The Children’s Book by AS Byatt

Not unlike a traveller wandering through a dry county looking for a pub, I frequently find myself reading a book with an eye out for references to drink in the text. The Children’s Book is exceptionally dry, and about the size of a county as well, but even this high density literary work slips in for a metaphorical quick one at least once.

One of the novel’s main characters is a young man named Phillip, discovered sketching in the nascent Victoria & Albert Museum in London. He has walked all the way there from the Midlands, determined to better himself. He gains an apprenticeship with Benedict Fludd, a genius potter who bears more than a passing resemblance to the disgusting Eric Gill.

On a visit to Paris to the Exposition Universelle in 1900, Philip and Fludd spot Rodin’s Crouching Woman amongst the works on show. This seems to stir something in Fludd’s deranged imagination and he later suggests an evening out to Philip, then promptly takes him to a brothel he knows in the French capital. That most erotic of drinks, champagne, is produced:

There was a confusion of smells – orris root, which Philip had never met and found sickly, attar of roses, wine, cigarette smoke and an undertone of human bodily odours. He made out faces through drifts of smoke, faces weary, faces laughing, faces middle-aged and faces very young. The fully and fashionably dressed lady of the house hurried forwards to welcome Benedict Fludd. Champagne was brought, and Philip, now sitting gingerly on a sofa facing a watchful row of ladies, had his first taste of it. It steadied him. He was excited and afraid. More champagne was brought. He was studied and discussed in incomprehensible French... He remembered the Crouching Woman, and primitive desire stirred in him. He drank more champagne and looked at the women.

Philip is sent off with a young lady called Rose. He hasn’t a clue what he’s supposed to be doing. Champagne to the rescue!

She began to teach him the parts of the body, in her language, pouring him more champagne, dabbing his fingers and chin and eyes with it, naming them in French and licking away the champagne.

And so on...

He Died With His Eyes Open by Derek Raymond

I found myself browsing the crime shelves again and dug out this nugget of hard boiled fiction from one of Britain’s overlooked writers, Derek Raymond. He wrote five books in the ‘Factory’ series about an unnamed detective sergeant in the ‘Department of Unexplained Deaths’.

Left with the unloved and the unmissed cases that never make the news, the detective is investigating the murder of a middle aged drunk, Charles Staniland, found brutally beaten to death in West London. There’s not much to go on at first, just a face, (what’s left of it), a few letters and a stack of audio cassettes in his squalid flat:

He was a drinker, too – you could tell that from his nose, and from his problems, as shown up in what he had recorded. Not an alcoholic, though; his handwriting was too precise, the letters as a rule well-formed for a man who had written quickly, and well-spaced between the lines, the lower loops never entangling themselves with the upper loops of the line below. It was an educated, reflective, intelligent hand that didn’t go with the cheap suit he was found in. What the hell had the man been doing?

Listening to the tapes, the DS discovers that Staniland was a regular at the Agincourt, a rough pub in Lewisham, where he drank heavily, despite the mocking and casual violence from a local criminal whom he nicknamed the Laughing Cavalier. Our man goes to investigate:

Inside, the place was built entirely of concrete, which nevertheless bore signs of attention from various demented customers. The bar was narrow, and behind it stood an unbelievably disagreeable-looking stout man, who had to be the governor. It was only a quarter past eleven in the morning; however, as I came in, he was helping himself to a triple vodka, obviously not his first in the day.

His queries paint a picture of a talented man, ruined by a marriage that didn’t work out and the subsequent flight of his wife and daughter. Staniland was even a scriptwriter at the BBC once, although the booze tempered his success:

“Well, he drank,” said Viner, “And I mean he really drank. The Beeb’s idea of drinking in the office is an occasional pale ale – Charles’s was a bottle of Scotch a day. Or two. Mind, he never passed out; his eyes just used to turn inward. I remember he was sick in his handkerchief once, but he was never incoherent, even. The bottle would be on his desk out in the open, and if a passing bigwig didn’t like it – well, Charles had rather a sharp tongue.”

