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WHY IS IT THAT SOME OF THE GREATEST WORKS OF LITERATURE HAVE BEEN PRODUCED BY WRITERS IN THE GRIP OF ALCOHOLISM, AN ADDICTION THAT COST THEM PERSONAL HAPPINESS AND CAUSED HARM TO THOSE WHO LOVED THEM?
In The Trip to Echo Spring, Olivia Laing examines the link between creativity and alcohol through the work and lives of six extraordinary men: F. Scott Fitzgerald, Ernest Hemingway, Tennessee Williams, John Berryman, John Cheever, and Raymond Carver.
All six of these writers were alcoholics, and the subject of drinking surfaces in some of their finest work, from Cat on a Hot Tin Roof to A Moveable Feast. Often, they did their drinking together: Hemingway and Fitzgerald ricocheting through the cafés of Paris in the 1920s; Carver and Cheever speeding to the liquor store in Iowa in the icy winter of 1973.
Olivia Laing grew up in an alcoholic family herself. One spring, wanting to make sense of this ferocious, entangling disease, she took a journey across America that plunged her into the heart of these overlapping lives. As she travels from Cheever's New York to Williams's New Orleans, and from Hemingway's Key West to Carver's Port Angeles, she pieces together a topographical map of alcoholism, from the horrors of addiction to the miraculous possibilities of recovery.
Beautiful, captivating, and original, The Trip to Echo Spring strips away the myth of the alcoholic writer to reveal the terrible price creativity can exert.
- Sales Rank: #312341 in eBooks
- Published on: 2013-12-31
- Released on: 2013-12-31
- Format: Kindle eBook
From Booklist
*Starred Review* British journalist and writer Laing (To the River, 2012) conducts and chronicles intrepid and divulging literary journeys, here recounting her travels across America, tracking the role alcoholism played in the lives of John Berryman, Raymond Carver, John Cheever, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Ernest Hemingway, and Tennessee Williams. She lifted “Echo Spring” from Williams’ Pulitzer Prize–winning play, Cat on a Hot Tin Roof, because it’s Brick’s “nickname for the liquor cabinet,” based on a brand of bourbon, and because the writers’ painful experiences echo one another’s and often converge. In this enfolding and exposing inquiry, Laing analyzes and intermeshes the lives of her subjects and her own as a child in a household poisoned by drink. She learns how alcohol affects the brain and discovers clues to each writer’s addiction in their published and private writings as she visits their haunts in New York, New Orleans, Key West, and the Pacific Northwest. As she investigates the symbioses between alcoholism and trauma, creativity, and repressed homosexuality, she recalibrates our perception of the suffering and brilliance of these seminal writers. Intently observant, curious, and empathetic, Laing, with shimmering detail and arresting insights, presents a beautifully elucidating and moving group portrait of writers enslaved by drink and redeemed by “the capacity of literature to somehow . . . make one feel less flinchingly alone.” --Donna Seaman
Review
“Most beguiling and incisive.” ―The New York Times
“[A] charming and gusto-driven look at the alcoholic insanity of six famous writers…There is much to learn from Laing's supple scholarship--and much to enjoy, too.” ―Lawrence Osborne, The New York Times Book Review
“Exquisite . . . Laing, wisely, doesn't reach any one-size-fits-all conclusions about the bond between the pen and the bottle . . . A marvelous writer.” ―Maureen Corrigan, NPR's Fresh Air
“Laing dives deep, plummeting into some of her subjects' darkest impulses . . . The result is a multilayered biography that reads quick as fiction, and is teeming with fantastically melancholy details of the writers we thought we knew.” ―Lauren Viera, Chicago Tribune
“[An] eccentric, impassioned, belle-lettristic, graceful and haunted book . . . [Laing's] story has a rambling, daydream quality.” ―The Wall Street Journal
“The Trip to Echo Spring is a rewarding book to wend your way through even if the writers Laing focuses on Cheever, Fitzgerald, Hemingway, Tennessee Williams, Raymond Carver and the American poet John Berryman--aren't among your particular favorites. Laing writes a fluid, fertile nonfiction... Although Laing isn't an alcoholic herself, she alludes to several adult relationships blighted by the disease, and her second-hand understanding of it is manifestly detailed and deep....Another powerful draw of The Trip to Echo Spring is the flashing imagination of Laing's literary criticism....A wondrously rewarding book.” ―Laura Miller, Salon
“Laing's writing is beautiful, her insights frequently surprising and powerful. The book's greatest virtue, however, is that it positively swells with empathy.” ―Rosie Schaap, Slate
“Olivia Laing's book is an exploration of alcoholism in six 20th-century American writers...that dazzles in both the scope of its ambition and the depths it reaches in analyzing its subjects. Laing, through the lens of extensive research both into the writer's biographies and into literature about alcoholism as a disease, paints these writers with a brush that renders them in new light....While there may be more uplifting books about writing and writers, few present the reader with such sobering realities about the downside to all those romantic, drunken nights in Paris or Key West.” ―Interview
