The Existential drinker 9781526134714

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The Existential drinker

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The Existential drinker STEVEN EARNSHAW

Manchester University Press

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Copyright © Steven Earnshaw 2019 The right of Steven Earnshaw to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted by him in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. Published by Manchester University Press Altrincham Street, Manchester M1 7JA www.manchesteruniversitypress.co.uk British Library Cataloguing-​in-​Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library ISBN 978 0 7190 9961 8 hardback First published 2019 The publisher has no responsibility for the persistence or accuracy of URLs for any external or third-​party internet websites referred to in this book, and does not guarantee that any content on such websites is, or will remain, accurate or appropriate.

Typeset by Out of House Publishing

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For Liz

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Contents

List of figures Preface Acknowledgements

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Introduction

1 I  Whiffs and gleams

1 Habitual drunkards and metaphysics: case studies from the Victorian period 2 Jack London, John Barleycorn (1913): truth

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II  The Existential drinkers 3 Jean Rhys and drunken consciousness (1929–​1939) 4 Charles Jackson, The Lost Weekend (1944): life projects 5 Malcolm Lowry, Under the Volcano (1947): singular experiences 6 Hans Fallada, The Drinker (1950): absurdity 7 Brian Moore, The Lonely Passion of Judith Hearne (1955): abandonment 8 Frederick Exley, A Fan’s Notes (1968): authenticity 9 Venedikt Yerofeev, Moscow–​Petushki (1970): self and others

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III  Enough: attic, Vegas, paradise 10 William Kennedy, Ironweed (1983): fugitive souls and free spirits

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Contents

11 John O’Brien, Leaving Las Vegas (1990): suicide 12 A. L. Kennedy, Paradise (2004): love

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Conclusion

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Bibliography Index

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Figures

George Cruikshank, The Bottle, Plate II 1 2 Gil Naza as Coupeau, photograph from original Ambigu theatre production of L’Assommoir (1879) 3 Vincent van Gogh, Night Café at Arles 4 Honoré Daumier, Two Drinkers

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Preface

This book flickered into life when I received an email asking if I would be prepared to attend a workshop entitled ‘Drinking Studies at Warwick: Research Perspectives’, acting as a commentator for a session on ‘Sources’. It had been ten years since The Pub in Literature was published and I confessed I wasn’t particularly engaged in that area any more. I was told it didn’t matter and I could approach the event how I liked, drawing on my previous experience. The truth was that although I had loved researching and writing that book, I had mentally closed off the project. I doubt if I could have named a single source on drinking which belonged to the twenty-​first century. The day itself brought home to me a couple of things: there was now an area of research formally known as ‘drinking studies’, and rather than closing off my interest in drink and drinkers, I had most likely just suppressed it. At the group’s ‘Biographies of Drink’ conference I  gave a paper which tentatively introduced the figure of the Existential Alcoholic. The more I thought about this figure, the more sense it made as a means of explaining a certain attitude to drinking. In writing up the paper for a book chapter I  realised that the term ‘alcoholic’, with its implication of dependency and lack of volition, was exactly the wrong mechanism for understanding what was at the heart of the issue. These were figures who apprehended the world through drinking, and in a manner which struck me as essentially Existential in nature, asking questions about self, meaning, authenticity, finitude, consciousness, truth, death, and nothingness, metaphysical questions brought about by a rootless, intensely subjective anxiety, where despair and exhilaration at the possibility of ‘truly existing’ were typical responses. The Existential drinker is an attempt to do justice to that apprehension.

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Acknowledgements

I remain indebted to Mark Hailwood and Deborah Toner for sending that email. Their hard work and organisational imagination in setting up the Drinking Studies Network (DSN) has provided the perfect environment for people to discuss drinking matters across disciplines, and this book would not have happened without them, DSN’s activities and its members. Their own work has also informed my thinking on ‘good fellowship’, ‘excess’, modernity, and drink. From the outset James Nicholls has been an astute and generous commentator on papers and ideas, and I have him to thank for pointing me towards Jean Rhys at an early stage, as well as for understanding what the project might be and helping to clarify key concepts. Will Haydock has shared his work and ideas around the carnivalesque, and on neo-​liberalism, while Jake Poller offered perceptive comments on earlier versions of the Jean Rhys chapter. I  was fortunate to find myself in a pub with A.  L. Kennedy and would like to acknowledge her good grace in talking about Paradise with me, while I would also like to thank Bethan Stevens for initially suggesting I take a look at that novel. Thanks also to Will Furnass who suggested Ablutions might be worth a read. James Kneale remains a model of the open-​minded researcher, always able to uncover something new and poking around in those places nobody else thought to seek out, and I have very much valued that intellectual curiosity. I am very grateful to Pam Lock for invitations to conferences in Bristol, and for discussions about nineteenth-​century drinking. Simon Mullins has on a number of occasions discussed psychiatric treatments available in mental health, and spurred me on to think about individual ‘capacity’. While the book presents the case for the committed drinker, this has not been without a fair amount of guilt on my part, particularly engendered by Annemarie McAllister, who has been a great champion of temperance history and a necessary corrective to some of my more blithe assertions. Others from the DSN –​Graham Harding, Richard Robinson, David Beckingham, Dan Malleck, Beat Kümin, and Paul Jennings –​have all expanded my drinking studies horizons and knowledge, while Jennifer

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Wallis and Sina Fabian responded to queries and Tim Holt put me on to a gem of a pub novel, David Ireland’s The Glass Canoe. Matthew Osborn kindly gave me access to his Rum Maniacs and Rebecca Lemon provided a copy of her paper ‘Shakespeare’s Drinkers’ after a presentation at Sheffield Hallam. Julia Podziewska has been a great conversationalist around European literature and Marxist theory, as well as providing a deep understanding of Victorian literature and culture. Fiona Martinez’s work on Simone de Beauvoir and authentic relationships has helped me think through that particular Existential thread. It was a boon to gain access to a complete run of Dionysos: The Literature and Intoxication Triquarterly, and Pam Lock and I are grateful to editors Roger Forseth (who sadly died in 2016) and Father Jim Harbaugh for allowing it to be digitised and made publicly available. Thanks also to Shana Aue at the Jim Dan Hill Library, University of Wisconsin-​Superior, and Jo Maguire at the British Library for carrying out the journal’s digitisation. Many colleagues at Sheffield Hallam University have been generous in time and spirit. I am especially grateful to Chris Hopkins for constant and crucial support throughout the research and writing of this book, and for acting as a critical eye on a completed draft. Colm MacCrossan was insightful and thoughtful in helping me understand the significance of ‘Stations of the Cross’, a recurring motif in some of the novels. A number of these works are in translation and so I have been thankful to have on hand Niels Pietersson for the German and Marie-​Cecile Thoral for the French, while Peter Jones fielded Russian questions; Martin Carter has always been ready, willing, and entertaining in his help with film enquiries; Matt Steggle and Lisa Hopkins also helped with queries and suggestions. I am grateful to the two anonymous readers who produced enthusiastic reports in response to the book proposal, and to the final reader’s suggestions for improvements and for pointing out some literature I missed, and then, of course, I feel very lucky that the commissioning editor, Matthew Frost, has once more trusted me with a book involving drink. Some of the material in the Introduction appeared as the chapter ‘Drink, Dissolution, Antibiography: The Existential Drinker’ in Biographies of Drink, eds Mark Hailwood and Deborah Toner, (Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2015), pp. 204–222, and a version of chapter one was published as ‘Habitual Drunkards and Metaphysics: Four Case Studies from the Victorian Period’, Social History of Alcohol and Drugs 28.2 (Summer 2014), pp. 143–60. I would like to thank the respective publishers, and the editors Dan Malleck, Pam Lock, Mark Hailwood and Deborah Toner for permission to reproduce this material. Finally, I  would like to thank Elizabeth, not least for the many discussions around the central themes of this book.

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Introduction

In 1913 Jack London published John Barleycorn: Alcoholic Memoirs,1 the author’s autobiography presented in the form of a drinker’s life. It was a potentially risky venture since by this time London was an established, world-​famous writer, with a reputation partly built on a strong masculine image, and his audience could easily have taken his book to be a confession that London was a weak man, nothing more than a slave to the bottle, a type long familiar to the public.2 Since the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries heavy drinkers had been regarded as morally and sometimes mentally deficient, but London declared that he was not like them, he was not a ‘fall-​in-​the-​gutter’ drunk, and in a genre-​defining book he ushered in a new type of drinker, one who celebrates drinking in complicated, often agonised and paradoxical ways. Certainly, some elements of this celebration can be found in previous literature: London’s insistence on a kind of truth-​seeking self-​transcendence is identifiable in the Romantics, and the use of drugs for expanding mental horizons and the limits of the self is evident in the work of Thomas De Quincey;3 Charles Lamb had written ‘Confessions of a Drunkard’, an early first-​ person narrative engaged with drink as a kind of addiction that could transform the self to the point where ‘The drinking man is never less himself than during his sober intervals’.4 Nor was the idea of using drink as a gateway to soul-​searching especially novel, since many Victorian temperance narratives had graphically recounted the depths of drunken despair even if they invariably ended in redemptive sobriety or salutary death.5 The difference with John Barleycorn was that London showed how individual, philosophical, and emotional commitment to drink could be at the heart of self-​consciousness, self-​definition, creativity, and self-​determined meaning. This intertwining of the self as an ongoing project in the name of authenticity, rejecting received ideas about how a person should comport themselves, and the centrality of drink as a means of engaging with self

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and world, is the foundation of the figure discussed in this book, a figure I  will call ‘the Existential drinker’. The focus of the book is therefore quite straightforward: it looks at individuals who confront what it is to exist by making a commitment to drink large amounts of alcohol. There have always been people whose lives have been dominated by drink, but that is not the same as consciously engaging with drink as a tool for orientating the self in relation to the world and others, with the avowed intention of ‘making’, ‘being’, or ‘becoming’ one’s self in this way. If such people existed prior to the nineteenth century –​and there is an argument that such a notion of ‘the self’ is a relatively recent development6 –​ they were not visible or represented in any number until the nineteenth century.7 Before that time such drinkers were typecast as criminals, comic turns, drains on the nation’s economy, immoral, irreligious, at best harmless merry fellows, depending on who was talking about them. In addition, there has also often been the figure of the pint-​pot philosopher, the drunk who delivers rambling insights into the workings of the world and the universe to anyone in earshot, but such types fared no better than any other drunkard or tolerated fool. Even the Bible on one occasion describes what could be an Existential-​drinker prototype –​‘I sought in mine heart to give myself unto wine, yet acquainting mine heart with wisdom; and to lay hold on folly, till I might see what was that good for the sons of men, which they should do under the heaven all the days of their life’8  –​but the idea has not been championed by many religions in the following 2,000  years. We could even go back to Classical Greece and the ‘symposium’, a gathering of philosophers inspired to deeper thought through wine, but again, their endeavours were not to do with forging the self and self-​determined meaning in the way that Jack London, and those who come after him, have pursued. Existentialism One of the arguments of the book, hinted at above, is that the figure of the Existential drinker emerges in the nineteenth century, and that this is because a new way of understanding what humans ‘are’ is forged in that period. The combination of this kind of drinking along with the further development of ideas around ‘existence’ coalesces more visibly into the figure of the Existential drinker in the twentieth century. By introducing this term I do not intend to suggest that there was (or is) a set of drinkers proclaiming to the world that they and their drinking are Existential, but rather that the best way to understand such drinkers is to regard them as viewing life and the world in a manner which is predominantly ‘Existential’ in outline. My contention is that there are

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drinking protagonists configured in literature and elsewhere whose central concerns are similar to those enlarged upon in Existential thought. Some of these configurations might draw directly from ideas inherent in its philosophy, or from writers regarded as part of the Existential tradition. Jack London, for example, refers directly to Schopenhauer and Nietzsche when he talks about the truths that humanity refuses to countenance, and which for London can subsequently be accessed and confronted through drink; alternatively, these representations might simply exhibit assimilated Existential ideas, because throughout much of the twentieth century such ideas were current and popular. In Charles Jackson’s The Lost Weekend (1944), a novel central to the Existential-​ drinker canon, its protagonist Don Birnam at one point thinks of himself as ‘the Student Raskolnikov’,9 thus invoking Dostoevsky’s Crime and Punishment (1866),10 an early novel with identifiably Existential themes  –​Raskolnikov contemplates the idea that if there is no God then he is free to do anything, including commit murder  –​and thus bringing to the reader’s attention the question of free will, but Jackson does not explicitly engage with Dostoevsky or Crime and Punishment beyond this. Whether the Existential drinker exists outside these artistic representations is not a topic explicitly covered in the book, although it should be noted that John Barleycorn is London’s account of himself, and many of the novels examined here have significant autobiographical elements which point the reader in the direction of lives lived beyond the page. Similarly, while it is outside the scope of the book to make sociological, medical or anthropological claims, it does claim repercussions for the way we might think about drinking and self, philosophical in nature, but also with possible wider disciplinary applications. Existential philosophy Existentialism is a philosophy established in the twentieth century, with immediate roots in the nineteenth in the work of Søren Kierkegaard and Friedrich Nietzsche. It is a philosophy most commonly associated with the works of Jean-​Paul Sartre, Simone de Beauvoir, Albert Camus, and Martin Heidegger, with ideas advanced in novels and plays as well as philosophical treatises. Although there are significant differences between some of these writers in terms of lines of argument, and disputes remain as to who and what should be included under the heading ‘Existentialism’,11 the writers nevertheless have in common a belief that what a person is, or can be, is wholly the responsibility of that individual.12 For Existentialism the pressure placed on individuals to conform to society’s expectations –​to become, for example, ‘the good citizen’ –​is

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a threat to the integrity of the self. According to Existentialism, all rules on how to behave in the world, what counts as ‘true’ and ‘good, ‘false’ and ‘evil’, are convenient fictions invented by society, serving to obstruct the fact that the world has no intrinsic universal meanings or values. Existentialists argue that we find ourselves ‘thrown’ into the world at birth without rhyme or reason. There is no God (or, for the Christian Existentialist, at least no God who overrides our free will), so there are no universal truths on which to base our actions and beliefs; that we are fundamentally ‘free’ to decide how to go about our lives is a basic condition of our existence. In order to ensure that individuals do not lose themselves in the crowd and social constructions, the Existentialists argue that we should question accepted morality, and in doing so we should insist on our own individual values and code of behaviour. This sense of self-​determination is what is commonly called ‘authenticity’ and is perhaps the most prized feature of Existentialism.13 Only the individual can determine what his or her life should be. Other people, sometimes lumped together simply as ‘the Other’, are arguably a threat to authenticity. As Heidegger puts it, ‘the Self of everydayness is the “they” ’,14 that is, when we trundle along with the rest of the world we are part of an undifferentiated mass; it is only when we take hold of our existence that we live authentically. Seen in this way it becomes clear how Existential thought dovetails with the idea of ‘the Existential drinker’. Most cultures legitimise one drug or another, with a mixture of formal regulations and cultural practice determining when drugs can and cannot be used. As a matter of law the state fixes when and where I can buy and consume alcohol; regardless of what the law says, I am still nevertheless reluctant to pour gin on my cornflakes in the morning, because I’m sure that society, family, and friends will disapprove, although equally, and without fear of censure, I  could look forward to a champagne breakfast with those very same people. Binge drinking –​short periods involving rapid consumption of alcohol  –​is socially acceptable under certain circumstances in many drinking cultures, usually at annual festivities, rites of passage or in a weekly release from work, but what is undoubtedly regarded as problematic is frequent, continual drinking, because of its effects on the body, mind, personal relationships, and citizenship. Yet from the perspective of Existentialism, if we extend its logic, such a manner of drinking is entirely the individual’s choice, so if people want to drink themselves to death, that’s their affair. From the Existential drinker’s perspective, it is part of the self’s struggle towards authenticity to choose to drink, not as a hedonistic act or an escape from self,15 but as a way of being in the world that is determined from within by that individual: this is their experience

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of the world, it is their way of being which has meaning for them, and it is the life which they have a passion for. These elements of experience, meaning, and passion are at the heart of Existential thought. In the Existential worldview it is not for anybody else to point an accusing finger at the committed drinker, be they close relatives, friends, medics, psychologists, the World Health Organization, the state, or latter-​day puritans. The choice to commit to drinking is absolutely central to the Existential drinker’s way of being, and one measure of success is the extent to which the individual can fend off the voices of others in his or her ongoing struggle for authenticity, to what extent the individual can continue to drink in the way he or she wholeheartedly believes in and commits to, for whatever self-​defined ends, when there is pressure from all quarters to fall in line with acceptable ways and levels of drinking, or pressure to abstain altogether. At the end of Being and Nothingness (1943), Sartre makes precisely this point, arguing that those who hope to find meaning in something external to themselves –​‘values as transcendent givens independent of human subjectivity’16 –​are ‘condemned to despair’.17 ‘Thus it amounts to the same thing whether one gets drunk alone or is a leader of nations’, he continues, because implicitly both the leader and the drunk may have succumbed to external value systems, or inauthentic modes of being. However, and with deliberate provocation, Sartre goes on to argue that we should judge the drunkard as more authentic than the leader because ‘the quietism of the solitary drunkard’ has a higher degree of consciousness over his ‘ideal goal’, and thus ‘will take precedence over the vain agitation of the leader of nations’.18 Sartre dares us to grant the inward-​ looking, socially useless solitary drunkard precedence over somebody who is responsible for the fate of a nation. It may seem an unacceptable conclusion, one motivated in part by an anti-​establishment stance,19 but the main point holds and is certainly in keeping with the logic of Existential thought: the meaning of one’s life has to come from within, has to be subjective –​‘the being by whom values exist’20 –​and on these grounds Sartre’s solitary drunkard can be, has to be, deemed a success. Self There is no current consensus as to what a self is, or even if such a thing exists, or at least exists in a manner which can be usefully and cogently discussed. For example, Galen Strawson writes:  ‘In the end, my brief for the self leads me to conclude that there are many short-​ lived or transient selves, if there are any at all’, and he is aware that such an argument may appear to do away with the (idea of) self even

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as he attempts to make a defence of his model of the ‘Transience View of Self’.21 John Lyons argues that the very term ‘self’ is an invention of the mid-​eighteenth century, and that no such conception of self existed or could have existed before this time, that is, individuals did not think of themselves ‘as selves’.22 Existentialism does not share these concerns about a coherent self, at least, not in these terms. During the period from the mid-​nineteenth century to the present with which we are concerned, we see that the writers and artists involved assume or assert the idea of a coherent self, even if it is one that is always in process, striving to make sense of self and world. Existentialism thus assumes (or argues) that a self is coherent, or, more accurately, can and should make itself coherent. The Existential drinker in seeking to attenuate the self does so precisely because he or she has an awareness of self that persists through time,23 even while recognising in the Existential manner that the self is a ‘willed’ project for which there can be no pre-​existing life-​script. Mostly, the ‘self’ is an individual’s self-​conscious experience of his or her existence through time, gathered together in an ongoing personal narrative (an autobiographical sense of self), constantly seeking to ensure an authentic self. While Existentialism’s idea of the self is not wholly consistent, either across the philosophy or even within the work of single writers,24 we can nevertheless fix on a crucial aspect which most of the Existentialists would agree with:  the self, rather than an entity designated and determined by God, nature, Fate, or society, describes a dynamic process in which an individual consciously wrestles with the possibility of what they are and what they can be; as Kierkegaard wrote: ‘All decision, all essential decision, is rooted in subjectivity’.25 It is accepted that any individual is always ‘situated’  –​that is, there are circumstances in which they find themselves not of their own making, for example, class, family, nation, era, gender, race, physical ability –​but how individuals respond to the facticity –​the brute facts –​of their situation is entirely up to them. Sartre’s view was that as an entity with consciousness, any individual is orientated in a manner which is ‘for-​itself’ (pour-soi), in the sense that it is free to choose itself (its self), free to choose its way of being. However, according to Sartre and Existentialists in general, most people would prefer an unthinking (unselfconscious) state which does not have to deal with this choice, what Sartre calls the ‘in-​itself’ (en-soi), an animal-​like or stone-​like existence, where the cow or the pebble just ‘is’, and cannot be otherwise, similar to Heidegger’s notion of the ‘everyday Self’, as mentioned above. Since we are conscious beings who can make ourselves (our selves), it is dishonest, ‘inauthentic’ or ‘bad faith’ to renege on our freedom and to settle for the unselfconscious life since we are always free to be otherwise. Within this context,

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part of the interest for writers and artists dealing with self and drinking is precisely this issue of how an individual can insist on an authentic self. The Existential idea of self, and how The Existential drinker conceives of the self in relation to a commitment to drinking, can be put into sharper relief by comparing it with the model of self as assumed by Alcoholics Anonymous (AA). The AA idea of selfhood is probably the most culturally dominant model in regard to persistent heavy drinking and to other ‘addictive’ behaviours.26 Even though the idea that a person might be diagnosed as ‘an alcoholic’ has largely been dropped by the medical profession, along with leading bodies such as the World Health Organization,27 its underlying assumptions remain prevalent.28 The AA model of self is instantly observable when a person is expected to introduce him-​or herself at an AA meeting using the standard formula ‘My name is X. I’m an alcoholic’. Here is an establishing, explicit declaration that X’s identity is fixed by his or her behaviour of excessive, repeat drinking. Therefore, at that moment of introduction X accepts that all along his or her self has been, is, and will continue to be, that of an ‘alcoholic’. X as an individual is thus subsumed into the AA narrative of what an alcoholic is, and for which there can be no other way of being. X is told (and accepts) that he or she is the same as all other people who drink heavily because he or she has the disease ‘alcoholism’, which cannot be cured, only managed. In declaring ‘I am an alcoholic’ there is an implicit assertion that X’s ‘self’ is not of his or her own creation, rather, it is a ‘type’; there is no possibility in the AA model of self that X drinks alcohol as a matter of free will, since in accepting AA’s twelve-​step programme for recovery X will at some point have to accept as part of step 1 that he or she is ‘powerless over alcohol’. For X to assert anything else –​for example, that he or she positively commits to drinking –​would draw the accusation that he or she is ‘in denial’. In its guide The Twelve Steps and Twelve Traditions, AA seems to explicitly warn against an attitude which is something like an Americanised version of Existentialism: We are certain that our intelligence, backed by willpower, can rightly control our inner lives and guarantee us success in the world we live in. This brave philosophy, wherein each man plays God, sounds good in the speaking, but it still has to meet the acid test: how well does it actually work? One good look in the mirror ought to be answer enough for any alcoholic.29

In AA’s influential model of drink and self, dominant throughout much of the twentieth century and into the twenty-​first, the idea that someone is ‘an alcoholic’ must needs destroy any apprehension of the self as

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self-​ creating and self-​ determining; being identified as ‘an alcoholic’ imposes a generic narrative (of disease) upon the person, a narrative which must place any notion of an individuating self into a position which is subservient to the dictates of the disease. Further, the aim of AA and many comparable models is for ‘the alcoholic’ to integrate back into society, to be the good worker, the good husband, wife, partner, mother, father, citizen, patient, with a secondary implication that the purpose of the self is to fulfil social functions and needs, and behave appropriately according to prevailing social norms.30 The idea of the Existential drinker is thus anathema to the AA model and other related models of the self. These ‘addiction’ and ‘disease’ models of self automatically cast a repeatedly drunken ‘self’ as one that will inevitably conform to those behaviour patterns predicted by medical, social, and cultural understandings of substance-​dependence. In contrast to this, Existential drinkers do not accept that they are obliged to act within one or more of these prescriptive understandings, but are instead resolute in their ability to determine the self, and to be wholly responsible for experience of self and world. An example of such a figure is evident in Malcolm Lowry’s novel Under the Volcano (1947), when Dr Guzman refuses to treat the British Consul Geoffrey Firmin for his heavy drinking.31 Guzman says there is absolutely nothing wrong with Firmin, it is just that he refuses to stop drinking, that is, Firmin’s relationship with drink is recognised by Guzman as a fully conscious, voluntary commitment. The doctor believes that the idea of a cure for Firmin’s drinking is nonsensical because such drinking is intrinsic to the way Firmin orientates himself, that is, it is essential to Geoffrey Firmin’s authenticity; for Guzman, therefore, Firmin’s commitment to drinking cannot be considered as if it is a disease. The Existential drinker’s self is thus willed into existence at the same time as it seeks to repel all traces of an ‘ordinary’, socially defined self. The very idea of the stable (social) self that the temperance-​modelled alcoholic must reconnect with is antithetical to the Existential idea of the self existing on its own terms and striving for authenticity. Happiness, hedonism, and illness It might be objected that the introduction of philosophy in support of excessive drinking is really just a cover for the obvious: these people are hedonists, or they are ill, physically and mentally, and thus in denial, deluded about their drinking behaviour. I will deal with these objections here and leave other objections, particularly concerning questions of ethics, for later in the chapter.

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Hedonism Many people enjoy getting drunk because it makes them happy, and ‘excessive’ is a relative term, so who knows what should count as too much drinking? In the context of this book people who unselfconsciously binge all the time are the fall-​in-​the-​gutter types that Jack London summarily dismisses.32 Nevertheless, what of the people who happily and self-​consciously drink to excess? Are they not Existential drinkers? Does the figure of the Existential drinker mask what is in essence an argument for libertarianism and hedonism?33 A popular image of Existentialism, deriving mainly from the manner in which the philosophy was appropriated by popular culture after the Second World War, is that it says people are free to do whatever they want. This indeed does sound like a hedonist’s charter, the 1960s’ countercultural ‘turn on, tune in, drop out’. The element that is missing in this version of freedom, however, is Existentialism’s emphasis on responsibility for the self, such that simply following sensual urges with no concern for anything or anybody else cannot be deemed to indicate a self wholly engaged with existence. Hedonism is not a goal of Existentialism, even if it might be part of a larger project involving the self, and neither is happiness an endpoint for the philosophy. Authenticity is the guiding principle, not happiness, and since authenticity is a process rather than an achievable state, a sense of struggle is often a component of Existentialism and, by extension, of the Existential drinker. It is not that the Existential drinker has to be unhappy to be authentic, for that would in itself be inauthentic, but rather that ‘happiness’ cannot be taken as a measure of authenticity. Sartre gives the gloomiest view of this when he says ‘Human reality … is by nature an unhappy consciousness with no possibility of surpassing its unhappy state’, precisely because it is constantly striving to become something it is not and can never achieve.34 Camus, on the other hand, presents a stoical view in The Myth of Sisyphus (1942) of the individual faced with meaninglessness, with a more insouciant inflection in his novel The Outsider (1942).35 We could also take Simone de Beauvoir’s view in The Ethics of Ambiguity (1947), her response to Being and Nothingness, that man’s ‘passion is not inflicted upon him from without. He chooses it. It is his very being and, as such, does not imply the idea of unhappiness’.36 So while it is certainly not the case that all Existentialists necessarily take the view that life is a species of suffering, it is important to stress that notions of ‘self-​fulfilment’ have more to do with popular psychology and culture than Existentialism, and little to do with authenticity.37

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At the other end of the scale is the objection that drinking in this way is a sign of ‘illness’. It is certainly quite often the case with the Existential drinker that at some point the drinking leads to a degraded physical existence alongside, or preceded by, an agonised mental one. Here it can seem that the drinker is ill, not in the sense that he or she has the disease alcoholism (as discussed above), but in the sense that there is some underlying mental instability which leads to, or is compounded by, ‘alcohol abuse’. A blanket judgement that all the drinkers discussed in the following chapters have a mental health problem would undermine the argument that these drinkers exercise a ‘will to drink’ since their capacity to make a decision is impaired to such an extent that their drinking cannot be deemed to be a matter of choice.38 It will have to be up to the reader to decide with respect to the following material if this is the case in any of the examples I give. The view most hostile to this book’s argument would be that anybody who wants to drink suicidally must, by definition, be ill in some way, as a consequence of physiology or mental imbalance; their perspective or capacity for rational thought is so impaired that they act against their best interests. In Hans Fallada’s The Drinker (1950),39 for instance, the narrator and protagonist, Erwin Sommer, ends up in the mental wing of a prison after a sequence of events in which he drinks heavily and behaves erratically; in Frederick Exley’s A Fan’s Notes (1968)40 the heavy-​drinking central character at various times in his life is committed to a mental asylum, often to his own relief. Yet, as will be argued, these characters, always, and with complete self-​awareness, choose to drink. Even if the reader interprets their behaviour as unusual and therefore evidence of mental instability, the characters are presented as selves who operate knowingly within an environment where such drinking may lead to their incarceration in a mental or criminal institution. Such incarceration is perhaps inevitable since some of these works do by their often anti-​social nature challenge ideas about what is normal behaviour and what is ‘deviant’. In doing so they often explicitly reproduce popular concerns circulating in the twentieth century, such as who is to say who is mad, and by what authority? The events in Venedikt Yerofeev’s Moscow–​Petushki (1970, samizdat)41 take place in a Russia where language and meaning have been so debased it is not possible to identify what is ‘normal’; Under the Volcano senses a world sliding towards the insanity of the Second World War, and in such a world getting drunk for days on end might seem a perfectly reasonable way to exist. These drinkers are aware that society views them pathologically,

11

Introduction

11

as if their drinking must be the visible symptom of some deeper physiological or psychological problem, and they are themselves often familiar with the terminology which attempts to scientifically capture and cure their ‘condition’. In The Lost Weekend, Don Birnam expands on the psychoanalytical approach to his drinking typical of the first half of the twentieth century; Fred Ex in A Fan’s Notes has to undergo different forms of psychological therapy and psychiatric treatment typical of post-​Second World War rehabilitation regimes; Erwin Sommer in The Drinker is put under observation when in prison for evidence of psychological disorder. So at the same time as there are many loving, lyrical, hedonistic descriptions of drinks, drinking, and drunkenness in these works –​Hannah Luckraft in A. L. Kennedy’s Paradise (2004)42 for example, but pretty much all the novels covered can be quite seductive around the pleasures of drinking  –​these are always juxtaposed with the bigger picture of the cost of an early death, a cost philosophically accepted by the protagonists and making perfect sense to them, if not to the medical community and society, which finds that very same behaviour puzzling. The drinkers know that medicine, friends, and family, as well as the law if they cross certain lines, have them under surveillance, but as much as they measure themselves against these perceptions the drinkers remain subjectively involved with something else outside of these frameworks, something that is unique to their subjectivity, something that is, in Heidegger’s phrase, ‘ownmost’. Will and consciousness It might appear that the argument so far avoids another obvious point, which is that free will is the central philosophical issue around heavy drinking, either regarding the extent to which humans can be said to have free will, or the capacity committed drinkers have for exercising it. But, for me, this is to come at it from the wrong point of view, and is one of the reasons why this book uses Existential ideas for thinking through the self and drink. Free will is a basic tenet of Existential thought:  the world is brought into being through our consciousness, and through that consciousness we are capable of changing how we are and what we are. Free will and consciousness are all linked together in the Existentialist idea of what it means to be human. Further, ‘what it means to be human’ cannot be a settled thing because for Existentialism the term ‘human’ is better understood as an open-​ended question, precisely because it is ontologically underwritten by freedom, asking the question ‘what can human be?’, rather than understanding ‘the human’ to be a fixed entity.

12

12

Introduction

As far as I can tell, this view of free will is one that is partly accepted even by those who see frequent, persistent drinking as problematic, for free will must enter into the equation here as well, otherwise it would not be possible to contemplate ‘an outcome’ where such drinkers could abstain from, or moderate, their drinking. The whole idea of ‘recovery’ depends upon the belief that people can change their behaviour (or self). The amount of help that may be required from external sources varies between rehabilitation programmes  –​aversion medication, therapy, support networks –​but the premise is always there that it is down to individuals to seek or accept help, to express a desire to give up alcohol, and to follow through on the advice they are given, all of which depend upon the exercise of free will. Even in the disease model of heavy drinking, where ‘alcoholics’ are not regarded as responsible for their disease, they do nevertheless remain responsible for managing their condition, which again must be a question of will. Whether the reader accepts or rejects the idea of a certain drinking behaviour as ‘alcoholic’ or ‘addictive’ or ‘substance-​dependent’, we always come back to the notion that individuals are constituted by freedom, a central tenet of Existential thought.43 Caroline Knapp’s recovery memoir Drinking:  A Love Story (1996), a deeply personal account of a drinking life from a position that completely accepts AA’s disease model of alcoholism, nevertheless repeatedly makes the point that it is a question of choice for the drinker: ‘The elevator metaphor is common in AA: the alcoholic’s elevator only goes in one direction –​straight down. The good news is you can get off any time you want … it’s a choice you make’; ‘Not drinking is a choice one makes every day, sometimes many times a day. The immediate decision is clear: either you pick up the glass or you don’t’.44 To state that it is a disease with neurological and genetic components,45 as Knapp does, while at the same time also claiming it is a question of choice, is to my mind contradictory.46 With respect to this The Existential drinker argues that the figures discussed here choose to drink and commit to drinking, even if some of these same characters themselves appear to be caught up, usually knowingly, in a similar struggle to reconcile their suicidal drinking and the knowledge that they are entities with free will. Sartre’s example of a reformed gambler faced with a roulette table illustrates the point that we are not defined by forces beyond our control, be they external social pressures such as family and the possibility of financial ruin, or internal, such as personal history and present urges. In the scenario Sartre argues that the gambler’s prior intention not to play the tables cannot now simply be relied upon as a fact of self –​this is what I have decided I am, my identity is secured as a non-​gambler –​but the gambler must face the condition of his ontological freedom, for he knows that he

13

Introduction

13

remains absolutely free to gamble or not to gamble: ‘The not-​gambling is only one of my possibilities, as the fact of gambling is another of them, neither more nor less. … I  am alone and naked before temptation as I was the day before’.47 A related question to the issue of free will is ‘why do people drink?’ The implication in the question is that drinking is a problem for which we need to find the cause. This book cannot answer the question, or, rather, it will show that there are many answers, not in the sense that people are unhappy in many different ways and so may turn to the bottle to self-​medicate, but in the sense that the question of authenticity and freely chosen projects is determined by the individual:  the Existential drinker has a metaphysical reason for drinking. The Existential drinker The narrative and lyric self One of the differences within Existential thought is how the self as a dynamic, self-​determining project is conceived. Heidegger’s approach tends to be impersonal, arguably more to do with an abstract notion of ‘being’ than any individual’s personal existence. Sartre, Camus, and de Beauvoir, however, often view the issue of self on a more fundamentally personal and relatable level. Heidegger’s view of self is also one which emphasises a kind of ‘here-​ and-​ now’ ‘astonishment’ at existence. Nevertheless, although Heidegger acknowledges that at any given moment we are projecting ourselves into the future and into the past, these projections are tied to the present moment: ‘Dasein traverses the span of time granted to it between the two boundaries [of birth and death], and it does so in such a way that, in each case, it is “actual” only in the “now”, and hops, as it were, through the sequence of “nows” of its own “time”’.48 In literary terms, this is quite similar to the lyric mode, and Heidegger’s attraction to poetry and poetics accords with this. Sartre, however, seems to prefer what might be called the ‘narrative view of self’, the sense that our striving to be authentic is a process of making our lives a coherent autobiography, or judging it against such a self-​narrating consciousness. This, in turn, is of a piece with his production of novels, short stories, and plays which deal with Existential themes through the use of narrative. His novel Nausea (1938), about a man seeking to write a biography, explicitly explores questions of self, existence, and narrative.49 Although The Existential drinker is predominantly concerned with novels, thus making the narrativising approach to an authentic self the

14

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Introduction

more common one, the fact that many of the novels have to make a structural decision as to how to deal with the potentially dull(ing) nature of repetitive drinking leads to solutions with some qualities of the lyric form. The problem of repetition is not encountered in representations of the more typical (literary) Existential protagonists such as Dostoevsky’s Raskolnikov, Camus’s Meursault, or Sartre’s Roquentin.50 When Raskolnikov and Meursault commit murder, these are ‘new’ events that bring in train an awakening to the world and self. The problem for the Existential-​drinker narrative is that the drinker’s very existence is circumscribed by drinking to the point of drunkenness on repeat occasions, a moribund behaviour which could be said to work against any dynamic notion of self,51 and hence against the idea of self as an always-​engaged, narrativising process. Viewed in this way, the Existential drinker is in a kind of auto/​biographical stasis. This is initially perhaps borne out when thinking of the structure of The Lost Weekend, Under the Volcano, and John O’Brien’s Leaving Las Vegas (1990).52 These three texts, for instance, confine the action to short time periods, a single day for Under the Volcano, a few days for The Lost Weekend and Leaving Las Vegas, no doubt because all that is required to show the drinker’s mode of orientation to world and self is a single representative period of drunkenness.53 Structurally then this does not afford movement forward in a life, as we might usually expect in novels with a biographical spine, and as such the exemplary drunken bouts necessary to the narrative structure run counter to an idea of autobiography as representing the onward movement of a life over time.54 It is also evident here that Under the Volcano and Leaving Las Vegas choose the final drunken episode of their protagonists’ lives to round off the narratives, as do many of the other novels discussed, such as Jean Rhys’s Good Morning, Midnight (1939),55 Kennedy’s Paradise, Yerofeev’s Moscow–​Petushki, and William Kennedy’s Ironweed (1983).56 For each central character, the final drunken episode is essentially the culmination of the myriad drunken episodes that have gone before. In this sense the novels do have an element of the lyric about them. The compression of a life into a single drunken episode presents the self as an object for contemplation in the manner of a philosophical meditation or spiritual confession. The drinking present offers a still point from which to view the self as truly ‘existing’. For the Existential drinker, this still point is a foregrounding of certain Existential concerns such as ‘meaninglessness’, ‘authenticity’, and ‘finitude’. With respect to ‘meaninglessness’, there is usually an acceptance that this way of existing  –​ repeating the experience of drunkenness –​is for both self and for society ostensibly ‘useless’, although such a mode of existence also re-​enforces

15

Introduction

15

the understanding that life itself is intrinsically meaningless, and that to pretend otherwise is a self-​deception. Rather than being a flight from meaninglessness, it places it at the centre of concern. The protagonist’s subjective creation of meaning is simultaneously foregrounded in this commitment to drinking, an ‘ownmost’ creation not directly communicable to others, not translatable. Related to this is ‘authenticity’, where the pressure to conform to society’s normative precepts is self-​evidently and formally resisted by the Existential drinker in this process: a rational society (modernity) requires citizens who are sober for most of the time, and thus the Existential drinker is potentially by default ‘authentic’ or, more precisely, in the process of striving for authenticity. Existential drinkers are also self-​evidently faced with finitude since they know that the outcome of committed drinking is likely to be an early death, bringing its ultimate facticity into ever-​sharper focus; hence Lowry’s novel situates Firmin’s drinking demise during the Mexican ‘Day of the Dead’ festival, and Leaving Las Vegas is structured around one final death binge. Both The Lost Weekend and Under the Volcano suggest a narrative structure analogous to the image of the ouroboros, the mythological snake, tail in mouth, eating itself. The protagonist in such a state thus confronts the question ‘what is it that makes life worth living?’, the very question that Camus asks at the start of The Myth of Sisyphus.57 The strand of Existentialism present in the Existential drinker is one that suggests ‘meaning’ cannot be found in the conventional world (or ‘real’ world, depending on point of view), but, paradoxically, can be found in what the Existential drinker’s consciousness provides, both drunk and sober, in its intense and intensified subjective focus on the individual’s being-​in-​the-​world and dance with death, such as Jack London initially describes. Whereas the typical view of the heavy drinker is somebody who is addicted to, or dependent upon, drink, from the Existential point of view this person is a ‘committed drinker’ since each repeated episode of drinking is a confirmation of a commitment to this project. In the Existential view, it cannot be the case that the individual chooses a project once and for all and then forgets about it having made that choice, as we have seen with Sartre’s example of the ‘reformed’ gambler. Instead, because the individual is always free to act otherwise and to be otherwise, the individual must always be ‘choosing’ this way of being in the world in order to be authentic. The Existential drinker is always free to leave off drinking at any moment, so self-​ consciously returning to drink not only continues to reconfirm the commitment, but also restates the freedom the individual always has. It also means the continual reacquaintance with finitude, since

16

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Introduction

these drinkers know that their mode of drinking is a form of suicide. For the Existential drinker, the act of repeated drunkenness, or the act of being in a drunken state repeatedly, does represent a stasis. However, rather than taking this negatively in the sense of ‘stagnation’, it creates a present in which death is continually faced: it gives the drunken moment or episode a metaphysical caste. The repetition of the drunken moment ensures ‘being and nothingness’, since the drinker contemplates memory and death, and often with the implication of past life flashing before the eyes of the dying person in these narratives; there can be no future in this metaphysics because the only future is death, so here is the acknowledgment and acceptance of life’s meaninglessness. This is not to deny that the situation is paradoxical: why should it be the drunken moment that illuminates life’s meaninglessness, rather than a sober epiphany? But that is not really the issue. The engagement with mortality is experientially foregrounded in repeated drunkenness and periods of sobriety in a way that cannot be replicated in a life that forecloses on drinking. Not all of the novels have this particular pattern of repetition, where a final drunken episode provides the gateway to Existential contemplation. Some, such as Hans Fallada’s The Drinker and Brian Moore’s The Lonely Passion of Judith Hearne (1955)58 offer more straightforward linear narration, but the circularities of the Existential-​drinker narrative as an analogue for the protagonist’s self-​reckoning and self-​ determination are prominent. The writer-drinker It is a feature of many of these pieces of literature that they are strongly tied to the lives of the authors. John Crowley calls Jack London’s John Barleycorn ‘A generically indeterminate narrative on the border between fictional autobiography and autobiographical fiction’,59 and it is common to the pattern of depictions of the Existential drinker that we are invited to read doubly, with one eye on the work of art and the other on the life of the artist. The artist is working from ‘within’ a commitment to drinking, so there is an implicit if unstable relationship between writer, work, and audience:  elements of Rhys’s Good Morning, Midnight and After Leaving Mr Mackenzie (1930),60 for example, might push the reader to consider their autobiographical connection, and in this sense they read both as ‘memoirs of an alcoholic’ and ‘alcoholic memoirs’. Kent Russell expresses sentiments which many of these writers might agree with: ‘I know it’s not the substance [bourbon] that’s addictive. The substance

17

Introduction

17

is just another tool’; ‘Alcohol is a tool, and so is writing’ –​‘When doing either of these things, I am –​for the time being, at least –​free. A worm on sunny ground, giving zero shits about a bird. When doing neither of these things … I sort of want to die’.61 It could be argued that the Existential drinker is mainly a fictional creation with no parallel in the real world, but this cannot be wholly accurate, because the characters who drink are quite often variants of the writer: London, Rhys, Jackson, Lowry, Fallada, Exley, O’Brien. Of course, the fictionalisation could be a form of fantasising on the writer’s part, a wish-​fulfilment even, and the works of art certainly mould and structure events and characteristics according to demands which are not necessarily documentary, and of necessity as artistic forms do not have the unbounded messiness of ‘real life’, but it does not seem plausible that these are so far removed from the authors’ drinking worlds that the novels are a realm all to themselves. Nobody would deny that there are elements of egotistical self-​ dramatisation and glorification in the writer-​drinker fictions, but that assessment can apply to many works of art and their creators. Nor can it be said that the writers listed here all have the same relationship to their works centred on drinker-​ protagonists. According to David Falk, Under the Volcano ‘represents Lowry’s supreme effort to achieve self-​mastery through art’,62 whereas we see that Charles Jackson was not able to reconcile himself to his creation Don Birnam, nor to the role of this work of art to his own life. Exley short-​circuits the problem by brazenly giving the protagonist of the fictional A Fan’s Notes his own name; A Fan’s Notes is something of a tease in any case since the novel is subtitled ‘a fictional memoir’.63 This paradoxical generic category encapsulates the contract between author, reader, and prose work: some of it is true, some of it is made up, and some of it is indeterminate between the two poles, with the suspicion that across these works the authors themselves may not always be sure. It is possible to read the novels both as self-​contained, autotelic artefacts, and as a species of autobiography. The approach I’ve taken in this book is predominantly one that interprets the novels on their own terms as works of art. Where I do consider the author’s life it is to broaden out the understanding of that art in relation to the themes of this book, but there is certainly no concerted attempt to correlate events in novels to events in authors’ lives, or to treat the authors as ‘Existential drinkers’ in their own right. The relationship between writing and the author-​drinker is of interest however in that the meaning of writing itself for such writers may have some connection with their investment in drinking, and vice versa, or

18

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Introduction

that in some instances writing is what replaces drinking. Fred Ex’s early dream in A Fan’s Notes is that he will one day be famous by writing ‘The Big Book’;64 in The Lost Weekend Don Birnam attempts to pawn his typewriter to get money for drink; Jack London set himself a writing target for each day before he could start drinking. For some of the authors these books represent their single major work, reinforcing the idea perhaps that these are novels with the utmost personal, autobiographical concerns: Under the Volcano, A Fan’s Notes, and Moscow–​Petushki all fit this bill. Jean Rhys’s pre-​war novels can be viewed together as a single set, and O’Brien’s Leaving Las Vegas is another candidate to stand as the author’s main creative output. But there is something more than just refusing to disentangle fact and fiction in these types of narrative. Kierkegaard often used pseudonyms for his literary-​philosophical writings, and Alastair Hannay makes a connection between this and Kierkegaard’s notion of ‘indirect communication’. Although pseudonymity is sometimes regarded as providing a mask behind which the author can hide, Hannay argues in relation to Kierkegaard that it can be ‘a way of fictionalizing fact that avoids the constraints and distracting implications of actual autobiography. In this light one can appreciate how the distance of pseudonymity might enable Kierkegaard actually to use himself as an example, but in a way that insulates his literary figures from the details of his own life’.65 Hence, the form allows for a possible ‘truer’ or more honest self-​accounting away from the factual constraints of straight autobiography. The novels in The Existential drinker do not have pseudonymous authors, but the alter-​ego protagonists do appear to function in a similarly enabling way as that of ‘indirect communication’. This allows writers to ‘share’ their subjectivity, that aspect which is ‘eternal’ (in Kierkegaard’s Christian framework) and not related to those matters which can be readily communicated, such as the mundane and our everyday selves.66 For those who come at the texts with the view that these are writings by alcoholics, the literature will tend to be judged according to how their ‘truths’ match AA and substance-​dependent-​ model ways of understanding. A  goal of this book is to counter this prevailing framework of interpretation and to view the writings as from within a Kierkegaardian legacy of an honest, ‘indirect communication’, even if Kierkegaard himself is hardly likely to have approved of the subject matter. A point of contention would be that Kierkegaard offers his creations as models to be judged, whereas the highly subjective and individual nature of the Existential-​drinker narratives are meant as sui generis accounts, if also directed, like Kierkegaard, towards questions of an authentic self.

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Introduction

19

Historical context I have noted that in Existential thought individuals are always ‘situated’, always born into a particular environment over which they have had no say. This is usually treated as a question of immediate surroundings and personal opportunities. But there is also a wider context which might be considered. I have already indicated that one of these is the way in which ‘the self’ becomes a category for attention around the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, becomes the entity we take for granted in our own times. Again, we can always discover antecedents, how St Augustine presents himself in the Confessions (AD 397–​400) for instance, including his meditation on time in Book XI,67 but arguably something happens in the last couple of centuries which produces an idea of people as selves, where ‘the self’ in the modern sense is understood primarily through the contents of phenomenological consciousness. Rather than trace the many tributaries that lead to this ‘modern’ self, I will just draw attention to a particularly striking feature which helps to put the figure of the Existential drinker in context, as well as position Existential philosophy in contemporary discussion –​the theme of ‘alienation’. I choose to focus on this because it is a feature of modern existence that both Marx and Kierkegaard deal with, that is, they separately identify the same problem that individuals and mankind as a whole, are, at their time of writing, alienated, but approach it with quite different philosophical frameworks, and offer quite different solutions.68 However, the materialist and spiritual conceptualisations they offer will recur repeatedly throughout the rest of the book, often in conflict, since ‘alienation’ would appear, as well as being central to Existential thought, to be a defining condition of the modern period into which the Existential drinker is born. Both Marx and Kierkegaard see that there is something wrong with the modern world, and both identify that this wrongness is down to a new set of social and economic relations. Kierkegaard talks of the effect of ‘the public’ on an individual’s relationship with himself and God, the many pressures to be ‘inauthentic’ (to use more direct Existential terminology). Marx likewise sees that a new set of relationships has come into being through the emergence of industrial capitalism and that this entails alienation. Thus, there is a comparable identification between these two quite different thinkers in which industrialisation and its effects fundamentally characterise our experience of the world. In terms of a very broad situatedness this can be called ‘modernity’, that is, the general situation of people born into the industrialising and industrialised nations of the nineteenth century onwards is a world increasingly dominated by technology, science, bureaucracy, and political systems that heed the

02

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Introduction

rise of the masses. It can be argued that alienation has always been present throughout history, going under other names such as melancholy, accidie, anomie, all moods which may have indicated forms of alienation from self, world, God, others. David E.  Cooper fixes on a related term when discussing the history of Existentialism:  ‘In taking the issue of estrangement as a central one for philosophy to resolve, existentialists engage with one of the great themes of philosophy –​one that ran through the history of the subject long before Hegel and Marx made it a topic of explicit attention’.69 However, it is probably fair to say that it becomes foregrounded in our period, as when Steven Crowell notes in discussing Sartre and consciousness the way in which ‘this non-​ identification is the phenomenological basis for the familiar existential idea that human reality is fundamentally alienated’,70 because consciousness of the world can never coincide with that world. This in itself suggests that throughout the history of mankind humans have always been alienated at some level, since if Sartre is correct it has always been the case that consciousness can never fully coincide with the world it is directed towards (or brings into being). My point would be, however, that it is in this period –​let us say late eighteenth century to the present –​that the question of ‘estrangement’, formulated as alienation in Marx and also in Existential writings, becomes acute. All of the central figures discussed in this book are alienated in relation to one or more characteristics of modernity, whether they live in France, Germany, the Soviet Union, America, Mexico, England, Scotland, or Ireland.71 The theme of alienation is strong in the Victorian case studies covered in Chapter  1, for example in George Eliot’s ‘Janet’s Repentance’ and Zola’s L’Assommoir. This brings us on to a second aspect when considering ‘situatedness’, that of Existential thought itself. Even if it was never particularly fashionable for philosophers and other adherents to self-​ identify as Existentialists, it is certainly the case that it has little traction as a contemporary philosophy or cultural phenomenon in the twenty-​first century. The unpopularity of the category ‘alienation’ is a case in point. As Simon Skempton notes in Alienation After Derrida, the whole premise that individuals have some authentic being from which they are distanced has been discarded in philosophical and critical thought because of the poststructural criticism of ‘presence’, a view which denies the idea that ‘the self’ could be anything like a profoundly self-​aware and self-​constituting autonomous entity.72 Elsewhere the broader sociocultural picture beyond academic disciplines is dominated by questions of ‘identity’, not in the sense of authentic individuals as self-​defining, but in the sense of group identities based upon such things as ethnicity,

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socioeconomic status/​class, physical and mental ability/​capacity, gender, sexual orientation, consumerism, nationality. In the dominant conversation about ‘identity’, ‘alienation’, if utilised with respect to identity formation, can only refer to ways in which people as part of a group identity are ‘estranged’ or marginalised from mainstream, dominant identities such as ‘white’, ‘male’, ‘European’, ‘able-​bodied’, ‘heterosexual’, etc. It will be evident that these group identities do have a part to play, with the novels representing situatedness to varying degrees: gender intersects with drink in all of the novels, and particularly Rhys’s creations; Catholicism features heavily in The Lonely Passion of Judith Hearne and Ironweed, while the protagonists of both Moscow–​Petushki and A Fan’s Notes pit themselves against the nation state. However, it is the alienation and authenticity of individuals which concern these writers, artists, and protagonists over and against these wider, shared, ‘situations’. The way in which this book uses Existentialism is to see the philosophy as being able to provide the best analysis of self and being-​in-​the-​world-​ with-​others, and so rather than treating Existentialism as falling mainly within the remit of history of philosophy, it regards it as not just chronologically coincidental with the novels covered here, but as a means with which to continue to understand the philosophical questions raised around drink and self.73 Objections It will be clear by now that this book is not a Public Health document. Nor is it aimed at Social Policy. If you are happy with that, and have no objections to its direction of travel, then please do skip this section and head to Chapter 1.  If you believe the project to be unethical, perhaps because it romanticises and philosophically validates behaviours which are destructive to individuals and society, or have other objections, then I will attempt to guess what they are and address them here. Ethics? It’s all well and good, so the argument goes, to glamorise ‘the outsider’ figure, but that can only be achieved in these novels by glossing over the misery caused to family and friends, either in their fictionalised worlds or by ignorance of how things work out in the real world. An epigraph Olivia Laing uses for The Trip to Echo Spring: Why Writers Drink comes from The Handbook of Medical Psychiatry, and it gives a good indication of the outlook within which she and others following this kind of argument write: ‘When alcoholics do drink, most eventually become

2

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Introduction

intoxicated, and it is this recurrent intoxication that eventually brings their lives down in ruins. Friends are lost, health deteriorates, marriages are broken, children are abused, and jobs terminated. Yet despite these consequences the alcoholic continues to drink’.74 There are two parts in response to this significant objection: the first is to consider the place of ethics within Existential thought, and the second is to consider the issue from a more general, ‘common humanity’, point of view. It remains a contested matter whether Existentialism entails any specific ethics or not. In the Conclusion to Being and Nothingness Sartre raises a series of questions about how we are to live, at the time of his writing, with the recognition of our fundamental freedom. In leading up to this he speaks of the individual as a moral agent.75 However, he says that any answers to these questions are for a future work on ethics, and although we do now have Sartre’s Notebooks for an Ethics (1992), it was a publication delayed until after Sartre’s death, in accordance with the author’s wishes.76 David Pellaeur concludes in his ‘Translator’s Introduction’ that ‘any overall synthesis [of Sartre’s ethics] is lacking and in the last analysis is unattainable’.77 Sartre’s commitment to Marxism soon after the publication of Being and Nothingness appears to have rendered redundant the necessity or urgency to publish a work which focussed on Existential ethical considerations, and, as Thomas C.  Anderson notes, the once Existentially central idea of authenticity is abandoned from the 1950s onwards.78 Place this absence from Sartre’s oeuvre alongside Heidegger’s avowal that ‘authenticity’ is not immanently a positive term and there does not appear much for an Existential ethics to hang on to.79 In fact, when Heidegger attempts to distance himself from Sartre’s ‘humanism’ (in 1947), establishing a ‘turn’ in his own way of thinking, he is also turning his back on ‘subjectivity’ in order to concentrate on a more abstract (or ontologically fundamental) account of Being,80 and thus is also moving away from what is commonly taken to be central to Existential thought, the notion that the individual’s phenomenological experience of the world is fundamentally salient to the self as a self. Camus in The Myth of Sisyphus emphatically warns against any attempt to sidestep the reality of meaninglessness through escape mechanisms which in turn provide a more positive philosophical outlook.81 Sartre does suggest in Existentialism and Humanism that every time an individual makes a choice it is at the same time one that is made for humanity,82 yet his insertion of this idea does not derive from Existential thought so much as Kant’s ‘categorical imperative’.83 Simone de Beauvoir, in The Ethics of Ambiguity, also has an argument similar to the Kantian view that in choosing for one I  choose for all.84 De Beauvoir argues diligently

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from within the parameters of Being and Nothingness, thus offering an ethical successor, but her argument still makes unwarranted leaps from the ontological to the ethical.85 On the other hand it should not be forgotten of course that Existentialism has been instrumental in providing inspiration for practical and politically radical agendas, the feminism of de Beauvoir’s The Second Sex,86 for instance, and the black activism and writings of Frantz Fanon and Richard Wright,87 and it is worth reminding ourselves of just how powerfully liberatory the idea of Existential freedom has been in general, individually and politically. But, again, these are not logically necessary ethical consequences to follow on from the Existential ontologies of Sartre and Heidegger. It could be argued that ‘authenticity’ and ‘freedom’ are actually ethical positions since they are treated positively by both philosophers, but they are without ‘content’, if by ethics is meant a vade mecum for social behaviour. The figures (‘being-​in-​itself’, Dasein) posited by Sartre and Heidegger could be called ‘moral agents’ in that Existential ontology posits a responsibility for the self which accords with a fundamental freedom, but the autotelic nature of Existential authenticity and freedom means that these identifications cannot provide the basis for a general ethics, in the usual understanding of that category. That is, for Existential philosophy, individuals have their own self-​defined ‘rules’ which are not destined for the public realm, as Sartre writes in his Notebooks:  ‘Ethics is an individual, subjective, and historical [“situated”] enterprise’.88 If we look at this state of affairs from the social rather than the individual’s point of view, the charge of irresponsibility inevitably becomes a major objection. Following on, a further objection might be that in a world with so many problems, paying attention to selfish egotists intent on ruining their lives and those of others is time poorly spent. This I would counter with: any social theory which urges categorical imperatives will always fail as a philosophical enterprise, for there can be no ‘ground’ on which to establish a common morality. ‘Freedom’ is sometimes advanced as an innate social and political good, but this nevertheless always comes with caveats which surely undermine the idea of freedom: laws, ethics, and custom by their nature proscribe freedom according to prevailing cultural precepts, even if couched in a universalist language. The question at the heart of this for Existentialism is the relationship between the two categories of freedom that de Beauvoir seeks to entwine: ontological freedom and ethical freedom. We can then put the issue in these terms:  if ontological freedom is a condition of existence, what are the ethical considerations that necessarily follow, in terms of responsibility to others?

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I would say ‘none’. I would say that the many manoeuvres to somehow redeem Existentialism from its subjective ethical cul-​de-​sac by treating it as a version of ‘humanism’ only ever do so by eliding its fundamental ontology, and thus fall into the trap that Camus warns against, that is, of constructing systems of thought to give us more palatable happy philosophical endings. These all rely, if we take Existentialism at its founding word, on some ameliorating deus ex machina which we might just as well have started with: God, love, freedom (that is, freedom in the political understanding of freedom, rather than an ethically neutral ontological freedom), creativity. If what ‘human’ is remains a process, defined by a constant questioning of what existence is –​something both Sartre and Heidegger agree upon, at least in their ‘Existential’ phases –​ rather than seeking some final definition, the logic of this is that such questioning remains open to all things, including those matters that are considered socially undesirable, anything, that is, on a spectrum from ‘unpleasant’ to ‘evil’. This might seem a despairing and unhelpful conclusion, and even worse for Existential thought if all that it amounts to is an ontology that describes how things ‘are’ with no consequent ethics with which to orientate ourselves. However, it seems to me that this is exactly the predicament that Existentialism does identify and which we do find ourselves in; or rather, it is exactly the question we are always asking, ‘What is it to truly exist?’ These various explorations of socially useless, largely socially destructive, committed drinkers are perfect examples of the difficulty. Consequently, no fundamental ethics will arise from the questions of self and existence that occur in the following chapters, nor will one be appealed to, from science, medicine, philanthropy, philosophy, anthropology, genetics, economics, gossip, nights of the soul. This should not be a surprise.89 These figures explore selves embedded in social relations in ways which highlight the fault lines of such questionings as we encounter them in our current historical situation. To view these figures as ‘problem drinkers’ is to miss the point about radical freedom, or to nudge them in directions more amenable to social appropriation, but away from other insights about existence. Bad faith? A criticism that could be made of the figure of the Existential drinker is that it is nothing other than a ‘type’, a role that is adopted by all of the protagonists and by some of the writer-​drinkers, and is therefore an act of bad faith. In other words, choosing to drink in this way is no different from submerging the self, as a waiter does when enacting his role as waiter (Sartre’s example of bad faith90), and is thus an evasion of

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self. The first thing to say in response is that many of the protagonists are aware of the possibility that taking on the role of a drunk or writer-​ drinker is just such an evasion. In that sense, then, the awareness of the possibility that ‘being a drunk’ is an inauthentic act is self-​consciously addressed, and the protagonists and writers seek to avoid slipping into such an unselfconscious orientation. Some novels and non-​fiction works do seriously and openly wrestle with the difficulty at length rather than simply dismissing it, and finally take the view that the whole idea that there can be creatively successful writer-​ drinkers, with (anti-​ )heroic fictional alter egos, is a cultural and personal delusion. In Ivan Gold’s Sams in a Dry Season (1990), for instance, the author’s fictionalised self (Jason Sams) looks back scathingly at the fact he ever bought into the whole romantic myth of the big-​drinking writer; John Berryman’s posthumously published Recovery:  A Novel (1973), which even in its unfinished state is quite some account of being in a treatment centre, also has a protagonist (Dr Alan Severance) who is highly critical of his own previous belief in the desirability of being a big w ​ riter-drinker. These disillusionments are attacks on the myth of the writer-​drinker, but they do not necessarily invalidate the purpose of these other works and writers who have not come to the same conclusion. The proof for Ivan Gold’s and John Berryman’s alter egos Jason Sams and Alan Severance is really the wisdom of AA retrospectively applied to their drinking and writing pasts. Other writerly disenchantments may stem from a sense of exhaustion with this specific sub-​genre of writing and the navel-​gazing drinker, as evident in O’Brien’s Leaving Las Vegas and his posthumous novel Better (2009). The very fact that the story of the agonised writer-​ drinker morphs into an identifiable category, which by definition entails repeated characteristics, can mitigate against a sense of authenticity, and some of the later works do reference the fact that they are writing in the tradition of The Lost Weekend and Under the Volcano, and seek to either avoid the pitfall or accept that falling into it is unavoidable. This ‘falling away’ is discussed more fully in the final chapter. Bourgeois individualism? Another criticism that could be levelled at these works is a criticism that can be levelled at Existentialism in its entirety, in that rather than being a radical philosophy it is really just another version of the bourgeois enterprise of ‘the self-​made man’. The main issue here lies with what we are to make of the categories ‘individual’ and ‘individualism’. It is undeniable that Existentialism focuses on ‘the individual’, even though it should also be recognised that the Existential individual is always a

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being-​in-​the-​world-​with-​others and that the self is always regarded as intersubjectively instated, rather than a solipsistic hermit. The extent to which Existentialism can be regarded as promoting a version of the bourgeois individual probably depends upon which version of Existentialism is under scrutiny, but it is true that Existential talk of ‘the self’ can seem at one with a bourgeois or neo-​liberal idea of ‘the individual’.91 However, the difference, culturally speaking, is that ‘the individual’, either in the older bourgeois sense or in its more recent neo-​liberal incarnation, is defined by a kind of economic relationship with society and others, that is, the terms of leeway individuals have with respect to what is required of them within society, to what extent they can ‘be individual’ within the bourgeois framework, is really a socioeconomic determination. In such frameworks the individual drinker is always modelled as a producer or consumer, of social and medical services, as well as of drink. The older bourgeois model would place drinkers at the wrong end of socioeconomic respectability, whereas within the consumerist model the binge drinker can at least be credited with rapid consumption, and thus on occasion be an asset to the economy, although in truth drinkers always were, given the large drink-​related revenues countries such as Great Britain, Russia/​USSR, and the United States have frequently relied upon. The Existential drinker, while situated within these sociohistorical contexts, is engaged in a different mode of orientation, since questions of authenticity are not related to socioeconomic modelling. The figure of the Existential drinker is certainly ‘individual’, but in essence this is not the individualism of bourgeois success or shopping for lifestyles. The conflict between these two versions of individualism is a theme of some of the novels, for example A Fan’s Notes and Paradise. Where are Fitzgerald and Hemingway? Whenever ‘writing’ and ‘drink’ are brought together there can be an expectation that certain writers need to be included:  Fitzgerald and Hemingway should be discussed, for instance, somewhere. Alfred Kazin’s 1976 article ‘ “The giant killer”:  drink and the American writer’ was the first major recognition of the link between great twentieth-​century American writers and drinking: ‘In fact, though no one ever talks about it very much, booze has played as big a role in the lives of modern American writers as talent, money, women, and the longing to be top dog’. He noted that the (then) three American Novel Prize winners for literature were also alcoholics  –​Sinclair Lewis, Eugene O’Neill, and William Faulkner  –​and added in Ernest Hemingway, Jack London, John O’Hara, John Berryman, and John Steinbeck to the widening list

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of well-​known American writers who happened to be big drinkers.92 Beyond this, we might include Charles Bukowski, Dorothy Parker, John Cheever, Robert Lowell, and from outside America we can add Dylan Thomas, Brendan Behan, Patrick Hamilton, and others. The reason that the work of Fitzgerald, Hemingway, and others is not included in The Existential drinker is that, whether emanating from writer-​drinkers or not, such representations are not especially concerned with drinkers and drinking in the Existential mode. Fitzgerald’s Tender is the Night (1934),93 dealing with ‘drinking problems’, and Hemingway’s Fiesta (a.k.a. The Sun Also Rises, 1926),94 with its bouts of ex-​pat heavy drinking in Europe, are both significant books in the history of drink-​ related novels, but they do not engage with self and drink Existentially. These writers and others may have plenty of drinkers or references to drinking, and there may even be Existential aspects to some of the writing (especially with Hemingway95), but I  felt that such instances were not sufficient to warrant inclusion. There are some drink-​permeated short stories as well which might be attended to, such as Fitzgerald’s ‘May Day’ (1920)96 and ‘An Alcoholic Case’ (1937),97 but they are not really involved in Existential themes,98 while Hemingway’s ‘A Clean Well-​Lighted Place’ (1933),99 with its ‘despair’, ‘nada’/‘nothingness’, implicates the Existential, but is too tangential.100 John Cheever’s ‘The Swimmer’ (1964),101 adapted into the 1968 film starring Burt Lancaster, and ‘Akhnilo’ by James Salter (1981)102 perhaps have more to offer in this vein, with their haunting, walled-​in male failures (probably) undone by drink; and perhaps also deserving of a closer look are John O’Hara’s Appointment in Samarra (1934), with its suicidal drinker-​protagonist Julian English, and some of O’Hara’s excellent short stories.103 Other drink-​permeated novels would include Jane Bowles’s wonderful Two Serious Ladies (1943),104 which takes life at a hedonistic sidelong glance, Kerouac’s novella Satori in Paris (1966), in which Kerouac is a self-​confessed ‘visiting drunkard alone in Paris’ chasing down his family history and experiencing Satori (‘enlightenment’), although he can’t quite remember where,105 Cyril Connolly’s novel The Rock Pool (1936), where Edgar Naylor intends to observe ex-​pats on the French Riviera, only to become one more bum himself, sucked into a self-​enclosed milieu which clings to the pleasure-​seeking 1920s while the 1930s happen elsewhere,106 and David Ireland’s grim and grimly funny vignettes from a Sydney pub, the Southern Cross, in The Glass Canoe (1976) –​‘The Cross is a place where you cannot see your self’107 –​but again I felt that all these stories and novels would have been peripheral to the central arguments in the book. Joseph Roth’s The Legend of the Holy Drinker (written in 1939)  feels like it should be

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on the list, but while certainly representing an anti-​materialist drinking narrative and a quasi-​spiritual allegory, it does not (to me) have the wider Existential credentials, even if, as the translator Michael Hofmann notes in his Introduction, ‘drink in the book is a philosophy’.108 This book Previous books which broach drinking in literature have tended to approach the subject by making the connection between the author’s drinking and the writing a central feature. Donald W. Goodwin’s Alcohol and the Writer (1988) is mainly devoted to drinking sketches of American writers –​Poe, Fitzgerald, Hemingway, Steinbeck, Faulkner, and O’Neill –​ to which he adds in the French Georges Simenon, ‘Learning to Drink American-​Style’, and the English-​born, Canada-​resident Lowry.109 The book ‘proposes … that alcoholism among American writers has been of epidemic proportions’110 and very much concerns itself with the lives rather than the literature. Tom Dardis’s book The Thirsty Muse: Alcohol and the American Writer (1989) is similar in outlook, although its accounts are more sustained and detailed in offering the drinking biographies of just four of the writers who appear in Goodwin:  Faulkner, Hemingway, Fitzgerald, and O’Neill.111 Thomas B. Gilmore’s Equivocal Spirits: Alcoholism and Drinking in Twentieth-​Century Literature (1987) sets out to deal with both the literature and the authors’ drinking lives, and how these are mutually reflective and informing, although not all the writers are necessarily ‘alcoholics’, for example Saul Bellow and Evelyn Waugh.112 He emphasises the interdisciplinary nature of his book, ‘joining literary analysis with scientific knowledge of alcoholism’.113 Like the Dardis and Gilmore books, however, the commentary is made firmly from within the perspective of alcoholism, so that the literature is sometimes judged accordingly:  ‘A basic fault of Brideshead Revisited as an investigation of alcoholism is that the more Waugh focuses attention on Sebastian’s holiness and special destiny, the less interest there is in his alcoholism’.114 These books came out within three years of each other, and filled what they saw as a gap in serious discussion of the relationship between writers and drinking, mainly American, perhaps a result of the steer given by Kazin’s article. Gilmore’s book is important in that it does offer some literary analysis of heavy-​drinking protagonists in novels, as well as some interesting work on Berryman’s poetry. John W.  Crowley’s The White Logic:  Alcoholism and Gender in American Modernist Fiction, published a little later, in 1994, significantly adds in London’s John Barleycorn, and focuses attention on writing mode and the largely masculine context for writing and

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drinking (the one female author included is Djuna Barnes and her novel Nightwood). The book draws on Goodwin, Dardis, and Gilmore in noting the connection between American writers in the first half of the twentieth century and the ‘veritable epidemic of alcoholism’,115 but significantly begins to draw away from a default acceptance of the disease concept of alcoholism. Instead, Crowley conceptualises ‘the drunk narrative: a mode of fiction that expresses the conjunction of modernism and alcoholism in a pervasive ideology of despair’116 and situates the work in a broadly cultural understanding of drunkenness. Another significant impetus in the focus on literature and drink from this seminal period was the founding of the journal Dionysos: The Literature and Intoxication Triquarterly (1989–​1994; 1996–​2001),117 which includes articles from some of these writers (Crowley and Gilmore) and others important to developing work in this area, for example Roger Forseth (founding editor) and George Wedge. The Editorial to the first issue places itself within the field of intoxication studies, which has, it notes, ‘essentially served the medical and social sciences’. Its aim was to bring intoxication studies to bear on literature: ‘Yet one taboo remains: the serious analysis of drink, drunkenness, addiction, and intoxication, an area best left, one gathers, to social workers, politicians, and comedians. But this will no longer do’.118 This research and commentary, and much work since, has largely addressed the literature in relation to addiction and alcoholism. What The Existential drinker does in contrast is to construct a putative canon of twentieth-​and twenty-​first-​century novels where the protagonists are committed drinkers and in which Existential themes are prominent. While attentive to issues around alcoholism, since this has been a dominant context for the period, the perspective is one which views a set of novels from a comprehensively philosophical point of view. There has been some work which touches on drink and philosophies of self, for example Anya Taylor’s Bacchus in Romantic England notes Kant’s trouble with the ‘I’ when an individual is drunk, suggesting as it does, in Taylor’s words, the ‘frightening notion’ of a ‘dissipating’ person,119 and Annette Federico is perhaps the first to identify the emergence of an Existential-​type drinker in nineteenth-​century literature in her 1990 Dionysos article.120 There are a number of the works discussed in The Existential drinker which have sometimes been addressed by other critics in their Existential aspects, for example Ironweed121 and Moscow–​ Petushki,122 but to my knowledge there is no grouping of these and other works into anything approaching an Existential-​ drinker canon. The Existential drinker is thus the first book to seek to place these novels and their interest in characters who orientate themselves in the world

03

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Introduction

through drink within the arena of Existential thought, and in doing so to argue that there is a demonstrable canon of such works. The book begins by looking at the emergence of such drinkers and drinking in the nineteenth century. The first chapter offers a number of case studies highlighting different aspects that contribute to the formation of this figure. It includes George Eliot’s long tale, ‘Janet’s Repentance’ (1857),123 possibly the first piece of literature to take the female drinker seriously,124 and important here as well for its placing of drink within a profoundly religious context, and Zola’s novel, L’Assommoir (1877),125 a supreme description of the impact of drink on a slum in Paris, and which like these other works records aspects of the relationship between drink and self which appear as new to the period within the context of industrialisation and the rapid expansion of cities. These aspects begin to dominate in the twentieth century, and it is attention to these later manifestations which forms the bulk of The Existential drinker, chapters devoted to analysis of key works in the provisional Existential-​ drinker canon. They begin with London’s John Barleycorn, after which the novels are roughly per decade. Jean Rhys’s four interwar novels have female characters wedded to self-​destructive drinking. While they offer a counterweight to the ‘heroic’ drinking of Jack London, they are also notable for the ways in which their apprehension of the world, modernity, and self are achieved through a modernist self-​consciousness. Two novels published in the forties, Charles Jackson’s The Lost Weekend and Malcolm Lowry’s Under the Volcano, are the century’s chronological and artistic pivots for the book. They appeared in close succession  –​ Jackson’s before Lowry’s, much to Lowry’s consternation126 –​and helped bring drinker protagonists to the forefront, substantially aided by Billy Wilder’s film version of Jackson’s novel starring Ray Milland (1945). Hans Fallada’s Der Trinker, although published 1950, was written in 1944, while The Lonely Passion of Judith Hearne gives us Ireland in the 1950s, with a quiet heroine at its centre, not the hard-​drinking male such a scenario might suggest. Frederick Exley’s A Fan’s Notes has been called ‘one of the finest of all sports novels’,127 and I would say it is also one of the best drinker novels published. Yerofeev’s Moscow–​Petushki, my other favourite novel here (alongside Rhys’s drinker novels), although coming out in 1970, is also really a sixties novel, and both of them seem very engaged with the kind of situatedness discussed earlier with respect to modernity and nation states. The last three novels with single chapters, Ironweed, Leaving Las Vegas, and Paradise, while still part of this putative Existential-​drinker canon, also show where that figure, for different reasons, is on the wane. The Conclusion covers some other works from this later period (1990s–​present) which more thoroughly dispose of the

