The Writer as Drunk
By ANTHONY BURGESS
T ITERATURE of the better sort makes little im- pact on the British people, unless it can be factitiously associated with scandal. The three best-known names of the modern period are, to the man in and woman on the street, Oscar Wilde, Dylan Thomas and Brendan Behan. All three behaved badly, and all three were Celts. The bad behaviour culminated in social or physical ruin which had a ritualistic quality about it, as though time had ordained that Anglo- Saxon guilt should be purged vicariously by Celts of great talent. Perhaps this same guilt has something to do with the inability to behave naturally and sin like a decent, or indecent, human being. Anglo-Saxon sin has generally been collective and historical, hence somewhat abstract; the notorious Celtic writer-sinners have served to demonstrate that the Fall is a perennial and palpable and personal catastrophe, to be punished in the individual flesh. Oscar Wilde's sin remains, admittedly, one reserved to a comparatively small segment of Anglo-Saxon society; the sins of those two more recent hero- victims are available to the least cultivated of men, though most lack the courage, stamina and (yes) money to push them to the limit. And, of course, there's also the question of talent. Much can be forgiven a poet that is totally culpable in a dustman or journalist.
All three of these men are remembered by their Christian names: Here lies Oscar (rest him, God) Not earth to earth but sod to sod. It was because of men like this That hell was fashioned bottomless.
In America, visiting British writers are greeted at cocktail parties by faculty wives with 'Can you screw as good as Dylan?' Men in Shepherd's Bush pubs keen over dead Brendan. Legends of the varied prowess of both Brendan and Dylan are eagerly turned into fantastic folk-myth. Both swore greatly and drank very heavily; Dylan, additionally, had the reputation—unjustified by biographical fact—of being a satyromaniac. Both (and this seems to me a large injustice to Dylan) are evaluated on about the same level by the British public; indeed—because Brendan was the more spectacularly drunken of the two —the Irish genius has been lauded above the Welsh. I personally don't think there can be any comparison. Dylan was the greatest lyric poet of the twentieth century; Brendan was a man with a lot of talk in him but a very limited creative gift. Dylan was incapable of shoddy work; Brendan's later writings were perfunctory and done for money. The drink never got into Dylan's poems; Brendan sometimes reads like a man eager to get his 500 words done before the pubs open.
Drunkenness is said to be a substitute for art; why, then, should artists get drunk? Not, presumably, because of a block, a desire to create and a sudden baffling inability to do so; both Dylan and Brendan were creating, after a fashion, to the last, and the drinking bolas were going on all the time. There was no question of alcohol being a stimulus to creation, however : it is very difficult to write well with a bottle beside one. Neither Dylan nor Brendan ever kept much drink in the house; they were essen- tially pub-men. I know little of the terminology of pathological drinking, but I should regard the true dipsomaniac as the quiet home-drinker- sipping all day, my dear, like a dowager, as Anthony Blanche puts it. Talk of Dylan's mixed- up insides and Brendan's diabetes and despair at being excommunicated for his IRA activities, —I don't think this gets us far. I would say that both men drank because pub-drink- ing remains the last of our creative social acts: for a man desperate to communicate in words, only the rising tide of alcohol in a cosy, stuffy atmosphere, the delirious prospect of the seventh veil dropping from the mind, can pro- vide the right bardic satisfaction. Communica- tion on paper is never enough; one needs a flesh-and-blood audience. But a theatre audi- ence is not enough, either—too impersonal and remote. I'm speaking, of course, of a particular kind of artist—the rhetorical writer with an ancestral memory of the word-man's social func- tion, the bardic job. Primed with wine in the kitchen, the bard confronted the tipsy warriors at the feast's end. The Welsh and the Irish rhetorician sang and rhapsodised in debased London's so-called literary pubs. They could find nothing better.
