Drinking and writers

Book Review of Marina Efimova

Alexander Genis: A new book about the relationship of American writers with alcohol aroused great and understandable interest among American readers, about Russians - I am not talking. This book, I dare to assume, are great prospects in the domestic market. Today, the host of our book review, Marina Efimova will present this work. But first I want to supplement the book about the drunkenness of American writers, with my considerations about the drunkenness of the authors of Russians.

The most famous here, of course, Venedikt Erofeev and Sergey Dovlatov. However, vodka in their writings plays fundamentally different role.

In Dovlatov’s prose, as all his fans know, the role of drunkenness is huge, but the opposite of the one that she played in life: in his stories, vodka does not drink, but sober up the author. Therefore, in Dovlatov, vodka is strikingly different from the one that Erofeev drinks, whom Sergei appreciated more than all contemporaries.

Erofeev’s alcohol is intoxication - a way to break free, becoming - literally - not from this world. Venichkino drunkenness is an apotheosis of the austerity. Having proclaimed the rejection of the earthly sake of heaven, Erofeev compares himself with the pine: "She, like me - looks only at the sky, and what she has under her feet - does not see and does not want to see."

No matter how tragic the poem Erofeev is, it fills us with joy: we are present at the feast, and not on the triplet. Venichkino drunkenness opens the way to another world. This road, as the "ladder" of the Athos elders, leads to the liberation of the soul, a captured body. Therefore, it is so important for Erofeev to follow each step - from a morning sip to a series of railway stations, with an increase in pathos approaching the cockerels.

In short, Erofeev is drunk on the go, and in Dovlatov - sitting in place.

Speaking of vodka, Dovlatov replaces the word with virtuoso in his clarity with a gesture.

Love visibility accompanies Dovlatov each part associated with vodka. For example, a heating pad with moonshine, which, "changing outlines, fought in his hands, like a pike." Contrary to the logic of Sergei, the refined expressiveness of the gesture increases in a direct proportion with the amount of drunk. And this reveals the secret of Dovlatov’s drunkenness: vodka made his world extremely unambiguous. Freeing things from the severity of our gaze, she helps them become herself.

There is a split in the metaphysics of Russian drunkenness: Venichka seeks to get away from the world, Dovlatov - dissolve in it. It is not that world that opens the hero of vodka, but this one.

In the "reserve" Dovlatov complains that no one wrote about the benefits of alcohol. But there Sergei himself filled this gap. This is the most eloquent paragraph in the apology of drunkenness:

"The world has not changed for the better at once. At first, mosquitoes disturbed me at first. Some sticky rubbish crawled into the leg. Yes, and the grass seemed damp. Then everything changed. The forest parted, surrounded me and accepted into its stuffy bowels. I became part of the world harmony. The bitterness of the mountain ash seemed inseparable from the humid smell of the grass. The leaves above my head were slightly vibrated. The mosquito, as on the television screen, swam the clouds.

(Music)

Alexander Genis: Well, now let's get back from Russian to American drunkenness. The microphone has Marina Efimova.

Marina Efimova: The book of Olivia Lang “Traveling to Eco Spring” is an attempt to answer the question that arose, I think, before every reader and lover of literature of the 20th century. Why were there so many best writers of our century so hard? Has it helped them to create or interfered with it? The reasons for their drunkenness in the secrets of their gift, or in the circumstances of their destinies, or in the peculiarities of their time, or, perhaps, in the restrictions and prohibitions of the world in which they lived and which they loved, was cramped to suffocation? ..

The name of the book is “Journey to Eco Spring” - a quote from the play by Tennessee Williams “A cat on a hot iron roof”: a young brick to the question of the father where he goes, answers: “On a short journey to the“ echo stream ”, that is, behind a portion of whiskey with this name - Echo Spring.

The book has six heroes, all Americans: Ernest Hemingway, Scott Fitzgerald, playwright Tennessee Williams, prose writer John Chiver, poet and prose writer Raymond Carver (whose stories Robert Oltman put the famous film “Short Stories”) and poet John Berrimen, author of “dreaming songs”.

The book is built as a journey through America with stops in those places where they lived, worked, drank and died. It must be warned right away that the discoveries made by the author during her journey not only did not give an unequivocal explanation of the writer's drunkenness, but, rather, added secrets and riddles. However, Lang has achieved another important goal. Using the works, letters and diaries of writers and their friends, she (as they say now) voiced the suffering that writers treated with a drink, and those that their medicine caused them.