The tapes refer to an antagonistic and abusive relationship with a woman called Barbara whom the DS is soon convinced holds the answer as to why Stanliland was killed. While his search for her combs the sleazy nightclubs of South London, he continues to listen to the tapes, finally discovering Staniland’s fatal raison d’être:

Most people live with their eyes shut, but I mean to die with mine open. We all instinctively try to make death less difficult for ourselves. Personally, I’ve got two ways. First, I drink. I drink for oblivion, and then a fall of some kind of blow, once I’m beyond thinking and feeling. That’s how I’d die, with my eyes shut. My other way is to rationalize my experience.

Looking into his own past, the DS is reminded of an artist whose wife has gone insane:

“She looks at naked existence all the time, you know, the way we only do with a bad hangover.”

The Detective is now far too involved; identifying with Staniland to the point that he even moves in with the woman who brought him down, an action that could cost him his own life...

Brutal and unflinching in its description of evil, He Died With His Eyes Shut is also an acutely sharp and uncomfortable insight into the human condition. With echoes of Hamilton’s Hangover Square, the Factory series are a piece of cult London fiction that I know I’ll be returning to.

Luke And Jon by Robert Williams

Winner of the National Book Tokens Not-Yet-Published prize, Luke And Jon is the engaging story of Luke Redridge and his father who have moved to a rundown Northern town in England after the sudden death of Luke’s mother. Moving into a dilapidated home on the fells outside the town, they meet Jon, a strange boy who dresses in 1950s clothes and who the local kids call ‘Slackjaw’.



It soon becomes apparent that Luke’s father is hitting the bottle as he tries to get over the death of his wife. Luke spots the evidence; a glass to hand, always; his father asleep at the kitchen table, an inch left in the bottle:

I don’t remember when I started noticing but it got to be that there was always a glass of whisky in his right hand. He held it low and to his side, almost behind his back, so that maybe I wouldn’t notice. When Mum was alive he used to buy bottles of beer, different brews with silly names, ‘Blond Witch’ or ‘Bowden’s Bathwater’, but he never came back with those now, just the whisky... He was still always up before me, no matter how bad he looked. He would be sat in his chair at the kitchen table with the morning sun streaking through the greasy windows, spotlighting his grey face and bloodshot eyes. His shaky hands were always wrapped around a cup of thick black coffee and if his hands were trembling too much he would leave the room and come back a couple of minutes later, less jumpy. I knew he went for a drink and he must have known that, but neither of us let on. He didn’t want me to see him drinking too early that was all.

Luke makes friends with Jon but the boy is cagy about where he lives and doesn’t invite him around. When Luke finally gets to visit Jon’s home he discovers that his friend is looking after his housebound grandparents, one of whom has severe senile dementia. Their house is filthy and Jon is doing his best to keep all three of them out of the clutches of social services. The council eventually catch up with him and Jon ends up in hospital, suffering from malnourishment.

Luke visits Jon with his father who has been so sozzled over the last few months that he hasn’t noticed that there’s been something wrong with his son’s pal:

And we all knew that whilst this was true it was also true that at times during the last few months a hurricane could have lifted our house up off the ground, spun it around in space and landed it in Latvia, and Dad probably wouldn’t have noticed, would have just opened another bottle and poured another glass when the dust settled and the windows stopped shaking.

Luke and his father find new focus in their lives, first by constructing a large wood sculpture of a horse which they secrete into a nearby forest, then by offering to adopt Jon. Williams ends his novel with Luke deciding I think that is enough, and although I felt that there was a lot more that he could have done with the story, it remains a moving debut novel about loss, grief and renewal.

On Writing: A Memoir of the Craft by Stephen King

I made the case a while back that I got far more from reading a good Stephen King novel than I had trudging through a particularly dreary offering by John Updike. If I required further proof that the fellow knew his stuff, then this is it.


Part personal memoir on how he got where he did, and part guide for people seriously interested in getting published, On Writing is funny, educational and a good read in itself. It also covers the period in his life when he was drinking heavily, and how his family intervened to stop him before he destroyed all he’d worked for.