“Olivia Laing emerges as a kind of British Susan Orlean, combining nonfiction narrative, travel writing, literary criticism and a touch of memoir in a personable style....Her descriptions of the landscape she sees, the conversations she overhears and the people she runs into are sparkling....Without building to a specific point or climax, Laing keeps you on board through her journey...Your head filled with the questions and answers so interestingly raised here, you will want to take a long look at both.” ―Newsday
“The Trip to Echo Spring...contains astute observations about addiction....Laing provides a remarkably cogent explanation of alcohol's effects on the brain and emotions.” ―Tampa Bay Times
“The Trip to Echo Spring, Olivia Laing's remarkable book about six alcoholic American writers, reminds me of the overhead projections we watched in classrooms before PowerPoint came along, in which several transparent sheets were artfully lined up atop each other to produce a complex document....I've read many words about the alcoholism of literary writers, and many more words about the 12 Step model of addiction and recovery. But until "Echo Spring," I'd never read a writer who bridged both worlds with such intelligence, grace and thoughtfulness.” ―Milwaukee Journal-Sentinel
“A funny, tragic, and insightful journey for anyone who has read F. Scott Fitzgerald, Ernest Hemingway, Tennessee Williams, or John Berryman; prepare to be smitten with this fresh offering. Those unfamiliar with these writers will want to read their works.” ―Library Journal (starred review)
“Laing, with shimmering detail and arresting insights, presents a beautifully elucidating and moving group portrait of writers enslaved by drink and redeemed by 'the capacity of literature to somehow...make one feel less flinchingly alone.” ―Booklist (starred review)
“The tortured relationship between literary lions and their liquor illuminates the obscure terrain of psychology and art in this searching biographical medidation....Laing's astute analysis of the pervasive presence and meaning of drink in the writers' texts, and its reflection of the writers' struggle to shape--and escape--reality...A fine study of human frailty through the eyes of its most perceptive victims” ―Publishers Weekly (starred)
“A provocative, evocative blend of memoir, literary history and lyrical travel writing.” ―Kirkus Reviews
“I'm sorry I've finished this wonderful book because I feel I've been talking to a wise friend. I've been trying to work out exactly how Olivia Laing drew me in, because I hardly drink myself and have no particular attachment to the group of writers whose trials she describes. I think the tone is beautifully modulated, knowledgeable yet intimate, and she can evoke a state of mind as gracefully as she evokes a landscape....I think this is a book for all writers or would-be writers, whether succeeding or failing, whether standing on their feet or flat on the pavement....It's one of the best books I've read about the creative uses of adversity: frightening but perversely inspiring.” ―Hilary Mantel, Booker Prize–winning author of Wolf Hall and Bring Up the Bodies
“I loved The Trip to Echo Spring. It's a beautiful book that has stayed with me in a profound way.” ―Nick Cave
“The Trip to Echo Spring...thank God, never reductively answers the question [why writers drink] but thoughtfully explores it through an examination of the lives and careers of 'Tennessee Williams, John Cheever and Raymond Carver among others.” ―Jay McInerney
“A beguiling, beautifully written journey in search of six famous literary drunks. What gives her book its brilliance and originality...[is] the quality of its writing.” ―The Sunday Times (London)
“The beauty of Laing's book lies not just in the poetry of her prose, the rich array of images, and literary allusions to her chosen subjects evoked during her transcontinental ghost-hunt, but intriguing links she makes to a wider literary landscape.” ―The Independent (London)
“Laing's analysis of the complex addiction is consistently shrewd. But what makes The Trip to Echo Spring truly worthwhile is that she, like those she writes about, is a terrific writer.” ―The Times (London)
“This book is a triumphant exercise in creative reading in which diary entries, letters, poems, stories and plays are woven together to explore deep, interconnected themes of dependence, denial and self-destructiveness. It is a testimony to this book's compelling power that having finished it, I immediately wanted to read it again.” ―Scotland on Sunday
“Like a night out with an academically-inclined Elizabeth Taylor or Ava Gardner. Sodden, surprising, riotous, and crazily up and down. Welsh puritan that I am, I loved it.” ―Daily Mail
“The book's subtitle, Why Writers Drink, undersells her achievement.…[Laing has produced] a nuanced portrait--via biography, memoir, analysis--of the urge of the hyperarticulate to get raving drunk.” ―New Statesman (London)
“It's deliciously evocative, Laing's melancholic and lyrical style conjuring the location, before effortlessly segueing into medical facts about alcoholism, the effects on the lives of each writer, and well-chosen passages from their work. This is a highly accomplished book, and highly recommended.” ―List (London)
“Matches smart textual analysis of 20th-century greats with down-and-dirty ferreting....A superb idea, exceptionally well executed.” ―Metro (London)
About the Author
Olivia Laing is the author of To the River, published by Canongate to critical acclaim, and shortlisted for the Ondaatje Prize. She was deputy books editor of the Observer, and writes for The Guardian, New Statesman, and The Times Literary Supplement, among other publications. She lives in Cambridge.
