was breaking up the mercury yolk into curds, and the curds were coming out of his eye."
As hangover novels go though, it's hard to top Martin Amis's Money (Jonathan Cape, 1984). John Self, a heroic drinker, has no illusions about its romantic aspects. "Are you familiar with the stoical aspects of hard drinking, of heavy drinking? Oh it's heavy. Oh it's hard. It isn't easy. Jesus, I never meant me any harm. All I wanted was a good time." Self is also a chain smoker and fast-food glutton (the French live to eat, he notes, the English eat to die). That small part of his life that isn't an actual hangover still feels like one.
Masturbation is his most vigorous form of exercise. That and drinking. "You recognize the type by now? Some people get sleepy when they drink a lot, but not us. When we drink a lot, we want to go out and do things. ..... Never do anything is the rule I try and stick to when I'm drunk. But I'm always doing things. I'm drunk."
John Self's drinking is a barely remembered, often solitary routine. There is no joy in it, no fellowship (unless you count the determined masturbatory sessions, which he does). He is defined by the hangovers, by regret. Every day is New Year's Day.
Don Gillmor lives in Toronto. On New Year's Day, he will wake up a changed man.
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