by Deirdre Sinnott
David Bowie’s deep ironic voice slipped about my bedroom and murmured in my ear, “We want you, Big Brother.” And I wanted him. What better way to slide next to my beloved Bowie than to read the book that inspired him?
So at about 15 years old, I read 1984 by George Orwell and mostly missed the point.
Putting aside the totalitarianism and the love story (yeah, yeah, totalitarianism bad, love good), the thing that stuck with me was the gin—Victory Gin. Here is how Orwell introduces it: “It gave off a sickly, oily smell, as of Chinese rice-spirit. Winston poured out nearly a teacupful, nerved himself for a shock, and gulped it down like a dose of medicine. Instantly his face turned scarlet and the water ran out of this eyes. The stuff was like nitric acid, and moreover, in swallowing it one had the sensation of being hit on the back of the head with a rubber club. The next moment, however, the burning in his belly died down and the world began to look more cheerful.”
Rubber club to the back of the head? Give me some of that. Anything that could morph my world into something more cheerful sounded worth the pain of swallowing. I remember the book being much more gin-soaked than it is. Winston Smith does not start out as an alcoholic. Eventually, after a resurrecting and heartbreaking illicit interlude, gin, which grew more horrible with every sip, became “…the element he swam in. It was his life, his death, and his resurrection.”
The magic was in the bottle. As I sat in humdrum classes and walked the peaceful streets of Clinton, New York, I dreamed of transforming my conventional life. I believed that alcohol, combined with a drastic change of scenery, would perform that trick. By the time I got to those books I was already proto-alcoholic. I had sipped the dregs of my mother’s daily cocktail of scotch and water, sampled beer during furtive gatherings in the chill of upstate winter nights, and plundered my parents’ liquor cabinet for ancient, rarely-touched bottles of sweet after-dinner liqueurs. I fixated on the booze and tapped my foot through high school, marking time until I could drink as much as I wanted.
Ernest Hemingway’s The Sun Also Rises introduced me to drinking wine out of a goatskin bag. I completely missed Hemingway’s not-so-subtle reference to the war injury that left Jake castrated. I was mystified by Jake’s frustrating and unconsummated relationship with Brett. But, if they were too dumb to see themselves as a couple, what could I do about it? I missed that their drinking showed the emotional devastation of the generation of World War One soldiers and survivors. These people weren’t getting on with their lives; they idled and floated through a river of booze and distractions. In the aftermath of a muddy, bloody, brutal war, a peaceful world made no sense. Why try to navigate life’s absurdities when you can watch strapping youths fighting bulls or go fishing for fat trout in cold mountain streams or drink until dawn?
Again I missed the point. Instead, I imagined the time when wine would be sprayed out of a goatskin and into my willing mouth. I wanted to kneel on the ground and have my lover stand above me, holding the skin about crotch-high, and shoot a warm load of red wine past my teeth and down my throat.
The me who so misread those books tried to be sophisticated, older, literate. I wanted to place myself among world travelers. I longed to feel something, to break away from the mundane and predictable. I lived in a small village and attended a central school where the daughters and sons of college professors mixed with kids who completed early morning chores on their parents’ dairy farms to hop on a school bus. I was a girl who hated wearing dresses, hated the idea of weakness, hated time spent submitting to feminine norms. I wanted to be on battlefields of Middle-earth, or investigating castles in Transylvania, or surviving on the hard streets of Tulsa with Ponyboy Curtis, or assisting Dr. Frankenstein in his electrified laboratory, reanimating lifeless tissue.
When I look at the young me, sitting on her bed, infatuated with Bowie, 1984 on her bedside table, I wonder why I connected so strongly with the lure of drinking. As I dreamed of tramping through Europe or running from authorities or wherever my romantic imagination took me, it was inconceivable that alcohol might stop me. Alcohol was the diving off point, the catalyst. Not the smothering, soaking blanket it became. I expected alcohol to take me away. Instead I dragged booze along until the hangovers, the dangerous dozing on late night subway cars, the stumbling drunkenness, the adulterous affairs, the gut emptying episodes, and the lure of drug and alcohol soaked relationships became too heavy to bear.
As I read these books now, 35 years and an encyclopedia’s worth of experiences later, I think I get them. Totalitarianism bad. Love doomed. Castration frustrating. War psychically devastating. And alcohol potentially life draining, at least in the hands of Winston, Jake and me.
Deirdre Sinnott, a regular contributor to Drinking Diaries, is working on a memoir called Drunk Dreams. You can find more information about Deirdre on her website.
this is a wonderful piece, Deirdre. You might enjoy some of the things I post especially the sample chapter from my memoir of those days, Nightfall in Verona, posted as its own page at http://loquaciouslyyours.com– my other blog. xxxJenne’
Wonderful writing with Deirdre’s knack for mixing humor and pathos. This is an essay that will resonate with everyone–drinkers or not.
Thank you Jenne and Tina. Rereading both books was a wonderful assignment. Youthful fantasies be damned. There’s more to them than gin and wine.
I love this. Growing up in central New York, knowing I’d have to go _somewhere else_. Escaping into fantasy worlds every night; a book a night, using sleep deprivation as a primitive form of antidepressant. I used pot to suppress the desire to rape and pillage, which is strong in all adolescent males. (I actually would have preferred sex to rape and could take or leave the pillaging, but basically, I feel pot is best used as a male anti-pillaging agent.) Anxiety stopped the pot and social isolation stopped the drinking, so I am now simply bipolar 2 on life.
Remember: Pillage THEN burn.
Joking aside, I’m glad to be relived of my stream of violent thoughts. I remember keeping a little chart going at work. Each time I had a violent thought I’d make a mark. Each time I had a sexual thougth I’d make another mark. Violence far outweighted the sex.
These days I only get violent at the dry cleaners when they steal my buttons.
Wine out of a goatskin, chianti in a straw-covered jug, Pernod at the Cafe du Monde- who can remember those exotic, very trippy places? Deirdre, your writing just gets better and better. Glad I found this blog.
Thanks Travel Gal!
Wine out of a goatskin, chianti in a straw-covered jug, Pernod at the Cafe du Monde- who can remember those exotic, very trippy places? Deirdre, your writing just gets better and better. Glad I found this blog.
Excellent portrayal of what an addictive person actually sees/hears. Well-demonstrated that an alcoholic personality reads these classics and “gets” the lure of alcohol when there is so much more at work. Well-written, Deirdre.
It’s interesting how a focus on alcohol in literature (a seemingly good idea) misses the really big ideas like totalitarianism and the horrors of war in the novels of Orwell and Hemingway. When I was still drinking, I pushed away the alcohol which might have been prevalent in my literature. In my sobriety, however, I am finding that I focus far more on alcohol in literature than I ever did before I was sober, perhaps because now I can face it as it relates to me. In currently reading many of the novels of the Victorian writer George Gissing, I am finding him a brilliant analyzer of how alcholic the Victorians really were.