Drink (64 page)

Changes in the treatment of drinking also occurred in playwriting. The transformation is apparent in the work of Eugene O’Neill, himself a recovered alcoholic, whose late, great dramas—
The Iceman Cometh
(1939),
Long Day’s Journey into Night
(1940), and
A Moon for the Misbegotten
(1943)—focus on the horrors rather than the wonders of intoxication.
The Iceman Cometh
mocks the repetitive speech and mental vacuity of habitual drunks;
Long Day’s Journey
highlights their sense of guilt and state of denial; and
A Moon for the Misbegotten
argues that they are already as good as dead. Jim Tyrone, hero of this last play, is abandoned by its heroine at the conclusion: Despite his wit, despite his wealth, despite her love, he is lost. “May you have your wish and die in your sleep soon, Jim, darling. May you rest forever in forgiveness and peace,” she reflects, as the curtain falls.

O’Neill’s representation of alcoholics as soulless shells, automatons who had lost their ability to love, was strong stuff, even by the standards of ASL propaganda. A similar trend was apparent in fiction. The comic or macho drunks who had graced the pages of Ernest Hemingway were replaced by an altogether darker style of inebriate. Instead, however, of showing the collateral damage drinkers could cause, à la
Ten Nights in a Bar-Room,
and using this to imply their black hearts, novelists went inside their characters’ heads, sometimes sympathetically, and portrayed the personal suffering that alcoholics endured.
Under the Volcano
(1947) by Malcolm Lowry typifies the change in treatment.

Set in Mexico in 1938,
Under the Volcano
follows the last day in the life of an alcoholic British consul who has been posted to a provincial town, in order to keep him from embarrassing his country. According to Lowry, “The idea I cherished in my heart was to create a pioneer work in its own class and to write at last an authentic drunkard’s story.” Much of the action is presented through the eyes of the consul, who drinks steadily, if not to say spectacularly, from page to page. Guilt and hopelessness are his principal emotions; like Faust, he feels he has made a pact with the devil and placed himself beyond redemption. In his creator’s opinion, “the agonies of the drunkard find a very close parallel in the agonies of the mystic who has abused his powers”; and while the consul puts on a brave face, he is certain he is damned:

Lowry himself was an alcoholic who completed his novel in a drift-wood shack on the coast of British Columbia, as far away from daily temptation as he could place himself. His addiction to the bottle was typical of the rising generation of authors, who seem to have received Hemingway’s advice to Fitzgerald, that “all good writers are drunks,” as a mantra. Some took it to extremes, such as Dylan Thomas, Welsh lyrical poet, who killed himself with alcohol in 1953, aged thirty-nine. Just days before he slipped into a fatal coma after a drinking session in the White Horse Tavern in Greenwich Village, he proclaimed, as a matter of pride, “I’ve had eighteen straight whiskies. I think this is a record”— sad words from the man who advocated fighting time until the end.

In the same years that writers were exploring the psychology of heavy drinking in their lives and in their work, a growing number of Americans were joining a new resistance movement against it: Alcoholics Anonymous, a voluntary, altruistic organization that traced its origin to June 10, 1935, the day on which one of its founders took his last drink. The AA was the brain child of two ex-alcoholics, Bill Wilson, a Wall Street speculator, and Dr. Bob Smith, a medic from Ohio. It aimed to help people cure themselves of their longing for drink through a program of mutual aid. In 1939 it published a manifesto,
Alcoholics Anonymous,
known by its devotees as the
Big Book,
which set out a “spiritual toolkit” with which dipsomaniacs might reform themselves via a twelve-step program. The toolkit, which laid a fundamental emphasis on belief in God, was derived from the teachings of the Oxford Group, a Christian cult that had flourished in the mid-1930s.

