May 1963

I shall take my drink on occasion. as one who was early warned away With all the books on my shelves, from alcohol. It was my fate to be with all the thoughts of the thinkers raised in a virtual sea of liquor. First shaded by my particular tempera- it was my father. Then no fewer than ment, I have decided coolly and de- three of my.uncles-proud Southern liberately that I should continue to gentlemen, one of them a naval hero. do what I have been trained to want Then one friend after another, colto do. I will drink-but oh, more leagues and writers, many of them skillfully, more discreetly than ever famous and all of them destroying Some Writers I Have Known before. Never again will I be a peripatetic conflagration.” themselves. I compiled a list of the victims I by Upton Sinclair* Thus, proudly, Jack London con- have known. Thirty of them are cluded his story. He went on with his known to most literate Americans; a drinking, “more skillfully, more dis- dozen are known throughout the How a t o p writer of his day views John Barleycorn’s creetly,” for two or three years. And literate world. then at the age of forty he gave his I say it is a frightful thing that so merciless p l u n d e r of literary talent last word on the subject of liquor by much of the talent and genius of taking his own life. America should have been distorted H e was one of my cherished by alcoholic poisoning, These are infriends, a fellow worker in the cause deed men and women who have to a o writer in our century has of social justice; and, although only great extent set the intellectual and N known greater acclaim than an idolizing public accorded Jack Loncentury have become the law of our land. In 1913, the year before World a year and a half older than myself, a hero to me personally. I have never moral tone of our time. They are among the few who have achieved don at the peak of his popularity. War I, Jack London published a little ceased thinking about him; I have fame and fortune; they have won Whenever he made a public appear- book entitled John Barleycorn. It never ceased to regret that I did not both the critics and the readers. Most ance, vast crowds swarmed to hear was a gallant work in which he told know how to help him. And recently of them started with vision and courhim speak. He was one of a very few the story of a life of wild drinking, I have come to believe that perhaps age, but in the end the example they whose work drew an enormous fol- beginning incredibly enough at the I can at least assist others by writing give us is of sickness of mind and lowing in the popular magazines, and age of five, and continuing more than a parallel study of the effects of alco- soul. was equally admired by serious liter- thirty years. In this slim volume he hol on the many drinking writers I They have helped bring about an .ary critics, sociologists, and philoso- described what he called “the Long have known. America in which people feel they phers. H e had legions of friends in Sickness” and “the White Logic’- As London did, I talk in terms of “must” drink. And America is drinkevery country, and an unmatched respectively, the pessimism and the “John Barleycorn” instead of em- ing, more than ever before in our rezest for living. An unparalleled story- skepticism produced by alcoholism ploying the technical phraseology of cent history. In the old days we teller, London was also a social -and when he came to the end, he current discussion of alcoholism. I do bought it in saloons; now we buy it philosopher of the first rank, spear- summed up his conclusions with this because I believe it is sometimes in groceries, drugstores, package heading many of the great social and these words: easier to fix one’s focus on a symbol stores, drive-ins and state-operated industrial reforms which by mid- “Mine is no tale of a reformed . or on a personification rather than establishments. A huge advertising drunkard. I was never a drunkard, on impersonal statistics and phrases. subsidy brings the allurements of rye * From The Cup of Fury b Upton Sinclair. Permission of The Channel Jress, Inc. and I have not reformed. . . . No . . . I write as one who has had but and bourbon before everybody in three or four sips of liquor in his life; the land. At the same time we have a

crime wave forever rising. Many of the criminal acts are associated with drinking. Someone has to speak out on this subject. I cannot help the old, I know. … 66 murdered.. . in a dingy fifth-floor room … 99