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Existential drinker: Ivan Gold’s Sams in a Dry Season, Patrick deWitt’s Ablutions (2009),128 and John O’Brien’s Better, published posthumously (2009). It is not the purpose of The Existential drinker to read these books for how they correspond to people’s experience of real-​life drinking, including how they might be first-​person recollections. These are dramatisations of ideas around self and drink. It does not turn to scientific, political, or sociological accounts in order to ‘trump’ the view from the inside. These are not alcoholic cases which are to be slotted into the patterns provided by statistical, epidemiological, psychological, sociological, or scientific explanations. I am going to take the line offered by Jack London, that the commitment to alcohol for these figures provides truths which are not everyday truths. Not ‘constructive’ or ‘destructive’ drinking either, since this is the individual’s quest for truth and meaning. ‘Constructive’ and ‘destructive’ are terms which implicitly place the individual within conventional society and could only be brought within the purview of ‘authenticity’ and ‘freedom’ at the Existential drinker’s behest. Most current and previous discussion of these works characterises the kind of drinking outlined here as problematic, whereas in The Existential drinker they represent nothing other than a commitment to authentic existence. Notes 1 Jack London, John Barleycorn (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009). 2 For example, from John B. Gough’s popular An Autobiography:  ‘I was now the slave of a habit which had become completely my master, and which fastened its remorseless fangs in my very vitals’ (Boston, MA: John B. Gough, 1845), p. 94. 3 Thomas De Quincey, Confessions of an English Opium Eater (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998). Alina Clej’s A Genealogy of the Modern Self:  Thomas De Quincey and the Intoxication of Writing (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1995) gives a thorough analysis of ‘intoxication’, mainly through opium’s hallucinogenic effects, in relation to De Quincey, self, and writing, using ‘intoxication’ in its figural as well as literal sense. 4 ‘Confessions of a Drunkard’, in The Works of Charles Lamb, vol. 3 (New York: W. J. Widdleton, 1871), p. 422. 5 David S. Reynolds provides a full picture of American temperance narratives in ‘Black cats and delirium tremens: temperance and the American renaissance’, in David S. Reynolds and Debra J. Rosenthal (eds), The Serpent in the Cup:  Temperance in American Literature (Amherst, MA:  University of Massachusetts Press, 1997). He breaks temperance narratives into four

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main types; ‘dark temperance’ tales could be regarded as the most relevant predecessors to the work discussed here. There is also extensive coverage in Matthew Osborn’s Rum Maniacs: Alcoholic Insanity in the Early American Republic (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2014), especially c­ hapter 6, ‘The drunkard’s demons’, and the Epilogue, ‘Alcoholics and pink elephants’. 6 For which see John O. Lyons, The Invention of the Self:  The Hinge of Consciousness in the Eighteenth Century (Carbondale, IL: Southern Illinois University Press, 1978), arguing that the idea of ‘the self’ is largely an eighteenth-​century invention. Before then, according to Lyons: ‘An inner life did not exist, or if it did it followed patterns that were so universal as to be tedious’, p. 44. 7 See Annette Federico, ‘ “I must have drink”: addiction, angst and Victorian realism’, Dionysos 2:2 (1990), 11–​25, which frames the issues within an addiction model. As will become clear, The Existential drinker does not use the concept of ‘addiction’ to understand the issues at play here, and instead emphasises the idea of a coherent ‘self’ which freely chooses to drink, motivated by the desire for authenticity. Some of these aspects can be seen in the eighteenth century, and then, depending upon definitions, taken back further. See in particular James Nicholls’s chapter ‘A fascinating poison: early medical writing on drink’, in his The Politics of Alcohol (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2009). However, the drunkard’s inner world is not of interest until the end of the eighteenth/​beginning nineteenth century, as Nicholls notes: ‘in turning away from the convivial and the light-​hearted, Romantic writers were able to mine the interiority of the (refined) drinker to an extent not previously attempted’ (p. 78). For a full treatment of the Romantics and drink, see Anya Taylor, Bacchus in Romantic England (Houndmills, Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1999). 8 Ecclesiastes 2:3 (King James Version). 9 Charles Jackson, The Lost Weekend (London:  Black Spring Press, 1998), p. 29. 10 Fyodor Dostoevsky, Crime and Punishment (Harmondsworth, Middlesex: Penguin, 1980). 11 The most significant fault lines are: the role of phenomenology in Existentialism (although, according to Hubert L. Dreyfus and Mark A. Wrathall this is no longer ‘moot’ and the two should be thought together: Hubert L. Dreyfus and Mark A. Wrathall, ‘A brief introduction to phenomenology and existentialism’, in Hubert L. Dreyfus and Mark A. Wrathall (eds), A Companion to Phenomenology and Existentialism (Oxford: Wiley-​Blackwell, 2009), p. 5); how strictly demarcated Existentialism can be as a philosophy separate from its wider cultural manifestations; which writers are properly Existential, with questions over the inclusion of Nietzsche most prominent, and in literature, whether Camus’s writings can be considered Existential rather than a modern stoicism. 12 For example:  ‘Only the particular Dasein decides its existence, whether it does so by taking hold or by neglecting. The question of existence never gets

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straightened out except through existing itself’. Martin Heidegger, Being and Time (Oxford: Blackwell, 1995), p. 32. 13 Heidegger denied that Being and Time privileged ‘authenticity’ over ‘inauthenticity’, but few commentators find this persuasive –​the whole thesis makes ‘authenticity’ and related terms such as ‘mineness’ more attractive and necessary than being part of ‘the they’. 14 Heidegger, Being and Time, p. 296. 15 Caroline Knapp refers to ‘the very real  –​and, to alcoholics, enormously seductive  –​phenomenon of taking psychic flight, ingesting a simple substance and leaving yourself behind’. Caroline Knapp, Drinking:  A Love Story (New York: Dial Press, 1996), p. 62. 16 Jean-​Paul Sartre, Being and Nothingness (London: Routledge, 1995), p. 626. 17 Ibid., p. 627. 18 Ibid. 19 I would suggest that the example is loaded in favour of the drunk. A more telling example would perhaps be one which compared the drunk with a committed aid worker. 20 Sartre, Being and Nothingness, p. 627 (italics in original). 21 Galen Strawson, Selves:  An Essay in Revisionary Metaphysics (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009), pp. 9ff.; ‘there’s a fundamental sense in which human selves can’t be supposed to have long-​term diachronic continuity, so that there are many transient selves in the case of an individual human being if there are any at all’, p. 12. 22 Lyons argues that ‘the self’ ‘was a fiction in the first place’, The Invention of the Self, p. 19. Jerome Buckley in The Turning Key: Autobiography and the Subjective Impulse since 1800 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1984) discusses the idea in detail, noting how ‘self’ has replaced ‘soul’ as religious authority has declined, for example, p. 15. 23 Strawson argues that there are endurantists (diachronic) and impermanentists (episodic), and that there are ‘Narrative and non-​Narrative forms of life’ (life as a story or not), and this colours the view of what the self is, Selves, pp. 14–​15. While Existential thinkers are likely to see future selves and past selves as projections, they emanate from the self that exists now rather than being the discrete, ontologically disconnected selves that ‘impermanism’ would suggest, and so conform to a diachronic, narrative model. 24 For example, Charles Guignon notes that Heidegger presents two ideas of self in Being and Time. The first is one which has become central to Existential thought, the idea of an ‘authentic self’; the second idea is one which sees the self as an event unfolding, enmeshed in a life-​world, and with much less insistence on a notion of an individuated self. Charles Guignon, ‘Becoming a self: the role of authenticity in Being and Time’, in Charles Guignon (ed.), The Existentialists:  Critical Essays on Kierkegaard, Nietzsche, Heidegger, and Sartre (Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 2004). Nietzsche, always included as part of Existential thought as something of an outlier, also seems to advance two contrasting ideas of self: like Heidegger

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he proposes an idea of an authentic self that we now think of as quintessentially ‘Existential’, but he also regards exceptional selves not as individuals but as forming a group at the vanguard of humanity (see Richard Schacht, ‘Nietzsche after the death of God’, in Steven Crowell (ed.), The Cambridge Companion to Existentialism (Cambridge:  Cambridge University Press, 2012), pp. 129–​30). In Genealogy of Morals, Nietzsche goes so far as to deny altogether that there is such a thing as a self; see Alexandar Nehemas, ‘How one becomes what one is’, in Guignon (ed.), The Existentialists. 25 Søren Kierkegaard, Concluding Unscientific Postscript to ‘Philosophical Fragments’, vol. 1 (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1992), p. 33. 26 Lance Dodes and Zachary Dodes calculate that there are over 300 organisations in the United States using the AA template for their programmes aimed at different issues: ‘smoking, shoplifting, social phobia, debt, recovery from incest, even vulgarity’. Lance Dodes and Zachary Dodes, The Sober Truth: Debunking the Bad Science behind 12-​Step Programs and the Rehab Industry (Boston, MA: Beacon Press, 2014), p. 1. For an excellent ‘anthropological’ study of AA, with particular focus on the meanings of the word ‘alcoholism’ for the group, see Paul Antze, ‘Symbolic action in Alcoholics Anonymous’, in Mary Douglas (ed.), Constructive Drinking:  Perspectives on Drink from Anthropology (Cambridge:  Cambridge University Press, 1989). Nan Robertson’s Getting Better:  Inside Alcoholics Anonymous gives a sympathetic history of the organisation, along with recovery narratives (New  York:  William Morrow, 1988); for an alcoholic’s behavioural analysis and social science view of AA see Danny Wilcox’s Alcoholic Thinking:  Language, Culture, and Belief in Alcoholics Anonymous (Westport, CT:  Praeger, 1998). Matts G. Djos offers a judgemental, AA disease-​model analysis of some alcoholic-​infused literature in Writing Under the Influence: Alcoholism and the Alcoholic Perception from Hemingway to Berryman (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2010), although even he reluctantly concedes the success of the writing and the role of alcohol may be interdependent: ‘I hesitate to suggest that their work might have been better without their addiction. Alcohol is integral with the very heart and content of much of their work. It expresses in deeply human terms the issues and frustrations, the difficulties of adjustment, and the overwhelming emotional pain that are common precursors to the kind of creativity that is evident in the poems and stories that we have read’, p. 116. For a sustained attack on the ‘disease concept’ of alcoholism, see Herbert Fingarette, Heavy Drinking: The Myth of Alcoholism as a Disease (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1988). Fingarette views the prevalent ‘disease concept’ as a hindrance to more appropriate treatments. For a positive, polemical appreciation of altered states, see Stuart Walton’s Out of It: A Cultural History of Intoxication (London: Penguin, 2002). 27 The World Health Organization replaced the term ‘alcoholism’ with ‘alcohol dependence syndrome’ in the ninth edition of its International Classification of Diseases (1977); see WHO, Problems Related to Alcohol

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Consumption: Report of a WHO Expert Committee (Geneva: WHO, 1980), Annex 2, ‘Alcohol Dependence Syndrome’. At the time of writing (2017), its ‘Lexicon of Alcohol and Drug Terms’ subsumes ‘alcohol dependence syndrome’ under the broader ‘dependence syndrome’, www.who.int/​substance_​abuse/​terminology/​who_​lexicon/​en/​. 28 Health professionals and those involved in social policy tend not to use the term. For example, in the comprehensive collection of views gathered in Peter Boyle et  al. (eds), Alcohol:  Science, Policy, and Public Health (Oxford:  Oxford University Press, 2013) the preferred terms are ‘heavy drinking’, ‘problem drinkers’, ‘alcohol abuse’, or ‘inappropriate alcohol consumption’. However, it should be noted that all of the words which serve as markers for undesirable behaviour  –​‘heavy’, ‘problem’, ‘abuse’, ‘inappropriate’ –​hide a moral dissatisfaction which continues to implicitly posit the model citizen –​one who drinks ‘appropriately’, in ‘moderation’ –​and somebody who is not, therefore ‘a problem’ who ‘abuses’. 29 Alcoholics Anonymous, The Twelve Steps and Twelve Traditions (2005), p. 37, www.portlandeyeopener.com/​AA-​12-​Steps-​12-​Traditions.pdf. This is perhaps close to Ayn Rand’s brand of Nietzschean-​style individualism as expressed in her neo-​liberally popular novel The Fountainhead. 30 For example, step 8 for the alcoholic is to make ‘a list of all persons … harmed’ and ‘make amends to them all’. 31 Malcolm Lowry, Under the Volcano (Harmondsworth, Middlesex: Penguin, 1972), p. 121. 32 For those interested in getting the view from a ‘fall-​in-​the-​gutter’ drunk, see John Healy’s autobiography The Grass Arena, an unsentimental portrait of ‘a fucked-​up wino’ (London: Faber, 1990 [1988]), p. 108. This does not go in for extended self-​analysis or philosophy, offering instead a bleak description of a group of London street drinkers over a number of years, characterised by begging, thieving, sleeping rough, violence, prison, and numerous deaths: ‘I’m still here drinking and smoking, doing my little bits of nick. It seems such an idle boast. I’m neither proud nor ashamed of it. It just is’, p. 164. 33 Lawrence Osborne’s travelogue The Wet and the Dry: A Drinker’s Journey is a good example of the hedonist’s enjoyment of drinking (London: Harvill Secker, 2013), while Charles Bukowski’s novel Post Office (1971) has a hedonist protagonist whose twin interests are drinking and sex (London: Virgin Books, 2009). 34 Sartre, Being and Nothingness, p. 90. 35 Albert Camus, The Outsider (Harmondsworth, Middlesex: Penguin, 1981). 36 Simone de Beauvoir, The Ethics of Ambiguity (New  York:  Citadel Press, 1996), p. 11. De Beauvoir goes on to make the point that man can joyfully accept his lot because living in ambiguity (confronted by ambiguity) allows for ‘disclosure’ of being, p. 13. 37 See Taylor Carman, ‘The concept of authenticity’, in Dreyfus and Wrathall (eds), Companion, with comments on ‘self-​ fulfilment’, pp.  229–​ 30. In

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Introduction contrast to de Beauvoir’s view in The Ethics of Ambiguity, the character Hélène in her novel The Blood of Others argues for unhappiness in this exchange with her lover, Blomart: ‘You have said to me so often that you respect other people’s liberty. And you make decisions for me and treat me like a thing’. ‘I didn’t want you to be unhappy’. ‘And if I prefer to be unhappy? It’s for me to choose’. (Simone de Beauvoir, The Blood of Others (Harmondsworth, Middlesex:  Penguin, 1976), p. 102)

Compare this to:  ‘But actually it is not a question of giving men time and happiness, it is not a question of stopping the movement of life: it is a question of fulfilling it’, de Beauvoir, Ethics, p. 80. David E.  Cooper offers a more positive take on Existential authenticity and happiness: ‘So forbidding is the authentic life sometimes made to sound that one wonders if anyone could want to seek it. But we should recall here a distinction that Heidegger makes between an initial mood of Angst, where disturbing feelings like “uncanniness” dominate, and a more mature mood which is one of sober but “unshakable joy” in reclaiming one’s “individualized potentiality-​for-​Being”. Authenticity has, after all, its own rewards’. David E. Cooper, ‘Existentialism as a philosophical movement’, in Crowell (ed.), Companion, p. 43. Heidegger does not explain why joy must be sober. 38 I am indebted to Simon Mullins for discussions around psychiatry, individual ‘capacity’ for decision-​making, and current treatments for mental health issues. 39 Hans Fallada, The Drinker (Brooklyn, NY: Melville House Publishing, 2009). 40 Frederick Exley, A Fan’s Notes (London: Yellow Jersey Press, 1999). 41 Venedict Yerofeev, Moscow Stations. A Poem, trans. Stephen Mulrine (London: Faber, 1997). 42 A. L. Kennedy, Paradise (London: Vintage Books, 2005). 43 For example, Heidegger:  ‘Being-​ in-​ the-​ world is … nothing other than freedom, freedom no longer understood as spontaneity but as defined by the formulation of Dasein’s metaphysical essence’, quoted by Craig Delancey, ‘Action, the scientific worldview, and being-​in-​the-​world’, in Dreyfus and Wrathall (eds), Companion, p. 363. 44 Knapp, Drinking, pp. 193–​4 and p. 238. 45 She approvingly quotes another drinker who likens alcoholism to diarrhoea: ‘try controlling that’ (ibid., p. 54); and writes that ‘alcoholism runs in families … most alcoholics probably have a genetic predisposition to it as well’; and ‘Addiction to alcohol is also a neurological phenomenon’ (ibid., both p. 115). At the same time the book also has a very strong attraction to the idea of an authentic self, to which heavy drinking/​ alcoholism is antithetical. 46 Knapp is not alone in lumping together all the possible causes, even if the whole then becomes a contradictory bundle. John Berryman, for instance,

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refers to his drinking problem as a ‘biopsycho-​ socio-​ spiritual disease’, Recovery: A Novel (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1973), p. 212. For a piece of fiction wholly opposed to granting ‘the alcoholic’ any sympathy or insight see Akhil Sharma’s short story ‘You Are Happy?’, in which the drinking mother is lured from her home in New York back to India in order to attend a funeral; while there she is murdered, with the husband’s tacit approval, in order to preserve the family’s honour and to solve his marital difficulties. Akhil Sharma, ‘You Are Happy?’, The New Yorker, 17 April 2017, www.newyorker.com/​magazine/​2017/​04/​17/​you-​are-​happy. 47 Sartre, Being and Nothingness, p. 33. 48 Heidegger, Being and Time, p. 425 49 Jean-​Paul Sartre, Nausea (Harmondsworth, Middlesex: Penguin, 1979). 50 Raskolnikov is, as already mentioned, the central figure in Fyodor Dostoevsky’s Crime and Punishment and Meursault is the main character in Camus’s The Outsider; Roquentin is the main character in Nausea. 51 ‘World is essentially revealed and so constituted through Dasein’s comportments. These comportments arise because of the temporal nature of Dasein: Dasein cannot, as it were, sit still, but must interact’, Delancey, ‘Action’, p. 363. 52 John O’Brien, Leaving Las Vegas (London: Pan, 1996). 53 The compressed time period is not specific to Existential-​drinker narratives, but it is aesthetically convenient. The single-​day structure of Under the Volcano is no doubt inspired by James Joyce’s single-​day novel Ulysses. Other drinker novels with short time frames include another of John O’Brien’s novels, Better, over a single day (New York: Akashic Books, 2009), and Ivan Gold’s Sams in a Dry Season (New York: Washington Square Press, 1992), set over a weekend. Short time frames are a staple of drama, of course, staying close to an Aristotelian unity of time, place, and action, and such a structure when imported into the novel form does help intensify the feeling that in the last binge everything is being brought to a head, rather than spreading the narrative out over months and years. Two notable plays where drink is central and with short time frames are Eugene O’Neill’s Long Day’s Journey into Night (1956, written 1941–​1942 (London:  Jonathan Cape, 1972)), a single day, and Edward Albee’s Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? (1962 (London: Penguin, 1965)), where events take place over an evening. The time span for Christopher Reid’s narrative poem The Song of Lunch (2009 (London: Faber, 2010)) is given in the title –​although the narrator is in a drunken slumber on the roof of the restaurant for about an hour of it, ‘out to lunch at your own lunch’, as his old flame puts it, p. 53. 54 Compare this to temperance narratives, where the destruction wrought by drink has to be shown over a long period. Douglas Jerrold’s Fifteen Years of a Drunkard’s Life (London: Samuel French, n.d. [1828]), one of the first temperance dramas, frames it in this manner and sets the temporal frame for later works; T. S. Arthur’s popular novel Ten Nights in a Bar-​Room and What I Saw There (Philadelphia: J. W. Bradley, 1861 [1854]) is spread out over ten years, not ten consecutive nights. The use of an autobiographical

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format for either fictional or confessional temperance narratives obviously demands the time period of a whole life. 55 Jean Rhys, Good Morning, Midnight (London: Penguin, 2000). 56 William Kennedy, Ironweed (London: Simon & Schuster, 2013). 57 ‘There is but one truly serious philosophical problem and that is suicide. Judging whether life is or is not worth living amounts to answering the fundamental question of philosophy’, Albert Camus, The Myth of Sisyphus (London: Penguin, 2000), p. 11. 58 Brian Moore, The Lonely Passion of Judith Hearne (London:  Harper Perennial, 2007). 59 John W. Crowley, The White Logic:  Alcoholism and Gender in American Modernist Fiction (Amherst, MA:  University of Massachusetts Press, 1994), p. 19. 60 Jean Rhys, After Leaving Mr Mackenzie (London: Penguin, 2000). 61 Kent Russell, I Am Sorry to Think I Have Raised a Timid Son (London: Corsair, 2015, Kindle edn, ch. 8). 62 David Falk, ‘Lowry and the aesthetics of salvation’, in Sherrill E. Grace (ed.), Swinging the Maelstrom: New Perspectives on Malcolm Lowry (Montreal and Kingston: McGill-​Queen’s University Press, 1992), p. 53. 63 Both John Berryman’s Recovery and Charles Bukowski’s Post Office are subtitled ‘A Novel’ and thus also signify some play on the boundaries between fiction, memoir, and autobiography. 64 Exley, A Fan’s Notes, p. 35. 65 Alastair Hannay, ‘Kierkegaard’s single individual and the point of indirect communication’, in Crowell (ed.), Companion, p. 78. 66 Ibid., p.  79. Philippe Lejeune argues against ‘the widespread theory according to which the novel is truer (more profound, more authentic) than the autobiography’. Philippe Lejeune, ‘The autobiographical pact’, in On Autobiography (Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press, 1989), pp. 26ff., but of course (as Lejeune is aware) this does then open up the problem of those very terms ‘truer’, ‘more profound’, ‘more authentic’. I would not see ‘indirect communication’ as falling within Lejeune’s analytical scope. 67 Augustine, Confessions (London:  Everyman, 2001). For example, Husserl: ‘The first person who sensed profoundly the enormous difficulties inherent in this analysis, and who struggled with it almost to despair, was Augustine. Even today, anyone occupied with the problem of time must still study …  the Confessions thoroughly’, quoted in Joseph Rivera, ‘Figuring the porous self:  St. Augustine and the phenomenology of temporality’, Modern Theology 29:1 (2012), 83–​103; see also Ryan Coyne, Heidegger’s Confessions:  The Remains of Saint Augustine in ‘Being and Time’ and Beyond (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2015). 68 For a detailed discussion of Marx in relation to this see István Mészáros’s Marx’s Theory of Alienation (London:  The Merlin Press, 5th edn, 2005). Mészáros identifies four elements:  alienation from nature, from self (as active in the world/​producing), from ‘species-​being’ (the human race), and from other men, p. 14.

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9 Cooper, ‘Existentialism’, p. 33. 6 70 Steven Crowell, ‘Sartre’s existentialism and the nature of consciousness’, in Crowell (ed.), Companion, p. 207. 71 It is outside the scope of the book to determine just how global a phenomenon the Existential drinker might be. 72 ‘The concept of alienation initially appears to encapsulate what “postmodern” and deconstructive thought claims to have laid to rest’, Simon Skempton, Alienation After Derrida (London:  Continuum, 2010), p.  1. Skempton attempts to rescue the concept by arguing that the metaphysics of presence is not intrinsic to alienation. 73 David Cooper makes the argument for the relevance of Existentialism as a whole: ‘Inspired by the issue of estrangement, existentialist thought moves in a coherent direction, from conceptions of the world and human existence to a doctrine of radical human freedom that leads into an ethics of authenticity and reciprocal freedom’, ‘Existentialism’, pp. 47–​8. 74 Olivia Laing, The Trip to Echo Spring:  Why Writers Drink (Edinburgh: Canongate, 2013), p. vii. 75 Ibid., p. 607. 76 Arlette Elaïm-​ Sartre, ‘Foreword’, in Jean-​ Paul Sartre, Notebooks for an Ethics (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1992), p. xxiii. 77 Ibid., p. viii. 78 Thomas C. Anderson, ‘Beyond Sartre’s ethics of authenticity’, Journal of the British Society for Phenomenology 33 (2002), 138–​54. For a view sympathetic to the idea of a Sartrean ethics, see Linda A. Bell, Sartre’s Ethics of Authenticity (Tuscaloosa, AL: University of Alabama Press, 1989). 79 For a discussion of what might count as ‘ethics’ in Heidegger’s work, see Sacha Golob, ‘Martin Heidegger:  freedom, ethics, ontology’, in Sacha Golob and Jens Timmerman (eds), The Cambridge History of Moral Philosophy (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2016), online preview at www.academia.edu/​10112989/​Heideggers_​Ethics_​Forthcoming_​in_​the_​ Cambridge_​History_​of_​Moral_​Philosophy_​. With respect to Being and Time, establishing an ontology for existence is the primary aim, and in this Sartre’s Being and Nothingness also follows suit. 80 For example, as Kristina Arp writes:  ‘In his “Letter on Humanism”, published in 1947, Heidegger strongly criticized what he saw as the underlying metaphysical assumptions of de Beauvoir’s and Sartre’s existentialism. Existentialist humanism, he says, enthrones the “subject” as a “tyrant of being” who deigns “to release the beingness of being into an all too loudly bruited “objectivity”’. Kristina Arp, ‘Simone de Beauvoir’s existentialism’, in Crowell (ed.), Companion, p. 256. 81 Camus, Myth of Sisyphus, pp. 35ff. He discusses Kierkegaard, Chestov, and Jaspers as such ‘existential philosophers’, pointing out how each makes an unwarranted escape from life’s absurd truth. Camus then sets himself the task of asking ‘if it is possible to live without appeal’, p. 53. 82 ‘When we say that man chooses himself, we do mean that every one of us must choose himself; but by that we also mean that in choosing for himself

04

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Introduction

he chooses for all men’, Jean-​Paul Sartre, Existentialism and Humanism (London: Eyre Methuen, 1973), p. 29; de Beauvoir, Ethics, pp. 60–​1. 83 ‘Act only in accordance with that maxim through which you can at the same time will that it become a universal law’, and, ‘I ought never to conduct myself except so that I could also will that my maxim become a universal law’, Immanuel Kant, Groundwork for the Metaphysics of Morals, ed. and trans. Allen W. Wood (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2002), p. 37 and p. 18, respectively. 84 For example: ‘To will oneself free is also to will others free’, Ethics, p. 73. A similar bonded sentiment is expressed in The Blood of Others: ‘One day I read, “Each of us is responsible for everything and to every human being”. It seemed so true to me’, p. 122 (Blomart speaking). The quotation is from Dostoevsky and also provides the novel’s epigraph. 85 For example: ‘To will oneself free is to effect the transition from nature to morality by establishing a genuine freedom on the original upsurge of our existence’. De Beauvoir, Ethics, p. 25. De Beauvoir allows herself latitude by introducing the idea ‘to will oneself free’, whereas, ontologically speaking, the individual is free regardless of any ‘willing’. 86 Simone de Beauvoir, The Second Sex (London: Vintage, 1997). 87 See Lewis R. Gordon, ‘Introduction’, in his Existence in Black: An Anthology of Black Existential Philosophy (New York: Routledge, 1997). 88 Sartre, Notebooks, p. 7. 89 As Jacob Golomb writes: ‘To conclude is to reach an end together, but the authentic posture, as understood by the philosophers of authenticity, forbids me from presuming to conclude for you or for us. Each individual has to come to her own conclusions about authenticity’. Jacob Golomb, In Search of Authenticity:  From Kierkegaard to Camus (London:  Routledge, 1995), p. 200. For criticism of Existential authenticity, see Theodor Adorno, The Jargon of Authenticity (London: Routledge, 1986). 90 Sartre, Being and Nothingness, pp. 59–​60. 91 The traditional bourgeois model and the neo-​liberal model may not be quite as synonymous as I  suggest here. Neo-​liberalism is covered in the book’s final chapters. 92 Alfred Kazin, ‘  “The giant killer”:  drink and the American writer’, Commentary (March 1976), 44–​50, p. 44. 93 F. Scott Fitzgerald, Tender is the Night (Harmondsworth, Middlesex: Penguin, 1985). 94 Ernest Hemingway, Fiesta/​The Sun Also Rises (London: Arrow Books, 1993). 95 For instance ‘death’ and ‘nothingness’ do become themes in relation to the bullfighting in Fiesta, but not in relation to drink. A good account of the Existential influence on American literature, including on Hemingway, is Richard Lehan’s A Dangerous Crossing:  French Literary Existentialism and the Modern American Novel (Carbondale, IL: Southern Illinois University Press, 1973). 96 F. Scott Fitzgerald, ‘May Day’, in Short Stories. The Bodley Head Scott Fitzgerald 5 (London: The Bodley Head, 1975).

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97 F. Scott Fitzgerald, ‘An Alcoholic Case’, in Short Stories. The Bodley Head Scott Fitzgerald 6 (London: The Bodley Head, 1975). 98 ‘An Alcoholic Case’ is seen through the perspective of a nurse who has taken it upon herself to care for an alcoholic. It ends with her resigned to the idea that it is pointless looking out for them:  ‘It’s just that you can’t really help them and it’s so discouraging –​it’s all for nothing’, ibid., p. 322. 99 Ernest Hemingway, ‘A Clean Well-​Lighted Place’, Scribners (March 1933), pp. 149–​50. 100 For difficulties over interpretation, see David Kerner’s ‘The ambiguity of “A Clean, Well-​Lighted Place” ’, Studies in Short Fiction 29:4 (1992), 561–​74. 101 First published in The New Yorker, 18 July 1964. Collected in The Stories of John Cheever (New York: Ballantine Books, 1978). 102 James Salter, ‘Akhnilo’, Grand Street 1:1 (1981), 124–​30. I am not including Salter as one of the writer-​drinkers, but rather the claim the story might have for recognition in this grouping. 103 John O’Hara, Appointment in Samarra (London:  Vintage, 2008), and Selected Stories (London: Vintage, 2011). 104 Jane Bowles, Two Serious Ladies (London: Sort of Books, 2010). 105 Jack Kerouac, Satori in Paris (London: Penguin, 2012); the quotation is at p. 35. 106 Cyril Connolly, The Rock Pool (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1981). 107 David Ireland, The Glass Canoe (Victoria, Australia:  Penguin, 1982), p. 129. 108 Joseph Roth, The Legend of the Holy Drinker (London: Granta, 2013), p. 3. 109 Donald W. Goodwin, Alcohol and the Writer (New York: Penguin, 1988). 110 Ibid., p. 1. 111 Tom Dardis, The Thirsty Muse: Alcohol and the American Writer (London: Sphere Books, 1990). 112 Thomas B. Gilmore, Equivocal Spirits:  Alcoholism and Drinking in Twentieth-​Century Literature (Chapel Hill, NC:  University of North Carolina Press, 1987). 113 Ibid., pp. 7–​8. 114 Ibid., p. 46. 115 Crowley, The White Logic, p. x. 116 Ibid. 117 All issues are available at http://​teaching.shu.ac.uk/​ds/​sle/​Dionysos.htm. Jim Harbaugh was editor for the journal 1996–​2001. 118 Editorial, Dionysos 1:1 (1989), p. 1. 119 Taylor, Bacchus, pp. 66–​7, p. 66. 120 Federico, ‘ “I must have drink” ’. 121 For example Christian Michener in ­chapter  4, ‘Existential struggles in an eschatological world:  the myth of Francis Phelan’, of his From Then

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into Now: William Kennedy’s Albany Novels (Scranton, PA: University of Scranton Press, 1998), although ‘Existential’ is used rather loosely. 122 For example, Konstantin Kustanovich, ‘Venichka Erofeev’s grief and solitude: existential motifs in the Poema’, in Karen L. Ryan-​Hayes (ed.), Venedikt Erofeev’s ‘Moscow–​Petushki’: Critical Perspectives (New York: Peter Lang, 1997). 123 George Eliot, ‘Janet’s Repentance’, in Scenes of Clerical Life (London: Penguin, 1998). 124 See Sheila Shaw, ‘The female alcoholic in Victorian fiction: George Eliot’s unpoetic heroine’, in Rhoda B. Nathan (ed.), Nineteenth-​Century Women Writers of the English-​Speaking World (London: Greenwood Press, 1986). 125 Émile Zola, L’Assommoir (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998). 126 Lowry’s long letter to Jonathan Cape (January 1946)  in response to a negative reader’s report is obliged to explain how it is different from The Lost Weekend. The letter is reprinted in full in Malcolm Lowry, The Voyage that Never Ends: Fictions, Poems, Fragments, Letters, ed. Michael Hofmann (New York: NYRB, 2007). He begins his defence: ‘This brings me to the unhappy (for me) subject of The Lost Weekend’, p. 392. 127 Michael Oriard, Dreaming of Heroes:  American Sports Fiction, 1868–​ 1980 (Chicago: Nelson-​Hall, 1982), p. 204. 128 Patrick deWitt, Ablutions (London: Granta, 2009).

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I

Whiffs and gleams

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1

Habitual drunkards and metaphysics: case studies from the Victorian period You have not endeavoured to ascertain what induced these people to drink, whether misfortune, or broken health, or what?1

Introduction The figure of the Existential drinker as discussed in the Introduction may seem a long way removed from the images we are familiar with of nineteenth-​century drunkenness and drunkards, treated en masse as types rather than unique, individuated souls. This chapter suggests significant moments in the transition from the nineteenth-​century’s stereotyping of the habitual drunkard to the twentieth-​century’s Existential drinker.2 In the nineteenth century the typical excessive drinker we see represented in different media is the first type of drinker that Jack London identifies in John Barleycorn, the unimaginative fall-​in-​the-​gutter type, a ubiquitous figure of the period. The second type of drinker, the one who sees the truth of life’s meaninglessness, the one who strives for an authentic self against a conventional public, is only to be glimpsed: the figure who repeatedly confronts his own death through suicidal drinking is largely hidden from our view because of the prevailing temperance portrayals of drunkards and drunkenness, or perhaps (less common) confined to a certain strain of drinking that overlaps Romanticism with confessional writing.3 Victorian descriptions of habitual drunkards, including visual imagery, usually rest on a generic ‘story’. That is, drunkenness is never just drunkenness, and a drunkard is never just a drunkard, but both are captured in a narrative that pre-​exists them, so that the essence of drunkenness and being a drunkard is understood within a prevailing moral narrative framework, one that usually follows the decline of the drunkard or drunkards over a number of years, ending melodramatically in murder,

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Figure 1  George Cruikshank, The Bottle, Plate II. Courtesy of The Lewis Walpole Library, Yale University

insanity, and destitution. George Cruikshank’s The Bottle (1847), a book of eight tableaux with text, is a famous example. One of the things to note is that in the standard temperance narrative the drunkard loses his job, so that employment is always part of the narrative of intemperance –​in Plate II of The Bottle the text reads: ‘He is discharged from his employment for drunkenness: they pawn their clothes to supply the bottle’ (Figure 1). The question as to why excessive drunkenness should be a problem is rarely explicitly asked since the underlying assumption is that habitual drunkenness means you cannot hold down a job, and the consequence of that is ruination for your family or, if you are a young man, your future career. In the chapter I  give four instances where there is some deviation from this standard temperance narrative: Mary Thompson, a habitual drunkard identified in a Parliamentary Report; George Eliot’s tale ‘Janet’s Repentance’; Zola’s novel L’Assommoir; van Gogh’s painting Night Café at Arles along with a letter he wrote to his brother with suggestions of how the picture is to be understood. The figures encountered here, both real and fictional, are largely ‘ordinary’ people, rather than (Romantic) ‘others’ or self-​avowed ‘philosopher-​drinkers’, and offer glimpses of the

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themes and representations which in the twentieth century contribute to the figure of the Existential drinker that is discussed in the following chapters. Mary Thompson The 1872 Select Committee on Habitual Drunkards was ‘appointed to inquire into the best Plan for the Control and Management of Habitual Drunkards’.4 Parliament had recognised that habitual drunkards were a significant problem in Britain and wanted to do something about it. The people it invited to give evidence were, in the main, high-​ranking police officers and doctors, all male, of course, as was the Select Committee. No habitual drunkards were asked to give evidence. One of the difficulties for the Select Committee was how to address the question that drunkenness in general prompted the Victorians to pose, and which, as we have seen, remains with us today:  Why do people persist in drinking to excess? Or, to put it in the language of the nineteenth century, why are people habitual drunkards? The representatives of the police and the medical profession at the Select Committee provided plenty of statistics in their evidence, giving the impression that the question could be solved in a systematic, socially scientific, and medically robust manner. The panel had its own particular lines of enquiry  –​the relationship between insanity and drunkenness, the possible role class played, biological inheritance, and the difficulty of deciding to what extent crime and drunkenness might be interrelated. A question usually put to witnesses was to ask if they thought a specially designed asylum, something like a modern-​day rehabilitation centre, would cure habitual drunkards. For example, James Crichton Browne was asked: ‘Supposing that it were desirable to establish public reformatories, furnished with legal powers to exclude drink and to include the inmates, in your opinion that presents the most probable means of curing a certain proportion of these cases?’ to which he replied: ‘It is the only hope’.5 One of the recommended outcomes –​that such centres be built –​must have seemed a foregone conclusion, even though a number of the witnesses, including police and doctors, said that it did not matter how long habitual drunkards were denied alcohol, they would always return to it. There are a few things pertinent here. The Committee concluded that the problem of habitual drunkards was one that belonged to ‘large towns and populous districts’, and could be ‘attributed in some measure to the higher wages and shortened hours of labour’.6 That is, the problem was one created by the growth of industrial capitalism. Oddly, there does

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not seem to be any recognition that the typical narrative about habitual drunkards, whereby the worker drinks to excess, ends up in poverty and dies, may actually be contradicted by this feature of industrialisation: a worker earns enough in two days to keep him going for the whole week –​he can both work and drink heavily.7 The problem here then is that the workers are not disciplined in the new way of working, and are not attuned to working towards amassing capital, they spend rather than save, and such behaviour is unacceptable to the state. Another problem the Committee struggles with is the fact only when drinking leads to criminal activity do habitual drunkards merit the full force of the law. The police representatives emphasise that there is a great reluctance to arrest people solely for being drunk; only if they are a public nuisance or committing a crime will they be detained. The authorities perceive that drunkenness is a problem in the new large towns, but they are at a loss to pinpoint where the problem lies. It cannot lie in the product, for some level of drinking is acceptable, as the Select Committee’s Report states in its conclusion: ‘the moderate use of alcoholic liquors is unattended by any bad effects’.8 If people are not impelled to become habitually excessive drinkers by poverty and attendant misery, why then do they do it? A similar example of this conundrum is provided by Dickens’s short story, ‘The Drunkard’s Death’ (1836), a stereotypical temperance narrative which tells us that drunkards choose the abyss of drink, yet offers no reason why: ‘But by far the greater part have wilfully, and with open eyes, plunged into the gulf from which the man who once enters it never rises more, but into which he sinks deeper and deeper down, until recovery is hopeless’.9 The Committee thus never seriously attempts to get to the bottom of why an individual drinks. The omission is partly because the Committee is looking for a pattern or patterns across the population, so that for any individual story to be of value to the Committee it must underwrite typicality rather than singularity. An example of this occurs with the very first witness, Mr William Smith, who is the Governor of Ripon Prison. He says that the habitual drunkards he sees are only there because of actions they commit when they are drunk, and he would not categorise them as criminals even though they have been caught in a criminal activity. He gives the example ‘of a woman who has been in Wakefield Gaol 17 times, for periods of from three days to three months; in Leeds Gaol 11 times, varying from eight days to one month; in Northallerton Gaol 15 times, varying from 14 days to one month; and in Ripon Gaol 15 times, varying from 14  days to two months; all for being drunk, drunk and disorderly’.10 This drunkard is taken in, not because she is drunken, but because she is ‘riotous’ and ‘brawling’.11 Normally for the

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enquiry this would be the last we would hear of an individual story used to support a general view, since she has the typical public profile of a habitual drunkard who is a repeat offender. Yet she reappears later on, identified as Mary Thompson (she uses a number of names, depending upon which jail she is in). And then yet further on there is this exchange: [Mr Mitchell Henry]  You have not endeavoured to ascertain what induced these people to drink, whether misfortune, or broken health, or what? –​ [Smith]  If the Committee will allow me, I will state that in the particular case of Thompson, she pronounced before she left the gaol, that if she had a home provided, and could get work in the town, she would never drink again. I repeated this to the visiting justices, and they allowed her a certain amount out of the gaol fund. I  then wrote to several ladies and gentlemen, and I  collected for this woman about 11 l. I  took a house in my name. I bought the furniture and all the requisites for one person. I put her in the house and she signed the pledge. I got her work at different gentlemen’s houses in charing and washing. I had a surplus of money left, so that if she was out of work we could maintain her. She retained that house for about two months, and she then got drunk; she said, that she could not bear it any longer. That was looked over by the ladies [sic] subscribers, and she was got sober again, and a further trial was given. I think that lasted about six weeks longer, and then she said that she would not live upon charity any longer. She then turned out, and she got drunk, and is in the gaol again now. That was thoroughly trying the woman; there was no excuse whatever; in fact, I may mention that she was promised by the ladies [sic] subscribers, that if she would refrain from this drink, they would keep her as long as she lived. In the face of all that, she said, that she would not live upon charity; she went to the drink again, and she is now in gaol.12

It is an almost perfect Victorian vignette:  the philanthropic voice of authority, the good ladies clubbing together to help a poor unfortunate; the temperance element is strong –​Mary signs the pledge and vows to stay off the drink. Even the backsliding might be accommodated by the typical narrative –​she is lower class and so perhaps therefore of weaker moral fibre, with the consequence that she will never escape the downward spiral of habitual drunkenness. But part of the story does not quite fit the temperance template. The reason she gives for opting out is that she will not live off charity, not that she has to drink. We could deduce that she is proud, but that does not seem plausible, because if she were that proud she would lay off the drink. We could say that she is deluded and that in modern parlance she is ‘addicted’ or has ‘alcohol dependence syndrome’. But that does not quite fit either: she is determined not to live the middle-​class Victorian good life, and she is determined to drink despite the best efforts of the great and the good.

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Mr Smith’s response illustrates the problem the Committee has with habitual drunkards: even while his intention is to explain what the issue is through a story of a habitual drunkard he has tried to help, neither the Select Committee nor we are any the wiser. It is not misfortune, and it is not ill health, it is the mysterious ‘or what?’ Further, there is nothing in the recommendations of the Report that, if put in place, could help Mary Thompson: she would be fined more money, be put on a register for habitual drunkards, and perhaps kept in an asylum until the alcohol was out of her and she was, theoretically at least, reformed. The story is a rare breach in the Select Committee Report: it is noteworthy precisely because it has a unique, individualistic bump in it that cannot be ironed flat. Even though the Committee has perhaps pursued the right line of enquiry  –​asking the Governor of Ripon Gaol why a habitual drunkard is a habitual drunkard –​it cannot get to the bottom of it. The Report thus makes recommendations that will address the symptoms, without getting at the cause, of habitual drunkenness. And yet, part of that cause may be a metaphysical response to the self-​same environment they agree is where such people are to be found: the new industrial centres, which require a new kind of workforce, one which can discipline and subordinate the self to the social and economic demands of industrial capitalism. The Committee is set up in such a way that guarantees apprehension of habitual drunkards at the level of public aggregate, but which cannot delve into their individual, inner lives. George Eliot, ‘Janet’s Repentance’ As we have seen, the typical narrative around drunkenness is the temperance narrative, and whether the ending of such a narrative is death of the drunkard or repentance, the underlying moral is that drinking to excess is wrong. It might even be more specific, as in T. S. Arthur’s popular and influential American novel Ten Nights in a Bar Room (1854), where the Maine Law banning the sale of alcohol, which had come into force in the state of Maine in 1851, is both endorsed where it exists and promoted for other states.13 Remember the question that Mr Mitchell Henry asks the Governor of Ripon Jail:  ‘You have not endeavoured to ascertain what induced these people to drink, whether misfortune, or broken health, or what?’ It is the ‘or what?’ which remains hidden, unexplored or misunderstood. And here I  think we can identify a certain metaphysical element that cannot be captured by typical nineteenth-​century narratives of excessive drunkenness and habitual drunkards. There is some adjacency of the metaphysical with certain religious aspects of temperance, but the latter is more in keeping with the idea that a sheep

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has gone astray rather than a profound engagement with the spiritual, asking that drunkards replace alcohol with the Lord, as, for instance, in Mrs Charles Wightman’s account of her attempt to reform the drinkers of Shrewsbury in Haste to the Rescue (1859).14 One Victorian story which gives an alternative account of habitual drunkenness to that of a temperance narrative is George Eliot’s ‘Janet’s Repentance’,15 published at the end of the 1850s. Janet is married to Dempster, and what began as a happy marriage is now characterised by Dempster’s brutish behaviour when drunk. Janet herself drinks, and is seen about the streets worse for wear. We do not actually witness her drinking, and the intimation is that this is done in the home (her first drink is there, we learn later; when we see her struggling to overcome temptation again it is in the home that we see her smash a brandy decanter). Her repentance comes through the help of a clergyman she initially rejects, Mr Tryan. The tale itself, however, begins with a long description of the town and does not mention Janet at all, and the reader begins to wonder if she will ever appear. This is no doubt part of Eliot’s realist aesthetic, to ensure that we understand character as part of the environment, because both here and in her other work, Eliot wants us to see how we are bound to our fellow creatures, and that change for the better can only be effected through the web of human sympathy. More than this, Eliot is also unusual in asking us to see the inner lives of people we might otherwise disregard, in a move which is typical of her novel Middlemarch, going from the general public view to private perspective, and then back again, in order to make commentary on the human condition and humanity. In ‘Janet’s Repentance’ Eliot guides the reader into thinking about what the lives of people are like away from the public gaze, for example, at the end of c­ hapter 8 she asks us to stop sneering at the possibly calculating manner of Mr Tryan’s clerical career and consider instead how Mr Tryan may be crying because he feels weak and a failure in the face of his struggles and sacrifice. So Eliot tries to get us to see the inner life, using the narrator’s authoritative voice. A certain distance through public aggregation remains: we are all alike under the skin, with a basic allotment of human goodness –​a point stressed on a number of occasions in the story –​and through wise omniscience, we are able to see beyond each individual to our general humanity. The ostensible reason Janet drinks is standard temperance fare: it is an anaesthetic against a life made miserable by her husband. A typical temperance narrative would often show that a woman takes to drink as a consequence of her husband’s drinking, either to keep him company, as in Cruikshank’s illustration, or to dull her consciousness of the beatings. However, it is the precise nature of her redemption, rather than her

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repentance, which is of interest here, because it opens up the possibility of a more metaphysical handling of the theme of repeated drunkenness than a standard, straightforward temperance narrative allows. This is because Eliot’s narrative pushes the religious dimension quite hard towards what borders on a religious-​metaphysical notion of alienation. For example: ‘Janet felt she was alone: no human soul had measured her anguish, had understood her self-​despair, had entered into her sorrows and her sins with that deep-​sighted sympathy which is wiser than all blame, more potent than all reproof –​such sympathy as had swelled her own heart for many a sufferer’.16 This is not quite the everyday Christian understanding that we might expect from the culture of the time. The foregrounding of ‘deep-​ sighted sympathy’ leans more towards Eliot’s humanism than a common Christianity, although of course there is significant overlap. The two other elements, aloneness and self-​despair, can also be taken as strongly derived from a Christian viewpoint, but within the context of the period and Eliot’s own reading there is something else happening. ‘Self-​despair’, although not to be understood quite in our present-​day usage of the term ‘self’, nevertheless introduces a particular view of the drinker as an alienated being. The immediate context is what might be called an orthodox Christian alienation. At the end of the story, when the minister Mr Tryan is dead, the narrator says that there are two memorials to Tryan. The first is the gravestone, whereas the second memorial ‘bears a fuller record: it is Janet Dempster, rescued from self-​despair’.17 Although to the modern reader ‘despair’ will simply signify somebody in a desperate situation, ‘despair’ in Christian thought is one of the most serious sins. The Catholic Encyclopedia, for example, notes that despair is not regarded as a passive state, but an active, intellectual abandonment of God.18 Aquinas considered whether ‘despair’ was the gravest of sins:  ‘Wherefore a gloss on Proverbs 24:10, “Nothing is more hateful than despair, for the man that has it loses his constancy both in the everyday toils of this life, and, what is worse, in the battle of faith” and Isidore says (De Sum. Bono ii, 14): “To commit a crime is to kill the soul, but to despair is to fall into hell” ’.19 By linking self-​despair and drunkenness, Eliot takes the character Janet as close to hell, physically and metaphysically, as possible. It could be argued that this is hardly out of character for a temperance narrative, since a standard feature is to insert a scene where the drunkard suffers delirium tremens, often rendered as an encounter with hell, full of snakes and demons. But that is usually done to show that drinking is bad and will more or less literally lead straight to hell, it is not the same as the religious-​philosophical self-​ despair Eliot identifies with Janet. There is indeed a delirium tremens

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scene in ‘Janet’s Repentance’, but it is given to her husband, who is most definitely not a candidate for soul-​searching or self-​despair, as we will see shortly. In addition then to giving us the first fully sympathetic account of a female habitual drunkard, Eliot opens up the idea that drink can lead directly to the kind of metaphysical engagement we find in the figure of the Existential drinker in the following century. For self-​despair is a form of alienation, and Eliot, familiar with Ludwig Feuerbach’s work, would have known that there is an argument to be made that alienation from God is in effect self-​alienation, since the God we claim to know is nothing other than a projection of ourselves.20 A  logical extension might be to say that Eliot intends us to consider all habitual drunkards to be the same as Janet. After all, she guides us towards Janet’s inner life with the aim of showing us that Janet’s repentance under Tryan’s influence represents some transcendent humanity, yet Eliot does not extend this sympathy and insight to the other habitual drunkard in the story, Dempster, Janet’s husband. Dempster, in contrast to Janet, is the wholly stereotypical drunk of temperance narratives. Janet is certainly partly the drunken female of temperance narratives, but she also stands out quite clearly as a metaphysical figure. Because Eliot herself is moving away from, or has already moved away from, Christianity at this point in her life, the metaphysical torment can also be seen as proto-​typically Existential, comparable to the way in which Kierkegaard’s notion of a personal God opens up a distinctly metaphysical being-​in-​the-​world, rather than one as defined in a more formally religious manner. Janet’s drunken self is a knowing self-​despair, in contrast to Dempster, who is a fall-​in-​the-​gutter drunkard and nothing else. Eliot begins to remove the religious context for the self, while asserting a belief in the self as a willed project outside of the pressure of materialism. The despair associated with habitual drunkenness can thus later be seen to hold out an attraction for the person who conceives of herself as wholly responsible for constituting her self, and is thus resistant to the new social pressures and social mores. Émile Zola, L’Assommoir Zola’s novel L’Assommoir, published in 1877, shares a broad literary intention with that of George Eliot’s work, which is to depict in a largely realistic manner the effect of environment on character. Zola states in the preface to his novel: ‘my characters are not bad, they are only ignorant and ruined by the conditions of sweated toil and poverty in which they live’.21 Just as Eliot puts a good deal of effort into placing Janet very

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firmly within a community, and perhaps concluding that the alienation stemming from drink is an alienation from a common humanity more than an abandonment of God, Zola devotes a great deal of energy to portraying the Paris slum district in which his three main characters live. He too wants to show us how these people are circumscribed by environment, and we might say that this in its way is no different from what the panel of the Commission on Habitual Drunkards hoped to achieve through its interrogation of its witnesses. But just as Eliot implicitly seems to be more interested in the ‘or what?’ of that Select Committee statement, rather than the possible causes of misfortune and broken health, so Zola, despite his theoretical proclamations on naturalism, also seems to give us an approach to habitual drunkards which suggests something to one side of the temperance narrative. On a basic level the story would appear to be another nineteenth-​ century temperance tale. Gervaise’s lover Lantier leaves her, and, after some persuading, she marries Coupeau, a roofer. Gervaise sets up her own laundry business and thrives. Things go badly when Coupeau falls from a roof, and, following his recovery, takes to drink. Gervaise’s former lover, Lantier, returns, and with Coupeau’s blessing lives with them, thus establishing a ménage à trois. Gervaise’s affections return to Lantier, but she also takes to drinking with Coupeau in the assommoir, a term utilised by Zola to indicate a low drinking den. Coupeau dies from his drinking, and at the end of the novel we see Gervaise in extreme penury, also dying. This is the way the novel is often described, and at the time, as now, it was not uncommon to treat Zola’s novel as a warning against drink. After all, drink would appear to be the ruination of two of the main characters, and the assommoir is itself a magnet for the ruin of many others. Such a view may have been reinforced by the hugely successful stage version that appeared a couple of years after the novel’s publication, which is a straightforward temperance narrative lacking much of the novel’s complexity. On British shores, where Zola was deemed to be beyond the pale, such a temperance view of L’Assommoir would have been nevertheless further reinforced by the most famous of the English sanitised dramatisations of the novel, Charles Reade’s Drink,22 also launched in 1879 and another hugely successful play, with an even stronger temperance message than the French stage version (see Figure 2).23 But any attentive reading of L’Assommoir will discover that it is not a temperance novel, not even in diluted form. It is relatively easy to show that this is the case by simply tracing through the plot. Coupeau falls from the roof, and for reasons which are not explained, he has no enthusiasm for work once he is recovered. He could work if he wished to, it is just that he has no appetite for it,

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Figure 2  Gil Naza as Coupeau. Bibliothèque nationale de France, Département des Estampes et de la photographie, FT 4-​NA-​238 (8)

and would rather be drinking. If anything, he adopts an anti-​temperance stance in that his bitterness stems from the fact that he did not drink before the fall, and yet such sobriety and endeavour have been rewarded with an accident. He can understand why his father’s life was miserable,

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because it reads like a standard temperance narrative –​his father drank and fell off a roof –​so that can be accounted just desserts; but here, unlike his father, Coupeau has done nothing untoward and still finds himself on the wrong side of fate. Temperance narratives stress that misfortune follows from drunkenness, but for Coupeau misfortune came his way when he was a sober and conscientious worker. And just as Coupeau’s sudden dislike of work is not fully explained, or indeed explained at all, there is a parallel lack of clarity as to why Gervaise lets her business go downhill. It is certainly not because she takes to drink. If there is any explanation, it is to be found in this passage: She went on counting out loud. She was used to filth, and didn’t find it in the least disgusting; she plunged her bare pink arms right in among shirts yellow with dirt, cloths stiff with grease from washing-​up water and socks eaten away and rotted by sweat. But, amid the penetrating fumes that hit her in the face as she bent over the piles, a kind of languor [nonchalance] came over her. Sitting doubled up on the edge of a stool and leaning towards the floor, she was stretching out her hands to left and right more and more slowly and smiling vaguely, her eyes dreamy, as if this human stench was making her drunk. And it seemed as though that was where her laziness [ses paresses] first began, that it came from the stifling reek of dirty clothes poisoning the air round about her.24

It seems as though an unexplained lassitude descends upon Gervaise while she is washing. The term Zola uses is ‘paresses’. The English term ‘laziness’ does not really catch a possible freighting which is religious and spiritual, for ‘paresse’ is the French term for ‘sloth’, one of the seven deadly sins, and thus akin to Janet’s self-​despair.25 If Zola wanted to warn against the evils of drink, to make drink the cause of Coupeau’s decline and Gervaise’s decline, it would be easy enough, and de rigueur for temperance tales. But he does not. As a young girl of 14, Gervaise drank heavily and had her first child, but she is clearly able to not drink if she chooses to, since we see her at the start of the novel as a sober person who doesn’t like drink. The narrative has no predetermined temperance script  –​alcohol and drinking have no innate effect on the narrative. In the course of both Coupeau’s and Gervaise’s lives then it seems that at some point work becomes meaningless, and this lassitude, this despair, exists without any direct physical or external cause. That is, the crisis of meaning comes from within as some kind of recognition of ‘the truth’ about existence, leading to (or registering) alienation from others and from self. And because the style of narration is free indirect discourse in L’Assommoir, unlike Eliot’s omniscient narration, if the cause of this despair is unknown to the character, it remains unknown to the reader. Returning to the passage here,

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note that there is a symbolic logic in that Gervaise is overwhelmed by the stench of humanity. On the one level there is the naturalist rendering of poverty, whilst on the other there is the invitation to read it metaphysically, with Gervaise burdened by the reality of what it is to be human, behind the scenes as it were, such that she succumbs to a spiritual and mental slothfulness. Vincent van Gogh, Night Café at Arles (1888) Van Gogh’s painting Night Café at Arles (Figure 3) shows a café, brightly lit, with a billiards table in the centre and tables lined against the two side walls. It is not heavily populated. There is a couple at the back table seated intimately, a lone male on the table next to them, arms on the table in a downward demeanour, and on the other wall, closer to the viewer, a couple of figures leaning across the table from each other. None of these has a distinct face. The only other figure in the painting is a man with a moustache standing behind the billiards table and seeming to

Figure 3  Vincent van Gogh, Night Café at Arles. Yale University Art Gallery. Bequest of Stephen Carlton Clark, B.A. 1903

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look directly out of the picture at us, probably the proprietor or a waiter, given his attire. The dominant colour in the painting is yellow, in the floorboards that come rushing down to the bottom of the picture from the centre, and in the lamps that take up a fair proportion of the top half of the painting. The vertiginous perspective widens the gap between those on the left and those on the right considerably. The overall impression is of a late-​night drinking establishment occupied by a few stray souls, suffused in yellow, with an unplayed game in the middle and a man with nothing better to do than stare back at somebody staring at him. The emotional tenor is perhaps best described as melancholic. It could easily be a genre painting of an inn for modern times. Other scenes of social life in Arles by van Gogh from that time period provide some context for the unusualness of the painting:  The Dance Hall at Arles, from the same year, shows a very crowded place. Although the people in the picture may not seem overtly happy, there is a sense of people engaged in everyday communal life, and Café Terrace at Night (1888) shows a more socially thriving scene than that of Night Café. It has the same yellow for the cafe exterior (it is in fact the same café), but the yellow is confined to a portion of the left-​hand side and counterbalanced by the blue of the starry night, and the figures are too distant and indistinguishable to invite the audience to form some view of them,26 unlike the figures in Night Café, where we are perhaps, on the visual evidence alone, invited to see these people as marginal to society.27 A letter that van Gogh wrote to his brother Theo adds another dimension to our appreciation of Night Café at Arles, taking it out of the genre tradition and into a different artistic realm. In the letter he hints at a narrative or narratives for the painting; offers views of art we would consider a mix of the traditional and the modernist; suggests a relationship between the individual self and alcohol; asks us to consider the artist’s self in relation to the artwork and to interpretations of the painting; and invites the viewer to respond to the painting as if it were autobiographical.28 In my painting of the night café I’ve tried to express the idea that the café is a place where you can ruin yourself, go mad, commit crimes. Anyway, I tried with contrasts of delicate pink and blood-​red and wine-​red. Soft Louis XV and Veronese green contrasting with yellow greens and hard blue greens. All of that in an ambience of a hellish furnace, in pale sulphur. To express something of the power of the dark corners of a grog-​shop. [Exprimer comme la puissance des ténèbres d’un assommoir.] And yet with the appearance of Japanese gaiety and Tartarin’s good nature.

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But what would Mr Tersteeg say about this painting? He who, looking at a Sisley –​Sisley, the most tactful and sensitive of the Impressionists –​ had already said: ‘I can’t stop myself thinking that the artist who painted that was a little tipsy’. Looking at my painting, then, he’d say that it’s a full-​blown case of delirium tremens.29

The initial reason for marking out this letter and painting lies in the first sentence: ‘In my painting of the night café I’ve tried to express the idea that the café is a place where you can ruin yourself, go mad, commit crimes’.30 Van Gogh seems to give these individuals the option of self-​ destruction through ruin, madness, or crime; each can choose another self, a different autobiography, a self that is definitively ‘outsider’. But we might also say that what van Gogh presents to us is the promise of dissolution, of a narrative (choice) of self from which there is no return, a Kierkegaardian ‘leap of faith’, albeit a destructive one in the manner of Raskolnikov. By saying that the place is one where the denizens can choose these other options he suggests that by entering such a place they position themselves on the precipice. If they choose not to re-​enter, they close off this possibility, but each time they return to the café at Arles they expose themselves to the possibility of this new or transformed self. It is a modern, Existential view of selfhood, where the self is wholly open to self-​construction, albeit in a nihilistic vein. The reference to Zola’s L’Assommoir is more than just van Gogh’s admiration for Zola’s naturalistic mode of writing. In the original French of the letter the term that van Gogh uses for the café is ‘un assommoir’ (here translated as ‘grog-​house’), and we can assume that it depicts the kind of establishment that Zola’s novel deals with, a magnet for those who no longer wish to participate in conventional society.31 It is a place to be rid of the social self. So taking van Gogh’s painting and letter, and the reference to Zola’s novel, we see that the idea of self is one that opens up the possibility of alternative selves, of constructed selves, but which simultaneously opens up the possibility of the annihilation of self. Whichever of these possibilities we might choose, the conjunction of elements moves the habitual drinker out of the realm of social narrative, or biography, into the realm of self as self-​narration, the autobiography that is the larger part of creating the (coherent) self. Unlike Dance Hall or Terrace, which appear as the viewpoint of the neutral observer-​artist (even if they are still the result of the painter’s individual ‘style’ or ‘temperament’), van Gogh asserts that Night Café can be read biographically and autobiographically. It suggests that we, the viewers, like Mr Tersteeg, might read the artist’s personality from it, but does so in a rather curious manner which again brings us back to alcohol and identity, and to the artist’s self. Van Gogh is not merely upping the

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Figure 4  Honoré Daumier, Two Drinkers. Image © 2014 The Barnes Foundation

ante a little when he suggests the viewer of Night Café would presume the artist was more than tipsy, because ‘delirium tremens’ clearly indicates the idea that the painter might be a habitual drinker. This is not to argue that this is what van Gogh presents himself as definitively, since he frames it all in conditionals around what Mr Tersteeg would think, but it does strongly hint at consideration of the painting as directly linked to the artist’s self. In this case he invites his brother to read the artist, van Gogh, as one of those figures who either has, or could, annihilate his self in alcohol. So the letter and the painting open up the possibility of a change of self, an annihilation of self, a choice of selves, and an art that can express this self-​­annihilation in a contract between artist and audience.32 It is very similar to the cluster of elements we will see in those ‘fictional memoirs’ of the following chapters which form such a large part of the Existential-​drinker canon. Nor is it just the knowledge of the letter that invites us to read the painting autobiographically. The manner of the painting is expressionist in its use of colour symbolism, as van Gogh wants the colours to express emotion and interpretative significance within, or on, his personal terms.33 In the letter quoted above the pale yellow is intended to symbolise ‘a

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hellish furnace’; the sense of a ruinous environment is signalled by the internal clashing of colour sets: ‘delicate pink’, ‘blood-​red’, ‘wine-​red’; ‘soft Louis XV and Veronese green’, ‘yellow greens’, ‘hard blue greens’; in another letter to Theo about the painting he writes:  ‘I’ve tried to express the terrible human passions with the red and the green’.34 On the evidence of van Gogh’s description of the colours alone we can see that the way he understands his own picture, and the way he invites Theo to understand it (and, by extension, the general audience, Mr Tersteeg and all), is that it is the equivalent of the self in hell. Reading this in tandem with the other commentary above we can see that this hell is that of the Existential drinker’s self, caught in something like Jack London’s idea that only drinking can get to the heart of existence and the self, with the further view that this is perhaps an expression or confession of the artist’s self that we are witnessing. Conclusion What can account for the behaviour of Gervaise and Coupeau, Janet Dempster, van Gogh’s painting and letter, and Mary Thompson? It is here we might return to the theme of alienation  –​so central to Existential thought –​more directly for an explanation of what underlies these responses, a feeling of anxiety and meaninglessness prompted by the new connections between self and world as structured by industrial capitalism. Indeed, the ‘boozing machine’ in L’Assommoir symbolises the industrialisation of drink and drunkenness: ‘The still worked silently on, with no flame visible, no cheerful play of light on its lack-​lustre copper surface, sweating out its alcohol like a slow-​flowing but relentless spring which would eventually flood the bar-​room, spill over the outer boulevards and inundate the vast pit that was Paris’.35 As noted in the Introduction, both Marx and Kierkegaard identified ‘alienation’ as a psychological and spiritual condition belonging to their age. For Marx, labour was alienated from itself because work, in the form of sapping toil in the factory, had no connection to the human: ‘labor is external to the worker, i.e., it does not belong to his intrinsic nature’.36 For Kierkegaard, ‘the public’ ‘levelled’ individuals into anonymity.37 Although we may trace drinkers who are idle and who fail to abide by approved social norms prior to industrial capitalism (Falstaff springs to mind), and ideas of ‘despair’, ‘sloth’, and ‘accidie’ have a long, religious history, we can see that there is a particular configuration of this in relation to habitual drunkenness. In the middle of the nineteenth century and onwards materialism makes inroads into the image of a being which is whole, either in Kierkegaard’s spiritual and religious sense or Marx’s ‘human’

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(species-​ being) sense, and it is through the atypical representations of habitual drunkenness outlined here that we can see this new sensibility registered. Both ‘Janet’s Repentance’ and L’Assommoir narrate a kind of despair which, when further removed from any religious context, becomes the basis for Existential angst in the twentieth century.38 While such despair in the nineteenth century, possibly the result of the pressures on self exerted by industrial capitalism, elicits the need for some kind of public response to counter it –​through Parliament, medicine, community, philanthropy –​in the twentieth century and beyond, certain characters, both real and fictional, will embrace or confront their sense of alienation, facticity, angst, and God’s abandonment, through the freely chosen act of excessive drinking. Notes 1 Mr Mitchell Henry, in Report from the Select Committee on Habitual Drunkards, Together with the Proceedings, Minutes of Evidence, Appendix and Index (1872) (Shannon, Ireland: Irish University Press, 1968), p. 3. 2 In doing so it is largely contrary to Mariana Valverde’s argument in Diseases of the Will (Cambridge:  Cambridge University Press, 1998), which urges historians to see the (philosophical) idea of ‘habit’ as a pragmatic guide to understanding alcoholism, for example pp. 68–​9. Valverde dismisses philosophical approaches which emphasise the role of the will: ‘From Heidegger to phenomenology and existentialism, European philosophy remained engaged in a pursuit of what pragmatists would describe as the abstract freedom of the transcendental subject’, p. 38. 3 See Taylor, Bacchus, and James Nicholls, especially on the emergence of confessional drinker narratives, ‘Drink, Modernity and Modernism: Representations of Drinking and Intoxication in James Joyce, Ernest Hemingway and Jean Rhys’, PhD dissertation, Liverpool John Moores University, 2002. 4 Report from the Select Committee, p. iii. 5 Ibid., p. 24 (qn. 464). 6 Ibid., p. iii. 7 For example, ‘He will perhaps work about two days a week, and he will drink during the remainder of the time; that is about his style of life’, ibid., p.  2 (qn. 23). 8 Ibid., p. iii. 9 Charles Dickens, ‘The Drunkard’s Death’, in Sketches by Boz (London: Penguin, 1995), p. 555. 10 Report from the Select Committee, p. 1 (qn. 9). 11 Ibid. (qn. 10). 12 Ibid., pp. 3–​4 (qn. 70). 13 Arthur, Ten Nights, for example, p. 196.

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14 Mrs Charles Wightman, Haste to the Rescue, or, Work While It is Day (London: James Nisbett, 1849). 15 Annette Federico discusses some similar Existential aspects in ‘ “I must have drink”’. 16 Eliot, ‘Janet’s Repentance’, p. 287. 17 Ibid., p. 350. 18 Catholic Encyclopedia, ‘Despair’, www.newadvent.org/​cathen/​04755a.htm. 19 Thomas Aquinas, Summa Theologica, 2nd rev. edn, 1920. Literally translated by Fathers of the English Dominican Province. Online Edition © 2008, Kevin Knight. 2.2, Question 20, www.newadvent.org/​summa/​3020.htm. 20 See, for example, Moira Gatens ‘The art and philosophy of George Eliot’, Philosophy and Literature 33:1 (2009), 73–​90, p. 73. 21 Émile Zola, ‘Preface’ to L’Assommoir, p. 4. 22 Charles Reade, Drink, ed. David Baguley (London, Ontario:  Mestengo Press, 1991). 23 William Busnach and Octave Gastineau, L’Assommoir: drame en cinq actes et neuf tableaux. Avec une Préface d’Émile Zola (Paris:  G. Charpentier, 1881). Figure 2, ‘Gil Naza as Coupeau’, is a photograph from the original theatre production of L’Assommoir (1879). 24 L’Assommoir, p. 140 (quoting the 1998 Oxford edition; I have added in the original French from Émile Zola, L’Assommoir (Paris: Éditions Gallimard, 1978), pp. 174–​5). 25 For a full description of ‘paresse(s)’, including its religious significance and literary use, see www.cnrtl.fr/​definition/​paresses. 26 Van Gogh’s description of the painting in a letter to his sister Willemien suggests he intends it to have a heartening effect: ‘Now there’s a painting of night without black. With nothing but beautiful blue, violet and green, and in these surroundings the lighted square is coloured pale sulphur, lemon green’, 9 September and 14 September 1888, Letter 678. All letters are viewable at http://​vangoghletters.org/​vg/​, and the letter numbers in this chapter refer to the numbering on that site. 27 Compare this to genre painting depictions of inns, which are usually happy affairs, as in seventeenth-​ century ‘Merry Company’ paintings, by, for example, Willem Pietersz, Dirck Hals, Abraham van den Hecken. 28 Judy Sund observes that van Gogh’s painting of his house in Arles, and the letter to Theo describing the places in the picture, ‘indicate that the picture served as a form of autobiography’. Judy Sund, True to Temperament: Van Gogh and French Naturalist Literature (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992), p. 190. 29 9 September 1888, Letter 677. Van Gogh often wrote to his brother in French, as here. 30 The potential for criminal, nihilistic behaviour that van Gogh describes is not self-​evident in the painting, and the introduction of such extra-​pictorial information is perhaps part of the new relationship between art, artist, and viewer (see note 31, below). For an example of a picture which could be

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taken to have this effect solely from an ‘intrinsic’ point of view, see Figure 4, one of Daumier’s ‘two drinkers’ images, as discussed in Steven Earnshaw, ‘Habitual drunkards and metaphysics: four case studies from the Victorian period’, Social History of Alcohol and Drugs 28:2 (2014), 143–​60. 31 In a letter to Theo, 30 April 1883, Letter 338, he writes:  ‘How beautiful Zola is –​it’s L’assommoir above all that I often think of’. 32 Van Gogh’s attitude to art and the artist was one of wanting to sense the presence of the artist in the painting, but not to the extent that we should know the private life of the artist. To Theo: ‘Now I told you on a former occasion that in general, and more especially with artists, I pay as much attention to the man who does the work as to the work itself. If the man is not there, I am now and then forced to draw conclusions from the work only (we cannot know all artists personally), or if the work is there, to form an opinion of the man by’, quoted in André Krauss, Vincent van Gogh:  Studies in the Social Aspects of his Work (Gothenburg: Acta Universitatis Gothoburgensis, 1983), p. 64. See also a letter van Gogh writes to his sister Willemien, 19 September 1889, Letter 804:  ‘But I, who read books to seek in them the artist who made them, could I be wrong to like French novelists so much’. The appeal to ‘distanced intimacy’ is typical of the modern writer’s view of the relationship between author, publications, and audience. See Steven Earnshaw, ‘The writer as artist’, in Steven Earnshaw (ed.), The Handbook of Creative Writing (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2014). 33 See Alfred Nemeczek, Van Gogh in Arles (Munich and New York: Prestel-​ Verlag, 1995) on van Gogh’s colour symbolism and the new relationship between artist, artwork and viewer, and the need for external commentary, p. 76, p. 80. 34 8 September 1888, Letter 676. 35 Zola, L’Assommoir, p. 42. 36 Karl Marx, ‘Estranged labour’, in Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts of 1844, www.marxists.org/​archive/​marx/​works/​1844/​manuscripts/​labour. htm. 37 See for example Søren Kierkegaard, The Present Age (New  York:  Harper Perennial, 2010) or his ‘The Crowd is Untruth’, https://​oregonstate.edu/​ instruct/​ p hl201/​ m odules/​ P hilosophers/​ K ierkegaard/​ k ierkegaard_​ t he_​ crowd_​is_​untruth.html. 38 Federico, discussing addiction (opium use as well as alcohol) in relation to Mary Barton, The Tenant of Wildfell Hall, and ‘Janet’s Repentance’, says: ‘These are painful characters, severely disturbed by the world around them, by injustice, misery, and untruth, just as much as they are by the unknowable and the unseen –​the nothingness they fear. The angst felt by the alcoholic character is genuine, not stereotypic’. Federico, ‘ “I must have drink” ’, p. 14.

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Jack London, John Barleycorn (1913): truth

John Barleycorn must have his due. He does tell the truth. That is the curse of it.

