好文需酝酿，作家要微醺 (英文原文 中文导读)
【Drunk in charge of a typewrite】
中文导读：
一杯干马提尼酒下肚，就能让美国短篇小说家约翰•契弗觉得自己“才华横溢、妙语连珠而又温文尔雅”；而对于海明威而言，喝酒不仅让他红光满面，还能为他带来文学灵感——“试问还有什么可以如威士忌这般能让你换一种思维，让自己的想法活跃于一个完全不同的层面？”当然，菲茨杰拉德也不例外，对他而言，白酒或红酒都可以为创作助兴，“当我喝酒的时候，”他坦言，“我的情感得以升华，而我会把它倾注到我的故事里面。”盖茨比命运的螺旋式下降便与菲茨杰拉德自身的经历密不可分。
奥利维亚•莱恩宣称，现代文学中精妙的框架、虚幻的结局、时间的转换和闪回的镜头或许并非智慧的结晶，而是作家们在喝醉酒时从打字机上敲出来的直观感觉。（by congchao）
原文：
God knows, here is a subject I know a thing or two about. When I heard that Evelyn Waugh called himself ‘a three-hundred-and-sixty-five bottles a year man’ my first thought was: I wish I could cut down like that. I never drank while I was working, but in the evenings or on holidays I never stopped.
I wasn’t addicted - I just liked it. Correction: I loved it. Olivia Laing, in this sobering study of boozy scribblers, sees the temptations too. ‘I sensed,’ she says, ‘how pleasurable it might be to let alcohol unhinge you, to take you down into an unreachable, sunken place, where sounds are very muted ... Nice good lovely gin, the nice good lovely rum. Click in a cube of ice. Lift the glass to your mouth. Tilt your head. Swallow it.’
The American short-story writer John Cheever was similarly enchanted. A Dry Martini made him feel ‘brilliant, chatty and urbane’. Drink not only gave Ernest Hemingway a happy glow, it gave him literary inspiration: ‘What else can change your ideas and make them run on a different plane like whisky?’ (A brilliant advertising slogan to put on a poster, that.) F. Scott Fitzgerald also believed the grain and the grape aided creativity. ‘When I drink,’ he claimed, ‘it heightens my emotions and I put it in a story.’
They were all deluding themselves, needless to say. As Laing makes plain, the effects of drink are ‘so wasteful, so relentlessly destructive’. Fitzgerald, for example, got into fights, crashed cars, knocked over dinner tables and ‘struggled off to the bathroom to be sick’. He kept stripping off in public, like Oliver Reed. He didn’t count beer as alcohol, which is why he could boast, ‘I’m on the wagon. Only beer’ - 20 bottles a day.
Kingsley Amis, incidentally, in bloated old age, held the same view of white wine. ‘Nothing for me,’ I heard him say once, ‘just a large glass of that Sauvignon Blanc.’
The best thing that ever happened to me was nearly dropping dead of pancreatitis in 2011. Nobody experiencing such agony ever wishes to touch a drop again. But a by-product of my hospitalisation is that I am now puritanical and disapproving. If I can give it up, anyone can give it up - and Laing’s book reinforces my impatience.
What an idiot Hemingway was, for example, to lay down the law by saying: ‘I could not imagine whisky harming anyone who was driving in an open car in the rain’. No harm caused at all, of course, except that slurping Scotch non-stop will cause respiratory depression, blackouts, coma, damage to the nervous system and a premature and squalid death.
Booze is a great psychological eiderdown, a way of soothing oneself and moving into a world of one’s own. Boozers believe, like Tennessee Williams’s Blanche Dubois, that their habits protect them from ‘the horrors of reality, a thing they’re too delicate to stand’. The list of alcoholic authors is (literally) staggering: Jean Rhys, Patricia Highsmith, Truman Capote, Dylan Thomas (Welsh, too, poor man) ...
Of the six Americans who have won the Nobel Prize for Literature, four were in drying-out clinics. Dozens of famous authors either committed suicide or endured and died from alcohol-related diseases, such as hepatitis, cirrhosis, fatty liver, gastritis, stomach ulcers, heart disease, impotence and infertility. (I was a martyr to inflamed piles - a complaint that has quite vanished with teetotalism. Thanks for asking. I still have diabetes.)
Alcoholism is such an occupational hazard, what is the underlying root cause? The common denominator is that writers - let alone artists and actors (e.g. Richard Burton or Peter Cook) - very often don’t like themselves all that much. They have ‘zero self-esteem’, according to Laing.
John Cheever, for example, who got the shakes so bad he had to be secured with a straitjacket, never overcame ‘a painful sense of shame and self-disgust’ about his humble origins and homosexuality. As ‘a skimpy, lonely boy, a little effeminate and dismally untalented at sports’, gin gave him apparent confidence.
Hemingway was similar. Being an author wasn’t to be sufficiently macho - writers had ‘a cissyish interest in books and movies’ - so drinking everyone under the table was a competitive physical activity, like boxing, fishing, shooting or bullfighting. Tennessee Williams’s dependence on applejack brandy with beer chasers also camouflaged a guilty homosexuality and was an attempt to evade everyday life, with its relentless demands and expectations.
Though at first alcohol boosts the neurotransmitters, so that ingesting a cocktail or a glass of wine leads to pleasure, thereby reducing tension and anxiety, once it becomes ‘the preferred method of managing stress’, pretty soon your insides are wrecked.
People may think they have developed a high tolerance level, but you could well end up like Pulitzer Prize-winning poet John Berryman, who wet beds, vomited in the car, passed out in hotel lobbies ‘and slept through a party given in his honour’. Berryman went to see Dylan Thomas on his deathbed, so he knew what drinking accomplished, and in 1972 killed himself by leaping off a bridge.
Alcohol ruins lives, but what effect has this ‘stew of spirits had upon the body of literature itself?’ asks Laing. She convincingly argues that the structural ingenuity, false endings, false beginnings, chronological shifts and flashbacks found in modern books, the ‘midway swerves and points at which the thread of narrative is abruptly severed’, may be adduced not to intellectual invention but to the simple fact that the authors were sozzled when bashing the typewriter.
The great Jay Gatsby is a character whose downward spiral is related to Fitzgerald’s own collapse. The emotional and structural chaos in Tennessee Williams’s plays ‘might be due to brain damage caused by alcohol addiction’. Similarly in Hemingway, the dense and impressionistic prose style is connected to the ‘circuitous and rambling’ personality of the author, who towards the end was unable to think clearly and consecutively - so blew his brains out.
And what of Olivia Laing herself? In order for the content to reflect or evoke the form of what she’s been discussing, the book lurches, digresses, repeats itself, loops about wildly, with many an interpolated and irrelevant purple passage, where Laing is gazing out of a train window, mulling over the weather.
The Trip To Echo Spring - the obscure phrase comes from a Williams play and means a replenishing visit to the liquor cabinet - is like a night out with an academically-inclined Elizabeth Taylor or Ava Gardner. Sodden, surprising, riotous, and crazily up and down. Welsh puritan that I am, I loved it.
Not for nothing are ‘The Twelve Steps of Alcoholics Anonymous’ printed as an admonitory appendix.
原来来自：《每日电邮》http://www.dailymail.co.uk/home/books/article-2394635/Drunk-charge-typewriter-THE-TRIP-TO-ECHO-SPRING-WHY-WRITERS-DRINK-BY-OLIVIA-LAING.html
京公网安备 11010802032529号