Now it is a question of giving information to the young. I tell myself man; at other times, he slumped over the editor would save the space for tion with a short novel titled The Red that among the seventy-four percent tables in Village bars, offering to him; but the story did not come, and Badge of Courage. He followed it of college students who drink today write “poetry” for tourists who would the editor would then be forced to up with a novel about a girl of the there may be a future Jack London buy him a drink. send an assistant to watch over the streets, and he wrote eccentric or 0. Henry, a future Sinclair Lewis Here is the rest of the story, as writer, help him sober up, and make poetry. And he too was a “drinking or Scott Fitzgerald. It is for them that The New York Times told it on Feb- him sit down and work. He could not man.” I am writing. I will tell what I have ruary 8. 1954: write anything bad, it seemed, but it Crane was obsessed by wars; I seen with my own eyes and heard “Maxwell Bodenheim, the per- was an agony for him to write at all. suppose that having imagined one with my own ears, often from the lips sonification of Greenwich Village Here was one more Southern with extraordinary vividness, he of the victims: novelists, poets, play- and Bohemia of the nineteen twen- gentleman in trouble with alcohol. wanted to see if he had been right. wrights and stars of stage and screen. ties, was found murdered with his His real name was William Sydney He tried to get to Cuba in an old tub I have seen two score of them go to wife yesterday in a dingy fifth-floor Porter, and I recall his tragic story of a steamer which sank, and he their doom, eleven as suicides. furnished room on the fringes of the with compassion. He was a bank barely escaped with his life; out of One of the shining stars of the Bowery. . . . The aging, unkempt clerk; one day some money was miss- that came a story, The Open Boat. Greenwich Village galaxy in the writer was lying on his back on the ing, and he was accused of embezzle- Later, when he reached Cuba, he Twenties was Maxwell Bodenheim. floor of the unheated, five-dollar-a- ment. Maybe he was guilty, or per- horrified everybody by stepping out He wrote “imagistic poetry,” and week room. His attractive, dark- haps he was “taking the rap” for of the trenches and making himself a highly-spiced novels with such titles haired wife lay on the room’s single somebody else-he would never dis- target for the shooting. He didn’t care as Replenishing Jessica, Naked on cot. On a small table nearby were cuss the subject. He fled to Honduras; very much about living; he used. to Roller Skates, and Crazy Man. As copies of scribbled poems, a pad of and A1 Jennings, the famous train say that thirty-five years were enough the most Bohemian of the many Bo- paper and pencils, and an empty bandit who later reformed and wrote for any man. He made only twentyhemians who lived and worked in the liquor bottle. an autobiography, tells of meeting nine. Village, Bodenheim enjoyed a great ” ‘The motive was not robbery,’ Early in the 1920s I invested the him there, half drunk and in jail. In vogue; his books were bestsellers, Chief of Detectives Thomas Nielson the end, they both went home and money from The Jungle in a buildand money was no problem. Beauti- said. Friends of the poet said they served their sentences in the same ing, formerly a private school, on the ful young women pursued him. He believe the slaying might have been prison. 0. Henry was dreadfully Palisades; it was directly across the lived in an alcoholic glory. the result of a drinking dispute. . . . ashamed of this cloud of suspicion; Hudson River from upper Manhat- What follows, however, sounds “For the last few years Mr. Boden- also, he grieved for his wife, who had tan. Including members and employlike an old-fashioned moralistic story heim had been a pathetic and ineffec- died of tuberculosis. He was proud, ees, we had some forty or fifty per- , out of those bound volumes of the tual figure, wandering through the tormented, and frightened. Before sons in our “co-op.” One person in I Christian Herald which I read as a streets of the Village and the Bow- long, death delivered him from his our midst was destined to become child in the home of my Methodist ery.” misery-at the age of forty-eight. eminent, although we did not know grandfather. “Bodey” became a mis- 0. Henry had to be watched and Another young writer I was ad- it. We kept him busy tending our furerable bum. He picked up a few coins guarded and made to write. He would vised to study was Stephen Crane, nace, sweeping our public rooms and here and there by posing as a blind promise a story by a certain date, and who had caused a tremendous sensa- staircases, -.-..-. – the little fish- . and cleaning

