THE JOCULAR ACADEMIC VULGATE for these
titles is "drunk studies," and as matter of fact, The Daiquiri
Girls is not one of them. But the melancholy photograph above, which
serves as cover art for a prize-winning collection of short stories due
out this fall from UMass Press, was too exquisite and evocative for us
not to reproduce in an issue on thinking about drinking.
The academic interest of "addiction studies" is represented,
rather, by three recent UMass Press titles that illuminate the darker aspects
of alcohol in the American experience: The White Logic: Alcoholism and
Gender in American Modernist Fiction; The Serpent in the Cup: Temperance
in American Literature; and Sobering Tales: Narratives of Alcoholism
and Recovery. "These three titles are a list, not a series,"
says the press's senior editor, Clark Dougan. "But it's conceivable
to me that if the field continues to grow and people continue to do interesting
work in it, a series could be warranted."
Why the academic interest in addiction now? Partly, Dougan thinks, it's
the topicality of drugs: "Whether they're drugs of healing or drugs
of addiction, they're perpetually in the forefront of the news," he
says. Perhaps even more important to young academics, drugs, particularly
alcohol, have received much less scholarly attention than their ubiquitousness
would seem to demand.
"In the long history of our republic," says Dougan, "the
temperance movement by any measure a major social and political movement
has gone almost unstudied in comparison with, say, the labor movement or
women's suffrage." Why that should be so is fodder for even further
thinking about drinking. Here, in any case, are excerpts that give some
of the flavor of these scholarly efforts.
"There are no second acts in American lives." F. Scott Fitzgerald's
grim pronouncement has often been cited by those who try to account for
the depressing frequency of attenuated careers and imaginative diminution
among the American modernists. Budd Schulberg, for instance, ponders the
all-too-representative case of Ernest Hemingway: "When a man can write
no better, think no better, know no more, after he is thirty-five than
before, especially a man with the unique artistic equipment of Hemingway,
are we not entitled, even obligated, again to ask, Why? What happened?"
For Schulberg, an erstwhile Marxist, the answer must lie in the noxious
culture of American capitalism. . . .
[This
line of analysis] overlooks another important factor one so conspicuous that
it's almost invisible. Although Schulburg notes many other things common to
"the lives of Sinclair Lewis, William Saroyan, Scott Fitzgerald, Nathanael
West, Charles Jackson, John O'Hara, Clifford Odets, Dorothy Parker, Ernest
Hemingway, Thomas Heggen, James Baldwin, Norman Mailer, James Jones, Irwin
Shaw, Tennessee Williams, John Steinbeck, William Faulkner, and others whose
paths have crossed with mine," he fails to observe that nearly all of
these writers were alcoholics and that drinking had a crucial effect on their
literary fortunes and misfortunes.
As T.S. Eliot might have said, I had not thought booze had undone so many.
It is much easier to name alcoholic American writers from the early twentieth
century than to think of sober ones.
-from The White Logic: Alcoholism and Gender in American Modernist
Fiction by John Crowley, University of Massachusetts Press,
1994.
From his own sufferance of bondage, [Frederick] Douglass felt a kinship
with those who had risen from the depths to tell their tales of alcoholic
enslavement, and he also understood how the subtle schemes of rum sellers
resembled those of the slave masters, who used intemperance as an instrument
for tightening their control.
During the holidays between Christmas and New Year's Day, Douglass reports,
slaves were induced to get drunk and stay drunk. Douglass treats the practice
as a ploy by slaveholders to suppress insurrection: "These holidays
serve as conductors, or safety valves, to carry off the rebellious spirit
of enslaved humanity." The object is to "disgust the slave with
freedom, by allowing him to see only the abuse of it.
"Thus,
when the slave asks for virtuous freedom, the cunning slaveholder, knowing
his ignorance, cheats him with a dose of vicious dissipation, artfully labelled
with the name of liberty. The most of us used to drink it down, and the result
was just what might be supposed: many of us were led to think that there was
little to choose between liberty and slavery. We felt, and very properly too,
that we had almost as well be slaves to man as to rum."
This last sentence quietly refutes in
the qualifying use of "almost" the notion that bondage to rum
is worse than bondage to man.
-from Crowley's "Slaves to the Bottle:
Gough's Autobiography and Douglass's Narrative," in
The Serpent in the Cup: Temperance in American Literature, David
S. Reynolds and Debra J. Rosenthal, eds., University of Massachusetts Press,
1997
What I try to do in working the program is put in a word for simplicity. I
once in a while, if I'm beat for something else to do, I'll hit the books.
But mainly, I come to the meetings. It took me a long time, and the erosion
of a lot of stubbornness to discover that, for me, all I have to do is come
here. Every day or almost every day, or more than once a day. And somehow
and I don't know how it works, as they say. I also try to talk to another
alcoholic every day, to remind me of who I am. And I try and make a genuine
all-out effort to help people. Because it's alien to my nature. I am not a
giver. I'm 
a
taker. Those things help me to stay sober. And things, again, things have
gotten increasingly good for me. I wouldn't go so far as to say they're beyond
my wildest dreams, because my dreams are very wild. But very, very good. I
catch glimpses of serenity what I think is serenity. I've never had serenity
adequately defined for me. I have the respect of my, uh, my family and children
and professional community. I don't owe anybody any money. I've even begun
to accumulate things, which I did not set out to do. But I've found that I
like them. And it's just made life very easy for me. If I can keep on internalizing
the fact that I don't drink for, by the way, the same reason I drank. I want
to feel good. And hopefully I will have learned the fact that drinking does
not make me feel good. It makes me feel bad, to the point of suicide, or implicit
suicide. But this makes me feel good. It's so simple it's hard to understand.
-from Appendix: Five Stories, in
Sobering Tales: Narratives of Alcoholism and Recovery by Edmund B.
Reilly,
University of Massachusetts Press, 1997
