A Trip To Echo Spring - Olivia Laing

A Trip To Echo Spring begins with an anecdote about two bedraggled drunks driving their Ford Falcon to the store to top up on booze. They arrive as the clerk is opening up – the passenger leaps from the car, and is at the counter, litre of whisky in hand, before the till has even been switched on. The passenger is John Cheever, creative writing tutor and author of some of the finest American short stories of the twentieth century; his driver is one of his students, by the name of Raymond Carver. It had been a rollercoaster couple of years for Cheever; before his appointment as a tutor at the University of Iowa’s prestigious Writer’s Workshop course, he had been straight-jacketed in an intensive care unit, suffering from delirium tremens. This sense of being propelled from place to place by drink is reflected in his magnificent short story The Swimmer, in which the protagonist attempts to swim home from a party. As his journey progresses, he experiences unexplained timeslips, encountering neighbours who make veiled references to shameful escapades which he can’t remember, before arriving home to find the building deserted.

Olivia Laing’s book is part travelogue, part memoir, and part exploration of the link between authorship and alcoholism. Travelling from New York via New Orleans and Key West to Port Angeles, Washington, she uses the cities she visits as jumping off points to discuss the lives of Cheever, Carver, Ernest Hemingway, F Scott Fitzgerald, Tennessee Williams and the poet John Berryman. These six authors could form the backbone of an American Literature syllabus, and the link between American fiction and alcoholism appears to be entrenched; Laing quotes Lewis Hyde’s essay Alcohol and Poetry, in which Hyde notes that ‘four of the six Americans who have won the Nobel Prize for literature were alcoholic, and about half of our alcoholic writers eventually killed themselves’.

In Laing’s analysis, the impulse to drink and to write are linked. Both activities are means by which an individual can mediate reality, reshape and redefine their experiences. Tennessee Williams, for example, came to depend on alcohol as a means of overcoming the anxieties which had formed in his childhood, just as his fiction obsessively returned to the experiences of his youth, seeking to understand, or distance himself from, his past. Cheever repeatedly retold a story of his father drunkenly standing on top of a rollercoaster, swigging from a bottle and threatening to jump, each time adding layers of irony to disassociate himself from the experience – the memory-obliterating effect of alcohol was another means of achieving the same end.

For some authors, booze could at first have a positive effect on their prose – Scott Fitzgerald, for example, said ‘my stories written when sober are stupid – like the fortune-telling one. It’s all reasoned out, not felt’. In her book Careless People, also released this year, Sarah Churchwell highlights the overwhelmingly vivid imagery of The Great Gatsby, the way colours are attributed to sounds, suggestive of the way that alcohol sharpens the senses, before giving way to the wooziness of intoxication. This imagery gives Gatsby much of its power; however, the drinking which fuelled this prose also led to some of the most disrupted years of Fitzgerald’s life, and diminished his capacity to write. Likewise, if Williams’s early plays could not have been written without the liberating effect of drink, the broken sentences and incomplete dialogue of his later work reflect the detrimental impact of alcohol on the brain, reminiscent of the effect of aphasia.

Laing argues that the process of writing requires the experiences of life to be subjected to 'the usual shaping, the usual scissoring and moulding by which real life is moulded into art'. For authors who are also alcoholics, the process is complicated by the process of denial, the desire to rationalise or project problems onto others. According to this thesis, the alcoholic suppresses the emotional repurcussions of their condition, while the job of the author is to identify and highlight hidden desires and meanings. There is, then, a need for authors to analyse and scrutinise themselves and their social peers within their work. At first, alcohol can be a tonic, helping to subsume the aspects which they identify and abhor, but later the process of denial can blunt the insights on which they rely. By the end of this complex process, experience can be twisted far beyond recognition.

In a letter, Williams asks ‘'why does a man drink? There's two reasons, seperate or together. 1) He's scared shitless of something. 2) He can't face the truth about something.' Alcohol certainly helped Williams to hide the truth. Reviewing his Memoirs, his friend David Windham said 'there is probably not an episode that did not happen at some time, to some one, in some way, but more likely than not to a different person, at a different time, with different details’. The events of his life have been blurred by drink, until they cannot hurt him. The inability of an alcoholic to confront the truth about themselves can also be seen in the writings of Ernest Hemingway, a perceptive man except when it comes to the discussion of drinking. In A Moveable Feast, for example, he describes going on a drive with Scott Fitzgerald: ‘'I could not imagine whisky harming anyone who was driving in an open car in the rain. The alcohol should have been oxidised in a very short time'.  

While some of the authors, including Cheever, were able to get help and live out their lives sober, some ended tragically. Berryman charted his attempts to follow the 12 step program in his novel Recovery. Laing recalls being shocked by the book’s abrupt ending. Later, she discovers that he committed suicide two weeks after abandoning the text. ‘Hardly any wonder Recovery was unfinished,’ she notes, ‘What a title. What an insane risk’.

Laing quotes a study by Dr Vincent Felitti on The Origins of Addiction, which links alcoholism to childhood traumas such as parental addiction, loss and sexual abuse. The report graded participants by level of trauma suffered, and individuals in the higher bands were proportionally more likely to experience addiction themselves. This doesn’t establish any causal link, of course, but Laing’s studies suggest a similar conclusion. Hemingway’s father committed suicide, as did Berryman's. Cheever’s threatened to. Williams and Fitzgerald felt unwanted by their fathers. Berryman and Cheever also felt acute social anxiety, a desire to belong to the bourgeoisie coupled with a fear of being found out.

As the text progresses, Laing discusses the effects of alcohol on her own life. Her mother’s lover was an alcoholic, and her violent outbursts were a feature of family life until she sought treatment. Laing confronts her mother for the full details of what went on, and is shocked to find she has her own memory-gaps, caused not by her drinking but by the need to blot out the effect of another’s. She writes evocatively, charting the changing landscape of her road trip, and providing insightful analysis of her subjects’ writing.

There are problems with the book; ultimately, the reasons people drink are many and varied, and it is impossible to provide a hard and fast answer to the question ‘why do writers drink?’, or even why some authors do while others don't. Echo Spring largely ignores the experience of female authors, as Laing acknowledges, and also black writers. Mainly, the book flows excellently – the stories of Williams, Hemingway and Fitzgerald intersect repeatedly, as do those of Cheever and Carver, but Berryman is rather disconnected from the rest, largely confined to a chapter at the end. As an idiosyncratic form of biography though, Echo Spring is excellent; the concept of drinking and writing as twin methods of manipulating reality is provocative and stimulating, whilst the textual analysis contained within inspires the reader to revisit the originals, praise for any critic.