But the drink took hold. We have all seen glassy-eyed Dylan and heard obstreperous Bren- dan. Fired at the first with what the drink imparts, the inflamed rhetorician is deaf to voices that niggle about diminishing returns. Only those with no true capacity for drinking really know when to stop. And, of course, there were the other factors: Brendan's genuine diabetic thirst; Dylan's medicine; the bardic misery at being on any level lower than the euphoric. Brinnin's book on Dylan in America tells one whole story; now Mrs Jeffs complements it with her own tale of Brendan.* Her work is, if anything, a more solid job than Brinnin's—more matter with less art—but, since Brendan's downfall follows no very original pattern, it inevitably seems full of déjà vu, and it cannot avoid a Brinnin-type nothing-for-tears peroration.
If sociability led Brendan on the road to excess (missing the Palace of Wisdom on the way), as well as guilt and despair and what else could be dissolved only in alcohol, that same sociability found sober expression in a less assertive need for people—the lineaments of helplessness and innocence. Both Brendan and Dylan were totally without guilt or malice, prelapsarian prodigies who acted out the Fall but were not really involved in it. The weak- ness of both (and Mrs Jeffs doesn't try to mitigate Brendan's weakness) called for help from the strong and responsible to an almost * BRENDAN BEHAN, MAN AND SHOWMAN. By Rae Jeffs. (Hutchinson, 35s.) destructive extent. Brinnin and Liz and Sarah, and the rest of the saints of the Dylaniad, recog- nised this demoniac cannibalism of the poet, but it only showed its teeth in his private life; the dangerous and damning thing about Brendan was that he cried for help in his art. Mrs Jeffs gave this help, justifying it on the ground that she worked for Hutchinson, Brendan's pub- lisher, whose legitimate commercial aim was to get books out of him and make money out of them. When Brendan, in drunken euphoria, had committed himself to an American publisher other than the one to whom he was contractually bound, he wanted that help to continue, and Mrs Jeffs wavered. She was approaching the ultimate in devotion. As personal devotion it was alto- gether laudable; as devotion to art it was less justifiable.
As a poet, Dylan was proud and alone, need- ing no help from anyone. The rigour of his approach to his art, the drafts piling high to reach a peak of impossible perfection, remains an example to all poets, drunk or sober. There is nothing like that in Brendan. He wrote a fine autobiographical book called Borstal Boy and two plays of little shape but immense vigour. Then all that was left was talk. Books had somehow to be made out of this talk, so along came Mrs Jeffs with the tape-recorder. The later works—all very slight affairs, though engaging —are edited tape, untouched by hand. Can we call them literature?
There's no reason why not. To speak Into a microphone is not very different from dictating to an amanuensis: Paradise Lost and the later novels of Henry James are undoubtedly litera- ture, and they were dictated. But with Brendan we always tremble on the frontier of what is merely excellent Irish talk, and the tape-recorder is revealed as more his instrument than the type- writer. But can talk be literature? Only as musi- cal improvisation can be musical composition. With talk we get rhythm, the pulse of imme- diacy, the breath of sincerity, but we don't get those other properties of art—shape, precision, economy. We get half-art, art indubitably minor. Dylan's art was not minor: it was shaped, cut, polished, intensified to the limit. Look for a parallel to him in the literature of the past, and you won't go far wrong if you adduce Virgil. But who does Brendan compare with? Probably one of the hack Elizabethans with the gift of the gab (but all the Elizabethans, like all the Irish, had that), an easy sardonicism, an ability (ready pen or ready amanuensis) to get it down on paper. Brendan reminds me of Greene, a man with rotting kidneys, an insatiable thirst, a need to keep going with the writing craft even when there was nothing to say. Leaving his mistress and his brat Fortunatus at home in sordid lodgings, Greene would swagger in the taverns with his henchman, Cutting Ball the pickpocket, and then, drunk and doomed, go back to write desperately. Like Brendan, he is remembered as a personality as much as a quasi-literary man. He became mawkish and tearful at the end, repenting his dissoluteness. Brendan never did, but he got a Catholic funeraL Let me commend Mrs Jeffs's book as a shocking, worrying, enlightening portrait of one of those Falstaffian figures that, as Mr Priestley reminds us, have to be destroyed in this pursed, prissy age and society, either from within or without. Brendan may have been a nuisance, but he was alive, and he proclaimed to a large public that the art of letters, however minor its prac- tice, belonged to life and not just to libraries. And soon, after a decent interval, let time send in the next Celtic sacrifice.
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