The Wet and the Dry (8 page)

Thus removed from the drug culture that would prospectively ruin them, their children were thrown into the suburban alcohol culture that would certainly affect them instead. Why alcohol rather than marijuana? The reasons were social: Haywards Heath was conservative and Little England. Only an hour from London and a half hour from Brighton and its “dirty weekends at the Metropole” extolled by T. S. Eliot, it was a fortress of private rectitude defended by a thousand lawns and yew hedges and scrolled gates. Behind these tall hedges stood the Victorian brick villas and the timbered Mock Tudors and the mansions with their service bells and dumbwaiters where isolated men and women could sink into their evenings with a glass of sherry and intoxicate themselves out of a present moment that offered
little outside the home but long, dusky lanes and streets of closed shops and parks where the perverts gathered with their own bottles. It was a fine place to grow up.

Such a place was bound to encourage the use of a drug that was commensurately traditional. In the late 1960s, in Haywards Heath, pot was mentioned as a taboo. It seemed to come from far away, from the tropics, from America, from another dimension of life. Intoxication as an idea, however, was familiar. I remember someone at school telling me that Malcolm X used to get high on nutmeg. I looked it up. Nine megs of nutmeg was lethal, apparently, and there was nothing in the references about it making you high. I tried eight megs, an entire container, and mixed it with yogurt. It failed to make me high, but I threw up all night. Malcolm X must have had an extra additive up his sleeve. I was sure even after that that nutmeg could get me stoned, and I tried it several times afterward with no result. It seemed like an
easily disguised
habit to have.

Attached so firmly to the colonial past, filled with its retired soldiers and government officials, as well as aging spinsters and widows and young families seeking a safer, more English way of life, Haywards Heath was more suited to the drugs that had been used for centuries: the sherry, the beer, the Scotch.

The men went off in the morning to catch the 7:50 express train to Victoria, and the women stayed behind in their big empty houses listening to Radio 4 and bossing around the butcher deliverymen. Their lives were isolated, and then there were those tall yew hedges and lawns. You could never see the neighbors unless you bumped into them by accident walking
down Summerfield Lane. Then they would stop for a moment, ask how the cats were, and move on.

So with my mother. On days when I was sick and staying at home, I remember the sound of her typewriter echoing through the house, and the radio turned up loud, and it was as if her past life were being guarded from submersion in her current life. I was sure that she had begun to drink.

She was a woman who had wandered almost by accident into a life she had not quite intended for herself. But as is often the case, a loyal and hardworking husband, a man with a sense of humor and an ability to love his children, had proved seductive. And why should it not be seductive? The drinker’s legendary unhappiness and frustration are often exaggerated, and it is in any case an unhappiness that is much more complex than is suggested by the tinny word
circumstances
. A drinker is entangled in herself, unable to unravel the threads that have closed in upon her. The daily intoxication arises from an entire life’s experience, not from an “illness” that is supposed to be less mysterious.

My mother dropped out of Durham University in her first year in 1953 and took a long experimental train journey across Europe to Naples. She was robbed on the train north of Rome and arrived in the Eternal City with nothing; an Irish priest, a friend of her family, took her in. The Tyneside Irish, of whom my mother was a member, were in those days severe Catholics (with a taste for spirited drinking), and the faith saved her in her hour of need. Rome in the middle of the Dolce Vita, fresh from the visits of Gregory Peck and Audrey Hepburn, must
have been a youth in and of itself. But eventually, tiring of its tourism, she moved south to Naples, where she lived in Parthenope on the waterfront, teaching English to businessmen and making casual friends out of neighbors like Lucky Luciano and the best-selling Catholic novelist Morris West.

She later said that she could not have suffered to go back to Naples, to see its slow decline. But a decline from what? The city she knew was feral, the dark metropolis of Norman Lewis’s brilliant book
Naples ’44
. It must have been the first city in which she had been free, far from priests and family. The first place in which she had been able to be a woman.

There was a fearless insolence about her, a quality I saw years later on her deathbed. The suburban life of Haywards Heath after Naples, marriage after the life of a reporter on the lam, must have been a shock. As the years passed, she began to drink. My sister told me one day that she had noticed the family piano sounding a little strange when she played. Opening the lid, she found a bottle of vodka hidden under the strings. This was a secret between us, and we didn’t talk about it for years. My own taste for drink, meanwhile, might be genetic, and it might have something to do with the Irish. Around us in those years in Haywards Heath hovered the shadowy outer family of the Tyneside Irish clan, the Grieves, the O’Kanes, and the O’Malleys, the male boozers who occasionally appeared at Christmastime and then disappeared like circus tricks, a nightmare fringe of shadow-puppet men with bright blue eyes and wet lips.

My uncle Michael, who died in a halfway home for alcoholics in Scotland, his foot recently amputated from diabetes, a man
who had disappeared for a quarter century, abandoning his wife and children, to whom he had become a mysterious stranger. My great-uncle John O’Kane, publisher of the Liverpool University Press, who appeared every Christmas Eve with a different girl fresh off ocean liners and airplanes from Madrid, who would walk in the front door covered with snow and sit at the piano, pull up his cuffs, and begin to play and sing, uninvited, mad and drunk. A man who was convinced that he was admired and loved, and maybe even feared, but who was none of those. As a child, I adored him. He wore tweed suits and Italian ties and brought me jazz LPs from stores in Paris and Barcelona; his hands shook all the time, and he had those bloody oyster eyes that did not preclude tenderness. I remember, as he lay next to me in bed listening to “Purple Haze” (not the Jimi Hendrix song), his smell of booze and cologne mixed up, the inadvertent vibration of his body.

