Writing Under the Influence in the Roaring Twenties

SOME literary buffs remember the 1920s as the strange season of triumph for American literature. Ernest Hemingway. F. Scott Fitzgerald. Gertrude Stein--all American expatriates--wrote tales that captivated not only American readers, but also audiences worldwide. In that decade, William Faulkner published The Sound and the Fury, and Eugene O'Neill won the Pulitzer Prize in drama three times.

Some historians remember the 1920s as the decade of decadence, the age of Prohibition, when alcoholism became chic and terribly American. Flasks were all the rage, and organized crime controlled the liquor supply. And as Hemingway recalls, it was a time when "good writers were drinking writers."

The Thirsty Muse: Alcohol and the American Writer

By Tom Dardis

New York: Ticknor & Fields, 1989

$18.95

Many of the great authors drank--were alcoholics in fact--but drinking did not make them great. Or so Tom Dardis argues in The Thirsty Muse, a fairly engrossing study of alcohol and authorship. He maintains that drink made them shooting stars, living fast and peaking young. Alcohol inhibited their performance and dulled their perceptions.

Dardis' thesis is a fascinating one, but it is also one that he does not adequately support. The book convincingly details the drinking of Hemingway, Fitzgerald, Faulkner and O'Neill--there is little doubt in the readers' minds that all the authors are alcoholics.

But he fails to draw the connection between alcoholism and the authors' work, beyond pointing to the eventual decline of their writing. Most of the connections he does make are tenuous, and much of the book seems contrived.

When Dardis recounts Fitzgerald's early history, he alleges that his father Edward Fitzgerald was also an alcoholic. He never supports this allegation, but that does not seem to matter to him. In reference to an event in 1908, he glibly writes:

Edward was suddenly dismissed from his job after ten years of service with the company. We have no idea what he did or didn't do, but is quite possible that his drinking had something, if not everything, to do with his being fired at the age of fifty-five..But the dire implications of the firing produced in Scott an enduring conflict of feeling about his father.

This kind of writing is sensationalist, and it proves little. If readers do not know how or why Edward was fired, how can they ascribe to its implications?

Dardis' facts are usually more complete, but the conclusions he draws from them are often just as forced. His arguments for the artistic merits of O'Neill's sobriety rely on circular logic. If O'Neill wrote badly sober, Dardis would maintain that alcohol was still in his system and clouded his thinking. If he wrote well drunk, it was a fluke.

In the end, Dardis cannot say what keeps people from writing well because he cannot say what makes them write well in the first place. Sobriety has never guaranteed great art. Dardis oversimplifies the writing process by implying that clear thinking and dedication alone produce great books, and he deals with the writers' "talent" as though it were a discreet quality that could conserved or expended.

Dardis never satisfactorily explains how the authors wrote so well during their drinking phases, never addresses the fact that nearly all their great works had alcohol as a theme--such as O'Neill's Long Day's Journey Into Night, Fitzgerald's The Great Gatsby or Hemingway's The Sun Also Rises.

He also never explores what makes his subjects write. He asserts that they drink because they are slaves to their genes, but he never really explains what inclines them to enter into a alcoholic cycle which they cannot escape.

There are other possibilities for the writers' decline, but he never mentions them--never mentions that like other writers, they might have grown tired or lost their passion for writing, that they might have lost the vitality of youth or that their material had grown stale. So Dardis never really convinces that the authors were victims of alcohol alone.

In reading The Thirsty Muse, the reader never doubts that the writers became powerless in the face of alcohol. Dardis writes that only O'Neill escaped its trap. But O'Neill merely traded addictions--he died a drug addict. Dardis does not even begin to explain what caused the author to fall prey to another addiction.

The structure of the book, though, is more conducive to biography than to analysis. It is surprisingly lively reading for nonfiction, and Dardis uses primary sources well.

BUT The Thirsty Muse is primarily a compilation of biographies--only 19 pages are dedicated to outlining the thesis, and those 19 pages comprise the introduction. In the body of the work, Dardis dedicates a portion to each author. Conspicuous in its absence is a conclusion or summary.

The individual biographies are well drawn depictions of these talented writers' descent into an ethyl hell, but they are not convincing pieces on the artistic merits of sobriety. Perhaps the world is still ignorant enough about the processes of art and addiction that a fair treatment of either--let alone the blending of the two--is impossible.