Tom Shone explores pedestrian prose from writers who stop drinking in Intelligent Life. He discovers that, from Fitzgerald to Faulkner, “none of these authors would write much that was any good beyond the age of 40”, blaming their creative decline on sobriety and enforced rehab. “AA can only help weak people because their ego is strengthened by the group,” said Fitzgerald. “I was never a joiner.” Shone agrees, noting that:
Certainly, if what you’re used to is rolling champagne bottles down Fifth Avenue beneath the light of a wanton moon or getting into the kind of bar fights that make a man feel alive, truly alive, the basic facts of recovered life – the endless meetings, the rote ingestion of the sort of clichés the writer has spent his entire life avoiding – are below prosaic.
Ironically enough, the writing that resulted from these writers’ battles with alcoholism (Fitzgerald’s “The Crack-Up” in Esquire and John Berryman’s Recovery) would have been instant bestsellers today, given the immense popularity of misery memoirs on both the Oprah and Richard and Judy book lists.
For more on literary inebriation, read Victoria Moore’s account of following Papa Hemingway’s “rum-soaked tracks in Cuba”.
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