Here was a male gorgon who stormed around the world on “business” liquoring himself at a thousand bars, “that drunken Irish loafer,” as my father called him, who didn’t care about gathering moss as he rolled like a stone through his ramshackle life. I admired his fearlessness. I admired the way at Christmas dinner he toasted everyone singly and did it with neat Glenfiddich, and then burst—still uninvited—into one of his own inane compositions. What sound track must have been playing inside his formidable and erudite mind? The alcoholic wants to be loved, and just as fervently he wants to be hated and reviled.

Dreaded but unavoidable, the drunk is always at the bar of
life, like the man in Tati’s
Playtime
who, despite being ejected from the lounge by the seat of his pants, always manages to reappear at the same spot. He is always there, irrepressible and stoic, doomed and melodic, while the teetotaler is home in bed, snoring next to a glass of water.

The moods of alcohol are like dabs of color on a psychotic palette that can be mixed at random. There are moments when intoxication induces a feeling of immersion in a vast and shadowy element. Walt Whitman ventures down to the shoreline and dissipates like “a little wash’d-up drift” into the ocean:

Aware now that amid all that blab whose echoes recoil upon me I have not once had the least idea who or what I am,

But that before all my arrogant poems the real Me stands yet untouch’d, untold, altogether unreach’d,

We know this feeling. Crudely but also subtly, the bottle facilitates this solitude, and the drinker knows it all too well. He is canny about his possibilities. A self-critic, a connoisseur of his own altered states, he knows exactly how to tweak himself upward and downward. He is an amateur alchemist when it comes to the drinks themselves. If he were a writer and wanted to explain himself to strangers, he would write a book called
In Praise of Intoxication
. No one would invite him to explain his views in public. In America, he would not be taken seriously
for a moment. But he would not be taken seriously by himself either: being taken seriously is not necessary to anything truly serious. The drinker is a Dionysiac, a dancer who sits still, a mocker. He doesn’t need your seriousness or your regard. He just needs a little quiet music, and a gentle freedom from priests.

The Pure Light of High Summer

                                  
It was the Greeks who defined
the subconscious Dionysian aspirations of the modern drinker, who could be imagined as a pagan remnant who has survived the purges of Christianity. Islam, ironically, gave us distillation just as the Greeks gave us fermentation. Distillation and fermentation: they could not be more different. One rational and scientific in origin, the other mystical and organic.

Dionysus is the god of vegetation, of the theater, of bulls, of women, and of wine. He is the destroyer and the liberator, “the god who crushes men.” But he is the god who also demands that embryos not be harmed. His cult was dominated by women. Its practitioners were primarily female with a reputation for being “raving women,”
mainas
. He was the god of what the Greeks called
zoe
, or indestructible collective life, as opposed to mere
bios
, the life of an individual. He emerged from the thigh of Zeus and was also known as
Dios phos
, “light of Zeus.”

The Greeks themselves found him baffling and unnerving,
They struggled to find the words to describe him. Was he anthropomorphic, or was he like some element of the universe that could only be sensed indirectly? The poet Pindar, invoking his miraculous relationship to the blossoming of orchards, compared him with
hagnon phengos oporas:
“the pure light of high summer.”

The great Hungarian scholar of Dionysus, Carl Kerényi, began his opus
Dionysos, Archetypal Image of Indestructible Life
, with a remarkable scholarly reverie on the subject of fermentation in Crete. Dionysus, he claimed, arose in some complex and obscure way from the fermentation symbolism of early Crete, where fermented honey and then beer suggested life emerging mysteriously from decay. It was fermentation itself that made Cretans think of the indestructibility of
zoe
. As things decay, they give off an enigmatic life; they bubble and seethe and self-transform. Like honey and mead, wine suggested
zoe
and seemed to partake in cosmic life. “A natural phenomenon inspired a myth of
zoe …
a statement about life which shows its indestructibility.”

The rising of the star Sirius in July became, as with the Egyptians, the time of ritual fermenting—that is, the height of summer. Fermentation and intoxication must have seemed a mystical unity to the Cretans, who also consumed opium, according to Kerényi. The intoxication must have had religious import to them, and from honey and beer they transposed the symbolism to the richer, more luxurious wine. They called their sacrificial bulls “wine-colored” for no particular reason, and a
thousand years later Greeks still carried bulls to the altar during Dionysian rites. Around this god many odd symbols crystallized for reasons we cannot now excavate. The bull, the snake, fermented grape juice, and the dolphins one sees on black-figured cups surrounding the ship where Dionysus sails alone under a mast of grapevines. They are the sailors who intended to kidnap him but were foiled and turned, by an act of godly mercy, into cetaceans.

The Cretans created a core mythology around this god of fermentation that the Greeks later continued, sometimes unknowingly. Though since Linear A, the actual language of the Cretans, has never been deciphered, we do not really know. The Minoan hieroglyph for
wine
, meanwhile, an ideogram in Linear B (early Greek translated into Cretan writing), is very like the Egyptian hieroglyph for the same thing, and we know from paintings of the Eighteenth Dynasty that Egypt already had a vast wine culture by the time Crete became rich, a viticulture that perhaps spread to Crete, as we can see from the Minoan
villa rustica
excavated at Kato Zakros. The vine was not Cretan or Greek, but in Europe its fermented fruit did become a singular god. A dense and complex core of symbols and myth passed into the occidental bloodstream, making wine a source of religious experience. It eventually became Christ’s blood.