The AA targeted hopeless alcoholics. Unlike the temperance movement, it made no attempt to brand anyone who drank as a fool committing a potentially fatal error. Instead, it divided drinkers into three classes: those who could take it or leave it; those who couldn’t leave it but could take it, albeit at the risk of some damage; and those who could not take it at all and therefore must leave it. A snapshot of the third category of individual was provided in the Big Book:

In the opinion of the AA, such all-or-nothing drinkers were actually victims, cursed with flawed personalities, which rendered them incapable of resisting alcohol.
“The fact is that most alcoholics, for reasons yet obscure, have lost the power of choice in drink. Our so-called willpower becomes
practically nonexistent. . . . We are without defense against the first drink.”
This no-fault diagnosis, in contrast to the stigma nineteenth-century drys had attached to drunkards, won the AA many converts; as did the tactic of sending reformed drunks to assist those who still suffered. Whereas in 1941, the AA had a mere two thousand members, by 1950 it had nearly ninety thousand, in three thousand separate groups across the United States. Moreover, chapters had been started in twenty-six foreign countries, and in 1950 the AA held a First International Convention. Attendance was strongest from the Anglo-Saxon diaspora and Scandinavian countries, and almost negligible from the wine-drinking regions of old Europe.

The progress of Alcoholics Anonymous in America was recognized in print by
The Saturday Evening Post:
“To anyone who has ever been a drunk or who has had to endure the alcoholic cruelties of a drunk—and that would embrace a large portion of the human family—90,000 alcoholics reconverted into working citizens represent a massive dose of pure gain. In human terms, the achievements of Alcoholics Anonymous stand out as one of the few encouraging developments of a rather grim and destructive half century.” The magazine also noted that the membership of the association had become, since its inception, progressively younger and increasingly feminine. Average age had dropped from forty-seven to thirty-five, and women comprised 15 percent of total membership, although in New York City a full 30 percent were female. Other such regional variations were apparent across America. While, in accordance with its name, the AA shielded the identity of its members, groups in Los Angeles were happy to flaunt their status as recovered drunkards. They staged mass meetings of up to a thousand ex-inebriates, and wore gold rings with an AA monogram, and stickpins in their ties, set with various precious stones whose color announced how long they had been dry. In New England, in contrast, AA goers treasured their anonymity.

However, certain aspects of the modus operandi of the AA attracted criticism, in particular its insistence on the acknowledgment of the existence of God as a prelude to sobriety. In the words of the
Big Book:
“We believe there is no ‘middle-of-the-road solution’ and that salvation is not possible without spiritual help. Morals and philosophy on their own are not enough.” The organization itself recognized that such insistence acted as a deterrent to agnostic and atheist drinkers, who might otherwise benefit from its aid. It advised members, when proselytizing, to “stress the spiritual feature freely” and to emphasize to a potential convert “that
he does not have to agree with your conception of God.
He can choose any conception he likes, provided it makes sense to him.
The main thing is that he be willing to believe in a Power greater than himself and that he live by spiritual principles.
” For those unwilling to believe, the AA recommended tough love: Leave them in their misery until they’re ready.

The AA’s perceived support of the alcoholism-as-disease theory was also controversial. Medical science had made considerable advances since the days of Benjamin Rush, pioneer of the idea, and Mary Hannah Hunt, the WCTU firebrand who had got it onto the school curriculum. Drinking did not fit easily with modern concepts of disease. It made no sense to equate a dry martini to the cholera bacteria either in its nature or effects. Moreover, if alcoholism really was a disease, why didn’t every drinker catch it? However, the belief that the AA endorsed the concept, combined with its evident success in curing drunks, led to a vogue for the theory in the press and attracted criticism from more sober observers. While Bill Wilson later clarified the official position of the AA, his clarification was ambiguous enough to please each side in the controversy: “We AAs have never called alcoholism a disease because, technically speaking, it is not a disease entity. For example, there is no such thing as heart disease. Instead there are many separate heart ailments or combinations of them. It is something like that with alcoholism. Therefore, we did not wish to get in wrong with the medical profession by pronouncing alcoholism a disease entity. Hence, we have always called it an illness or a malady—a far safer term for us to use.”

