BOOZE AND THE MUSE

CHICAGO TRIBUNE

During these fits . . . I drank-God only knows how often or how much.

- Edgar Allan Poe

Then I was drunk for many years, and then I died.

- F. Scott Fitzgerald

Writers and alcohol. Everyone`s heard the stories: from F. Scott Fitzgerald rolling champagne bottles down 5th Avenue in New York to Ernest Hemingway busting up bars and people on Key West. But few have looked past the anecdotal evidence for the underlying truth.

Certainly that`s not for lack of material. Just listing the writers who drank a lot would take one through the reading list for an undergraduate degree in 20th Century American literature: Dashiell Hammett, Thomas Wolfe, James Thurber, Jack London, Tennessee Williams, Raymond Chandler and kegs-full of others.

In fact, the list is so long that it would be easier to list the writers who didn`t drink. As Sinclair Lewis, a nonteetotaler, once asked, ''Can you name me five American writers since Poe who did not die of alcoholism?''

Why have so many writers drunk? Is it the hours? The need to find a creative outlet? An ingrained tradition few cared to break with? Something in their genes? A natural outgrowth of dealing with editors?

One who has pondered these questions is Dr. Donald W. Goodwin, a psychiatrist who has spent 20 years studying alcoholism. Goodwin`s own aspirations to be a writer once took him from Kansas to New York City, where he hoped to drink with famous writers (he didn`t). Now he has written a book about the phenomenon.

In ''Alcohol and the Writer'' (Andrews and McMeel) Goodwin tries to explain the high rate of alcoholism among authors. To this end, he

concentrated on eight heavy-drinking writers: four American Nobel Laureates

(Ernest Hemingway, John Steinbeck, William Faulkner and Eugene O`Neill), two other American writers (Edgar Allan Poe and F. Scott Fitzgerald), a Belgian (Georges Simenon) who moved to America and then drank like an American (which means to obsessive excess), and an Englishman (Malcolm Lowry) whose not entirely successful cure for alcoholism was to move to the Canadian wilderness (interestingly, Lowry`s best-known work, ''Under the Volcano,'' is about an alcoholic British diplomat living in Mexico).

Sitting in a bar near the University of Kansas Medical Center in Kansas City, where he is chairman of the school`s psychiatry department, Goodwin explains his motivations for writing the book.

''Of the seven American Nobel Laureates in literature, four of them-Sinclair Lewis, Ernest Hemingway, Eugene O`Neill and William Faulkner-were clearly alcoholic, and a fifth, John Steinbeck, was probably alcoholic,'' said Goodwin, holding a happy-hour meatball in one hand and a gin and tonic in the other. ''Five of seven, 71 percent, is a pretty high rate of alcoholism, surely the highest rate in any precisely defined group known to exist.''

A prolific author, Goodwin published two other books in 1988:

''Psychiatric Diagnosis'' and ''Is Alcoholism Hereditary?'' He says that it was purely by chance that ''Alcohol and the Writer'' joined the other two.

''I had written a couple of essays on the subject, which came to the attention of a Canadian publisher, who called and asked me to write a book on the subject. I had a lot of other things going on, so I jokingly said, `I don`t know, but maybe I could be bought with a check.` He took it seriously and sent me a check, so I wrote the book.''

Besides his psychiatry background, Goodwin drew on his own experiences with alcohol and writing. They began when he was 7 and starting to read, when his boyhood hero-Uncle Ralph, a football star-brought his beautiful fiancee, Alice, to Goodwin`s home to be married.

''That was the first time my newspaper-publishing Methodist father let alcohol into our home. Sports, girls and six-packs all became identified in my mind. They still are.

''Later in high school, everything revolved around beer. Even though my town was Methodist, there was a tacit approval, even an expectation, that you drank.

''I remember for my high school prom my friend borrowed his father`s new car. After he came home with the insides of the car covered with the puke of his friends who had drunk too much, he didn`t get in trouble because his parents thought it was funny.

''In college, which was also Methodist and supposedly dry, alcohol was identified with practically everything fun.

''You believed that the girls did more when they drank,'' said Goodwin, sipping his drink and sinking into the deep leather couch. ''Besides, we were young and healthy, so hangovers weren`t a problem.

''I went to New York and took graduate courses in literature at Columbia University. This was the late `50s, and writers were still lionized in a way they no longer are. My friends and I would go to bars hoping to drink with the famous writers.

''It took us a while to realize that all we ended up doing was sitting around drinking with other people who idolized the same people we did and that had we seen a famous writer, he wouldn`t have wanted to drink with us anyway.''

During this time, Goodwin was working as a writer for a newspaper features syndicate, but his writing ambitions were fading.

''I saw that New York was full of talented writers, many of whom were barely getting by, so I enrolled in medical school,'' Goodwin said.

His interest in alcoholism began in the late `60s. ''There was a lot of research money available to study alcoholism and not a lot of competition for it. Combining my professional interest in alcoholism with my personal interest in writing was a logical result.''

Goodwin said that he chose the eight writers in his book deliberately.

''I wanted to look at a complex problem from many angles.'' And that he does, with rich portraits that make it easy for the reader to forget that the subject of the book is alcoholism. Some of the revelations in Goodwin`s character portraits:

- Edgar Allan Poe was one more alcoholic in a family of alcoholics, including his stepfather, who from his deathbed proclaimed his hatred for Poe. It`s no wonder that, having come from such an unhappy background, Poe would have a chaotic adult life. Even as he was turning out works like ''The Raven,'' he was going on alcoholic binges that left him short on friends, cash and health.