John Barleycorn (1913) is Jack London’s account of his life from youth up to the time of writing the book, held together thematically by the author’s love-​hate relationship with ‘John Barleycorn’, a traditional personification of drink. The memoir has a conversational style which earns the trust of the reader, and in regaling its audience with the life of Jack London we see the concerns with poverty, gender, authorship, evolution, and society that are visible throughout London’s fiction and other writing. John Barleycorn also holds forth on philosophical ideas, and some of these are brought to bear on the matter of the author’s drinking in a manner which prefigures the work of later writers in the canon of Existential drinkers. Jack London was at various times an oyster pirate, hobo, journalist (sport and war), doyen of magazine fiction (short stories set in the Klondike and, towards the end of his life, in the South Seas), novelist (including Call of the Wild, which brought him fame, The Iron Heel, a dystopian fiction admired by Orwell, The Sea-​Wolf, and Martin Eden, a semi-​ autobiographical novel), adventurer, world celebrity. John Barleycorn is one of the first all-​out formulations of the writer-​as-​drinker, mixing the nineteenth-​century temperance view of the habitual drinker who is a moral failure with the image of the heavy-​drinking writer who can attain truths not available to the run-​of-​the-​mill drunkard, nor indeed available to the run-​of-​the-​mill sober citizen. At the end of the book London appears ambivalent as to his own fate as such a drinker. He begins the final chapter by telling his many readers:  ‘Of course, no personal tale is complete without bringing the narrative of the person down to the last moment. But mine is no tale of a reformed drunkard. I was never a drunkard, and I have not reformed’.1 Nevertheless, the book ends as

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if it is part of a temperance campaign, illustrating its mixed, sometimes contradictory views: ‘And yet, in conclusion, I can well say that I wish my forefathers had banished John Barleycorn before my time. I regret that John Barleycorn flourished everywhere in the system of society in which I  was born, else I  should not have made his acquaintance, and I was long trained in his acquaintance’.2 Rather than setting out to establish some final, rigid view on the thinking, imaginative drinker that London holds himself to be, the book insists on the paradoxical nature of drinking and, indeed, a certain kind of drinker. London tussles with the ambiguity of his situation in a manner that can be described as ‘Existential’: he gains meaning from drinking and the insights it provides, while never losing sight of the meaninglessness of existence and the destructive nature of alcohol. What London’s use of alcohol does in John Barleycorn is foreground mortality as the basis on which lives must be lived: by drinking heavily, the drinker never lets go of the facticity of mortality, for, as London puts it, ‘John Barleycorn makes toward death’.3 In the early days of his youth the reason for drinking is explicitly to do with an assertion of masculinity and the desire to enter the adult male world of saloons in Oakland, California, as well as the occasional escape from boredom.4 But even at this stage in his life, he can look back and declare: ‘Gradual as was my development as a heavy drinker among the oyster pirates, the real heavy drinking came suddenly and was the result, not of desire for alcohol, but of an intellectual conviction’.5 From the perspective of the mature writer who continues to drink heavily, alcohol is personified as ‘John Barleycorn’, embodying the ambiguity of a human existence simultaneously constituted by transcendence and by facticity. London’s ambiguity and ambivalence, projected onto the figure of John Barleycorn, display the belief that there is something more to life than just the material world, while at the same time insist that there is nothing other than just the empirical universe, a fact underscored by the bodily decay and intimations of finitude that habitual heavy drinking produces and which the book records. This paradoxical embrace is set out at the beginning. Jack has just returned from voting in favour of female suffrage.6 He tells Charmian, his wife, that previously he had been against this, but he now believes that women are the only means with which to ‘drive the nails into the coffin of John Barleycorn’.7 Charmian doesn’t pick up on the idea that women will save the day, or the fact that he believes they should have the vote. Instead: ‘But I  thought you were a friend to John Barleycorn’, Charmian interpolated.

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‘I am. I was. I am not. I never am. I am never less his friend than when he is with me and when I seem most his friend. He is the king of liars. He is the frankest truth-​sayer. He is the august companion with whom one walks with the gods. He is also in league with the Noseless One. His way leads to truth naked, and to death. He gives clear vision, and muddy dreams. He is the enemy of life, and the teacher of wisdom beyond life’s vision. He is a red-​handed killer, and he slays youth’.8

Friend/​enemy; liar/​truth-​sayer; life/​death; clarity/​vagueness; death/​ arcane knowledge:  the binary oppositions are repeated with variation throughout John Barleycorn, and the paradoxical stance that John Barleycorn is the truth that will lead to death, and that the truth is nothing other than death, is maintained. The rhetoric is very much that of Zarathustra, Nietzsche’s seer who descends from the mountains to tell the world the truth which the general mass of humanity is blind to: John Barleycorn ‘transvalues all values’, an allusion to Zarathustra.9 What is especially pertinent to the dynamic this puts in place is that John Barleycorn allows the drinker to move beyond the everyday world into a realm of understanding that is denied those trapped in the mundane ‘reality’ of ‘the two-​by-​four, cut-​and-​dried, conventional world’;10 but the price of this ‘greater’ or ‘real’ understanding of the world is ‘death’, since only John Barleycorn grants such an access, and drinking is a slow suicide.11 London’s ambivalence towards his drinking is an attempt to represent the perceived paradox of existence. In addition, there appear to be two main underlying, conflicting models of selfhood in the book, while a third is briefly introduced in passing without influencing the book as a whole. The first model is of a solid self, here present in the figure of the all-​action hero, ready, willing, and able to conquer the world; the second model is closer to the ‘Existential’ view, more interested in ‘becoming’ than identifying the known and knowable individual as a completed and fixed figure.12 The third model, given in passing, is one of a self that consists predominantly of the experiencing consciousness at any given moment, and most likely derives from a reading of William James’s The Principles of Psychology (1892), in which James suggests there are many selves and where he gives a central role for consciousness.13 It is the second model of selfhood, however, which opens up a number of lines of enquiry with respect to London’s portrayal of the Existential drinker.14 ‘Memoirs of an alcoholic’ or ‘alcoholic memoirs’? John Barleycorn begins by rehearsing its origins and intentions, including a conversation with Charmian about what its title should be. Charmian

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says the book will be doing a social good by warning wives and daughters about the dangers of alcohol,15 so London suggests ‘memoirs of an alcoholic’. Charmian says he has not shown himself to be a dipsomaniac, and ‘alcoholic memoirs’ is settled on instead.16 The reason for rejecting ‘memoirs of an alcoholic’ is straightforward, since London insists he is a drinker who is always in control of his drinking, and his wife confirms the view that he chooses to drink, as opposed to being an ‘alcoholic’ or dipsomaniac who is dependent on the substance. The meaning of ‘alcoholic memoirs’ though is not at all straightforward. Is ‘alcoholic’ here solely adjectival, as in ‘an alcoholic drink’, and supposed to direct the reader only to those parts of London’s life which involved drinking, ignoring the parts of his life in which alcohol was not involved? It would serve to reinforce the assertion that the author is not an alcoholic, since drink has not taken over his life to the exclusion of all else. On the face of it, though, London understands ‘alcoholic’ in its more modern form to mean a disease over which the victim has little or no control, in which a person has a chemical, and possibly biological/​genetic predisposition towards alcohol. What is confusing is that London also thinks such people are rare –​ one in ten thousand. If such alcoholics are as rare as he asserts, the implication is that drunkenness is a choice and not a disease: ‘I outlined my life to Charmian, and expounded the make-​up of my constitution. I was no hereditary alcoholic. I had been born with no organic, chemical predisposition toward alcohol. In this matter I  was normal in my generation’; ‘I have no word to say for or about the microscopically unimportant excessivist, the dipsomaniac’; ‘My body did not cry out for alcohol. As always, alcohol was repulsive to my body’.17 It may be, of course, that London is inconsistent across his oeuvre. In A Son of the Sun, the narrator describes the character Pankburn in this way, through the eyes of its hero, Captain Grief: ‘Now it is not good for man to drink alone, and Grief threw sharp scrutiny into his passing glance. He saw a well-​built young man of thirty, well-​featured, well-​dressed, and evidently, in the world’s catalogue, a gentleman. But in the faint hint of slovenliness, in the shaking, eager hand that spilled the liquor, and in the nervous, vacillating eyes, Grief read the unmistakable marks of the chronic alcoholic’.18 The description is one that could be found throughout the nineteenth century as it applied to habitual drinkers, so it is only the introduction of the term ‘alcoholic’ which is new here. Once identified as an alcoholic, the character is fixed by the language of science and religion as he seeks to explain himself, and what it is to be an alcoholic. He tells Grief: ‘your chemistry is good. To you alcohol has never been a million maggots gnawing at every cell of you. You’ve never been to hell. I am

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there now. I am scorching’.19 In the short story ‘Created He Them’,20 the character ‘Al’ (the name leaving the reader in no doubt as to his nature) blames his craving for alcohol on his ‘stomach’,21 but is nevertheless saved by his brother George’s non-​scientific intervention –​George holds out a revolver and tells Al that if he refuses to accept medical treatment he should do the decent thing and commit suicide. If he is not prepared to do either of those things, George will shoot him. So, while in these works and in John Barleycorn it is evident that London accepts there is such a thing as alcoholism, and that there is such a person as an alcoholic, there is some doubt as to its prevalence and what it involves, and it may be that he is just paying lip-​service to the scientific-​sounding term ‘alcoholic’. Nevertheless, in John Barleycorn London does give an image of what we would now take to be an alcoholic, when he describes ‘two types of drinkers’, the sottish type who drinks to unconsciousness, and the thinking, philosophical type, whose brain is intoxicated.22 Of the first type he writes: ‘There is the man whom we all know, stupid, unimaginative, whose brain is bitten numbly by numb maggots; who … falls frequently in the gutter, and who sees, in the extremity of his ecstasy, blue mice and pink elephants. … The other type of drinker has imagination, vision’.23 Aside from the message that he is not one of these ‘chronics’, what he really wants the reader to grasp is that it is only those who are cursed with ‘imagination’ and ‘intellect’ who suffer John Barleycorn as he has and does, and that he has ‘mastered’, and continues to master, alcohol. He thus presents alcohol as an intellectual and imaginative challenge that he has wrestled with throughout his life, and so perhaps in this sense it does seem that ‘alcoholic’ serves only as an adjective in ‘alcoholic memoirs’, indicating that the one staple continuity of his life has been alcohol, rather than ultimately anything to do with ‘alcoholic’ in the medical, analytical sense.24 It is important to realise this since the book’s framing process –​title, descriptor, introduction –​urges the reader to see London as a man who has fought an imaginative, intellectual, and metaphysical battle with alcohol throughout his life. Rather than simply naming the enemy as ‘drink’ or ‘alcohol’, this framing process makes ‘John Barleycorn’ the symbol of London’s metaphysical foe, yoking together ‘alcohol’ and the ambiguity of existence within the aura of a timeless, elemental force. In taking part in this eternal battle the book stresses that the creature Jack London is always in the process of ‘becoming’, hence the ambivalent ending is important: a more conclusive finale would show that the author had finally ‘mastered’ drink, and the Jack London who was ‘becoming’ is at last a fixed, knowable ‘Jack London’, a man who overcame all

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obstacles. But because the struggle is ongoing and constitutive of Jack London’s ‘becoming’, ‘Jack London’ cannot be set in stone as a finished character, figure, author, or person. The above account of John Barleycorn places the book firmly at the head of the list of Existential-​drinker titles that follow, drawing out those characteristics of self, finitude, truth, and world that can be claimed to be part of Existential thought. Some of the language and ideas draw on Nietzsche, both directly and indirectly, and taken all together it does establish a striking template for the figure of the Existential drinker. But there are a number of criticisms which could be aimed at the treatment of John Barleycorn and its subject matter, since they often have broader significance for later discussion in The Existential drinker. These are to do with: the level of direct engagement with philosophy; the relationship between writer and text; the status of ‘alcoholism’ as an accepted and acceptable term. Philosophy in John Barleycorn There is little critical consensus on Jack London as a ‘philosopher’. Some see a unity of thought and a systematic programme of engagement with the main philosophical issues of the day, whereas others image a writer whose endless appetite for reading ensured an eclectic, loosely managed cluster of ideas. Cassuto and Reesman in Rereading Jack London turn to a credo from Walt Whitman in order to position London as a thinker: ‘Do I contradict myself? /​Very well then I contradict myself, /​(I am large, I contain multitudes.)’25 In order to make the case above for John Barleycorn as a piece of writing that amounts to the first fully realised account of the Existential drinker, I have been rather sparsely selective in mentioning explicit handling of philosophy within the text, outlining instead those aspects which most readily conform to the thinking, Existential drinker.26 But the book itself has many philosophical influences, and while I would still maintain that there is a deliberate holding in antagonistic suspension of immanence and transcendence, most noticeably through the transformation of the symbol of John Barleycorn, this is not to assert that the memoirs provide a coherent philosophical argument. It may be best to treat John Barleycorn as divided within itself, and not presenting a logical discourse. This is certainly not to denigrate it, for the book is a way of comporting the self towards the world which insists on honesty, and is closer to a Heideggerian notion of truth as disclosure rather than truth as a form of rational and logical discourse.27 This is why the form of John Barleycorn is so interesting as well –​it doesn’t ‘settle’ itself, appearing instead to mix

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autobiography and fictionalising, selective remembering, all the while trying to work out the puzzle of the relationship the narrating self has with its drinking self. One of the strongest influences on London was the theory of evolution. He thought very highly of Darwin’s On the Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection (1859), and was much exercised by the competing interpretations of Darwin’s theory which followed, some diverging between those who saw society as replicating the struggle for existence (social Darwinism; Herbert Spencer) and those who believed that human society should develop an ethics which would counter the primordial, dog-​eat-​dog essence of the natural world (Thomas Henry Huxley).28 London, as was often the case when he was attracted to competing views, seemed to either hold both simultaneously, or to oscillate between them: he would sometimes champion the rugged individualist, occasionally espousing an Übermensch mentality, yet he would also champion socialism, ‘the People’ who saved him from his ‘long sickness’, and the need for communal action from an international working class, claiming as well that he had been misunderstood in his relation to the idea of Nietzsche’s ‘superman’. In recounting his life in John Barleycorn, all of these views are apparent. The relevance of these to drinking may not be immediately obvious, but in setting himself up as somebody who is always in the process of overcoming, he demonstrates the strength of both the individual and the species. If he can prevail, physically and metaphysically, while respecting nature, mankind as a whole can look to the future as a healthy one.29 This might also put into perspective the way in which London himself is positioned in John Barleycorn: he recognises the unhealthy aspects of heavy drinking –​it ‘inhibits morality’,30 it brings on physical decline –​ and while he may not be able to resolve the conflict between self and drink, it may be that in recognising this ill health a future world or society will move on, perhaps in the way Nietzsche expected culture to improve through the work of the ‘overman’. If truth, as London sees it, is only accessible through the ‘unhealth’ that John Barleycorn provides, the assumption has to be that it may only be in some future society or culture where the healthy, sober world can face up to ‘the truth’ that convention currently suppresses. More specific in influence on John Barleycorn is the work of William James. His The Varieties of Religious Experience gave a positive anthropological value to the altered state of consciousness brought on by drinking: ‘The sway of alcohol over mankind is unquestionably due to its power to stimulate the mystical faculties of human nature, usually crushed to earth by the cold facts and dry criticisms of the sober hour.

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Sobriety diminishes, discriminates, and says no; drunkenness expands, unites, and says yes. It is in fact the great exciter of the Yes function in man’.31 London can thus lay out sentiments similar to these propounded by James to support his argument that drink does provides access to truths hidden or suppressed by sobriety.32 More than that, drinking seems to offer a Nietzschean ‘yes’ to the world in all its contradictions, so that the book cannot have the same ending as London’s semi-​autobiographical Martin Eden (1909), where a sick spiritual-​mental health ends in suicide. Again, taking these things together  –​a generalised Nietzschean/​ Schopenhauerian ‘will-​to-​power’/‘will-​to-​life’, and a positive view of a drunken state, rather than the usual social opprobrium –​allows us to see that John Barleycorn paints a picture of London as an explorer in the realm of committed drinking where he encounters himself as an irreconcilable being acutely alert to the paradox of existence. The critical view of this would highlight the extreme romanticising that appears prevalent here:  the antisocial rebel involved in a largely unacceptable practice. But London himself was wary of a reheated romanticism, usually preferring to bring things back to the materiality of the world. The book guards itself against romanticism by its reliance on science as the premium authority for a description of the ‘world as it is’, with the quasi-​objective fields of philosophy and sociology in important supporting roles. He chooses these authorities to support his view of drinking and self, at both the subjective and objective level, rather than taking his cue from one or more of the Greek symposium, the Romantics, or his near-​contemporary fin-​de-​siècle decadents, as he might so easily have done. Any private enlightenment he has is always cast in the light of knowledge for the benefit of the greater good, not just his private self. He does not revel in Weltschmerz, as someone in a Romantic mould might, but kicks against the ‘soul-​sickness’ he experiences, and he is always open about the negative effects of alcohol, both socially and individually; his wider views about improvement of the species as well as the individual serve to diminish any romanticist notions.33 But, of course, he remains convinced that heavy drinking is revelatory, and in an attempt to communicate what may seem mysterious (in a William James manner), he utilises a powerful symbol of his own making. The White Logic But to the imaginative man, John Barleycorn sends the pitiless, spectral syllogisms of the white logic.34 John Barleycorn sends his White Logic, the argent messenger of truth beyond truth, the antithesis of life, cruel and bleak as interstellar space,

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pulseless and frozen as absolute zero, dazzling with the frost of irrefragable logic and unforgettable fact.35

London’s term for the paradoxical nature of alcohol, its ability to grant insights into life only through the granting of death, is ‘the White Logic’. We have already noted the emphasis on paradox and ambiguity in the engagement with existence, truth, and self, and so when London ventures ‘logic’ he partly uses it in this sense of a paradox. As for ‘white’, London valued symbols as a means of literary expression and an effective path to direct communication and greater understanding,36 and it is clearly meant to enhance the paradox of immanence–​transcendence that ‘John Barleycorn’ ‘logically’ embodies.37 The meaning of ‘whiteness’, however, is not self-​ evident in John Barleycorn. It does have some association in the book with ‘enlightenment’, as in ‘My brain was illuminated by the clear, white light of alcohol’,38 but the association most reasonably made in London’s work as a whole is with its use in the Klondike stories and its connection with snow and ice.39 The most famous of these, ‘To Build a Fire’, opens with a couple of references to the vast white spaces, but does not take ‘whiteness’ any further. The story that is best paired with ‘white logic’ is ‘The White Silence’, where whiteness is blankness, and with blankness is ‘indifference’; the image is of a vast, impersonal, indifferent universe in which human endeavour is ultimately futile, although this realisation also produces a type of religious-​mystical experience when ‘man walks alone with God’, adding to the paradoxical nature of the symbol. Whiteness in this story is indifference, but it also encourages man to enter into the mysteries of the universe. In John Barleycorn whiteness still partly retains this overwhelming nothingness, but the intimation of some spirit in the universe is replaced by the ‘white light’ of philosophical appreciation, which does not have the force of consolation that ‘walking alone with God’ has. Initially, as in ‘The White Silence’, London can infuse various kinds of ideal as humanity’s noble resistance to the cold, brute, inhospitable universe, but in the later period of his life, which is where John Barleycorn appears, he concludes that such ‘vitality’ and ‘forces’ are illusions rather than a truth just out of reach towards which we are always striving. As James I. McClintock says: ‘He tried to solve a twentieth century problem of alienation, despair, futility, suffering and death with a nineteenth century set of values that presumed a rational, man-​ centered world order’.40 McClintock’s list of problems sits firmly within the view taken up by Existentialism towards the self and world. As we have seen, Camus baldly sets out in The Myth of Sisyphus that anything which might palliate ‘the twentieth century problem’ is a lie, and this

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is the belief London reluctantly reaches in John Barleycorn. Unlike the view expressed in ‘The White Silence’, in John Barleycorn there is no intimation of ‘walking with God’. If there is any sense of transcendent revelation, now in the hands of John Barleycorn rather than the Alaskan landscape, it is that of Camus’s Sisyphus, where Existential stoicism in the face of the universe’s indifference, and in the face of the futility of all endeavour, is the order of the day. McClintock goes on to claim: ‘The rest of Barleycorn testifies to London’s own inability to maintain an emotional commitment to these life-​giving truths against the onslaught of primary truth’.41 In John Barleycorn, primary truth outweighs what London once held to be the important secondary truths of what is meaningful and gives life its value. ‘The White Logic’ thus functions as a symbol rather than shorthand for a rational (‘logical’) appraisal of the human lot, since ‘alcohol’, and the kind of relationship with it that London depicts as the autobiographical thread upon which the basis of his life depends, could not provide a scientific-​rational grounding for knowledge. It runs counter to the previously, more strongly held views of London based on the science of evolution and historical materialism.42 In John Barleycorn London once more appears to have used symbolism to apprehend the universe when logic falls short. Science may have ‘disenchanted’ the world from the second half of the nineteenth century onwards, and London largely embraced the natural-​scientific view of life as explained by Darwin, but ultimately in John Barleycorn science cannot fully explain the world, or redeem it. By combining an individualised ‘white’ with an idiosyncratic use of ‘logic’, London also fuses together the idea of a scientifically proven Godless universe and the paradox of existence. In doing so he conjures up a means to handle the meaning of his life’s drinking, and in turn the puzzle of his own self. London’s sense of ‘the holy’ in ‘The White Silence’ is transposed to James’s view of the ritual uses of alcohol; the assessment in John Barleycorn is that the revelations London has ritually achieved are of the secular, philosophical kind. Writer and text Immediately prior to the above excerpt from The Varieties of Religious Experience William James casually notes that ‘public opinion and ethical philosophy have long since branded as pathological … the consciousness produced by intoxicants and anaesthetics, especially by alcohol’.43 This gives an indication that in America and elsewhere at that time to declare oneself as somebody who continues to drink to a level that is socially unacceptable was quite a courageous move,

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even more so for a person of Jack London’s standing. As mentioned in Chapter 1, the notion of habitual drinking as a moral failing would have been widespread (and carrying through to the more scientific notion of ‘alcoholism’), and the danger for London’s image as an all-​ out American action hero is that it would be damaged by the admission of such a character flaw. London was aware of his public profile and was one of the first writers with an international reputation to use it to his advantage as a professional author. The bravado portrayed in John Barleycorn is no doubt part of the macho image –​he is man enough to take on the demon drink, scourge of the nineteenth century, and demonstrates that he can conquer what has enslaved thousands of others. But just as John Barleycorn can be seen to present a transitional figure in relation to the Existential drinker, caught between the precepts of the temperance movement, the science of alcoholism, and the will-​to-​drink, it also presents a transitional figure in relation to the writer-​drinker. As well as the overtly masculine self-​portrayal, London’s reputation was as an unflinchingly honest writer and person. The voice of John Barleycorn is ostensibly that of the writer-​author-​narrator whom we trust, the man-​of-​the-​world who tells it like it is, about himself and what he has experienced. What is nineteenth century about this is that it depends upon a notion of a person as a ‘character’, somebody with characteristics that can be listed and from which future actions can be plausibly guessed; the person’s individual parameters are largely stable or fixed. But, as already hinted at in the way in which John Barleycorn ends, Jack London also seems to have an idea of a self that is more fluid, more open to the world and experience, to ‘becoming’ rather than ‘being’. The difference here is the move from the writer as ‘honest’ (in the novelistic sense, a reliable narrator), to one who seeks to be ‘authentic’. Of course, the notion of ‘authenticity’ in its later Existential manifestation cannot be part of London’s lexicon, but the fluidity of self, the self held in suspension as it is at the end of the book, suggests an ongoing project of personhood rather than the pinning down of a thing that ‘was’ and ‘is’ ‘Jack London’. The movement away from ‘honest’ Jack London towards ‘authentic’ Jack London is not meant to imply that Jack London as the narrator in John Barleycorn is ‘dishonest’ in some way, it is simply to indicate that London’s conception of his self is closer to the one that emerges in the twentieth century rather than the nineteenth-​century one identified by D. H. Lawrence as ‘the old stable ego’.44 There is a danger of imposing too much of a later twentieth-​and twenty-​ first-​ century sensibility around autobiographical work onto London’s book, one that already comes primed with ideas about the

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multiplicity of self and selves, and the impossibility of ‘knowing’ a person through his or her writing, since all we have is the writing from which to derive the ‘real’ person.45 But I don’t think this is the case here. Jeanne Campbell Reesman begins her entry for ‘John Barleycorn’ in Critical Companion to Jack London with reference to the unclear or multiply generic nature of the book:  ‘autobiography, memoir, confession, temperance tract, sociological study, and a novel. It is all that –​and more’ (she also cites Künstlerroman).46 London’s own quibbling over ‘memoirs of an alcoholic’ or ‘alcoholic memoirs’, yet ultimately calling it John Barleycorn, as if the personification of alcohol is his alter ego –​‘I –​or John Barleycorn, for it was the same thing’47 –​further adds to this sense of ‘fluidity’. This is not, though, postmodern fluidity. It is much more in keeping with the Kierkegaardian sense of personhood, the power or will to hold together what Kierkegaard called ‘personality’, in the face of commitment and choice. That is precisely the kind of self London presents to the reader in John Barleycorn. By using the verb ‘present’ I  do not wish to imply that there is something disingenuous about the book or London’s role as author. Nevertheless, it does remain an issue: the book comes to us as ‘memoirs’, so there is an implied contract of trust between author and audience in that we expect Jack London to tell us the truth about himself; we read it differently from Martin Eden, which is a novel drawing heavily on autobiographical material and which, as a novel, has poetic licence to manipulate source material for ends other than factual truth-​telling. It is inevitable perhaps that the more we read of London the more we attempt to triangulate in order to get at the real Jack London, something James Williams warns us against.48 But this indeterminacy around the ‘self’ of Jack London is not one that we back-​project. In the novel Martin Eden, Martin does ultimately find everything meaningless and commits suicide, and this imparts an Existential, nihilistic texture to the novel, and by implication, because of its autobiographical origins, the writer Jack London. In contrast, John Barleycorn, in leaving the ending ‘open’, leaves the person ‘Jack London’ open, and this in turn opens out onto the shifting connections between Jack London the person, Jack London the writer, and the figures in the literature we read who have their origins in the person we perceive to be ‘Jack London’. As we have seen, this is played out through the way he understands himself in conflict with the paradoxical reality and symbolism of ‘John Barleycorn’. It is as if London has chosen John Barleycorn as his own rock to be rolled up the mountain, knowing, like Camus’s Sisyphus, that this choice is his own creation (including the book we are reading) in the midst of a vast, indifferent universe.

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Notes 1 London, Barleycorn, p. 205. 2 Ibid., p. 208. 3 Ibid., p. 2. 4 ‘As my drinking grew heavier, I began to note more and more that it was in the drinking bouts the purple passages occurred. Drunks were always memorable’, ibid., p. 59, and previously: ‘that afternoon’s drunk on the Idler had been a purple passage flung into the monotony of my days. It was memorable. My mind dwelt on it continually. I went over the details, over and over again. Among other things, I had got into the cogs and springs of men’s actions’, ibid., p. 34 –​even here, the escapism of drinking is a cognitive spur. 5 Ibid., p. 45. 6 This is ‘the October 1911 suffrage amendment to the Californian state elections’ (John Sutherland, ‘Introduction’, in London, Barleycorn, p.  xxi; and see note to p. 1). London notes that he had been drinking before and after the vote, ‘because of the warmth of the day’, p. 1. 7 London, Barleycorn, p. 1. 8 Ibid., pp. 1–​2. 9 Ibid., p. 8. London does not name Zarathustra directly. When he says that John Barleycorn ‘looks upon life and all its affairs with the jaundiced eye of a pessimistic German philosopher’, pp. 7–​8, this is probably meant to reference both Nietzsche and Schopenhauer. Towards the end of the book he has John Barleycorn say: ‘Look at them, all the sad wraiths of sad mad men and passionate rebels –​your Schopenhauers, your Strindbergs, your Tolstois and Nietzsches’, p. 200. 10 Ibid., p. 76. 11 Such a ‘slow suicide’ is distinct from the once popular, but now largely debunked Irving Stone assertion that London took his own life at the end with drink and drugs, Sutherland, ‘Introduction’, pp. xvi–​xvii. In John Barleycorn London does indicate both types: ‘Yet suicide, quick or slow, a sudden spill or a gradual oozing away through the years, is the price John Barleycorn exacts. No friend of his ever escapes making the just, due payment’, p.  8, but in his own case, having once experienced the temptation of suicide under the influence of drink, he is dismissive of ‘quick’ suicide. 12 A similar double notion of selfhood is present in Martin Eden. The Bodley Head Jack London 3 (London:  The Bodley Head 1965 [1909]). For the first part of the novel we have the self-​made man, who comes good as a writer through hard work, earning the respect of the respectable (middle-​ class) world. The second half, though, turns its back on this stereotypical rags-​ to-​ riches narrative, and shows Martin as somebody who succeeds only in discovering the meaninglessness of existence within which he has no purpose. Jonathan Spinner claims Martin Eden represents ‘one of the first fictional statements of American existentialism’. Jonathan Spinner, ‘Jack London’s Martin Eden:  the development of the existential hero’, in Ray

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Wilson Ownbey (ed.), Jack London: Essays in Criticism (Santa Barbara, CA and Salt Lake City, UT: Peregrine Smith, 1978), p. 115. 13 For example, ­chapter 10 of The Principles of Psychology, ‘The consciousness of self’: ‘And this unbrokenness in the stream of selves, like the unbrokenness in an exhibition of “dissolving views”, in no wise implies any farther unity or contradicts any amount of plurality in other respects’. William James, The Principles of Psychology (New York: Henry Holt, 1931, vol. 1, p. 335). This third model of self is more prevalent in postmodern notions of subjectivity. 14 Some commentators simply assume that London was an alcoholic. For example: ‘after reading John Barleycorn, one surmises that he was a thoroughgoing alcoholic, despite what he says at the end about being able to control it’, Jeanne Campbell Reesman, Critical Companion to Jack London: A Literary Reference to His Life and Work (New York: Facts on File, 2011), p. 131, or wish to frame the book as John Sutherland does: ‘It all boils down to the one question –​was Jack London at the time of writing John Barleycorn an alcoholic?’, Sutherland, ‘Introduction’, pp. xiv–​xv. As discussed in  Chapter  1, such labelling cannot be taken as scientific, but is rather a judgement that is culturally determined. Sutherland notes that there is some sanitising of London’s image in the three-​volume Letters of Jack London (1988), where the editors ‘defiantly assume that Jack had no problem with alcohol whatsoever’, Sutherland, ‘Introduction’, p.  xviii. London’s drinking does not loom especially large in Earle Labor’s biography Jack London:  An American Life (New  York:  Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2013, Kindle edn), even though like most other biographies of London it is heavily reliant on John Barleycorn. Sutherland’s stance is that ‘the truth almost certainly resides in the pages of John Barleycorn’, ‘Introduction’, p. xviii. Crowley spends some time arguing that London was incontrovertibly an alcoholic (The White Logic, pp. 19–​20) and reads the book as the expression of somebody ‘in denial’, p. 24, an idea echoed by Reesman: ‘the book is anything but a simple revelation –​it is layered with many ironies –​ and some sincere denial’, Critical Companion, p. 130. 15 London, Barleycorn, p. 4. 16 Ibid., p. 5. In certain instances of publication this appears to be the book’s subtitle, or at least to be an accompanying descriptor. The title-​page of the Oxford World’s Classics edition reads ‘John Barleycorn /​“Alcoholic Memoirs” ’ and Sutherland in his ‘Introduction’ states that London gave it this subtitle. Crowley in The White Logic also deals with the distinction between ‘alcoholic memoirs’ and ‘memoirs of an alcoholic’, although differently from the approach I take here, placing it in the context of understanding around ‘inebriety’ and ‘dipsomania’ in the period, p. 22. 17 London, Barleycorn, p. 2, p. 6, p. 139. 18 In the story ‘The Proud Goat of Aloysius Pankburn’, in Jack London, A Son of the Sun (New York: Doubleday, Page & Company, 1912), p. 44. 19 Ibid., p. 52. 20 In the collection When God Laughs and Other Stories (New  York:  The Regent Press, 1911).

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1 Ibid., p. 136. 2 22 London, Barleycorn, pp. 6–​8. 23 Ibid., p. 6. 24 Crowley gives a good brief survey of the development of the word and concept of ‘alcoholism’ in The White Logic, pp. 3–​5, including the shift from adjective to noun for ‘alcoholic’, p. 4. 25 Leonard Cassuto and Jeanne Campbell Reesman (eds), Rereading Jack London (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1996), p. 2. They go on to say: ‘Though London saw value and challenge in Nietzsche’s ideas … we suggest that his unsystematic, often self-​contradictory worldview, buttressed by his eccentric vision of “individualistic socialism”, may be better described by Emersonian representativeness than by Nietzschean greatness and its accompanying discontents’, pp. 3–​4. 26 ‘Philosophy’ here should also include social theory, a new discipline in the nineteenth century (sociology). 27 Per Serritslev Petersen argues that London’s mode of thinking is dialectical rather than contradictory and/​or confused. See Per Serritslev Petersen, ‘Jack London’s dialectical philosophy between Nietzsche’s radical nihilism and Jules de Gaultier’s Bovarysme’, Partial Answers 9:1 (2011), 65–​77; Lawrence I.  Berkove views the see-​sawing of ideas between works as ‘seeking truth with basic and overriding intellectual honesty, and his search, even when it appears to stumble or backtrack, turns out to be most productive along a path illuminated by Darwinian thought’. Lawrence I. Berkove, ‘On Jack London:  Darwinism and the evolution of Jack London’, in Lawrence I. Berkove (ed.), Jack London:  Critical Insights (Pasadena, CA:  Salem Press, 2012), p. 7. 28 For the difference between Huxley and Spencer in relation to London, see Berkove, ‘On Jack London’, especially pp. 10–​11. 29 For instance, ‘Barleycorn is with me because I was born in what future ages will call the dark ages before the ages of rational civilization’, Barleycorn, p. 189. 30 Ibid., p. 53. 31 William James, The Varieties of Religious Experience: A Study in Human Nature (London: Longmans, 1902), p. 387. 32 Sutherland writes: ‘London read James’s book while meditating the composition of John Barleycorn, on board the Dirigo, March–​July 1912’, London, Barleycorn, n. 7. 33 This is not to say that all Existential drinkers fall outside of the ‘accusation’ of Romanticism and glorifying heavy drinking. London’s qualified exaltation of drink is more complicated. 34 London, Barleycorn, p. 7. 35 Ibid., p. 188. 36 It is generally accepted that his late discovery of Jung served to confirm ideas he had already developed around the power of symbols. 37 There may be a problem with ‘logic’ as well that London highlights when conjoined to ‘white(ness)’, since ‘reason’ fails or is a kind of category in the

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‘unknown’ that whiteness symbolises; on the role of logic in London see James I. McClintock, White Logic:  Jack London’s Short Stories (Grand Rapids, MI:  Wolf House Books, 1975), pp. 81ff., and, for example, in discussing the earlier Alaskan stories:  ‘The Northland landscape is the “unknowable” which cannot be comprehended through positivistic logic and must be evoked symbolically and poetically’, p. 83. Scott Derrick observes, in agreement with others such as McClintock, that ‘ “whiteness” represents a general epistemological limit in his fictions’. Scott Derrick, ‘Making a heterosexual man: gender, sexuality, and narrative in the fiction of Jack London’, in Cassuto and Reesman (eds), Rereading Jack London, p. 128. 38 ‘White’ is also associated with light and truth in this dialogue with John Barleycorn: ‘Your clear white light is sickness’, I tell the White Logic. ‘You lie’. ‘By telling too strong a truth’, he quips back. ‘Alas, yes, so topsy-​turvy is existence’, I acknowledge sadly. (London, Barleycorn, p. 194)

39 Earle Labor discusses the symbol of ‘the white silence’ as one of four motifs in London’s ‘symbolic wilderness’ in his essay ‘Jack London’s symbolic wilderness’, in Ownbey (ed.), Jack London, pp. 31–​4. He also offers a quote from the opening of White Fang to illustrate London’s view that ‘Man may find a certain serenity in the arctic wastes, but it is the blank serenity of death’, p. 33. 40 McClintock, White Logic, p. 75. 41 Ibid., p. 76. 42 Setting to one side how the theory of evolution itself was open to interpretation when applied to civilisation, and that the science of dialectical materialism may not be of the same order as the physical sciences. 43 James, Varieties, p. 387. 44 Letter to Edward Garnett, 5 June 1914, in D. H. Lawrence, The Letters of D. H. Lawrence, ed. Aldous Huxley (London: Heinemann, 1956). 45 This is largely the approach taken by James Williams: ‘We will never be able to retrieve a pure London presence from the creation of Martin Eden –​ or, for that matter, from the words of the narrators of People of the Abyss, John Barleycorn, and the other semi-​, quasi-​, or “straightforward” autobiographical works’. James Williams, ‘Commitment and practice: the authorship of Jack London’, in Cassuto and Reesman (eds), Rereading Jack London, p. 11. 46 Reesman, Critical Companion, p. 129. It may seem extreme to classify John Barleycorn as a novel, but Russ Kingman writes:  ‘John Barleycorn is as fictional as The Call of the Wild or White Fang’, A Pictorial Life of Jack London (1979), quoted by Sutherland, ‘Introduction’, p. xvii, with Kingman coming to this view on the basis of London’s ‘modest’ ‘bar bills’. 47 London, Barleycorn, p. 30. 48 Williams, ‘Commitment and practice’.

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3

Jean Rhys and drunken consciousness (1929–​1939)

Damned voice in my head.

Jean Rhys published four novels across the 1920s and 1930s, all of which have a central protagonist who is female, usually existing as a kept woman or prostitute who is also frequently described as drinking alcohol. In all four novels the life of the woman ends in despair.1 The style of the novels is poetic, economical, and often fragmentary, with a theme common to all of them being that of the outsider status of women. Although the novels had some critical recognition at the time, they did not achieve much popular success, and the subject matter of women who are sexually frank and always drinking may have accounted for this lack of popularity. Rhys’s pre-​war writing is usually classed as modernist, and like most modernist novels they are interested in the self, consciousness, and interiority, and the way that the world is experienced by the self through consciousness.2 That world, for the modernists, is one characterised by modernity, a world increasingly dominated by the triumph of science, technology, industrialisation, rationalism, and technocratic governance. Rhys’s four novels present the reader with a complex of self, consciousness, and modernity, inflected by an argument that women are forced to live differently in the world from men, and therefore experience and understand the world differently from men. One of the major achievements of the novels is the way in which they render the various states of consciousness of the female protagonist in the modern world, and what I look at in this chapter is the way in which Rhys integrates questions of gender, consciousness, modernity, alcohol, and the self. Rhys’s protagonists choose their orientations as a way to define their selves and to define what is true in and about the world they inhabit. As one of her characters declares: ‘ “no place is a place to be sober in. That’s what I think” … She had the look in her eyes of someone who is

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longing to explain herself, to say: “This is how I am. This is how I feel” ’.3 As we will see, this identification of the continually intoxicated altered state of consciousness with selfhood and authenticity is a key theme of Rhys’s pre-​war novels. While most writing on Rhys contextualises her primarily through biography, often reading her novels as directly and symptomatically expressive of her own life, or placing her within the world of Paris bohemia in the 1920s and 30s, I will treat these novels as predominantly literary explorations of consciousness and concerted Existential awareness. The novels: narrative perspective, consciousness, and the Existential drinker Modernist novelists very often execute the novel through the restricted consciousness of a narrator or characters, and their work is often characterised by variant forms of the stream-​ of-​ consciousness technique. This has the effect that the reader is not allowed to see the world from a presumed objective omniscient narrative perspective; extreme examples of restricted-​ consciousness narratives are to be found in William Faulkner’s The Sound and the Fury (1929) and As I Lay Dying (1930).4 Even when the narrative perspective is in the third-​person in a modernist novel, it is often free indirect discourse, so that the reader is in effect constrained to the point of view of the character who is the focus at that point, such as in Virginia Woolf’s novel Mrs Dalloway (1925).5 Taking the pre-​war novels of Jean Rhys as a group –​Quartet (1929), After Leaving Mr Mackenzie (1930), Voyage in the Dark (1934), Good Morning, Midnight (1939) –​ Quartet6 and After Leaving Mr Mackenzie are third-​person narratives, Voyage and Good Morning are first person. There is a general movement across the novels to have the reader stuck solely within the consciousness of the protagonist, even though we do get glimpses of other consciousnesses in the first two novels and some narratorial comment. This means that approaching the works with respect to an idea that there is an ‘altered state of consciousness’ presents a problem, since we tend to be looking out from within one single consciousness, and therefore there are no separate consciousnesses against which to judge or identify an altered state. This technical problem needs to be kept in mind as we look at Rhys’s depictions of drunken consciousness in detail. While modernism provides the literary and stylistic context for Rhys’s writing, thematically the novels can be considered as presenting us with variations on the figure of ‘the Existential drinker’. In Rhys,

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as with London in the previous chapter, drinking grants access to the truth about self and the world, with the world significant as it appears phenomenologically to the individual consciousness rather than that of social groups. Rhys’s characters and fiction have often been seen in an autobiographical light, but it is remarkable how little attention has been paid in critical work on Rhys to drunken consciousness as a cognitive medium for the protagonists. Drunken consciousness We can see the importance Rhys attaches to the idea of a ‘drunken consciousness’ at the start of her first novel, Quartet. On the second page, Marya, the heroine, is invited up to an artist’s studio, and the artist asks her opinion of some drawings she has bought:  ‘Marya, helped by the alcohol, realized that the drawings were beautiful. Groups of women. Masses of flesh arranged to form intricate and absorbing patterns’.7 The paintings require an altered state of consciousness in order to be properly appreciated, and, by implication, properly understood. The suggestion also is that a normal state of consciousness simply will not do if we are to get at the hidden structures of the world. Right at the beginning of the novel, therefore, and, I would suggest, embracing the four novels taken together as a group, is the idea that drunken consciousness gives access to truths about the world, and truths about art. This view of the self in relation to the world, very much in keeping with the tenets of modernism, insists on the primacy of subjective consciousness over any kind of rational, objective worldview. What has value therefore is the individual’s alcohol-​induced altered state of consciousness for real understanding. It is also evident here that alcohol makes it easier to understand new, contemporary representations of the modern world. There is an implication then that modern art may itself represent an altered state, and that to match the mind to this representation also requires an altered consciousness, achieved in this instance via alcohol. The idea that the modern world was radically new and therefore required radically new art and artistic techniques was a mainstay of modernist writers and artists, but along with this we can see that there is an assumption that consciousness itself has to change in response (or, more passively, responds by changing); the alternative assumption is that modernist art has to pay attention to consciousness in a way that it believes art has not done before.

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This may seem to make quite a lot out of a mere two lines, but the reading is supported elsewhere in Rhys’s work. For example: From the balcony Marya could see one side of the Place Blanche. Opposite, the Rue Lepic mounted upwards to the rustic heights of Montmartre. It was astonishing how significant, coherent and understandable it all became after a glass of wine on an empty stomach. The lights winking up at a pallid moon, the slender painted ladies, the wings of the Moulin Rouge, the smell of petrol and perfume and cooking. The Place Blanche, Paris. Life itself. One realized all sorts of things. The value of an illusion, for instance, and that the shadow can be more important than the substance.8

Again, understanding of the world is helped through a drunken consciousness. Drinking on an empty stomach implies a more inebriated state (no food to soak up the alcohol), and the suggestion here, and throughout Rhys’s novels, is that the drunker you are the closer to real truth and real understanding you are. Life itself becomes comprehensible through drunken consciousness, and more readily accessible. That the character has an innate desire for truth, in contradistinction to the world at large, is made clear later on: ‘People went ludicrously wrong. You told the truth, the stark truth –​or perhaps you gave it a fig-​leaf so as not to harrow too much  –​and everybody said:  “Come, come”, and “Don’t tell me”, and: “Do you think I was born yesterday?” ’9 Rather like Jack London in John Barleycorn, it is alcohol that allows for the kind of truth that everyday reality will not tolerate. Initially there would appear to be some contradictions in Quartet over the status and role of drunken consciousness. There is a doubleness when the character alludes to ‘shadow’ and ‘illusion’ for this drunken world, a realisation that this state of mind, this kind of understanding of what life is, is somehow not real, while paradoxically having a greater value than what is real. Further, it seems that coming out of the altered drunken state to the sober self is actually harmful to the self, rather than the other way around, that is, going from sobriety to drunkenness; the contradictions and confusions register a transition away from the ‘reality’ which any sober person’s consciousness is supposed to perceive. The character’s drunken state becomes more appealing because more accurate, more revealing of the truth even as it gets further away from a consensual empirical reality. In Rhys’s first published novel, there is a hesitancy about the role of the altered state which disappears in the later novels; here the view is implicitly held back by conventional criticism, since the perception retains the familiar distinction of material and shadow. The traditional, sober consciousness posits a primary world

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constituted of physical objects, and a secondary world constituted by shadows and illusion. Social disapproval extends to the world of altered consciousness since such a consciousness does not correlate with a consensual, social reality; in this earlier work there is still a tendency to defer to an empirical world which is supposed to have prior purchase on, and priority over, the experiencing consciousness.10 Quartet also makes the connection between the workings of consciousness and selfhood. The relationship between Marya’s mode of existence and her sense of self is decidedly Existential when she tells her bullying lover, Heidler, that ‘ “I feel as if I’d fallen down a precipice” ’.11 His simple, uncomprehending response is ‘ “You funny thing” ’, for it is only Marya who experiences her self in this way as an entity not grounded as a solid, substantive object. Rather, Marya’s self is forged or created ex nihil by her own consciousness, or from within her own consciousness. The metaphysical reading of Marya’s descent into self as an ungrounded creation returns in a later drunken binge: She shut them and again the bed plunged downwards with her –​sickeningly –​into blackness. She was trying to climb out of the blackness up an interminable ladder. She was very small, as small as a fly, yet so heavy, so weighted down that it was impossible to hoist herself to the next rung. The weight on her was terrible, the vastness of space round her was terrible. She was going to fall. She was falling. The breath left her body.12

This is very like the Existential recognition of the self as an abandoned consciousness in an indifferent universe, the latter here rendered ‘terrible’ in appreciation of the self’s lonely predicament. It is similar to a view expressed in a piece of art that Julia Martin contemplates in After Leaving Mr Mackenzie: ‘a picture representing a male figure encircled by what appeared to be a huge mauve corkscrew. At the end of the picture was written, “La vie est un spiral, flottant dans l’espace, que les hommes grimpent et redescendent très, très, très sérieusement” ’.13 Even here there is a suggestion that she is in a self-​sufficient, altered state of consciousness, for ‘she stood for a long time’ looking at the picture, ‘complete in herself, detached, independent of the rest of humanity’. What is an altered state of consciousness? Before looking further at the novels I will examine more closely what is meant by the term ‘an altered state of consciousness’ (ASC), since while ‘consciousness’ is an accepted and central element of Existential thought,14 the question of ‘altered states of consciousness’ does not

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really feature in Existential discussion. Instead, it belongs both to a common discourse around drunkenness and the recent scientific upsurge in interest in consciousness. However, thinking about consciousness in this way will help lay some foundations for thinking about the role the drunken altered state plays in the life of the Existential drinker There is certainly no consensus on what constitutes an ASC, partly because there is no agreed view across or within disciplines as to what consciousness itself is. A  recent argument, derived from neuroscience, indicates how consciousness might be conceptualised: The notion of an ASC is, we propose, the notion of a state of the nonconscious neurocognitive background mechanisms of consciousness. In this state the background mechanisms tend to produce misrepresentational contents of consciousness such as hallucinations, delusions and memory distortion. The effects of the background mechanisms are global or general: an ASC is a globally misrepresentational state. The state is also only temporary and reversible.15

Revonsuo et  al. thus posit that consciousness equates to the contents of consciousness, and that it is nonconscious neurocognitive processes which generate (the contents of) normal consciousness. The argument is that we should then term consciousness ‘altered’ only if there is a global misrepresentation by the nonconscious cognitive processes of the brain. In such an event, the contents which the cognitive processes generate and which are apparent in consciousness are deemed to be misrepresentations of the actuality of the external world or the world of memory. Where this contemporary scientific view runs into difficulties is precisely the way in which Rhys chooses to depict consciousness, and drunken consciousness in particular. Heidler’s perception of the world in Quartet is the one that society subscribes to –​he embodies the way the world is understood to be. Heidler’s ‘global’ perception equates to the view presented by Revonsuo et al., the presumption that there is a standard (default) representational view of the world against which we can identify those occasions when a particular mind does not accord with this and generates global misrepresentations. The assumption is that there is an agreed-​upon empirical reality against which we can judge the misrepresentations and thus identify an ASC. What Rhys does in Quartet, and increasingly in the other novels, is to question the validity of that particular agreed-​upon world, the role individual consciousness has in apprehending the supposedly true, real world. Through the use of naturalised drunken ‘altered’ states of consciousness, the novels raise the possibility that consciousness in effect determines the world (and self), in a manner that chimes with

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Existential thought, rather than simply registering a fixed world to varying degrees of accuracy. For instance, in Quartet, there is a growing sense of alienation as the novel progresses, and this is set against the dominance of social ‘reality’, and at the expense of that reality. It is indicated when Heidler, the man Marya comes to depend upon and who casts her aside after an affair, says:  ‘ “[Y]‌our whole point of view and your whole attitude to life is impossible and wrong and you’ve got to change it for everybody’s sake” ’.16 We start to see here how what we can say about altered states of consciousness becomes quite problematic.17 In terms of the novel, at the thematic level, Heidler is simply pointing out to Marya that there are social conventions regarding their behaviour, and that while they are having an affair she needs to keep up appearances for everybody’s sake, including his wife’s. At a deeper level though, and existing somewhere at the border of psychology and philosophy, the novel advances the view that what constitutes the world is primarily dependent on the way consciousness conceives of it, and contests the idea that consciousness is merely a kind of organic mirror to a pre-​existing reality. In other words, in Rhys’s novels, whatever our consciousness delivers up to us just is the way the world is, it does not subserve and simply reflect some outer, external, more objective and ‘real’ reality.18 In this manner, Rhys’s novels urge the reader to experience and see that ‘empirical reality’ –​the conventional world –​is not a neutral physical entity, it is instead a biased construction of social convention. In Rhys’s drinking novels we get to a point where the drunken consciousness of the protagonist radically fails both to comply with and conform to any external, pre-​existent (socially constructed) version of the world (the ‘sober’, dominant view). However, since Rhys does not allow us outside her protagonist’s consciousness, the reader’s absolute point of view, like the character’s, becomes the world of that consciousness –​there is nothing else, no external orientation, no access to the world of common, social consciousness (‘empirical reality’) from which to judge her state as altered. It is the consciousness of the protagonist which becomes the ‘true’ consciousness and the ‘real’ world, both for the protagonist and for the reader. In effect Rhys makes the point, through her portrayal of ‘drunken consciousness’, that ‘normal consciousness’ (sober, social, habituated consciousness) is conventional, always subject to the intersection of dominant ideologies (patriarchy; modernity). The commitment to the ‘altered state’ is a commitment to an authentic, rather than conventional, truth, and thus enables the character finally to commit to the process of forging an authentic self. Heidler says ‘your whole point of view and your whole attitude to life is impossible and wrong’, and this description of the protagonist is in

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essence a description of the consciousness of each of the protagonists of the other three drinking novels. What the increasing use of alcohol in each of the novels does is align this alienated consciousness –​alienated when trying to correlate it with a supposed default empirical reality –​with a sense of the primacy of the self’s consciousness, or the individual consciousness. The attempt to harmonise an alienated consciousness with a sense of an authentic self can only be achieved by these protagonists via alcohol. This is what we get with Jack London’s John Barleycorn, and what we will see time and again in the books that follow. Marya, and the female protagonists in the other novels, experience this modern world as wrong, or, at least, wrong for them; and we in turn as readers, especially when confined to the consciousness of the protagonists, also experience the world as wrong. From the point of view of the ‘external’ empirical world, such subjective consciousnesses as we find in Rhys’s drinking female protagonists misrepresent the world, whereas for the subjective consciousnesses themselves, the disjuncture becomes a kind of split consciousness  –​or perhaps, split self  –​which while at times becoming irreconcilable and unbearable without alcohol, eventually gives way to the normalised altered consciousness. This may seem just another way of identifying somebody with ‘a drink problem’, someone who drinks as a refuge from a world that is too harsh, as when, for instance, Marya thinks that the whole world is ‘a dream’.19 Looked at from ‘the outside’, this is a perfectly reasonable assessment of Marya and the other female drinkers, creatures who live in a ‘dreamlike’ bubble, unable to face up to reality, and there are certainly times when being drunk in the novels functions in this way, as when Marya, now put out of sight by Heidler in the South of France, says: ‘I must get drunk tonight. I must get so drunk that I can’t walk, so drunk that I  can’t see’.20 However, the novels in their form make a statement about consciousness in their refusal to allow the default social consciousness to dominate. The reader is obliged to see the world through the protagonist’s altered state of consciousness, an altered state that is now the norm.21 Roles are reversed: the self is at home in what is a newly naturalised state of consciousness. The importance of a writer being able to provide a point of view not available to everyday, habitual perception, and only to be reached through an altered state, is made explicit in After Leaving Mr Mackenzie when the heroine, Julia Martin, suggests to her Uncle Griffiths that Dostoevsky was able to do this thanks to his epilepsy. He asks: ‘ “Why see the world through the eyes of an epileptic?” ’ and Julia replies: ‘ “But he might see things very clearly, mightn’t he? At moments”. “Clearly?”

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said Uncle Griffiths. “Why clearly? How d’you mean clearly?” ’22 His role here is rather like that of Heidler, a dominant male ruling over a group of females, enforcing the social norm of patriarchy, what elsewhere she calls ‘organized society’.23 Julia’s response –​her resistance –​is to suggest that altered states give access to the truth, whether through alcohol or epilepsy, and this validates her own drinking existence, as well as the novel we are reading as a kind of altered state provided by the author Jean Rhys. Rhys thus presents us with protagonists who are in a ‘normalised altered state’, and places the reader in a similar position. This can be interpreted as akin to Heidegger’s notion of mood, where our being-​ in-​the-​world always (ontologically) involves us being in a certain attitude to the world. Again, this is a departure from a more scientific, and socially scientific, way of positing an empirical, consensual reality from which we can measure any individual deviance. For Heidegger, and for Existentialist thought in general, individual consciousness simply is the initial point from which we are ‘in the world’, and this is exactly the way in which Rhys’s drinking novels present their female protagonists.24 This is not to deny a physical world, but it is to deny the idea that the physical world constitutes reality. For Rhys, ‘consciousness’ and ‘mood’  –​both deliberately altered with the aid of alcohol to the extent that such a consciousness becomes ‘normal’ –​are what remain central.25 The female Existential drinker The Existential drinker is typically male, and the repeated use of large amounts of alcohol to confront Existential questions of self, truth, authenticity, meaninglessness, and death are often portrayed in masculine works as heroic, as we have seen with Jack London. But for Rhys’s female protagonists a dominant feature of their situatedness is the patriarchal world which surrounds them, and the truth of this available to them via alcohol leads to abject despair. That the world is male-​dominated is overt, not just in brute power but in the way it permeates all aspects of existence, as in Quartet where Marya says of Heidler: ‘He had everything on his side –​right down to the expression on the waiter’s face when he brought up her breakfast. Everything. Including Logic and Common Sense’.26 There is therefore a double alteration of consciousness in Rhys’s female protagonists away from the social norm: the modern, gendered world creates an alienated consciousness which is firstly altered from a consciousness measured by social, public, acceptable standards; this

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alteration is magnified, contained, or exploded in the second alteration brought on by alcohol. Unable to stop crying, I went down into the lavabo. […] I stayed there, staring at myself in the glass. What do I  want to cry about? … On the contrary, it’s when I am quite sane like this, when I have had a couple of extra drinks and am quite sane, that I realize how lucky I am. Saved, rescued, fished-​up, half-​drowned, out of the deep, dark river, dry clothes, hair shampooed and set.27

Is the crying here evidence of the ‘nonconscious neurocognitive’ background, that is, things going on in the brain behind consciousness? It accords to an extent with the idea that the protagonist has a split consciousness, and bringing the crying to the fore –​re-​cognising it –​allows the truth to come through the drink –​the belief that this peculiar altered state provides the accurate view of the world, that this altered state is in fact a proper presentation of the self in the world: despairing yet sane –​very much like Jack London’s view of himself in John Barleycorn as a Nietzschean drinker. Only through being drunk can Rhys’s female protagonists realise exactly how their gender and economic status might determine their (inauthentic) consciousness, and how outside of this, accessible through drink, is the possibility of forging the authentic self, not beholden to the habituations of the modern world and its determining of what amounts to a false consciousness, and, by extension, an inauthentic self. This is most obviously the case towards the end of Good Morning, Midnight: I am very drunk. […] A hum of voices talking, but all you can hear is ‘Femmes, femmes, femmes, femmes …’ And the noise of a train saying: ‘Paris, Paris, Paris, Paris. …’ Madame Vénus is angry and Phoebus Apollo is walking away from me down the boulevard to hide himself in la crasse. Only address: Mons P. Apollo, La Crasse. … But I know quite well that all this is hallucination, imagination. Venus is dead; Apollo is dead; even Jesus is dead. All that is left in the world is an enormous machine, made of white steel. […] I have another drink. Damned voice in my head, I’ll stop you talking …28

The protagonist provides recognition of her altered consciousness in the statement ‘I am very drunk’, yet this becomes ‘normal’ consciousness, as we have already seen, and there is no suggestion that it is reversible as Revonsuo et al. require of an altered state, since the now normalised truth of drunken consciousness overtakes any assertion by others about the way the world is, or even her own views when sober.

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Taken across all four novels, this indicates a new ‘type’ or even ‘model’ of consciousness –​a consciousness gendered female, responding to modernity (the machine, the city, the death of the human, the death of love, the death of religion), unable to cope, and substituting a new consciousness to replace this default modern one of the machine and modernity, which passes for the social norm. Unlike the male Existential drinker, the conflict is not resolved, either through bathetic death, as we will see later in Under the Volcano, heroic self-​belief, as in John Barleycorn, or a gleeful, self-​destructive repetition, as in The Lost Weekend. The female Existential drinker of Rhys’s pre-​war novels is trapped in the truths she encounters in what, by the end of each novel, becomes an apparently irreversible drunken consciousness. This is not to deny that alcohol can be a dangerously ‘altering’ substance for the female characters  –​they are often reconciled to men they initially dislike  –​for example when Maudie and Anna pick up two men at the start of Voyage in the Dark: ‘I hated them both. You pick up people and then they are rude to you. This business of picking up people and then they always imagine they can be rude to you. But when I had had a glass of port I began to laugh too and after that I couldn’t stop. I watched myself in the glass over the mantelpiece, laughing’.29 This reminds us that although there is always a metaphysical element to the novels, they are also grounded in particular situations, so that drinking is at the same time a retreat from the world, a way of making the world seem better (in Voyage, it sometimes makes the world seem more comical), a means to reconcile her to being with a man she may not like so much when sober, or being persuaded to drink for the benefit of others. But taken as a whole, it is drunken consciousness that becomes the means to access and represent all truth,30 so that all these insights occur within this consciousness. It is taken for granted in these novels, as it is in Existential thought, that the only kind of truth that is significant is, following Kierkegaard, that which is encountered by ‘the actual existing individual’ rather than the truths purveyed by ‘common sense’, or by philosophical systems of thought, or scientific objectivity.31 The drunken consciousness of Rhys’s protagonists enforces the centrality and salience of truth as only meaningful in a subjective sense. Conclusion In these novels Rhys provides the reader with an altered consciousness that becomes permanent, and therefore a newly naturalised ‘real’, constituting in turn ‘truth’ that is largely conceived Existentially, if in a rather solipsistic manner (when viewed ‘from the outside’). In doing so the novels formally, as well as thematically, directly offer a challenge

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to the modern, capitalistic, male-​powered world through the way consciousness can be understood as an individual’s Existential choice and commitment.32 This is not unambiguous, however. When Sasha Jensen declares: ‘I have another drink. Damned voice in my head, I’ll stop you talking …’, it is left open to the reader to decide whether silencing this voice is indeed an act of self-​destructive despair, or a necessary step in radically and permanently altering apprehension of a world that relentlessly aims to mould consciousness to its own ends. But if we compare this to the socially pliable consciousness of the heroine in Rhys’s first novel –​‘It seemed to her that, staring at the couple, she had hypnotized herself into thinking, as they did, that her mind was part of their minds’33 –​we can see precisely how Rhys, in her last pre-​war novel does give a complete and altered consciousness to a female protagonist, achieved through the life-​style of a committed drinker. Notes 1 Arguably perhaps with Voyage in the Dark (Harmondsworth, Middlesex: Penguin, 1975): Anna Morgan is ready to start all over again, fresh, although whether this is despair or hope depends on the reader’s interpretation of her narrative. Jane Nardin, in response to Crowley’s view of the despair of ‘the drunk narrative’, sees the despair in Good Morning, Midnight as ‘largely specific to women in a patriarchal society’. Jane Nardin, ‘“As soon as I sober up I start again”: alcohol and the will in Jean Rhys’s pre-​war novels’, Language and Literature 42:1 (2006), p.  68. However, I  treat the kind of ‘despair’ envisioned by Rhys as of a more metaphysical, Existential nature. In this I am closer to Nicholls, who also takes issue with Crowley: ‘While not suggesting that despair and alcohol consumption are never related, I would argue that the relationship between drink and modernist aesthetics is one which, broadly, tends not towards despair, but towards the idea of transcendence’. Nicholls, ‘Drink, Modernity, and Modernism’, p. 112. 2 Rhys’s writing has many obvious features in common with modernist literature, some of which I discuss here, even if her writing is not always deemed the most perfect of matches. See Sylvie Maurel, Jean Rhys (London: Macmillan Press, 1998), pp. 6–​7. 3 Julia Martin in After Leaving Mr Mackenzie, p. 37. 4 William Faulkner, As I  Lay Dying (Harmondsworth, Middlesex:  Penguin, 1982); The Sound and the Fury (London: Vintage, 1995). 5 Virginia Woolf, Mrs Dalloway (London: Triad, 1975). 6 Jean Rhys, Quartet (London: Penguin, 2000; originally published as Postures in 1928). 7 Ibid., p. 8. 8 Ibid., pp. 20–​1. 9 Ibid., p. 73.

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0 The following section discusses this more fully. 1 11 Rhys, Quartet, p. 88. 12 Ibid., p. 126. 13 Rhys, After Leaving Mr Mackenzie, p. 13; ‘Life is a spiral, floating in space, which men climb and descend very, very, very seriously’. 14 This is not to say that there is agreement on the details of how consciousness is constituted amongst the Existentialists, but rather that Existentialism tends to assume a foundational role for consciousness in establishing the parameters of self and world. Such a fundamental view is contested by science. 15 Antti Revonsuo, Sakari Kallio, and Pilleriin Sikka, ‘What is an altered state of consciousness?’, Philosophical Psychology 22:2 (2009), 187–​204, p. 202. There is not the space here for discussion about the more elemental term ‘consciousness’. As Revonsuo et al. themselves caution: ‘The scientific study of consciousness is a challenging domain, not only because of the philosophical “hard” problem involved (how any physical thing could have any phenomenal properties; see Chalmers, 1996), or the methodological difficulties in measuring or modelling consciousness … but also because the basic concepts in this field remain unclear’, p. 188. Susan Blackmore’s Consciousness provides comprehensive coverage of the issues relating to consciousness and ‘the hard problem’, and like Revonsuo et al., and many others, she notes: ‘Part of the problem is that “consciousness” has no generally accepted definition in either science or philosophy, despite many attempts to define it’. Susan Blackmore, Consciousness:  An Introduction, 2nd edn (London: Hodder Education, 2010), p. 1. I would argue that ‘consciousness’, because of its very phenomenal nature, means that it cannot be dealt with solely within one discipline (science) –​its existence as a ‘semantic field’ demands attention from philosophical and literary studies as well, as I attempt here. Rhys’s approach to rendering consciousness is well described by Todd K. Bender as one akin to literary impressionism, as he outlines with reference to Ford Madox Ford: ‘Impressionist writers aim to record the way impressions impinge on consciousness to make that “shimmering haze” which is life, and they try to control and manipulate the constructive activity of their audience as it registers an impression of their work’. Todd K. Bender, ‘Jean Rhys and the genius of impressionism’, in Pierrett M. Frickey (ed.), Critical Perspectives on Jean Rhys (Washington, DC: Three Continents Press, 1990), p. 77. 16 Rhys, Quartet, p. 89. 17 Towards the end of the novel, when Marya meets up with her husband Stephan, he says: ‘ “You are funny, you! You have a special way of looking at things” ’, ibid., p. 140. The fact that this ‘special way of looking at things’ may be present both sober and drunk for Marya suggests the way in which the novel normalises Marya’s altered state of consciousness. In After Leaving Mr Mackenzie Horsfield wants to find a room for Julia, being ‘understanding of her own peculiar point of view’, p.  122, and Anna Morgan is likewise

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regarded as idiosyncratic to the point of being half-​mad in Voyage in the Dark: ‘ “You’re a rum little devil, aren’t you?” Walter said. “Oh, I always was rum”, I said’, p. 45; ‘ “The thing about you”, [Ethel] said, ‘is that you’re half potty. You’re not all there; you’re a half-​potty bastard. You’re not all there; that’s what’s the matter with you. Anybody’s only got to look at you to see that” ’, p. 124. 18 In Revonsuo et  al.’s argument, the nonconscious neurological processes render –​presumably with the accuracy of a mirror –​the reality that feeds conscious processes (consciousness). 19 Rhys, Quartet, p. 96. 20 Ibid., p. 124. 21 Eva Müller-​Zettelmann and Rudolf Weiss write in discussing Marya and Quartet:  ‘The method of characterization is subtle, making the reader experience one of the central aesthetic maxims of Rhys’s own brand of impressionism:  she believed that the form of the world is inseparable from the emotional and attitudinal values superimposed upon it by a perceiver’. Eva Müller-​Zettelmann and Rudolf Weiss, ‘“La vie toute faite des morceaux”:  intermediality and impressionism in Jean Rhys’s Quartet’, in Elke Mettinger, Margarete Rubik and Jörg Türschmann (eds), Rive Gauche: Paris as a Site of Avant-​Garde Art and Cultural Exchange in the 1920s (Amsterdam: Rodopi, 2010), p. 86. The same can be said of the other pre-​war novels. 22 Rhys, After Leaving Mr Mackenzie, p. 96. 23 Ibid., p. 17. 24 Kevin Aho talks of ‘moods as disclosive’: ‘For the existentialists, we do not gain knowledge of the human situation through detached thought or rational demonstration but through the affective experiences of the individual. We understand what counts or matters in our lives through our moods, through the ways in which we feel about things. Some moods … have the capacity to shake us out of our everyday complacency and self-​deception by disclosing the fundamental freedom and finitude of our situation’. Kevin Aho, Existentialism (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2014), p. xii. 25 It is tempting to see this as analogous to Wyndham Lewis’s description of ‘the everyday drunkenness of the normal real’, quoted in Nicholls, ‘Drink, Modernity, and Modernism’, p.  253, but this is not what is meant. The ‘normal real’ in Rhys is banal, bourgeois, machine-​like, masculine, and normalisation of a drunken consciousness is the counter to this. 26 Rhys, Quartet, p. 93. 27 Rhys, Good Morning, Midnight, p. 10. 28 Ibid., p. 156; ‘la crasse’ = grime, filth. 29 Rhys, Voyage in the Dark, p. 12. 30 See also note 24, above, discussing Aho on ‘moods’. 31 See, for example, John Macquarrie, Existentialism (Harmondsworth, Middlesex: Penguin, 1972), pp. 137–​9; Steven Earnshaw, Existentialism: A Guide for the Perplexed (London: Continuum, 2006), pp. 36–​7.

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32 It is important to recognise the significance of form here  –​that the novel itself is presented as a consciousness which is entirely ‘altered’ from ‘normal’ consciousnesses. With respect to form, Sylvie Maurel states:  ‘Jean Rhys’s resistant voice is more likely to be heard in her handling of narrative form rather than content’, Jean Rhys, p. 25. 33 Rhys, Quartet, p. 76.

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Charles Jackson, The Lost Weekend (1944): life projects

Of course! that’s why he drank! But who could hope to understand that –​ who but the guy who did it himself?