Most helpful customer reviews
0 of 0 people found the following review helpful.
Roots and Routes
By Jaybee
There's no doubt the author did a scholarly job in tieing together the roots of addiction on her route to visit where each tormented writer lived and wrote. Her own story however, not always as interesting, put some bumps on the flow of the work. I found myself skipping some of those parts, and that affected my overall reading experience.
41 of 45 people found the following review helpful.
A sad, beautiful, and important book
By Larry Feign
Many critics and biographers have speculated, pontificated or poked fun at the symbiosis between writers and the bottle, but Olivia Laing delves into their psyches in a quest to truly understand. This book can't help but move you.
Focusing on six well-known American alcoholic writers, Laing, a British author and literary critic, set out on a trip around the USA to visit the places these men inhabited, read through their letters and journals, and speak to surviving relatives, while poring through their published works, trawling for clues, aching for answers. Two committed suicide; two knowingly drank themselves to death. Laing strips the romance and the condemnation from their life stories and paints a picture of six deeply troubled artists.
The book is mostly biography, part journalism about the physiology and psychology of alcoholism, part literary criticism, tied together with interludes of travelogue and memoir, the latter to reveal the author’s personal motivations behind the project. Much emphasis is placed on setting—searching for meaning in the way the authors’ favorite haunts affected both their writing and their personalities—and some of Laing’s strongest writing is in her descriptions of place, in which the language soars.
Why Writers Drink. Does Laing find the answer? I think she does so in the cases of these six writers, though whether that can be extrapolated to all writers and their addictions remains to be seen. Though she demolishes the romanticism associated with artists and alcohol, and provokes deep, thought-provoking questions. Would there have been a “Great Gatsby” or “A Streetcar Named Desire” had their authors not been addicted to drink? As Laing describes in moving detail, John Cheever’s memorable story “The Swimmer” is a journal of his own battle with the bottle. Laing achieves a certain intimacy with each writer, by distilling their excuses and behaviors into literary liquor which is both absorbing and disturbing to read.
There is a certain danger in plumbing the souls of erudite alcoholics—a deep, liquid sadness permeates every page, which lingers for days after finishing. I have to say that my admiration for these writers as people was knocked off its pedestal, but I’m left with a gut-wrenching empathy for each of them.
29 of 30 people found the following review helpful.
Poetry without purpose
By Marci Kesserich
The subject of alcohol and the American author has always fascinated us, for reasons both prosaic and prurient. We hold in our minds a certain romantic image of the hard-drinking writer, a marriage of the Dionysian libertine and the Apollonian artist, trading bon mots at the Algonquin Round Table or sweating pure gin as they hurriedly and brilliantly rewrite Act 3 during the middle of Act 2 on opening night. The gold standard on this subject is of course 'The Thirsty Muse' by Tom Dardis, a set of slim but rich biographical sketches not of his chosen writers but specifically of their alcoholism, written to brilliant effect.
As someone who has always enjoyed the subject, I happily picked up 'The Trip to Echo Spring', excited to read a young woman's perspective on six dead male drunks. In short, I came to this book wanting to enjoy it. I did not. I could provide a running annotation as to why, but that would be repetitive and tiresome. Instead, I will simplify by saying that it has two distinctive failings, one minor and one major, that crucially undermine both its intent and its presentation.
