Reviewed: The Trip to Echo Spring, by Olivia Laing. Publisher: Picador, 10/14. Paperback $17.00, 384pp.

Home // March.12.2018 // Paul Blumer

Messages in the Bottles

In The Trip to Echo Spring: On Writers and Drinking, Olivia Laing offers an invigorating dive into the cold waters underlying the work of six of the most iconic Alcoholic-American writers. She takes on the gargantuan mythoi of John Cheever, Raymond Carver, Ernest Hemingway, F. Scott Fitzgerald, John Berryman, and Tennessee Williams, and weaves their tales of drunkenness and darkness into an inspired exploration about not only what it is to be a creative alcoholic, but also what it means to flounder in the depths of personal suffering. Somehow Laing manages to puncture the legends' sacrosanctity while at the same time buoying their well-earned reputations. She achieves this by acknowledging the duality of human nature and examining the writers under a discerning, narrative objectivity.

The narrative progresses organically, if a bit haphazardly. More than once I found myself going to the shelf to pull down an old anthology in order to re-read one of the short stories she twists into the book like garnishes in a well-balanced cocktail. A talented scholar, Laing is also a real writer, and you can tell by the way she tracks her journey across American landscapes as seen through the plate-glass windows of a modern Amtrak. Her first-person narration expresses, time and again, the feeling of having seen these places before, the lush settings of the stories and biographies of these most inspiring of American alcoholics. And now she's here for real, visiting from England with her life's perspective behind her and crocked enlightenment ahead. She paints the subjects of her study with vibrant attention to detail, going so far as to examine them through the lenses of social history and modern science.

“In order to understand how an intelligent man could end up in such a place,” Laing posits, “it's necessary to first know what a shot of Smirnoff or Scotch does to the human body.” She goes on to describe the positive-reinforcement effects of serotonin and dopamine and the negative-reinforcement sedative impact of alcohol on receptor sites of gamma-aminobutyric acid. Apparently, these competing factors obtain a brain-chemical balance sufficient to calm the frantic waters of anxiety and stress… for a time.

Laing juxtaposes the psychiatric text of the DSM-IV with the intuitive “click” Tennessee Williams describes in Cat on a Hot Tin Roof: that key moment a drinker seeks when tension melts away and nerves sit peacefully below the surface—until the brain adjusts, and an arms-race ensues between neuroadaptation and alcoholic stupefaction. The brain adjusts, and the drinker drinks again.

Why do these men drink? Laing dives deeper: “Writers, even the most socially gifted and established, must be outsiders of some sort, if only because their job is that of scrutinizer and witness.” It's discomfiting to observe while also directly interacting. Writers live with a duality of the senses—they're listening, seeing, hearing, smelling, tasting, knowing in parallel—on the one hand as desperate social animal and on the other as ruthlessly objective narrator. The crossing currents erode a gully of anxiety through a writer. A hero's ration of booze can soften the edge, reconcile that fundamental dissonance—or at least stir up the waters enough to hide the rift. But tip the balance and the drinking therapy becomes its own anxious demon. “A man that drinks,” Laing quotes Williams, “is two people, one grabbing the bottle, the other one fighting him off it, not one but two people fighting each other to get control of a bottle.”

Through their letters and notebooks, Laing tells the story of each author's movement along the arc of drinking, starting with that first warm anxiety-diffusing sip which cut through the tension of social interaction and opened a portal into the mise en scene they so longed to capture on the page; the drink which split the writer in twain, one part telling stories and charming company while the other lurks below the surface, its fear and loathing and anxiety hidden under a reflection of past and present enmeshed in one shimmering image. That this ominous and ever-present lurking anxiety is so stereotypically characteristic of these kind of drinking creatives begs the question, where does this anxiety originate?

Referencing biographies on her subjects and the writers' own primary documents, Laing details the sobering reality underlying addiction: namely, that addicts are filling a hole. The etiology varies—a traumatic childhood, a missing parent, abject shame, sexual mis-identity—but the symptoms manifest the same.

Laing refers to the Adverse Childhood Experience Study from the mid-1990s which demonstrated a clear correlation between childhood trauma including “parental addiction, violence, sexual abuse, loss, and disruption of other kinds,” and the origin of addictions including alcoholism. Each of her literary subjects would score high on the ACE range: “Just under 12% of adults with an ACE score of 3 had become alcoholics... Berryman's ACE score was 3. It is difficult to get enough of something that doesn't work. He was addicted to a false source of nourishment, but the thirst was real. ”

For these men, Laing explains, “storytelling was a panacea, a route out of pain and danger... [Cheever] said that he'd become a writer ‘to give some fitness and shape to the unhappiness that overtook my family and to contain my own acuteness of feeling'… though, he'd begun to wonder if telling stories wasn't in some muddled, mysterious way related to his desire to drink.”

Was writing another false source of nourishment? Was it just another attempt to drown the pain by turning it into a world of words? If so, it seems circular. Trauma-bred demons drive writing-channeled anxiety, triggering the impulse to drink, calling those echoes of trauma back to life, and on and on. Circular or not, Laing affirms that such acts of sacrifice have had a dramatic ripple effect on multitudes of readers. When visiting the grave of Raymond Carver, Laing points out that “we all carry something inside us that can be rejected.” Different people choose to escape or not, in the best way they know how. Like Carver, Fitzgerald, Williams, Hemingway, Berryman, and Cheever all sought escape from their pain at the sundered margins of their shores—but in trying to swim away they were caught up in their own riptides and washed away, each leaving behind their neatly rolled scrolls corked into empty bottles.

The most difficult part of reading The Trip to Echo Spring is resisting the urge to set down the book at every section break or chapter and dash headlong for a bottle and typewriter. Those who drink and those who write will know what I mean here: the book is not only stirring, it's irresistible.

With thanks to Nick Rodelo for his editorial contributions to this review.

Banner graphic source: Poster (detail) advertising Akadama sweet wine; this was the first nude advertising poster in Japan. Published in 1922 (Taisho 11). Directed by Toshiro Kataoka featuring Emiko Matsushima. Sourced from Wikimedia Commons; in the public domain.