pond in our glass-roofed court. ingly unsuccessful.” My own belief is confusion in people’s minds. reler myself.” More details came ‘His name was Harry Sinclair that drinkiqg is a cause rather than a The facts concerning our ex-furfrom the writer William E. Wood- Lewis. We called him Hal. result of marriage failure; but I sup- naceman’s misfortune have been reward. Bill told me that never had hc I was glad of all the success that pose it is like the problem of the hen vealed in biographical material which seen anyone get so blind drunk as came to Sinclair Lewis, and deeply and the egg-each is both cause and appeared after his death-the quart “Red” Lewis. He had been drunk in regretful for the misery. For it was effect. Phyllis pays tribute to his of brandy a day, the shakes, the Woodward’s home for days and as in the case of Jack London: alco- peculiar powers of sympathy and tapering off, the swearing off, the nights. hol destroyed him. kindness. “I think,” she says, “that wine phase, the wandering over the The art expert, Martin Birnbaum I began to hear about it, but there he would have done anything for his earth, the avoiding of friends and the . -who was my classmate in collegewas nothing I could do; Hal always friends, and at any sacrifice; and I seeking for peace where there is no tells of an excursion out of Venice resented any effort to interfere. I met on a yacht owned by the Princess think that any man was his friend peace, the decline in writing power, ‘ an old-time journalist with an absorb- Marina Raspoli. “We suddenly who treated him with integrity and and the final delirium. ingly interesting story of real life to good feeling.” This I can confirm. Hal wrote his last novel in Europe. missed ‘Red’ and when we found For some of his doings-such as His closest friend at the time was tell, and I said to him, “You ought him, he was so hilariously drunk that to get Sinclair Lewis to help you getting slapped by Theodore Dreiser, Perry Miller, professor of American we had to ship him back to Venice.” make that into a bestseller.” or for standing in a church pulpit and literature of Harvard University; and Phyllis Bottome, who was a close His answer was, “No, thank you! friend, attributed his mad drinking “daring” God to prove that He ex- in the April, 1951, issue of The At- He is doing his writing on booze. He to his two marriage failures. She calls isted by striking him dead on the spot lantic Monthly, Dr. Miller compasgets drunk in public and makes vio- his first “a most heart-rending sense- -I used to get some of the blame. sionately described his friend’s final lent rows, and I’m too good a quar- less marriage,” and his second “bit- The similarity in our names caused months in these words: “As soon as

he finished the manuscript, he started terrible pain, and I thought she was drinking, until his Florentine physi- dying. In that crisis I did not stop to cian forbade him spirits. When I argue any theological questions. I reached him in April, he was guzzling prayed. My wife declares that these quantities of red wine, and despite prayers saved her life. I won’t argue Aleck’s strenuous efforts, he gener- with the skeptics. I will simply say ally succeeded in knocking himself that God made psychology, too, just out by afternoon. At a Florentine res- as He made all other things-the taurant he commanded the orchestra human mind as well as the human to play the sentimental tunes of his body. And the way they work is the earlier escapades; he peeled off and way He works. If prayer gives you flung about five-thousand-lira notes courage and hope and love, then -Babbitt on a spree-until Aleck what I say is “Thank God!” could get him out and pour him into I am able to say to alcoholics: the car. By August he was drinking Prayer will help you, your own only beer, but he had already had prayer and others’! Alcoholics . two serious heart attacks and should Anonymous invites the drinker to benot have touched even that.” lieve that a Power greater than them- Through a miracle of physical selves can restore them to sanity. stamina, Hal made it to the age of They invite those in the depths of sixty-six. More tragic than any short- despair to make a decision to turn age of years was the loss of produc- their wills and their lives over to God tivity, the absence of joy. He must as they understand Him. have suffered in those last days in I have put before the public the Rome, waiting for death to take him tragic record of a half-century of out of the clutches of his tormentor. American genius, twisted and tor- I have never doubted that this is a tured by alcohol. I hope it is read spiritual universe.. I t was the same with one fact always in the back of with my beloved wife. Some years the reader’s mind: three out of four ago she had the kind of heart attack of the students in college today are doctors call “congestive.” She was in drinkers.