King first got pissed on a school trip to Washington from his native Maine in 1966. The coach stopped in New York overnight and the boys lit out for the nearest off license:

A bunch of us more adventurous boys found a package store around the corner from the hotel. I cast an eye over the shelves, aware that my spending money was far from a fortune. There was too much – too many bottles, too many brands, too many prices over ten dollars. Finally I gave up and asked the guy behind the counter (the same bald, bored-looking, gray-coated guy who has, I’m convinced, sold alcohol virgins their first bottle since the dawn of commerce) what was cheap. Without a word, he put a pint of Old Log Cabin whiskey down on the Winston mat beside the cash register. The sticker on the label said $1.95. The price was right. I have a memory of being led onto the elevator later that night – or maybe it was early the next morning... This memory is more like a scene from a TV show than a real memory. I seem to be outside of myself, watching the whole thing. There’s just enough of me left inside to know that I am globally, perhaps even galactically, fucked up.

He spent the rest of the night violently throwing up and wakes up the next day with a demonic hangover. Only a lunatic – a masochistic lunatic, would do the same thing again... On the next day on their way through Pennsylvania, they stop in Amish country. He sidles into a store and goes straight to the top shelf:

The clerk sells me a fifth of Four Roses without asking to see any ID, and by the time we stop for the night I’m drunk again.

Stephen picks up the habit pretty quickly, and it soon develops into a raging drink problem:

Ten years or so later I’m in an Irish saloon with Bill Thompson. We have lots to celebrate, not the least of which is the completion of my third book, The Shining. That’s the one which just happens to be about an alcoholic writer and ex-schoolteacher. It’s July, the night of the All-Star baseball game. Our plan is to eat a good old-fashioned meal from the dishes set out on the steam table, then get shitfaced. We begin with a couple at the bar, and I start reading all the signs. HAVE A MANHATTAN IN MANHATTAN, says one. TUESDAYS ARE TWOFORS, says another. WORK IS THE CURSE OF THE DRINKING CLASS, says a third. And there, right in front of me, is one which reads: EARLY BIRD SPECIAL! SCREWDRIVER A BUCK MONDAY-FRIDAY 8-10 A.M. I motion to the bartender. He comes over. He’s bald, he’s wearing a gray jacket, he could be the guy who sold me my first pint back in 1966. Probably he is. I point to the sign and ask, “Who comes in at eight-fifteen in the morning and orders a screwdriver?” I’m smiling but he doesn’t smile back. “College boys,” he replies. “Just like you.”

He continues in denial, employing the world-famous Hemingway Defense:

...as a writer, I am a very sensitive fellow, but I am also a man, and real men don’t give in to their sensitivities. Only sissy-men do that. Therefore I drink. How else can I face can I face the existential horror of it all and continue to work? Besides, come on. I can handle it. A real man always can.

Eventually, with the help of family and friends, he faces down the drink (and by then the drugs too). He debunks the idea that drinking and writing have to go together:

The idea that creative endeavor and mind altering substances are entwined is one of the great pop-intellectual myths of our time. The four twentieth-century writers whose work is most responsible for it are probably Hemmingway, Fitzgerald, Sherwood Anderson, and the poet Dylan Thomas. They are the writers who largely formed our vision of an existential English-speaking wasteland where people have been cut off from one another and live in an atmosphere of emotional strangulation and despair. These concepts are very familiar to most alcoholics; the common reaction to them is amusement. Substance-abusing writers are just substance abusers – common garden-variety drunks and druggies, in other words. Any claims that the drugs and alcohol are necessary to dull a finer sensibility are just the usual self-serving bullshit. I’ve heard alcoholic snowplow drivers make the same claim, that they drink to still the demons. It doesn’t matter if you’re James Jones, John Cheever, or a stewbum snoozing in Penn Station; for an addict, the right to the drink or drug of choice must be preserved at all costs. Hemmingway and Fitzgerald didn’t drink because they were creative, alienated or morally weak. They drank because it’s what alkies are wired up to do. Creative people probably do run a greater risk of alcoholism and addiction than those in some other jobs, but so what? We all look pretty much the same when we’re puking in the gutter.

It’s not glamorous and not conducive to getting the written word on the page...