The hungover writer – guest post by Milton Crawford

Published by SarahP on 10 Nov 2010 at 5:07 pm under BookRabbit

Milton Crawford, author of The Hungover Cookbook, discusses his love of authors who have been fond of the occasional tipple – from Tennessee Williams to Hunter S. Thompson – and that very schpecial relationship between writers and alcohol…

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Many great writers have been great drinkers too, or perhaps, as The New Yorker suggests, that should be drunks. Dylan Thomas famously said that ‘An alcoholic is someone you don’t like, who drinks as much as you do’. I suggest that the distinction between the two categories lies in a question of productivity. If you can drink a lot and produce a lot of great writing, you’re a writer that drinks a lot. If you drink a lot and fail to do much of anything (except, perhaps, fall over, sleep and walk to the off-licence the following morning), then you’re a drunk. Kingsley Amis clearly realised how delicate a balance it was between the two, saying that ‘Now and then, I become conscious of having the reputation of being one of the great drinkers, if not one of the great drunks, of our time’.

The drunks needn’t bother us, but the writers who drink a lot are considerably more interesting. Off the top of my head I can think of a fairly notorious group of ten whose work makes up an impressive body of writing. They are: Byron, Hemmingway, Tennessee Williams, F. Scott Fitzgerald, James Joyce, Kingsley Amis, Truman Capote, Hunter S. Thompson, Dylan Thomas and, the sole female representative, Dorothy Parker. But was alcohol a necessary part of their writing lives or merely a way of trying to calm their brains after epic bouts of creativity?

Alcohol is hardly the most inspiring of drugs, after all, unlike, perhaps, the laudanum that Coleridge took and which inspired the poem Kubla Khan. Instead, excessive drink tends to make people boorish, repetitive and, ultimately, depressed. Parker attempted suicide twice. Hunter S. Thompson and Hemmingway, egregious quaffers of the most masculine variety, both shot themselves.

Others on the list prematurely ruined their health from drinking: Dylan Thomas died age 39, Fitzgerald when he was 44 and Truman Capote died from liver failure, aged 59. Perhaps it is Hemmingway’s line that seems the most plausible to explain the enduring link between writing and alcohol. ‘When you work hard all day with your head,’ he wrote, ‘and know you must work again the next day what else can change your ideas and make them run on a different plane like whisky?’

This is the sentiment which inspired The Hungover Cookbook; the morning after a few drinks I find that new ideas for writing (if not always the application required to put them into motion) fill my head, because the continuity with the previous day has been interrupted by alcohol. There has been a pause. I wanted to write a book that celebrated the hangover as an opportunity for great ideas and whimsical deeds.

I use P. G. Wodehouse’s delightfully named classification of hangovers, mentioned in his Jeeves and Wooster novel The Mating Season, as the starting point for my cookbook. The categories are: the broken compass, the sewing machine, the comet, the atomic, the cement mixer and the gremlin boogie.

It is rather ironic, then, that Wodehouse was one of the most disciplined and prolific writers of the 20th century, who preferred to sit at his typewriter everyday rather than in a bar, and who died at the grand age of 93.