If John Barleycorn has mixed feelings about committed drinking, and Rhys rarely allows a sustained outside view on her drinking heroines,1 Charles Jackson’s novel offers what appears to be a straightforward indictment of somebody who gives his life over to drink. Don Birnam is a self-​regarding failure with no concern for the people who attempt to help him. The novel displays in detail Birnam’s self-​deceptions and deviousness, and shows the drinker as a moral coward who uses alcohol as a means to escape from self-​hatred and social responsibility. As with other books with heavy-​drinking protagonists, possible reasons are given for the turn to drink –​here it is suppressed homosexuality, events in youth, ‘practically anything out of childhood’2  –​and an absent father. Such interpretations are nevertheless not ‘big enough’ to explain the turn his life takes after childhood,3 and ‘There were so many dozen reasons that didn’t count at all; none that did’.4 For the reader, at the level of the novel, such interpretations miss the significance of a structure founded on repetition:5 the drinker continually analyses his self, and indirectly what a self is, in a manner that London’s John Barleycorn argues is more truthful than the evasions of everyday sobriety, even if Birnam continually doubts the honesty of this incessant self-​scrutiny. The conflicting ideas presented to the reader about the reasons for drinking, coupled with the novel’s form and self-​referential nature  –​ Birnam considers writing a book which sounds rather like The Lost Weekend  –​suggest conflicting interpretations. The first might be a judgement that the novel wholly accepts ‘alcoholism’ as the correct psychological and medical frame for understanding Birnam’s behaviour, and gives a pitch-​perfect portrayal of the alcoholic as a narcissist.6 It thus displays the full array of psychoanalytic, psychological, and medical

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terminology that might accompany such a judgement. Another interpretation might foreground the type of metaphysical element identified in the previous chapters, either as a supplement to the broadly psychological-​ medical view of alcoholism, or as a contrary view held by the novel which offers a better explanation of Birnam’s drinking than the discourse of ‘alcoholism’. This latter view, I would argue, ultimately provides the more plausible, broadly Existential appreciation of Birnam’s ‘being-inthe-world’. The overt cause-​and-​effect explanations of homosexuality and a traumatic childhood might be grist to the mill of textbook clinical assessment in the period, but the structure of the book, coupled with its virtual first-​person narrative perspective, surely works against the more straightforward interpretation. This may seem a question of degree rather than a clear-​cut preference for either the psychological-​medical view or the philosophical one, yet the form of the book does seem to invite the reader into seeing some significant issue with the way the self exists in time, in itself a way of orientating the self which is primarily Existential, and a view I would argue is supported by formal consideration of the novel, especially its putative cyclical nature. Birnam himself is aware of psychological explanations, but usually dismisses the ability of psychology, psychiatry, or psychoanalysis7 to explain Birnam to himself, for they can never get at ‘the root of the matter, the thing that drove him to do what he did, the thing that drove him to drink’;8 ‘[H]‌ow did they [people; psychiatrists] know why you did what you did, when no one knew the things that drove you, not even yourself?’9 We might also ask why, if the alcoholic’s troubles are largely brought upon himself because of a fault or faults in his character –​Birnam is ‘weak’ all ways round, unable to master his sexuality, unable to overcome his past, unable to face his present, unable to work towards a better future  –​a work of art should expend so much energy in giving us the minutiae of such a person’s life? Seen from the outside, such a person may warrant pity and help in varying measures, but certainly does not deserve a whole novel told from that person’s self-​justifying perspective. The brother and Birnam’s girlfriend, Wick and Helen, give up so much of their own lives to help him, while Birnam gives so little in return. The constructed self The weekend in which the action takes place is ‘lost’ because there is no sense of a life flourishing, progressing, being lived to the full.10 The weekend consists of Birnam preparing to binge, and then bingeing, having to find more money to continue the project, and then suffering delirium tremens and hallucinations when he attempts to halt this

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particular binge. His mind is taken up with his past life, and key events are returned to in classic trauma style for he repeats and relives the major affective turning points.11 This is not done passively, however. Although there is something undoubtedly pathetic in the way in which he keeps returning to how he might be a successful pianist or a successful writer, he always slaps himself down for getting carried away, and so each delusion is replaced with a more accurate self-​assessment, for example, ‘he cursed this mocking habit of his which always made him expose his own fancies just as they reached their climax’.12 The temptation is for the reader to think that, along with Birnam himself for some of the time, if only he could get himself sober, and keep himself that way, or at least get his drinking under control, he would be ‘living’ and be able to take up the life he should be more profitably leading. Yet the novel also shows that Don Birnam just is this person who subjects himself to intense scrutiny, one who understands this self that exists through and with drink. One of the corollaries of believing that he would be the better person for not drinking heavily is that this is not his real self: ‘In drink, he was not Don’.13 But the book, in its insistence on giving us the whole of Birnam’s life to the exclusion of all other lives, implies an importance to this way of being. We cannot escape the fact that the novel does not end with Birnam’s death, but with the joyful return to drinking and his, no doubt self-​mocking, ‘Why did they make such a fuss?’ It could be, of course, that this is a ‘modern’ ending, ‘open’ in the sense that the narrative refuses to show us how it all ends for Birnam, returning us in effect to the beginning of the book. Alternatively, this may not be a properly ‘open’ ending because readers may understand that while Birnam believes that there is no ‘end’ to his drinking behaviour, he is nothing other than delusional, since the reader knows that Birnam’s continued binge-​drinking will have serious consequences. Such drinking behaviour is suicidal, and each repetition must bring him closer to (the novel’s implied closure of) death, ‘his logical end’14 as he sometimes acknowledges. The reader can see in totality the reality of his predicament, even if Birnam cannot, or, at the binge’s finale, will not. Yet the novel offers a challenge, calling the first chapter ‘The Start’ and the final chapter ‘The End’, only for the reader to discover that these are not the beginning and end of Birnam’s life story, but are merely typical ‘starts’ and ‘ends’ to his bingeing, periods of time that repeat. Birnam is perfectly aware that drinking in the way he drinks can kill him,15 and that indeed, if he had enough money ‘he would kill himself in a month’;16 when he plans to go out on a binge he gives himself a little reminder as he looks at himself in the mirror: ‘But don’t forget … you’re skirting danger’. Birnam feels under pressure from his girlfriend

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and brother to live the accepted, normal life, and he chooses not to yield to the pressure; he chooses, instead, to seek his self out. He rakes over his life and self, and in doing so he strips away such social conventions in order to explore being Don Birnam and in order to construct Don Birnam. This striving for authenticity, the refusal to accept society’s view of him and the refusal to settle on a stabilised self, is at the expense of conventionality, and takes place in the face of a death made inevitable if he continues in this way. It may not be ‘living’ in the socially acceptable sense, because he lives the life of the addict (to use the language of alcoholism), the chemical holds sway over the individual, the individual is dependent upon the chemical. Although it may appear that Birnam is nothing other than a hedonist, there is very little that is pleasurable about Birnam’s life, despite the occasional euphoria. Self-​loathing appears on virtually every page, whether drunk or sober. Again, this is Birnam putting his self under a microscope, and it is only his relationship with drink that appears to be able to deliver the truths to him about his self and his existence. This is not to deny that the novel provisionally presents a damning picture of an alcoholic, nor to deny that Birnam partly sees himself in that light,17 but it does so in such a way that it allows the reader to see something in the character which does not fit quite so securely into the ready-​made discourse of alcoholism. It portrays somebody who is struggling to define a self from within, rather than from an idea of what society wants the self to be. He sees himself as different from the millions of others who have reached their thirties and discovered that life is not what it promised when they were younger. Others accept the lives that were not their dream lives, whereas he does not, even if he knows that his ‘rebellion’ is open to the charge that he has substituted introversion, fantasy, and drink for the conventional life of work, sobriety, heterosexuality, and marriage.18 The light heart with which Birnam intends to return to bingeing after losing the weekend to delirium tremens and hospitalisation is partly the prospect of returning to the fray of the self, knowing that no matter how destructive it may seem, there is nothing else for him to do but return to full self-​consciousness, that is, full consciousness of the self as a fluid entity: anything else would be inauthentic. If Don Birnam were simply ‘an alcoholic’, there would be little beyond a straightforward temperance narrative for the reader to latch on to (and indeed this is how the novel has been understood and used); the novel would exist solely as a warning against drink. Even as Birnam recognises himself as an alcoholic, he says that drink cannot satisfy him (without being able to say what could fulfil that function), and that while he recognises ‘the old Demon of Ennui’

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as pushing him to drink, he also accepts that there is nothing that can overcome ennui: ‘Left unguarded by Wick, determined to avoid the long weekend that was to help him, he would have found the thing to set him off, regardless’. He likes drink ‘for what it did to him’, and taking the character’s life as a whole as presented in the novel, what it ‘does for him’ is bring to the forefront contemplation of the nothingness at the centre of existence, and its rounding off with death.19 On the one hand he can belittle this as Existential romanticising: ‘Spell of riot, Raskolnikov, indeed!’; ‘Balls! He was a drunk, that’s all’.20 Again, however, the novel as a whole portrays somebody who in order to understand what (his) self is, knowingly pushes the self as far as it might go. With no purpose to life that Birnam can see, and even though he has had and continues to have all the ‘riches’ that life might offer, there is nothing but ennui and the metaphysically abandoned self that always feels guilty ‘regardless’.21 And although he also castigates himself for not really living dangerously,22 again, taking the character across the novel, he does indeed live in such a way which is likely to kill him, or get him killed, while he is also troubled by the fact that he feels remorse when he recognises this as his repetitive behaviour:  ‘But obviously, too part was not [bent on self-​destruction]; —​he’d be the last to deny it’.23 On one level, he finds himself psychologically conflicted in a traditional way, but this partial insight cannot answer to the seemingly deeper metaphysical problem whose symptom is ennui, and to which Birnam’s response is to repeatedly ‘sharpen’ his consciousness and metaphysical awareness in order to better understand such a self in such a world. His belief that the poet is wiser than the psychiatrist in these matters24 also suggests that literature is better able to understand and represent his Existential plight than science,25 implicitly giving value to the novel we are reading as a means of understanding better somebody who is drawn to binge-​drinking as a means to self-​revelation. What kind of self? It is telling to compare the way Jackson treats homosexuality in his second novel, The Fall of Valor,26 with his treatment of alcoholism in The Lost Weekend.27 In The Fall of Valor the protagonist John Grandin is an English tutor, slowly coming to understand that he is homosexual. There is something here about the way in which the novel offers the story of a man coming to accept what he is in a society that disapproves of that particular identity which is comparable with the treatment of Birnam. The contrast between Grandin and Birnam shows Grandin to be the more self-​enlightened, since Grandin accepts by the end of the

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novel that he is homosexual whereas Birnam repeatedly refuses to accept that he is an alcoholic, or what an alcoholic ‘should be’. The importance of homosexuality to parts of The Lost Weekend might also lead us to see that homosexuality and alcoholism, both defined as ‘problems’ in this period (1920s–​1940s), are equivalent in some way. In the first part of the American twentieth century to be either an ‘alcoholic’ or a ‘homosexual’ is to be helplessly deviant.28 However, this brings us on to the question of will. Is it that, in both cases, the person’s identity, the person’s ‘self’, is fixed? The discourse of the time does suggest that in both instances people are genetically predestined from birth to be alcoholics and homosexuals, and any intervention to correct the behaviour can only ever be ameliorative: you cannot cease to be an alcoholic or a homosexual, you can only seek to accommodate the perversion as a means of being acceptable to society. While this may be the most convincing interpretation for The Fall of Valor  –​though the novel’s ending suggests that society is far from ready to accept homosexuality –​The Lost Weekend does not conform so readily to the view of the alcoholic as a pre-​ordained self. One of the strengths of Jackson’s novel is that in presenting Birnam largely through his consciousness, he is able to present an idea of self that is not stable, in a way that is not possible for a person who is identified as homosexual at that time. That is, the novel does not appear to accept ‘alcoholic’ as an identity in the same way that ‘homosexual’ is constitutive of an identity. John Grandin is certainly a character ‘in the round’ rather than a homosexual stereotype, but as an individual he will always be characterised as ‘homosexual’, it is not something he can ‘choose’ to be or not to be, he can only choose to accept or suppress his homosexual being and public profile. ‘Alcoholic’, on the other hand, is not unequivocally immutable in The Lost Weekend since it seems to be as much a question of will as bio-​ psychological determinism. The self in The Lost Weekend is shown to be important through its intersection with drinking, drunkenness, altered states, self-​consciousness, and outsider status. The nature of Birnam’s drinking and encounter with self is cyclical, not just because this is the repetition of addiction (in the standard view), but because there is no stable, fixed self to relax into. Both novels unfold as if they are heading towards death or redemption. Yet Jackson shows, to varying degrees, that the ‘alcoholic’ is not somebody with a fixed identity, and that somebody who chooses to live his life this way will ultimately not be affected by being labelled ‘alcoholic’, as Birnam constantly rails against the inability of science to understand his particular experience of self and world. Again, this is not to say that the author of The Lost Weekend completely refuses the premises of Alcoholics Anonymous, either continuously

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throughout his life or periodically, but the novel itself does not have to be read in this way. Its narrative perspective pushes us to see it as Birnam sees it, and thus allows us to see a self endlessly struggling with its self, with a self that has no grounding in external verities. The lack of a fixed self is reinforced throughout the novel by Birnam’s constant looking in mirrors, so the self is neither the physical person nor its reflection; instead, it is the interpretation of the self by the self, a way of being that lacks anything of a fixed substance, akin to Kierkegaard’s non-​substantial view of the self, in fact, and Sartre’s notion of the for-​ itself. The first time we see Birnam in Sam’s bar, he stares at himself in the mirror until he no longer recognises himself. The fact that drinking is the avenue to seeking out the authentic self is partly achieved in the novel by use of the term ‘glass’ to refer both to a mirror and to a drinking glass, a symbolism the novel makes explicit for the reader when Birnam contemplates writing a book, ‘In a Glass’, and explains its meaningful progress: ‘the glass of the title meaning at first the whisky glass he was drinking from, out of which grew the multitude of fancies; then the idea blurring and merging gradually, subtly, with the glass of the mirror till finally the title comes to mean in the reader’s mind only the glass over the bar through which the protagonist looks back on his youth’.29 In addition to the visual doubling of the self, which he acknowledges as a feature of his whole life –​‘Mirrors seemed to have taken up a hell of a lot of time in his life’30 –​the lack of a fixed self is further signalled by his constant talking to himself out loud when alone, questioning ‘ “am I putting it on, is it all my imagination? Or if not mine, whose?” ’, undermining the possibility that there is a ‘self’ that can simply be uncovered beneath a superficial apprehension. Instead, it suggests that the self constructs its self from within, constantly revising itself, hence the constant looking back at younger ‘selves’, to the extent sometimes (as above) that the narrative of the self can be fixed as it was determined in the period of ‘youth’. At other times, and overlapping with the sense of a self in flux, is the idea that the self is a performance, for he imagines his self-​ questioning is carried out in front of ‘an audience where he himself was every one of the several hundred people staring back at the performer in silent contempt and ridicule. He knew he was thus looking at himself’.31 Here the self is the choice of parts, but this is perhaps more the idea of the social self playing required parts, masking the more authentic self. It is the ‘contempt and ridicule’ of his imaginary self-​as-​chorus which will strip back the social veneer. It could be noted, contra Jack London’s view of the role of alcohol in self-​enlightenment, that Birnam sometimes has such perceptions without alcohol, thus leading us to ask the question, what is it that alcohol does enable in The Lost Weekend and in Birnam’s

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self-​searching and construction? But the rhythm of the novel suggests that we cannot finally separate out sober and separate Birnam selves into discrete entities. Instead, they are all of a part and it is the dynamic around alcohol, the whole life dominated by drink, drunk and sober held in tension, which the novel presents as a possible self-​enlightenment. Yet, as may already be apparent, it could be said that there is actually no consistent model of the self in The Lost Weekend, either as Birnam himself might understand it, or as the novel might show us irrespective of Birnam’s own views. He sometimes thinks of himself as having a sober ego and a drunken ego, with the sober ego drinking sociably with others until the drunk ego must take over and he drinks alone,32 or a sober self that is Birnam and a drunk self that is not Birnam.33 This splitting of the self into two might suggest that there is a single self lurking behind which could be rediscovered, presumably by excising the dominant drunken ego, since ‘the sober ego’ is regarded by society as the ‘default’ or proper ego, as discussed in the last chapter. Such a view once more privileges the hegemonic ideal of the citizen who is sober for most of the time. The novel opens up the possibility that the drunken ego (self) might be the individual’s preferred path because for that individual it simply has more to offer in the way of being in the world. The bourgeois world of work, wife, and family simply does not offer a plausible existence for Don Birnam. It is not necessarily a case of one being ‘better’ than the other. In choosing the life of ‘the lost weekend’ Birnam does not just reject conventional life, he rejects conventional notions of a self that is pre-​ scripted. In doing so, it may be that there is no consistent ‘kind of self’ to be, that is, he switches between ideas of self –​drunk and sober ego, a self that is nothing other than performance, ‘dramatizing again’34 –​ an indication of a striving towards being-​in-​the-​world which struggles for some kind of authenticity. Put another way, he does not run away from the confusing models and images of his self that are reflected in physical and mental mirrors, even as he ‘runs away’ from what friends, family, and society would see as his familial and social obligations. For Birnam there can be no external ‘fuss’ that matters to him; all the fuss belongs to his self.35 In addition, Birnam on occasion evinces a fairly solid Existential view of the world and his self as ‘living dangerously’.36 At Jack’s bar, observing those around him, he feels that he is the only one who ‘sees’, that he is the only one who is alive, that he is a god. He contemplates stealing a handbag, not because he needs to steal, but because he needs to experience all the million things that can be experienced in the world. In this, there are shades of Raskolnikov, committing a crime to know the feeling of going beyond conventional morality, and something of van Gogh’s

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night-​time cafe, evoking an atmosphere where anything is possible for the self open to all experience.37 Some of his language is that of religion, such as ‘salvation’, ‘abasement’, ‘expiation’, but again these fail to provide a wholly satisfactory means of understanding. He is very much like London’s view of the philosophically committed drinker, different from other fall-​in-​the-gutter drinkers: ‘It was intoxication (hell, he knew that), but it was also that old godlike superiority again, a superiority conscious of itself but superior just the same’.38 And as with London, the feeling of superiority, of seeing everything clearer than the mass, than ‘all the frowning un-​understanding world’, can be too much, and he rests assured that he is able to wipe out everything with the oblivion of drink, ‘Lethe’. He concludes, ‘Of course! that’s why he drank! But who could hope to understand that –​who but the guy who did it himself?’39 Further, there is also a sense, as with London, that it is only ‘brilliant men’ who are alcoholics and thus attract interest and sympathy from others, ‘else why would anyone care?’,40 meaning ‘why would anybody care enough to look out for them?’, as Helen and Wick look out for him, as well as ‘why would anybody care enough to read a whole book about an alcoholic?’ There is one passage in the novel, however, where Birnam appears to understand his own problem with drinking, homosexuality, and self. This is when he compares himself to Bim, the gay nurse on the alcoholic ward. Although he finds Bim’s behaviour irritating –​the way he touches, his knowing manner and feline movements –​Bim’s whispered parting words of ‘I know you’ strike home when Birnam gets back to his apartment. Birnam works his way to an acceptance that Bim understands him as an alcoholic and as a repressed homosexual. He recognises that Bim is at ease with himself, and can thus be his self. In comparison, Birnam does not feel that he (Birnam) is the kind of person who can freely accept who he is, and that he drinks precisely because he cannot freely be himself. Drinking, in this self-​analysis, is the consequence of not living authentically, not being his self. This may finally seem a plausible character ‘insight’ after Birnam’s constant denial that the motivation for his drinking could ever be understood by anybody. However, Birnam concedes that Bim only has partial insight into the nature of an alcoholic. The following passage is rather convoluted, but the gist of it is that it begins with what looks like an acceptance of an AA account of an alcoholic, then embraces an Existential view of authenticity, gives up on that thought, and reaches for another drink: [T]‌he alcoholic was not himself able to choose his own path, and therefore the kinship [Bim] seemed to reveal was incidental, accidental, transitory at

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best. If the drunk had been himself he would not be a drunk and potential brother in the first place. And not to be oneself was a thing incomprehensible to the nonchalant Bim, whose one belief in life was to be just that, regardless of who or what, to hell with any or all. It could be such a marvellous world if everyone would only let down their hair  –​marvellous for Bim. He could do it; why couldn’t everybody else? But millions had nothing to let down their hair about, even among drunks, and millions could be themselves by being no different from what they had always been. For Don, the avenue where Bim beckoned was a blind alley, not shameful but useless, futile, vain, offering no attractions whatever, no hope, nowhere a chance to build. Bim knew better, of course:  knew that one could not moralize or rationalize oneself out of it: the alley either existed for you, or it did not. Very well, let him know better! Wasn’t it possible that one could skirt the alley by very reason of knowing it was there? And not skirt it out of fear, either, but out of anguished regard for all that one would have to leave behind if one entered, all the richer realizations of self that would never be fulfilled. But this was protesting too much; why argue, why be anguished or angered, why waste time on all that, when the whole thing boiled down to one simple fact: drunks were alike, sure, but no more like Bim (necessarily) than Bim was like other male nurses or they like him. But could you tell him that? Not in a thousand years. And why bother, why give him a chance to raise his eyebrows any higher than he already had? Why bother with anything but the glass and the whisky at hand?41

Bim’s outlook is that everybody should be just like him (Bim) and ‘let their hair down’, that is, if everybody just relaxed and were their (true) selves everything would be OK. But, in what would seem to be Birnam’s objection, not everybody has something that is repressed in this way, and can actually just carry on being who they are. The implication is that ‘repression’ cannot explain alcoholism, since millions of alcoholics are not repressed, and Bim oversteps his perceptiveness when he claims to identify similarities between himself and Birnam, in this case, Birnam’s possible homosexuality. Birnam then moves away into becoming angry at how homosexuals behave, and how marginalised groups in general behave. He argues that knowing all this, he is able to ‘skirt it’. A  further implication from Birnam is that if he accepted his own homosexuality then this would close off the richness of other selves he might be. However, it is evident in this chapter, as he goes on to fantasise once more about being a celebrated actor or concert pianist, that he is just as unable to pursue any path to a more fulfilled self if he keeps his homosexuality secret as he would be if he were to be openly gay in a homophobic society. This is all rather tortuous and conflicted, since sometimes in the streamof-consciousness it is not clear whether homosexuality or alcoholism is

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the topic of ‘knowing’, and it is difficult to tell if the confused and confusing nature of the passage is at the level of the character or the level of the novel.42 Birnam appears to both accept and deny that he is a homosexual like Bim; to believe that repressed homosexuality both is and isn’t the cause of his drinking and his failed life; and to assert that he as an alcoholic cannot choose the path he goes down, yet simultaneously assert his ability to knowingly skirt wrong ‘avenues’. ‘Anger’ as the keynote to the problem might be useful, but this is not followed up, either. Does the title of the chapter, ‘The Dream’, circumscribe all of this, so that whatever Birnam lays before the reader must be taken as illusionary, including accurate self-​perception? Quite possibly. This passage occurs just over half-​way through the novel, and it is not the kind of novel to offer a ‘key’ to understanding, at least not (possibly) until near the end. One of the main reasons for turning pages of The Lost Weekend is to discover the cause of Birnam’s drinking, and, rather like a detective novel, each possible solution to the question, ‘why does Birnam drink?’, proves to be a red herring. An interpretation that views Birnam as an alcoholic would no doubt see his many confusions and (self) evasions as evidence of him being ‘in denial’, or having at best limited insight into his own clinically observable condition, since he accepts he is an alcoholic but refuses to accept the consequences of that insight. However, I think this just returns us to the metaphysical conundrum that having suggested there is an identifiable motivation for drinking, Birnam once more appears to find that he is an exception to all possible codifications and labelling, thus remaining a unique self existing in a unique manner, despite the outward ‘recognition’ of ‘I know you’ which would cast him as the same as a million other drunks. At the end of it all, his mix of delusion, self-​perception, and self-​laceration persists, and the motivation for his drinking continues to have no necessary or sufficient explanation. Yet The Lost Weekend does provide a possible ‘key’ within the circularity of ‘start’ and ‘end’, for Birnam pushes the self time and again to peaks and troughs in order to provide experiences of the self which are then grasped by the ‘imagination’ in order to explore the self to the full. Again, it is clear that this is not to do with hedonism, and there may even be an undertone of Birnam as a latter-​day Christ figure since he is 33, suffering more than the rest of humanity can possibly suffer: ‘Was it that his imagination laid hold of that suffering and transmuted it to experience, an experience he did not profit from, true, but experience all the same: a realization of who and what he was, a fulfilment of self? Was he trying to find out, in this roundabout descent to destruction, what it was all about; and would he, at the final and ultimate moment, know?’43 The fact that only at the moment of death can he truly ‘know’

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what his self is, is a further clue to Birnam as a self-​willed project whose being-​in-​the-​world can only be orientated from within the self. As ever, he is critical of the insight –​is this all it is, then, the desire for transmuted experience, where such ‘self-​dramatization’ is ‘childish’?44 –​but that is no doubt central to the self that is constructed from within, a consciousness of consciousness, for ‘who was more important or interesting to one than oneself?’.45 This does, though, become a circular trap, since later he repeats the thought process: everybody suffers, he is no different, except that he has an imagination and understanding which is out of the ordinary.46 This thought hints at the importance of the writer and this novel we are reading. Birnam cannot escape the belief (fact) that he suffers in this particular way, that he continues to go through this ‘interminable process’,47 and that this sets him apart in a self-​fulfilling manner because he agonises and has the ability to agonise to an extent not visible in the masses. Even if he sees his self-​obsession as others see it –​selfish, childish –​this does not help him to live any other way. He is condemned to the burden of self-​ exploration which he feels others are lucky to escape because they do not have this prized ‘imagination’. Birnam repeatedly tells himself that such self-​exploration and suffering is without purpose –​‘it was nothing’48 –​ but there is nothing else to replace it, except, as in Nausea-​fashion, the transformation of that experience into the book we are reading. It is ‘creativity’ which fills the role of meaningful purpose, although whether The Lost Weekend is meant to be the book that Birnam writes is undetermined; it is similar to the book he imagines writing, but the book’s actual ending presents a protagonist who does not find a ‘meaningful’ or ‘purposeful’ breakthrough via imagination.49 The novel presents a drinker-​ philosopher, without being clear whether it is the character, the character as author’s alter ego, or the author himself who manages to transcend The Lost Weekend’s solipsistic version of the Existential self. The Lost Weekend and temporality The way in which the novel explicitly deals with ‘time’ indicates an approach that is engaged with the self as it exists in and through time. The Lost Weekend manages different time schemes and different temporalities, and locates the self within these in various ways. The narrative’s primary chronological frame is a long weekend, beginning on a Thursday afternoon around 1  p.m., when Birnam avoids a prearranged visit to the opera with Helen and Wick, and the binge ending on the following Tuesday when he wakes up at 10.30 a.m. and notes to himself: ‘That meant the long weekend was over’.50

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The continued repetition of a single event calls to mind Nietzsche’s notion of ‘the eternal return’. In ‘the eternal return’ (‘eternal recurrence’) Nietzsche asks us to imagine what any given moment lived for eternity (or eternally recurring) would be like. Is this moment the one we would choose? The Lost Weekend in effect, through its narrative structure of returning us to the beginning when we get to the close of the book, provides Birnam’s moment of ‘eternal recurrence’, the binge’s disclosure of self. Despite all the agonising Birnam suffers within the binge(ing) period, he is drawn to repeating it until his death. In this sense, then, he does indeed choose this way of being, this orientation of self and world, for eternity. In the broader Existential line, the idea is that we should consciously ‘choose’ our life and moments on our own terms, regardless of the pressure from others to act in a more socially acceptable manner. Birnam does not just choose a single act that contravenes the prevailing orthodoxy (as does Raskolnikov when he murders) but makes it his way of life; in another Nietzschean formulation, it is his ‘style’. Whether this does nothing more than add a philosophical gloss to being a drunk is not the issue (or rather, it is an issue dealt with in the Introduction). Birnam is aware of such a charge when he frequently criticises himself for his presumed arrogance, yet  also continues to counter this by his belief that he is able to see further and suffer more than the rest of humanity. However, within this framework of repetition, there are other temporalities at play. One of these is the way in which the self is presented in the narrative as one which is experiencing ‘now’ (the present) as well as caught up in the self’s past. Similar to the portrayal of Clarissa in Virginia Woolf’s Mrs Dalloway, the past self is coterminous with the present self, or, perhaps more accurately, as in Heidegger’s formulation, the self exists as a being-​towards-​the-​past and a being-​towards-​the-​future.51 The past self does not exist in some world separate from the present, it is a function or projection of the ‘current’ (now, experiencing) self. This too is part of the way in which the novel is structured. It could easily have presented Don Birnam’s life in chronological order, and we as readers are able to reconstruct such a linear biographical narrative. However, we experience Birnam’s life as it exists ‘presently’ in his consciousness, and thus as it appears phenomenally to the self, rather than as it might be represented in a linear, objective narrative. In presenting the self in this way, as an experiencing consciousness, Jackson is very close to the way in which Heidegger understands the self to exist, as a kind of ever-​present phenomenal self that projects itself backwards towards its birth and forwards towards its death, constantly revising both projections, and thus constantly revising the present self as it strives for authenticity. The adoption from modernism of

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the stream-​of-​consciousness technique within a compressed time frame thus views temporality and self in a very similar fashion to Heidegger’s view of the self. A point of difference between the view within The Lost Weekend and Heidegger is instructive, however. Heidegger always accounts the future-​projected self (the self we are not yet, the self we imagine being or aim to be) as something other than the current, experiencing self. Yet there is very little real sense that Birnam does seriously imagine a different future Birnam; his view of his self as a repetition of ‘self-​ ­analysis’-​within-​bingeing does not project a future self that is a modification or transformation of the ‘current’ one. There are different ways of appreciating this. One might be that the alcoholic, like any other addict, is unable to see any way out of the addiction. If we take into account the way Jackson understands alcoholism as a diagnosable medical or psychological ‘type’ of the same order as nymphomania and homosexuality, as he appears to do across his novels and short stories, then this makes sense because these ‘disease’ and ‘perversion’ models can only really be ‘lived with’, or ended with death.52 Such characters as Birnam (alcoholism), Winifred Grainger (A Second-​Hand Life, nymphomania), Eudora Detterson (‘The Sunnier Side’, ‘ “Eudora’s a nympho and dipso from way back” ’, Bickert to ‘Charles Jackson’53), and John Grandin (The Fall of Valor, homosexuality) are stuck in their diagnoses. Another interpretation might be to take Birnam’s temporal impasse of self as a despairing critique of existence, but ultimately rescued in the broader view by ‘imagination’, the kind of creativity that fiction (for Jackson) vouchsafes. After all, with this novel and other novels in The Existential drinker, the fact of ‘the novel’ is evidence of some kind of purpose. ‘Charles Jackson’ in ‘The Sunnier Side’, a short story which also serves as the writer’s manifesto, makes this comment on the characters he draws from his own youth: ‘Who knows what Faith or Fig or Eudora got out of life? Whether their lives had purpose or point is anybody’s guess, but it’s a pretty safe bet that Eudora at least, after descending into the very depths, must have brought up something rich and strange; and none of them lived out their lives in the kind of blind happiness which, by its very nature, is doomed’.54 Again, the reader cannot fail to note the doubleness of the assertion, just as when Don Birnam notes the fascination people have for people such as himself: by everyday social standards, these are people who waste (‘lose’) their lives with selfish behaviour and are a drain on others, yet these people live ‘rich’ (full) inner lives precisely because they ‘descend the depths’ of life and self, and, by extension, the writer serves a purpose by bringing such lives to a wider audience. The ‘time’ of their lives, at this level at least, does have meaning and purpose.

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There is a way, then, in which, despite the self-​loathing Birnam and other of Jackson’s ‘diseased’ characters suffer, their lives are more lived as lives of uniquely existing individuals rather than those living according to social norms. This notion of diving deep within the self in order to disclose self and world, and thus to enhance life, is suggested by Birnam when he notes that the vicious circle of drinking has ‘depths’ to sound, each drink sounding a new depth: [A]‌nd this is not the bottom, this unhuman torture of now, this wanting to start all over again, even though he well knew that a fifth depth and a sixth were yet to be sounded. He knew all that, he was no fool like other people (they who believed his promises when he knew better than to believe them himself); and knowing it, he yet craved the drink that would bring the whole ruin down upon him again.55

Even though Dante’s circles of hell are no doubt alluded to here, it does not detract from Birnam’s view that each drink takes him deeper into the nature of self and being. There is one further set of observations to be made regarding time and the self in The Lost Weekend, providing another constellation of psychological, social, and Existential responses within the complex of drinking and self. Birnam frequently refers to a drinking binge as a ‘time out’. The phrase ‘time out’ originally comes from sport, where it signals a break in the normal course of play which allows players and coach to regroup. In more general usage it means a break from the daily grind of everyday pressures. Birnam takes the idea much further because, after all, binges dominate his life, either during one or contemplating the next one, and so his life becomes one big ‘time out’. He is fully aware of his existence in time, and the significance of self in time, because in contrast to his ‘time outs’, he characterises his time with Helen as ‘in time’: ‘He knew those little Saturday-​and Sunday-​ night suppers in Bleecker Street, so charming and cosy and in time –​ so God-​damned in time that you weren’t even left alone: long enough to sneak a drink out of the hall-​closet where she kept the liquor’.56 Being ‘in time’ then is having to behave socially, so ‘time out’ is characterised not just as a break from the everyday, but as being a private self outside of social strictures. Not only, then, does his drinking take him outside of social convention, he recognises (or manipulates) temporality for his own being, stretching the common notion of ‘time out’ to be something other than a conventional ‘time’. But he is also aware that such time outs are ‘lost time’, ‘wasted time’, and that the only way to recover ‘time’ is to have those periods where time is ‘uncounted’, that is, when he is not straining to cope with time because of the need for a drink.

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In this, perhaps as everywhere else in the novel, the views presented are conflicting. The sense of time that circumscribes the whole of Don Birnam’s life may be, as already indicated, his sense of fully choosing to have the recurrence of self as experienced in his long weekends. Simultaneously, within this cyclical temporality, there is a notion of a narrative self that is stagnated, projecting backwards only, as if stuck in the past of key events. It is perhaps worth ending this chapter with yet another notion of ‘time’. When Birnam is on the alcoholic ward he is taken with a phrase the doctor utters in relation to another patient there: ‘delirium is a disease of the night’. ‘Night’ here brings with it a number of associations we have already encountered in van Gogh’s Night Café at Arles, the ‘time’ when the everyday is cast aside and there is a confrontation with the unmasked self, Kierkegaard’s ‘midnight hour’.57 The whole of The Last Weekend can be taken in this way, as another version of the self stripped bare. Birnam lurches between ‘time out’, ‘in time’, the ‘disease of the night’, and lost time, having ‘nothing but time’, that is, the self experiences itself in time, but without any prescription as to what to do with that time, ‘the time had to be filled’.58 He may have no reason to be bored, as he accepts, for in all respects he is an accomplished man, and should have all the resources of high civilisation to purposefully fill his time, but this time-​bound creature can find nothing, at least nothing socially useful, to do with the time he has. This chapter no doubt will appear to read against the grain of The Lost Weekend and the life of Charles Jackson. Don Birnam is a fictionalised version of the author, and Jackson used the same figure elsewhere, in short stories, either with the same name, or characters with a similar profile, and planned a sequel. Jackson stated that there was a large overlap between himself and the character, and the package of author, novel, and paratextual material all points to an endeavour to understand the inner life of an alcoholic using the dominant psyche-​tools of the day.59 Critics have read the novel in this way, sometimes drawing on Jackson’s own life and statements in order to support the interpretative framework of alcoholism.60 However, as I hope I have shown, there is a way in which the novel is other than a detailed case history, that it acknowledges a metaphysical core which cannot be explained away in these terms. Despite an array of classical possible causes, Birnam never decides on an explicit reason for his drinking, and what the reader is ultimately presented with is a character who seeks to understand a self and create a self, with one of the obstacles to the endeavour being this very framework of the disease model of alcoholism which it dips into, but also emerges from.

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1 Jean Rhys’s short story ‘Let Her Sleep it Off’, from a later writing period, is an exception, in The Collected Short Stories (New York: Norton, 1987). 2 Jackson, Weekend, p. 22. 3 Ibid., p. 51. 4 Ibid., p. 202. 5 Patrick A.  McCarthy, drawing on Hugh Kenner’s work, notes the prevalence of ‘repetition’ when comparing The Lost Weekend to two stories in Joyce’s Dubliners, ‘Counterparts’ and ‘A Little Cloud’. Patrick A. McCarthy, ‘Reading Dubliners in The Lost Weekend’, Studies in Short Fiction 34:4 (1997), 441–​8, p. 446. Birnam begins reading ‘Counterparts’, and so Joyce’s tale of a man who needs to drink suffices as a trigger for the start of this particular binge. 6 Mary Ann Melfi reads it in these AA/​psychoanalytic terms: Birnam is a narcissist, and this predates the disease of alcoholism, which then combines with and exacerbates the problem. According to Melfi, his arrested development stems from the fact that ‘as a child, he was neither perfect nor perfectly loved’. Mary Ann Melfi, ‘Authenticity versus the lingering glance backward: narcissism in The Lost Weekend’, Journal of Evolutionary Psychology 19:3–​4 (1998), 154–​64, p. 162. 7 Birnam does not distinguish between the ‘psyche’ sciences. 8 Jackson, Weekend, p. 58. 9 Ibid., p. 108. 10 It is also ‘lost’ in the sense that Birnam is not able to recall events in drinking binges. Paradoxically the novel form allows for such recall, except that where Birnam has blackouts the narrative does not fill in the gaps. 11 And also fulfilling the conditions for narcissism, as defined by psychoanalysis; see Melfi, ‘Authenticity’, p. 154. 12 Jackson, Weekend, p. 31. 13 Ibid., p. 163. This seems simple enough. However, this is only his projection of Helen’s understanding of him, and it really just serves to allow him for a while to distance sober Don (real Don) from drunken Don (not Don). This particular way of splitting the self is not consistent, since as we have seen, ‘drunk Don’ views himself as the more perceptive self. At another point in the novel, he notes his own self-​destructiveness as a possible wish to destroy some part of his self which he regards as other than his self: ‘Self-​pity like this would drive him to suicide! Or was it someone else he wished to destroy in destroying himself?’, p. 167. 14 Ibid., p. 167. 15 Ibid., p. 44. 16 Ibid., p. 28. 17 He is contemptuous of people who, experiencing a hangover, say they don’t want to drink, whereas he desperately wants to: ‘Clearly it was the difference between the alcoholic and the non-​’, ibid., p. 41, and refers to himself as an alcoholic throughout, e.g. ‘he [Birnam] knew the alcoholic from the inside’, p. 69.

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8 Ibid., p. 46. 1 19 All quotations ibid., pp.  42–​3. Jackson’s character Harry Harrison in A Second-​Hand Life, although socially very popular, suffers from ‘death and thoughts of death’ and ‘But this! What was it –​our old friend taedium vitae, ennui, distaste of self and all his ways?’ Charles Jackson, A Second-​Hand Life (London: New English Library, 1969 [1967]), p. 13, and there are other similarities between Harrison and Birnam. However, this mood does not become a predominant theme in Jackson’s last published novel. 20 Jackson, Weekend, p. 43. 21 Ibid., p. 82. 22 Ibid., p. 43. 23 Ibid., p. 44. 24 Ibid. 25 He also dismisses the psychiatrist because he has no personal experience, and fails to see the ‘elusive bundle of contradictions … sat there across the desk’. The psychiatrist’s academic approach loses sight of the human being, ibid., p. 53. 26 Charles Jackson, The Fall of Valor (New  York:  Arbor House, 1986), first published 1946. 27 Just as Birnam provides an allusion to a previous piece of literature focused on a drinker (‘Counterparts’), he also refers to a work focused on homosexuality, Thomas Mann’s Death in Venice, Jackson, Weekend, p. 24. And just as ‘glass’ can be understood doubly, Birnam merges (symbolically conflates) ideas here as well. Regarding the projected ‘In a Glass’ as about ‘that boy and this man’ (Birnam as he is now and his younger self), Death in Venice is about a man’s love for a boy. It is as if Birnam the man loves Birnam the boy. 28 In A Second-​Hand Life Jackson treats the subject of nymphomania in a similar fashion to homosexuality and to alcoholism to the extent that the novels focus on protagonists who are deemed to be officially recognisable psychological-​medical ‘types’ or ‘cases’. 29 Jackson, Weekend, p. 21. Crowley sees this passage as a lampoon of what a modernist novel might make of the material that goes into The Lost Weekend, in The White Logic, p. 140, whereas Blake Bailey takes The Lost Weekend to be identical to ‘In a Glass’. Blake Bailey, Farther and Wilder: The Lost Weekends and Literary Dreams of Charles Jackson (New York: Knopf, 2013), p. 134. However, I think the relationship between the two is more akin to that ‘doubleness’ or uncertainty we find elsewhere in the novel. As to its being realist rather than modernist, The Lost Weekend, wholly constructed from a single character’s claustrophobic consciousness, is the kind of psychological realism that certain modernist writers were interested in –​there is not the clear distinction between modernism and realism that Crowley identifies when comparing the modernist Under the Volcano to The Lost Weekend’s ‘stark realism’ and ‘tough-​minded pragmatism’. Crowley, The White Logic, p. 140. 30 Jackson, Weekend, p. 19.

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1 Ibid., pp. 14–​15. 3 32 Ibid., p. 31. 33 Ibid., pp. 162–​3. 34 Ibid., p. 31. 35 ‘What’s all the fuss’ is a refrain for Birnam, usually when he has ‘transgressed’ accepted behaviour. He has the same reaction when he is caught stealing a handbag, ibid., p. 38, but this may be ‘front’ in all instances. After he leaves the bar, he shakes violently, wants to collapse, pretending to be drunk, so that somebody else can look after him, pp. 38–​9. Roger Forseth picks up on this phrase in ‘ “Why did they make such a fuss?” Don Birnam’s emotional barometer’, Dionysos 3:1 (1991), 11–​16. 36 Jackson, Weekend, p. 36. 37 Ibid., pp. 34–​6. 38 Ibid., p. 109. 39 Ibid. 40 Ibid., p. 202. 41 Ibid., pp. 132–​3. 42 Crowley astutely observes that part of the problem here is the novel’s use of free indirect discourse, with the narrative voice close to that of Birnam’s consciousness, yet nevertheless at a putatively ironic distance: ‘But how much distance? How credible or reliable are Don Birnam’s opinions meant to be? … How closely may Jackson be identified with a character who is evidently based on himself?’ Crowley, The White Logic, p. 154. 43 Jackson, Weekend, p. 183. 44 Ibid., p. 184. 45 Ibid. 46 Ibid., pp. 199–​200. 47 Ibid., p. 200. 48 Ibid., p. 197. 49 Unlike the film’s ‘Hollywood ending’ which closes with precisely this redemption that creative purpose can provide, Birnam is encouraged to write up his experiences in ‘The Bottle’, a novel which the character has previously abandoned, and he looks set to do this. 50 Jackson, Weekend, p. 207. 51 Dasein is ‘having been (thrown)’ and futural:  Heidegger, Being and Time, p. 373, and the idea is repeated on p. 376. 52 Mark Connelly notes that ‘the disease model of homosexuality’ was ‘widely accepted at the time’, that is, 1930s and 1940s. Mark Connelly, Deadly Closets: The Fiction of Charles Jackson (Lanham, MD: University Press of America, 2001), p. 59. 53 Charles Jackson, The Sunnier Side and Other Stories (New York: Vintage, 2013), p. 35; ‘Originally published in hardcover in a different form by Farrar & Rinehart, Inc., New York, in 1950’. 54 Ibid., p. 57. 55 Jackson, Weekend, p. 177.

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6 Ibid., p. 92. 5 57 ‘Do you not know that there comes a midnight hour when everyone has to throw off his mask? Do you believe that life will always let itself be mocked? Do you think you can slip away a little before midnight in order to avoid this?’, Søren Kierkegaard, Either/​Or, vol. 2 (New York: Anchor Books, 1959 [1843]), p. 164. 58 Jackson, Weekend, p. 13. 59 ‘ “It is my belief that alcoholism is largely the fault of parents who overindulge or overprotect their children to the point where they (the children, grown older but still childish) cannot face reality and seek ‘escape’ in drink” ’, Charles Jackson, ‘What’s so funny about a drunk?’, Cosmopolitan (May 1946), quoted in Bailey, Farther and Wilder, p. 24. 60 For instance, there is a recording of a speech to Alcoholics Anonymous (1959) which includes him saying ‘Once an alcoholic, always an alcoholic. This I learned through long and bitter experience’, Alcoholics Anonymous Speech, 1959, www.youtube.com/​watch?v=OHXdvpPZgys. Jackson later rejected AA.

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Malcolm Lowry, Under the Volcano (1947): singular experiences

You will think I am mad, but this is how I drink too, as if I were taking an eternal sacrament. Notions of freedom are tied up with drink.1 [A]‌nd William James, if not Freud, might be in agreement with me when I affirm that the agonies of the drunkard find a very close parallel in the agonies of the mystic who has abused his power.2

If Jackson’s novel condemns the drinker to an eternal hell through its implication that every binge is subject to repetition, Lowry’s equivalent is to settle the heavy drinker in a ‘Day of the Dead’ festival in Mexico, 1938, where the main character encounters ‘hell’ in physical and spiritual dimensions. The basic story for Under the Volcano is that Geoffrey Firmin’s wife Yvonne has left him, only to return one year later and offer him the chance to get back together and make a new life. It is an event he declares he has spent a year praying for –​‘This was the moment then, yearned for under beds, sleeping in the corners of bars …’3 –​ and yet over the course of the day he rejects the opportunity of ‘redemption’ presented by this ‘miracle’ and chooses instead to drink, to remain in hell, for reasons the rest of this chapter will attempt to uncover. The symbolic state of purgatory Despite the basic premise of the story, this is far from a basic narrative. The novel mobilises an elaborate and insistent working through of symbols in order to render the subjective experience of the drinker. The symbols typically accumulate associations in diverse ways as the novel progresses, and thus work to build up powerful compressions of meaning and resonance.4 The novel seems to have an underlying presumption that only such a rendering can do justice to the emotional pitch of life and experience of the world, both for characters and for readers: ‘the

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poetry of life in the midst of the abattoir’, as the Consul says of a book he would write, if he could only stop drinking.5 The novel’s own mode, then, is predominantly expressionistic, coming at the world via symbolic apprehension rather than logic and reason because they either fail or are an inadequate means to understanding. Like the Consul, the reader is then led to finding multiple meanings at every level: standing by the barranca (ravine) next to the tavern where Firmin drinks, or crossing a river, or encountering a goat or an armadillo, or viewing the two volcanoes which dominate the landscape, is always something more than a naturalistic physical description. But it is not just a matter of constructing, decoding, and interlinking the many symbols. The novel’s play with language and its mediation between individual consciousness and world means that there is no single symbolic method that the reader can rely on for interpretation. An example of the difficulty is provided in a scene when Firmin contemplates, in a self-​ consciously extravagant style, the ever-​present barranca:  ‘He paused, peeping, tequila-​unafraid, over the bank. Ah, the frightful cleft, the eternal horror of opposites! Thou mighty gulf, insatiate cormorant, deride me not, though I seem petulant to fall into thy chops. One was, come to that, always stumbling upon the damned thing’.6 By this point ‘cleft’ has already had accumulated associations, aside from the fact that ‘to cleave’ can mean both ‘to sunder’ and its opposite, to bring together: one legend tells how the earth was cleft in Mexico when Christ was crucified,7 and ‘[Yvonne] longed to heal the cleft rock. She was one of the rocks and she yearned to save the other, that both might be saved’;8 ‘eternal horror of opposites’ suggests some abstract psychological fear; ‘cormorant’ and ‘chops’ add metaphor to metaphor; ‘damned thing’ is both common cursing and a reference to a religiously accursed object. And the reader also realises that as the novel advances Firmin’s life is dominated by his proximity to an abyss that has physical, political, psychological, ethical, and metaphysical dimensions. In this latter aspect it parallels Sartre’s image of the groundlessness of self: ‘If nothing compels me to save my life, nothing prevents me from precipitating myself into the abyss. The decisive conduct will emanate from a self which I am not yet’.9 Beyond the intricate intra-​symbolic weaving the symbols also gravitate around the idea that lies at the heart of this novel, which is something to the effect that humanity, in the form of Geoffrey Firmin, finds itself in a state of purgatory. So while each symbol can function autonomously, each symbol also operates in concert at a higher level with others to create a kind of ‘meta-​symbol’ which embodies the meanings and contradictions of what was once commonly called ‘the human condition’. The fact that Firmin’s drunken dissolution mirrors and is representative

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of the decline of the human race in its totality means that anything we might say about him as an individual drinker seems destined to give way to this larger picture. Put another way, we have a novel whose focus is the life and mind of a character as rendered through his relationship with drinking, yet we are also presented with a cipher rather than an existing individual,10 with Firmin’s many agonies a replication of the final death throes of Civilisation, poised as it is to commence the Second World War.11 As Lowry wrote in a preface to the novel: ‘On one level, the drunkenness of the Consul may be regarded as symbolising the universal drunkenness of war, of the period that precedes war, no matter when. Throughout the twelve chapters, the destiny of my hero can be considered in its relationship to the destiny of humanity’.12 Firmin’s death at the hands of Mexican fascists at the end of the book would certainly appear to support this political-​humanist reading. Keeping in mind the two levels, Firmin as individual and Firmin as humanity’s representative, will allow us to address the relationship between the individual and society in a manner which is atypical for much Existential thought, since the novel primarily places the individual in a world-​historical context rather than taking that individual on self-​ conscious, singular terms. We can look at the figure of Firmin from the Existential point of view, and see how this correlates with the notion that his fictional existence serves intentions beyond the representation of Existential uniqueness. Firmin and beyond As indicated above, in Under the Volcano the piling on of symbols is not just a literary device, it is the means with which the world itself is to be understood, a way of discerning patterns and meaning; things are ‘like’ other things, and can thus be connected and made sense of by extensive and extended similarities, so analogy and metaphor are not ‘optional’ ways of being in the world which could otherwise be understood more straightforwardly, but are the prime, elemental paths to knowledge. There is also a sense that such an attempt to pull everything together into some overarching symbol, or symbolic system, is too much, that the collation of symbols overwhelms the individual rather than enlightens.13 Drink, for Firmin, here serves a number of functions. It opens up the connection-​making, symbol-​apprehending facility through the altered state that alcohol brings him, enhanced, when he drinks it, by the hallucinatory qualities of mescal (mescaline). By being in a frequently altered state he is always able to ‘see’ clearly the horror of the world,14 to focus in a way which modernity’s speed denies: ‘The mescal, while it assuaged,

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slowed his mind; each object demanded some moments to impinge upon him’.15 In this manipulation of consciousness through drink there is some similarity with Rhys’s heroines, whereby drunken consciousnesses represent and reveal the ‘reality’ of the world and existence, over and against the socially convenient ‘real’. Rather than escaping reality, it is an access to the truth-​telling reality Jack London advances in defence of drinking. For Firmin, in a disintegrating world, it holds him together metaphysically, yet it is a self-​conscious Faustian pact, since, like London before him, he knows that the end can only be death. On the individual level, Firmin’s drinking has inevitably been interpreted as a refusal to confront the difficulties of life. In an early review, Robert B. Heilman noted: ‘Geoffrey’s tremendous drinking can simply be considered pathological, of course; but it becomes, morally, an escape, an evasion of responsibility’.16 Heilman’s is the conventional social view of the alcoholic.17 Firmin sometimes accepts this view of his drinking, that he is a ‘lost soul’ needing help from Yvonne to get him back on track, but he always pushes his actions and thoughts beyond this judgement and continues drinking. What is it, then, that Geoffrey Firmin, wants? Why should he reject Yvonne’s miraculous offer? Why? What is it that Geoffrey Firmin wants that could be better than unconditional love? Why is it that he prefers drinking to anything the world offers up? Or what?: ‘sourceless sorrow’18 Firmin has a magpie mind which strives to make sense of the self in a universe in a variety of ways. He draws on religious and spiritual systems, such as the Cabbala, which in part enables him to formally connect disparate experiences and knowledge through publicly available symbols, analogies, metaphors, and metonyms, to which he also adds his own puns and similes. It is as if the solution to his own and the world’s ills rests with E.  M. Forster’s injunction to ‘only connect’. Yet ultimately Firmin gives up on this project and brings death upon himself, provoking those Mexican fascists to shoot him and throw him in the barranca; such an end is preferable to living with Yvonne in a Canadian log cabin.19 There are a number of what might be called ‘conventional’ readings which seek to explain this self-​destructive behaviour. In particular, the ‘alcoholic’ view casts him as another slave to the drug, unable to overcome his addiction; a Romantic view might identify Firmin’s world-​ weariness and a readiness to quit it, or perhaps he is a poète maudit. A less-​touted interpretation is one that might see Firmin as the wronged

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party in his relationship with Yvonne, since Yvonne has extra-​marital affairs with his half-​brother Hugh and with Laruelle, and the lovelorn Consul is unable to reconcile his belief in the sanctity of marriage with his wife’s infidelity.20 Another type of Romantic/​psycho-​metaphysical interpretation might see the age-​old quest for ‘the beyond’, a belief that the material world cannot be all that there is to life, there has to be ‘something else’, ‘something more’ than just ‘this’, and hence his attraction to metaphysical systems like the Cabbala and powerful biblical narratives such as ‘the Fall’ which might explain why ‘this’ is ‘this’, and why he finds himself metaphorically ejected from the Garden of Eden at the end of the novel. Sue Vice partly offers a psychoanalytic reading which views drink as the embodiment of desire itself and which can only therefore be satiated by death, ‘which drink at once desires and conveniently effects’.21 However, another approach might be to see Firmin’s behaviour as a mixture of Jack London’s perspective in John Barleycorn and Jean Rhys’s interwar heroines. Here we would be acknowledging that Firmin is drawn to pushing boundaries of self in a world from which he is alienated. His drinking is a conscious choice. Staring at the vast array of drinks available in a cantina he hears a voice:  ‘ “Geoffrey Firmin, this is what it is like to die, just this and no more, an awakening from a dream in a dark place, in which, as you see, are present the means of escape from yet another nightmare. But the choice is up to you. You are not invited to use those means of escape; it is left up to your judgement; to obtain them it is necessary only to  –​”’, and the voice in his head bringing him to account is interrupted.22 Such consciousness of choice in the face of drink and drinking reveals the world as it is, not an escape from self for Firmin but a sustained effort to achieve authenticity in a world which rejects such ideas. The ‘or what?’ which appeared when the Victorians tried to understand Mary Thompson’s rejection of everything society has to offer is a question Under the Volcano poses in relation to the self and to the nature of existence. The default position for interpretation of the novel is that, despite the (limited?) sympathy the reader might feel for Firmin, there is nevertheless the sense of a life wasted. However, as Ronald Binns has pointed out, we should not be drawn into believing that a brilliant career has been cut short, since the Consul had washed up in a position of little global significance before the year of bingeing began.23 To view matters on Firmin’s terms, though, is not necessarily to see it as a life wasted. It may be a terrible thing to say, and this refers back again to Sartre’s idea that ‘the drunkard’ may be superior to ‘the general’, but isn’t Firmin’s life exactly as he wishes it to be? Isn’t this also the attraction of the novel, that, as desperate and as grim as the narrative is, Firmin chooses

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the route of authenticity, he is this person, not someone manufactured by others, by social convention, or by historical forces? Imagine the opposite, the Hollywood ending:  a mid-​ distance Technicolor image establishes the pair’s longed-​for Canadian log cabin, small and resolute amongst teeming, towering pines; we close in to see Firmin chopping wood; cut to Yvonne inside, gently keeping the newly minted Geoffrey Jr. in check, watching over the pots, laying the table. The camera draws back, out through the window. Smoke rises against a crisp blue sky. The reason this does not appear true to the novel is that it does not stay true to the character and what, at the level of the novel, the character might stand for. This is not to offer a ‘fatalist’ or ‘determinist’ view of things. Such views only hold sway if we take pity on Firmin on the understanding that his life is a failure. As I am suggesting here, by Firmin’s own set of values and desires, by his own understanding and striving for meaning, his life is a success, even if it ends in death. This search for meaning is central to the Consul’s mode of being, even if some of this is to be read as the quest for external verities, rather than the Existential drinker taking responsibility for his self, and for the self as it is in the world with others. What is perhaps unclear about the novel is whether, unlike the Consul, readers are being invited to glean a satisfactory explanation for self and world by the end of the narrative. This might be provided by the novel’s circular structure, since at the start we are one year on from the events, with Geoffrey and Yvonne already dead. More likely, however, is that for the reader all interpretative strategies are doomed, as they appear to have been for the Consul. As Patrick McCarthy writes:  ‘Whereas Lowry reinforces our sense of his novel’s thematic unity by giving it a circular structure and establishing innumerable correspondences and associations within the narrative, he also introduces alternative discourses which impinge upon the Consul’s (and the other characters’) consciousness, emphasizing their separateness by typographic means’,24 and this tends to undermine the possibility of an all-​encompassing interpretation. A  further consideration might be the way in which the novel deals with narrative and fictionality, for just as ‘In a Glass’ in The Lost Weekend poses metafictional questions, so the Consul’s own projected book invites the reader to ponder on whether Under the Volcano is some kind of ultimate synthesis in itself which answers the question: ‘Is there any ultimate reality, external, conscious, and ever-​present, etc. etc., that can be realized by any such means that may be acceptable to all creeds and religions and suitable to all climes and countries?’25 But as readers of Under the Volcano we cannot be sure at all, for if the Consul’s search for ultimate meaning is meant to mirror civilisation’s, other than the fact that the Second World War is around the

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corner –​or because of this fact –​little sense is to be made of the Consul’s sense-​making and the book’s aesthetic tidiness. By providing narrative closure (Yvonne and Geoffrey are dead), but no hope of a final interpretation, the reader is positioned as the Consul is, knowing the problems and possible frames of understanding without any hope of final enlightenment. The two best bets that might make sense on personal and public levels are ‘love’, in the form of Yvonne, and active political engagement in the form of Hugh, but both fail. The novel thus approaches ‘meaning’ from the point of view that meaning is everywhere, that the world is overdetermined, that is, it has many meanings, and no single ‘key’ can unify these multiple, often contradictory understandings. However, if we take the fact of Firmin’s search for meaning, rather than the manner in which he often attempts to locate such meaning externally in patterns, symbols, and systems, he then appears as in the same bracket as Jack London’s alter ego John Barleycorn, the Rhys heroines, and Don Birnam. Further comparison with Josef K. in Kafka’s The Trial26 will help bring out the ways in which Firmin is Existentially distinct from other meaning-​ generating schemes which are largely external to the individual. Under the Volcano and The Trial Critics have drawn attention to the similarity between Josef K.’s death and Geoffrey Firmin’s, for instance, the overwhelming bathos of dying ‘like a dog’ that characterises both their executions.27 The parallels, however, do not end there. Kafka’s novel begins when K. is arrested for crimes of which he is unaware. On a metaphysical level, K. is awakened to his existence, whereas previously he had been living the habituated, unthinking life of a clerk, and he is forced by the mysterious nature of his imprisonment, ostensibly ‘free’ to continue living exactly as he did before, to consider what this existence is.28 ‘The Law’ which governs his life, and which might give clues as to how he is to behave in life, is forever out of reach, encapsulated in a parable communicated to him by a priest in which a man seeks admittance to the Law, but fails to get past the gatekeeper of the first door. Behind this door are more doors and more ferocious gatekeepers. When the man dies the door closes, since it existed only for him. In Under the Volcano, the Farolito, the drinking place where Firmin ends up, is described as ‘composed of numerous little rooms, each smaller and darker than the last, opening one into another, the last and darkest of all being no larger than a cell’,29 and so the image bears similarity with the idea of sequential spaces that must be negotiated in some kind of quest narrative for the ‘key’ to truth and existence.

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The appearance of Yvonne on the morning of the Day of the Dead functions in a similar way to the appearance of the warders in The Trial in that this is the moment of awakening for the Consul to the true nature of his existence. Although it might seem that the ‘present’ of the Consul’s life in the eyes of the reader consists of the entire year following Yvonne’s departure, it is really just the one day in which the Consul truly lives, or is truly ‘awakened’ and ‘enlightened’. The idea that it is just this one day in which he is an ‘actual existing individual’ is foreshadowed when a character believes that the Consul has spent the year like ‘a man living in continual terror of his life’,30 and at one point during the day itself Firmin notes ‘it was still only five to two. It was already the longest day in his entire experience, a lifetime’.31 The preceding year has been spent imagining such a moment as Yvonne returning, and has thus been spent in a bingeing limbo. With Yvonne physically present, all options for life are on the table for the Consul. Although the reader might be drawn into thinking that Firmin is habituated to drink, and the rest of the book is therefore a journey to see whether drink or Yvonne gain the upper hand –​that is, has the drinking gone so far that it has overwhelmed one or more of his physical, psychological, and spiritual systems to the point of no return? –​this is in effect the one day that Firmin lives authentically. In The Trial, how K.  should live becomes the point of K.’s existence, and a major difference between the two novels is that K.  never comes to a conclusion, whereas the Consul knows that this is ‘his day’ for living, when he must face up to the fact of Yvonne’s presence and all that this entails for him. K. is taken to a piece of wasteland and uncertainly accepts his fate. The Consul, on the other hand, ensures his own death, for he is warned that he is in danger, but does not act upon it.32 This difference overlaps with the idea that Firmin takes his own life seriously, and so can be said to live authentically on this day. K. is accused of not taking his life seriously, and an unconscious drift towards execution appears to be a punishment for not living authentically, whereas the Consul chooses his own end. On this reading, the Consul’s day is not the culmination of his life, it is the one day of his ‘ownmost’ life. Lowry’s choice to have the novel’s main time frame the course of one day is not primarily a means of observing the dramatic convention of unity of time and place, such as we find in O’Neill’s examination of drink and drugs in Long Day’s Journey into Night, nor necessarily the modernist trope of expanding daily time outwards beyond the bounds of a ‘realistically’ paced narrative, such as in Joyce’s Ulysses and Woolf’s Mrs Dalloway.33 It no doubt has elements from both, the air of events peaking in the former, the extensive detailing of individual consciousnesses in a small time in the latter, but essentially this is Kierkegaard’s ‘midnight

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hour’ once again, when the mask(s) fall away. It is the ‘day of the dead’ for everybody who is not Geoffrey, since these are sleepwalkers not alert to the reality of truly existing. This ‘stripping away’ of social bonds, social obligations, and social identity is treated on material and symbolic levels when he loses his passport and other personal possessions on the Ferris wheel. He feels himself liberated because he no longer has the burden of being the socially defined and entrapped ‘Geoffrey Firmin’, he is his self existing purely and simply. The Existential Firmin Greig Henderson makes some suggestive comments with regard to reading the novel existentially, only to dismiss the possibility: Developed in detail, the existential model would no doubt prove to be illuminating, but to the extent that it assumes that the radical freedom of the individual has the capacity to forge a path through the hell of self-​absorption and to escape the prisonhouse of language through an authentic and self-​determining act that puts the individual into unmediated contact with the reality of the human condition, it rings false, rightly or wrongly, to postmodern ears.34

It is not clear from this, however, what the postmodern objection is to. Is it the idea of individual authenticity, radical freedom, or insight into ‘the human condition’ (not quite how Existentialism would consider its project)? It certainly might be that Henderson takes the contemporary temperature correctly by judging some of these things ‘false’, but he also notes that such a judgement may be given ‘rightly or wrongly’.35 For this section then I would like to explore the possibility of seeing Firmin as engaged in the project of Existential authenticity, and hopefully providing the illumination that Henderson indicates might be forthcoming. Freedom, authenticity, and ‘the human condition’ Like Sartre’s gambler, the Consul is free to drink or not to drink, and he chooses to drink. It could be said that he is dependent upon drink, and that this accounts for the fact that he is unable to stop drinking and so unable to restore a loving relationship with Yvonne. However, that would make for a fairly pointless novel since there would be nothing at stake, for whatever Firmin did would always end up with him drinking: the novel is not interested in presenting its character this way. Firmin knows what he is doing when he deliberately puts himself into an alcoholic haze and into the various stages of enlightenment and the

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‘paradise of despair’36 that this affords him. It is not just that he prefers this way of being, he judges that it is better than any alternative. Again, this is freely chosen, for nowhere in the novel is the sense given that his drinking is the result of an addiction about which the character can do nothing. When replying to Laruelle as to the reason he is not making more of an effort now that Yvonne has returned, he makes out that his battle ‘against death’ must take priority:  ‘ “My battle for the survival of the human consciousness” ’,37 meaning his own, although as usual with any of Firmin’s utterances there is the possibility he means that he does this for the sake of humanity in general. Again, this fits within a broadly Existential framework of the Sartrean variety which makes consciousness central as an imaginative, creative force (as opposed to a ‘realist’ consciousness which dutifully registers the external world as its default reality38). Unwillingness by critics to read Under the Volcano in this way is really a moral judgement of the kind that says choosing to drink instead of choosing anything ‘positive’ must be flawed, and so there must be some reason we can discover for the Consul’s error (the nature of drink itself, perhaps, or a weak character, as we saw in the Introduction and Chapter 1). But the novel makes clear it is the Consul’s choice to live this way. He may be a fool to think this, but the novel does not undermine any of the characters who seek to live their lives as they wish –​Firmin, Hugh, Yvonne –​for it does not offer any authoritative narratorial viewpoint from which to say that they go about their lives in the wrong way.39 That is not to say that Firmin’s way in the world goes unchallenged, for the other characters do argue with him. Laruelle will concede that the Consul’s drinking might have some of the benefits of clarity and insight he claims, ‘the efficacy of your tequila’, but dismisses such magnificence as the equivalent of witnessing a battle in miniature on a toe-​nail: ‘That’s like the kind of clear seeing you indulge in. Everything seems perfectly clear, because indeed it is perfectly clear, in terms of the toe-​nail’.40 Nevertheless, Firmin prefers suffering to not suffering. The reader is primed for this since the three epigraphs prior to the novel’s opening are united in this orientation, including one from Bunyan’s Grace Abounding for the Chief of Sinners in which the speaker envies the dog or the horse, because ‘they had no soul to perish under the everlasting weight of Hell or Sin, as mine was like to do’. Firmin seems to regard suffering as the most pure form of existence: ‘perhaps the soul thrived on its sufferings, and upon the sufferings he had inflicted on his wife her soul had not only thrived but flourished’.41 To not ‘suffer’ is to accept a vision of the world which he deems to be untruthful. In philosophical terms, to accept what Yvonne, and Hugh in his way, offer, would be to substitute a lie for the

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reality of what the world is like. The world is ‘hell’, and to take up the vision of a Canadian idyll as that substitute would be the failure to face the world squarely. Henderson argues that Yvonne ‘is more desirable as a trope in the figuration of suffering and despair than as a flesh-​and-​ blood lover’,42 and this may be true, but whether or not Yvonne is a trope or a real person that the Consul rejects, when Henderson argues that ‘Retaining the purity of his poetical motives, the Consul is loyal to the sources of his being’, we can see that the motive behind Firmin’s drinking existence is nothing other than ‘authenticity’. All of this still may be nothing more than self-​glorification on the Consul’s part, and might even be the novel’s glorification of Firmin, but this self-​regard is never presented as anything less than authentic. Rather, the battle within, and of, consciousness, in a world whose reality is bleak, is precisely what counts as authenticity. To save consciousness for the world, a putative aim of the book Firmin never writes, is really the desire to rescue subjectivity, the uniquely existing individual, from a world in disarray. If Firmin were to accept the proposal to take up again with Yvonne, he would be acting out a role. His choice, to refer back to Sartre’s provocative equivalence, is  for the drunkard over the general. His personal world of Yvonne and Hugh is one where he has suffered betrayal, and the world at large is one structured by cruelty and violence and in which ‘intervention’ is pointless. It is a despairing assessment of the world, to be sure, but that does not make it any less accurate or true for the Consul, and to opt for anything which obviates or ignores this would be ‘bad faith’. The ritual of drinking, his commitment to drinking on the Day of the Dead, ensures his authenticity. ‘Paradise of despair’ I have dealt with Firmin as an Existential drinker, and holding the book up to this light seems a reasonable thing to do. Of course, the complexity of the novel and its persistent ambiguities and ambivalences mean that it can be held up to other lights and at other angles, especially so for a novel which proposes different systems of understanding, be they spiritual, aesthetic, philosophic, or the very way in which we are being asked to read it.43 In mainly focusing on Firmin I am not alone, for most critics see the Consul as the book’s raison d’être, while Hugh, Yvonne, and Laruelle are his supporting cast. Even if we take the view that they represent versions of Firmin rather than being characters in their own right, so that the novel is a modern-​day psychomachia, or, in Brian O’Kill’s view, a ‘heteroplasty’, in which the four chief personas are intended to be ‘aspects of the same man, or of the human spirit’,44 it

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would still mean that Firmin is the centre of gravity since there is never any suggestion that the roles could be reversed, with (at the level of novel) the Consul a satellite in Yvonne’s story, for instance. In this sense, then, the book can be regarded as ultimately concerned with whatever it is that constitutes the Consul’s concerns. The other characters are significant only in their relation to Firmin. I have also talked about how one of the difficulties in presenting Firmin as an Existential drinker is that the novel is construed in such a way that Firmin is positioned primarily as a symbol of humanity’s suffering rather than asking us to sink ourselves firstly and foremost into the character’s life. Lowry’s own comments on the novel accord with this perception.45 There is a character in there, and I  suspect that one of the reasons the novel has found such an enthusiastic audience is that the Consul does work as a relatable character who is also able to bear such a large amount of symbolic weighting; the Consul also works as a character because his way of being in the world is, as already mentioned, to apprehend it symbolically, so the novel’s process of meaning-​making colludes with Geoffrey’s and thus with Geoffrey’s way of being. I will end the chapter by considering a phrase which occurs in passing in the novel, ‘paradise of despair’, and which brings together these many strands. The clear-​sighted realist such as Laruelle says that the drinker is an egotist and a narcissist, and the drinker, be it Don Birnam or Geoffrey Firmin, agrees. In the final chapter, Geoffrey has made his way to the Farolito: ‘He was safe here; this was the place he loved –​sanctuary, the paradise of his despair’.46 It immediately gives this idea that Geoffrey acknowledges all the misery that he encounters and that he brings into being, and further, that he enjoys it. Calling it ‘paradise’ ups the ante, giving the drinker an entire universe of happy misery for eternity, not just the earthly here-​and-​now. The religious connotations mean that ‘despair’ must represent the domain of hell, the opposite of paradise, so the phrase conflates or entwines heaven and hell into a single impossible entity. There is nothing unusual in creating a paradox in order to present a felt anxiety, and inversions and minglings of heaven and hell have been a staple of the arts. For us though, this particular phrase has a number of resonances. If we think back to ‘Janet’s Repentance’, there was never any sense that Janet could revel in despair in the way that Firmin chooses to. Because Eliot’s story takes place within a religious context, the reality for Janet is that heaven and hell are distinct realms, and to indulge in despair is an active going against God. But in Under the Volcano there is no assumption that Geoffrey’s angst takes place in the sight of God. This, then, is modern despair, and because there may be no God, there is in his place only the abstraction ‘humanity’ which can be appealed to. But

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Geoffrey looks around and sees that humanity is mad with the prospect of war. That perhaps leaves flesh-​and-​blood ‘humans’ for appeal, such as Yvonne, Hugh, and Laruelle, but they have betrayed him, regardless of how well-meaning they may appear to themselves and others. He berates Hugh for having done nothing for humanity except castigate capitalism, and he accuses Yvonne of selfishness for denying him children; ‘both your souls stink’,47 he declares, showing us that he views these attitudes and behaviours metaphysically. In the same vein he goes on to accuse them both of only pretending to help him when all the while they were having an affair:  ‘What an uncommon time you two must have had, paddling palms and playing bubbies and titties all day under cover of saving me … Jesus. Poor little defenceless me.  –​I  hadn’t thought of that. But, you see, it’s perfectly logical, what it comes down to: I’ve got my own piddling little fight for freedom on my hands’.48 On Firmin’s metaphysical understanding, his abhorrent drinking cannot be a sufficient cause for their betrayal of him, and from this it is a short step to understanding his misanthropy, for if Yvonne and Hugh are capable of betrayal then all individual humans are similarly capable and will thus always be flawed in a way which must be fatal to humanity, or at least fatal to what Firmin believes humanity could and should be. In such a conclusion, which we might regard as Firmin’s own take on original sin, he can see nothing but despair for humanity;49 this means that individuals must fight individually for their freedom and for authenticity, there can be no grand social project.50 But, of course, in Geoffrey’s eyes, only he, through his drinking, is able to understand this and, rather like Don Birnam, only he is able to suffer Christ-​like in this all-​consuming manner.51 It might seem that the obvious solution to suffering and the evils of the world is ‘love’, and the novel is certainly set up in this way: Geoffrey suffers, and he is then presented with love as his salvation in the form of Yvonne. But as we have seen, it is suffering that Geoffrey chooses over love. When Yvonne first returns she seems to recognise that his embrace of suffering is what has been the downfall of their relationship in the past and will probably continue to be so: ‘This is like an ultimate denial –​oh Geoffrey, why can’t you turn back? Must you go on and on for ever into this stupid darkness, seeking it, even now, where I cannot reach you, ever on into the darkness of the sundering, of the severance!’, and where in Yvonne’s mind she links the words ‘sunder’ and ‘sever’ to the idea of divorce. Geoffrey’s insistence that the possibility of love be turned into suffering reappears at the end of the novel when he goes with the prostitute María. In his drunken climax this is how he understands his actions: ‘(and it was this calamity he now, with María, penetrated, the only thing alive in him now this

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burning boiling crucified evil organ –​God is it possible to suffer more than this, out of this suffering something must be born, and what would be born was his own death), for ah, how alike are the groans of love to those of the dying …’.52 The complex of suffering, love, God, death, and the knowledge that this suffering grants him does not make for any coherent argument, but the novel does not aim for anything like logical coherence. The overriding element for Firmin and the novel as a whole is the importance of suffering, and love must play second fiddle to it. Firmin knows his whole ‘style’ is grandiose and arrogant, that he undoubtedly views himself as an aristocrat of the soul, but rather than being a spur to changing his behaviour, his alienation is a direct consequence of his desire to suffer. In these respects, his drinking enables his choice of suffering in two ways: all of the obnoxiousness attendant upon his commitment to drinking means that friends and humanity in general cast him out (and, eventually, ‘down’), ensuring his purgatory, while the effects of drunkenness, and mescal in particular, enhance his natural ability to bring together the universe within a single consciousness. Nevertheless, why should Firmin’s commitment to drink and its correlate of despair represent ‘paradise’, a modern ‘paradise’ that is, shorn of its religious association and representing a metaphorically desired eternity? One short answer is that this is nothing other than Camus’s injunction to embrace the reality of how things are. The wider consideration is more complex, however, because it brings us back to the conclusions reached above, that Firmin takes on board the reality of the human lot and decides that life is not worth living, or, rather, accepts that living authentically can only bring on death. From the outside ‘despair’ is indeed ‘desperate’, but from Firmin’s inner world the ‘paradise of despair’ is exactly this revelling in the intense meaning-​making which he enjoys so much, the intensity of the myriad of connections he makes through this way of being, both in his mind and, by extension, the novel itself. In this sense Firmin is in keeping with the figure of the Existential drinker, even if he does retreat from being-​in-​the-​world-​with-​others. He is not a ‘writer-​drinker’ in the way that some of the other characters in the pantheon are, despite the drinking parallels between Firmin and Lowry, but there is certainly a presentation of a drinker who experiences his own creative meaning-​making. On the surface much of Firmin’s mental activity appears to recycle or manipulate externalities, from literature, film, science, religion, politics, a dilettante’s flipping between interests, but beyond this it is Firmin’s unique way of holding all of these things together through committed drinking which creates this world from within. The novel does allow us to see outside Firmin, through the occasional third-​person perspective, extended forays into the consciousness

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of Hugh and Yvonne, and the criticisms of characters like Laruelle, but these pale into insignificance when compared to Firmin’s uniquely existing consciousness and existence, fuelled by a life orientated around the inner and outer worlds of drink and drinking. The place he feels at home in is the Farolito, ‘the lighthouse’, with its (ironic) gesture towards ‘enlightenment’. That he would end up in such a place is foreshadowed earlier on when Firmin imagines a ‘timeless’ place where there are ‘innumerable white cantinas, where one could drink for ever on credit, with the door open and the wind blowing’.53 This is what his day of living brings him. Notes 1 Malcolm Lowry, ‘Without the Nighted Wyvern’. Quoted in Mark Ellis Thomas, ‘Malcolm Lowry’s poetry’, in Grace, ed., Swinging the Maelstrom, p. 234. This is the title as used in Earle Birney’s Selected Poems of Malcolm Lowry. In The Collected Poetry of Malcolm Lowry, ed. Kathleen Scherf (Vancouver: UBC Press, 1992) it is number 315, titled ‘We sit unshackled drunk and mad to edit’, written 1940–​1954. 2 Malcolm Lowry, ‘Preface to a novel’. Reprinted in Gordon Bowker (ed.), Malcolm Lowry:  Under the Volcano. Casebook series (Basingstoke, Hampshire: Macmillan, 1987), p. 34. 3 Lowry, Under the Volcano, p. 75. 4 For detailed discussion of symbols and the novel see Patrick A. McCarthy’s Forests of Symbols:  World, Text and Self in Malcolm Lowry’s Fiction (Athens, GA:  University of Georgia Press, 1994); Hilda Thomas’s ‘Praxis as prophylaxis:  a political reading of Under the Volcano’, in Grace (ed.), Swinging the Maelstrom, also has excellent work on how symbolism functions in the novel. 5 Lowry, Under the Volcano, p. 91. 6 Ibid., p. 134. 7 Ibid., p. 21. 8 Ibid., p. 60. 9 Sartre, Being and Nothingness, p. 32. 10 Stephen Spender’s line of argument is that while the novel is ‘perhaps the best account of a “drunk” in fiction’, ‘Fundamentally Under the Volcano is no more about drinking than King Lear is about senility’, in Bowker (ed.), Malcolm Lowry, p. 92 and p. 93, and our real interest is in the Consul. At another level, Lowry regarded all four main characters as aspects of one person, as he explained in his long letter to Jonathan Cape of January 1946 in defence of his novel: ‘The truth is that the character drawing is not only weak but virtually nonexistent, save with certain minor characters, the four main characters being intended, in one of the book’s meanings, to be aspects of the same man, or of the human spirit, and two of them, Hugh and the

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Consul, more obviously are’, in Lowry, ‘Letter to Cape’, in The Voyage that Never Ends, p. 389. 11 A trope he employs with other characters in the novel, and in Swinging the Maelstrom there are further clear examples: ‘And as the old man talked on and on, the confused story of his wandering, which sometime queerly resembled the story of mankind’, Malcolm Lowry, Swinging the Maelstrom: A Critical Edition, eds Vik Doyen and Miguel Mota (Ottawa:  University of Ottawa Press, 2013), p. 15; ‘My God, he thought suddenly, why am I here, in this doleful place? Yet –​perhaps it wasn’t a maelstrom but the foul core of his world to which he had descended, where the pitiful meaning of the arrogant years was revealed’, p. 20; ‘were his past just such a feeble sum of prankishness, were his past not as the nations  –​and which of them dared stop drinking, dared face the knees of the years knocking together?’, p. 22. 12 In Bowker (ed.), Malcolm Lowry, p. 35. 13 Brian O’Kill puts it like this: ‘the chaos in his mind arises less from a vision of universal disorder than from excess of a kind of delusive order created by a baffling plethora of correspondences. Everything, to his mind, appears to be related to something else; therefore nothing is, clearly, simply and uniquely’. Brian O’Kill, ‘Aspects of language in Under the Volcano’, in Bowker (ed)., Malcolm Lowry, p. 37. 14 In Lowry’s novella ‘The Last Address’, Lawhill calls such connection-​making ‘continuity’, as he explains to Dr Claggart: ‘Continuity! Always to be awake, to see everything, to be the world’s spout; so, the vacillations, and the continuous drinking’, in Lowry, Swinging the Maelstrom, p.  141. ‘The Last Address’ is an earlier version of what became ‘Lunar Caustic’ and, finally, ‘Swinging the Maelstrom’. It is reprinted in Lowry, Swinging the Maelstrom. 15 Lowry, Under the Volcano, p. 338. 16 Robert B. Heilman, ‘A multivalued poetic fiction’ (1947), in Bowker (ed.), Swinging the Maelstrom, p. 67. 17 Patrick A.  McCarthy also treats the Consul as straightforwardly alcoholic:  ‘the alcoholic’s capacity for self-​ deception helps to maintain his illusion that everyone sees him as he wants to be seen’, Forests, p. 63; this view significantly informs McCarthy’s interpretation, as in: ‘Geoffrey’s conviction of his difference from others derives in large part from his alcoholism, the drinking which he carries out “as if I  were taking an eternal sacrament” ’, ibid., p. 107. 18 ‘The sunlight could not share his burden of conscience, or sourceless sorrow’, Lowry, Under the Volcano, p. 80. 19 The idyll appears in his unsent letter to Yvonne, ibid., pp. 42–​3. 20 In this I would agree with John Orr, that ‘If adultery is no longer the “issue” that it is in Flaubert or James, neither is it purely incidental or matter-​of-​fact. What Bloom [in Joyce’s Ulysses] has to overcome in the present moment, Firmin has been unable to forget in time past’. John Orr, ‘Doubling and modernism in Under the Volcano’, in Sue Vice (ed.), Malcolm Lowry Eighty Years On (Houndmills, Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1989), p. 27. However, it

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can also be plausibly argued, as Sue Vice does, that Firmin wilfully drives Yvonne towards the infidelity that he knows he will not be able to live with in order that he will have to die, which is his desired end having tested her for perfidy. Sue Vice, ‘Fear of perfection, love of death and the bottle’, in Vice (ed.), Malcolm Lowry Eighty Years On, pp. 93–​4. I suggest an alternative view at the end of the chapter. 21 Vice, ‘Fear of perfection’, p. 95. 22 Lowry, Under the Volcano, p. 229. 23 Ronald Binns, ‘Materialism and magic’, in Bowker (ed.), Malcolm Lowry, p. 182. 24 McCarthy, Forests, p. 77 25 Lowry, Under the Volcano, p. 44. 26 Franz Kafka, The Trial (Harmondsworth, Middlesex: Penguin, 1978). 27 Miguel Mota and Paul Tiessen,‘Introduction’ to The 1940 ‘Under the Volcano’, ed. Chris Ackerley, Miguel Mota, and Paul Tiessen (Ottawa:  University of Ottawa Press, 2015), p.  li, also drawing attention to Richard Cross, Malcolm Lowry: A Preface to His Fiction (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1980). 28 See Earnshaw, Existentialism, pp. 5–​6. 29 Lowry, Under the Volcano, p. 204. 30 Ibid., p. 36. 31 Ibid., p. 223. 32 Ibid., pp. 367–​8. 33 See note 53 in the Introduction on the prevalence of short time frames in many of these texts. 34 Greig Henderson, ‘ “Destroy the World!”:  gnosis and nihilism in Under the Volcano’, in Frederick Asals and Paul Tiessen (eds), A Darkness That Murmured:  Essays on Malcolm Lowry and the Twentieth Century (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2000), p. 72. 35 This is not to dismiss Henderson’s ‘gnostic’ reading, which certainly adds to our understanding of the novel. 36 Lowry, Under the Volcano, p. 339; this phrase is discussed at the end of the chapter. 37 Ibid., p. 221. 38 Jean-​Paul Sartre advances the idea that the production of ‘irreality’ is the key to human consciousness in The Imaginary (London: Routledge, 2004), and such a view of consciousness is typical of most Existential thought. 39 We will see later that Firmin does believe Hugh and Yvonne live ‘wrongly’, but that cannot be taken to be an authoritative view. 40 Lowry, Under the Volcano, p. 221. 41 Ibid., p. 76. 42 Henderson, ‘ “Destroy the World!” ’, p.  74. Henderson also writes:  ‘He rejects the dubious promise of the brightness and light that is figured in the Himalayan landscape of the opening sequence for the sure promise of alcoholic transfiguration. By implication, he also rejects the salvation to be

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gained through the selfless love of another’, p. 76, and that the Farolito is, quoting from the novel, ‘sanctuary, the paradise of his despair’, p. 77. 43 Lowry’s long letter to Cape is partly a request for Cape’s ‘reader’ to read differently, and Lowry second guesses how the novel’s audience might approach, and be encouraged to approach, it. This compares with Woolf’s and Lawrence’s requests for patience and openness from readers with their new modes of writing. 44 O’Kill, ‘Aspects of language’, p. 40. 45 See Lowry, ‘Letter to Cape’. 46 Lowry, Under the Volcano, p. 339. 47 Ibid., p. 314. Also: ‘ “What have you ever done for humanity, Hugh, with all your oratio obliqua about the capitalist system, except talk, and thrive on it, until your soul stinks?” ’ 48 Ibid., p. 315. 49 The sense that this is of the same order as ‘original sin’ can be seen when Geoffrey feels betrayed by Yvonne having had a child by another man prior to their having met, ibid., pp. 76–​7. 50 Laruelle has a similar view:  ‘One side or the other would win [the war]. And in either case life would be hard. Though if the Allies lost it would be harder. And in either case one’s own battle would go on’, ibid., p. 15. Firmin makes a similar argument when he talks about the pointlessness of ‘intervention’ in the name of defenceless countries, pp. 311–​13, and connects this to the attempted personal interventions into his behaviour of Hugh, Jacques (Laruelle), and Yvonne, p. 314. 51 Lowry said of the final chapter:  ‘In fact the feeling you are supposed to get from this chapter is an almost biblical one. Hasn’t the guy had enough suffering? Surely we’ve reached the end now. But no. Apparently it’s only just starting’, ‘Letter to Cape’, p. 422. In the same letter Lowry casts himself as a Christ-​like suffering author, albeit in a self-​mocking manner, and by association gives the impression that Charles Jackson has also done the same with The Lost Weekend: ‘But now, when this ex-​pseudo author climbs down from his cross in his little Oberammergau where he has been hibernating all these years to offer something really original and terrific to atone for his sins, it turns out that somebody from Brooklyn has just done the same thing better’, ibid., p. 394. 52 Lowry, Under the Volcano, p. 350. 53 Ibid., p. 304.

