Alcohol and the creative process, especially writers

 

"Writers and Rum"

by

Adam Gopnik

January 9th, 2014

The Atlantic

“Writers in this office used to drink,” a grizzled veteran of these corridors once said sternly to a couple of pup reporters, whom he had discovered taking turns trying on a good-looking cashmere jacket in another cubicle. The moral, abashing if not shaming, was that in the halls where once real men had roamed, or drank in peaceable closets, now mere jacket-fanciers wandered. Certainly, it’s impossible to turn the past pages of this magazine, or the pages of American literary history, for that matter, without being reminded of how inextricable the drinking life and the writing life—or, to put it more bluntly, alcoholism and art—once were. From St. Clair McKelway to Dorothy Parker and James Thurber, and from Ernest Hemingway to F. Scott Fitzgerald to Sinclair Lewis and beyond, it was not long ago that if you wrote you drank, and if you weren’t drinking it was because you were drying out.

The critic Olivia Laing has just published a good, sad book on this subject called “The Trip To Echo Spring: On Writers And Drinking,” which tells at length the mostly familiar but still melancholy stories of the drinking lives of Fitzgerald and Hemingway and Tennessee Williams and John Berryman and John Cheever and Raymond Carver, complete, it sometimes feels, with tipped-in napkin stains from each of their favorite bars. Oddly fixated, for a Brit, who surely has plenty of scribbling drinkers in her own country, on this one—a reviewer in the Times claims that she “romanticizes the vast American landscape as a place made for rumination,” though rum-ination seems more like it—she entangles the story of these gifted men with tales of her own alcoholic family. We attend an A.A. meeting in her presence, and then are off to Key West, where Hemingway downed many and Tennessee Williams even more. Tender and sympathetic though she is to her subjects’ compulsions, and difficult though it is to be completely immune to the appeal of dissolute lives in our timid time, it mostly makes for depressing reading, which was, perhaps, her point.

I’m just old enough to be able to have seen the tail end of that literary culture of really big drinkers—and a real culture it was, as Laing understands. It may be hard to believe that it was so, when nowadays we mostly ingest our drugs from prescription bottles, early in the morning or late at night—but it existed, and was as alluring as it was utterly toxic.

As I wrote in my book about eating and drinking, “The Table Comes First,” one of my early editorial occupations was taking two remarkable writers, Mordecai Richler and Wilfrid Sheed, once a month out to a largely liquid lunch. Both died before their day. Sheed, at least, did what a writer should, and got a very fine book, “In Love with Daylight”, out of it later on—all about drying out, with pills and cancer thrown into the Job-like bundle—marred only by the rummy’s blind certainty that what he suffered from was merely social drinking, plus a little more. (They can be pulling the tiny bottles out of your hand in the hotel room after the third blackout, and you can still stubbornly believe that it’s just social drinking, maybe a little more.) “I took more from alcohol than alcohol has taken from me,” Sheed liked to quote Churchill as saying—and what that old drinking culture took from alcohol was sociability, of a rather Londonish kind, where the bumps and bruises of literary conflict seemed at least to heal a little sooner and the literary types mingled more freely. (Sheed, for one, was equally at home with the National Review crowd and the New York Review of Books crowd and the New York Daily News crowd, and he wasn’t unique.)

At the other, soberer end, John Updike once said to an admirer that the reason for the astonishing longevity he shared with Philip Roth—not just achieving the second acts that Fitzgerald said were impossible in American lives but third acts and fourth acts and then both men appearing, so to speak, out in the lobby to shake hands and do card tricks after the show—was, simply, that neither drank. He brought it up because he knew it was unusual. Growing up, he had absorbed the notion that a good writer wasn’t just possibly a drunk; a good writer had to be a drunk to be any good at all. (Jazz musicians, I think, believed something similar about the harder stuff, though the price they paid was more obvious in jail time and the advantages they took more obvious, I’m told, in blissed out periods. Bill Evans’s piano playing circa 1961 makes a strong case for heroin.)