Its minor failing is that Ms. Laing's writing is just overly precious. This is a flaw common to many new talents: their ability to write prettily often precedes their ability to write well. This book is full of lovely, clever sentences, but they neither move her narrative along nor expand upon or elucidate her thesis. With her polished prose she builds landscapes on which nothing moves, houses in which no one lives, and characters who enter and leave the book without incident. Take for instance the following representative passage:
"There were rocking chairs at Charlotte airport and one of the concession stands sold barbecue. The flight to Miami was delayed and by the time we boarded it was already evening. The runway was marked out in glowing dots of green and blue and larger splashes of red, the dark bulk of the city beyond a scattering of gold. A swift sense of pressure in the feet, then we were up in wispy cloud the colour of smoke, and then out into the unencumbered ink-blue of night. I had a sense of being cut loose from all my body's usual routines, and yet I was deeply relaxed, both physically and in my heart."
I truly, honestly don't mean to sound snarky, but this is how Olivia Laing boards her connecting flight to Miami.
Put simply, she has not yet learned to consistently put her imagery and metaphors to work in service of her story, to write prettily with purpose. She will ride a train, and then she will step off it. She will see a street, and then she'll pass by it. The more the reader notices these bloodless scenes the gaudier they seem, like tacky Christmas ornaments that lack even the virtue of a backstory. (See Mark Twain's fourteenth rule of good writing: "Eschew surplussage.") But this is, as I said, a minor failing, and one she'll likely grow out of. The major failing, and the one which fatally undermines the book, is the failure of its central conceit. It tries to marry two stories and ends up telling neither.
Ms. Laing proposes to embark on a pilgrimage to different locales while seeking to provide insight into the role of alcoholism in her chosen American writers. Broadly speaking, there are two ways she could have done this.
The first would be to use the skeleton of her road trip as a running metaphor for her journey into progressively deeper insights into writers and alcoholism, informed by her own personal experience with the subject matter. This would allow her to provide the reader with some of the fundamental medical and biological information they will need at the outset, as well as cursory biographical details on the subjects she'll be exploring, discursively building to a deeper understanding of both the authors and their disease.
The second would be to use various incidents and observations in her travelogue as springboards from which to launch into specific discussions of her authors and their alcoholism. Which is what she does. The problem is one that several other reviewers have noticed: her travelogue is so focused on her own internal processes that when she attempts to return to the ostensible point of her book, one can almost hear the gears grinding; the segueway is disjointed and strained because it is unnatural, artificial, something she imposes on the narrative rather than allowing to flow from it. This should have been her first clue that her approach might be flawed, that if her travelogue was not producing novel episodes or insights then perhaps it was not the best vehicle for reaching her destination.
These transitions are jarring not only within the narrative but stylistically as well. As the reader continues, they notice that Ms. Laing paints the experiences of her authors with broad strokes of solid paint, but her own with fine-tipped daubs of watercolor. The shift between the minute and ultimately pointless observations of the author on cities and sunsets that pass her by, and the shopworn and shallow analysis she provides of her authors is disappointing. One thing required of this sort of excursion is that the author has read deeply of her subjects, that she has identified themes and characters which provide fresh perspectives, that she has identified patterns over time which she can intimately relate to her thesis.
This would be worthwhile and admirable work - unfortunately, it would also be HARD. To read through the life and works of a Williams or Cheever with a critical eye in search of answers to specific questions is scholarship, one that requires hours of patience and reflection and a disciplined attention to detail. It is certainly less work than writing a travel diary first and then adding a cursory review of alcoholism second. To tell us that Fitzgerald drank too much at parties and then note that characters in his stories sometimes also drank too much at parties is no insight, nor does it yield any great revelation to travel to the room where Tennessee Williams once described sleeping under a skylight only to find that, yes, there is a skylight there, and one might easily slide a bed underneath it. What few details she does offer which seem archival in nature turn out to be almost verbatim transcription from other biographers. Had Ms. Laing provided an original analysis of the works of her subjects, using her own perspective and critical faculties to relate them to her subject, she could have indeed produced an excellent book. As it is, what she has given us is a potpourri of quotes, bald biographical details, and a précis of many of their famous works. I do not know that there is much here about these authors that one couldn't find on their respective Wikipedia pages.
Ultimately, the book fails because it never successfully integrates its travelogue with its analysis. The travelogue produces nothing and winds up nowhere, never prompting or informing the discussion the author is attempting to have. When it does awkwardly digress into analysis of the six authors or their writings, it quickly skims the surface of its purported subject, never stopping to sift the sands because (I suspect) she does not know what she is looking for or how to recognize it if she finds it.
This book has received several overwhelmingly positive reviews, almost all of them mentioning the quality of its writing. As a craftswoman of poetic sentences, Olivia Laing is superb. She has proven she can write very pretty prose - I hope that in her next book she will actually put it to use.
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