Vice: I Drink, Therefore - memoirs on drinking - Brief Article

National Review, Feb 22, 1999 by Mark Cunningham

I like to drink-enough to unwind after the daily crisis of newspaper deadlines; enough to forget the day's cares, and the morrow's; enough to warm in the presence of strangers; enough to loosen the tongue and open the ear and really talk with a friend; enough, sometimes, to cut loose and get a bit foolish.

Okay, okay: I like to get drunk. You got a problem with that?

Every once in a while, someone who happens to be in AA will suggest to me that I do indeed have "a problem." Allow for the fervor of the convert, and the thought is still worth considering. Alcohol, after all, can chew up lives. It's done so in my family, and is famous for doing so in my line of work, the news biz.

And so I opened Susan Cheever's recently published Note Found in a Bottle with interest. The book is the memoir of one literary alcoholic whose father was another literary alcoholic, the noted WASP author John Cheever. In fact, it's her third memoir. After five indifferently received novels, and her father's death, she wrote Home Before Dark, a bestselling "biographical memoir" of him. She followed up with Treetops,narrating the history of her mother's family back several generations, continuing to explore WASP restraint, resentment, repression, anger, identity, and love.

Then she quit drinking. What she learned in carrying out that decision offers the presumed rationale for Note, whose subtitle is My Life as a Drinker. But on the evidence of the book itself, Miss Cheever knows now little more than that alcoholism was at the heart of what she hated most about her old life.

Indeed, though jacket blurbs and jacket copy long ago crossed the line from advertising to fantasy, this book's promise just what it most conspicuously lacks: e.g., from Erica Jong, "a stunning story of spiritual rebirth"; from the publisher, "clear-eyed candor, in a book about recovery that is both wrenching and ultimately inspiring." Note never pinpoints when the author quit or what the trigger was, and has just a few scattered glosses on how she overcame the difficulties. (There isn't even much about her famous father.)

The bulk of this book is recollections of a series of dreary, dishonest affairs (including three marriages) with men whose charm, if any, she fails to convey; frequent dropping of names, with rarely a sense of real human connection; a certain growing awareness of her need to quit boozing, with more frequent flash-forwards to her sober years. Then she abruptly stops, pats herself on the back, and the book is over.

Even the pain she surely felt can't stir the reader, because she doesn't describe it, but merely asserts it. Miss Cheever surely is "in recovery" now, but that doesn't seem to be thanks to any true self-examination; she just finally grew up enough to stop being beastly to herself, her children, and anyone else who walked in the door.

Note made me wonder if self-ignorance was intrinsic to the alcoholic memoir. When I reviewed Pete Hamill's A Drinking Life (1994) for nr, I found much more meat in the author's life apart from alcohol than insight into drinking. Perhaps I was unfair: Hamill's book provided a vital insight for Caroline Knapp-whose memoir Drinking: A Love Story (1996) comes closer to delivering on the promise of Cheever's jacket copy: If not quite "inspiring," then at least "clear-eyed."

Miss Knapp, a quasi-journalist like the other two, fully describes both the pit and her escape from it. Her recovery she treats with proper caution, noting the ongoing agonies (Why can't I have just one damn beer?) and the poor odds of success-almost everyone else in her rehab class relapsed.

Most important, she captures what may be the essence of alcoholism- quoting Hamill quoting his inamorata, Shirley MacLaine, complaining of movie scripts that use booze to get two characters into bed: "'It's a cheat,' she'd say. 'It's using the drink instead of forcing the painful choice.'" That's what Caroline Knapp did, what all the alcoholics I've known do: use the drug to dodge life's necessary pains, and so bring more pain in the end.

Booze is hardly the only thing we use to avoid those choices, of course. People do it with dope and coke and food and sex and work and, hell, even video games. Politics and religion, analysis and AA, as well: What man can use, man can abuse. And the habit of abuse can reach a point, psychological or physiological, where quitting is the only answer. But that is amputation-a sometimes-necessary crippling.

After all, the good life demands the occasional excess. A full-blown drunken evening now and then is not just an easing of one's burdens, but a celebration of the outrageously fine fortune that is life-a good beyond duty, discipline, and all the other mere stoic virtues.

Even using alcohol as an anesthetic does not lead invariably to alcoholism. After all, most of us learn to limit our drinking by our early 20s-in other words, after a certain amount of first-hand experience with drink and its consequences. It's a part of growing up - learning not always to take the easy out.