Of course, ballplayers and ballerinas and aluminum-siding salesmen, for that matter, all drink, too, or used to. But most aluminum-siding salesmen or ballerinas presumably saw drinking too much as a problem, whereas writers, for a surprisingly long time, as Laing reminds us, saw drinking as an essential feature of the act, a complement to the act of authorship. When Norton and Kramden overindulge at the Raccoon Lodge, they say, “Oh, what a head!” Only writers say, “Oh, what a chapter!”

* * *

If a theory is called for—and when is it not, in these woods?—to explain this phenomenon, it is that writing is work in which the balance necessary to a sane life of physical and symbolic work has been wrested right out of plumb, or proportion, and alcohol is (wrongly) believed to rebalance it. Anyone not a writer is probably sick of hearing how hard writing is, and obviously writing is not nearly as soul-destroying as coal mining or burger flipping or whatever you like. But writing is, if not uniquely hard work, then uniquely draining work. Some basic human need for a balance between thinking and acting is still kept intact even by the most tedious of other tasks. All rewarding effort involves a balance between wit and work—between the bits you do alone in your head and the bits you do in company with your hands (or voice or body or whatever). Laboring in your head, exclusively, does feel unnatural; whatever else we might have been doing, back out there on the primeval savannah, we weren’t sitting and moving the ends of our fingers minutely on a stone surface for six hours at a stretch.

The dramatic and plastic arts have elements of both wit and work intertwined—actors move around and shout, a director moves them (and shouts at them); painters have the sheer physicality of paint, and the givens of the canvas offer you four lines and a white surface to start with. A writer, on the other hand, stares out mournfully over the abyss of language—there are, truly, an infinite number of ways of forming the sentence you are about to attempt, all save one of them ugly and inadequate. And there’s nowhere to look for help but your own fingers.

The only cure, or hope, is to make the act of writing physical—to move it from your head to your gut—and, in doing so, to make it automatic, aerobic. That’s hard, and can be done in only two ways, both calling for outside assistance. One is to take the drug, or drink, and hope that it helps to ‘physicalize’ the work, move the pedals, and start the breathing—the theory used by those writers, like the elder Hemingway, who do the drinking and the writing simultaneously. Or else, to make the transition from mind to hand sober, knowing that the exhaustion it engenders will call for an antidote. Drained, one wants to replenish, and the whiskey or wine bottle is at hand. This is false reasoning of course, but it is the speciousness of writers.

Or was. No generalization about literature ever survives contact with the enemy, reality—doubtless there’s a young novelist in New York now writing her twelve-hundred-page opus on love and Brooklyn with a bottle of Jack Daniels in hand, and certainly Gary Shteyngart is doing his bit for the virtues of vodka. Still, there’s a general sense that the drugs of choice for writers now are more often little blue pills than big brown bottles. The onset of feminism, which compelled male writers at last to take some responsibility for their kids (one of the things that Laing’s writers certainly were not were present-tense dads), the diffusion of literary life from narrow bands of energy in London and New York and Paris into the academic monasteries of creative-writing programs—all of this has made the evening’s common cocktail a lost communion cup. (You can take the pill, and then send the kids to school.) Writers cope with the drain of writing now with yoga and meditation and marital discord (and, of course, with weed and Oregon Pinot, too) but the heyday of the writer with the whiskey bottle always on his desk seems past.

The price we pay for the end of the drinking life for writers is, perhaps, not so much isolation, though that is so: people can’t believe how few writers actually know other writers; the bars solved that for the old guys, at least. We also pay it, perhaps, in undue cheerfulness and extended youthfulness. The single most astonishing thing about the old-time writers Laing studies is how old they were when still young. Alcohol ages. Fitzgerald died just past forty, but everyone was already treating him like Rip Van Winkle. This was partly because he had out-lived his time but mostly because youth died then with the young. Now hair dye and twenty-four-hour gyms and wild salmon and celery juice or whatever have extended youth or the illusion of youth right to the edge of extreme old age. The unduly extended boyishness of this generation’s fully mature writers is still much spoken of, with annoyance, often by critics of what must seem to the boyish writers unduly extended girlishness. (The boyishness takes the form of being too arch for too long, the girlishness of being too catty too often.) But life is always worth extending on any terms available. “American writers are so strange,” an aging (and alcoholic) British wit once said. “They’re such … chirpy chappies.” The price of a lot less drink may be far fewer barroom sing-alongs among the bards, but also far fewer early deaths, if ever more chirpy chaps. It seems a decent trade.

