In Love with Hell

Why do some writers destroy themselves by drinking alcohol? Before our health-conscious age it would be true to say that many writers drank what we now regard as excessive amounts. Graham Greene, for instance, drank on a daily basis quantities of spirits and wine and beer most doctors would consider as being dangerous to his health. But he was rarely out of control and lived with his considerable wits intact to the age of eighty-six. W. H. Auden drank the most of a bottle of spirits a day, but also worked hard and steadily every day until his death. Even T. S. Eliot, for all his pontifical demeanour, was extremely fond of gin and was once observed completely drunk on a London Tube station by a startled friend.

These were not writers who are generally regarded as alcoholics. 'Alcoholic' is, in any case, a slippery word, as exemplified by Dylan Thomas's definition of an alcoholic as 'someone you dislike who drinks as much as you.' The word is still controversial and often misunderstood and misapplied. What acclaimed novelist and poet William Palmer's book is interested in is the effect that heavy drinking had on writers, how they lived with it and were sometimes destroyed by it, and how they described the whole private and social world of the drinker in their work.

He looks at Patrick Hamilton ('the feverish magic that alcohol can work'); Jean Rhys ('As soon as I sober up I start again'); Charles Jackson ('Delirium is a disease of the night'); Malcolm Lowry ('I love hell. I can't wait to go back there'); Dylan Thomas ('A womb with a view'); John Cheever ('The singing of the bottles in the pantry'); Flann O'Brien ('A pint of plain is your only man'); Anthony Burgess ('Writing is an agony mitigated by drink'); Kingsley Amis ('Beer makes you drunk'); Richard Yates ('The road to Revolutionary Road'); and Elizabeth Bishop ('The writer's writer's writer').

About the Author

William Palmer was born in 1945 and educated at schools in England and Wales. During the 1960s and 70s he lived in London and the Midlands and worked at a bewildering variety of jobs. He began writing at the age of fifteen but only became a full-time writer in the mid-80s: his first novel, The Good Republic, was published by Secker & Warburg in 1990 and since then he has had eight books published. His latest novel, The Devil is White, was published by Jonathan Cape in early 2013. His latest full-length collection of poems, The Water Steps, came out from Rack Press in 2017.

Stories and poems have appeared in many journals, including London Magazine, Poetry Review, Rialto, the Spectator, the Times Literary Supplement, and have been broadcast on BBC Radio 3 and 4. He has reviewed regularly for the Independent and Literary Review.

In 1997 he was awarded the Travelling Scholarship of the Society of Authors, an Arts Council Bursary followed in 2002, and the First Collection Prize for his book of poems, The Island Rescue, at the Listowel Writers' Week literary festival in 2006. He was a Writing Fellow at the University of Birmingham, 2000-3, at the University of Warwick, 2005-7, and at King's College, London, 2011-12.