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Hans Fallada, The Drinker (1950): absurdity

I am, if I may say so without presumption, a great sufferer.

In Hans Fallada’s novel The Drinker (Der Trinker1), Erwin Sommer recounts his decline in fortunes from a time when he was a respectable and successful citizen through to the present time of narration when, after supposedly firing a shot at his wife Magda, he is the inmate of an institution for the criminally insane, with no chance of being released. The Drinker doesn’t go out of its way to invite philosophical contemplation, and the narrative is mainly driven onwards by the reader’s desire to know what will happen next to Erwin and how it will all end. Such a response to the novel might be reinforced by the knowledge that Fallada’s work was associated with a ‘school’ of literature in the 1920s and 1930s known as die neue Sachlichkeit, ‘new objectivity’, where the emphasis was on the ‘factual’ recording of everyday life.2 A good example of this type of writing is Fallada’s earlier novel Little Man, What Now? (1932),3 which treats the lives of an ordinary young couple in Germany at the start of the 1930s in the midst of the global depression. Walter Greenwood’s Love on the Dole (1933)4 might be a comparable English-​ language novel, since it too deals with poverty and unemployment using a predominantly realist mode, and both novels draw on the immediate autobiographical experiences of the authors for material. Nevertheless, there are a number of elements to The Drinker which make it an ‘Existential drinker’ text. While not exactly following all of the contours of some of the other novels treated in this book, it does nevertheless address them in one way or another, and in particular it expresses the feeling of Existential absurdity, that is, the belief that we find ourselves born into a world not of our making and which has no intrinsic meaning or purpose. The novel indicates that being a good citizen is meant to provide Sommer with a purposeful framework of business, marriage, and the respectable social standing of being a ‘gentleman’, ‘a

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respectable citizen of 41 years old’ in his own words,5 but at each turn he rejects these props. He does not do this in a planned, systematic manner, as if following some philosophical ideal of Existential freedom, and nor does the novel as a whole suggest that this is necessarily the agenda. Nevertheless, in broad terms the novel’s narrative serves to remove the ‘stage scenery’ of an unthinking, habituated existence, and in doing so reveals the essential absurdity that such an existence masks. Laid bare, Sommer is ‘superfluous’ in the sense that there is no necessity for his existence,6 neither in the obvious material sense, for he is not needed by his wife, business, or society, nor metaphysically, for he can find no final reason to make his life mean anything. In doing this the novel points up the ‘superfluous’ nature of existence, and as a consequence we might thus be led to ask ourselves just exactly what the meaning of our lives is. If there is no intrinsic reason for our existence, an apprehension which is the basis of Existential absurdity, then why carry on living?7 Sommer’s self-​destructive actions in drinking and a set of associated behaviours, and his eventual incarceration, are the manifest symptoms of the fact that there are indeed no intrinsic reasons for living. Like Meursault in Camus’s The Outsider, there is nowhere else that such a determinedly antisocial person can end up except locked away, awaiting death:  the guillotine for Meursault, self-​inflicted tuberculosis for Sommer as he drinks from the bottles used for expectoration by those already infected. Alienation and absurdity While the novels discussed so far appear to be on the side of the protagonist as a fully aware and committed drinker, Fallada’s book offers a different angle. Sommer is rather like the figure of K. in The Trial, by turns both arrogant and puzzled about the nature of his existence. As with the other drinkers we have seen, Sommer’s authenticity is achieved through drink within the context of modernity, since the lifestyle of the habitual drunkard is knowingly at odds with the kind of citizen the modern world requires. However, unlike these other texts, the actual drinking is finished with about a third of the way through the book, and one of the advantages of this from our point of view is that it allows the reader to see how choosing ‘drink’ as a life-​defining project does not necessarily entail continuous ‘drinking’. The narrative is structured around the rupture in Sommer’s life initially provided by his recourse to heavy drinking, and it is in this way that the binge period functions as the kind of awakening which is provided by the ‘arrest’ in The Trial and Meursault’s act of murder in The Outsider, both fictional instances

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leading to the removal of the ‘stage scenery’ of habituated life that Camus mentions in The Myth of Sisyphus. On one level Sommer’s story is an ordinary unfolding of events typical of temperance narratives: business troubles and a failing marriage lead Sommer to drink, and this in turn exacerbates the character’s unhappy relationship with his wife, friends, and associates. He then seeks comfort in more excessive drinking and uncharacteristic sexual behaviour when he becomes obsessed with a barmaid whom he calls ‘The Queen of Alcohol’, eventually leaving the authorities no choice but to put him in an institution, judging him to be both violent and mentally unstable. The problem for the straightforward, ‘immediate’, interpretation is that the cause of Sommer’s drinking is really never very clear, and thus neither is its significance, at least not at the level of a temperance narrative, for he is punished disproportionately by what is in essence a life sentence behind bars. There is an ambivalence prevalent here that is found in many of the Existential-​drinker accounts. Sommer tells us from the outset that he is not a habitual drinker –​‘Of course I have not always been a drunkard. Indeed it is not very long since I first took to drink’8 –​ and the reasons for Sommer’s drinking are too casual and clichéd to be sufficient reason for all that follows: ‘My business affairs did not proceed as they should’, an observation which slides into the fact that he has always needed ‘the sympathy and encouragement of those around me’ and that ‘even my wife was turning away from me’.9 As the story continues it is never clear, even by the end of the novel, which is cause and which is effect:  does Magda turn away from him because of his behaviour regarding their ‘business’, which in turn leads to his drinking and domestic abuse, or does her attitude towards him only really change when he takes to drinking? Erwin’s statements are contradictory, initially suggesting that alcohol is to blame: ‘Ah yes, alcohol had made me do it. When once I had understood, when once I had realized to the full, what a liar alcohol is, and what liars it makes of honest men, I swore never to touch another drop and even to give up my occasional glass of beer’.10 However, he later declares that his unhappiness predates his drinking by at least a year, and the moment he takes to spirit (schnapps) drinking at an inn has no identifiable cause:  ‘I was at the mercy of mysterious influences, and the strength to resist them had been taken from me’.11 Nor is there any discernible reason for his secret drinking at home: ‘I had no warning of what I was about to do next. Suddenly, to my own surprise …’, and he goes to the drinks cabinet with Magda out the room.12 He claims that ‘man gets used to anything, and I am afraid that perhaps he gets used quickest of all to living in a state of degradation’,13 which might be further proof of the excuses of a befuddled drunkard, and

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support a reading which sees Sommer as largely self-​deluded. However, this last statement is remarkably close to Raskolnikov’s outburst in Crime and Punishment when he says ‘Man gets used to everything –​the beast!’, with its philosophical aftershock that such a view entails a moral relativism around good and evil.14 Magda responds to her husband: ‘ “I can see it’s no use talking to you any more, Erwin. You have lost all sense of right and wrong” ’.15 We also appear to be in that moment that Gervaise experiences in the laundry, overtaken by some metaphysical accidie: ‘ “It can’t be the alcohol. I never drank schnapps before today, and this lassitude has been hanging over me for such a long time now. Whatever can it be?” ’16 Elements of the sense of ‘awakening’ to the world and questions around what constitutes ‘freedom’ are subtly hinted at when Erwin attempts to rescue the prison grocery contract that he is set to lose. Once outside the prison: ‘I looked into the bright sunshine of that lovely spring day like someone who has just awakened from a heavy dream, and doesn’t yet know whether he is really awake or is still sighing under the weight of the nightmare. I was still sighing under it. In vain the iron gate had dismissed me to freedom; I remained the prisoner of my own troubles and failures’.17 While the protagonist never fails to point up the physical rewards of drinking to oblivion, the wiping out of failure and regret, he also indicates that he is prepared to live ‘beneath the surface’ to experience the beauty of ‘falling’ and ‘to shut [his] eyes and plunge into nothingness, deeper and deeper into nothingness’;18 later when he turns away from schnapps to the more ‘dangerous’ plum-​brandy, he is plunged into ‘abysses’.19 These references to dream/​reality,20 nothingness, freedom, including the sentiment that ‘alcohol transformed the whole world for me’,21 actually have little impact or import so early on in the novel (even if putting them together as I have done here indicates otherwise), since the reader is caught up in Erwin’s narrative of business failure, marital failure, and his problem drinking, and at this point the reader is not in a position to know that Erwin will end up in prison. But the fact that the question of cause and effect around the centrality of his drinking becomes less significant as the novel proceeds, and is never a consistently plausible approach to self-​understanding for Sommer himself, suggests that the metaphysical insight the situation brings to him is what is of most importance to the novel as a whole, that is, the encounter with ‘falling’, ‘nothingness’, ‘abysses’, ‘lassitude’, and the question of real ‘freedom’ away from bourgeois convention. For instance, when in hospital, Sommer develops boils and talks about his capacity for suffering: ‘I am, if I may say so without presumption, a great sufferer’,22 a self-​view similar to those of London, Don Birnam, Geoffrey Firmin, and perhaps

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even Rhys’s heroines. In Sommer’s statement there is an allusion to, or echo of, Job’s suffering in the Bible, when God visits a plague of boils upon Job to test his faith. To place a character in such a situation in a Godless world, as The Drinker does, provides the ground on which to build an Existential response. Like Firmin in Under the Volcano and Rhys’s female drinking protagonists, the sense is once more of an individual alienated from the world into which he has been born. In The Drinker there is both the literal abandonment of Sommer by his wife and society, and the metaphysical abandonment he discovers in prison and which the concept of Absurdity seeks to capture as an ontological given. Narrative, modernity, and the Existential self There are also a couple of aspects to The Drinker which are unusual in comparison to the other books dealt with here. As already mentioned, one is that the ‘drinking’ ends about a third of the way through the novel, when Sommer is placed in a custody from which he never escapes. The second is that his sense of an ‘authentic self’ is not articulated as an inherent project or ultimate goal. This could of course be because it is not one of the novel’s abiding interests and that looking for Existential authenticity is unwarranted by the novel, but I don’t think that this is the case. One question we might ask is just how far Erwin Sommer’s sense of self is dependent upon ‘drink’. Even though the novel’s title steers the reader towards seeing Sommer’s identity as defined through drink, Sommer sometimes disavows this ready interpretation, while at other times he invites us to see that this transformed world gives access to a fully understood self:  ‘The coloured web in my brain enticed me, the dark untrodden jungles of my inner self tempted me; from afar, a soft seductive voice was calling’.23 In the penultimate chapter Sommer comes to a full recognition of his self in the world, a self that has remained without solidity in the first-​person narrative, since he has been volatile in his dealings with his wife, Magda, and other inmates when he is in hospital/​prison, for reasons where the causes are not always obvious, as we have seen. Towards the end there is a plaintive cry from Sommer: ‘ “This is the autumn, it will break your heart”. Two words tacked themselves on: “Fly away! Fly away!” Yes, to be able to fly away from this soiled world, from this unclean “I”!’24 Again there is the sense of a secularised religious context: here it is in the language of ‘soiled’ and ‘unclean’, as if both he and the world are guilty and sinful –​he is sullied, the earth25 is despoiled –​in a way that is similar to Geoffrey Firmin in Under the Volcano, and ‘the drinker’ in this self-​presentation comes to represent the condition of the world in the middle of the twentieth century.26

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But what has led to this final assessment and predicament? Prior to his incarceration and time in the hospital he has been insistently resentful of Magda’s ‘efficiency’, with the implication being that he does not live up to her standards of application and orderliness. The German original is tüchtig,27 which also carries a social context of traditionally valued qualities, here coupled with his wife Magda. There is then a sense of both emasculation and a failure to live in the German world of business. The insistence that Sommer places on the contrast between himself as a helpless dissolute and his wife’s successful handling of business certainly nudges the reader to interpret  along these lines. His failure as a businessman is starkly foregrounded at the end of the novel when Magda informs Erwin that she has taken up with a former business acquaintance who is a wonder at managing their affairs. This brings together interpretations of the novel in relation to drinking, self, and capitalism. In the second half of the book, at the moment he finds himself in the hospital, Sommer realises that his life is now in the hands of a ‘machine’,28 and so this element of the narrative is a continuation of the sense that the ‘individual’, and the idea of the individual, no longer has any meaningful existence. All people must accede to ‘efficiency’ (be hard-​working, conscientious, orderly, just like Magda) and to the demands of ‘the machine’ (a motif relating to modernity that we have already seen in Jean Rhys’s novels). Although represented quite differently from the other drinker texts discussed so far, this underlying principle remains. His treatment of Magda on the straightforward level is irrational and cruel, amounting to domestic abuse, and yet if she represents the world order at its most dominant and desirable his actions are cast in the light of an individualistic response to such a dehumanising process. His reasons for being critical of Magda at the beginning of the story are to do with little things that he believes are done deliberately to annoy him, for instance she doesn’t offer him cake at his birthday party, and a cobweb in his room isn’t cleared by her for three whole days when cleaning the rest of the house.29 This might prompt the reader from the outset to see Sommer as paranoid, believing that his wife is against him and finding ‘evidence’ for this in trivial events which more likely than not have innocent explanations. But the conflation of ‘drunkenness’ and ‘madness’ later on in the novel, again while plausible on the everyday level as presented within the narrative, does not seem to fully account for either Sommer’s actions or his treatment. The downgrading of the charge from ‘homicidal intent’ to ‘uttering menaces’30 indicates that his imprisonment and subsequent time in hospital under indefinite observation is a disproportionate reaction from the authorities, as if the inciting incident with his wife is always just a pretext for

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ensuring somebody who refuses to conform will be imprisoned and labelled ‘insane’. The alienation from the modern world is also symbolised by his move inside the prison hospital, since while he is now in the clutches of the ‘machine’ he can see the inaccessible beautiful countryside from his window:  ‘Outside above the high iron-​spiked wall I  see the peaceful evening countryside with its meadows and slowly ripening cornfields, right across to the low strips of woodland on the horizon’.31 He also notes himself how easily distracted he is from bigger plans; his revenge upon Magda, for instance, gives way to more immediate, mundane matters,32 so his world continues to narrow. All this is punishment for his failure to be a good businessman and a good husband. It is once inside and locked away from the social world that the metaphysical world begins to emerge. We thus have a double movement at this juncture:  this failure to succeed leads to a stripping away of the protagonist’s conventional view of self and world. Once in prison he is forced to contemplate the temporal ground of his existence: ‘The weight of an infinite length of time in which nothing happens, descends on me like lead. This bare room, containing only the essentials, seems an image of my future life. Nothing to look forward to, nothing to wish for, nothing to hope for … a life in which every minute is empty and the future will be empty, too’.33 On the one hand he must contemplate life’s nothingness, a life emptied of meaning, and in this sense he is forced to confront an existence pared back to its essentials; on the other hand this emptiness is a contrived punishment, lacking the ‘fullness’ that the conventional bourgeois world offers, as long as the person accepts the terms and conditions of such a world, that is. Part of the novel’s ending is an ironic inversion of the successful capitalist. Sommer is committed as ‘insane’, yet finds himself ‘comfortably off’ from the money his ex-​wife pays for the guardian. He will end up being wealthy because he is not in a position to spend all the money: ‘I shall die a wealthy man’. As already suggested, however, Sommer does not exhibit that desire for an authentic self that is more obviously observable in the other novels. He simply seems to descend unwittingly into this metaphysically elemental situation. The actions that lead him there, the prodigious drinking and expenditure, the hostility towards his wife and others, just seem to happen because he has that particular personality. The musings about nothingness and meaninglessness, it could be argued, are natural outcomes for anybody who finds him-​or herself in Sommer’s predicament. But again I would compare the way in which the narrative works in Fallada’s novel to the way it works in The Trial. In Kafka’s novel Josef K. is awakened to a world he has lived in for thirty years but has never

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taken any notice of. Once in the newly perceived world, the world as it really is, he finds that he does not understand it, nor can he understand how to behave in it. The ‘parable of the gatekeeper’ towards the end of The Trial, as noted in the previous chapter, can also be applied in outline to Erwin Sommer. Throughout the novel the reader feels that there is something inevitable about the way that once the chain of events has started it can only end badly for Sommer, without adequate psychological or causal explanation. It is no accident that both novels pit a character against ‘the law’, a concept with physical and metaphysical implications. Fallada’s novel, like Kafka’s, refuses to suggest anything other than that human existence is absurd and that there is no metaphysical solution to the basic condition of absurdity. Fallada’s figure of ‘the drinker’ then becomes emblematic of the ontology of existence, just as Kafka chooses to present to the reader a man who finds himself arrested for doing nothing wrong. The difference between K.  and Sommer, however, is that the latter regards himself as besudelten, ‘besmirched’ or ‘sullied’,34 whereas K.’s only self-​ perceived failing is that perhaps, like the man in the parable, he has been too passive in his existence, waiting for ‘the Law’ to be given to him rather than ‘creating’ it himself. Why should Sommer see himself in this way as ‘fallen’? The paralleling of his own condition with that of the world certainly carries with it the sense that both self and world are ‘fallen’, in a theological sense, and Sommer does appear to yearn for a prelapsarian existence when he espies the natural rhythms of the countryside beyond the prison walls. In Sartrean Existential terms, this is the desire to make the ‘for-​itself’ identical to the ‘in-​itself’, to return to a state of being that is unaware of its own existence. But of course this cannot be. The awakening of consciousness to his authentic self –​the self stripped bare of habituations –​entails the impossibility of returning to the unselfconscious state. It could be that the novel has no especial sympathy for this view of the self-​regarding, self-​pitying individual at the same time as it exposes it, and that might be borne out by placing the novel in the context of Fallada’s other work, which is predominantly of a social caste. The drinker as Everyman Consider this list of novels from around the time of the Second World War which have drinking and drinkers as a central motif: Good Morning, Midnight (1939), The Legend of the Holy Drinker (1939), Hangover Square (1941),35 Two Serious Ladies (1943), The Lost Weekend (1944), The Drinker (1944), Under the Volcano (1947).36 There is a ‘peak’ here

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at mid-​century of ‘drinking’ novels that are not part of the ‘recovery narratives’ prevalent at other times in the century. These novels put drinkers at the heart of the narrative in ways which are non-​judgemental, even where the characters may judge themselves harshly on personal grounds. All the works show an awareness of the social stigma attached to drunks and alcoholics, and exist at a time when habitual drunkenness has been fully medicalised, as we saw in The Lost Weekend,37 yet they find ways of presenting their characters which go beyond these dominant modes of understanding the drinker. It seems natural to ask why all of these works should appear around the same time (Under the Volcano would have appeared during the Second World War if Lowry had found a willing publisher), and whether in considering this there is anything of import for discussion of ‘the Existential drinker’. Is there some reason for the convergence around the Second World War of  Existentialism, heavy drinking, and literature, or is it all coincidental? The short answer is ‘I don’t know’. ‘Existentialism’, as broadly defined and outlined in the Introduction, begins mid-​nineteenth century. Kafka’s writings begin in earnest in the second decade of the twentieth century. If we take the argument that expressed alienation is a response of despair to modernity, and that Existentialism is one particular aspect of that, then it is no surprise to see that literature continues to deal with the theme in the middle of the twentieth century. The World Wars can be viewed as the products of modernity: the First World War is the first war fought on an industrial scale using the methods of modern industry; the Second World War is the consequence of a response to the global failure of capitalism, and/​or the continuation of battles for empire (for example, the German Third Reich). Does Existentialism become popular in the immediate post-​Second World War period because a philosophy which takes its starting point to be the absurdity of the universe –​there is no ‘sense’ to the universe we find ourselves in –​is actually the only thing that makes sense following the fact of two World Wars and the Holocaust? Even if all of the above is true –​and it is a contestable narrative at every point –​none of it accounts for the ‘flowering’ of such novels. These are all works from writers who at times, or all the time, drank heavily. As writers, they were perhaps bound to be interested in the personal and the political, although of course there is no rule which says they have to write about either, or even be interested in either in the first place. Lowry’s novel addresses fascism and the role of political agency in the world, but subordinates it to metaphysical issues; it is complicated since the novel also views the world as ‘drunk’ in its movement towards war. Jackson’s novel, on the other hand, studiously avoids the war raging

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across the pond in Europe, even though the war is happening as he writes. Since he does deal with the war elsewhere (the short story ‘How War Came to Arcadia, N.Y.’, in The Sunnier Side, and  in his second novel, The Fall of Valor) we can only assume that it is deliberate and he does not want the novel to be read in relation to the Second World War, nor for ‘drunkenness’ to be taken as a metaphor for anything else, such as the world’s madness. Hamilton’s novel makes specific mention of the declaration of war, and a murdered character is described as a fascist, so it would be possible to thus read it in a similar way to Lowry’s, that is, the behaviour of Harvey Bone’s drinking circle is somehow a comment on the ‘drunken’, careless, craven entry into the Second World War, but this I think is forcing the issue. Such concerns are hardly evident in Hamilton’s earlier stories on the drinker’s milieu in Twenty Thousand Streets under the Sky. Likewise, Rhys’s novel is similar to her earlier novels, where a female drinker in a hostile world is the focal point. There is something in all of these works, in other words, including the relationship between the author and the author’s writing, that can be put into the social and historical context of the period, but nothing to say that the figure of ‘the drinker’ has any special or necessary place. However, I do feel that there is something about Fallada’s The Drinker which warrants further scrutiny. What I have not so far mentioned is that Fallada’s novel was written while he was incarcerated in a Nazi mental asylum in 1944. This fact means that there is some pressure to read it as an allegory of the erosion of freedom undertaken by the Nazis in the 1930s. Sommer seems to recklessly take up drinking and to behave in a manner which presents him as oblivious to the dangers which eventually destroy him. John Willett makes just such a tentative claim in his ‘Afterword’ to The Drinker. He notes that ‘there is no direct reference either to National Socialism or to its organizations’38 yet concludes: ‘it is hard not to take its steady descent into the pit as a parable –​less specific than the big novels but all the more shocking –​of Germany’s march into the depths’.39 I am inclined to agree with this, partly for the reason that in the same period of incarceration in which Fallada writes The Drinker he also writes a prison diary, which, rather than detailing his actual time in prison, is primarily an account of 1930s Germany and the way in which the country succumbs to National Socialism.40 The ways in which he sees himself acting in the 1930s, along with others, suggests a blindness and naivety to just how dangerous the situation was. He remains sad and angry at the way his beloved homeland has been hijacked by the National Socialists, and in part the diary is a self-​reckoning, just as The Drinker is Sommer’s own self-​reckoning. By extension, given the overlap between the narrative of

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the novel and Fallada’s own life, The Drinker can be read as another version of the author’s self-​reckoning. So The Drinker can be read in at least four ways: a simple tale of the drinker coming to a sticky end; an Existential narrative of an awakening to the Existential absurdity of existence; a parable on the fate of Germans and Germany in the 1930s; a fictionalised authorial confession  –​but it is the role of absurdity, rendered through the protagonist’s self-​awareness of being ‘the drinker’, which perhaps is the most convincing. Notes 1 Hans Fallada, Der Trinker (Berlin: Aufbau, 2011). 2 Noted by John C. Willet, ‘Afterword’ to The Drinker, p. 285. 3 Hans Fallada, Little Man, What Now? (New  York:  Melville House Publishing, 2009). 4 Walter Greenwood, Love on the Dole (London: Vintage, 1993). 5 Fallada, The Drinker, p. 117. 6 Sartre explores this feeling of ‘superfluousness’, and its revelation of existence, in Nausea. 7 Camus’s opening question to The Myth of Sisyphus, as previously noted. 8 Fallada, The Drinker, p. 1. 9 Ibid. 10 Ibid., pp. 5–​6. 11 Ibid., p. 14. 12 Ibid., p. 17. 13 Ibid., p. 9. 14 Dostoevsky, Crime and Punishment, p. 44.There is also perhaps an element of the self-​ loathing and ‘spite’ of Dostoevsky’s nameless protagonist in Notes from the Underground, and a further possible Dostoevsky reference when Sommer calls the asylum ‘the house of the dead’, ‘das Haus der Toten’ (original German). 15 Fallada, The Drinker, p. 53. 16 Ibid., p. 24. 17 Ibid., p. 11. 18 Ibid., p. 37. 19 Ibid., p. 108. 20 ‘It was as if I lay imprisoned in some heavy nightmare, close to waking all the time and yet unable to waken, and becoming involved in ever deeper and more fearful horrors’, ibid., p. 64. 21 Ibid., p. 5. 22 Ibid., p. 281. 23 Ibid., p. 28. 24 Ibid., p.  278. There is an implicit irony in that ‘Sommer’  –​‘summer’  –​is denied ‘autumn’. Else, his Queen of Alcohol, puns that it will always be ‘Sommertime’ with him, p. 114.

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5 ‘Earth’ would be the more usual translation for ‘Erde’. 2 26 Given these religious echoes of Job (suffering and boils) and questions of guilt/​sin/​fallenness, it also might make the reader reconsider an early passage when Magda takes care of Erwin’s injured feet after he has been wandering:  ‘she washed my feet, washed the dirt of the road out of my wounds, wiped them gently, applied the ointment, and bandaged them up’, ibid., p. 37 (cf. John 13:14–​17). He also talks of being beyond ‘salvation’: ‘I realised with a terrible certainty that I was lost, that there was no salvation for me, that I belonged to alcohol, body and soul’, p. 47. When in prison he exclaims ‘ “In hell”, I think. “I have landed in hell” ’, p. 181. 27 I am indebted to Niels Petersson for discussion of this word and other matters relating to translations from the German. 28 Ibid., p. 175; Fallada, Der Trinker, ‘die Maschine’, p. 172 29 Fallada, The Drinker, p. 1. 30 Ibid., p. 174. 31 Ibid., p. 176. 32 Ibid., p. 170. 33 Ibid., p. 177. 34 The original of ‘Yes, to be able to fly away from this soiled world, from this unclean “I”!’, p. 278, is ‘ “Ja, wer fortfliegen könnte von dieser beschmutzten Erde, von diesem besudelten Ich!” ’, Fallada, Der Trinker, p. 287. 35 I have not covered Hamilton’s novel in The Existential drinker because although there is a certain Existential feeling in relation to the milieu of alienation, there is little sense that Harvey Bone is driven by notions of authenticity. 36 We could add to the list two plays by Eugene O’Neill, The Iceman Cometh (1939) and Long Day’s Journey into Night (written 1941–​1942), and slightly earlier, John O’Hara’s novel Appointment in Samarra (1934). 37 And ten years earlier Fitzgerald’s Tender is the Night (1934) places the alcoholic in a psychoanalytical context. 38 Willett, ‘Afterword’, p. 298. 39 Ibid., p. 302. 40 Hans Fallada, A Stranger in My Own Country: The 1944 Prison Diary, ed. Jenny Williams and Sabine Lange, trans. Allan Blunden (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2015).

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Brian Moore, The Lonely Passion of Judith Hearne (1955): abandonment

But what if the godless were right …?

We are quite a few pages into The Lonely Passion of Judith Hearne before discovering Judith Hearne’s drinking habit,1 and it is then that we begin to realise how her drinking is entangled with a growing intimation that God is no longer part of her life. Alienated through ostensibly social causes such as her ‘odd duck’ physical appearance and family responsibility, the character’s dulling of reality through drink is also her response to the kind of bleak truth that Jack London identifies in John Barleycorn. The novel is located in early 1950s Belfast, and from within that particular environment it takes the reader into a view of the world which suggests a desolation of spirit in a society that demands religious obeisance regardless of the plight of any given individual, a society in which family ties have an equally strong, and largely entwined, influence. The twin pressures on self are established on the opening page when Judith moves into new lodgings: her first act is to place a photograph of her dead aunt in the centre of the mantelpiece, and her second act is to put a picture of the Sacred Heart at the head of the bed.2 Typical of a certain strand of Existentialism (for example, Dostoevsky’s Crime and Punishment), The Lonely Passion of Judith Hearne portrays the shock of ‘freedom’ and the feeling of ‘abandonment’ when people either through choice or circumstance find themselves adrift of these internalised anchor points. In this Judith Hearne is a descendant of Janet Dempster from George Eliot’s tale, and anticipates some of the material in Ironweed and Paradise, covered in later chapters. Although the sociohistorical contexts of Judith Hearne and Erwin Sommer are very different, the rejection of their social environments, and simultaneous and consequent resort to heavy drinking, is similar. In turning away from the conventions that provide meaning  –​bourgeois values for Sommer; a religious, family-​orientated society for Hearne –​the

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characters face a ‘nothingness’ and sense of abandonment that they fill with alcohol. The identities of both characters are then bound up with the project of drinking. A difference between Hearne and Sommer, and indeed those figures such as Rhys’s heroines, Jack London, Geoffrey Firmin, and Don Birnam, is that Hearne does not have drink as a goal in itself. Even though Sommer is not engaged in ‘drinking’ after a third of the way through the novel, his life remains self-​defined by it. Hearne seems to more obviously fit that kind of character who is on occasion overwhelmed by drink, who ‘lacks capacity’ to make proper judgements, who does not quite appear to choose to drink in the way I have argued that these other figures do, although she does plan a drinking binge towards the end of the novel which is also a continuation of her drinking up to that point. Nevertheless, the ‘truth’ peddled by ‘the godless’ in the novel is perhaps rather too hard for Judith Hearne to bear, and the extent to which the novel embraces a thoroughly Existential outlook is certainly open to question. Existential thought and literature emphasise the primacy of choice in rejecting the deadening pressure of convention, of ‘the they’, on the self, and the element of will in Judith Hearne’s behaviour is very much open to interpretation in relation to her drinking. Her predicament of ‘loneness’ seems far from self-​willed since a large part of the narrative is taken up with her expectation that James Madden will be the man for her and save her from the life of a spinster. This means that for much of the novel Judith Hearne pins her hopes on an ‘external’ validation of self while at the same time accepting the truths of Catholicism. This chapter attempts an analysis of the novel within this general view to see what connections might be made between Judith Hearne’s loneness, drinking, and Existential freedom once the sense of God’s abandonment comes to the fore. Passion The first thing to note is the title. ‘Passion’ most obviously refers to Hearne’s romantic desires, but it also, given the religious context for much of what happens in the novel, refers to ‘passion’ as in ‘Christ’s passion’. The meaning of ‘passion’ in relation to Christ is ‘suffering’, so Moore neatly fuses the idea of Hearne as both romantically unfulfilled and as existing in a manner that parallels that of Jesus in his final days. To ask the reader to see Judith’s plight as in some ways comparable to that of Christ creates quite a complex symbolic framework. If Hearne’s suspicion is that the ‘godless’ may be correct, while the novel casts her in the figure of Christ, the symbolic implication is not too far distant from an Existential idea that we become our own gods, imagining self

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and creating individual morality. It may seem quite a leap to view the shabbily genteel Judith Hearne as taking on the role of a Nietzschean superman, yet she is certainly positioned as somebody who must create her own set of values when the bulwark certainties of society, family, friends, and religion are shown to be fraudulent. These certainties should be there for everybody, but Hearne finds the good things in life do not come her way. Of course, a religious view of the novel might show that the trials that Judith Hearne undergoes are a test of her faith, as with Job in the Bible and the more general tenor of Christian belief, but that does not appear to be the novel’s view of its character. The Sacred Heart The Sacred Heart is an image of Christ, usually with a halo, and sometimes holding his fingers up in benediction, as in the picture that Judith has, and with a representation of his heart surrounded by thorns on the middle of his chest. On the top of the heart there is usually a cross, and sometimes there are flames as well. Beneath the thorns a wound with dripping blood might be included. The heart is the symbol of Christ’s love and compassion for the world and the thorns and other associated imagery indicate suffering, both Christ’s and humanity’s. A person may devote themselves to the Sacred Heart, and this is what Judith does. The Sacred Heart thus becomes Judith’s personal spiritual focus. While devotion to the Sacred Heart may incorporate many different aspects, towards the end of the Litany of the Sacred Heart, which we can assume that Judith knows, are the calls ‘Heart of Jesus, source of all consolation’ and ‘Heart of Jesus, salvation of those who hope in Thee’, and these are the most fitting in Judith’s circumstances. The narrator introduces possible symbolic significance for the story as a whole by describing elements of the picture which have an air of foreboding:  ‘His eyes kindly yet accusing. He was old and the painted halo around His head was beginning to show little cracks. He had looked down on Miss Hearne for a long time, almost half her lifetime’.3 She then has trouble hanging it. If the photograph of her aunt follows her everywhere and helps her view material circumstances with a critical eye, the Sacred Heart takes care of her spiritual and emotional needs –​up to a point. While religion is her comfort in life, and drinking is her occasional refuge from life’s disappointment of being obliged to look after her ill aunt and missing out on marriage and children, religion is the overwhelmingly necessary support. However, what becomes apparent is that it is religion which prevents her facing up to life honestly. The consequence of the drinking is that it brings on shame at the drinking lapses, where both Christ in

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the image of the Sacred Heart and her aunt in the photograph cast looks of disapproval, while this in turn leads her to start doubting the significance and truth of religion. After a drunken bout in her room she goes to church, where her thoughts lead on: ‘The great ceremonial of the Mass, the singing, the incense, the benedictions, what if it was show, all useless show? What if it meant nothing, nothing?’4 Religion stands in the way of nothingness, and while it might seem that drinking is ‘wrong’ and no solution, it is apparent that staying true to all that religion offers and represents is the one thing that prevents Judith from an honest self-​ appraisal about being-​in-​the-​world-​with-​others. Religion in this society is the dominant external pressure to behave in a certain way when encountering the trials of life. It is the consequences of drinking which lead to Judith’s realisation that this is the case, that is, it is not ‘willed’ in the way London talks about it, for Judith does not actively seek out truth through drink, but the result is the same as London’s assertions. Unsurprisingly, at the point in the book where she contemplates the idea that church ritual and iconography are an empty show, Hearne immediately regrets her ‘blasphemy’. Nevertheless, the genie is out of the bottle and she is open to, or ‘vulnerable’ to, further encounters with ‘nothingness’ and ‘meaninglessness’. Walking away from the church she continues ‘supposing’: supposing that the ‘godless’ are right, that mankind evolved from slime, that there was no such thing as sin, that she could have acted out her lustful desires (recalling occasions when she felt these emotions). She remembers John Healy, who imagined not being Catholic and not believing, and who could then be a profligate:5 ‘No hell, no purgatory, no responsibility to God. If all the priests were wrong and you died and slept into nothingness, what point, then, in all of that? […] No god’.6 If this indeed is the case, then perhaps drinking does have to be seen as nothing other than Judith Hearne’s choice. When she lives as a believer, drinking is the temptation which she should resist and which she must confess to as a sin of commission. However, when she no longer believes, when ‘nothingness’ and ‘meaninglessness’ are the ontological givens rather than a universe overseen by God, what is the place of her drinking then? It can no longer be succumbing to the devil, it can only be her wish, it can only be a consequence of what she wills. The remainder of the book, from about half-​way through, is this struggle to come to terms with such an Existential premise. Again, at this point, her reasoning leads her to contemplate the moral anarchy that would ensue if there were no God, and then how defenceless a woman like her would be: ‘No, no there has to be a god and if there was no god, men would make one’.7 This, of course, is just as dangerous a presupposition, to believe that God is man-​made, or could

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be man-​made, and again, very much a Nietzschean vein of thought. She does continue at different times to argue herself back into faith, but what she really is looking for now is a sign from God. The landlady’s son, Bernie, ridicules this view when he maliciously points out that her silly religion means she has been waiting for a miracle to happen to turn her life around, and no such miracle has occurred. One of her replies is: ‘This life is a cross we have to bear in order to store up merit in the next’,8 another item of faith, and another she rejects when others offer her this as advice, such as Father Quigley. The novel presents a number of different types of relationship individuals can have with religion. For Madden ‘Religion was insurance’, ‘Confession and resultant absolution were the pillars of his faith. He found it comforting to start out as often as possible with a clean slate, a new and promising future’.9 This is not just his attitude to religion, but his attitude to life, for he is somebody always ready with a new scheme and somebody always falling short of his own standards, for example with his drinking and his hypocritical sexual behaviour when he rapes the housemaid. For him, each day can be a new start after behaving badly. The religious attitude of others is also often portrayed as hypocritical, but it is possible that, in a way, Hearne sets a standard for belief and behaviour which is higher, more rigorous and honest than that of other characters in the novel. Although Judith Hearne is not regarded as a ‘religious person’, this only means that she does not get involved in church affairs and enterprises, not that she doesn’t believe. Her aunt’s advice has been ‘Prayer and a rigorous attention to one’s religious duties will contribute far more towards one’s personal salvation than the bickering that goes on about church bazaars’, and so, easing into Hearne’s mindset, ‘Miss Hearne had her lifelong devotion to the Sacred Heart. He was her guide and comforter. And her terrible judge’.10 Religion is everywhere in Belfast, and in Hearne’s world, the Sacred Heart is virtually everything in the way of making her way in the world, of living on a day-​to-​day basis and of shaping her life narrative and self. But what, exactly, is the true narrative, which is the ‘centre’ or ‘the point’ of the novel?11 From what has been said so far it would appear to be Judith Hearne’s loss of faith. But rather like the heroine of ‘Janet’s Repentance’, there is something quite subtle about the treatment of the nature of faith, both in general and in Judith’s particular case, and this gives us further consideration of the role of drink and drinking. A crucial issue is whether Hearne turns away from God, or whether she becomes an atheist. At one point she does come to the conclusion that there is no God. When she is in the hotel room towards the end of

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the novel she knows there is no reason to feel guilty, because without a God, being drunk cannot be a sin. This makes it all seem as if she has come to a philosophical ending, but of course the emotional and the rational are mixed in together. It is her feeling of abandonment that leads her to see that there is no God and that she is thus free to do whatever she pleases. In this she is no different from Raskolnikov, it is just that she tests the limits of her known universe by drinking rather than by committing murder. In that sense, the exemplary ‘sin’, the act which indicates perfect free will, could be any action that is shocking to everyday accepted values. From the Existential point of view, however, Hearne is unable to do anything with this new-​found freedom. What in a sense has helped her realise fully her secular situation –​drinking –​is also the only thing she can turn to, and this in turn is what traps her. But her belief that there is no God is qualified towards the very end of the novel when she is in Earnscliffe, a kind of rest home run by nuns, thinking to herself: ‘No, I am no atheist. I do not believe, O Lord, help my unbelief. What will become of me?’12 Whether or not there is a distinction to be made between being an atheist and being an unbeliever is a moot point, since the sense of both terms is the non-​existence of God or gods  –​a-​theism, without God(s). The distinction is that somebody can only be an ‘unbeliever’ in the eyes of somebody who ‘believes’. It is possibly a version of this which is present in the context of the novel, for the argument about God’s existence is carried on by Judith with God, that is, Hearne is in the position of asking God whether he exists or not, as paradoxical as that may seem. It does appear sometimes as if Judith rejects God’s existence, but this outburst close to the end of the book is the religious position she arrives at: an unbeliever in her own eyes. The way in which she reconciles herself to this is to accept the form of life without its content. All passion is gone by the time she accepts her lodging at Earnscliffe, passion in both the senses the novel offers, suffering and desire. When the nurse tells her that it may be two or three more weeks yet before she can leave –​and she has already been there for a number of weeks –​the reader suspects that, like Erwin Sommer, she will never leave. Judith herself probably suspects the same thing since she asks the nurse to put on display her two pictures, of her aunt and of the Sacred Heart, as if settling in for the long haul. When looking at them Judith recognises that they are part of her, the photograph of her aunt more real than the aunt who is long dead. As to the Sacred Heart: ‘It is here and You are gone. I is You. No matter what You are, it still is part of me’,13 which concurs with the idea that her unbelief is from within a kind of belief.

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The novel ends: ‘She closed her eyes. Funny about those two. When they’re with me, watching over me, a new place becomes a home’. The narrative’s conclusion is bleak:  Judith Hearne as a person in her own right is unloved, abandoned, with no purpose in life. Rather like Erwin Sommer’s predicament, drinking has been the means to stripping back existence to its basics, and, again rather like Sommer in his prison, there is nothing substantial to make up for the ‘nothingness’ that the situation reveals. It should be pointed out that, again like Erwin Sommer, there is no sense here that Judith Hearne has an ‘addictive’ personality. At certain points in her life she turns to drink as a source of comfort, a joyful release –​she sings loudly when drunk –​a general anaesthetic, but she is not desperate for drink all the time, and the ending shows her taking comfort in the familiarity of the two icons, aunt and Christ, as the final response to a world in which she has felt ‘loneness’ –​alienation –​to be her abiding condition. Notes 1 On her regular Sunday afternoon visit to the O’Neills’ she drinks sherry (Moore, Lonely Passion, p. 88) but this is only a clue in retrospect. 2 Ibid., p. 7. 3 Ibid. 4 Ibid., pp. 140–​1. 5 Ibid., pp. 142–​3. 6 Ibid., p. 143. 7 Ibid. 8 Ibid., p. 183. 9 Ibid., p. 66. 10 Ibid. 11 The novel amusingly demonstrates how people may wilfully misinterpret stories according to their biases when Mrs Rice says that Father Quigley once refused a communion rail from Mrs Brady because it was paid for with ‘the wages of sin and corruption’. Bernie tells Judith with ‘anti-​clerical malice’ that this isn’t the point of the story. Mrs Rice has omitted Mrs Brady’s reply to Father Quigley, asking how Mary Magdalene acquired the money for oils, pp. 14–​17. 12 Ibid., p. 253. 13 Ibid., p. 255.

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Frederick Exley, A Fan’s Notes (1968): authenticity

‘I’ve discovered what alcoholism is’.

Before readers get to the main narrative of Frederick Exley’s A Fan’s Notes, they are given a few pointers as to what they might expect to be its major themes. The first signpost is the subtitle, ‘A Fictional Memoir’, indicating a confusing, confused, or paradoxical genre. The confusion is exacerbated with the preliminary ‘A Note to the Reader’, beginning ‘Though the events in this book bear similarity to those of that long malaise, my life, many of the characters and happenings are creations solely of the imagination. In such cases, I of course disclaim any responsibility for their resemblance to real people or events, which would be coincidental’.1 Once again, then, we are in the realm of autobiographical fiction, with Exley placing stress on the loose and imaginative manner in which he has reproduced his life. Thus he tells us he wants ‘to be judged as a writer of fantasy’.2 Two further pointers are provided by epigraphs. The first is from the eponymous protagonist of Nathaniel Hawthorne’s debut novel, Fanshawe (1828): ‘If his inmost heart could have been laid open, there would have been discovered that dream of undying fame; which, dream as it is, is more powerful than a thousand realities’. The second epigraph is from a Dylan Thomas letter to Pamela Hansford Johnson:  ‘All Wales is like this. I  have a friend who writes long and entirely unprintable verses beginning, “What are you Wales, but a tired old bitch?” and, “Wales my country, Wales my sow”’.3 The novel is thus set up to be a fictional autobiography in which the author’s projected dreams of glory are punctured by a troubled patriotism. There is not much here though to warn the reader that the life of the novel’s narrator, Fred Ex, is that of a heavy drinker, unless, I suppose, the reader already knows that the novel’s author Frederick Exley had such a life himself.4 Questions about the nature of America in the 1950s and early 1960s, and a central character who finally realises he must remain forever a

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‘fan’ and never be a football star, certainly do form two of the main obsessions in the novel. We can add to these the pursuit of sex. So how are ‘drinking’ and ‘self’ manifest in the novel? The novel opens with Exley recounting a recent event in which he believes he is having a heart attack. He is following the usual Sunday routine at his favourite bar, waiting to watch his team the New  York Giants on screen, when he collapses. It turns out that he has drunk too much on a weekend when he has hardly eaten, and this combined with the anticipation of the game has brought on the collapse. He lets the reader know that the ‘nearly heroic drinking’5 is routine. The incident in turn leads him to re-​evaluate his life, to consider his mortality, and in a novel that moves forward at the same time as it repeatedly returns to key life events, we learn in great detail about a self-​hating narrator who also happens to pretty much hate everybody else most of the time. His most recent job is as an English teacher, so he knows his literature –​the novel is awash with literary references6 –​and he is fully aware of how the dominant social and psychoanalytical world of 1950s America views a loser such as he is, since he finds himself on more than one occasion in a mental asylum being subject to electro-​shock therapy and insulin-​ induced comas.7 Such a novel may not sound very attractive, but this is an extremely funny and moving work, told in a manner which gives the impression of complete authorial honesty, one of those works where the reader might feel that the fictionalisation of the writer’s life conveys truths that a straightforward autobiography might fail to achieve, as noted in the Introduction. None of this, though, is necessarily the stuff of the Existential drinker. What makes it so is that Exley does not shy away from a logical conclusion of Existential thought –​the determinedly authentic self, when judged by generally accepted criteria of ‘virtue’ and ‘goodness’, may be a rather unpleasant self. In this, he actually stands in a rather strong line of such figures: Dostoevsky provides such a protagonist in Raskolnikov, who murders two people to prove that he rather than society or God is the source and author of meaning in the world; Kierkegaard’s Abraham in Fear and Trembling is prepared to murder an innocent child in a way which goes against all accepted and acceptable ethical values;8 Meursault in The Outsider likewise murders without just social cause. Existential drinkers also act against social norms, knowingly committing self-​murder and causing distress to friends, family, and many others they might come into contact with. On his mother’s davenport Exley catches her watching him, and suspects that she views him as somebody who has travelled within himself only to find some kind of evil. Whether that is what she thinks or not, he describes what has happened to him in those very terms: ‘Out on the road I had discovered

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my own putrefaction, had discovered in my heart murder, utter, brutal, and conscienceless murder’9 –​putting him in that lineage of figures who can only understand themselves and an idea of self from within, set against conventional social laws and mores. Is such behaviour really about an ‘authentic self’, though, rather than, say, simply acquiring the kind of knowledge of self that has been a staple of the modern novel since the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, for example in novels like Emma, where Emma is led to a self-​understanding thanks to Mr Knightley, or in novels along the lines of the Bildungsroman which show the reader how the protagonist becomes a responsible adult, such as Jane Eyre?10 Exley’s realisation is twofold: that he is a person who is constantly running away from responsibility, and that it is possible to write a novel with hate as the starting point rather than love.11 A cowardly wannabe writer prone to hatred of self and others again sounds like somebody we should be avoiding, and no doubt such drunken navel-​ gazing is the kind of literature that Donald Newlove castigates in Those Drinking Days.12 But I think that Exley’s self-​appraisal, where there is virtually no attempt at all to redeem the character, is more Existential than anything else. If there is a self which both recognises and makes its self, in the face of pressures to be and to do otherwise, then Exley the committed drinker is precisely this figure. The way in which he has long periods of time spent on ‘davenports’ (sofas) without motivation seems to bear out Camus’s notion that there has to be a reason for living that comes from the self rather than being imported from outside. The obsession with the New York Giants provides a structure for existence for a period of time, but ultimately it is not the routine itself so much as the sense of the self as a project of authenticity which is at issue for Exley the narrator. The main barrier to authenticity –​the pressure of ‘the they’ –​comes in the form of the American Dream, constituted as it has been (and is) by one or more of money, fame, and beautiful women. He pursues all of these, as he knows he is expected to do by the society he lives in, a society that radiates outwards from his parents, particularly his father, who had a fame of his own and which he would like to emulate: ‘I wanted to have my name one day called back and bantered about in consecrated whispers’.13 Having no sporting talent of his own, he finds himself somehow gaining fame vicariously, in his own mind, by following the career of the New York Giants footballer Frank Gifford, believing that such close attention to this player somehow makes it his own life: ‘ “He may be the only fame I’ll ever have!” ’14 In addition to this ‘fame’, he also finds the golden girl, Bunny Sue, only to come to a stark realisation that he has projected all his desires into making her

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part of his personalised American Dream, ‘Miss America’, his ‘nemesis’.15 As to riches, he has opportunities in the world of advertising and PR, but again only to eventually realise the reality that this world is just as vacuous as any other. Whilst pitting the American Dream against the reality of everyday experience is not in itself especially original in art and literature, the American Dream as used by Exley is more imaginatively cast as exemplifying the groundlessness of existence: the novel is both a direct attack on 1950s America and a metaphysical account of how an individual strives to ‘exist’ in a world in which he is alienated. His inability to consummate his relationship with Bunny Sue is also shown as his inability to connect with his country: ‘I went back to Chicago and replayed the memory of it; it was that day I first sensed that I had never loved Bunny Sue –​I could not even put her features together –​and that my inability to couple had not been with her but with some aspect of America with which I could not have lived successfully’.16 He is partly brought to realisation about Bunny Sue when he spends time with her family, and that instigates his dismissal of the element of the American Dream which comprises the perfect family, as represented in a 1950s Kodak advertisement he describes, or (inversely) when he bumps into ‘a family so incredible that for the first time in my life I considered the possibility of Norman Rockwell’s not being a lunatic’.17 It could be argued that the novel is still nevertheless primarily about a kind of patriotism, and that Exley’s anger is directed against a perceived decline in America’s greatness rather than being anti-​American. When he meets the ‘new America’ as represented by four clean-​cut college boys, he provokes them into beating him up, spitting at them ‘am I not American?’ This may ultimately be the novel’s position on ‘America’: other criticisms come in the form of Mr. Blue, a failed elderly salesman of aluminium siding who desperately continues to push himself and his wares, with echoes of Willy Loman in Death of a Salesman (1949) and foreshadowing Shelley Levene in Glengarry Glen Ross (1984).18 Mr. Blue dies farcically when Christmas decorations explode, the snow foam forming the beard of St Nicholas and the blood on his shirt providing the cerise.19 It is another indictment of the nation: ‘Mr. Blue’s way of death was fitting. He had been utterly corrupted by America’.20 Another example of what counts as success, alongside ‘the family’, and money, is membership of the country club.21 When it is less evidently the American Dream against which everybody is judged, the aims still contribute to a normative societal pressure, as when Exley describes how the doctor in the mental asylum attempts to motivate his patients with ‘The goals –​a wife and family, a vice-​presidency, a Cadillac’,22 the ‘notions of normality’ that the medical profession appears to accept without demur.23 Although he

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is not forced to engage in work in the asylum, he realises he had better do so to demonstrate he understands this is ‘what makes the wheels go round in America’ and doing this, along with desiring a colour television, will ensure his release.24 Thus the novel situates Exley explicitly within a detailed social and historical milieu, within and against which the self engages. In the midst of this, Exley’s commitment to drinking fulfils a number of functions, but primarily it signals his unwillingness to accept America, and by extension, the world,25 on its terms rather than his. He is alienated, and he ensures that he alienates others; the emptiness of the American Dream is not just him as an individual running up against the reality of American life, such as we find in Death of a Salesman, but the emptiness of life itself. Neither the American Dream nor his own passion can fill the void. All of the passions which appear to give meaning to his life are external impositions:  the dream girl(s), the money, the fame, or, more virtuously, the idea that ‘Life was Ennobling, that God was beneficent, that the Universe was a Joyous and Profoundly Simple Thing’.26 All of these possible motivations for making life worthwhile are cast aside at some point. The novel is an Existential text in the same way that The Trial is, with a lead character unable to overcome the central paradox of an existence in which there is no intrinsic meaning to life, in which there is no guidebook on how to live, and the only certain knowledge is that it will all end in death. Unlike those characters who embrace drinking, albeit in an agonistic way, such as Jack London, through Rhys, Jackson, Lowry, and (as we will see) Venedikt Yerofeev, Exley concludes at the end that he remains ‘running’. Josef K.  remains ‘waiting’ for the Law, which turns out to be waiting for ‘death’ (on one interpretation). Still, what about the drinking? The drinking Drinking is so central to Exley’s existence that after the initial establishment of its place in his life it often fades into the background, something he is doing off stage while the real story is something else altogether. After the relationship with his dream-​girl-​come-​true Bunny Sue breaks down, he simply glosses the period with: ‘my dizzying descent into bumhood is the usual bleak fantasy, so I will omit the details. After repeated warnings about my excessive drinking, I was fired from my job’.27 In talking about Mr. Blue and his death, Exley introduces the time and place of such chat very casually: ‘With a stranger, two at the most, I am sitting at some distant saloon at two in the morning and, the bar empty now, we are sipping beer’ as if he is some latter-​day ancient

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mariner condemned to drink and tell tales,28 which, in a sense, he is, as he tells the reader that to save himself he had to tell of his past, to himself, and to us. At the end of the novel, and hinted at throughout, is the final understanding that he has to ‘write out’ his existence, ostensibly to comprehend his past in a way that will make sense of his present self. This would be a neat, psychoanalytical narrative if it were left there, but the ambiguity of the ending, his feeling of forever ‘running’, in a novel which notes how narrativised endings are always unsatisfactory,29 tells us that there is no final reconciliation between self and world. The ‘running’ is his response to the anxiety without cause, it is his ‘angst’, central to Existential thought. ‘Drinking’ is the manner in which he works through the sensation of ‘running’, a teller of tales to any stranger who will listen. His continued drinking can only foreground mortality. He tells us on the first page that the heart attack was no such thing, but what it did rekindle was the fear of death he thought he had brushed to one side: ‘having cast it off, I thought, with the effortless lunacy of a man putting a shotgun into his mouth and ridding himself of the back of his skull. That the fear of death still owns me is, in its way, a beginning’.30 As with the novels already covered, there are plausible reasons for Exley’s drinking which are psychological rather than philosophical. He drinks to ‘sustain’ his dreams of conquering New York.31 The drinking binge that leads to his collapse has been sparked by his receipt of divorce papers. His sons are twin 2-​year-​olds and later on Exley recounts a moment when he actually has fatherly feelings for them, after a lengthy earlier period where he had no interest at all. Yet none of these reasons, nor the other failures in his life, are sufficient cause to explain the drinking. Only the groundlessness of his existence, in the midst of these life disappointments, really explain his relentless turn to drink. It would be fair to ask what he gets from drinking. He doesn’t provide any descriptions lauding drink, as we get in John Barleycorn, Rhys, Under the Volcano, and The Lost Weekend. It may initially have been part of a general hedonism he was drawn to in his youth,32 but the attraction of a hedonistic lifestyle is over at some point; apart from a spell in Chicago, it is only on rare occasions he finds life sensuously pleasurable. He does cast himself as ‘worthless’ in comparison to other good people, such as his wife, Patience,33 or his step-​father,34 and so it might seem that he drinks because of low self-​esteem. But these reasons do not measure up to the ingrained disdain he has for the world, and for his self when it attempts to ingratiate itself in the world, for example by getting a good job, or when he withdraws from the world to journey into the self on one davenport or another.

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The alcoholic Exley accepts the label of ‘alcoholic’ as a commonplace reference to somebody who drinks excessively, but does not evince any belief in it either as an accurate description of his own condition, for it cannot account for his malaise of self, nor in any of the possible cures from medicine or quasi-​spiritual outlets. On television he watches ‘a “religious” show, a drama about the redemption of an alcoholic woman through the discovery of Jesus Christ’ and finds it implausible.35 In the mental health centre Avalon Valley, he is obliged to attend group therapy sessions for alcoholics: ‘It was not that any of us doubted the efficacy of group therapy for alcoholics (it is probably the only treatment), but, oh, dear heart, alcoholics in the loony bin!’,36 yet the whole tenor of the book is that there is no cure for whatever it is that ails him, and certainly not what the medical profession and ancillary treatments offer. Exley’s story is exactly the same as everybody else’s labelled ‘alcoholic’:  ‘one long grievous history of lying, cheating, and stealing for booze, and in the wake of that story an aggrieved mother and father, a heartbroken wife, neglected children’ as he says of another alcoholic inmate,37 but the problem remains that the label has no purchase on the real ‘problem’ because it cannot understand the person, a view that we saw was held by Don Birnam. It is only possible, in what may be deemed Existential fashion, for an alcoholic to understand his own ‘truth’. When Paddy the Duke tells Exley he has worked out that ‘sadness’ is the key to understanding what alcoholism is, Exley looks back and concludes ‘that Paddy had come to a kind of truth, the truth for himself’.38 When he is in hospital after the seizure, he refrains from getting into a lengthy conversation with the nurse as to why he doesn’t go to Alcoholics Anonymous in order to sort himself out. He gives the reader a couple of reasons for this. One is that when he did attend meetings in the past he didn’t like their evangelical and confessional nature. Further: ‘Unlike some men, I had never drunk for boldness or charm or wit; I had used alcohol for precisely what it was, a depressant to check the mental exhilaration produced by extended sobriety’.39 This is the opposite of the tradition that sees drink as a drug that opens the doors to perception. It could be argued that by using drink as a damper on what he deems a heightened awareness of the world when sober, he is unable to face up to reality, and so being drunk takes the edge off the world and off a self that doesn’t stand up to much scrutiny. But in some ways we are in similar territory to that of Jean Rhys’s heroines, where the sober world is not a liveable place, nor should it be taken for a reality that each individual perforce must accept. When he talks about ‘the place’ (location) around

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the bar in which he has his seizure, of its beautiful vistas and immaculate lawns, he says: ‘Even up close it looked like some dream of place, and because I hated that place, I hated myself for having to seek its aid’.40 The drink cuts both ways: it does numb conventional reality, but it also bolsters the self which strives to be authentic. Existence When Exley early on considers why he supports the Giants, why he immerses himself in following them, he gives a number of reasons, for instance, the job of being a football player is direct and male, it offers certainty in his world of circumspection.41 But at the end he cannot identify any particular thing about it except that it brings him to life: ‘Whatever it was, I gave myself up to the Giants utterly. The recompense I gained was the feeling of being alive’.42 Of course, the problem with this, as already suggested, is that this particular spur to feeling ‘alive’, to truly ‘existing’, is external to the self and so at some point, just as with any other external spur to life, such as Judith Hearne’s belief in God, it may not be enough, and so the individual is sent back to a naked awareness where they must confront the ungrounded self. Exley does indeed refer to his team as ‘the One God’43 and so clearly lays out the correlation that his identification with the Giants is his version of a secular religion, a reliance on spiritual sustenance external to his self. Religious traces are also present in the way he contemplates existence, telling a twenty-​ ­something grieving drinker to accept his pain as part of life,44 a throwback to the idea that mankind suffers because of Adam’s original sin. Exley often alludes to the possibility of some all-​encompassing external project which he might devote himself to as a means to ‘cushion’ himself against the world: ‘God or Literature or Humanity’.45 When he thinks he is about to die he keeps moving, believing motion to be life. As I moved I was still weeping profusely; scalding tears streamed down my cheeks, and all the time I called, if not to God, to the insidious and arbitrary forces of the universe  –​Oh, don’t let it be like this! Not like this! –​even attempting in my fear, to bargain with that force, asking time for one more beer, time for one more game, time to get used to the notion of an eternity of darkness. ‘You son of a bitch!’ I said. ‘I want to live!’46

In facing death Exley faces life as it is, rather than sleepwalking through it. And yet, rather than family or love, what he asks for is another beer. Of course, as is abundantly clear throughout the novel, he does not believe in God or external forces because he knows that the life he lives and has lived has been entirely within his own hands. The life he has lived and

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lives is authentic, even if, by most people’s standards, it is his own fault if it looks to be void of anything that might have made it worthwhile. Madness Exley’s novel was published in 1968 and mainly covers the 1950s, along with the first two or three years of the 1960s.47 The immediate post-​ Second World War period is known for being a time when conformity constituted a greater social pressure than before, especially following the inroads made by the psyche sciences. The consequence is that ‘madness’ as a concept straddles a spectrum from, at one end, a clinical diagnosis which identifies biochemical causes as the underlying problem (psychiatry), through psychological and psychoanalytical descriptions and cures, to a social ostracism which deems those unwilling to conform to convention as ‘mad’. The society in which Exley lives, according to Exley, is closest to this societal view of madness:  ‘We had failed our families by our inability to function properly in society (as good a definition of insanity as any)’.48 Exley suspects that his friends and neighbours regard him as being childish and an embarrassment because of his ‘drinking, debts and hospitalisations’, the latter just desserts for somebody who thinks he can successfully exist outside the parameters of the American family, ‘as though they were telling me that getting myself proclaimed mad and dragged away a number of times was only a childish and petulant refusal to accept their way of life as the right way, that in seeking some other way I had been assuming a courage and superiority I hadn’t possessed’.49 The connection between drunkenness and madness is longstanding and provides an aptness here for Exley in that his drunkenness and associated negative behaviours can be awarded this classification. While recognising the opposition between the desires of American society and those of some of its individuals, the novel does not set out to describe a Laingian, countercultural idea of madness as a wholly socially constructed affair. He does recognise virtually throughout the novel that he is not well, either in society’s eyes or in his own.50 His willingness to accept the hopes and goodness of Bunny Sue, Patience, his mother and step-​father, for instance, demonstrate that this is no solipsistic recounting. At all turnings he recognises his own shortcomings. Nevertheless, the point appears to be one similar to the Existential view that being-​in-​the-​ world is necessarily being-​in-​the-​world-​with-​others: the existing self is not one that can live in splendid isolation, it is one that is situated within relations: ‘America had gone wrong for me, or me for America’.51 Part of that point, however, is that the state of being-​in-​the-​world-​with-​others

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is one of continual tension, one that cannot be resolved. Exley notes the clash between the troubled individual’s private world and the social world when considering the actions of the doctors in the asylum: No doubt to a great extent motivated by lack of time and an unconscious awareness of their own shortcomings, they found it simpler to eliminate our realities and substitute those of society. It had seemed to me, too, that the doctors were quite willing –​perhaps, unconsciously eager –​to punish patients for refusing these realities. About the treatment there was a kind of melancholy brutality; hadn’t we, after all, long since, put aside society’s realities as being incompatible with our abilities to live?52

As with Rhys’s novels, there is no superior or default reality, as defined by society and science, against which to judge the reality of individual consciousness. For instance, when in Avalon Valley, he notes that what is common to all the inmates is ‘ugliness’, because ‘there was in mid-​century America no place for them. America was drunk on physical comeliness’, thereby inverting whose or which world is ‘sober’ and whose or which is ‘drunk’.53 By apprehending the world in this way, by understanding existence as comprising multiple realities, both ‘external’ and ‘internal’, the reader (taking the novel on its own terms) is not in a position to substitute a single reality (or set of realities) against which all others are to be judged, and that has to include the reality of the drunken consciousness, in actuality and narrative retrospect. In such a way it is possible for the ‘fictional memoir’ to grant a drunken being-​in-​the-​world equal status to any other kind of being-​in-​the-​world. It is here that we see once again Sartre’s ‘drunkard’ as more authentic than ‘the general’, and that the realities of an un-​sober worldview, as with Rhys’s heroines and Firmin’s fantastical mind, are given Existential credence. Exley is also careful to maintain a view of this self as Sartre’s ‘for-​itself’, in that Exley is always watching himself be ‘Ex’: ‘There was always one I, aloof and ironical, watching the other me play out “his” tawdry dream’.54 This is crucial to seeing Exley’s life as a commitment to whatever life it is that is lived, rather than one that is submerged helplessly beneath ‘the they’ of society or the agency-​depriving view of ‘madness’ –​‘one’s consciousness so irrevocably laid on the indifferent altar of science’55 –​ or ‘alcoholism’. His belief that a spell in an expensive private asylum (his first period in an asylum) will help him, because money will solve everything, and because he will have the opportunity to pour out the darkest secrets of his soul to a humane profession, turns out to be yet another illusion perpetrated by America, and, by extension, the world. It’s not that he doesn’t have dangerous fantasies –​‘dreams of rape and murder and incest’56 –​but he knows them to be precisely that, ‘fantasies’. To reveal them to America’s

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best psychiatrists and psychoanalysts is meant to be his way of getting at the ‘heart’ of it all, but of course, nothing comes of it. The self has to make its own meaning to be authentic. Family and love Exley does have family in the novel, he has a wife and twin sons. His seizure is preceded by Freddie the barman impersonating Exley as he imagines he might be ten years in the future:  drunk, hopeless, and showing a fading photograph of the boys that nobody believes are his.57 He calls them ‘my only and final link with humanity’,58 and then he has the attack. He stumbles outside because he does not want to die in a barroom, no doubt leading the reader to expect that this is a moment of transformation, a moment when he overcomes his drinking and irresponsibility. However, nothing changes, and instead the novel rakes over the past, bringing the reader back to this point in time and then taking us beyond a little. If there is one moment that does connect Exley with humanity, it is the event when he sees the twins and feels a bond to them that is not described anywhere else in the novel. From a more ‘human(ist)’ narrative we might expect that this is the moment that would change Exley into a man who will take his place in conventional life, accommodating himself to his wife Patience and to bringing up the children. He says, though, that it’s too late. Why is it too late? While none of God, Humanity, Literature, Fame, or Money can provide an ultimate meaning for Exley, ‘love’ could be the one thing the novel believes can serve as a bridge between self and world. It is certainly presented in a way which makes it of an order different from these other possible sources of meaning, and a way of being in the world which demands more consideration than anything else, for instance: ‘I wanted the wealth and the power that fame would bring; and finally, I wanted love –​or said that I did, though I know now that what I wanted was the adulation of the crowd, and that love was just a word that crowded so many other, more appropriate words off the tongue’.59 ‘Love’, then, has to be treated with great care to be understood properly. In the seizure incident, when Exley believes he is having a heart attack, he envisages the circumstances of his death in a way he has long foreseen: ‘If it had hit me then, I’d have died the way I had for a long time believed I could die, impenitent, chill of heart, unloving, unloved’.60 The scenario for the reader seems very clear: the narrator is a man who has drunk away his life, and the intimation of death gives him the forceful clarity that his has been a loveless existence. By implication, then, what could redeem a selfish alcoholic is love, and, by extension, what should