Despite such equivocation, the disease theory of alcoholism gained increasing credence in the 1950s. In 1951, the World Health Organization acknowledged alcoholism to be a serious medical problem, and in 1956 the American Medical Association classified it as a treatable sickness. Moreover, the disease theory was accepted as true by a new federal organization, the National Council for Education on Alcohol (NCEA), and adopted as the flagship policy of the Center of Alcohol Studies at Yale University, led by E. M. Jellinek. In 1960, Jellinek published
The Disease Concept of Alcoholism,
which defined the affliction by its symptoms, which included an insatiable thirst and erratic behavior.

A number of treatments were developed to combat the new illness. The first was a pharmacological version of electrotherapy, which hitherto had been a common remedy for drunkenness. A high-voltage charge across the frontal lobes sometimes converted inebriates to abstinence at the flick of a switch. Sadly, such conversions were rare, and hence the appearance of a drug promising the same transformations in behavior was greeted with excitement in the medical profession. The drug was disulfiram, a patented version of which, called Antabuse, was offered to American alcoholics in 1951. Antabuse plus even small amounts of booze generated an instantaneous and violent hangover in the drinker, who could expect to enjoy hot flushes, a throbbing head, copious vomiting, hyperventilation, tachycardia, hypotension, syncope, vertigo, and confusion, all within a few minutes of sneaking a drink. Not only did Antabuse make drinking painful, but it was also on occasions fatal—negative reactions to it included “acute congestive heart failure, unconsciousness, convulsions, and death.” Such strong medicine clearly was not suited to every alcoholic, and experiments were made with other drugs, notably LSD.

The treatment of drunks with LSD was pioneered by Dr. Humphry Osmond in Saskatchewan, Canada, in the early 1950s. Osmond, who coined the term
psychedelic
and defined it in a ditty (“To fathom hell or soar angelic, just take a pinch of psychedelic”), tested LSD on schizophrenics before moving on to alcoholics. His patients included Bill Wilson, one of the founders of AA, who was still lapsing fifteen years on, and he claimed a 50 percent success rate overall. Osmond, together with Abram Hoffer, also investigated the potential of nicotinic acid and its amide, aka niacin, as a cure for the disease of alcoholism. Wilson once again volunteered as guinea pig and reported favorably. He reintroduced the name Vitamin B
₃
for niacin and recommended it to fellow alcoholics as an antidote to the anxiety, tension, and depression to which they were prone. However, the AA did not endorse his views on either LSD or Vitamin B. If effective pharmacological therapies existed for alcoholism, then what need for a belief in God and the twelve steps? LSD fell further out of favor when nonalcoholics started taking it for fun.

Disease or not, drinking was infecting an increasing number of Americans at the midpoint of the twentieth century. According to federal figures, annual per capita consumption had doubled from a post-Prohibition low of roughly a gallon of pure alcohol in 1934 to 2 gallons in 1950— about the same level as it had been in 1916, when teetotalers were predicting an imminent collapse in the morals and economy of the country. Beer was America’s favorite beverage—in 1950 the average drinker got through 23 gallons each year, supplemented with 1.73 gallons of liquor and 1.27 of wine. The demand for beer was supplied by national brewing companies, who sold uniform products coast to coast. Advances in the chemical processing of water had made it possible to produce homogeneous beer wherever—California Budweiser could be identical to Virginian. Once they had established complete control over their product, the brewers sought to gain market share through national advertising campaigns—in periodicals, on the radio, at the movies, and via the newfangled television. Whereas in 1938 the industry spent six million dollars per annum on advertising, by 1950 it was spending over fifty million. It also became involved in the sponsorship of sporting events. The link between beer drinking and athleticism had been established by Colonel Jacob Ruppert, beer baron and owner of the New York Yankees. Ball games were perfect events at which to promote and to sell beer, and other brewers followed suit.