Goodwin downplays the reports, most unsubstantiated, of Poe`s morphine addiction and instead hypothesizes that a drink called absinthe could have contributed to his peculiar intoxicated states. Absinthe was an addictive distilled spirit derived from wormwood that tended to turn the brain into a similar substance. It was banned by most governments earlier this century.

Freudian interpretations of Poe`s life also reveal, Goodwin writes, that he had deep sexual fears involving visions of his mother that may well have contributed to his celibate lifestyle and probably to his desire to escape reality through drink.

Given his family background and his many psychiatric problems, Goodwin concludes, it`s no wonder that ''Poe was the first of the great alcoholic American writers. Just as he invented the detective story and science fiction, he founded the tradition-or at least was a charter member-of the `bright but blasted brotherhood` of lost, dissipated artists.''

- Although the tumultuous results of F. Scott Fitzgerald`s drinking are widely known, little has been determined of its causes.

Unlike Poe, Fitzgerald had a comparatively happy childhood in a normal family. Still, he drank, to great excess. Such was his dissipation after success with ''The Great Gatsby'' and other novels during the 1920s that when he died in 1940 it came as a surprise to many. They thought he had died years before.

In an attempt to explain Fitzgerald`s drinking, Goodwin looks at some of the reasons writers drink in general. He says that writing and alcohol may interact and serve common ends.

''Writing is a form of exhibitionism; alcohol lowers inhibitions and prompts exhibitionism in many people. Writing requires an interest in people; alcohol increases sociability and makes people more interesting. Writing involves fantasy; alcohol promotes fantasy. Writing requires self-confidence; alcohol bolsters confidence. Writing is lonely work; alcohol assuages loneliness. Writing demands intense concentration; alcohol relaxes.''

These traits may explain why Fitzgerald, who had a tortured sensitivity and who wanted only to be loved by others, drank, but it doesn`t explain his alcoholism. Why he drank to such excess, Goodwin concludes, ''is as inscrutable as the mystery of his writing talent.''

- ''I`ve been drunk 1,547 times in my life but never in the morning,''

said Ernest Hemingway, who considered drinking a part of his manhood. Unfortunately, his boast was false, since there are numerous reports that

''Papa,'' in his later years, quaffed vodka and tequila to start the day and spent the rest of his waking hours chasing those elixirs down with oceans of wine, whiskey, gin and just about any other fluid containing alcohol.

Why the not-just-heavy-but-ruinous drinking and the suicide at age 61?

Goodwin links Hemingway`s demise to the Czech word litost, which describes a feeling of grief, remorse and indefinable longing brought on ''by a sudden insight into one`s own miserable self.''

Goodwin puts forth the theory that an alcoholic like Hemingway, who succumbs to litost, will admit defeat and take to destructive drinking. ''At 61, Hemingway had forsworn ruinous drinking. He had only one other option and took it.''

Did drinking help or hinder the careers of the writers Goodwin profiled?

The answers are mixed. Before becoming a teetotaler in the mid-1920s, Eugene O`Neill was a highly productive playwright. Afterward he went 12 years without a play on Broadway.

Conversely, Malcolm Lowry produced his one great work, ''Under the Volcano,'' while staying sober, living in a hut in Canada. His writing output before and after this period was frequently incoherent.

Then there`s William Faulkner, who spent most of his adult life in varying stages of drunkenness and whose love of whiskey led him to say,

''There`s a lot of nourishment in an acre of corn.''

Critics cannot agree on whether alcohol helped or hindered his writing, although many blame his murkier efforts on the effects of his beloved corn whiskey. Still, during his 50 years of writing he produced 19 novels, scores of poems and short stories, and dozens of screenplays.

In the end, Goodwin postulates, it is the perception most writers have of themselves as loners that opens the door to their drinking.

''Writing and alcohol both produce trancelike states,'' Goodwin writes. A gift for creative writing may involve an innate ability to enter such states. Being a loner-shy, isolated, without strong personal ties-may facilitate these states when it is time to write and may encourage drinking to overcome the shyness and isolation when it is time to relax.

''Creative writing requires a rich fantasy life; loners have rich fantasy lives: The ultimate loner is the schizophrenic, who lives in a prison of fantasy. Alcohol promotes fantasy.''

All the writers in Goodwin`s book can be considered schizophrenic, he says. Most had radical mood shifts when drinking, such as Fitzgerald, who would check his breath after one drink to make certain it wasn`t offensive. But give him a few more, and he went out of his way to offend.

Hemingway`s mood shifts were frequent, and his fantasy life was so rich that during one well-documented visit to New York, he often addressed imaginary audiences, to the befuddlement of his companions.

Thus, says Goodwin, writing and drinking may not have a cause-and-effect relationship. Rather, they are activities with common goals. Each complements the other.

''This country finally seems to be getting a mature attitude about alcohol. The fascination of it as the forbidden fruit is fading. The popular media used to be filled with jokes about drunks. In just the past few years, those jokes have been replaced by messages about responsibility.

''I think that with this change will go the romantic image of the heavy-drinking author.''

This prediction notwithstanding, however, Goodwin takes a few minutes to relate his favorite drinking-writer story before leaving for home:

''Dorothy Parker and a friend went to a funeral home in New York to pay their last respects to a famous writer who had just died an untimely death.

''The friend sighed as they gazed down into the coffin, `Doesn`t he look just wonderful?`

'' `And why shouldn`t he?` replied Parker, who drank quite a lot herself. `He hasn`t had a drink in three days.` ''

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