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always redeem humanity is love, a logic familiar from Under the Volcano. On a typical interpretation this would mean that Exley’s fatal character flaw is an inability to enter into loving, reciprocal relationships with family such as his mother, wife, children, or with friends, since he takes without giving, from people such as the Counselor, a man who helps him through different stages of his troubles. These are all the elements of a standard temperance narrative, and it seems contrary and wilful to interpret it otherwise. But the problem with this is that it ignores what is resolutely Existential about the novel: this is precisely Fred Exley’s self. In the same way that Raskolnikov and Meursault choose to be authentic, and thus exist wholly outside of normal social relations, Exley, in demanding of himself authenticity, cannot do otherwise. He cannot love for the sake of loving, he cannot love family and friends because this is what is demanded of him by right-​thinking people. In The Outsider Meursault is condemned by society for not grieving at his mother’s funeral. Exley condemns himself in a conventional way throughout the novel for being without love, and yet even at the end of the novel there is no sense in which he could be anything else. He eventually accepts that he is an outsider, and that he is a writer. Both of these may be taken to be an abnegation of responsibility, at least in the way that Exley frames it for himself, but despite everything he cannot compromise his authentic self. Yet this still does not capture Exley and love, for in the immediate aftermath of the seizure he considers what ‘messages’ the incident sent him: ‘Had I loved my mother? My wife? At the existential moment I had wanted to believe that I had; but I could understand now, listening to my ever-​quietening heart, that I had probably deceived myself into believing that I was still capable of love. More than anything I mourned the loss of this capacity. The realization of this loss suddenly made me want to weep again’.61 It is one of the few occasions where the sentiment and tenses are confusing, on the one hand implying that he had the capacity to love in the past and did so, but on the other hand giving the impression that he never did love his mother or wife (and later on it is clear that he hasn’t loved Patience, his wife). Similarly, when he remembers his father’s death –​‘I had not known whether I loved him or not, whether he was the Earl Exley who “beat up on” people or the man whose strong hands went out to the dregs of this world’ –​Exley’s confusion around the emotion is apparent. The novel remains ambivalent about ‘love’. Redemption: the autofictional author-​narrator-​drinker Rather like The Myth of Sisyphus in its dismissal of (Existential) philosophies which redeem themselves in one way or another by smuggling

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in an essentialist meaning, and thus conveniently forget the meaninglessness at the heart of the world with which they must begin, Exley casts out, as we have seen, those more common pursuits which might provide reasons for living:  sex, money, fame, God, and, more problematically, love. There are two things, however, which act as a kind of redemption in terms of providing a self-​determined project:  drinking and writing. I will talk about the writing first before seeing how this links with the drinking. One of the features of an autobiographical fiction such as A Fan’s Notes is that the book we are reading is acknowledged to be a physical entity in the real world rather than existing in a bracketed-​out fictional realm, so in theory the narrator stands in relation to the novel in the same way that we as readers do, that is, external to the book, since the narrator is a version of the real-​life author. The Lost Weekend refuses this model of authorial self-​referencing, so that we are asked to read the novel as independent of the life of its author and regard Don Birnam as wholly fictional. This was done partly because Jackson didn’t want readers to assume he was an alcoholic like Don Birnam and with the same set of problems, but it is also a reasonable aesthetic stance  –​authors don’t wish their work judged according to extraneous biographical details since it often leads to ‘reductive’ or simplistic responses, as discussed in the Introduction. Jackson was angry when Hollywood chose to end its version of his novel with Birnam foreswearing drink and returning to writing, because the implication for the audience was that Don Birnam was in reality the writer Charles B. Jackson. What difference does it make to reading A Fan’s Notes that we know the author wants us to recognise a connection between the author and the narrator? After all, even though Exley’s ‘A Note to the Reader’ tells us that there are great similarities between the novel and his own life, he still avers that it is a work of fiction, at the fantasy end of the fictional spectrum. There is no ready answer to this. Literary Criticism has frequently avoided biographical readings since the middle of the twentieth century, and authors have quite often preferred to have their writing judged as aesthetically autonomous. But readers not bound by Literary Criticism or Theory can choose to delve as deeply as they like into the lives of the writers, believing that literary works are written extensions of people just like ourselves but who happen to be better at articulating their experiences of the world than non-​(professional) writers might be. Further, some works appear to positively invite biographical attention in the game-​playing manner that Exley’s ‘A Note to the Reader’ does, whereas other fictional works by their very nature, perhaps impersonal

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nature, might seem to have only an indirect connection between the author’s life and the narrative. One way of approaching the connection between Exley’s life and art is to see that A Fan’s Notes is a subtle Künstlerroman, a novel that tells how the writer came to be a writer, such as James Joyce’s Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man. Exley’s novel is full of literary references, to writers who are role models as writers, guides to life and the self,62 fantastic literary places and ‘real’ literary places (­chapter  6, ‘Onhava Regained and Lost’, has both Onhava  –​the capital of Zembla in Nabokov’s Pale Fire –​and Saul Bellow’s Chicago), and to the characters they have created against whom he can judge his own life. There is, then, already a continuum between life and literature, where life is lived out against a background of literature, and the literature, his own and that of others, is an expression (rather than straightforward ‘reflection’) of that life. Of interest here, then, is when he mentions his earliest piece of writing that may have had any merit. This is a piece from his time at college called ‘A Portrait of Constriction’, beginning with the line ‘I am a spider without filament; I extend to no place’. Although he makes no comment on the line itself, it reads as a fusion of the openings to Dostoevsky’s Letters from the Underworld –​‘I am ill; I am full of spleen and repellent’,63 and Kafka’s ‘Metamorphosis’, in which Gregor Samsa wakes up to find himself changed into a ‘monstrous insect’.64 Exley the narrator appears to be all of these things alluded to, and then something else, since the main sentiment is that he has no connection to others, no ‘extension’ in space, or perhaps more accurately, ‘community’. The line presents a man who regards himself as unfit for human society, an outcast with no human relations. But as bad as the story Exley claims it was, the line gives the reader a sense of the theme(s) that have preoccupied the young Exley, and which can be seen in the novel, but also that as bad as the piece was in its entirety, it did have the merit of ‘a tentative feeling for language’.65 The novel cleverly drops in, almost incidentally, the transformation of a man who begins as wanting to write in order to be famous, who then believes he is poetically talented by writing for the advertising industry,66 finally to one who realises that his self is one that must be a writer. I say that this is done in an understated way because the book mainly foregrounds Exley the sports fan and Exley the committed drinker. The fact that he spends months on the first line of writing this book, having read numerous works on ‘the art of writing fiction’, is dealt with in passing,67 while showing how he attempted to con people into thinking his writing was going well. When in Avalon Valley in the latter part of his stay there he manages to write a vast amount, although it still

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isn’t the book we have in front of us: ‘In many ways that book was this book, which I wasn’t then ready to write’,68 and he does give an account of a tortuous writing process.69 This project of self as writer, with writing its own reward rather than as means to other ends, is referred to by Exley as ‘The call’. Exley is fully aware that at the same time as he rejects 1950s consumerist-​conformist America and all who sail in her, he might simply fall into an alternative set of identities that in their way might be no better. The further struggle is that his authentic self often seems to be no more than one of these other fixed identities. In a letter to Patience that he never sends, he recalls its pretentiousness: ‘ “For my heart”, I wrote, “will always be with the drunk, the poet, the prophet, the criminal, the painter, the lunatic, with all whose aims are insulated from the humdrum business of life”’70 –​ all of them Romantic outsider figures in this juxtaposition, a parallel set to his ‘outcast’ ‘chums’ at the University of Southern California: ‘poker and horse players, drunken veterans, petulant instructors, would-​ be novelists, homosexuals, talentless poets, an occasional Negro’.71 The core of the letter, though, is that he will be a writer, and, as he says, this does not mean to say a famous or brilliant writer, since those things cannot be guaranteed. We can compare this to both Sartre’s and Camus’s ‘escape’ routes to what can often seem the cul-​de-​sac of the project of self. At the end of Nausea Roquentin realises that his self-​determined project is to write, and to write what appears to be the very book we are reading. In The Myth of Sisyphus Camus talks about ‘creativity’ as a positive project that gives purpose.72 Similarly, the figure of Exley in A Fan’s Notes appears to find meaningfulness in the act of writing, with the implication that the book itself is the autofictional author’s goal, successful in bringing order to a chaotic existence, or an existence that has lacked self-​definition and definition of self. The narrative arc of Exley’s self in chronological sequence is: hedonism,73 forced conformity (Chicago), illness when self and world are irreconcilable (on the davenport, in the asylums), acceptance of outsider status (time at the Counselor’s), acceptance of the project of self (writer). The movement towards realising himself as a writer is also one that must abandon the clichéd image of the writer, and particularly the writer-​drinker, as when Exley remembers his tutor Harlan Hatcher at USC recalling time spent in Paris in the 1920s, where everybody was drinking and talking about writing, except Hemingway, who ‘was locked up in a room getting on with the business of his life’.74 Exley says of himself and the other drinkers at Louis’ ‘that we represented to one another wasted time and crippling dreams’.75

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Exley’s self-​realisation that he cannot be part of normal society is expressed when looking back on how the Counselor accepted Exley’s presence in his apartment without question: In my own bad time, when I had been shuttling back and forth between asylums, when even my family had despaired of my recovery, he had given me a davenport to lie down upon, and books to read, and money with which to buy liquor. Never once had he inquired about my health. He hadn’t because he had understood that what I needed was time to get used to being an outsider, a condition he had long ago accepted about himself and which had become an article of the faith by which he moved.76

There is no Romantic grandstanding here, no sense of conquering the world. That part of the rebel outsider is foresworn for a mundane acceptance that he just is an outsider, for better or worse. While for earlier times in his life this outsider view is certainly one that accords with Romanticism and a superior vantage point, the self we encounter towards the novel’s chronological endpoint is one that sees Romanticism as a form of posturing, another ‘external’ source of sustenance for the self. It is only when he comes to the juncture of being an outsider who doesn’t have a point to prove that he can then move on to be a writer who is separate from the received image of the writer. In an earlier incarnation of his self, when he longed for the ‘adulation of the crowd’, he imagined that he would get it by writing ‘The Big Book’.77 The reference here is to writing the one great novel that can illuminate America –​‘the next Great American Novel’ as somebody in advertising mocks his ambition78 –​a book perhaps like Bellow’s The Adventures of Augie March, which Exley uses to frame the time he works in Chicago.79 However, there may also be an intended irony since the guide used by Alcoholics Anonymous is also known as ‘The Big Book’ … which brings us back to the question of Exley’s drinking. If being a writer is what Fred Exley is all about, what role does the drinking play? Is it just another feature of being an outsider, ‘a drunk’, just like a ‘homosexual’, ‘criminal’, or ‘poet’? As we have seen, it certainly is partly this, and, as we have also seen, drink and drinking fulfil a number of functions, not just the most obvious presentation of Exley to the world as somebody who has no regard for it. His commitment to drinking helps create the alternative world he wants to inhabit authentically. When the young Exley casts himself as the spider without filament, without extension into place, he projects an image of self that is solipsistically, obnoxiously self-​sufficient. The lifetime of heavy drinking, to the point of his encounter with mortality, goes some way to living out this early story. It becomes one way to ensure that ‘the they’ cannot

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intrude upon, cannot compromise the authentic ‘Fred Ex’. Of course, it can be argued that the price of authenticity, freedom, and a pristine philosophic self-​consciousness, is that very unloving and unloved death that Exley fears and which is a price that nobody in their right mind would want to pay. And yet, somehow, perhaps rather like Meursault, there remains something admirable about the author’s fantastic alter-​ego ‘Fred Ex’ who simply will not accede to sentiments, to a way of being he is not passionate about. He is a ‘fan’ of his own life, on his own terms. This does not mean that there is a resolution, but it does mean that the ‘running’ with which the novel ends can be seen as that running towards self which Existentialism calls for, rather than the usual interpretation of running away from responsibility and the real world. Ultimately, the reader no doubt makes some kind of decision, about the character Fred Ex in the novel, and then perhaps Frederick Exley the author, and then perhaps, as a further separate entity, the person Frederick Exley. When Ex in the novel takes a literature course at USC, he does so ‘with a view to reading The Books, The Novels and The Poems, those pat reassurances that other men had experienced rejection and pain and loss’.80 This is a novel about somebody who experiences those emotions within his ‘self-​ pitying bosom’,81 who can be self-​critical about the Romantic embodiment of those emotions in literature –​‘Oh, I had had my enthusiasms, but they were dark, the adoration of the griefs and morbidities men commit to paper in the name of literature, the homage I had paid the whole sickly aristocracy of letters’82 –​but who refuses, in the name of an authentic self, to give either himself or his readers any pat reassurances. ‘The call’ of the writer-​drinker might be the one commitment Exley can self-​determine, but without in any way suggesting it could possibly be anybody else’s panacea. By the end of the novel, Exley can see the world for what it is, finds himself unable to stop raging against it, but at the same time is able, through drinking and writing, to live with the ‘strange, anguished, and perverse realities we had fabricated for ourselves’.83 Coda A Fan’s Notes is about a loser with no control over his life. Every time there is a setback he turns to alcohol: the failed connection with Bunny Sue; inability to find a job he likes; recognition he won’t be a football star or achieve fame of any kind; his rejection of Patience and the twins; his lack of success in writing. He is weak, cowardly, self-​hating, misogynistic. He claims that this was always to be his fate and passively accepts it, rather than making any great effort to change it. Elsewhere he references Henry James’s short story ‘The Beast in the Jungle’, a story

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about a man who waits all his life for a revelation which will transform him, only to realise at the end that the woman who stood by him was to be that very revelation, but it is too late since she is now dying. That seems to have saliency for Exley’s life as well. I wouldn’t argue against any of these descriptions. However, I would still argue that Exley fulfils the idea of ‘the Existential drinker’: he maintains, as Nietzsche argued individuals should, his own ‘style’. The novel itself is also a triumph of hard-​earned style. It is impossible to conceive of the figure in the book as living a life that could be authentic in any way other than this, in other words, it would not be possible to truly exist as Ex in any way other than this. The novel ends: ‘And when again the vision comes, I find that, ready to do battle, I am running: obsessively, running’.84 That ‘ready to do battle’ is the very opposite of somebody passively accepting his fate. Notes 1 Exley, A Fan’s Notes, p. vii. 2 Ibid. 3 Ibid. 4 The novel has the limited fame of ‘cult’ status, and Exley himself left little trace of his rootless existence, ‘until later years’, Jonathan Yardley, Misfit: The Strange Life of Frederick Exley (New York: Random House, 1997), pp. xi–​ xii. Yardley’s is the sole biography of Exley. 5 Exley, A Fan’s Notes, p. 1. 6 For example:  Nathaniel Hawthorne, Dylan Thomas, Pamela Hansford Johnson, Charles Dickens, Hans Christian Andersen, Truman Capote, Ernest Hemingway, Thomas Mann, Saul Bellow. There is even a joke which may be at the author’s expense, when he overhears two men in the street cite ‘Aymé and Kerouac and Edmund Wilson and Ginsberg and Pope’, ibid., p. 353, and hates their pretentiousness. Some of the novelists also provide protagonists to be emulated: Mann’s Tonio Kröger and Felix Krull, Bellow’s Augie March, Beerbohm’s Felix Argallo. 7 Treatments which represent the drive for conformity in post-​Second World War America, as also seen in Ken Kesey’s One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest, which presents a psychiatric ward as a microcosm of a regimented America (London: Picador, 1980 [1962]), and a section of Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Man where the unnamed protagonist is subjected to electro-​ shock therapy for, ultimately, not conforming to America’s view of how a black man should behave (Harmondsworth, Middlesex: Penguin, 1979 [1952]). 8 Søren Kierkegaard, Fear and Trembling (London: Penguin, 2003). 9 Exley, A Fan’s Notes, p. 210. 10 Jane Austen, Emma (London: Penguin, 1985); Charlotte Brontë, Jane Eyre (London: Penguin, 1985). 11 Exley, A Fan’s Notes, p. 335.

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12 For example, writing from the point of view of a recovered/​recovering alcoholic, mocking the younger self for believing drink could be mastered by the genius writer. Donald Newlove, Those Drinking Days:  Myself and Other Writers (New York: McGraw Hill, 1988), pp. 11–​15. 13 Exley, A Fan’s Notes, p. 30. 14 Ibid., p. 232. 15 Ibid., p. 220. 16 Ibid., p. 221. 17 Ibid., p. 57. Norman Rockwell’s paintings/​illustrations were (are) renowned for portraying an ‘apple-​pie’ version of America. 18 Arthur Miller, Death of a Salesman (London: Penguin, 1961); David Mamet, Glengarry Glen Ross (London: Methuen, 1984). 19 Exley, A Fan’s Notes, ­chapter 6, ‘Who, who, is Mr. Blue?’ 20 Ibid., p. 296; ‘like Joyce’s Leopold Bloom, like Quixote, Mr. Blue had become the perennial mock-​epic hero of his country, the salesman, the boomer who believed that at the end of his American sojourn of demeaning doorbell-​ ringing, of faking and fawning, he would come to the Ultimate Sale, conquer, and soar’, ibid. 21 Ibid., pp. 18–​19. 22 Ibid., p. 75. 23 Ibid., pp. 75–​6. 24 Ibid., p. 94. 25 Exley’s horizons do appear exclusively American. Only occasionally is there a suggestion of a wider world, for example, when he notes his brother has to go off to fight in the Second World War, pp. 182–​3, or that they are living in ‘the hydrogen age’, p. 190. 26 Ibid., p. 84. 27 Ibid., p. 173. He does provide a little more detail, but again it is a summary of drinking behaviour rather than anything extensive:  ‘For the next few months I drew forty-​five dollars a week in railroad unemployment and with this, together with moneys I quite shamelessly bummed from my roommate and other barroom acquaintances, I was able to stay drunk continually’, ibid. 28 Ibid., p. 298. 29 Ibid., p. 297. 30 Ibid., p. 1. 31 Ibid., p. 71. 32 Ibid., p. 18. 33 Ibid., pp. 361–​2. 34 Ibid., p. 224. 35 Ibid., p. 14. 36 Ibid., p. 111. 37 Ibid., p. 114. 38 Ibid., p. 115. Exley later says, quoting Shakespeare, that: ‘therein the patient cures himself’ (p. 225; the reference is to Macbeth); in other words, it is only the individual who can come to understand his or her own self sufficiently in order to come to terms with being-​in-​the-​world.

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9 Ibid., p. 26. 3 40 Ibid., p. 23. 41 Ibid., pp. 6–​7. 42 Ibid., p. 8. 43 Ibid., p. 9. 44 Ibid., p. 20. 45 Ibid., p. 30. 46 Ibid., pp. 22–​3. 47 The novel begins ‘On Sunday, the eleventh of November, 196-​’. The only year this could be is 1962. 48 Ibid., p. 75. 49 Ibid., p. 10. 50 ‘the coming years of hospitalization were necessary to me –​and they were –​ they were necessary only in that one man might make his peace with a new and different man’, ibid., p.  186. This sounds as if the ‘new and different man’ is the one who accepts conformity to the dominant American way of life. However, at the end of the novel, while he may be reconciled to certain aspects of self and world, the tension via authenticity remains (see comments on ‘running’ later in the chapter). 51 Ibid., p. 80. ‘Was I, too, insane? It was a difficult admission to make, but I am glad that I made it; later I came to believe that this admission about oneself may be the only redemption in America’, p. 88; again, this is another suggestion that his illness is also in some way America’s insanity. The logic of this then becomes that he might as well live in a lunatic asylum as in America at large: ‘I did, in fact, eventually come to such an equanimity that I believed I could live out my life at Avalon Valley, live it there as well as live it in any America I had yet discovered’, p. 97. He also suggests, when looking back to seeing Mussolini and Hitler on newsreels as a child, that they were clearly mad, p. 182; he sees in the ‘infantile’ face of a jingo writer for a missile firm ‘the world’s insanity’: ‘“That’s the way the missile goes/​Pop goes the world!” ’, pp. 213–​14. Ex appears to be referring to Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-​Four when he says ‘For years I had been aware of the theory, expounded by Orwell and others, that the world was in all probability mad’, p. 214. In Orwell’s novel it is expressed thus: ‘Being in a minority, even in a minority of one, did not make you mad. There was truth and there was untruth, and if you clung to the truth even against the whole world, you were not mad’. George Orwell, Nineteen Eighty Four (Harmondsworth, Middlesex: Penguin, 1981), p. 174. However, overall, A Fan’s Notes does not make the continual associations of a drunken, mad world in the same way that Lowry does in Under the Volcano, Exley’s novel mainly confining its critique to that of America. 52 Exley, A Fan’s Notes, p. 76. 53 Ibid., p.  77. Similarly, the Negro with ‘the devil inside him’ Exley sees as a perfect representation of America’s endemic racism, both ‘mad’ and ‘real(ity)’: ‘to tell him there was no devil was not only lack of imagination, it was a lie’, pp. 78–​9.

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4 Ibid., p. 80. 5 55 Ibid., p. 87. 56 Ibid., p. 84. 57 Ibid., pp. 21–​2. 58 Ibid., p. 22. 59 Ibid., p. 35. 60 Ibid., p. 22. 61 Ibid., p. 26. 62 After a spell at Avalon Valley he intends to reread Freud, but finds all he needs in Dostoevsky and Hawthorne, pp. 79–​80; when he struggles to give shape to the vast amount of writing he has done he turns to ‘E. M. Forster and Flaubert and Scott Fitzgerald’, p. 334. 63 Fyodor Dostoevsky, Letters from the Underworld (London: Dent, n.d.), p. 5. Exley talks of ‘my self-​loathing’, p. 84. 64 Franz Kafka, Metamorphosis and Other Stories (London: Penguin, 2000), p. 76. The original term ‘Ungeziefer’ has been variously translated as ‘insect’, ‘cockroach’, etc. 65 Exley, A Fan’s Notes, p. 36. 66 Ibid., pp. 44–​5. 67 Ibid., p. 301. 68 Ibid., p. 329. 69 Ibid., pp. 329–​35. 70 Ibid., p. 361. 71 Ibid., p. 36. 72 Camus, Myth of Sisyphus, pp. 86–​7. 73 Exley, A Fan’s Notes, pp. 18–​19. 74 Ibid., p. 129. 75 Ibid. 76 Ibid., p. 19. 77 Ibid., p. 35. 78 Ibid., p. 50. 79 Ibid., p. 135. 80 Ibid., p. 59. 81 Ibid., p. 63. 82 Ibid., p. 67. 83 Ibid., p. 76. 84 Ibid., p. 385.

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Venedikt Yerofeev, Moscow–​Petushki (1970): self and others

My spirit was refreshed, while my parts went all to hell.

‘Venichka’  –​Venedikt Yerofeev’s alter ego in Moscow–​Petushki  –​ sets off on an increasingly surreal, drunken train journey from the capital of the Soviet Union to the suburban town Petushki, with the intention of seeing his lover and their child. Over 125 km, two hours fifteen minutes, and 130 pages, Yerofeev simultaneously gives the reader a history of Russian literature and a vivid account of the state of the Soviet Union in the 1960s, in a style that might be described as ‘altered-​state philosophy’. Along the way Venichka generously details cocktail recipes for those who might be foolish or brave enough to try them, such as ‘Dog’s Giblets’, which consists of beer, shampoo, anti-​dandruff solution, superglue, brake fluid, and insecticide, marinaded in cigar tobacco for a week.1 The novel’s full title is Moscow–​Petushki: A Poem, but the helter-​ skelter mix of genres takes it beyond a prose poem, as helpfully outlined half-​way through the journey:  ‘God only knows what genre I’ll be in by the time we reach Petushki. Since Moscow it’s been all philosophical essays and memoirs, poetry and prose, Turgenev-​style … Now, it’s a whodunit!’2 It is a book that seems both dense –​allusions, philosophical arguments, historical figures, the inclusion of classical and biblical literature –​and uncluttered, whisking the reader along in a carefree manner, not spending very long on any particular subject, yet somehow managing to significantly condense ideas, meanings, and associations. The novel has many of the elements we have seen elsewhere: the failed life of the worker; the failed life of the writer transmuted into an aesthetic triumph; the alternative world and consciousness of the committed drinker; access to a more profound truth not available to the world of sobriety or drinker dullards; a self that is in essence Kierkegaard’s ‘actual existing individual’, separate from a society pressuring the individual to eliminate the self in favour of public assimilation.3 It wrestles with

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the state of Venichka’s soul and the state of the Russian nation, before slipping completely into a world of devils and angels, echoing Under the Volcano in this respect, but with no sense at all that we can zoom out from the infused vision to gain a more sober perspective. Like A Fan’s Notes, it is also very funny. One of the distinctive features of Moscow–​Petushki when set against the other books is that it ultimately refuses to provide a key to any coherent interpretation.4 All of the literature examined so far has a way of making sense of the absurdity of existence and its intersection with a commitment to drinking, but with Moscow–​Petushki the reader is on a train trapped with the impassioned, chaotic rants, anecdotes, and objectionable views of Venichka, which accumulate in intensity and provocation as he approaches the end of the line and his girlfriend of twelve weeks’ standing.5 The overriding feeling is that neither reader nor narrator has control over the ride, such that the only thing that does seem to make sense is the referencing of drinks and calculations about the meaning and use of alcohol. The closest analogues from other works we have looked at in terms of lacking a grip on the world are some passages in Rhys and Lowry where subjective reality takes centre stage, and (looking ahead), some of the scenes in A. L. Kennedy’s Paradise. But the drinking works of Rhys, Lowry, and Kennedy’s novel retain a kind of formal, novelistic cohesion, a perspective or way of grounding the most individualistic of worlds, of framing the drinkers within putatively more stable physical environments. Moscow–​Petushki gives the reader no consistent framework at all. There is certainly an impression as we depart the station that we might be headed somewhere –​the projected idyll of Petushki, where he will find ‘happiness and salvation’6  –​ but the longer the journey rattles on, the more ridiculous the world and Venichka’s place in it appears to be. His response to living in Moscow, never having seen the Kremlin, becomes similar to the idea of the girlfriend in Petushki: they inflate fantastically in his mind. The sense of Existential anguish is plainly expressed when he describes how he has experienced ‘loneliness’ from the time when he was 20 to his current age of 30. Having been incredibly lonely at the earlier age he wonders if he has become less so in the following ten years. He struggles to understand what this loneliness is, and talks of being at one time ‘gripped by despair and anguish at the sight of those tomatoes’ his friends bring him for a birthday.7 It is only by comparing life to drink that he can make sense of all this: [M]‌aybe I can explain by finding some sort of analogy in the world of the sublime. Let’s say a quiet chap drinks a full bottle of vodka, 750 grammes,

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and becomes rowdy and happy. Now, if he adds another 700 grammes to that, will he be even rowdier and happier? No, he’ll go quiet again. And then, again, if you think how many mysteries there are in the world –​and here his example is that it doesn’t matter how much you drink, your soul is never at ease with itself.8

In a plain, drink-​permeated view of the world, Venichka has all the trappings of the self unable to identify any one thing which could be the cause of his angst, or the source of balm. The reader might also note that another important context is a religious one, both in a metaphysical sense that the world is an unfathomable mystery relatable back to God, and in the sense that Venichka’s world is one of overt religious tussles with angels, the devil, and biblical wisdom. However, for Venichka, unlike Judith Hearne, he never contemplates abandoning God, even if God appears to have abandoned him;9 rather, it is as if he is happy to inhabit the religious-​metaphysical world in the same drunken way he inhabits the actual world. Behind all this, and perhaps more so than in any of the other works in The Existential drinker, we have a character in Venichka who proclaims that he has committed to a self-​determined and self-​determining project: There are no crappy professions, you’ve got to respect every calling. The instant you wake up, you’ve got to drink something right away or rather, no, I tell a lie –​not just ‘something’, but exactly what you’ve been drinking the night before, and you’ve got to keep on drinking it, with a few breaks –​say forty, forty-​five minutes –​until by nightfall you’ve drunk 250 grammes more than you had the night before.10

He goes on to rail at the younger generation for not having this commitment; in his own youth he ‘experimented’ on himself with drink, not just blacking out for a day or two after a binge, but seeing this as a dance with death: ‘if you dared the way I did when I was your age, one fine morning you just wouldn’t wake up at all. But I did, I’d wake up nearly every morning and start daring again’.11 He insists that his commitment to drinking is as valid as any other kind of commitment, bearing out the Existential notion that it is only the individual who can self-​define what is meaningful:  ‘Of course, you’ll say:  “This calling of yours is vile and false”. But I’ll tell you, I’ll repeat what I’ve already said: “There are no false callings, every profession deserves respect” ’.12 And yet Venichka does have an apparent goal beyond drinking, and that is to be with his girlfriend and child in Petushki. But as the journey wears on, what seems a plausible destination is revealed to be, the reader suspects, a solipsistic, utopian projection. If the reader is still willing to believe that there is a mother and son at the end of the line, there is no

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way they could live up to the elaborate praise he heaps on them, for it is made in such a way as to get the reader to believe that it is knowingly and self-​evidently absurd, that Venichka knows he is being absurd, and, in turn, that the journey itself can only be a further part of the futility he identifies as at the heart of existence. His inexplicable loneliness amongst friends is one way of expressing an essential, felt alienation; the idea that a person might just as well study hiccups seriously as anything else that might be studied by ‘psychiatry and extra-​galactic astronomy and the like’ is another:  ‘ “Surely there’s more to life than that, there must be something…” “But there isn’t!” I shout. “That’s just my point. There really isn’t. There’s nothing else” ’.13 ‘Drink’, ‘woman’, ‘child’ are all components of a self-​determined project, but ultimately he does not seem able to install ‘woman and child’ –​‘Petushki’ –​as authentic and meaningful. The more he insists on them, and the closer the train gets to them, the more they recede as anything that could possibly be attained. That just leaves the world of drink. God, fate, and Russia In his inimical way, Venichka wrestles with the problem of free will, God, and fate. There are a number of passages which combine these elements. In the chapter ‘Usad to 105th Kilometre’ he meets the devil, who is set on tempting him. The question is: to what? To jump from the train into the darkness that has suddenly enveloped his carriage? The biblical story alluded to is the temptation of Jesus, when he fasts for forty days and forty nights in the Judaean desert. In Moscow–​Petushki Satan asks Venichka:  ‘So what’s so special about this darkness’14 and tells Venichka he should just accept that light follows darkness: ‘we can’t control the eternal laws of existence’ and ‘there’s no point in demanding light outside, when it’s dark’.15 The implication is that what Venya wants is to experience meaning in his state of abandoned confusion. Satan then teases him by saying that it’s ‘such a long way from Moscow!’16 Again, as with the reference to Venichka’s experience of ‘darkness’, the implication is metaphorical, that the journey Venichka is taking is metaphysical or spiritual.17 The metaphysical aspect continues when Satan asks Venichka why he thinks he should be travelling faster than the others on the train, and points out that the others are not asking why it’s dark or taking so long. This all indicates that the journey is now wholly transformed from the physical to the metaphysical, from the communal, ‘Russian’, real-​world analogue to Venichka’s inner self. The crux appears to be the universe goading Venichka, through the guise of the devil, to consider his existence in a world that Satan insists cannot be gainsaid by

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individuals. The other passengers have ‘dozed off’, a sign in Existential terms of their habituation to life, of not truly living. It is only Venichka who takes his life in his own hands to consider what his existence actually is. Of course, it is not quite as straightforward as this. Yerofeev forces the reader to see this kind of Existential reading within the context of being on a train, and the constraints, including a sense of predestination, or lack of self-​determination, that the set-​up entails. However, this may be no more than the notion that we are humanly ‘situated’ and that Yerofeev must make his way freely within such ontological givens as Russia, drink, and human passion. The tension between self and ‘the they’ continues in the following chapters, however, when Venichka insists that the lonely individual must seek out others. These chapters are populated with encounters with people from Russian history:  Stakhanov, the ‘record-​ breaking’ miner and Socialist Hero; Vodopyanov, an aircraft pilot and early hero for the Soviet Union. His situatedness is determinedly that of Russian society, history, culture, and in one sense he inverts the ‘heroic’ through his drinking. But he also, as already noted, makes drinking the measure of everything. For instance, the Sphinx’s first riddle is to calculate ‘how many times a year shock-​worker Stakhanov went for a piss, and how many times for a crap, assuming he got smashed three hundred and twelve days in the year’,18 or that ‘[Hegel] used to say:  “There is no difference, apart from differences of degree, between degrees of difference, and the absence of any difference”. Meaning, translated into good Russian, “Who doesn’t drink these days?” ’19 It’s not just that such irreverence levels everything downwards, puncturing all of the grand visions of the nation, it is that Venichka reorders the world according to his own self. Well aware of his surroundings and the life he lives, like many other Russians, he nevertheless bends that existence to his own will-​to-​drink. But the nearer he gets to Petushki, the more his absolute isolation from all other souls is emphasised. The ghosts and hallucinatory figures come and go, leaving him completely alone on the train, perhaps already dead, perhaps only conversing with other dead souls like himself. Any appeal to being-​in-​the-​world reinforces his alienation and his commitment to drink, the only thing that can hold him together.20 Another passage illustrating his argument with God and fate is when he asks us to consider hiccupping. The next time you have a fit of hiccups, he suggests, record the intervals between hiccups. You will end up with, for instance: ‘17–​3–​4–​17–​1–​20–​3–​4–​7–​7–​7–​18’. You might continue to do this, looking to find some underlying pattern to it, and, by extension, to the meaning of existence. But you will be wasting your time, because God is in charge of everything and determines everything. The satirical

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target here would seem to be the modern sciences, which attempt to understand the world through empiricism and inductive thought. On the other hand, is Venichka seriously suggesting that we simply surrender our selves to God? He does seem to: ‘I hiccup, trusting in Divine Providence, without an antagonistic thought in my head; for I  believe that He is good, and I too am therefore good and blessed. God is good, yes. He is leading me out of suffering towards the light’.21 As with everything in the book, we can either take it as tongue-​in-​cheek, or a kind of acceptance that even God must eventually go the way of all other sources of meaning, since the moment he praises God he simultaneously acts blasphemously, saying he needs to find the right kind of vodka to drink his health: ‘Alas, I haven’t a thing worthy of Thee. Kuban vodka’s horse-​piss!’,22 and he wants to create a cocktail with a religious name, such as ‘The Waters of Jordan’ or ‘The Star of Bethlehem’. At the end of the novel, though, it is obvious that Petushki is just an imagined utopia, so a rereading can only take this to be ironical, or to be holding all possibilities in suspension, unable to decide between them. The Soviet state functions in a similar way to God, constructing notions of meaning and purpose which are in opposition to the view of the world that Venichka has. Towards the end, when he reaches the platform at Petushki, he is up against a famous sculpture of a worker with a hammer and a peasant girl with a sickle.23 The worker hits him on the head with the hammer, and the girl goes for his balls with the sickle. The symbolism is overt:  the very visionary essence of modern Russia beats its men into the ground and emasculates them. The appearance of Pozharsky and Minin24 re-​enforces the centrality of Russia –​its present and its history –​in the life of its citizens and for the way Venichka orientates himself. Pozharsky and Minin led Russia’s struggle for independence at the beginning of the seventeenth century against a Polish-​ Lithuanian invasion, in what became known as the ‘Time of Troubles’, setting in train the dynasty of tsars running from 1612 to 1917.25 Edith W. Clowes makes the point that the ending of the novel, with Venichka murdered by four thugs, shows Russia to remain characterised by violence.26 However, I would stress again the Existential nature of the book. It may be that Venichka is no different from millions of other Russians (in the eyes of Venichka/​Yerofeev) in his love of drink, but the manner in which he commits to it, the manner with which he understands his self and world through this commitment, is his ‘leap of faith’. Venichka himself continually draws on a religious framework to situate his self and his relationship with the world, so it is not too much of a stretch to see it in these terms. For example, at the end of the novel he directly addresses the question of God in relation to himself: ‘If He –​if He has

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left this earth for ever, but can still see each one of us, well, I know He’s never so much as glanced in this direction! But if He hasn’t abandoned this earth of mine, if he’s tramped all over it barefoot, got up as a slave, then He must’ve given this place a miss …’27 He invokes Jesus’s ‘talitha cumi’ (‘Arise …’) on more than one occasion, and at his own death replaces it with ‘lama sabachthani’ (‘Why hast thou forsaken me?’).28 The assault on him by four men is no doubt meant to bring to mind the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse from the final book in the Bible. He believes that the angels/​four men are laughing at him while God has left the scene.29 Both God and Russia are present at his death, and, on one level, responsible for it. But Venichka’s life is finally not determined by Russia, nor is it determined by his relationship with God. He knows he is free to choose how he responds to the situation he finds himself in. For instance, at the very end of the novel he is nailed to the floor, in a variation of Christ’s death. Again, this does not define his life in quasi-​religious terms. The blasphemous nature of the ending, with Venichka taking on the role of a demotic Christ and the implicit idea that railway stations parallel the Stations of the Cross,30 makes sense through Venichka’s self-​constructed world. He is clearly not like the others he shares Russia with since they do not ‘sacrifice’ themselves, and to the end of the book his consciousness of his life creates this particular significance. It could be argued, as Clowes does, that the Russia which Venichka represents is one that sacrifices all of its citizens –​‘All claims to social (or personal) transfiguration are false’31 –​although throughout the novel there is a distinction between drunk and sober citizens, as for instance when he praises those who are lousy in the morning with hangovers, in opposition to those who are ‘bright and cheerful first thing, full of hope, and then totally knackered by evening’ and who are nothing but ‘narrow-​minded mediocrities … Complete shits’.32 But overall there is little to suggest that anybody else in the novel has Venichka’s unique consciousness or self-​orientation in the world. This is emphasised repeatedly as the fellow travellers disappear from the train and he is acutely aware that his situation is one of absolute aloneness. The journey into darkness is not just his journey into death, his abandonment by God, but also the revelation that his consciousness and self are singular entities, no matter how closely enmeshed they are in being-​in-​the-​world-​with-​others. His death is also foretold early in the novel as possibly his choice of suicide: ‘And so there I am, I’ve fallen in love with myself on account of my suffering, as much as my own person, and I start to strangle myself. Yes, I take hold of my own throat, and start choking’,33 highlighting once more the self-​ critical and self-​determining aspects of Venichka.34

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Comparison with Exley’s A Fan’s Notes also helps put the ‘Russianness’ of Moscow–​Petushki into relief. For two such different books the similarities are quite substantial, for they are both obsessed with drinking and preoccupied with the parlous state of their countries, yet  also exhibiting a certain pride. Neither has any ultimate regard for the world of work; both male narrators simultaneously hold elevated and misogynistic views of women; they are self-​hating and egotistical, and both advance the possibility that an unresolved, unlocatable ‘sadness’ is at the heart of the desire to drink and always be drunk. One of the major differences, however, is that A Fan’s Notes places the heavy drinker very much in the category of a ‘problem’, hence Ex’s times spent in mental asylums and encounters with Alcoholics Anonymous. In contrast, there is no indication at all in Moscow–​Petushki that drinking in Russia is regarded within the ‘disease’ model of understanding or the psycho-​bio-​social-​spiritual approach of Alcoholics Anonymous. Russian drinking is depicted as widespread, offering strong social (particularly male) bonds in a country portrayed as having serious social problems. Fred Ex dramatises himself as alienated from his country, whereas Venichka’s drinking is the same as everybody else’s, it is a cultural norm.35 As Ryan-​Hayes describes it: ‘In Venichka’s world, it is not drinking that gives rise to Gore/​Grief; rather, drinking is normative, a symptom of the endemic spiritual illness that is grief. To exist in this world means to drink, and the only alternatives that present themselves are those of degree’.36 The social nature of this –​and Ann Komaromi argues that in Moscow–​Petushki ‘Venichka’s provocative performance demonstrates a drive to renew the poetic potential in language in order to create the possibility for meaningful social dialogue once again’37 –​should not hide the fact that the novel moves from the social to the individual’s personal heaven and hell, ultimately making it more akin, once again, to A Fan’s Notes. Both novels do situate their protagonists firmly within social networks and societies, but then place them on narrative arcs which isolate them from those values. It is finally of no consequence that Fred Ex appears to live in a well-​ordered society and Venichka in a dysfunctional one. Exley’s novel presents an America which most citizens buy into, while Yerofeev’s shows Russians communally opting in to disaffected behaviour; Ex’s and Venichka’s alienations have largely metaphysical roots, impervious to how they are situated other than that drinking presents itself as an option. The way in which their drinking takes centre stage may differ according to their respective cultures, but we are essentially looking at the same Existential-​drinker dynamic.

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The Existential drinkers Venedikt/​Venichka: the writer-​drinker

In keeping with many of the books already discussed, the protagonist of Moscow–​Petushki, Venichka, is related to the book’s real-​world author, Venedikt Yerofeev. This is done explicitly at one point when Venichka talks about diagrams of people’s drinking, including that of ‘your humble servant, ex-​brigade leader of the OTC cable layers, and author of the poem Moscow Stations’.38 Throughout the novel the reader is constantly reminded of the link between the character Venichka and the author Venedikt in a way that parallels that of A Fan’s Notes’ use of Fred Ex/​Frederick Exley. The diminutive form of the author’s name for the fictional avatar encourages the reader to view the latter affectionately (the diminutive as pet name), but also in some way as ‘reduced’ (the author’s alter ego, but with less substance).39 A BBC programme on Yerofeev recorded by Pawel Pawlikowski40 shortly before Yerofeev died introduces some of the originals for the characters in the novel, including one drunk who recalls a form of literary duelling with Yerofeev and others, in which the participants challenged each other as to who could best recite literature from memory. In the programme Yerofeev has to use a voice box in order to speak, following surgery for throat cancer. The whole documentary is shot in the grey tones obligatory for any Western depiction of an East European/​Russian setting, and is pervaded by the listlessness of those who knew Yerofeev. Nevertheless, there is some joyful recounting of them working together, and the scams and drinking that went on. Yerofeev, in answer to an interviewer’s question, does not regret any of this past life, and really answers with a shrug, as if to say it couldn’t have been any other way. It isn’t difficult to connect the author Venedikt to the narrator Venichka, at least, not on the basis of the documentary. Taking a broader view that places Yerofeev as a Russian writer in and around the 1960s/​1970s, we can see, following Cynthia Simmons’s Their Fathers’ Voices, that the use of an author stand-​in for protagonists was not confined to Yerofeev, and other writers found it a congenial strategy for responding to the constraints of life in the Soviet Union, or, in the case of Eduard Limonov, in exile from the USSR.41 The books are characterised by aesthetic and psychic fragmentation, such as Sokolov’s marvellous School for Fools (published 1976, written 1960s), and frequently have the history of Russian literature woven into the prose texture (and again, not so different from a book like A Fan’s Notes, with Ex’s frequent references to other American writers; like A Fan’s Notes, Limonov’s It’s Me Eddie is subtitled ‘A Fictional Memoir’). In these ways, Yerofeev’s aesthetic choices are not unique: for example, the refusal of

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‘realism’ in favour of literary techniques that invoke schizophrenic, hallucinatory, and stream-​of-​consciousness modes, as well as the use of a writer-​protagonist, are found elsewhere as contemporaneous, postmodern literary strategies. A note in Their Father’s Voices indicates that Yerofeev both encouraged and discouraged attempts to closely identify himself with Venichka,42 reminiscent of Charles Jackson’s oscillation between denial and acceptance when linked to Don Birnam. Simmons characterises the Russian novels as ‘aberrant texts’  –​the drunken delirium of Moscow–​Petushki, the schizophrenic, atemporal narrative of A School for Fools, the sexual excess of It’s Me Eddie –​and again this places Yerofeev’s work as ‘of a piece’ with other literature from the period, and, by extension, makes the writer like other writers. A significant point of difference when considering Yerofeev the author and Venichka the character is that by the end of the novel Venichka is speaking from beyond the grave. We also know at this very late point in the novel that we may not have left Moscow at all, so, if we want to make sense of the novel, one problem is that it does not adhere to known physical laws. As previously discussed, both The Lost Weekend and Under the Volcano invite us to return to the beginning of the novel, and in doing so convey through this narrative trope the enclosed cyclical and repetitive nature of committed drinking: Don Birnam blithely believes he has escaped the consequences of a binge, while Geoffrey Firmin is trapped in the novel’s aspic. A difference between Under the Volcano and Moscow–​Petushki is that we know Firmin is already dead at the start of the novel since we are located chronologically a year after the narrated events, whereas Venichka’s journey is relayed in real time, and he thus seems alive to the reader, that is, at least until the very end. At the end of the line, if we try to make sense of what we have just read and experienced, we are forced into unsatisfactory explanations:  was he dead all along? Did he die on the journey? If he is dead throughout the narrative, then what, exactly, is the nature of the train journey? Is it wholly metaphorical? Wholly metaphysical? I  started out by saying that the novel becomes increasingly surreal, whereas it might be more accurate to say that it is, if not always surreal, then happening within an unreal time and space. An interpretation that took into account Venichka’s speaking from beyond the grave could view the train journey as a report of the trip to hell, an interpretation boosted by the appearance of the devil, angels, familiars, and the events of Venichka’s past rising up before him. Petushki then functions as the dream of heaven that can never be realised. Further along this line of interpretation, Venichka might represent some resurrected figure, not implausible given the references to salvation and resurrection in the novel, and the

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self-​declared notion that Venichka’s life is one of suffering. If, as with Under the Volcano and The Lost Weekend, we find ourselves returned to the beginning of the novel, the declaration after he has taken some coriander vodka –​‘my spirit was refreshed, while my parts went all to hell’43 –​now takes on a literal meaning rather than a metaphorical one, since on a second reading we know he is already spirit only, and a couple of pages further on he hears the voices of angels tell him to close his eyes to avoid being sick.44 Similarly, the notion of the drinker’s circularity is there at the start, because no matter how many times he attempts to see the Kremlin, he finds himself in Kursk station.45 The suggestion that the whole novel places the lost soul in hell is reinforced. In that sense, the novel takes place wholly on the metaphysical level, even if this only becomes apparent at the end of a first reading. Situatedness: society and literature Another way of thinking about Venichka’s drinking is through the Sartrean view of situatedness, and through this I will come back to the issue of the writer-​drinker. We have seen that the novels convey ‘situatedness’ to varying degrees. Don Birnam is the least formally ‘situated’ of the protagonists in that he is the least ‘constrained’ by external pressures. Geoffrey Firmin’s level of freedom is on a similar scale, even if the novel appears to side with Firmin’s view that he is living at a time when the world is in a fallen, chaotic, self-​destructive state, and thus he is constrained by universal metaphysical misery; Fred Ex has every material advantage and simply chooses to drink. At the other end of the scale, Rhys’s heroines are overwhelmed by the constraints of gender, while Judith Hearne is hemmed in by religion as well as gender. The drinking of all of these figures is at odds with the mass of people around them because they live in societies where drink is prevalent as a social lubricant and is officially sanctioned as a means to a ‘time out’, but their individual behaviour crosses the line of what is and what is not socially acceptable. Of course, having ‘committed’ to drink, the views of society are largely and finally irrelevant to those characters and they stand out as ‘uniquely living individuals’, living in a manner of their own choosing. The fact of Venichka’s drinking in a culture depicted as one populated by heavy drinkers might throw into question the idea that his drinking is an index to his uniqueness. In Russian literature, drinking and drinkers are frequently part of the landscape.46 Dostoevsky’s Crime and Punishment began as a short story entitled ‘The Drunkards’, intended as a social-​realist address to the misery brought on a family by a father’s

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drunkenness, and survives in the novel as the drunken Marmeladov, Sonya’s father, whom Raskolnikov meets in a tavern at the start of the novel.47 In Valentin Kataev’s entertaining 1926 novel, The Embezzlers, a couple of Soviet functionaries wake up on a train after a night’s binge, having carelessly stolen 12,000 roubles from the state. Neither their continued drunkenness nor the fact of their embezzling draws any negative comments from the people they meet. More pertinently, when the two embezzlers, the senior accountant Philip Stephanovitch and the cashier, young Ivan, find the town of Kalinoff (typical of all Russian provincial towns)48 to be boring, this is only because there is a three-​ day embargo on the sale of alcohol while military recruitment goes on: ‘ “The people are dull because they are waiting for vodka” ’ explains one of the townspeople.49 As soon as the embargo has lapsed and forty-​ proof vodka returns we see Kalinoff as it really is, lively, fun, vibrant, full of music, drunk, and where the only sober person is a frightened policeman.50 Looking at society more widely we come to the same conclusion: in his popular guide, From Nyet to Da:  Understanding the New Russia, Yale Richmond calls ‘alcoholism’ ‘the other -​ism’ (after Communism).51 Mikhail Gorbachev’s anti-​alcohol drive, 1985–​1988, certainly had an impact, but the combination of a significant reduction in government revenue, and a culture bound by drinking and the production of alcohol, eventually seems to have trumped the reduction in alcohol-​ related death; the campaign, involving some prohibition measures, was halted.52 Richmond notes how seriously embedded the heavy-​drinking culture is, and how this is coupled with notions of the Russian soul, as when he quotes from Andrei Sinyavsky (pseudonym for Abram Tertz): ‘our idée fixe. The Russian people drink not from need and not from grief, but from an age-​old requirement for the miraculous and the extraordinary –​ drink, if you will mystically, striving to transport the soul beyond earth’s gravity and return it to its sacred noncorporeal state’.53 He could be describing the exact state of Venichka, whose drunken intellectualism easily shades into mystical apprehensions of the universe. All of the above situates the novel and its author in a heavy-​drinking culture. Further, we might also reiterate that discussions of Russia and Russian literature often refer to a preference for the emotional over the rational, and this in relation to the Russian soul, as Tatyana Tolstoya writes: ‘Logical categories are inapplicable to the soul. But Russian sensitivity, permeating the whole culture, doesn’t want to use logic –​logic is seen as dry and evil, logic comes from the devil –​the most important thing is sensation, smell, emotion, tears, mist, dreams, and enigma’.54 This too is part of the contested cultural situation that Yerofeev finds

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himself in, and which clearly aligns him within a more general Russian outlook.55 One or two additional points might be made which contextualise exactly how Yerofeev is part of this, before showing how he then separates himself out. Critics have commented on passages which reveal how Venichka is seen in relation to his fellow citizens. In one story, Venichka tells us of a time when he shared a flat.56 Clowes interprets the set-​up as analogous to the ideal of Soviet communal living.57 The situation starts to deteriorate when the drinking flatmates take Venichka to task for never appearing to go to the toilet. This, according to Simmons, signals his difference from them and simultaneously his inability to be one of them. The flatmates call him out: ‘Thinking you’re superior to the rest of us, that’s what –​that we’re just small fry, and you’re Cain and Manfred’.58 It serves as a critique of communality, or at least that element of it which involves the coercion to conform. That the working culture is also one of communality is made clear when Venichka loses his job ‘on account of: “introducing a corrupt system of individual performance graphs” ’,59 and thereby upsetting the established (differently corrupt) socialist system.60 A certain alienated misanthropy is evident from the beginning: ‘You think I  want all these people? I  mean, even Our Redeemer said  –​and to his own mother, mind: “What art thou to me?” So what’s this nasty seething mass got to do with me, indeed?’61 Yet the question is genuine, for the ‘separation out’ of the unique individual is shown to be difficult to achieve given the very kind of communal ‘situatedness’ Venichka is born into and the fact that, for all the character’s prickliness, he appears thoroughly sociable when in the right company. At times he yearns for communication: ‘So I call out to all those nearest and dearest to me, to all men of goodwill, to all whose hearts are open to poetry and compassion: “Stop whatever you’re doing, pause with me, and observe a minute’s silence for that which is inexpressible” ’.62 He takes pride in the ‘vacant’ eyes of the Russian people since it indicates that they will never sell out, not like those in the ‘money-​ready’ land (presumably the West): ‘Yes, I like my people. I’m glad I was born here and grew to manhood under the gaze of those eyes’.63 This back-​handed compliment, part of an ongoing fort-​ da with his fellow citizens, is in fact more in keeping with the Existential view that an individual can never be aloof from the world in the drive towards authenticity, since existence is always being-​in-​the-​world-​with-​ others. More than simply being in the social world, or the public world, it is part of Russian situatedness that Venichka’s story seems very much involved with that of the Soviet state and culture. The same could perhaps be said of Fred Ex in A Fan’s Notes in relation to the American state and culture, but the ending of that novel –​again, similar in some ways

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to Moscow–​Petushki, since Ex is beaten up by four men –​suggests that Ex’s fate is not like that of other Americans, whereas Venichka’s demise is typical of millions of other Russians if we view him as a victim of the state. As Mulrine notes: ‘[Moscow Stations] ends with the death of Venya, stabbed in the throat with a cobbler’s awl wielded by the leader, presumably Stalin, of the four Horsemen of the Communist Apocalypse, who eventually run him to ground near the Kremlin’.64 The gruesome ending is both highly individual  –​Yerofeev himself died as the result of throat cancer –​and general, for Venichka’s suffering is symbolically emblematic of that of many others during the Brezhnev ‘period of stagnation’. The continuation of historical inequalities and iniquities in Russia is part of the novel’s landscape, with its constant references to events from the past, but it also self-​consciously continues a satirical literary heritage. It partly stands in the lineage of travel literature that begins with Alexander Radischev’s A Journey from St. Petersburg to Moscow (1790),65 an account which establishes the frame of a journey in order to expose the country’s and the state’s failings. As with Yerofeev’s novel, the travelogue is awash with the misery of the Russian people at the hands of the ‘monstrous’ Russian Empire: ‘I looked about me –​my heart was troubled by the sufferings of humanity. I turned my eyes inward –​I saw that man’s woes arise in man himself, and frequently only because he does not look straight at the objects around him’;66 ‘Hard-​hearted landlord, look at the children of the peasants subject to you! They are almost naked. Why? Have you not imposed upon those who bore them –​in pain and sorrow –​a tax, in addition to all their work on your fields? Do you not appropriate the linen to your own use even before it is woven?’67 The reference in Moscow–​Petushki’s subtitle, A Poem, to Gogol’s Dead Souls: A Poem, further indicates the novel’s satirical take on Russia/​the Soviet Union, and while there probably are not too many comparisons to be made between Venichka and Gogol’s protagonist Chichikov, the free-​ wheeling, absurdly humorous spirit that moves backwards and forwards along the moral-​amoral-​immoral line in Gogol’s novel is replicated. It may even be that the ‘already-​dead’ Venichka implicitly brings to life one of those dead souls who count for so little in Gogol’s book. Venichka says of himself, at the time he produces a graph for each worker: ‘Me, the thoughtful prince, the analyst so lovingly sifting through the souls of his people’, but ultimately Venichka is one alone with his dead, ‘sick’, vodka-​ drenched soul.68 Since throughout the novel he has been in dialogue with God and his angels, this is perhaps a Christian Existential drinker’s fate. His relationship with God is unique to himself, and in a sense he gives himself over to God, yet it seems to remain on his own terms through his conflicting commitment to drink  –​‘So, what can I  drink in Thy

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Name?’69 –​Venichka’s self-​defined paradox. This is his response to all of the contexts he is born into –​religion, society, literature, even the ideal of family  –​to configure his alienated self through his commitment to drink and the abiding sense of meaninglessness. His emotional openness, leading to many self-​contradictions, is a sign that he acts in good faith, a sign of his authenticity. However, as I  have already remarked, a ‘coherent’ interpretation, one that could account for the novel’s many asymmetrical, non-​binary contradictions, is not possible. For example, Moscow–​Petushki could be interpreted primarily as a contemporary religious text, and the passage at the very end where Venichka stands in front of God, speechless when asked how his life is on earth, ‘good or bad?’, might be understood to represent the character’s insight into his own spiritual emptiness.70 This would be further supported by his self-​assessment:  ‘Mene, tekel, upharsin, i.e., I’ve been weighed in the balance and found wanting, a lightweight –​ a tekel. Well, what the hell?’71 The revelation is that he has wasted his life and is not worthy of having the door opened (to heaven), and/​or, if we go back to the beginning of the novel, Venichka is simply following in the footsteps of Ecclesiastes when he alludes to its recurring theme that ‘all is vanity’.72 Another interpretation might privilege the novel’s social critique, and pick up on the way in which Venichka takes his personal plight to be a universal one: ‘For is not the life of man simply the soul’s sidelong glance? The soul’s eclipse? We’re all of us drunk, each in his own way, only some have imbibed more than others’.73 The laying out of multiple interpretations and worlds, overlapping, contradictory, is very much the postmodern mode. Yet, after all, it is perhaps the novel’s, and the character’s, uniqueness which impresses most in its portrayal of an unrepentant commitment to drinking, while we should also be aware that the novel would see any attempt to recuperate it in Existential terms as pointless:74 in one scene Venichka bumps into Louis Aragon and Elsa Triolet, only to tell us that he was mistaken, and that they were in fact Sartre and de Beauvoir, ‘but well, really, what’s the difference?’75 Notes 1 Yerofeev, Moscow Stations, p. 50. 2 Ibid, p. 52. The literal translation would render the title Moscow–​Petushki: A Poem. Stephen Mulrine’s version brings into play the Stations of the Cross and thus the religious aspect of the novel. H. William Tjalsma’s translation gives the title Moscow to the End of the Line (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 1992), suggestive of a physical and metaphysical final destination. I am using Mulrine’s translation here.

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3 Konstantin Kustanovich expands on how Venichka’s actions are those of the self insisting on Heideggerian ‘mineness’. Kustanovich, ‘Venichka Erofeev’s grief and solitude’, pp. 139–​40. 4 Valentina Baslyk writes: ‘Moscow–​Petushki surely emerges as the most strident work of its decade in its rejection of the realist’s view that the world is deterministic, preeminently rational, and possessed of a stable unity’. Valentina Baslyk, ‘Venichka’s divided self’, in Ryan-​Hayes (ed.), Venedikt Erofeev’s ‘Moscow–​Petushki’, p. 76. 5 He tells the story of how he was ‘resurrected’ by her twelve weeks ago, Yerofeev, Moscow Stations, pp. 67–​8. However, when talking to Semyonych, the ticket inspector, he says his trips to Petushki started three years previously, p. 86. 6 Ibid., p. 26. 7 Ibid., pp. 39–​40. 8 Ibid., pp. 40–​1. 9 Kustanovich gives a detailed reading of the novel in Existential terms and sees Venichka’s plight as ‘an abandonment by God’, one in which God barely speaks. Kustanovich, ‘Venichka Erofeev’s grief and solitude’, p. 135. However, I would emphasise just how insistent Venichka’s dialogue is with the religious-​metaphysical world, such that he seems to immerse himself in it rather than abandon it. 10 Yerofeev, Moscow Stations, p. 41. 11 Ibid., p. 42. 12 Ibid., p. 44. 13 Ibid. 14 Ibid., p. 103. 15 Ibid. 16 Ibid. 17 Mark Altshuller notes this, as well as placing it in a literary context:  the ‘journey from Moscow to Petushki is the soul’s symbolic journey from darkness to light, the journey Gogol had in mind for Chichikov, and which Dante carried out’, quoted in Mark Lipovetsky, Russian Postmodernist Fiction: Dialogue with Chaos (Armonk, NY: M. E. Sharpe, 1999), p. 67. 18 Yerofeev, Moscow Stations, p. 107. 19 Ibid., pp. 116–​17. 20 Ibid., p. 117. 21 Ibid., pp. 46–​7. 22 Ibid., p. 47. 23 Ibid., p. 121. 24 Ibid., pp. 109ff. 25 In 2005 Vladimir Putin established the holiday ‘Day of People’s Unity’ for 4 November to celebrate the end of the ‘Time of Troubles’ in 1612, replacing a holiday on 7 November which celebrated the anniversary of the 1917 revolution. See Arkady Ostrovsky, ‘New Russian holiday harks back to time of troubles’, Financial Times, 4 November 2005, 10.

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26 Edith W. Clowes, Russian Experimental Fiction: Resisting Ideology after Utopia (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2014), p. 48. Lipovetsky states that Venichka sleeps past Petushki and thus remains on the train as it returns to Moscow, Russian Postmodernist Fiction, p. 79. However, this interpretation ignores Venichka’s murder and the fact that he is speaking from beyond the grave. Or does he return to Moscow as a dead soul? But see also Lipovetsky’s comments on the fact that Venichka’s is ‘the otherworldly point of view’, p. 81, which is also the title of Lipovetsky’s chapter. 27 Yerofeev, Moscow Stations, p. 128. 28 Ibid., pp. 129–​30. 29 Ibid., p. 130. 30 Stephen Mulrine, ‘Foreword’ to Yerofeev, Moscow Stations, p. ix. 31 Clowes, Russian Experimental Fiction, p. 46. 32 Yerofeev, Moscow Stations, p. 12. 33 Ibid., p. 14. 34 Yerofeev’s short story ‘Through the Eyes of an Eccentric’ has similar themes and style to Moscow-Petushki, with life’s meaninglessness and the possibility of suicide at the heart of it. It begins with the arrogant and self-​ ­lacerating narrator setting out with three guns in order to end it all, only to be rescued by the writings of the philosopher Vasily Rosanov. His laudatory description of the philosopher would also seem apt to describe Venichka, including: ‘lampooning just about everything we’re accustomed to revere … with a bitter intensity, a gentleness distilled from black bile, and a “metaphysical cynicism” ’. Venedikt Yerofeev, ‘Through the Eyes of an Eccentric’, in The Penguin Book of New Russian Writing. Russia’s ‘Fleurs du Mal’ (London: Penguin, 1991), p. 136. 35 The idea that drinking was widespread at this time is supported by official (if inconsistent) figures: ‘per capita alcohol consumption [in the USSR] increased by over 300  percent between 1950 and 1970’, Kate Transchel, Under the Influence:  Working-​Class Drinking, Temperance, and Cultural Revolution in Russia, 1895–​1932 (Pittsburgh, PA: University of Pittsburgh Press, 2006), p. 154. Transchel also cites a popular advertisement from the Khrushchev period (1953–​1964): ‘Delicious, cheap, and nutritious –​drink vodka. Absolutely!’, p. 155. 36 Karen Ryan-​Hayes, ‘Erofeev’s grief’, in Ryan-​Hayes (ed.), Venedikt Erofeev’s ‘Moscow–​Petushki’, p. 110. 37 Ann Komaromi, ‘Venedikt Erofeev’s “Moskva–​Petushki”: performance and performativity in the Late Soviet text’, Slavic and East European Journal 55:3 (2011), 418–​38, p. 420. 38 Yerofeev, Moscow Stations, p. 23. 39 Baslyk compares Moscow-Petushki to Eduard Limonov’s novel It’s Me, Eddie with respect to the naming strategies, and also notes its unreality: ‘The two confessional works whose protagonists bear diminutives of their authors’ first names –​Edichka and Venichka –​meld their narratorial and authorial voices so radically that at times it is impossible to distinguish between them. Sokolov’s schizophrenic youth [in School for Fools] and Erofeev’s alcoholic

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create a mental landscape in which the unreal embraces the delusional and the fantastic to a point that it is difficult to discern where one ends and the other begins’. Baslyk, ‘Venichka’s divided self’, p. 54. There is a full discussion on the role of names in Moscow–​Petushki in Natalia Vesselova’s ‘Venichka, Venia, Venedikt Erofeev:  the paradigm of the narrator’s name’, ‘Moskva–​ Petushki’, Essais sur le Discours de l’Europe Éclatée 19 (2003), 33–​9. 40 Pawel Pawlikowski, From Moscow to Pietushki (1990), www.pawel pawlikowski.co.uk/​page9/​. 41 Cynthia Simmons, Their Fathers’ Voices: Vassily Aksyonov, Venedikt Erofeev, Eduard Limonov, and Sasha Sokolov (New York: Peter Lang, 1994), p. 93. 42 Ibid., ­chapter 3, n. 3. 43 Yerofeev, Moscow Stations, p. 1. 44 Ibid., p. 3. 45 Ibid., pp.  1–​2. Laura Beraha, partly drawing on Ryan-​Hayes, notes the repetitive element, calling it a Sisyphean rhythm. Laura Beraha, ‘Out of and into the void:  picaresque absence and annihilation’, in Ryan-​Hayes (ed.), Venedikt Erofeev’s ‘Moscow–​Petushki’, pp. 25–​6; Ryan-​Hayes also comments on the enclosed circular nature of the novel (‘Erofeev’s grief’, p.  106). The use of repetition might also serve a sociopolitical cathartic function, identified as common across a number of post-​Stalin ‘phantasmagoric’ texts by Olga Matich, for example in the works of Aksyonov and Aleshkovsky. Olga Matich, ‘Unofficial Russian fiction and its politics’, Humanities in Society 7:3–​4 (1984), 109–​22, p. 114. 46 Mark Schrad covers some of the more notable ones from ‘the classics’ such as Chernyshevsky’s What is to be Done?, Marx, Engels, etc., in ­chapter 10, ‘The pen, the sword, and the bottle’, of his Vodka Politics: Alcohol, Autocracy, and the Secret History of the Russian State (New York: Oxford University Press, 2014). 47 ‘When Dostoevsky first conceived of the work that ultimately became Crime and Punishment, he titled it “The Drunkards”, and said that it would deal with ‘the present question of drunkenness … [in] all its ramifications, especially the picture of a family and the bringing up of children in these circumstances (letter to A. A. Kraevsky, June 1865, cited in Fangar, p. 17)’, Sarah J.  Young, ‘Re-​reading Crime and Punishment:  “The Drunkards” ’, Russian Literature, History and Culture, http://​sarahjyoung.com/​site/​2010/​ 09/​06/​re-​reading-​crime-​and-​punishment-​the-​drunkards/​. There are more details in Schrad, Vodka Politics, p. 137. 48 Valentin Kataev, The Embezzlers, trans. L. Zarine (London:  Ernest Benn Ltd, n.d. [1929] [Rastratchiki, 1926]), p. 178. 49 Ibid., p. 181. 50 Ibid., pp. 214–​15. 51 Yale Richmond, From Nyet to Da: Understanding the New Russia, 4th edn (Boston, MA: Intercultural Press, 2009). ‘The other -​ism’ is a section title, pp. 103ff. 52 For a detailed account of the campaign see Daniel Tarschys, ‘The success of a failure:  Gorbachev’s anti-​alcohol policy, 1985–​88’, Europe-​Asia Studies

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45:1 (1993), 7–​25. The value to Russia of revenue from drink has been important for centuries: ‘There have been several times in Russian history when taxes on drink made up 60% of the national budget’, Dwight B. Heath, Drinking Occasions (Philadelphia, PA: Brunner/​Mazel, 2000), p. 138 (citing Vroublevsky and Harwin, 1998). 53 Quoted in Richmond, From Nyet to Da, p. 104. 54 Tatyana Tolstoya, ‘Notes from underground’, New York Review of Books 37:9 (31 May 1990), p. 4, quoted in Richmond, From Nyet to Da, p. 40. 55 ‘Contested’ because I am aware that these are broad brushstrokes (stereo) typical of internal and external perceptions of Russians. As a counterpoint to this view, we might note that Nabokov deplored this aspect of Russian culture, particularly as he found it in Dostoevsky’s writing. 56 Yerofeev, Moscow Stations, pp. 15–​18. 57 Clowes, Russian Experimental Fiction, pp. 50–​1. 58 Simmons, Their Fathers’ Voices, p. 16. 59 Yerofeev, Moscow Stations, p. 19. 60 Ibid., pp. 19–​21. 61 Ibid., p. 3. 62 Ibid., pp. 8–​9. 63 Ibid., p. 14. 64 Mulrine, ‘Foreword’, p.  vii; not mentioned by Mulrine, but Stalin’s father was a cobbler. 65 Clowes, Russian Experimental Fiction, pp. 46–​8, and others, have made this connection. Its relationship to the Russian literary travelogue is explored in Katherine V. Moskver, ‘Back on the road: Erofeev’s Moskva-​Petuški and traditions of Russian literature’, Russian Literature 48 (2000), 195–​204. 66 A.  N. Radischev, A Journey from St. Petersburg to Moscow (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1958), p. 40. 67 Ibid., p. 221. 68 Yerofeev, Moscow Stations, p. 25 and p. 29. 69 Ibid., p. 47. 70 Ibid., p. 123. 71 Ibid., p. 124. 72 Ibid., p. 3. 73 Ibid., p. 123. 74 Simmons analyses the novel as one that might be recuperated via the regenerative power of the carnivalesque –​a feature of some postmodern literature –​but also by accepting that others may decide not to drink: ‘Once art has made the revelation, social melioration or the aesthetic ideal must be pursued “sober and straight” ’, Their Fathers’ Voices, p. 89. I would argue against this interpretation for Moscow–​Petushki because Venichka is so distinct from the other drinkers, and obviously from non-​drinkers, that his personal experience and expression of being in the world cannot be extended to others. 75 Yerofeev, Moscow Stations, pp. 80–​1.

