“What this book is interested in,” William Palmer writes in the introduction to his study of writers and their drinking habits, “is the effect that heavy drinking had on writers, how they lived with it and were sometimes destroyed by it, and how they described the private and social world of the drinker in their work.” Palmer’s preoccupation is the life as much as the writing of his 11 subjects – Patrick Hamilton, Jean Rhys, Charles Jackson, Malcolm Lowry, Dylan Thomas, Elizabeth Bishop, John Cheever, Flann O’Brien, Anthony Burgess, Kingsley Amis and Richard Yates – and he offers a forensic examination of both in this enjoyable exploration of an enduringly fascinating subject.
Palmer’s anecdotes flow as freely as the drink in the writers’ lives. In the latter stages of his career, Hamilton’s “daily consumption can seldom have fallen below the equivalent of three bottles [of spirits]”. A drink-sodden Rhys attacked her husband, “leaving his face scratched and his eyes blacked”. According to his wife, Lowry would drink anything: “Anything included tequila, mescal, whisky, gin, beer, rubbing alcohol, after shave lotion, and hair tonic.” Bishop, invited by Robert Lowell to dine with TS Eliot and WH Auden, was so nervous that “she instead sampled all the bottles in a friend’s apartment and passed out”.
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