Sunday roundup: Globalism and alcoholism

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Good morning, and welcome to all the new subscribers.

This week I wrote about Vladimir Putin’s unintentionally revealing army recruitment campaign. Speaking of Russian imperialists, I also covered the British government’s decision to appoint an oxymoronic “free-speech tsar”. Do they know what the tsars did to free speech in Russia? Apparently, they do not.)

Elsewhere, I have been working on a long read on alcoholism for Perspective magazine, and will post a link when it’s out. The most difficult question to answer is why some, perhaps most, people can handle hard drugs, without becoming addicts, while others succumb. It leads to the follow-up: why can some alcoholics give up, while others drink themselves to death?

Writers have always hit the booze. I don’t want to glamorise alcoholism by saying it is a disease of literary genius. Alcohol addicts are no different from illegal drug addicts or junk food addicts. The majority turn to drugs to escape from poverty or their own mental health problems. (The one leads to the other, of course.)

Nevertheless, alcohol and writing go together like gin and tonic. In 2021 William Palmer published In Love with Hell, a wonderfully humane account of 11 writers and their alcohol obsessions.  In an attempt to persuade you to read the book , here is what I wrote about it at the time.

                            Alcohol’s feverish magic

Alcohol has many side effects: euphoria, conviviality, mindless violence, cancer, and mental breakdown. But from the point of view of the alcoholic, its most seductive property is its ability to justify itself.

“You find the best stories in the pub,” my colleagues and I on the old Fleet Street would hear alcohol tell us as we knocked off for a long lunch, which could last into a long evening. And indeed, as the drink flowed, glistening and glorious ideas for stories appeared that had us falling off our bar stools in helpless laughter. As it flowed some more, they were forgotten and replaced by new ideas - more glistening and more glorious. Cut off the flow, the alcohol whispers, and you will become a deadbeat bore, churning out pap and living the unremarked life. 

Christopher Hitchens, who contrary to the portrayals of his enemies was the most generous of intellectuals, once gave me an uncharacteristically schoolmasterish lecture on how I must never, never think of stopping boozing. If I did, my creativity would vanish. He had literary authority behind him. “Smoke like a fish and drink like a chimney,” cried V.S. Pritchett. Don’t worry about becoming an alcoholic, said Dylan Thomas: an alcoholic is just “someone you dislike who drinks as much as you do”.

Stay with it and alcohol takes you to a new normal. A bottle of wine at lunchtime? Pah! A mere aperitif. “A few pints” after work — a pleasingly vague definition that could be stretched to four or five — and then more at home. This is your right, and alcohol says that you have every reason to feel outraged if you cannot exercise it.

Doubting journalists could look to the example of proper writers, great writers, who were heroic drinkers — “heroic” because alcohol also tells you that the more of its company you can take, the tougher you are.

The novelist and poet William Palmer has turned himself into a modern Vasari in their honour and produced a Lives of the Drunk Artists. His In Love with Hell (Robinson, £20) offers sympathetic and wonderfully perceptive biographies of 11 novelists and poets from Patrick Hamilton to Richard Yates via Jean Rhys and Dylan Thomas, alongside an overarching explanation of why they risked allowing drink to destroy them.