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Enough: attic, Vegas, paradise

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William Kennedy, Ironweed (1983): fugitive souls and free spirits

… and what if I did drink too much? Whose business is that? Who knows how much I didn’t drink? (Helen)

Existentialism’s decline as a cultural force probably begins in the 1970s. Its credo of authenticity and self-​ determination is overtaken by a different kind of individualism, arguably co-​opted by the dictates of free-​ market capitalism:  ‘freedom’ becomes ‘consumer choice’, so rather than the outcome of philosophic immersion, the landscape of Existentialism is determined as just one lifestyle choice among many options. Intellectually, Existentialism’s ‘actual existing individual’ is replaced by ‘the subject’, an entity wholly constituted by identities of gender, race, class, etc., as discussed in the Introduction. Existentialism is either too selfish –​it ignores the fact that we are pre-​eminently social creations bearing social responsibility –​or not selfish enough, since to restrict individuals to ‘authenticity’ hinders the potential for a person’s reinvention(s) or multiplicity of identities, none of them bound to any sense of an authentic self. If authenticity disappears as a guiding light, and along with it the correlate of responsibility for a self that is of ontological necessity free, the sense of Existentialism’s social, cultural, and historical urgency is also dispersed. Attitudes may still be deemed ‘Existential’, usually indicating a reference to one or more of ‘nothingness’, ‘meaninglessness’, or indulgent navel-​gazing –​what’s the point of anything? what’s it all about (who cares …)? –​and writers and artists may also still allude to it, but few would set out to produce a work of art that is wholeheartedly Existential. Even if the novels we have been looking at rarely engage directly with Existentialism, Existentialism’s importance through the period covered so far means that its influence can be seen and felt in the literature. Coincident with this fading of Existentialism is an indication that the ‘great days’ of the culturally important writer-​ drinker are also at an end. This is the result of a number of factors, the

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first of which is a campaign to deglamorise the kind of self-​destructive creativity seen in the last two chapters in which the failing drinker is also, interdependently, the successful writer. The other reason for the rejection of the writer-​drinker is down to aesthetic fashion, a view that the confessional mode for drinking-​focused literature is outdated, at least in relation to recovery narratives, and that there are simply too many of them for us to learn anything new: please stop telling us about your former heroic drinking days and how life is better sober. It may also be that addiction narratives found hard drugs more interesting than drink, since drinking was always comfortably legal and connected to a majority social norm, whereas the use of cannabis, LSD, heroin, cocaine, etc. were (are) illegitimate and thus intrinsically, more dangerously and excitingly, countercultural, with Irvine Welsh’s Trainspotting pre-​eminent and William Burroughs a significant inspiration. The final part of The Existential drinker thus turns to novels which in part replicate the fact that what engages society and writers has moved beyond, or simply sits outside, Existential thought. There do remain elements of the language and ideas of Existentialism, but they become subordinate to other prevailing motivations and understandings from the 1970s onwards. The protagonists in Ironweed, and, in the next two chapters, Leaving Las Vegas and Paradise, all drink to excess in ways with which we are now familiar, and this type of drinking is still related to the way in which those characters view themselves as existing in the world, but such orientations are not primarily guided by questions of alienation and authenticity, while any notion of ‘freedom’ is largely transmuted into questions of ‘choice’ and lifestyle, and the wagging finger continues to point at moral or psychological flaws. Each of the novels, in different ways, ends up sidelining the possibility of the Existential drinker. Ironweed William Kennedy’s Ironweed is set in 1938 in the city of Albany, the capital of New  York State.1 Its protagonist is Francis Phelan, a self-​ declared bum and one-​time fugitive following his murder in 1901 of Harold Allen, a strike-​breaker, after Francis ‘pitched’ a stone at him with some force, thus also ending his own promising career in baseball. The fugitive spirit appears hard for Francis to shake off, and propels him throughout the rest of his life. The novel is ostensibly realist, but Francis sees and converses with dead people from this violent past in a fashion little different from the way in which he talks to the living.2 While there is no intimation that the deceased characters exist in the physical world shared with the novel’s other characters, their solid presence to

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Francis does mean that the reader has to pay attention to the question of who is solely a projection of Francis’s inner world and who is an actual physical contemporary. The constant haunting by ghosts from his past constitutes a significant structuring of the novel, conveying the idea that Francis is in purgatory, entering purification before ascension to heaven.3 The journey involves Francis’s reckoning with all those he has wronged and those who have wronged him. The novel therefore sets up at least two levels of interpretation: the straight story of a drinker-​bum at the end of the 1930s, inviting us into the world of a sympathetically realised recreation of the lives of those at the bottom end of the social scale, and a metaphysical-​religious journey of a soul looking into itself, wondering what life is all about. Francis’s psychological complexity perhaps provides a bridge between the actual and the metaphysical, but the emphasis on a religiously-tinged psychology is ultimately anathema to the idea of a thoroughgoing Existential drinker, despite their significant overlaps, as we shall see. The opening scene, set in a cemetery where Francis Phelan has picked up casual work as a gravedigger, establishes the world of haves and have-​ nots, and lets us know precisely where we should place Francis in this scheme. The truck he is in moves through the ‘monuments and cenotaphs of kindred design and striking design, all guarding the privileged dead’, through ‘acres of truly prestigious death’ and then, ‘inevitably, came the flowing masses, row upon row of them under simple headstones and simpler crosses. Here was the neighborhood of the Phelans’.4 The connection between drink, poverty, and death is likewise established at the outset. When Francis happens on the 1884 graves of two Phelan brothers, we are told: ‘The brothers read also in Francis’s face the familiar scars of alcoholic desolation, which both had developed in their graves. For both had been deeply drunk and vulnerable when the cutthroat Muggins killed them in tandem and took all their money: forty-​eight cents’.5 However, in the novel it is clear to the reader that Francis, unlike these unrelated Phelan predecessors, is not predestined for poverty, as a reader might expect from the above opening, and from the fact that the novel is set in the 1930s. Francis determinedly rejects the possibility of a comfortable existence and instead stays true to his ‘fugitive spirit’; he is a man who chooses a drunken-​bum’s life (the novel shows that it is possible to be a bum and not to drink6), and also that it is possible to break out of a cycle of drinking and poverty; it is simply that Francis prefers to drink and be poor. Likewise, the book is at pains to let us know that Francis is not a fall-​in-​the-​gutter-​type drunk, for when Francis sees the grave of the recently deceased pool hustler, Daddy Big, who choked on his own vomit from drink, we are told: ‘Francis knew how to drink. He drank

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all the time and he did not vomit. He drank anything that contained alcohol, anything, and he could always walk, and he could talk as well as any man alive about what was on his mind. Alcohol did put Francis to sleep, finally, but on his own terms’.7 This distinction reminds us of Jack London’s differentiation between two kinds of drunk, and accords with the declarations we have seen repeated that our protagonist-​drinkers are not like other heavy drinkers because there is always something that sets them apart. As with the novels already discussed, there are certainly ‘reasons’ for the cause of Francis’s drinking, in particular the death of his son when he accidentally dropped him,8 but these are not made sufficient, that is, there is a will to drink above and beyond possible ‘causal’, material explanations.9 In fact, it is spelt out that Francis drank before the death of Gerald, since he makes a point of saying that he wasn’t drunk at the time he dropped him:  ‘I had four beers after work that day. It wasn’t because I was drunk that I dropped you. Four beers, and I didn’t finish the fourth’.10 Even after the event he has the opportunity to return to the bosom of a loving family, one which would forgive his years of abandonment and dissipation, yet he still chooses to be poor and itinerant. There are certainly elements of religious guilt in the drinking and broader behaviour, just as there are with Judith Hearne, and for some readers the combination of responsibility for his son’s death and Catholic guilt is understandable enough as necessary and sufficient for drinking. Add to this that in the course of the novel we learn Francis is prone to violence and has killed a number of people, intentionally as well as accidentally, and the reader can’t help feeling that his preference for drunkenness is understandable from a psychological standpoint and doesn’t require any kind of metaphysical explanation. However, the novel also communicates the sentiment that Francis experiences Existential anxiety, for on occasion he does express a sense of self that is of his own volition and making, for a self that is made without appeal to any authority other than its own self-​consciousness. It is also true, nevertheless, that this Existential comprehension is situated within Francis’s deeply felt religious sensibility, seeing life as an unknowable mystery, with individual fates decided elsewhere. The identification of Francis Phelan as an Existential drinker is therefore a qualified one, in keeping with the general shift in a culture where Existentialism is now treated more loosely as a cluster of attitudes towards the world which can sit alongside other non-​ Existential worldviews. The Existential aspects can be regarded as ‘loose’ since the mix of Existential and non-​ Existential attitudes from a logical point of view can be rather contradictory: God’s mysterious will and the world’s unknowability as forces in

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the world are not generally considered to be part of Existential thought. When Judith Hearne despairs, this is in the mould of an Existential rejection of God, and Yerofeev shares elements of this. In contrast, Francis Phelan accedes to a world overseen by God, as indicated by the implication that he is in purgatory during the novel’s forty-​eight hours.11 At one point Phelan’s fugitive behaviour is summarised in this way:  ‘the running, finally, in a quest for pure flight as a fulfilling mannerism of the spirit’,12 a phrasing which expresses both his religious sensibility –​ ‘spirit’  –​and Existential authenticity. The novel retains this ambiguity and ambivalence throughout, although the latter wanes as the former waxes.13 The arc of Francis’s life and his attempt to understand the forces that have shaped that life, his own and others, are encapsulated in the chapter devoted to Francis’s girlfriend, Helen, when she takes herself off to a hotel to die. She is thinking here also of Arthur, her first love: For really, Helen wanted to fly free in the same way Francis did. After Arthur she knew she would always want to be free, even if she had to suffer for it. Arthur, Arthur, Helen no longer blames you for anything. She knows you were a man of frail allegiance in a way that Francis never was; knows too that she allowed you to hurt her. … Moving along in the world willfully, that’s what Helen was doing then (and now). A will to grace, if you would like to call it that however elusive that grace has proven to be. Was this willfulness a little deceit Helen was playing on herself? Was she moving, instead, in response to impulses out of that deep center? Why was it, really, that things never seemed to work out? Why was Helen’s life always turning into some back alley, like a wandering old cat? What is Helen? Who is Silvia, please? Please?14

This circumscribed notion of the Existential is typical of the novel as a whole. The attachment to flying free at the cost of personal suffering, and the assertion that it is the self’s wilfulness which can bring this about, is suggestive of Existential preoccupation. The self-​questioning around identity is not just a ‘who’ but a ‘what’, as if it is not just the self which is at issue, but which models of the self should be mobilised in the first place. And all of this takes place in the shadow of death, for Helen is readying herself to die by this point, even if the novel does not specify if she will die from the large benign tumour or not. The narrative purpose

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of her death is more to do with how she faces up to mortality than the fact that she is dying. But if all of this is Existential, the passage reveals that even at death’s door Helen remains a mystery to herself, for while ‘What is Helen?’ and ‘Who is Sylvia?’ (comparing herself to the mysterious woman in Schubert’s song), can be interpreted as a consciousness reflecting on its own lack of grounding, for there is no entity that just is ‘Helen’, it is more likely to be read in the way that we understand Francis’s inability to pin the course of his life down to either his own will or Fate, or even a mixture of the two. Faced with death, their lives would appear to be only knowable to or by God. The difference between this conclusion and the ending of Moscow–​Petushki is that Venichka’s confrontation with God seems like some surreal self-​projection, in keeping with a completely will-​full self, whereas Francis and Helen orientate themselves within the God of their Catholic upbringing. The narrative does allow Helen to be more in the Existential vein than Francis, however, for the sentimentally religious elements in Helen’s dialogue with self are mostly subsequently, and immediately, negated. As the chapter moves towards Helen’s final moments she steps outside of the religious version of her life and calls such a reading the ‘sad’ reading, an ‘error, for there are no women like Helen. Helen is no symbol of lost anything, wrong-​road-​taken kind of person, if-​only-​knew-​then kind of person’,15 and every step of the way has been the result of her own free will. Fighting the religious view that has been inculcated in her by a Catholic upbringing, and reckoning the accumulation of sins in her life, she insists that they should be called ‘decisions’, not sins, and hence ‘she has no compulsion to confess them’. In relation to Existentialism, what this section of the novel does is move the reader into an area of Existential thought that we have not seen in the other books, which is the question of how two committed drinkers can be together and yet still ensure each other’s freedom. Helen insists that she is not abandoning Francis by choosing death, but rather ‘abdicating for the man she used to love so he can be as free as Helen wants him to be, as free as she was in her own way, as free as she always was in her own way, as free as the two of them were even when they were most perfectly locked together’.16 This insistence on mutual freedom within a relationship is identical to that called for by de Beauvoir, and is very close to the language of mutually guaranteed freedom sometimes found in Existential philosophy when discussing self and other (see Introduction). So the novel does perhaps settle within this chapter devoted to Helen on an Existential viewpoint. Benedict Giamo provides a highly persuasive reading of Helen as thoroughly Existential, and interprets her very much as an embodiment of Sartre’s pour-​soi: ‘her

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situation is not unlike a Sartrean image of freedom, phenomenologically rendered’,17 although not necessarily with drink at its centre, as it has been with our other Existential drinkers. In the context of the novel as a whole, though, the Existential is held in abeyance, and some of the doubts about causality being other than an individual’s will are given more credibility. It may be that Francis, like Helen, cannot really explain why they have both ended up wasting their respective talents  –​she a classical pianist, he a baseball player –​and have insisted on a descent to the bottom of the social heap. Yet it is probably reasonable to say that if Helen’s chapter privileges an Existential viewpoint, and close as Francis comes at times to espousing the same, the novel’s resting place is with the healing value of familial love rather than authentic being, for Francis returns to his ex-​wife Annie’s house, and to Christian forgiveness, since Annie has never blamed Francis for Gerald’s death, and no longer holds any grievance against him for his abandonment of her and their two remaining children. This inconsistent and contradictory mix of views about life and self can be traced in the chapter that follows the one dealing with Helen’s death. The narrative returns to Francis now working for the rag-​and-​ bone man called Rosskam (­chapter  6). Francis once again is brought to the point of going over his life when those whose deaths he has been involved in directly or indirectly appear in front of him. He feels as if his hands have had a life of their own in these killings, and comes to the conclusion that the most distinct patterning in his life story has been violence. No other family member has killed anybody as he has. Unlike Helen’s acceptance of will and freedom Francis here appears to deny altogether that he is a self-​determining being: Harold Allen. The latter name suddenly acted as a magical key to history for Francis. He sensed for the first time in his life the workings of something other than conscious will within himself: insight into a pattern, an overview of all the violence in his history, of how many had died or been maimed by his hand, or had died, like that nameless pair of astonished shades, as an indirect result of his violent ways.18

Soon after this Francis also reflects back on how ‘flight’ has characterised his life,19 and not just because of events, but every time spring comes around: ‘the dance music rises in Francis’s brain, And he longs to flee again, And he flees’. This moves the narrative away from seeing Francis as an Existential drinker, or at least is another juncture where the novel provides an alternative ‘magical key’ to self-​ understanding. That is, the novel has no overarching view on these matters, presenting instead

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different and incompatible philosophical notions as to why people’s lives map out as they do, and without showing a preference for any particular view, be it religious, Existential, fatalistic, psychological, social, or atavistic (Francis’s ‘primal’ violence).20 So while Helen can reconcile her life to one of her own decision-​making, Francis is a mixed picture. This in itself might then cause the reader to call into question how much self-​deceit there may be in Helen’s view of her self, especially if we take Francis’s idea that our lives are governed by patterns of behaviour hidden from us, as he invokes when talking to the singing barman: ‘It wasn’t Gerald who did me. It wasn’t drink and it wasn’t baseball and it wasn’t really Mama. What was it that went bust, Oscar, and how come nobody ever found out how to fix it for us?’21 If this throws Helen’s version into doubt, then it also as a whole casts doubt on the Existential self, suggesting instead that the ‘flight’ inherent in Existentialism’s insistence on an ontological freedom is a self-​deceiving evasion, that it is not the freedom of a bird but the kind of flight which serves only as an escape. The novel’s highly fluid narrative voice –​it never quite offers a purely first-​person character point of view –​means that it is entirely up to the reader how to respond to these lives. In effect, the novel offers up the whole mix, each in a convincing way, both from the individual character’s perspective and when taking in all of the characters’ lives, from those of Helen and Francis to the rest of the novel’s cast, alive and dead. For the most part, then, even while espousing Existential notions, Francis never gets close to understanding his self or believing in a wholly willed self.22 The psychological view he holds suggests that if he could go deep enough into himself he would find the ‘real’ Francis and the fount of all actions, the ‘magical key’ that could explain himself to himself. As we have seen, Helen is the more truly Existential in this respect since she sees her life as the consequence of her own decisions, whereas Francis is at the mercy of his love of flight, his love of violence, and his evasion of justice.23 He can explain this to himself in these terms, but not, for instance, why he never called on his family when he had the opportunity, and why he does come home this once.24 He can call himself worthless for the way he has behaved towards his family, and apologise for what he has done to them, but that still does not explain the mystery of his being. This, I would say, remains either a psychological issue or a religious one. Francis’s anti-​status quo is not some kind of universal alienation from a self struggling to be authentic, it is one moulded by a set of external circumstances and inner fixed traits. The drinking belongs to these forces acting from outside the conscious self: ‘I don’t know why I do anything in this goddam life’25 and, likewise, all the figures haunting him from the past: ‘You never knew no more about how things was than I did’.26

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The novel likes to play on ambivalence, as when Francis goes up to the attic when back home and finds a photograph from nearly forty years ago in which he is playing baseball. In rooting round he is ‘touching untouchable artifacts of a self that did not yet know it was ruined, just as the ball, in its inanimate ignorance, did not know yet that it was going nowhere, was caught’,27 indicating that his is a life that had promise and is now over, only for the reader to be privy to: ‘And Francis is not yet ruined’, he ‘still lives to play another day. Doesn’t he?’ Yet again, then, the overriding impression is of a self that is being blown hither and thither by deep, largely unconscious, psychological motivation and social pressures. The ambivalence the novel exhibits towards Francis’s drinking is integral to this. At one point, in true Existential-​ drinker style, Francis condemns those who have given up drinking as emotional cripples,28 the implication being that his drinking constitutes a yea-​saying, life-​affirming self, and that only by remaining with drink can he be truly living. But elsewhere the drinking itself does not appear integral to Francis’s being-​in-​the-​world at all. For instance, there are no descriptions of drunken altered states of consciousness,29 even though we have access to Francis’s mental world, an interesting narrative choice in itself for a book with a drinker at its centre. We know, or suspect, that Francis is drunk, because others comment on it, and the dialogue in these scenes is entertainingly arbitrary or rapidly violent, with the verbal leading to actual violence. The same effect of presenting a contradictory, ineffable self to the reader could be achieved without the element of heavy drinking; it could be achieved by making violence and flight the sole symptoms of Francis’s ‘evasions’ of self and society, for instance, or his having a gambling problem. The real issue when viewed in this way is not the resort to heavy drinking but rather not having money, or choosing not to have money and living as a down-​and-​out. In the novels we have looked at so far, drinking itself constitutes the self-​determined life, but here it becomes increasingly incidental to a man who is ‘at war with himself, his private factions mutually bellicose’30 and trying to survive what sometimes appears to be a ‘character is fate’ model for self.31 After Helen’s death, it is as if the novel itself has decided that her view of self-​determination (even if not a completely Existential groundlessness of self) is not as compelling or accurate a comprehension of self as the idea that the self is under the sway of biology, psychology, religion, family, and the social. The novel is driven by asking what motivates or causes such people to live such lives, from its beginning in a graveyard to its dual ending: in the first ending Francis flees once more on a freight train and in the second we appear to be in his dream of the safe place of his wife’s attic, even planning to move downstairs (thus bringing them

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physically closer).32 On the religious level, Annie is something like an angel, so it makes narrative sense to have him go through purgatory and then to end up here in a quasi-​paradise of uncertain ontological status. Physically he is on the train, but spiritually and imaginatively he has atoned for his sins and moved back into the attic, having made peace with his family and the dead. In the train carriage he has flung an empty whisky bottle at the moon, while in the attic there is no mention of drinking, with readers once more free to judge Francis’s actions as they see fit, either siding with Annie’s forgiveness or critical of the drinker’s perennial wishful thinking. Regardless of either verdict, by the close of the novel its sentiment has moved some distance away from the earlier Existential possibilities which are sometimes evident in Francis but which are most visible in Helen. Notes 1 Kennedy has written two cycles of novels set in Albany, with three novels in each cycle. They feature recurring characters, although each can be read as self-​contained, as I will largely do here: ‘It must be mentioned, however, that all of his novels stand on their own, even though a Kennedy fan may take special delight in following destinies of different characters who know one another and inhabit his Albany’. Neila C. Seshachari, ‘Introduction’, in Neila C. Seshachari (ed.), Conversations with William Kennedy (Jackson, MS:  University Press of Mississippi, 1997), p.  ix. Some of the events in Ironweed dovetail with those of the earlier novel Billy Phelan’s Greatest Game (Harmondsworth, Middlesex: Penguin, 1985 [1978]) –​for example, when Francis registers twenty-​one times to vote –​while having no significant impact on the interpretation of the novels read in isolation. Anya Taylor has made the point that the cycle involving Ironweed, Billy Phelan’s Greatest Game and Legs (New York: Penguin, 1983 [1975]), is ‘drink saturated from the start’. Anya Taylor, ‘Ironweed, alcohol, and Celtic heroism’, Critique 33 (Winter 1992): 107–​20, p. 112. Christian Michener goes into detail about the history and relations in the Albany cycle in ­chapter 1 of his From Then into Now. 2 It should be noted that Kennedy regards the novel as moving away from realism, as he explains in an interview with McCaffrey and Gregory, in Seshachari (ed.), Conversations, p. 42. There is certainly a strong element of mysticism in the novel (interview with Kay Bonetti, in Seshachari (ed.), Conversations, pp.  69–​ 70), while Anya Taylor’s frame of reference in ‘Ironweed, alcohol, and Celtic heroism’ is shamanism, with alcohol providing entry into another world, which thus takes the novel even further away from realism:  ‘Ironweed can best be understood in this context of anthropological and mythological study’, p. 109. However, even taking into account the unresolved ending, there is no real indication that the figures

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from the past who appear to Francis are anything other than the ghosts of a mind struggling with itself. I am more inclined to Donald Pizer’s view that Ironweed is ‘a striking example of the continuity of naturalism in American fiction’, in which alcoholism has been one of the ‘most persistent naturalistic strains’. Donald Pizer, The Theory and Practice of American Literary Naturalism: Selected Essays and Reviews (Carbondale, IL: Southern Illinois University Press, 1993), p. 187 and p. 188. 3 Benedict F. Giamo claims that ‘anti-​purgatory’ is a more accurate description: ‘Francis, the Late-​Repentant, belongs more precisely to Dante’s Ante-​ Purgatory –​the waiting place for those who delayed repentance, especially for traitorous acts done to one’s own kin –​than to Purgatory itself’. Benedict F. Giamo, The Homeless of ‘Ironweed’: Blossoms on the Crag (Iowa City, IA: University of Iowa Press, 1997), p. 3. 4 Kennedy, Ironweed, p. 1. 5 Ibid., p. 3. 6 I am using the term ‘bum’ here as it is presented in the novel, but should note that others regard drinking as an essential part of the definition of a bum: ‘Ben L. Reitman, who tramped a good deal himself, remarked that a hobo works and wanders, a tramp dreams and wanders, and a bum drinks and wanders’, Stewart Holbrook, quoted in Frederick Feied, No Pie in the Sky: The Hobo as American Cultural Hero in the Works of Jack London, John Dos Passos, and Jack Kerouac (Lincoln, NE:  Authors Choice Press, 1964/​2000), p. 17. 7 Kennedy, Ironweed, p. 6. 8 When he visits his son Gerald’s grave for the first time, the son does not condemn him for the accidental dropping, but does condemn him ‘for the abandonment of the family, for craven flight when the steadfast virtues were called for’, p. 18. 9 Although approaching the novel from a different angle to this book, Giamo notes a similar difficulty:  ‘The problem of intentionality in the novel challenges the reader to ascertain the relationship among character, motive, and defining action (agent–​purpose–​act). Frankly, this is not an easy assignment, for the overriding sense of mystery that suffuses the relationship checks any facile attribution of cause (or agency)’, The Homeless of ‘Ironweed’, p. 65. Giamo turns to a ‘phenomenological approach’, and with respect to Francis emphasises the prevalence of ‘the traditionally guilt-​laden cultures of the West’ and thus Francis’s persistent feeling of responsibility for all that has happened, p. 65, and finally drawn together in the tragic genre, pp. 70ff. 10 Kennedy, Ironweed, p. 20. Annie, his wife, backs up this version of events in Billy Phelan’s Greatest Game, and blames herself for not pinning the diaper correctly, p. 249. 11 The novel is prefaced with an epigraph from Dante’s Purgatorio and begins in a graveyard: ‘Francis saw the pair of Phelan stones and turned his eyes elsewhere, fearful that his infant son, Gerald, might be under one of them.

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He had not confronted Gerald directly since the day he let the child slip out of its diaper’, Kennedy, Ironweed, p. 2. 12 Ibid., p. 82. 13 Nor should it be ignored that ‘spirit’ is a term that also invokes the presence of the dead, as is evident from the very start of the novel: ‘Francis Phelan became aware that the dead, even more than the living, settled down in neighborhoods’, p.  1. The many allusions to other mythical and literary ‘flights’, are noted by, for example, Taylor, ‘Ironweed, alcohol, and Celtic heroism’, p. 115. 14 Kennedy, Ironweed, p. 148. 15 Ibid., p. 149. 16 Ibid., p. 152. 17 Ibid., p.  120. Although Giamo makes other references to Existentialism throughout his reading of Ironweed, it is only in relation to Helen that the philosophy is fully applied, for example:  ‘Although Helen cannot change the facticity of the matter, she is nonetheless presented as one who assumes responsibility:  she reviews, reflects, and imagines; makes choices and decisions; takes certain positions in relation to self and others; and, overall, invests her life with a rich sense of meaning, worth, and value’, The Homeless of ‘Ironweed’, p. 119. Michener’s chapter on Ironweed is headed ‘Existential struggles in an eschatological world:  the myth of Francis Phelan’, but ‘existential’ is here used in a largely psychological sense of self-​questing, an ‘existential journey’ that is common to ‘any life’, although with a fair share of ‘self-​created meaning’, From Then into Now, p. 99. 18 Kennedy, Ironweed, p. 159. 19 Ibid., p. 161. 20 The lack of an overarching view is typical of literature from the 1960s/​ 1970s onwards, on the back of the turn to a general postmodern scepticism. Geoffrey R. Liliburne offers a religious interpretation of Francis’s progress through the novel: ‘the nameless force [Francis] seems to be fleeing is never reduced to an element of his own psyche, yet is certainly no deus ex machina. It is in the absence opened up by his sense of pursuit that the suggestion of a transcendent power is evoked’. Geoffrey R. Liliburne, ‘The Color Purple and Ironweed: postmodern narratives of transformation’, Quarterly Review 7:2 (1987), 38–​54, p. 51. 21 Kennedy, Ironweed, p. 54. 22 Michael G.  Yetman’s article on Ironweed is largely in the context of Romanticism and its American assimilation. He does also note towards the end of the article a significant Existential dimension:  ‘What is so impressive about the Kennedy performance is that the absurdist, existential victory is presented so convincingly through the sensibility of an alcoholic bum permanently on the skids, and in a supporting context of utterly failed, at best marginal lives, and baseball nostalgia and jungle towns and weeds and dust and dead bums’ flesh and bones and vomit’. Michael G. Yetman, ‘Ironweed: the perils and purgatories of male romanticism’, Papers

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on Language and Literature 27:1 (1991), 84–​104, p.  102. As will be evident from my reading, I see the novel as ultimately moving away from this possibility. Billy Phelan’s Greatest Game, like Ironweed, also appears to offer an Existential possibility for lives, only to ultimately reject it. For example: ‘ “It’s your life”, Martin said [to Francis], but even as he said it he was adding silently: but not entirely yours. Life hardly goes by ones’, p. 37, suggesting once again that forces outside the individual are just as significant as questions such as authenticity and freedom. 23 Kennedy, Ironweed, p. 176. 24 Ibid. 25 Ibid., p. 193. 26 Ibid., p. 195. 27 Ibid., p. 186. 28 Ibid., p. 44. 29 That is, unless we take the hallucinatory nature of narrated present to be related to his drinking, but there is little to support this reading. Anya Taylor writes: ‘he drinks an enormous amount, in a culture founded on drink, in a subculture of drunks, but, oddly enough, does not attain his visions as a drunk’. Taylor, ‘Ironweed, alcohol, and Celtic heroism’, p. 112. 30 Kennedy, Ironweed, p. 228. 31 Yetman picks up on his inconsistent behaviour: ‘Actually, Francis’s behavior is various and contradictory throughout. He is, willy-​nilly, and often in odd combinations, bellicose, compliant, wooden, courtly, principled, wily, magnanimous with those less well-​off than himself, or self-​preoccupied and therefore quite indifferent to the plight of others’. Yetman, ‘Ironweed: the perils and purgatories’, n. 2. 32 Yetman writes:  ‘We can never be certain which of the two endings is the “true” one’, ibid., p. 86. Both endings are written in the physically actual present tense, while logically Francis cannot be both on the train and back in the attic at home with Annie. If Giamo is correct, Kennedy’s Very Old Bones (1992) has Francis ‘on the road rather than reunited with his family’ (The Homeless of ‘Ironweed’, p. xviii), but this raises the issue of whether we should be reading Ironweed as self-​contained or as strictly part of the cycle.

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John O’Brien, Leaving Las Vegas (1990): suicide

Yes, of course I’m an alc, he thinks. What about it? It’s not what the story is about.

William Kennedy’s Ironweed was published in 1983, at a time when the West’s prevailing inclination was for consumerism and a deregulated market. While not dealing directly with the Great Depression and poverty, as a reader might expect of a novel set in 1930s America, Ironweed nevertheless appears to offer its contemporary audience a deliberate counterweight to the politics and economics of its time by focusing on society’s left-​behind. The novel won the Pulitzer Prize in 1984 and was made into a film starring Jack Nicholson and Meryl Streep. The screenplay was by Kennedy and faithfully followed the novel’s plotline. It was released in 1987, the same year that Wall Street was released, with its motto ‘greed is good’. Leaving Las Vegas seems to follow in Ironweed’s footsteps –​a novel first (1990), then a film (1995), with both novel and film very much a part of the social and cultural landscape of overdriven consumerism and self-​indulgence. If Ironweed’s critique of capitalism’s flaws is implicit,1 O’Brien’s explicitly seems to target the vacuity and soullessness of modern life, with Las Vegas its starring symbol and objective correlative.2 The novel’s semi-​autobiographical content would seem to return us to the milieu of the writer-drinker. The idea of drinking as a slow suicide has been a recurrent theme throughout The Existential drinker, often drawing on Camus’s premise as expressed at the beginning of The Myth of Sisyphus that to truly exist there must be some authentic desire for existence. It is from this idea that Leaving Las Vegas appears to find its cue: Ben has taken to heart the idea that if there’s nothing to live for then why go on?, and rather than continuing the slow death of his previous heavy drinking the book begins at the point where he has decided on certain death in one final drinking binge, quipping to himself along the way that not even an existential pep

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talk from Camus can help.3 As with the relationship between Geoffrey Firmin and Yvonne in Under the Volcano, love here, in the form of his relationship with the prostitute Sera, is seen as a threat to an authentic self, rather than offering redemption, or in conflict with the possibility of redemption, comparable also to Francis’s relationship with Annie.4 As with Ironweed, there is a conscious rejection of a mainstream Existential model of the self, although in Leaving Las Vegas it works in a different way. Ironweed provides multiple possible causes for Francis Phelan’s behaviour, with, as we have seen, some preferences in evidence, but with no overall explanation, for it certainly does not ultimately favour the Existential self. On the other hand, unlike Ironweed, Leaving Las Vegas offers no explanations at all. Camus is somehow still in the background, but this time with the emphasis on suicide rather than Francis Phelan’s Sisyphean stoicism. When Sera asks Ben why he is a drunk intent on killing himself, not only is he unable to answer the question, but he doesn’t care about such questions in the first place.5 Of course, Sera is open to the same kind of questions about self-​­destructive behaviour, for example why she lives her life as a prostitute. She recognises the parallel herself, but like Ben (and this is one of the reasons she doesn’t push him to answer) she doesn’t wish to analyse her own life in any detail: ‘In all fairness she considers that she, herself, would not care tonight to expound the happy-​go-​lucky world of prostitution, and she is again impressed by his failure to bring that up. Sera tries not to look too deeply at things anymore, for fear that they may not hold up to scrutiny’.6 Does this mean that their lives as ‘drunk’ and ‘prostitute’ are evasions from facing up to reality? At this level it would certainly seem to be the case, as they appear to live inauthentic lives in the way that Sartre talks of ‘bad faith’, acting out the roles of ‘the drunk’ and ‘the prostitute’. By not being philosophical, by not looking too deeply into things, they can cope. The issue remains for the reader though: are the causes of their behaviour psychological, social, spiritual, philosophical, or some mixture of these? An answer to this might be found in one of the few artistic statements in the novel. Although it never directly discusses the aesthetics of literature, it does make connections between lifestyle and aesthetic choices. The first time Ben visits Sera’s apartment he appraises her through the decor:  ‘Like a Shaker home, this place platonically denies all but function, and for that reason aspires to a higher level of art: a deliberate art of basic reality’.7 That ‘deliberate art of basic reality’ is both the style and the subject matter of Leaving Las Vegas, stripping art and life back to its basics. The connection between a pared-​back aesthetic and reducing existence to a  question of survival is tacitly made just a few

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pages later: ‘Her own life plan these days is limited to just about that. Plan: stay alive. If she has to sell her soul to make that work, then fine’.8 At the same time this view of her life also continues to close off the possibility of any spiritual or philosophical orientation since she is willing to sell her soul to serve more basic needs. But for the reader this continues to leave unanswered the same questions about self, authenticity, and self-​ determined projects. And when the labels ‘drunk’ and ‘prostitute’ are used as shorthand for identity, are we to take it that the book itself is reductive in its opinion of its characters? It is apparent that calling Ben ‘a drunk’ –​and having him call himself a drunk –​is tantamount to saying he is an alcoholic, and so the novel avoids going into the niceties of how far this way of life is or is not a choice: ‘ “We know I’m a drunk. That’s part of what we have here, and you’re all right with that. Likewise, we know you’re a hooker, so if and when you decide to work, whatever your motivation, that’s up to you” ’.9 Yet, despite all this nay-​saying to self-​and soul-​searching, Leaving Las Vegas maintains a certain aura of the Existential. Its insistence on nothingness and meaninglessness is very much in tune with Camus’s idea that there can be no imposition of meaning which is not at the same time false. Ironweed does exactly what Camus warns against, frequently offering up the brute meaninglessness of life, only to then furnish the characters with possible get-​ out clauses. Leaving Las Vegas offers no possible redemptive feature at all, and this can make for a rather distanced reading experience.10 At the level of plot we witness the same scenarios as the novels we have already looked at, that is, somebody committed to excessive drinking as a means of slow suicide. But the payoff for these other works is the number of insights offered along the way:  cultural, emotional, philosophical, psychological, social, stylistic, spiritual, Existential. O’Brien’s novel is written in a mainly flat prose: it juxtaposes three individual narratives, Ben’s, Sera’s and Al’s (although Sera’s and Al’s interlock; Al is Sera’s pimp and ex-​boyfriend), and is relentless in detailing Ben’s constant drinking and horrible demise. His death wish –​‘motivation’, as Sera puts it –​is unexplained and even the power of Sera’s love for him (and, in a way, his for her) cannot save him. What’s in it for the reader? The presumption has to be that the reader empathises in some way with Ben’s and Sera’s plights. One interpretation is that they are unwittingly trapped in undesirable lives because they believe these lives to have been freely chosen by themselves. This does remain ambiguous throughout the novel since it remains unclear if they are in fact freely chosen lives, or if these are characters self-​deluded about the level of free will they have. Given all that’s been said above, and taking this view

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into account, Ben and Sera do sometimes appear as puppets of forces outside themselves, at the mercy of contingency and environment, and concomitantly inauthentic, content to unthinkingly act out the scripts of ‘drunk’ and ‘prostitute’ society provides. Yet to take this view ignores the fact that they also frequently self-​consciously commit themselves to these very lives, that they take stock of their lives on a regular basis, and seemingly commit as free beings to continue to choose these lives. That does not in itself negate the criticism that they are self-​deluding, but the question then becomes: who is in the position to make this judgement of delusion? It could be that any ‘right-​thinking’ person is exactly the person in that position, since nobody would willingly choose to accept the life of ‘drunk’ or ‘prostitute’, if these terms are taken to represent identities outside desirable social norms, since the novel is graphic in its depiction of the humiliations and abuse involved in both of these roles. While I think it is possible to reach some conclusions about Ironweed, which has this similar set of elements to Leaving Las Vegas, Ironweed has a final, if qualified, reliance on psychological and spiritual frames, whereas Leaving Las Vegas does not. Since we are not provided with possible explanations for Ben’s behaviour, we are left with nothing but to accept Ben’s death as his choice for suicide as an act that only makes sense for him. Although this may seem flimsy given the breadth and depth of what has gone before in The Existential drinker, this is actually in keeping with a core tenet of Existentialism, that the individual’s choices can only make sense to that uniquely living (experiencing) individual. Although I would argue that Leaving Las Vegas in most respects knowingly refuses to engage with Existential ideas, having ‘moved on’ from this cliché of the sixties, just as it has moved on from the trope of ‘alcoholic’, the narrative logic of it is identical to that of Camus’s The Outsider, where at the end of the novel Meursault completely accepts his own death.11 The rest of this chapter looks specifically at the way the novel treats ‘alcoholism’, ‘art’, ‘love’, and ‘suicide’ in order to examine the idea that Leaving Las Vegas remains true to this one aspect of the Existential, at the expense of the broader Existential undertakings we have observed in the other novels. Alcoholism A key statement about Ben’s self-​perception of his life in relation to drinking is given in this outburst: He looks in the mirror and doesn’t care that he is an alcoholic. The issue is entirely irrelevant to him. He does all this deliberately, with purpose.

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Yes, of course I’m an alc, he thinks. What about it? It’s not what the story is about. There are a million ways to croak; he’s only plucking a piece of life. Let go and fuck God. There are a thousand mind manipulations. As he and his friend used to joke about: It’s time to cut your hair, get a job, and just give up. Ha Ha.12

This encapsulates much of the ambiguity about the novel. The novel asks us to move on with Ben and away from the category of ‘alcoholic’. When he declares that this is ‘not what the story is about’ there is an implicit challenge to the reader to work out exactly what, then, the novel –​‘the story’ –​is properly concerned with, that is, if it is not about the life of an alcoholic (and, in parallel, the life of a prostitute). The joke about getting your hair cut and getting a job –​‘just give up’ –​is further evidence of a weariness with the narrative trope of countercultural, anti-​establishment, and anti-​capitalist sentiment (and again an implicit reference to The Myth of Sisyphus, perhaps, when Camus depicts the conformist’s generic day of work13). O’Brien presents Ben as already having moved beyond whatever stories there are about alcoholics and rebellion, since neither of these narratives has cachet or relevance for him. That would seem to suggest therefore that the novel will move the reader beyond the familiar and into some new territory. But in fact the paragraph quoted above ends with: ‘The crime is not that he’s an alcoholic; big deal! The crime is that he’s disoriented, big time’.14 The idea that Ben is ‘disoriented’ helps build towards a picture of him as somehow lost in the modern world, a world not too dissimilar from Fred Ex’s disorientation in modern America in A Fan’s Notes, although in Leaving Las Vegas there are even fewer compass points than in Exley’s novel. At least Fred Ex has targets to aim at  –​the American dreams of conformism, fame, sexual and monetary success –​but Ben doesn’t actually seem angry about anything, and nor does he seem to care about anything. The disorientation is therefore absolute, and in this way it would be possible to say that Leaving Las Vegas is much closer to an Existential assessment of life’s groundlessness, with an absolute view that there is nothing anywhere that can provide meaning other than that which the individual provides. All of the previous novels have protagonists operating within social, cultural, historical, and psychological contexts which provide boundaries. Either those contexts do not exist any longer, or Ben chooses to ignore them. This is partly reinforced by the plot. Although the novel is entitled Leaving Las Vegas, for the first two-​ thirds of the book Ben is in Los Angeles. The reason he wants to move to Las Vegas is because there are no restrictions on the sale of alcohol,

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so he will be able to purchase drink any time of the day: ‘Time is now the biggest irritation in his life. Las Vegas looms in the back of his head. Free from closing hours, lots of liquor always everywhere, it is inevitable that he will end up there’.15 By extension, Vegas then comes to represent boundary-​less existence, where individuals are free to be who or what they want, with nothing to stop them.16 This is certainly an extreme hedonistic version of freedom, but nevertheless it is certainly the way that Ben’s freedom is presented to the reader. But here the novel does remain ambiguous and possibly mirrors in itself the ‘disorientation’ it claims is Ben’s story. Is the novel implicitly critical of a certain kind of logical endpoint to the idea of America: Vegas, freedom, choice? If the novel is indeed a criticism of America along these lines, then it rests on a rather narrow definition of freedom and the cost to the self that this entails. This freedom is tied solely to hedonism, which in turn requires cash; after all, Ben’s final binge is carefully calculated according to how much he has saved and how much he can spend on his credit cards before he is found out, very much a consumerist ethic. The freedom Ben alights upon is the hedonism of drinking, sex, and gambling. The novel’s implicit judgement is that amidst the endpoint of American civilisation the self is finally deracinated and empty, that not only have we moved beyond stereotypical narratives of ‘alcoholism’ and (Romantic) ‘rebellion’ but we have moved beyond responsibility for the self as well, or, to take a postmodern line, in Vegas we can be many selves, we do not have responsibility for a single, coherent self. All of these possibilities take us beyond Existentialism, since Existentialism operates on the idea of a self that is responsible for its self, not one that is dispersed into many selves that lack a co-​ordinating consciousness. There are perhaps three main areas where the novel does give the reader some kind of orientation –​art, love, suicide –​but whether any of these count as resistance to a hedonism that is the only kind of freedom available is arguable, as discussed below. Art Both Sartre and Camus give considerable attention to art when thinking about how to respond to life’s meaninglessness. It is of course also a paradoxical feature of Existentialism that the effort poured into thought, literature, and philosophy intrinsically implies meaningful activity. We have already seen on a number of occasions how the ‘failed person’ of the drinker is also the successful artist, and that the level of success is somehow in direct relation to the depths of drinking. Although for the

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main part there is no indication that Ben is or wants to be an author, there is a passage in the novel when Ben is clearing out baggage from his past and where we get some indication of how art and life are viewed, both for Ben and in relation to contemporary life:  ‘So separated from him and each other, his possessions no longer have a story to tell. They are reduced to elements, building blocks of a modern American existence. No longer parts summing into a whole, they are without collective meaning, an eraser mark on the page of his life’.17 The objects from the past form no coherent whole, certainly not for Ben, and perhaps not for America either, the suggestion being that Ben’s disintegration as a drunk mimics America’s disintegration as a nation, and as such Leaving Las Vegas becomes a direct successor to A Fan’s Notes. But more importantly, behind this is the claim that it is narrative itself which fails. All the elements of a story (or a nation) remain, but there is no mechanism (narrative) to enable them to cohere: ‘stories’ fail in their function of making sense. It is no surprise then that at the level of the novel’s narrative there may be no meaningful coherence. So even if we take the view that comprehending a life can only be done from within the self experiencing that life, Ben/​the novel advances the view that the self cannot be held together by narrative. This feature would negate any individual’s Existential self-​determination since the Existential self does depend upon a meaningful (self) narrative, as noted in the Introduction: ‘This tapestry which he is unraveling never really told a story to begin with; it was always non-​figurative and woven without volition’.18 The novel insists that whatever may have been narratively knit together represents a false attempt to make his life coherent, and the ‘non-​figurative’, meaning ‘without human figures’ and/​or without metaphors/​tropes, suggests both the deracination already commented on and an avoidance of the poetic (lyric); ‘without volition’ indicates that he has been impelled by an impersonal patterning and by forces beyond the self. All of this points to the negation of narrative as a meaning-​making activity, and throws into question literature and the novel as a way of making sense of self and world. Such questioning of art is not part of the momentum we have seen in the other novels discussed, which do tend to assume narrative and literature are important means of apprehending self and world. Another significant aspect to this passage is what Ben throws onto the fire: ‘Very drunk, but well fueled with purpose, he turns to the more detailed task of purging the very personal things. He builds a small fire in the brazier on his patio. In goes the amateur artwork that he has created: the photographs, a carved piece of pine, a watercolor painted over a love poem to his wife, a story he had written’.19 Could this be a gesture towards the artist as a failure? Describing the artefacts as ‘amateur’

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leaves open ‘professional’ art as important, but there is nothing elsewhere to tell us that art can have any kind of impact on the lives of those in Las Vegas or Los Angeles. There is also the hint of a creativity that might have had some personal significance, once upon a time –​photography, woodwork, painting, poetry, fiction  –​and a means of personal expression. Here again, though, other than the gesture towards a certain pervasive sadness, the novel does not go into detail, refusing to expand on the hinterland of Ben’s life, and in implicit opposition to most novels where such experiences are regarded as primary encounters (for example in Ironweed when Francis is in the attic and goes through objects from his personal history). Ben is ‘empty’, and this is replicated in the novel’s treatment of Ben’s meeting with his past life. A more salient correlation between art and Ben’s life than this encounter is perhaps his description of his life as a piece of performance art, which would also have the effect of diminishing the importance of an individual’s past in the construction of self-​determination: ‘At times like this he likes to think of his life as one big piece of performance art. Not structured enough to be an actual play, it is full of irrationality and minuscule details and can only be viewed from the inside out. Once. By him. If he doesn’t black out’.20 If he has only been an amateur when expressing himself in more traditional artistic outlets, there is nobody who can dismiss his ability to perform his own life. This, though, further serves to remove any notion of authenticity. Although it could be said that such a performance is in keeping with Sartre’s idea of the ‘for-​itself’, one interpretation would be to see this in the postmodern context of the time of the novel, that the novel presents only the replica of a possible self.21 Considering that his life is ‘a piece of performance art’ is just one way Ben presents his life to himself. The disorientation mentioned earlier is evident here in the character’s inability to correctly identify what is the best art form to express or represent the self. Love If there is a continual theme that runs through the books in The Existential drinker it is the idea that if these drinkers only gave themselves over to ‘love’ they would be ‘saved’:  if only Don Birnam had listened to Helen, if only Rhys’s heroines could find the right man, if only Judith Hearne could find somebody interested in her for herself. Why couldn’t the Consul take Yvonne back and establish their joint vision of an idyllic life? Why can’t Francis re-​establish his life with Annie? Perhaps we could even go all the way back to Jack London, who should have taken more heed of Charmian. As with the elements so far discussed

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in Leaving Las Vegas, we have the story of Ben and Sera itself,22 and a kind of metanarrative  –​a story about the type of story, or stories, the novel is dealing with. Hence Sera and Ben realise that there exists a narrative where the two of them rescue each other. Sera is pleased when Ben doesn’t ask questions about why she is a prostitute, because she has had her fill of the type of man who does this, the kind of man who exudes sympathy while at the same time occupying the moral high ground. Ben is adamant that, likewise, he is not to be saved by Sera. His intention is to die through drinking. One of the problems around the idea of ‘love’ is its very conventionality, that it is bound up with the idea of a spouse and a family, and that this traditional way of life is restrictive and leads to inauthenticity. Part of love’s conventionality lies in the traditional view that it requires subordination and sacrifice of the self to others, to spouse and children, to other relatives. There is a telling episode when Ben is poolside and makes friends with ‘a fat family from the midwest’: ‘Talking with them, Ben felt a great sense of admiration for their general contentment, but he knows that this wouldn’t stand up to scrutiny; their life could no more work for him than his for them, nor would he want it to’.23 Like Fred Exley, Ben is simply unable to live a conventional life as others do. As elsewhere in the novel, there is no explanation as to why it wouldn’t work; as readers, it seems we are being asked to accept that this is what Ben is like and we can’t go any further than that, or we should just move on because Ben’s life is not open to ‘scrutiny’, either by himself or by the reader. The fact that the family is content and ‘fat’ is suggestive of lives that are lived at the level of well-​fed animals, the ‘in-​itself’ of cows, not humans actively engaged in the question of their existence. So while Ben is made distinct from these people when his scrutiny of them indicates he does not believe them to be ‘truly existing’, he does not suggest what real existence is or might be, unless we are to take it that simply living the way Ben does is truly existing. Some of this attitude might explain Ben’s reaction to Sera’s affection for him. It is possible of course to build an argument that explains his behaviour psychologically around the idea that he is unable to accept or express emotion. One example of him rejecting sympathy from others is when a bartender steps outside the bounds of his job to warn Ben off drinking, a kindness rewarded only by Ben’s rudeness. This type of minor rebuttal is writ large when it comes to Ben’s dealings with Sera. Close to the end of the book Sera simply can no longer bear to see him so ill with drink and asks that he do just one thing for her, which is to go to the doctor. His response to her concern is to say that perhaps it’s time for him to move out of her flat: ‘ “And do what, rot away in a room? We’re

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not going to talk about that! I will not talk about that! Fuck you! You’re staying here. You are not moving to a hotel. One thing! This is one thing you can do for me. I’ve given you gallons of free will here, you can do this for me” ’.24 Here is the whole dynamic between his Existential self, drinking, and love. Her reference to free will, whose measure is alcohol, is a recognition that their relationship has been built on respect for the self’s inviolable freedom, but her request that in return he do something for her is a betrayal of that understanding.25 As extremely unreasonable and self-​defeating as his behaviour may seem as a response to her concern for his well-​being, it remains faithful to his self-​defined project. His refusal to see a doctor is insufficient of itself for Sera to end the relationship or return it to its original footing, but Ben by this point is now determined that he must break his connection with her. As a consequence, when Sera is out at work he hires a prostitute and is then caught with her when Sera returns. He has engineered the whole situation so that Sera has no option but to accept that he needs to move out of the apartment in order to restore his authentic self. In one way it can be taken as a measure of his feelings for Sera, that he doesn’t want her to have him as a burden anymore and have to watch him in his death throes, but the bigger claim is that he is sticking to his plan to drink himself to death and that ‘love’ does not fall into the same category of significance, that his free will must be maintained regardless, that his ‘free will’ cannot be something gifted to him by Sera. Even though he regards Sera as an angel, and, by implication, his possible salvation, again such a stereotypical narrative is not allowed to play out and Ben retains his authenticity, at the cost of his life. Suicide: undoing the self This returns us to the novel’s central narrative, Ben’s desire to commit suicide by drinking. The great unexplained is the question of why he drinks. When the reader is asked to accept that he is an alcoholic and to ‘move on’, does that mean that the reader is also expected to accept that there can in reality be no explanation, that some people just are alcoholics, a fact that may be down to psychology, physiology, or philosophy? All of these three types of explanation are touted at one point or another. There is something in Ben’s psyche which will not allow him to accept others into his life. At a bar where a woman smiles in a way that communicates a shared humanity, we are told he is unable to respond in kind because he is ‘Locked in a circle of logical inaccessibility, he thinks: I am not good enough to be with you, and because I will not be with you, I am not good enough’.26 It also needs to be remembered

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that he meets Sera through hiring her, not looking for sex, but for human warmth, to know that life goes on even as he will die soon. This would appear to be some psychological aspect requiring a case history that would explain his emotional paralysis and sense of worthlessness. We are told that his marriage fell apart, but no details, psychological or otherwise, are provided. We are told he is fired from his job for drinking, even though he is good at his job. Like his failed marriage, this is just sketched in and has none of the detail we would require to explain psychological causation. As to physiology, the novel portrays him as always in need of another drink, no matter how sick he is, what time of the day it is, or how many blackouts he endures. He craves drink, and sometimes it seems as if his mind is simply accommodating his biology. With respect to contemplation, yes, we get his views on self and life, yet there is no pushing of these ideas towards anything except the next drink or closing them off in epigrammatic fashion. I have already dealt with the ways in which the novel shares some aspects of the Existential drinker with previously discussed works, as well as the ways in which its sensibility sits outside this. There is one element, though, which informs the novel throughout, and this is its tacit assertion that there are no more viable models of self, be they Existential or humanist. The novel’s nihilism extends to the refutation of the idea that a self has worth and meaning, and to a recognition that this is the general state of affairs in contemporary America:  ‘Apart from his bed and some heavy furniture, what remains, what he owns, what’s left, fits into a suitcase. Ben looks around himself, surveying the apartment. The job has been well done. How right, he thinks, that what I  have done so well here is to undo. And indeed, he continues to be a tireless architect of his own undoing’.27 Ben’s free will is to the fore here, and the drinking is part of the wilful intention to ‘undo’ the self. What, though, is he undoing? Is he stripping back the accumulation of convention  –​ wife, job, meaningless routine  –​to pure biology, mainly in the form of drinking until he blacks out, and some bouts of paid-​for sex? The section where he details his working day before he gets sacked suggests the habituation –​he can do his job, but his drinking is too much –​but he can only stomach doing his job, presumably, because of the anaesthetic effect of drinking. But why ‘undo’ his self? Isn’t it unravelling by itself without his help? After the breakup with his wife, he realises the ‘horror’ of his situation, which suggests that he has found himself on a downward spiral not of his own volition.28 It may be that the novel as a whole has no logic, that it is a piece of performance art, ‘Not structured enough to be an actual play … full of irrationality and minuscule details [that] can only be viewed from the inside out’, and the absence of meaning and

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meaningfulness reproduces in this way the incommunicability of a life that only makes sense from the inside. This does seem to be a large part of it, allied, I would suggest, with an assessment that contemporary life has no space for the human. The evidence for this is when the relationship between Sera and Ben starts to progress. Sera feels connected with her self, as does Ben. The implication here is that there is some original self which has been lost over the years to the point where the self is submerged beneath an accumulation of coping strategies which constitute the means of sheer ‘survival’ mentioned by Sera above. The relationship on equal terms with equal respect for their respective lives allows them to briefly flourish in this way. Sera works to sever herself once and for all from her one-​time lover and pimp, Al, because what she has now with Ben means something. The hour of human warmth that Ben thought he was buying has continued naturally with the time he spends with Sera, without making claims on her. Again, it could be said that the novel does not really give clues as to why Sera and Ben end up as ‘the prostitute’ and ‘the drunk’, nor really why their relationship is unable to overcome the rut they find themselves in. Nor is it that the novel confines this emptiness with flashes of a lost humanity to just Sera and Ben. Early in the novel Sera has a radio on in the background and a caller to the show asks the host where God is amongst all the sex shows and drinking on the streets. He tells her to have faith: ‘The drunk, the prostitute, the will not, live not suicides, will be swept away from our clean floor and into the pit to burn. Then you, Jo, and I and our sisters and brothers will walk again without the tainted presence of those that embrace the evil’.29 Although the novel does not position itself religiously, it sets itself out to present exactly these three categories of evil: the drunk, the prostitute, and the suicide. But finally, having flirted with the possibility of the restoration of ‘the human’ and, by extension, humanism, it settles for recording ‘performances’ of these three categories. The novel accepts without further questioning that these are how the lives of the alienated are lived, and in this way O’Brien’s novel, like William Kennedy’s Ironweed, is another move away from the Existential drinker. Notes 1 As Yetman describes it: ‘In Dante’s work purgatory is a steep mountain; in Kennedy’s, it is the economic and moral “urbanscape” of the Great Depression, strewn with broken bodies and lost, desiccated souls’. Yetman, ‘Ironweed: the perils and purgatories’, p. 90, but it should be emphasised that the connection is not explicitly made by the novel.

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2 Strictly speaking, Los Angeles and Las Vegas. Las Vegas is the more extreme version of LA since there are no restrictions on drinking (discussed later in the chapter) and therefore no apparent restrictions on the self. However, the perceived emptiness of modern life is evident in both cities. At the beginning of the section ‘Bars’, when Ben is in LA, it is 10 a.m. and he is already onto his fourth vodka-​cranberry. The only thing to do in the bar is watch television quiz shows in which the prizes are explicitly consumer goods and implicitly sexual ones, O’Brien, Leaving Las Vegas, pp. 59–​60. A few pages later he says he doesn’t watch the sports shows that television dribbles out, p. 63. This milieu seems little changed from that portrayed in A Fan’s Notes. 3 O’Brien, Leaving Las Vegas, p. 100. 4 A couple of other similarities between Ironweed’s Helen and Leaving Las Vegas’s Sera are that both women respect the autonomy of the men they are with while also insisting on their own autonomy, and both women survive through their provision of sex to men. 5 O’Brien, Leaving Las Vegas, pp. 143–​4. 6 Ibid., p. 144. 7 Ibid., p. 140. 8 Ibid., p. 144. 9 The terms ‘alcoholic’ and ‘a drunk’ are used by the characters interchangeably in the novel. Sera identifies Ben as a drunk (p. 133) and later refers to him as ‘an alcoholic’ (p. 167). 10 I am not pursuing an autobiographical reading of Leaving Las Vegas, for reasons discussed previously in this book. O’Brien’s sister Erin O’Brien provides biographical assessment with respect to Leaving Las Vegas and his posthumously published novel Better (a novel discussed in the Conclusion) in ‘Clues in John O’Brien’s Better’, Los Angeles Times (19 July 2009), http://​ articles.latimes.com/​2009/​jul/​19/​entertainment/​ca-​john-​obrien19, p. 2. 11 Meursault is convicted of murder and faces execution, but he accepts that he has brought this ending upon himself. 12 O’Brien, Leaving Las Vegas, pp. 67–​8. 13 Camus, Myth of Sisyphus, p. 19. 14 O’Brien, Leaving Las Vegas, p. 68. 15 Ibid., p. 75. 16 ‘What happens in Vegas stays in Vegas’ was an advertising campaign to boost tourism which post-​dates the novel, but perfectly captures the hedonist’s idea of freedom. 17 O’Brien, Leaving Las Vegas, p. 96. 18 Ibid., p. 96. 19 Ibid. 20 Ibid., p. 86. 21 As, for instance, in Cindy Sherman’s sequence of ‘Untitled Film Stills’, 1977–​ 1980. Cindy Sherman, Untitled Film Stills (London: Jonathan Cape, 1990). 22 And Al, although he often seems tangential to the main story. 23 O’Brien, Leaving Las Vegas, p. 123.

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4 Ibid., p. 183. 2 25 The fact that she measures this granting of free will as ‘gallons’ indicates that she sees his idea of free will and drinking as synonymous. 26 Ibid., p. 99. 27 Ibid., p. 97. 28 Ibid., p. 88. 29 Ibid., p. 29.

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… my condition does indeed mean that I’m ruined without drink and yet, equally, drink will save me from all of my ruinations: those it inspires and every single other trouble, large and small, it keeps me free.

All of the elements of the Existential drinker are present in A. L. Kennedy’s Paradise: an absenting God;1 distaste for a conventional, habituated life, and for the many people who live those lives; the never-​ending confrontation with finitude; a determination to struggle with self and authenticity. It presents itself as the story of an excessive drinker, Hannah Luckraft, who seeks to make sense of her self and the world, and who hopes to make a success of her all-​consuming relationship with another drinker, Robert Gardener. As with some of the previous novels discussed, there is a fundamental lack of necessary and sufficient explanation as to why the central character drinks to such a self-​mortifying extent.2 It could be that Hannah is ‘weak’ and unable to face up to the realities of life, or that she has come to the view that this world isn’t worth the candle. When she has the possibility of happiness in her relationship with Robert she struggles to accept joy without drink, a situation she identifies as a problem and which in turn places her back on a downward drinking spiral. She has only managed to reach the age of 36 because her brother Simon always comes to the rescue when called on, as do her parents. However, even Simon is close to giving up on Hannah when we first see her, and mutters within earshot: ‘ “She’ll never be okay, she doesn’t want to” ’.3 Hannah understands her own behaviour, the way she manipulates her family into ensuring that they keep her alive, but either she does not understand her self (if we view the difficulties on a purely psychological model) or she does not, on the surface at least, wish to insist on an authentic self. A reading which sees the book as a contemporary, sophisticated depiction of both the alcoholic’s inner life on its own terms and the negative impact such a life has on family and other close relationships would not be wide of the mark. The term ‘alcoholic’ on this reading would leave

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open to question the extent to which the drinker can be deemed helplessly addicted. Yet there is something else here that the novel seems to want to provoke. For all of its delineations of Hannah as a character whose evasions and deceits (of self and others) are the behaviours portrayed as typical to addicts of all kinds,4 the novel nevertheless asks us to take Hannah seriously, and without pity, for there is no indication that we are necessarily being asked to sympathise with her plight, and there is no indication that this is a latter-​day temperance narrative which demands consciousness-​raising on the part of individual readers and society. What looks like an inability to control a self-​destructive drinking habit is also a determination to drink at all costs, as she describes how her being ‘rescued’ always involves being treated as an animal who has no discipline, where putative saviours talk about her in the third person, clean her up, eliminate the booze, take away clothes and belongings, lock her in:  ‘Oh, but it’s not so awful. After the first time it happens, you realise  –​they can’t keep it up forever, they have other concerns, they lose patience. Not one of them can wish you to be different as long and as hard as you can wish to stay the same’.5 The provocation to the reader may be then to accept Hannah precisely for what she is, and not to attempt to correct her or wish that she behave differently, forcing her to be somebody other than Hannah. In this, then, there is evidence of an Existential project on the novel’s part as well as Hannah’s. One of the elements that complicates this interpretation is the form of the novel. The entire narrative is split into fourteen sections, each of which alludes in some way to one of the fourteen Stations of the Cross, the images and narrative that traditionally cover Christ’s journey, starting with Jesus being condemned to death, through to Pilate’s hand-​ washing, the crucifixion at Golgotha, and Christ’s placement in the tomb. But if this is not a temperance narrative, of either the religious or the secular kind, why wrap it up in the form of Christian ritual? Does the novel represent a more direct (re-​)engagement with God than we have previously seen, with God as the source of all meaning in the world and for the self? After the Godlessness of Leaving Las Vegas, and the quasi-​mystical nature of Ironweed, have we returned to a world which is firmly lapsarian, with the promise that we can reach ‘paradise’ only if we embrace something else, something outside the individual? Let’s start with a fundamental Existential question: ‘Why bother?’ We saw that Leaving Las Vegas’s answer to the question ‘what’s the point?’ is ‘there isn’t one’, and, implicitly following Camus’s injunction, Ben opts

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for suicide. A similarly profound questioning appears in Paradise half-​way through. Hannah is recuperating at Simon’s house, and she thinks how nice this will be, and how they can chat, ‘ “Not about anything serious, I don’t want to be serious, only to chat” ’.6 This perhaps sounds like further evidence of somebody who doesn’t want to face up to the world and would like to retreat into the blissful childhood she shared with her brother. But what happens is that she does end up thinking seriously about the purpose of existence. In her non-​seriousness she is reminded of a man who, when they were children, always seemed content just standing outside the house and smoking. This leads her back to a conversation she once had with her mother about that man, who she learns is called ‘Mr Russell’.7 Her mother explains: ‘ “He smokes the pipe so he’ll look occupied. What he’s really doing is looking at the sun and being happy. He’s just being happy. For no reason” ’. When the young Hannah points out that Mr Russell isn’t smiling her mother says ‘ “He doesn’t need to” ’,8 and it is this which leads into a consideration of how life should be lived. As a child, then, and with Mr Russell as her example, she says:  ‘I was held by the idea that adults might settle themselves behind a habit, some mild camouflage, and then simply be happy, privately and without cause’, and Hannah consequently experiments with this idea by smiling at Mr Russell. He peered down at me in surprise, but then developed the most luminous, unblemished, sincere smile I’ve ever seen. I could wonder today if Russell was a drinker, but I don’t believe so –​his expression had no edge, no meaning, no request, it anticipated no result: it was simply a release of monumental joy. After proof like that, I had to assume the passing years would haul me up and out to happiness, no doubt about it. Otherwise, why bother? Otherwise, why bother?9

The question is firmly in the Existential camp. The answer Hannah’s mother gives, however, shifts away from this towards one which suggests a private contentment, as exemplified by Mr Russell, and by her husband, Hannah’s father, who is happy to potter about in his greenhouse: both examples share an aura of Zen-​like stillness. While it could be argued that this leaves the answer to ‘why bother?’ in the hands of the individual, as a response that is wholly self-​determined, this is not necessarily of an Existential caste, since the mother’s examples suggest a kind of unthinking, or unfocused, contentment which is closer to an acceptable habituation  –​the contented cow  –​rather than an active striving that Existential philosophy urges. It is not easy to see at this crucial juncture in the novel what the difference would be between the life that Mr

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Russell leads, self-​absorbedly smoking his pipe, communicating nothing, doing nothing, and the lives of those whom Hannah condemns for what is the equivalent of a bourgeois existence, such as churchgoers at a carol service, or the life her brother Simon has made for himself with Gillian and the impending birth of their first child. Nevertheless, it is telling that Hannah wonders if Mr Russell could be a drinker; the presumed implication is that she wonders if she herself can be this happy person as a drinker. There are three possibilities the novel presents to the reader as routes to happiness: an authentically orientated self; love; religion. An uncertain self One of the achievements of Paradise is the persuasive nature of its protagonist, Hannah Luckraft. She is fully aware of how she is perceived by others, and how her behaviour is selfish, harming others as much as herself. Her desire for a reciprocal, loving relationship is achingly present throughout, and while the reader may root for a happy ending in the conventional sense, there is the constant foreboding that something will go terribly wrong. This anxiety is communicated in part by Hannah’s own make-​up, because whenever things are going well she senses it is only because they are a prelude to some impending disaster: ‘I’d become used to spending pleasant times with Robert –​I’d come to regard them as guaranteed  –​which was really an obvious indication that I  should expect those times to stop’.10 Such a life story and outlook is not particularly Existential, but rather dependent upon a longstanding idea that ‘character is fate’, that is, Hannah must live her life according to the personality she was born with as best she can. The novel mixes this older view of how individuals are constituted with a more postmodern idea that we are not fixed at all, that we are not a single bounded character but are comprised of fluid identities, able to choose our own characters and without any obligation to be responsible for any particular self. This view is expounded by Hannah when her relationship with Robert appears altered following her return from Clear Springs, the Canadian rehab centre she absconds from. Hannah initially puts drinking into a sociological context and then moves into how committed drinkers behave: Nobody is complete –​we all need topping up. Alcohol can add a little, but mainly it enlarges what’s already there. Environmental factors, traumas, levels of income and training, they can shape me: I can pick and choose what I borrow and what I assimilate. But, for the drinker, there are better possibilities than this. What I  wait for are those beautiful, uncommon

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chances to truly search another human being and be truly searched by them, to shift shapes in each other’s company.11

While Ironweed offers different models of self, its model of choice is that of coherent individuals who must face their own spiritual mystery. Some of this Catholic apprehension of the world is also evident in Paradise. In relation to drinking as a defining feature of the protagonists this spiritual side means that the significance of Hannah’s drinking –​the need to drink and the desire to drink –​may also remain mysterious, outside the reach of psychological, biological, and sociological explanations. But in Ironweed there is the sense that Francis Phelan is a fully recognisable individual. It may be that the third-​person narration, infused as it may be in large part with Phelan’s worldview, nevertheless allows the reader to come to such a conclusion. It may also be that Francis, for all his doubts, is sure that there is a person who is Francis Phelan with all these traits. Hannah, on the other hand, can simply come across to the reader as an inconsistent character, sometimes appearing to us and to herself as a coherent entity (if, nevertheless, questioning and fragile), and at other times invisible and merged with others. An alternative interpretation is that the novel presents Hannah inconsistently to the reader rather than Hannah herself being inconsistent, that is, the novel has no particular interest in drawing recognisable boundaries around the kind of self Hannah could be or is.12 Sometimes she is a (stereo)typical alcoholic, and this is enough to define her, both in the eyes of others and in her own estimation, that is, her actions are the same as those of all other drinkers, or at least are drawn from a repertoire of alcoholic vignettes. Part of this is her ‘merging’ of her identity with others, whether it be a lover (Robert) or any other alcoholic who happens to be in the pub, ‘two liquids blended as one’.13 The difference between Paradise and the two novels which chronologically precede it in The Existential drinker –​ Ironweed and Leaving Las Vegas –​ is Paradise’s weakened obligation to any notion of an authentic self. Both Francis Phelan and Ben Sanderson strive for some kind of authenticity. Hannah Luckraft, along with these two other drinkers, may ask ‘why bother?’, but yet while both Francis and Ben are still committed to drinking and self, Hannah, while evincing strong views on many subjects, does not settle on any view of self, and hence must slip between ideas of self, and ideas of what she is and what life (being) is. Nevertheless, Hannah does constantly try to make sense of self and world. One way in which she attempts to engender a sense of a coherent, narrative self is through her continual recalling of the past, and this serves to build up a character for the reader as the novel proceeds. Yet the coherence and cohesion that self-​narration often provides for characters

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does not work for Hannah in Paradise: each recollection might appear as another piece towards completing the twinned puzzles of ‘what/​who is Hannah Luckraft?’ and ‘why bother?’, but ultimately each piece just deepens or reinstates the puzzle. For example, one way Hannah attempts to understand her alienated self is to remember her experience of going to the circus with her father. Initially she imagines a parallel between the lives of the performers and her own: ‘Their pasts and their futures are sheened with misfortunes, with an enforced appetite for pain. Their damp and close and everlasting present stiffens with blood on demand. They can read strangers, curse them, work them into helplessness. They are freaks. They are monsters. They are my natural family’.14 While this may start out as offering an analogy for her own life, it is not an analogy at all. She completely invents this idea of what the ‘true circus’ is and then draws an analogy with her own imaginary ideal. This in turn is one possible image for the reader of how Hannah conceives of herself: she is a mixture of pain projected backwards and forwards and assimilated into autobiography, and an eternal (moving) present which can be brought to consciousness whenever she wants. This can operate as a description of the character Hannah and of the way the novel itself unfolds –​jumping between memory and plans, usually painful, and always returning to the here-​and-​now in its joyous and gory Technicolor. Coming away from the circus visit she tells us that she hadn’t seen the ‘True Circus’, a way of also telling us that she hasn’t seen her true self. Yet the novel in its entirety, since it has exactly all those elements which Hannah identifies as constituting the ‘True Circus’, is that self-​same ‘True Circus’, Hannah’s self constituted by pain. At this level, the reader is able to comprehend the whole ‘true circus’, the character and self of Hannah, or at least the collage that makes up Hannah, since the reader is able to take in the whole of the novel, but this level of insight isn’t granted to the character herself, again suggesting that she is not quite striving for authenticity, or in a position to do so. Put another way, the ‘pain’ which might be read Existentially as a combination of angst, groundlessness, alienation, and desire for authenticity, has no fixed source:  sometimes it is Hannah’s own doing, but sometimes the causes are deemed external, right down to the never-​explained spur for drinking itself. The surname ‘Luckraft’ can be taken to encourage readers and Hannah to see one’s life as a wholly contingent affair, rather than one navigated with free will. However, this may still not be the whole story. Another dimension to the novel is its insistence on regarding relationships as central to living, rather than insisting on the contentment of self-​contained individuals, such as those represented by Mr Russell. Hannah appears to advance a desire in the extract quoted above (‘Nobody is complete …’) for

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mutuality, in both intimate relationships and in more generally friendly ones, and advances the idea that it is drink (for committed drinkers) which can bring people closer together through a process of ‘osmosis’. Again, though, without a more solid sense of what the self is in the first place, this is one more possibility amongst many and instead reinforces the case for a fluid self. The reader is then left to decide at what level the self as a series of ‘and’ conjunctions (the self is this … and this … and this –​a sequence of performances about the idea of what a self is) is to be taken as definitive: is it solely Hannah’s way of being, in contrast to other characters, or is she emblematic of a general view of fluid selves expounded at the level of the novel? How are we to make sense of Hannah’s predicament? This leads on to consideration of the form of the novel: if Hannah is unable at the level of self to forge the self, and the narrative threading does not enable the reader to piece together how self operates for Hannah, the form of the novel in its numbered sections does appear to provide a level of understanding which circumscribes and is superordinate to Hannah’s own apprehension. In other words, the form of the novel ‘understands’ what Hannah cannot. This in turn may give the reader a clue as to how the novel as a whole is given over to the reader, with Hannah, the committed drinker, inside it. Does the form of the novel work ‘with’ Hannah, or ‘against’ her? This brings us on to ‘religion’, the second option the reader sees might lead to conventional happiness or to the search for Existential authenticity. ‘There are fourteen’ Maurice hisses intently across me at the Parson, ‘There are twelve’. ‘There are fourteen. Do you want me to name them? With a meditation that’s appropriate for each?’15

So Hannah Luckraft is a committed drinker with a shaky sense of self and a habit of forming troubled relationships. The reader presumes she is a lapsed Catholic, with sins of drunkenness, blasphemy, adultery, no confessions. The novel drifts in and out of presenting Hannah as someone striving to be authentic, with drink paradoxically providing the means towards authenticity and an escape from reality. How, then, to read character and novel when the narrative constantly echoes that of Christ’s passion, each chapter referencing events in a corresponding station? It is not the intention of this chapter to itemise every possible connection between the Stations of the Cross and Paradise, but I would note that there is an insistent paralleling between the novel and the gospel accounts which opens itself up to an interpretation at this symbolic level.16

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Although at no stage does Hannah quite say she is a character from the passion, part of the novel’s significant religious texture can be felt in such instances as when Hannah says ‘But there’s always the chance of resurrection, a bar at hand to sort things out’,17 and makes wry comments such as ‘I am helplessly nailed between two second-​rate locations and trying not to find this symptomatic of my moral state’,18 or when Robert says ‘You’ll see  –​I’ll be the cross you have to bear’.19 Her brother is called ‘Simon’, and his role is similar to that of Simon of Cyrene, who helps Christ carry the cross; the three times that Jesus falls are echoed in the times that Hannah takes up drinking after periods of sobriety, at Stations/​sections 3, 7 and 9. The novel even manages to recreate ‘Jesus meets his mother’ when the reader meets Hannah’s (Station/​section 4); Station 8, where Jesus meets the women of Jerusalem, has its parallels in ­chapter 8 when Hannah goes home and is taken inside to meet Mrs Anderson, and later in the same chapter when she encounters Robert’s wife and daughter. There is also a scene when Hannah wanders into a church and some children are preparing an Easter play:  ‘The content escapes me beyond the occasional word –​bread, wine, garden, betrayed, forsaken, stripped’. It is quite possible that we too as readers are not encouraged to look much further than some superficial, ‘overheard’ similarities, but that would seem to do the novel a disservice. The religious allusions are plentiful throughout, as indicated above, and the role that Hannah self-​consciously adopts as committed drinker is that of Christ.20 It can also be said that the novel, in the way it is framed, places her in this role, that is, the form of the novel is in sympathy with, or colludes with, Hannah as a Christ-​like figure. While Hannah is not a practising Catholic, she is fully knowledgeable about it –​‘I have known my Bible well for many years’21 –​and would appear to accept Catholicism, such that her actions take place within the context of her religious belief, since she does not seriously question God’s existence, nor the existence and validity of the Church, as we saw Judith Hearne do in both those instances. In this sense we are back with Venichka in Moscow–​Petushki, and possibly Francis Phelan in Ironweed, as they endeavour to maintain authenticity and a drinker’s life within a religious context. The overriding theme of the passion is Christ’s suffering, and this is very much the dominant note in Paradise, since whatever Hannah does, and whatever luck comes her way (for example, Robert’s initial entry into her life), she always suffers, and always expects to suffer. While this is imitative of Christ’s passion, including in the sense that she constantly undergoes suffering,22 it is not in itself a blasphemous thing to do, since contemplation of the Stations and Christ’s suffering puts the participant in precisely this relation with Christ, where the empathic process in itself

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can provide comfort for those with troubles of their own, as is clearly the case here with Hannah. But the point of Christ’s suffering is that it leads to atonement, when Christ’s resurrection is the sign of Christ taking away the sins of humanity. For a person, or a novel, to focus solely on the ‘suffering’ aspect of the Stations and not then undertake to engage with the meaning of the resurrection is in effect to remain in a state of despair.23 That brings us to the novel’s ending in order to understand better the meaning of the narrative arc and Hannah’s place in it:  do the novel and Hannah remain in despair, thereby refuting God and the meaning of the Stations, or does the ending instate the resurrection and ‘paradise’, as we saw partially fulfilled in ‘Janet’s Repentance’? Is the novel’s title to be read with, or without, irony? And where does this leave any notion of an authentic, drinker-​committed Hannah? In the penultimate section Hannah is at Clear Springs and appears to recover from delirium tremens, as if she has visited hell and is now stable, even if she rants on about Robert, as Nurse Ogilvie and Nurse Forbes comment. This gives way to the final section, just over a page long, where Hannah is lying down. She hears thunder, which is ‘like the sound of a broad stone, being rolled away’,24 a reminder that at the last station Jesus is in the tomb. The final paragraphs read: I stand, because all this is solid now, possible and fixed, and I see that my holdall is fat and happy and the bed freshly made. Behind me, in the bathroom, I hear the small metal glide as the shower curtain closes, then a chatter of water, the comfortable, jumble of noises when somebody starts to wash. I smile. I reach into my holdall and find the full bottle of Bushmill’s undisturbed:  that marvellous label:  the long, slim door that leads to somewhere else. When Robert has finished, when he steps through, pink with scrubbing, wrapped snug in a towel, then we’ll lie on the bed together and we’ll talk, we’ll tell each other everything. I’ll ask him to bring through the glasses and then we’ll begin.25

The image of her standing and everything becoming real suggests the resurrection, even if the act of resurrection is not itself an element of Station 14. A bottle of Irish whiskey to hand with a label that points to somewhere else, and the promise of Robert coming to bed, indicate that Hannah’s idea of paradise is in the offing.26 In religious terms, this surely is blasphemous, painting paradise as a place replete with sex and booze rather than populated by the holy. In that sense, then, the ending places the novel and Hannah in an ironical relationship to Catholicism and the Stations. However, Hannah’s grip on reality at this point has already disappeared some time ago, somewhere on the train journey from

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Toronto to Calvary on her way to Clear Springs, a journey which, rather like Venichka’s in Moscow–​Petushki, becomes increasingly surreal (and no doubt with a joke around the similarity of the names Calvary and Calgary). Venichka’s end is violent, at the hands of some contemporary apocalyptic thugs, whereas Hannah’s endpoint is a private, fantastic retreat, joyful, yet –​from the position of the reader –​a completely false situation. The difference between Yerofeev’s ending and A. L. Kennedy’s is that Yerofeev abandons realism half-​way through, having already warned us that he doesn’t know what genre he will be in by the time he gets to Petushki. Paradise does not operate in the same way, it takes us in and out of Hannah’s solipsistic version of events, yet always gives the reader clues as to what the real state of affairs is outside Hannah’s head, as, for instance, when the nurses’ dialogue around Hannah’s recovery from delirium tremens and her obsession with Robert is recorded, thereby letting the reader know what has ‘really’ happened to Hannah. She does indeed remain committed to drinking in this final scenario, and to all intents and purposes is happy to be so. The novel has, however, moved some way away from any notion of authenticity; rather, at this level, it is a hedonistic, solipsistic version of individualism, since there is no sense in which Hannah is any longer a being-​in-​the-​world-​with-​ others; rather she is nothing other than her dream of Robert and her desire for drink, as happy as this might make her. But does this focus on religion miss the point about love, mentioned earlier? Love The majority of the novels considered in The Existential drinker take the figure of a drinker who is individually committed to drinking, insisting that, in the name of authenticity, friends, lovers, family, one and all, must live their own lives. If others suffer the consequences of the drinker’s behaviour, that is their choice, for they are free agents in the same way that the drinker is fundamentally, ontologically free. The drinker figure takes centre stage, and the others, who do not share a similar commitment to drinking and, by implication, do not choose to properly ‘live’, must remain outside the true sphere of existence. The central image here is of those loner Existential figures such as Raskolnikov, Josef K., Meursault, and Roquentin. Certainly, all of these figures have elements of romantic and erotic involvement, but those attachments are asymmetrical since their partners do not entertain the same ideas about freedom, choice, authenticity, and finitude as the central protagonists do. But there is another strand of Existential thought which is different from the steadfast, authenticity-​seeking loner, one which is very much focused

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on the way in which authenticity can be maintained for those involved in intimate, loving relationships, and where each party sees the other as a similarly constituted ‘free’ being. In the asymmetrical relationships there is a continuous battle line drawn between the serious drinker and the non-​serious drinker. The two novels which offer some notion of equal partnerships, Francis and Helen in Ironweed and Ben and Sera in Leaving Las Vegas, still ultimately depict the protagonist as someone out on his own because of his drinking.27 Paradise is the one novel which presents two lovers as equally committed drinkers. The language of alcoholism, addiction, and the twelve-​step programme, the anguish of close relatives, the prevalence of psychological and psychoanalytical explanations, the religious context, are all features of the novel, but so too is the idea of a fully mutually realised love which retains, and in part enables, the Existential drinker’s authenticity. A  good analogous model would be Simone de Beauvoir’s novel The Blood of Others. In this novel, set in the time of the Second World War and the French Resistance, Hélène is dying and her lover Jean Blomart worries that it is his fault for bringing her into the fight. She insists that they have existed, do exist, on equal terms, that this life is Hélène’s chosen life. This sense of equality and authenticity (or the striving for authenticity) is also present in Paradise, the sense that Hannah and Robert are equal partners in drinking. This is not to ignore the fact Robert and Hannah do on occasion attempt to quit drinking, and support each other when that happens, but they seem to accept the inevitability that what they do, and what they need to do together, is drink. Except, to return to the overarching theme of these last three chapters, there are aspects of what the reader is presented with which seem to quite deliberately move the characters and the novel itself away from both the religious and the Existential. Infused with ideas of sin and guilt, and wrapped up in a version of Christ’s passion, from a religious point of view the whole narrative is, as has been already argued, nothing other than blasphemy (whereas there is still a feeling of acceptable apotheosis at the end of Moscow–​Petushki). From the Existential point of view, the mutual freedom is realised solely as indulgence in sex and booze. The blasphemous and the hedonistic come together in the following passage:  ‘But what I’d really love is for us to get blessed drunk, child drunk together: to excel ourselves and race into that place of innocence and light where nothing will hurt us and there can be no harm, where we are so powerless and lost that we become holy, that our Maker has to take us in hand’.28 The sentiment of authenticity and finitude that ghosts the novel gives way here to drunkenness as escape into innocence, a means of achieving prelapsarian sublimity, the ‘paradise’ of the title. Rather than Sartre’s

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‘for-​itself’, this blissful condition is closer to Christian ‘kenosis’, where the self is emptied of its will so that the self can receive God, than it is to the Existential self striving for authenticity: ‘I assume that its bliss comes mainly from this absence of yourself –​it burns you up completely and grants you the grace of a temporary death while it curls up and rejoices in your soul’.29 Paradise therefore retains some of the spirit of religion and Existentialism, but seems to finally rest on an individually realised happiness where the self is absent and drink is the agent of obliteration. That this happiness can be found in a blessed drunken state of innocence is more aligned to a culture of individual excess that can sit outside mainstream normative values which do allow for hedonism –​individuals are free to get drunk and obliterate the self  –​than a hedonism that is socially and culturally bounded, one for which the individual is responsible and must calculate. To talk of the commitment to drinking in this manner, though, is really to have moved away from the more thoroughgoing notion of the Existential drinker that has motivated the previously encountered figures. In justifying her and Robert’s behaviour, Hannah thinks: ‘But if the two of us enjoy what we enjoy, then what’s the problem?’,30 so the issue is around legitimate enjoyment (and, as we have seen, finding contentment and happiness), and the question of self is subsumed in these ways of seeing life. Coincidentally, she also suggests near the end of the novel that she is only ‘Hannah Luckraft’ when she is together with Robert, which is yet another model of self, this time a kind of old-​fashioned romantic notion (if, nevertheless, derived from the Bible) where man and woman form one whole: ‘And Robert should have been here and I should have been able to find him and tonight we should be together and alive. And we should be each other’s mercy, each other’s gift, each other’s love. And I should be Hannah Luckraft and that should be a joy’.31 Here the idea is that the true self has been held back and can only emerge, or be released, when Hannah is romantically successful and finds her complementary half, but it is yet another model of self in the novel that does not fit with the idea of self-​determined projects. Ultimately As described above, there are many elements of the Existential in Paradise, but ultimately it returns the committed drinker to the figure of someone who uses drink to escape the world as it is, somebody who subscribes to varying ideas about self and identity, rather than ensuring that the self in the world is in pursuit of authenticity. This becomes clearer as the novel progresses. In Section XII, Hannah is on the Trans Canada railroad heading for Clear Spring.32 Hannah stays sober on the

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train so that when she meets Robert, who she believes to have left his family once again in order to recuperate at Clear Spring, she will be strong. But staying off the drink takes its toll: ‘Reality –​there’s nothing but horror in that’.33 Rather than the Existential drinker’s belief that drinking provides a focal point for authenticity, Hannah’s reliance on alcohol is ultimately acknowledged to be just that, a way of keeping the horror of existence at bay. But, to reiterate, this is one idea of self and world amongst others in Paradise, for even immediately after this another model of self is contemplated:  ‘Except this is something else. A personal problem. I can feel it stroking the back of my hair. This is for me. A plan I didn’t make that’s just for me’,34 as if behind it all the prime mover is either God or Fate. Notes 1 ‘Its existentiality is religious, attempting both to prove and disprove “the burning absence that I  am afraid is the heart of God” ’, Ali Smith, ‘The road to oblivion’, review of Paradise, Guardian (28 August 2004), www. theguardian.com/​books/​2004/​aug/​28/​fiction.alismith. 2 A. L. Kennedy in an interview says that she did not want to give any direct cause for Hannah’s drinking. To the question ‘But she is drinking to anesthetize some pain, presumably’, Kennedy answers: ‘Yes, but I didn’t really want her to have anything that she genuinely has to obliterate. If she wasn’t drinking, she wouldn’t need to black anything out. [laughs] I think the most frustrating kind of person throwing their life away is the one who doesn’t actually have anything wrong except the cure for what they think is wrong. I wanted it to be like that for Hannah. Eventually, drinking messes things up so much that she gets a reason to drink’. A.  L. Kennedy, ‘Clumsy sex, women who drink, and Jesus’, interview with Bookforum (1 April 2005), www.thefreelibrary.com/​Clumsy+sex,+women+who+drink,+and+Jesus%3 A+A.+L.+Kennedy+talks+with...-​a0131433366. 3 Kennedy, Paradise, p. 141. 4 A good example is in Section VI. Hannah has phoned Simon to come and help her. She tells the reader that her reason for drinking everything in the flat before he arrives is to prevent him feeling obliged to search the place for hidden booze: ‘But I would have been wrong to allow it –​not waste on such a scale:  it wouldn’t have been ecological. Or moral  –​more like breaking and entering, or some similar crime, and if you love him, you can’t let your brother commit a crime’, p. 142; with an allusion as well to the story of Cain and Abel. 5 Ibid., p. 143. 6 Ibid. 7 There’s undoubtedly a joke here since Bertrand Russell was often pictured smoking a pipe, and later on we get ‘memories of Russell’s happy pipe’,

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p. 147. As well as the image of a contented, rather vacant Bertrand Russell, it also points the reader in the direction of philosophy and philosophers, if only in a semi-​serious fashion. 8 Ibid., pp. 143–​4. 9 Ibid., p. 144. 10 Ibid., p. 211. 11 Ibid., p. 212. 12 Neil Gordon’s review of the novel notes a similar difficulty, although he ascribes this to the novel’s use of Hannah’s interior monologue throughout. Neil Gordon, ‘Paradise: Message in a bottle’, New York Times, Sunday Book Review (3 April 2005), 10. Bharat Tandon’s TLS review also identifies a problem with ‘under-​characterization’, acknowledging that while ‘One of alcohol’s effects may be an erasure of identity, edging it out in favour of something all its own … this only works up to a point; there remains the paradoxical fact that for all the attention that the novel affords to the contours of Hannah’s psyche, she is still oddly under-​characterized’. Bharat Tandon, ‘Falling from and falling down’, TLS online (27 August 2005), www.the-​tls. co.uk/​articles/​private/​falling-​from-​and-​falling-​down/​, no pagination. 13 This is also probably an allusion to holy communion –​the assimilation of Christ into the supplicant –​since Hannah likens this ‘blending’ to being even closer than trapping and eating the other person’s brain, p. 213; cf.: ‘He that eateth my flesh, and drinketh my blood, dwelleth in me, and I in him’ (John 6:56, King James Version) 14 Kennedy, Paradise, p. 215. 15 Ibid., p. 206. 16 I am deeply indebted to Colm MacCrossan for discussing with me the meaning of the Stations of the Cross in Catholic life and ritual, and possible interpretations in relation to the novel. 17 Kennedy, Paradise, p. 22. 18 Ibid., p. 199. 19 Ibid., p. 60. 20 The novel does occasionally suggest Hannah in other roles, for example that rather than Robert being Hannah’s cross to bear, she is his: ‘You’ll see –​I’ll be the cross you have to bear’ is closed off with Hannah telling us that this would prove to be a lie, p. 60. 21 Ibid., p. 37. 22 And the novel has three-​day repeated cycles within the overall narrative –​a drinking binge in London; the trip to Calvary  –​as if the passion repeats itself within the passion, fractal-​like. There is also a feeling for Hannah that religion demands such self-​examination to the point where the self disappears: in a mirrored lift in the opening section she sees her image disappear into infinite regress: ‘What is this –​a Jesuit lift?’, p. 14. 23 I am indebted to Colm MacCrossan for this point. 24 Kennedy, Paradise, p. 343. 25 Ibid., pp. 343–​4.

