Those Drinking Days: Myself and Other Writers

I've spent most of the second half of my life looking for Donald Newlove. Is he dead? Is he alive? I have no idea. I only know that this book affected me profoundly when I was a blossoming writer, with grandiose ideas about the craft and about the crazy nuance of excess. No other writer tells a tale of drunken ego like Newlove, I think, because none can exert this kind of self-flaggellating honesty. A masterful, beautiful book that looks closely at all the great, drunken writers with the trained eye of one who has suffered of the same spirits. It should appeal to anyone who writes, drinks or, more likely, both.

I loaned this book to Jonny Mac in Boston, and he never gave it back. This book explores the self-destruction which is so attractive to so many writers, such as Dylan Thomas in his little cottage by the sea. Inversely, it seems to exert a pull on those who are in mid-binge phase, hoping that the self-destruction will make them better writers. Which always sounds like someone saying that developing ulcers and colitis to be more like John Calvin, will make them a better theologian. The author shook himself loose from this thinking, but not until it almost killed him. If Mac gives me the book back some day, I'd like to read it again. John, it's been what, since 1982 or so? Are you done yet?

There have been countless books and plays about alcoholic characters, many of them writers, but less works about the writers themselves. The first half of the book is an autobiography of Newlove from his sloshed life. The second half profiles an array of great alcoholic (or at least near alcoholic) writers (Faulkner, Capote, Fitzgerald, etc). Unfortunately out of print, I still remember this one pretty vividly from about 20 years ago when it came out.