Predictable writing?

I have heard of this before. It is curious in that students papers could be analyzed to make sure it is authentic of the student's style. Big Brother is closer than you think.

"The Jargon of the Novel, Computed"

by

Ben Zimmer

July 29th, 2011

The New York Times

We like to think that modern fiction, particularly American fiction, is free from the artificial stylistic pretensions of the past. Richard Bridgman expressed a common view in his 1966 book “The Colloquial Style in America.” “Whereas in the 19th century a very real distinction could be made between the vernacular and standard diction as they were used in prose,” Bridgman wrote, “in the 20th century the vernacular had virtually become standard.” Thanks to such pioneers as Mark Twain, Stephen Crane, Gertrude Stein and Ernest Hemingway, the story goes, ornate classicism was replaced by a straight-talking vox populi.

Now in the 21st century, with sophisticated text-crunching tools at our disposal, it is possible to put Bridgman’s theory to the test. Has a vernacular style become the standard for the typical fiction writer? Or is literary language still a distinct and peculiar beast?

Scholars in the growing field of digital humanities can tackle this question by analyzing enormous numbers of texts at once. When books and other written documents are gathered into an electronic corpus, one “subcorpus” can be compared with another: all the digitized fiction, for instance, can be stacked up against other genres of writing, like news reports, academic papers or blog posts.

One such research enterprise is the Corpus of Contemporary American English, or COCA, which brings together 425 million words of text from the past two decades, with equally large samples drawn from fiction, popular magazines, newspapers, academic texts and transcripts of spoken English. The fiction samples cover short stories and plays in literary magazines, along with the first chapters of hundreds of novels from major publishers. The compiler of COCA, Mark Davies at Brigham Young University, has designed a freely available online interface that can respond to queries about how contemporary language is used. Even grammatical questions are fair game, since every word in the corpus has been tagged with a part of speech.

Suppose we’re interested in looking at past-tense verbs. The most common examples in COCA are nondescript: “said,” “came,” “got,” “went,” “made,” “took” and so on. On the surface, the fiction offerings aren’t that different: “said” is still the big winner, while some others move up the list a few spots, like “looked,” “knew” and “thought.” But ask COCA which past-tense verbs show up more frequently in fiction compared with, say, academic prose, and things start to get interesting: the top five are “grimaced,” “scowled,” “grunted,” “wiggled” and “gritted.” Sour facial expressions, gruff noises and emphatic bodily movements (wiggling fingers and gritting teeth) would seem to rule the verbs peculiar to today’s published fiction.

Beyond the use of individual words, researchers can uncover even more striking patterns by looking at how words combine with their neighbors, forming “collocations.” Dictionary makers take a special interest in high-frequency collocations, since they can be the key to understanding how words work in the world. It’s a particular boon for making dictionaries that appeal to learners of English as a second language. When the lexicographer Orin Hargraves was studying collocations for a project at Oxford University Press (where I previously worked as editor for American dictionaries), he struck upon a trove of collocations that “would not be statistically significant were it not for their appearance in fiction.” And these weren’t just artifacts of genre fiction, like “warp speed” in sci-fi or “fiery passion” in bodice-ripping romance novels.

Using the Oxford English Corpus, encompassing about two billion words of 21st-century English, Hargraves found peculiar patterns in simple words like the verb “brush.” Everybody talks about brushing their teeth, but other possible companions, like “hair,” “strand,” “lock” and “lip,” appear up to 150 times more frequently in fiction than in any other genre. “Brush” appears near “lips” when two characters’ lips brush against each other or one’s lips brush against another’s cheek — as happens so often in novels. For the hair-related collocations, Hargraves concludes that “fictional characters cannot stop playing with their hair.”