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6 Similar to the second conditional –​‘happy’ –​ending of Ironweed. 2 27 Helen does match Francis’s drinking, but they do not share their drinking lives as Robert and Hannah do. 28 Kennedy, Paradise, p. 246. 29 Ibid., p. 247. 30 Ibid., p. 246. 31 Ibid., p. 339. 32 The novel doesn’t identify exactly where the rehab centre is, indicating only that Edmonton is close to the destination. A look at a map of Canada reveals, in the context of the novel’s Stations of the Cross structure, that the place Hannah is headed for is no doubt Calvary, since this is relatively close to Edmonton, and therefore a possible allusion to ‘Calgary’. 33 Kennedy, Paradise, p. 309. 34 Ibid., p. 310 (italics in original).

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An ironical view of paradise may be a fitting place to end the canon of Existential drinkers. The paradises ventured as endpoints –​Venichka’s Petushki, the child’s room at the end of Ironweed, Hannah Luckraft’s pure interiority –​are evidence of the persistence of spiritual frameworks in Existential thought, the self as a secular version of the soul, with ‘authenticity’, ‘commitment’, and ‘project’ constituents of ‘the calling’. Existential thought from Kierkegaard onwards is one response to modernity’s deracination, overtaken now by other models of self, dealt with by questions of ‘identity’ rather than ‘authenticity’, and in a socioeconomic context which privileges consumerism and leisure, such that excessive drinking is now part of this complex, even if binge drinking attracts some measure of demonisation. The figure of the Existential drinker was at its most potent when the cultural context was most hospitable to Existentialism, but once the idea of an authentic self in the traditional Existential sense is either discredited, or appropriated in ways which have little connection with Sartre’s, de Beauvoir’s, or Heidegger’s ideas, the salience is lost:  the excessive drinker becomes a narrative device on which to hang other concerns, rather than a figure who properly ‘lives’ through the moods and attunement that a commitment to drink offers, while all around others fall away into self-​crushing conventional lives and roles. Once Existential concerns around authenticity and self fade, the heavy drinker is represented as committed to drinking only in the manner that modern conceptualisations of addiction allow for, or he or she drinks for reasons that may be mysterious but are not necessarily philosophical, again an engine for driving plot and character forward. John O’Brien’s Better, published posthumously in 2009, is a novel which portrays the now-​terminal difficulty of having characters who might weave together committed drinking with Existential interrogations of self. The characters drift listlessly through the wealthy

0 42

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Double Felix’s mansion, free to have as much drink and sex as they could wish for, whilst wary of showing themselves to be caring people, emotionally and intellectually. Leaving Las Vegas has elements of this, yet there is an authentic integrity to Ben which persists, despite his self-​ avowed emptiness. Bill, the narrator of Better, and Double Felix enjoy exchanges similar to Ben’s philosophical asides, but they are so emotionally debauched from the beginning that Better’s set-​up is ‘empty’ at every level.1 When Bill opens up to the reader in the last chapter,2 he pinpoints a humiliation at school –​a mock seduction by the popular Patty in front of other students –​as the catalyst for a series of problems which he is obliged to come to terms with. However, rather than providing a psychological explanation, Bill sees no reason to consider his self as a matter of urgency: ‘These are and always shall be merely my problems. Even at their most dreadful and tenacious, I have always viewed the conditions of my life as in hand, things to be attended to in due time … For it’s only me, only my life, and there’s nothing so awful that I can’t simply absorb it into my general condition’.3 By not taking any responsibility for self, the insights that might be afforded by commitment to drinking are just part of the hedonist’s side-​show. The protagonist is no longer prepared to take heed of the self, and equally, for a general audience it may also be that there is no longer any willingness to listen to the drunks, no matter how fascinating they believe themselves to be. The demise in representations of the figure of the Existential drinker is exacerbated by the fact that there is no longer any cachet attached to being a writer-​drinker. To make a creative virtue out of what many would now view primarily as a personal problem can only detract from the writing and the ability to write, rather than enhance it. John Berryman, in the incomplete autobiographical Recovery: A Novel, is already espousing the possibility at the start of the 1970s that the writer-drinker has had his day. Berryman, in the guise of Dr. Alan Severance, proposes to cure his alcoholism by following through on the AA twelve-​step programme, an attempt the reader sees in great detail. Part of this plan to overcome alcoholism, hinted at in parts of the published novel and evident in notes to finish the novel, is to look outside the self: ‘I need a programme of iron. AA will never do it. Maybe becoming a Jew?’4 In this desire the spiritual dimension comes to the fore, but of course in Existential terms it would be the giving over of the self to an external value system, an action which is central to the AA programme, the ‘higher power’ of step 2. In a note related to the novel Berryman writes: ‘Existential immoral crisis: angst. Effort not only would not avail but is not available. Situation seems desperate. Yet some have escaped’,5 but again, for Berryman, the escape is through religion –​ ‘become, thro’ dependence, FREE’.6

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Ivan Gold’s writer-​drinker Jason Sams, in Sams in a Dry Season, simply declares:  ‘alcohol not as useful’. Sams looks back on twenty years of drinking, and just a couple of early publications and unfulfilled promise to show for it. What went wrong? At one time it had seemed necessary to Sams to be a big drinker since it was obvious that ‘too many important American writers since Poe or even further back to a few in Increase Mather’s time had been roaring drunks, making it quite clear that art and alcohol went hand in hand’.7 It now turns out that those twenty years have not been a good career choice at all. It is another reason for the waning of the Existential drinker  –​being a heavy-​drinking writer constructing semi-​autobiographical fiction has had its day in terms of professional advancement. What Sams ignores is that those previous writers did not see it as a career package at all, or at least not in the same way that Sams is now obliged to view it. The previous writers were committed to the drinking and the writing, regardless of where it took them. Towards the end of the twentieth century, then, there is a retrospective pall cast over the list of writer-​drinkers, a self-​consciousness about either being at the tail-​end of a tradition (Sams/​Gold) or writing within it but not being the heavy-​ drinking author yourself (A.  L. Kennedy). Sams quotes from James’s Varieties of Religious Experience, not to ambivalently bolster arguments for drink as Jack London had done, but to explain why drinking no longer works. Drink can offer mystical revelations in ‘whiffs and gleams’, but that is all, for really, following James, it is a ‘degrading poison’ with nothing sufficient to sustain the writer beyond a rare insight.8 When the therapist reads his books, she tells him his second book is not literature, for it is not about love, sex, loss, and sadness, but is simply a ‘cry for help’ because he is nothing other than an alcoholic who needs to go to AA.9 An attendant problem with ‘dry’ endings, however, is that the narrative is always in some way a temperance tale, for what is important to the story is that the person has been through dangerous or bad times and has survived. To be fair to Sams in a Dry Season, though, Sams frequently has nineteen-​day dry periods before returning to boozing: it is the thought of a twentieth dry day which fills him with horror since after that comes a sobriety he cannot face. Perhaps this is a novel which tries to overcome the boredom of stories about reformed writer-​drinkers, but is nevertheless operating within a tradition that is losing its cultural viability. Perhaps people in general do prefer recovery narratives and memoirs, stories without the complication of avowed self-​ fictionalisation and endowed with happy endings:  Sarah Hepola, Blackout:  Remembering the Things I Drank to Forget; Caroline Knapp, Drinking: A Love Story;

24

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Conclusion

Augusten Burroughs, Dry: A Memoir; Alan Kaufman, Drunken Angel; Jowita Bydlowska, Drunken Mum:  A Memoir; Rachel Black, Sober is the New Black: A Then and Now Account of Life Beyond Booze.10 And then as well there are memoirs designed as self-​help books:  Veronica Valli, an addictions therapist and recovering alcoholic, Why You Drink and How to Stop: A Journey to Freedom. Jason Vale in Kick the Drink … Easily! argues that there is no such thing as an alcoholic, and here’s how to give it up. Clearly, then, there is a large audience for books on recovered and recovering drinkers, with the old-​fashioned mixture of vicarious thrills and regretful rectitude, memoirs of one-​time horrors, humiliations, depths-​of-​despair, and how these have been overcome, and how much better life is sober, captured, for example, in the title of Sacha Z. Scoblic’s book Unwasted: My Lush Sobriety.11 The implication is the longstanding trope that alcohol is slavery and abstinence is freedom. All of these books trade on the fact that the authors have themselves been through the alcoholic’s journey, twenty-​first century versions of John Gough’s Autobiography, and all with the temperance template that life is better without alcohol. The books in this sense are underwritten by a guarantee of the contemporary take on authenticity –​these things really happened –​and not so concerned with the authentic self so much as being the good (reformed) citizen. Nothing could be further from the idea of the Existential Drinker, consciously committed to drinking, than Annie Grace’s This Naked Mind: Control Alcohol, Find Freedom, Rediscover Happiness and Change Your Life: Volume 1, which argues that only by training the unconscious mind can we overcome addiction to drink.12 Nevertheless, elements of the Existential drinker do linger, as with Patrick deWitt’s Ablutions (2009). The title, coupled with a discussion of ‘ablutions’ which occurs towards the opening, has overtones of religious cleansing. But the bartender narrator is unable to connect with his own emotions and life, and drink-​walks through a marital breakdown and numerous sexual encounters with customers, episodes which are graphically recorded. The distancing effect, putting barriers between affect, intellectual comprehension, and responsive behaviour, is largely achieved through the use of the ‘you’ voice, so we have ‘you find yourself crying’ scenarios  –​where ‘you’ is ostensibly the narrator  –​rather than more immediate ‘I was crying’ formulations. It certainly identifies a spiritual emptiness, an American world full of desperate, lonely people13 whose suffering overwhelms the nameless narrator to the point where he cannot care any longer. While the title Ablutions and the inclusion of some notes on ‘suffering’ suggest another Existential-​drinker scenario, this passage towards the end of the novel indicates the refusal of

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deeper intent: he tells a taxi driver, using another distancing voice: ‘ “I spoke excessively about myself with no regard for truth or the boredom of others”. You scratched your face and nodded, agreeing with yourself. “I slept badly but I’ve lived to tell the tale” ’.14 There is simply no means for philosophical or religious apprehension of self and world in the novel, further evidence perhaps of modernity’s deracinating effect, where texts as a whole act out the deracination –​the narrator’s self is split in different ways, for example, ‘you allow yourself to think of your drunken, blacked-​out other half not as a man to fear but as one upon whom you would call if you were ever in trouble. This is a fantastic lie but because you are telling it only to yourself you do not feel bad about it’15 –​or, as in Leaving Las Vegas, the character performs deracination in an equally self-​knowing way. Another example of this kind of representation is Denis Johnson’s collection of short stories, Jesus’ Son (1992), which is populated with characters who are full of drink and drugs, while the narratives remain permeated with religious echoes that follow on from the collection title, for example, the mention of ‘sacrifice’ in ‘Work’.16 The narrator, sometimes name-​checked as ‘Fuckhead’, shares the same disassociation from emotions as deWitt’s narrator, as if the body continues to have somatic experiences which are separated off from any responsibility for a coherent self because of the effect of drugs and alcohol, for example:  ‘When I  squeezed shut my eyes, hot tears exploded from the sockets. When I  opened them I  was on my stomach’.17 There is also a similar bathetic use of seriousness:  ‘Because we all believed we were tragic, and we drank. We had that helpless, destined feeling. We would die with handcuffs on’,18 with occasional epiphanies that go nowhere: ‘Generally the closest I  ever came to wondering about the meaning of it all was to consider that I  must be the victim of a joke  … I  had a moment’s glory that night, though. I was certain I was here in this world because I couldn’t tolerate any other place’.19 The Victorians often linked drinking to poverty, ignoring the more ‘spiritual’ problems which may have been inaugurated by industrial capitalism, as we saw with the case studies in Chapter 1, but which remain evident in the second half of the twentieth century. For the figures in many of the later works money and jobs are not the immediate pressing issues, yet the drinking persists and it is modernity more generally which is the problem. When capitalism does feature in the neo-​liberal period,20 it is in a rather tired way. Hannah in Paradise declares:  ‘Capitalism  –​ whoever invented that didn’t drink –​no imagination. They’ll just sack the first person they see, no matter what’.21 The question of money is not intrinsic to drinking for these characters, nor is it really central to

42

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Conclusion

their lives outside of drink. Ablutions actually ends with the deliberately banal suggestion that tedious work leads to unhappiness, as the narrator advises the unpleasant man who rents a car to him that he should quit and seek happiness instead, and in the case of the narrator the implication then is that the tedium of washing-​up for six years has led him to drink. However, this is somewhat tagged on at the end, since the narrative logic from what has preceded is that it is the sum of human misery and a consequential misanthropy which make the narrator’s drinking an understandable response to this particular view of the world. When Hannah in Paradise has trouble with money, it is hardly in the category of Victorian poverty, and her declaration that getting a job is inevitable doesn’t quite square with another declaration that ‘Being me is a job –​is labour so time-​consuming and expensive that I have to have a second job just to support it’. Even Ironweed, set in the 1930s, does not make money a question of survival, and hence the earlier link between the rise of Existentialism, industrial capitalism, and the Existential drinker is weakened with a different socioeconomic environment, characterised, as suggested when discussing Leaving Las Vegas, as neo-​liberal and consumerist. Not having money at any given time is not the same as Gervaise not having money at the end of L’Assommoir, nor like any of the temperance-​styled narratives which chart the inexorable path from the bottle to the grave. It is consumption that now produces an alienated self rather than labour, that is, when the model of a coherent self is mobilised at all. When it is not, when a different model is preferred where a person can slip between multiple selves, there can be no core problem of alienation. Although I have largely avoided linking the lives of the authors and the lives of the protagonists, there does seem (to me at least) to be a qualitative difference between those novels where the writer is able to draw on personal experience and those which are written from research and external observation. It is not a conclusion I  wanted to reach, since I prefer to take works of art as autonomous entities, but perhaps it does indeed make sense that the feeling of a personal investment in commitment to drinking and self on the part of the writer does enable an emotional, physical, intellectual, and philosophical comprehension from the ‘inside’ which is then manifest in the literature, staying true to the idea of ‘indirect communication’, as outlined in the Introduction. In the best works of the provisional canon discussed here  –​Rhys’s four interwar novels, The Lost Weekend, Under the Volcano, A Fan’s Notes, Moscow–​Petushki –​the drinking matters to the characters and to the authors because it is the self that is committed to and lived with until the end. It is not a random fixation, that is, it is not a plot device

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that could just as well be served by giving the protagonist some other addiction, chemical or otherwise. In these particular works meaninglessness, self, authenticity, death, and alienation are brought to the forefront of consciousness by the commitment to drink. Throughout the twentieth century psychosocial and biological explanations have proliferated to capture such orientations, but from the Existential drinker’s perspective they are wrong every which way. For such figures, the reasons for drinking are ultimately metaphysical, a means to think, experience, and exist through profound Existential questions. Notes 1 According to Erin O’Brien, her brother John was working on Better at the same time as writing Leaving Las Vegas. She reads the book as one in which William’s ‘identity’ is determined by his genetics, hence the allusions to heredity in the names ‘Double Felix’ (double helix) and ‘Zipper Allele’: ‘[‘zipper’ is] a common description of the double helix structure when it “unzips” during replication. Allele referred to an alternative form of a gene that affects its host’s inherited characteristics, such as hair and eye color. Alleles are also associated with genetic disorders, including alcoholism’. O’Brien, ‘Clues’, p. 1. Of course, such determinism is antithetical to any notion of the Existential self. ‘William’ was also the name of Erin’s and John’s father. 2 Chapter 10, followed by an Epilogue. 3 O’Brien, Better, p. 170. 4 Berryman, Recovery, p. 132. 5 Ibid., p. 232. 6 Ibid., p. 234, dated 20 November [1971]. Berryman committed suicide the following year (1972). 7 Gold, Sams in a Dry Season, p. 11. 8 Ibid., p. 12. 9 Ibid., p. 37. 10 Sarah Hepola, Blackout (London: Two Roads, 2015); Augusten Burroughs, Dry: A Memoir (London: Atlantic Books, 2004); Alan Kaufman, Drunken Angel (Berkeley, CA:  Viva Editions, 2011); Jowita Bydlowska, Drunk Mom: A Memoir (London: Penguin, 2014); Rachel Black, Sober is the New Black (Lexington, KY: Createspace Independent Publishing, 2014). 11 Veronica Valli, Why You Drink and How to Stop:  A Journey to Freedom (n.p.:  Ebby Publishing, 2015, Kindle edn); Jason Vale, Kick the Drink … Easily! (Carmarthen, Wales:  Crown House Publishing, 2011); Sacha Z. Scoblic, Unwasted: My Lush Sobriety (New York: Citadel Press, 2015). 12 Annie Grace, This Naked Mind: Control Alcohol, Find Freedom, Rediscover Happiness and Change Your Life (London: HQ, 2018). 13 Nathaniel West’s Miss Lonelyhearts would certainly seem to be in the background. Nathaniel West, Complete Works (London: Picador, 1983).

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4 deWitt, Ablutions, p. 161. 1 15 Ibid., p. 26. 16 Denis Johnson, Jesus’ Son (London: Granta, 2003), p. 51. 17 Ibid., ‘Car Crash While Hitchhiking’, p. 10. 18 Ibid., ‘Out on Bail’, p. 32. 19 Ibid., p. 34. 20 I am using ‘neo-​liberal’ as the widely accepted term from socioeconomics and cultural criticism, referring to the dominance of the free market in which people are presumed to have free choice. See Visanthie Sewpaul, ‘Neoliberalism’, in James D. Wright (ed.), International Encyclopedia of the Social and Behavioral Sciences, 2nd edn (Oxford:  Elsevier, 2015), online version. Manfred B. Steger and Ravi K. Roy describe neo-​liberalism as ‘a common set of ideological and political principles dedicated to the worldwide spread of an economic model emphasizing free markets and free trade’, although with ‘local’ variants, in Neoliberalism (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010), p. 10. 21 Kennedy, Paradise, p. 123.

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Vice, Sue (ed.), Malcolm Lowry Eighty Years On (Houndmills, Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1989). Walton, Stuart, Out of It: A Cultural History of Intoxication (London: Penguin, 2002). West, Nathanael, Complete Works (London: Picador, 1983). WHO, ‘Lexicon of Alcohol and Drug Terms’. www.who.int/​substance_​abuse/​ terminology/​who_​lexicon/​en/​. WHO, Problems Related to Alcohol Consumption:  Report of a WHO Expert Committee, Annex 2, ‘Alcohol Dependence Syndrome’ (Geneva: WHO, 1980). Wightman, Mrs Charles, Haste to the Rescue, or, Work While It is Day (London: James Nisbett, 1849). Wilcox, Danny, Alcoholic Thinking: Language, Culture, and Belief in Alcoholics Anonymous (Westport, CT: Praeger, 1998). Williams, James, ‘Commitment and practice: the authorship of Jack London’, in Leonard Cassuto and Jeanne Campbell Reesman (eds), Rereading Jack London (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1996). Woolf, Virginia, Mrs Dalloway (London: Triad, 1975). Yardley, Jonathan, Misfit:  The Strange Life of Frederick Exley (New  York: Random House, 1997). Yerofeev, Venedikt, Moscow Stations: A Poem, trans. Stephen Mulrine (London: Faber, 1997). Yerofeev, Venedikt, Moscow to the End of the Line, trans. H.  W. Tjalsma (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 1992). Yerofeev, Venedikt, ‘Through the Eyes of an Eccentric’, in The Penguin Book of New Russian Writing. Russia’s ‘Fleurs du Mal’. Compiled with an Introduction by Victor Erofeyev (London: Penguin, 1991). Yetman, Michael G., ‘Ironweed:  the perils and purgatories of male romanticism’, Papers on Language and Literature 27:1 (1991), 84–​104. Young, Sarah J., ‘Re-​ reading Crime and Punishment:  “The Drunkards” ’. Russian Literature, History and Culture. http://​sarahjyoung.com/​site/​2010/​ 09/​06/​re-​reading-​crime-​and-​punishment-​the-​drunkards/​. Zola, Émile, L’Assommoir (Paris: Éditions Gallimard, 1978). Zola, Émile, L’Assommoir, trans. Margaret Mauldon (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998).

602

Index

AA see Alcoholics Anonymous ‘abandonment’ 62, 87, 102, 140, 148–​54, 178, 179, 182, 191n.9 absurdity 39n.81, 136–​46, 177, 179, 208n.22 accidie 20, 61, 139 addiction 1, 7–​8, 15, 29, 32n.7, 34n.26, 36n.45, 36n.46, 49, 64n.38, 101, 103, 111, 121, 127, 154, 198, 225, 234, 239, 242, 245 Adorno, Theodor 40n.89 adultery 133n.20 Aho, Kevin 96n.24 Albany 198, 206n.1 Albee, Edward 37n.53 ‘alcohol dependence syndrome’ 34n.27, 49 alcoholics 7–​8, 12, 18, 21–​2, 26, 28, 31, 33n.15, 36n.45, 36n.46, 41n.98, 64n.38, 67–​9, 78n.14, 98, 99, 101, 103, 106, 107–​8, 109, 113, 114n.17, 117n.60, 121, 133n.17, 144, 147n.37, 161–​2, 165, 167, 173n.12, 199, 208n.22, 212, 213–​14, 219, 222n.9, 224, 228, 241, 242 Alcoholics Anonymous (AA) 7–​8, 12, 18, 25, 34n.26, 103–​4, 106, 114n.6, 117n.60, 161, 170, 183, 234, 240, 241 alcoholism 7–​8, 12, 21–​2, 26, 28, 29, 34n.26, 35n.28, 62n.2, 64n.38,

68, 75, 79n.24, 98, 99, 101, 108, 111, 113, 114n.6, 115n.28, 117n.59, 133n.17, 164, 183, 187, 207n.2, 213–​15, 224–​5, 234, 240, 245n.1 alienation 19–​21, 38n.68, 39n.72, 52–​3, 54, 56, 61, 62, 73, 89–​91, 122, 131, 137–​40, 142, 144, 147n.35, 148, 154, 158, 159, 179, 180, 183, 188, 190, 198, 204, 221, 229, 244, 245 aloneness 5, 13, 27, 52, 68, 73, 87, 104, 105, 112, 149, 154, 177, 179, 180, 182, 189, 233, 242 Altshuller, Mark 191n.17 America 20, 74, 103, 155, 156, 157, 158–​9, 163, 164, 169, 170, 171, 172n.7, 173n.17, 173n.20, 173n.25, 174n.50, 174n.51, 174n.53, 183, 188–​9, 210, 214, 215, 216, 220, 242 American Dream, the 157–​9, 214 American writers 26–​7, 28, 29, 184, 241 Andersen, Hans Christian 172n.6 Anderson, Thomas C. 22 angst 36n.37, 61, 62, 64n.38, 129, 160, 177, 178, 200, 229, 240 anti-​social behaviour see conformity Antze, Paul 34n.26 Aquinas 52 Aragon, Louis 190 Arp, Kristina 39n.80

261

Index art 16–​17, 58, 60, 63n.30, 64n.32, 85, 211, 215–​17, 241 Arthur, T. S. 37n.54, 50, 62n.13 atheism 152–​3 Augustine, St 19, 38n.67 Austen, Jane 157 authenticity 1–​2, 4, 5, 6–​7, 8, 9, 13, 14, 15, 18–​26 passim, 31, 32n.7, 33n.13, 33n.24, 35n.37, 36n.45, 38n.66, 39n.73, 40n.89, 45, 75, 84, 89, 90, 91, 92, 101, 104, 105, 106, 110, 122, 123, 125, 126–​8, 130, 131, 137, 140, 142, 155–​ 72, 174n.50, 179, 188, 190, 197, 198, 201, 203, 204, 209n.22, 211, 212, 213, 217, 218, 219, 224, 227–​36 passim, 239–​40, 242, 245 autobiography 1, 3, 6, 13, 14, 16–​18, 35n.32, 37n.54, 38n.63, 38n.66, 58–​61, 63n.28, 69–​71, 74–​6, 80n.45, 85, 136, 145–​6, 155, 156, 167, 184, 210, 222n.10, 229, 240, 241, 242 autofiction 166–​71 ‘awakening’ 14, 125, 137, 139, 143, 146 bad faith 6, 24–​5, 128, 211 Bailey, Blake 115n.29 Barnes, Djuna 29 Baslyk, Valentina 191n.4, 192n.39 Behan, Brendan 27 being/​Being 13, 22 being-​in-​the-​world 15, 36n.43, 53, 91, 99, 105, 109, 163, 164, 173n.38, 180, 205 being-​in-​the-​world-​with-​others 21, 26, 131, 148, 151, 163–​4, 182, 188, 233 Belfast 148, 152 Bell, Linda A. 39n.78 Bellow, Saul 28, 168, 170, 172n.6 Bender, Todd K. 95n.15 Beraha, Laura 193n.45 Berkove, Lawrence I. 79n.27

261

Berryman, John 25, 26, 28, 36n.46, 38n.63, 240 Bible, the 2, 122, 140, 147n.26, 178, 179, 182, 190, 231, 235, 237n.13 ‘Big Book, The’ 18, 170 binge drinking 4, 9, 15, 26, 37n.53, 87, 99–​100, 101, 102, 109, 110, 112, 113, 114n.5, 114n.10, 118, 122, 125, 137, 149, 160, 178, 185, 187, 210, 215, 237n.22, 239 Binns, Ronald 122 birth 4, 13, 103, 110 Black, Rachel 242 Blackmore, Susan 95n.15 blackouts 114n.10 boredom 66, 113, 241 bourgeois 25–​6, 40n.91, 96n.25, 105, 139, 142, 148, 227 Bowles, Jane 27, 143 Boyle, Peter 35n.28 Brezhnev, Leonid 189 Brontë, Charlotte 157 Buckley, Jerome 33n.22 Bukowski, Charles 27, 35n.33, 38n.63 ‘bum’ 27, 159, 198, 199, 207n.6, 208n.22 Bunyan, John 127 Burroughs, Augusten 242 Burroughs, William 198 Bydlowska, Jowita 242 Cabbala, the 121, 122 ‘calling’ 178, 239 Camus, Albert 3, 9, 13, 14, 15, 22, 24, 32n.11, 37n.50, 38n.57, 39n.81, 73–​4, 76, 131, 137, 138, 146n.7, 156, 157, 166–​7, 169, 171, 210–​11, 212, 213, 214, 215, 222n.11, 225 canon (Existential drinker) 29–​30 capitalism 19, 47, 50, 61–​2, 94, 130, 135n.47, 141, 142, 144, 197, 210, 214, 243, 244 Capote, Truman 172n.6

26

262

Index

Carman, Taylor 35n.37 carnivalesque, the 194n.74 Cassuto, Leonard 70, 79n.25 Catholicism 21, 148–​54, 200, 202, 228, 230–​3 Cheever, John 27 Chernyshevsky, Nikolay 193n.46 Chestov, Lev 39n.81 Chicago 158, 160, 168, 169, 170 childhood 98, 99, 104, 114n.6, 174n.51, 226 children 22, 56, 117n.59, 130, 135n.49, 150, 156, 161, 165, 166, 176, 178, 179, 189, 193n.47, 203, 208, 218, 231, 239 Christ 108, 119, 130, 135n.51, 149, 150–​1, 154, 161, 182, 225, 230–​ 3, 234, 237n.13 Christianity 4, 18, 52–​3, 150–​1, 189, 203, 235 civilisation 79n.29, 120, 123 class 6, 21, 47, 49, 72, 77n.12, 197 Clej, Alina 31n.3 Clowes, Edith W. 181, 182, 188 commitment 1, 2, 5, 7, 8, 11, 12, 15, 16, 22, 24, 29, 31, 33n.19, 72, 74, 76, 89, 94, 98, 106, 128, 131, 137, 157, 159, 164, 168, 170, 171, 176, 177, 178, 180, 181, 185, 186, 189, 190, 202, 212, 213, 225, 227–​8, 230–​5 passim, 239, 240, 241, 242, 244, 245 Communism 187, 188, 189 community 54, 62, 168 confession 1, 14, 19, 45 conformity 3–​4, 8, 10, 15, 53, 59, 71, 74–​5, 86–​7, 88–​92, 93, 94, 100–​1, 103, 104, 110, 111–​12, 113, 116n.35, 122, 123, 126, 136, 137, 141–​2, 148, 149, 151, 156, 157, 158, 161, 163–​4, 165, 166, 169, 172n.7, 174n.50, 176, 186, 188, 205, 213, 214, 218, 224, 239 Connelly, Mark 116n.52

Connolly, Cyril 27 consciousness 1, 5, 6, 9, 11, 13, 15, 19, 20, 30, 67, 71–​2, 74, 83–​94, 95n.14, 96n.18, 96n.25, 97n.32, 101, 102, 103, 109, 110, 111, 115n.29, 119, 121, 123, 125, 127, 128, 131, 132, 134n.38, 143, 164, 171, 176, 182, 200, 202, 205, 215, 229, 245 altered state 34n.26, 71, 84–​94, 95n.15, 95n.17, 97n.32, 103, 120–​1, 176, 205 ‘constructive drinking’ 31 consumerism 21, 26, 169, 197, 210, 215, 222n.2, 239, 244 Cooper, David E. 20, 36n.37, 39n.73 Coyne, Ryan 38n.67 creativity 1, 24, 34n.26, 109, 111, 116n.49, 127, 131, 169, 198, 217 Crichton Browne, James 47 crime 47, 48–​9, 52, 58–​9, 63n.30, 105–​6, 116n.35, 124, 169, 170, 187, 214 Crowell, Steven 20 Crowley, John 16, 28–​9, 78n.14, 78n.16, 79n.24, 94n.1, 115n.29, 116n.42 Cruikshank, George 46, 51 Dante 112, 191n.17, 207n.3, 207n.11, 221n.1 Dardis, Tom 28, 29 Darwin, Charles 71, 74, 79n.27 Dasein 13, 23, 32n.12, 36n.43, 37n.51, 116n.51 Daumier, Honoré 64n.30 ‘Day of the Dead’ 15, 118, 125, 126, 128 death 1, 4, 11, 13, 15, 16, 32n.35, 40n.95, 45, 50, 66, 67, 72–​4, 80n.39, 91, 93, 100, 101, 102, 103, 108–​9, 110, 111, 115n.19, 120–​7 passim, 131, 134n.20, 137, 151, 156, 158, 159, 160,

263

Index 162, 165–​6, 170, 171, 178, 180, 182, 185, 187, 189, 199, 200, 201–​2, 203, 208n.13, 210, 212, 213, 219–​20, 235, 243, 245 de Beauvoir, Simone 3, 9, 13, 22–​3, 35n.36, 35n.37, 39n.80, 40n.82, 40n.84, 40n.85, 190, 202, 234, 239 delirium tremens 52–​3, 59, 60, 99, 101, 113, 232, 233 denial (in denial) 7, 8, 78n.14, 108 deracination 216, 243 Derrick, Scott 80n.37 De Quincey 1, 31n.3 despair 1, 5, 24, 27, 29, 38n.67, 52, 53, 56, 61, 62, 73, 83, 91, 92, 94, 94n.1, 111, 127–​32, 144, 177, 201, 232, 242 devil, the 151, 174n.53, 178, 179, 185, 187 deWitt, Patrick 31, 242–​3, 244 Dickens, Charles 48, 172n.6 Dionysos: The Literature and Intoxication Triquarterly 29 dipsomania 68, 78n.16, 111 see also alcoholism disease model (of drinking) see alcoholism Djos, Matt 34n.26 Dodes, Lance 34n.26 Dodes, Zachary 34n.26 Dostoevsky, Fyodor 3, 14, 40n.84, 59, 90–​1, 102, 105, 110, 139, 146n.14, 148, 153, 156, 166, 168, 175n.62, 186–​7, 193n.47, 194n.55, 233 Dreyfus, Hubert L. 32n.11 drinking heavy 1, 7–​12 passim, 15, 27, 28, 35n.28, 36n.45, 45–​50 passim, 62, 65–​7, 68, 71, 72, 79n.33, 98, 100, 118, 137, 138, 148, 155, 159, 161, 170, 183, 186–​7, 198, 199–​200, 205, 210, 212, 224, 239, 241 see also alcoholics; alcoholism

263

reasons for 48, 51, 66, 98, 113, 121, 138, 160, 178, 183, 200, 204, 211, 212–​13, 219–​20, 224, 244, 245 drugs 1, 4, 77n.11, 125, 198, 243 drunkard see ‘habitual drunkards’ drunkenness 1, 11, 14, 16, 29, 37n.53, 45–​62, 71–​2, 84–​92, 93, 96n.25, 103, 104, 105, 114n.13, 119–​20, 121, 130–​1, 141, 144, 145, 157, 163, 164, 178, 182, 186–​7, 190, 193n.47, 199, 200, 205, 230, 234, 235 drunks see ‘habitual drunkards’ Earnshaw, Steven 64n.30, 64n.32, 96n.31, 134n.28 Eliot, George ‘Janet’s Repentance’ 20, 30, 46, 50–​3, 54, 56, 61, 62, 64n.38, 129, 148, 152, 232 Middlemarch 51 Ellison, Ralph 172n.7 ennui 101–​2, 113, 115n.19 epilepsy 90–​1 estrangement 20, 21, 39n.73 see also alienation eternity 18, 110, 129, 131, 162 eternal return 110 ethics 8, 21–​4, 39n.73, 39n.79, 71, 74, 119, 156, 215 evolution 65, 71, 74 existence (Existential) 2, 4, 6, 8, 9, 13, 14, 23, 24, 31, 32n.12, 39n.73, 39n.79, 40n.85, 56, 61, 66, 67, 69, 72, 73, 74, 77n.12, 87, 101, 102, 111, 112, 121, 122, 124, 125, 127, 132, 137, 141, 142, 143, 146, 146n.6, 154, 158, 159, 160, 162–​3, 164, 177, 179, 180, 188, 210, 215, 218, 226, 233, 236 Existentialism 2–​6, 9, 11, 15, 19–​26, 29, 32n.11, 39n.80, 95n.14, 144, 148, 149, 171, 197, 198, 200–​1, 202, 204, 208n.17, 213, 215, 239, 244

624

264

Index

Exley, Frederick 17 A Fan’s Notes 10, 11, 17, 18, 21, 26, 30, 155–​72, 177, 183, 184, 188–​9, 214, 216, 218, 222n.2, 244 facticity 6, 15, 62, 66, 208n.17 faith 52, 59, 140, 150–​2, 181, 221 Falk, David 17 Fallada, Hans 17 Drinker, The 10, 11, 15, 16, 30, 136–​46, 148, 149, 153, 154 Little Man, What Now? 136 fame 18, 155, 157, 159, 165, 167, 170, 171, 214 family 4, 6, 11, 12, 21, 37n.46, 46, 105, 148, 150, 156, 157, 158, 160, 161, 162, 163, 165–​6, 170, 178–​9, 186–​7, 190, 193n.47, 200, 203, 204, 205, 206, 207n.8, 218, 224, 229, 233, 236 Fanon, Frantz 23 fate 56, 179–​83, 202, 236 Faulkner, William 26, 28, 84 Federico, Annette 29, 32n.7, 63n.15, 64n.38 female Existential drinker, the 91–​3 Feuerbach, Ludwig 53 Fingarette, Herbert 34n.26 finitude 14, 15–​16, 66, 70, 96n.24, 224, 233, 234 Fitzgerald, F. Scott 26–​8, 41n.98, 147n.37, 175n.62 Flaubert, Gustav 133n.20, 175n.62 Ford, Ford Madox 95n.15 ‘for-​itself’ 6, 143, 164, 217, 202–​3, 235 form (literary) 1, 14, 17, 18, 37n.53, 70–​1, 90, 97n.32, 98, 99, 110, 114n.10, 123–​4, 177, 217, 225, 230, 231 see also genre Forseth, Roger 29, 116n.35 Forster, E. M. 121, 175n.62 freedom 3, 4, 6, 9, 11, 12–​13, 15, 22–​4, 31, 32n.7, 36n.43, 39n.73, 40n.84, 40n.85, 62n.2, 96n.24,

118, 124, 126–​8, 130, 137, 139, 145, 148, 149, 153, 171, 182, 186, 197, 198, 201, 202, 203, 204, 209n.22, 215, 219, 222n.16, 233, 234, 240, 242 free indirect discourse 56, 84, 116n.42 free will see will Freud, Sigmund 118, 175n.62 friends 4, 5, 11, 21, 22, 105, 131, 138, 150, 156, 163, 166, 179, 233 futility 73, 74 Gatens, Moira 63n.20 gender 6, 21, 83–​94, 186, 197 genetics 24, 47, 103, 245n.1 genre 1, 17, 25, 38n.63, 70, 155, 176, 207n.9, 233 genre painting 58, 63n.27 Germany 20, 136, 145, 146 Giamo, Benedict 202–​3, 207n.3, 207n.9, 208n.17, 209n.32 Gifford, Frank 157 Gilmore, Thomas B. 28, 29 God 3, 4, 6, 7, 19, 20, 24, 52, 53, 54, 62, 73, 74, 129, 131, 140, 148, 149, 151–​3, 156, 159, 162, 165, 167, 178, 179–​83, 189–​90, 191n.9, 200, 201, 202, 214, 221, 224, 225, 231, 232, 235, 236, 236n.1 Gogol, Nikolai 189, 191n.17 Gold, Ivan Sams in a Dry Season 25, 31, 37n.53, 241 Golob, Sacha 39n.79 Golomb, Jacob 40n.89 Goodwin, Donald W. 28 Gorbachev, Mikhail 187 Gordon, Neil 237n.12 Gordon, Lewis R. 40n.87 Gough, John B. 31n.2, 242 Grace, Annie 242 Great American Novel, The 170 Greenwood, Walter 136

265

Index Guignon, Charles 33n.24 guilt 102, 140, 147n.26, 153, 200, 207n.9, 234 ‘habitual drunkards’ 45–​62, 65, 66, 68, 75, 118, 137, 138, 144 Hamilton, Patrick 27, 143, 145, 147n.35 Hannay, Alastair 18 happiness 9, 36n.37, 111, 177, 178, 224, 226–​7, 230, 233, 235, 244 Hatcher, Harlan 169 Hawthorne, Nathaniel 155, 172n.6, 175n.62 Healy, John 35n.32 Heath, Dwight B. 194n.52 heaven 129, 183, 185, 190, 199 hedonism 4, 9, 11, 27, 35n.33, 101, 108, 160, 169, 215, 222n.16, 233, 234, 235, 240 Heidegger, Martin 3, 4, 6, 11, 13, 22, 23, 24, 32n.12, 33n.13, 36n.37, 36n.43, 39n.79, 39n.80, 62n.2, 70, 91, 110–​11, 116n.51, 191n.3, 239 Heilman, Robert B. 121 hell 52, 58, 61, 68–​9, 112, 118, 126, 127, 128, 129, 147n.26, 151, 176, 183, 185, 186, 190, 232 Hemingway, Ernest 26, 27, 28, 40n.95, 169, 172n.6 Henderson, Greg 126, 128, 134n.35, 134n.42 Henry, Mitchell 49, 50 Hepola, Sarah 241 heterosexuality 21, 101 historical materialism 74 Hofmann, Michael 28 Holbrook, Stewart 207n.6 Holocaust, the 144 homosexuality 98, 99, 102–​3, 106–​8, 111, 115n.27, 115n.28, 116n.52, 169, 170 human, the 2, 11, 24, 57, 61, 93, 126–​8, 130, 221

265

humanism 24, 39n.80, 52, 165, 220, 221 humanity 3, 22, 33n.24, 51, 53, 54, 56, 57, 67, 73, 87, 108, 110, 119–​20, 126–​8, 129, 130, 131, 135n.47, 150, 162, 165, 166, 189, 219, 221, 232 Husserl, Edmund 38n.67 Huxley, Thomas 71, 79n.28 ‘identity’ 7, 12, 20–​1, 59, 102, 103, 126, 140, 169, 197, 201, 212, 235, 237n.12, 239, 245n.1 illness 8, 10–​11, 163, 169, 174n.51, 183, 218 ‘imagination’ 69, 108, 109, 111, 127, 149, 155, 243 impressionism (literary) 95n.15, 96n.21 inauthenticity see authenticity ‘indirect communication’ 18, 38n.66, 244 individualism 25–​6, 197, 233, 235 industrialisation 19, 30, 47, 48, 50, 61–​2, 83 insanity 46, 47, 58, 59, 92, 142, 163, 174n.51 see also mental health interiority 32n.7, 83, 239 intoxication 22, 29, 31n.3, 69, 74, 84, 106 Ireland, David 27 Ironweed (film) 210 Jackson, Charles 167, 185 Fall of Valor, The 102–​3, 111, 145 ‘How War Came to Arcadia’ 145 Lost Weekend, The 3, 11, 14, 15, 18, 25, 30, 42n.126, 93, 98–​113, 118, 123, 124, 129, 130, 135n.51, 139, 143, 144–​5, 149, 159, 160, 161, 167, 185, 186, 217, 244 Second-​Hand Life, A 111, 115n.19, 115n.28 ‘Sunnier Side, The’ 111 James, Henry 171–​2

62

266

Index

James, William 67, 71–​2, 74, 78n.13, 118, 241 Jaspers, Karl 39n.81 Jerrold, Douglas 37n.54 Job 140, 147n.26, 150 ‘John Barleycorn’ 65–​7, 69, 70, 71, 72–​3, 74, 76, 77n.9, 77n.11, 80n.38, 124 Johnson, Denis 243 Johnson, Pamela Hansford 155, 172n.6 Joyce, James 37n.53, 114n.5, 115n.27, 125, 133n.20, 168, 173n.20 Kafka, Franz 144, 168 Trial, The 124–​6, 137, 142–​3, 144, 159, 168, 233 Kallio, Sakari 95n.15 Kant, Immanuel 22, 29, 40n.83 Kataev, Valentin 187 Kaufman, Alan 242 Kazin, Alfred 26–​7 Kennedy, A. L. 241 Paradise 11, 14, 26, 30, 148, 177, 198, 224–​36, 236n.1, 236n.2, 236n.12, 239, 243, 244 Kennedy, William Billy Phelan’s Greatest Game 206n.1, 207n.10, 208n.22 Ironweed 14, 21, 29, 30, 148, 198–​ 209, 210, 211, 212, 213, 217, 221, 221n.1, 222n.4, 225, 228, 231, 234, 238n.27, 239, 244 Legs 206n.1 Very Old Bones 209n.32 kenosis 235 Kerner, David 41n.100 Kerouac, Jack 27 Kesey, Ken One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest 172n.7 Kierkegaard, Søren 3, 6, 18, 19, 39n.81, 53, 59, 61, 64n.37, 76, 93, 104, 113, 117n.57, 125–​6, 156, 176, 239

Kingman, Russ 80n.46 Knapp, Caroline 12, 33n.15, 36n.44, 36n.45, 36n.46, 241 Komaromi, Ann 183 Kremlin, the 177, 186, 189 Künstlerroman 168 Kustanovich, Konstantin 42n.122, 191n.3, 191n.9 Labor, Earle 78n.14, 80n.39 Laing, Olivia 21 Lamb, Charles 1 language 10, 119, 126, 168, 183 Las Vegas 210, 214–​15, 217, 222n.2 law, the 4, 11, 23, 48, 124, 143, 159 Lawrence, D. H. 75, 135n.43 Leaving Las Vegas (film) 210 Lehan, Richard 40n.95 Lejeune, Philippe 38n.66 Lewis, Sinclair 26 Lewis, Wyndham 96n.25 libertarianism 9 Liliburn, Geoffrey R. 208n.20 Limonov, Eduard 184, 192n.39 Lipovetsky, Mark 192n.26 literature 102, 162, 165, 168, 171, 190, 216, 241 London, Charmian Kittredge 66, 67–​8, 217 London, Jack 1, 2, 3, 9, 15, 17, 18, 26, 30, 31, 61, 65–​77, 84, 86, 91, 92, 104, 106, 121, 122, 124, 139, 148, 149, 151, 159, 217, 241 ‘Created He Them’ 69 John Barleycorn 1, 3, 16, 28, 30, 45, 65–​80, 86, 90, 92, 93, 98, 122, 124, 148, 160, 200 Martin Eden 65, 72, 76, 77n.12, 80n.45 Son of the Sun, A 68 ‘To Build a Fire’ 73 ‘White Logic, The’ 72–​4 ‘White Silence, The’ 73, 74, 80n.39 Los Angeles 214, 217, 222n.2 Lost Weekend, The (film) 30, 116n.49, 167

267

Index love 24, 93, 115n.27, 121, 122, 124, 126, 130–​1, 134n.42, 150, 154, 157, 158, 162, 165–​6, 167, 171, 182, 202, 203, 211, 212, 213, 215, 217–​19, 227, 233–​5, 241 Lowell, Robert 27 Lowry, Malcolm 17, 28 ‘Last Address, The’ 133n.14 ‘Lunar Caustic’ 133n.14 Swinging the Maelstrom 133n.11 Under the Volcano 8, 10, 14, 15, 17, 18, 25, 30, 37n.53, 42n.126, 93, 115n.29, 118–​35, 139, 140, 143, 144, 149, 159, 160, 164, 174n.51, 177, 185, 186, 211, 217, 244 lyric form 13–​16 Lyons, John 6, 32n.6, 33n.22 McCarthy, Patrick A. 114n.5, 123, 132n.4, 133n.17 McClintock, James I. 73, 74, 79n.37 Macquarrie, John 96n.31 madness 59, 141, 145, 163–​5, 174n.53 Maine Law 50 Mamet, David 158 Mann, Thomas 115n.27, 172n.6 marriage 22, 51, 101, 105, 121–​2, 130, 136, 138, 141, 150, 220 Marx, Karl 19, 20, 61–​2 masculinity 1, 28–​9, 66, 75, 91, 96n.25, 141, 162, 181 see also gender Matich, Olga 193n.45 Maurel, Sylvie 94n.2, 97n.32 meaning 1, 2, 4–​5, 9, 10, 14–​15, 16, 17, 22, 31, 45, 56, 61, 66, 74, 76, 77n.12, 91, 93, 109, 111, 123, 124, 131, 136, 137, 141, 142, 148, 151, 154, 159, 165, 167, 169, 176, 178, 179, 181, 183, 190, 192n.34, 197, 212, 214, 215, 216, 220–​1, 225, 243, 245 meaninglessness see meaning

267

medicine 11, 24, 62, 69, 98, 99, 144, 158, 161, 163 Melfi, Mary Ann 114n.6 memoir 12, 16, 17, 38n.63, 60, 67–​70, 76, 155, 164, 184, 241–​2 see also autobiography mental asylum 10, 47, 50, 136, 145, 156, 158, 159, 161, 164, 169, 170, 172n.7, 174n.50, 174n.51, 183 mental health 10–​11 Mészáros, István 38n.68 metaphysical, the 39n.80, 50, 52, 53, 69, 93, 99, 102, 108, 113, 119, 121, 122, 124, 139, 140, 142, 143, 144, 160, 178, 179, 183, 185, 186, 191n.9, 199, 200, 245 Mexico 20, 118, 119 Michener, Christian 41n.121, 206n.1, 208n.17 Miller, Arthur 158, 159 misanthropy 130, 156, 188, 244 misogyny 171, 183 modernism 29, 30, 58–​9, 83, 84, 85, 94n.1, 94n.2, 110–​11, 115n.29, 125 modernity 15, 19–​20, 30, 83, 85, 89, 93, 120–​1, 137, 141, 142, 144, 239, 243 money 18, 26, 49, 99, 100, 142, 157, 158, 159, 164, 165, 167, 170, 188, 205, 214, 243–​4 mood (Existential) 20, 37n.37, 91, 96n.24, 239 Moore, Brian Lonely Passion of Judith Hearne, The 16, 21, 30, 148–​54, 162, 178, 186, 200, 201, 217, 231 morality 1, 2, 4, 22, 23, 40n.85, 49, 50, 65, 71, 75, 98, 105, 121, 127, 139, 150, 151, 189, 198, 218, 221n.1, 236n.4 see also ethics mortality see death Moscow 176, 177, 179, 185 Moskver, Katherine V. 194n.65 Müller-​Zettelmann, Eva 96n.21

628

268 Mullins, Simon 36n.38 Mulrine, Stephen 189, 190n.2 mysticism 71, 73, 118, 187, 206n.2, 225, 241 Nabokov, Vladimir 168, 194n.55 narcissism 98, 104, 105, 114n.6, 114n.11, 129 Nardin, Jane 94n.1 narrative 1, 6, 7–​8, 13–​14, 16, 18, 29, 33n.23, 37n.53, 56, 58, 59, 62n.3, 110, 123, 124, 140–​3, 152, 160, 166–​71, 177, 183, 185, 186, 198, 205, 208n.20, 216, 218, 228, 239 see also temperance narratives naturalism 54, 59, 119, 206n.2 Nazism 145 Nehemas, Alexander 33n.24 Nemeczek, Alfred 64n.33 neo-​liberalism 26, 35n.29, 40n.91, 243, 244, 246n.20 Newlove, Donald 157, 173n.12 New York 160 New York Giants 156, 157, 162 Nicholls, James 32n.7, 62n.3, 94n.1 Nietzsche, Friedrich 3, 32n.11, 33n.24, 67, 70, 71, 72, 77n.9, 79n.25, 92, 110, 150, 152, 172 night 24, 57–​61, 63n.26, 113 nihilism 59, 63n.30, 76, 220 nothingness 16, 27, 40n.95, 64n.38, 73, 101, 102, 113, 119, 139, 142, 149, 151, 154, 159, 197, 210, 212, 214 nymphomania 111, 115n.28 O’Brien, Erin 222n.10, 245n.1 O’Brien, John 17 Better 25, 31, 37n.53, 222n.10, 239–​40, 245n.1 Leaving Las Vegas 14, 15, 18, 25, 30, 198, 210–​23, 225–​6, 228, 234, 240, 243, 244, 245n.1 O’Hara, John 26, 27, 147n.36

Index O’Kill, Brian 128, 133n.13 O’Neill, Eugene 26, 28, 37n.53, 125, 147n.36 ‘original sin’ 130, 135n.49, 162 Orr, John 133n.20 Orwell, George 65, 174n.51 Osborn, Matthew 31n.5 Osborne, Lawrence 35n.33 Ostrovsky, Arkady 191n.25 outsider 21, 59, 83, 103, 166, 169, 170 ‘ownmost’ 11, 15, 125 paradise 127, 128–​32, 206, 225, 232, 234, 239 Paris 27, 30, 54, 61, 84, 92, 169 Parker, Dorothy 27 passion 5, 9, 61, 149–​50, 153, 159, 171, 180 Passion, the see Stations of the Cross patriarchy 89, 91 patriotism 155, 158 Pawlikowski, Pawel 184 Pellaeur, David 22 Petersen, Per Serritslev 79n.27 Petushki 176, 177, 178, 179, 180, 181, 185 philanthropy 24, 49, 62 philosophy 2, 8, 19, 20, 24, 62n.2, 70–​2, 79n.26, 93, 99 Pizer, Donald 206n.2 pledge, the 49 Poe, Edgar Allan 28, 241 postmodern 39n.72, 76, 78n.13, 126, 185, 190, 194n.74, 208n.20, 215, 217, 227 ‘pour-​soi’ see ‘for-​itself’ poverty 48, 53, 54, 57, 136, 199, 205, 210, 243, 244 Pozharsky and Minin 181 prohibition 187 project(s) (life) 1, 6, 9, 13, 15, 53, 75, 98–​113, 109, 137, 140, 149, 157, 162, 167, 169, 178, 179, 212, 219, 235, 239

629

Index prostitute 83, 130, 211, 212, 213, 214, 218, 219, 221 psychiatry 11, 99, 102, 115n.25, 163, 165, 172n.7, 179 psychoanalysis 11, 98, 99, 114n.6, 114n.11, 122, 147n.37, 156, 160, 163, 165, 234 psychology 5, 9, 11, 31, 98, 99, 163, 198, 200, 205, 208n.17, 234 public, the 19, 45, 61 see also ‘they, the’ purgatory 118–​20, 131, 151, 199, 201, 206, 207n.3, 221n.1 race 6, 197 racism 174n.53 Radischev, Alexander 189 Rand, Ayn 35n.29 Reade, Charles 54 realism 51, 53, 115n.29, 136, 184–​5, 191n.4, 198, 206n.2, 233 reality 86–​7, 88–​91, 93, 96n.18, 121, 123, 127–​8, 131, 134n.38, 158, 161, 162, 164, 171, 176, 177, 192n.39, 211, 232–​3, 236 recovery (narratives) 12, 25, 34n.26, 144, 198, 241–​2 redemption 51, 103, 116n.49, 118, 161, 166–​71, 174n.51, 211, 212 Reesman, Jeanne Campbell 70, 76, 78n.14, 79n.25 rehabilitation 11, 12, 25, 47 Reid, Christopher 37n.53 Reitman, Ben L. 207n.6 religion 2, 33n.22, 68, 93, 121, 123, 131, 148, 149–​53, 161, 186, 190, 227, 230–​3, 240 religious sensibility 30, 50, 52, 53, 56, 61, 62, 73, 106, 129, 131, 140, 147n.26, 149–​53, 162, 178, 181, 182, 190n.2, 191n.9, 199–​206 passim, 208n.20, 225, 230–​3, 234, 235, 236n.1, 237n.22, 242, 243 repetition 14, 15–​16, 45, 49, 52, 91, 93, 98, 100, 102, 103, 109–​10,

269

111, 113, 114n.5, 118, 156, 185, 193n.45, 237n.22 responsibility 3–​4, 5, 8, 9, 12, 23, 40n.84, 53, 98, 105, 121, 123, 148, 151, 157, 165–​6, 171, 197, 200, 207n.9, 208n.17, 215, 227, 235, 240, 243 Revonsuo, Antti 88, 92, 95n.15, 96n.18 Reynolds, David S. 31n.5 Rhys, Jean 17, 18, 21, 30, 83–​94, 98, 121, 122, 124, 140, 141, 149, 159, 160, 161, 164, 177, 186, 217, 244 After Leaving Mr Mackenzie 16, 84, 87, 90–​1, 95n.17 Good Morning, Midnight 14, 16, 84, 92, 92n.1, 94, 94n.1, 143, 145 ‘Let Her Sleep It Off’ 114n.1 Quartet 84, 85–​7, 88, 89, 90, 91, 95n.17 Voyage in the Dark 84, 93, 94n.1, 95n.17 Richmond, Yale 187 Robertson, Nan 34n.26 Rockwell, Norman 158, 173n.17 Romanticism 1, 32n.7, 45, 46, 72, 79n.33, 102, 121, 122, 169, 170, 171, 208n.22, 215 Rosanov, Vasily 192n.34 Roth, Joseph 27–​8, 143 Roy, Ravi K. 246n.20 Russell, Bertrand 236n.7 Russell, Kent 16–​17 Russia 10, 177, 179–​83 Russian literature 176, 184, 186–​90 Ryan-​Hayes, Karen 183, 193n.45 Sacred Heart, The 148, 150–​1, 152, 153 Salter, James 27, 41n.102 salvation 130, 134n.42, 147n.26, 150, 152, 185, 219 Sartre, Jean-​Paul 3, 5, 6, 9, 12–​13, 14, 25, 20, 22, 23, 24–​5, 39n.78,

0 72

270

Index

39n.79, 39n.80, 39n.82, 104, 109, 119, 122, 126, 127, 128, 134n.38, 143, 146n.6, 164, 169, 186, 190, 202–​3, 211, 215, 217, 233, 234–​5, 239 Schacht, Richard 33n.24 Schopenhauer, Arthur 3, 72, 77n.9 Schrad, Mark 193n.46, 193n.47 Schubert, Franz 202 science 19, 24, 68, 72, 74, 83, 88, 91, 93, 95n.14, 95n.15, 102, 103, 131, 164, 181 Scoblic, Sacha Z. 242 Second World War see World War Two Select Committee on Habitual Drunkards (1872) 47–​50, 54 self 1–​9, 13–​16, 19–​33 passim, 52, 53, 58–​61 passim, 67, 70–​6 passim, 77n.12, 78n.13, 83–​91 passim, 98–​113 passim, 119–​22 passim, 140–​3, 148–​71 passim, 176–​94, 200–​5 passim, 208n.17, 212, 215, 217, 219–​21, 224–​30 passim, 235, 236, 239, 240, 243, 244, 245 Seshachari, Neila C. 206n.1 Sewpaul, Visanthie 246n.20 sex 35n.33, 83, 138, 152, 156, 158, 167, 185, 214, 215, 220, 221, 222n.2, 222n.4, 232, 234, 236n.2, 240, 241, 242 shamanism 206n.2 Sharma, Akhil 36n.46 Shaw, Sheila 42n.124 Sherman, Cindy 222n.21 Sikka, Pilleriin 95n.15 Simenon, Georges 28 Simmons, Cynthia 184, 185, 188, 194n.74 sin 52, 56, 127, 135n.51, 140, 147n.26, 151, 153, 154n.11, 202, 206, 230, 232, 234 Sinyavsky, Andrei 187 situatedness 6, 19–​21, 23, 24, 26, 30, 91, 93, 159, 163, 180, 181, 183, 186–​90

Skempton, Simon 20, 39n.72 sloth 56, 57, 61 Smith, William 48–​50 sobriety 1, 15, 16, 35n.37, 49, 55–​6, 71–​2, 83–​4, 86, 89, 92, 93, 95n.17, 98, 100, 105, 114n.13, 161, 164, 176, 177, 182, 187, 194n.74, 198, 231, 235–​6, 241, 242 society 4, 6, 8, 10–​11, 14, 15, 21, 23, 26, 66, 71, 88, 91, 101, 137, 150, 156, 163, 164, 183, 186–​90, 205 see also conformity Sokolov, Sasha 184, 192n.39 solipsism 26, 93, 109, 163, 170, 178, 233 Soviet Union, the 176, 180, 181, 184, 188, 189 Spencer, Herbert 71, 79n.28 Spender, Stephen 132n.10 Spinner, Jonathan 77n.12 spirituality 19, 51, 61, 72, 118, 121, 125, 128, 150, 162, 179, 183, 190, 206, 212, 213, 228, 239, 240, 242, 243 Stalin, Joseph 189, 194n.64 state, the 4, 5, 21, 30, 48, 181, 188–​9, 216 Stations of the Cross 182, 190n.2, 225, 230–​3 Steger, Manfred B. 246n.20 Steinbeck, John 26, 28 stoicism 9, 32n.11, 74, 211 Strawson, Galen 5–​6, 33n.21, 33n.23 stream-​of-​consciousness 84, 110–​11, 185 subjectivity 5, 6, 11, 15, 18, 22, 78n.13, 93, 118, 128 substance dependence 8, 12, 18 see also addiction suffering 9, 73, 108–​12 passim, 127–​31 passim, 135n.51, 136, 139–​40, 147n.26, 149–​50, 153, 162, 181, 182, 186, 189, 201, 229, 231–​2, 242

271

Index suicide 4, 10, 12, 15–​16, 38n.57, 45, 67, 69, 72, 76, 77n.11, 100, 102, 114n.13, 156, 160, 182, 192n.34, 210–​21, 225–​6 Sund, Judy 63n.28 ‘superfluousness’ 137, 146n.6 Sutherland, John 77n.11, 78n.14, 78n.16, 79n.32 symbolism 60–​1, 72–​4, 76, 79n.36, 104, 118–​20, 129, 132n.4, 181, 191n.17 sympathy 36n.46, 51, 52, 53, 106, 122, 138, 143, 199, 218, 225, 231 Tandon, Bharat 237n.12 Tarschys, Daniel 193n.52 Taylor, Anya 29, 32n.7, 62n.3, 206n.1, 206n.2, 208n.13, 209n.29 temperance narratives 1, 31n.5, 37n.54, 45–​6, 48–​56, 65–​6, 75, 101, 138, 166, 225, 241, 242, 244 temporality 14, 37n.51, 37n.53, 37n.54, 109–​13, 125–​6, 132, 142 Tersteeg, Mr (Hermanus Gijsbertus) 59, 60, 61 ‘they, the’ 33n.13, 149, 157, 164, 170–​1, 180 Thomas, Dylan 27, 155, 172n.6 Thomas, Hilda 132n.4 Thompson, Mary 46, 47–​50, 61, 122 ‘thrownness’ 4, 116n.51 ‘Time of Troubles’ 181, 191n.25 transcendence 1, 66, 70, 73, 74, 94n.1, 109, 208n.20 Transchel, Kate 192n.35 Triolet, Elsa 190 truth 1, 4, 31, 65, 67, 70–​4 passim, 80n.38, 84–​6, 91–​3, 101, 104, 121, 124, 148, 149, 161, 174n.51, 176

271

Vale, Jason 242 Valli, Veronica 242 Valverde, Mariana 62n.2 van Gogh, Theo 58, 61, 64n.31, 64n.32 van Gogh, Vincent Night Café at Arles 46, 57–​61, 105–​6 van Gogh, Willemien 63n.26, 64n.32 Vesselova, Natalia 192n.39 Vice, Sue 122, 133n.20 Wall Street (film) 210 Walton, Stuart 34n.26 Waugh, Evelyn 28 Wedge, George 29 Weiss, Rudolf 96n.21 Welsh, Irvine 198 West, Nathaniel 245n.13 Whitman, Walt 70 Wightman, Mrs Charles 51 Wilcox, Danny 34n.26 will 3, 4, 6–​10 passim, 11–​13, 40n.84, 40n.85, 62n.2, 72, 103, 149, 151, 153, 179, 180, 200–​5 passim, 212, 219, 220, 223n.25, 229, 235 Willett, John 145 Williams, James 76, 80n.45 Woolf, Virginia 84, 110, 125, 135n.43 work 4, 8, 46–​50, 54–​6, 61, 62n.7, 101, 105, 159, 171, 176, 183, 188, 189, 212, 214, 220, 244 World Health Organization 5, 7, 34n.27 World War One 144 World War Two 9, 10, 120, 123–​4, 135n.50, 143–​5, 173n.25, 234 Wrathall, Mark A. 32n.11 Wright, Richard 23 writer-​drinker 16–​18, 24–​5, 26–​9, 65–​7, 74–​6, 90, 109, 111, 131, 144, 157, 166–​71, 176, 184–​6, 197–​8, 210, 215–​16, 240, 241, 244

27

272

Index

Yardley, Jonathan 172n.4 Yerofeev, Venedikt 159, 184, 185 Moscow-​Petushki 10, 14, 18, 21, 29, 30, 176–​90, 201, 202, 231, 233, 234, 239, 244 ‘Through the Eyes of an Eccentric’ 192n.34

Yetman, Michael G. 208n.22, 209n.31, 209n.32, 221n.1 Zola, Émile L’Assommoir 20, 30, 46, 53–​7, 59, 61, 62, 64n.31, 244