Announcer: “Modern life,” wrote Hemingway, “often exerts physical pressure, and alcohol is the only physical relief.” Watching the poet John Berrimen, Sol Bellow explained his alcoholism so much: “Inspiration carries the danger of death. If he wrote what he dreamed of writing, he would fall apart. The drink was a stabilizer for him. She somehow weakened this fatal intensity. ”

Marina Efimova: Once, discussing the fate of Edgar in, Baudler described alcohol as an instrument that the writer needed, "to kill something inside him-a worm that did not want to die."

During a trip from city to city and from bar to bar, other feelings that prompted her heroes to drink to the author of Olivia Lang. She begins the book with a bright episode. The case takes place in the winter of 1973 in the company of Chiver and Carver near the wine store in a cold city of Iowa-City, where both writers teach at a local university.

Announcer: “There was a few minutes left until 9 in the morning, when the store opened. Chiver, 60-year-old, stomped his leg in the moccasins and was absolutely insensitive to the cold, like a schoolboy on a picnic. ”

Marina Efimova: Trying to guess the condition of these two, trembling with impatience of the sufferers - Chiver and Carver - two authors of almost the best stories in American literature of the 20th century, Lang writes: "I begin to think that alcohol could be a way to disappear from the world for them." And she recalls the hero of the Chiver's story “Pluev”, who, crossing the country's country basins and treating them to a drink, as if crossing one life to another, from one flour to another, until it sails to madness - that is, to disappears from the world. “And time is in the story,” writes Lang, “splashes, as splashes in a glass of Jin with soda.”

Announcer: “Chiver Roman 1977“ Falconer ”was completed by a sober writer who was cured of alcoholism (but not from despair). The hero of his novel - Farrugut - miraculously fled from prison, returns to life like a biblical lasar. This liberation of the hero was for Chiver the embodiment of his own liberation. Only for him it was already an unrealistic fantasy, which he, nevertheless, was able to magically stage and even live in it. ”

Marina Efimova: Both, Chiver and Carver, died early, and both were from cancer. Carver - at 50, in the town of Angels Port, Washington. And this town was made by the final point "Traveling to Eco Spring."

Trying to understand the effectiveness and effect of alcohol, the author of the book is dug up to the first experiments of intoxication of his heroes. Carver (judging by the notes of his wife) began to drink when he fell in love with a young actress, being a married man, a burdened family. Tennessee Williams (like Chiver) for the first time began to use the liberation effect of alcohol to get rid of panic in the society of unfamiliar, outstanding and self -confident people. For Hemingway, alcohol was (and remained), figuratively speaking, an analgesic one. He wrote to a friend:

Announcer: “The trouble is this: all my life, as soon as things began to go out of hand, it was enough for me to drink so that they immediately began to look much better.”

Marina Efimova: The book “Travel to Eco Spring” is notes of the traveler, and I must say, Olivia Lang is a wonderful traveler. She sincerely shares the love of Tennessee Williams for the new Orleans and nostalgically describes his daily visits to the Victor bar, where he drank Brandi Alexander to the sounds of jazz of the small group “Ink Spot” (Ink Spot). With the same intuitive persuasiveness, she describes the famous journey of Hemingway and Fitzgerald on a car from Lyon to Paris, where both future classics got drunk until the loss of consciousness, sitting under the trees under heavy rain. She cites Hemingai's angry excuses in the book, who was accused of soldering Fitzgerald.

Announcer: “It was difficult to suspect a potential alcoholic in him, because he was drunk literally from a drop of wine. In those days in Europe, we were guilty, as something like a healthy and normal as food, plus as a source of happiness, prosperity and delight. I could not pretend to have lunch without wine or beer. And I could not imagine that half a white “Makon” can make in Scott the chemical changes that would turn it into a fool. ”

Marina Efimova: One of the advantages of the book “Journey to Eco Spring” is the lack of author’s moralizing in it. Occasionally, Lang tries to insert into the text one or two scientific-medical explanations, but quickly relates, realizing that medicine here is not an adviser. All reviewers note the author’s worthy delicacy and her sincere sympathy for their heroes, whom she is trying not to judge, but to understand.

Of course, after such a book, there is a temptation to connect the tendency to alcoholism with the talent and features of creative natures. However, if this is a curse of talent, then why didn’t Mark Twain, Thornton Wilder, Sol Bellou, John Appadike? Even Joseph Brodsky did not drink (a lot) - at a time when everyone was drinking. What mental powers did these writers possess that they were able to endure life with all its trials?

And another fact that can add something not to unravel, but, soon, to the riddle of writer's alcoholism: many (especially compassionate women) attached to Sergey Dovlatov with the question of why he drinks. Suffering? Doubts? Stress? And once Sergey said: “Well, believe my honest word - I drink because I really like it.”