Tom Shone has been studying writers who have quit drinking. He’s doing it, of course, for a novel he’s writing. How meta. Still, he gives us some interesting anecdotes.
In America William Faulkner and Scott Fitzgerald were the Paris and Britney of their day, caught in the funhouse mirror of fame, their careers a vivid tabloid mash-up of hospitalisations and electroshock therapies. “When I read Faulkner I can tell when he gets tired and does it on corn just as I used to be able to tell when Scott would hit it beginning with ‘Tender is the Night’,” said Hemingway, playing the Amy Winehouse role of denier-in-chief. He kept gloating track of his friends’ decline, all the while nervously checking out books on liver damage from the library; by the end, said George Plimpton, Hemingway’s liver protruded from his belly “like a long fat leech”.
Poets aren’t immune either–in fact, we may be even more prone to lushiness, given our generally morose natures and lack of opportunities for fame and fortune. (I’m only partly sarcastic here.) I’m doomed, according to Shone: “If you are an American poet from the South, you might as well walk into a bar right now. And don’t, whatever you do, write a novel about recovery.” No worries there. I don’t have the energy for a novel. I might tweet it though.