“Bolting upright” and “drawing one’s breath” are two more fiction-specific turns of phrase revealed by the corpus. Creative writers are clearly drawn to descriptive idioms that allow their characters to register emotional responses through telling bits of physical action — “business,” as they say in theater. The conventions of modern storytelling dictate that fictional characters react to their worlds in certain stock ways and that the storytellers use stock expressions to describe those reactions. Readers might not think of such idioms as literary clichés, unless they are particularly egregious. Individual authors will of course have their own idiosyncratic linguistic tics. Dan Brown, of “Da Vinci Code” fame, is partial to eyebrows. In his techno-thriller “Digital Fortress,” characters arch or raise their eyebrows no fewer than 14 times.

Brown’s eyebrow obsession may simply signal a lack of imagination, but corpus research can also illuminate a writer’s stylistic creativity. Masahiro Hori, a professor of English linguistics at Kumamoto Gakuen University in Japan, has studied how Charles Dickens breathed new life into literary collocations. In “The Pickwick Papers,” for instance, Dickens played off the idiom “to look daggers at someone” (meaning to shoot a wrathful glare, itself descended from Shakespeare’s “to speak daggers”) by innovatively replacing “daggers” with “carving-knives”: an old lady “looked carving-knives at the hardheaded delinquent.” To be sure, a careful reader might have discerned the originality of the phrase on his own, but corpus analysis allowed Hori to confirm and extend his insights into Dickens’s ­originality.

For David Bamman, a senior researcher in computational linguistics with Tufts University’s Perseus Project, analyzing collocations can help unwrap the way a writer “indexes” a literary style by lifting phrases from the past. Often this can consist of conscious allusions — Bamman and his colleagues used computational methods to zero in on the places in “Paradise Lost” where John Milton is alluding to the Latin of Virgil’s “Aeneid.” Though traditional literary scholarship has long sought to track these echoes, the work can now be done automatically, transcending any single analyst’s selective attention. The same methods can also ferret out how intertextuality can work on a more unconscious level, silently directing a writer to select particular word combinations to match the expectations of the appropriate genre.

When we see a character in contemporary fiction “bolt upright” or “draw a breath,” we join in this silent game, picking up the subtle cues that telegraph a literary style. The game works best when the writer’s idiomatic English does not scream “This is a novel!” but instead provides a kind of comfortable linguistic furniture to settle into as we read a novel or short story. While Twain, Hemingway and the rest of the vernacularizers may have introduced more “natural” or “authentic” styles of writing, literature did not suddenly become unliterary simply because the prose was no longer so high-flying. Rather, the textual hints of literariness continue to wash over us unannounced, even as a new kind of brainpower, the computational kind, can help identify exactly what those hints are and how they function.

[Ben Zimmer is the executive producer of Visual­Thesaurus.com and Vocabulary.com and the former On Language columnist for The Times Magazine.]

Thanks to POSP stringer Tim.

Deceased?--Diagramming Sentences

Remember high school and those English classes when time was spent diagramming sentences? I'm not sure if such an exercise was successful and I am not even sure such exercises are being done anymore, but they could certainly be interesting.

A sentence from Nathaniel Hawthorne's The Scarlet Letter...

"In my native town of Salem, at the head of what, half a century ago, in the days of old King Derby, was a bustling wharf--but which is now burdened with decayed wooden warehouses, and exhibits few or no symptoms of commercial life; except, perhaps, a bark or brig, half-way down its melancholy length, discharging hides; or, nearer at hand, a Nova Scotia schooner, pitching out her cargo of firewood--at the head, I say, of this dilapidated wharf, which the tide often overflows, and along which, at the base and in the rear of the row of buildings, the track of many languid years is seen in a border of unthrifty grass--here, with a view from its front windows adown this not very enlivening prospect, and thence across the harbour, stands a spacious edifice of brick."

For more information see Eugene R. Moutoux's web site.