"Jeffrey Bernard Was Unwell, and Wonderful."

Twice previously, I've written about Jeffrey Bernard.

Jeffrey Bernard was unwell, but I'm feeling fine, thank you.

Got a Drinking Problem? "Jeffrey Bernard Is Unwell."

The third time's bound to be the charm. For those doubting the ability of a reformed alcoholic to write sympathetically about another who never did, Bosley's account is a corrective. Whether there is glamour in drinking oneself to death can be decided by the reader. There was a time when it appealed to me. Now, not very much.

Jeffrey Bernard Was Unwell, and Wonderful, by Deborah Bosley (The Fix)

... His other regular watering hole and second home, The Coach and Horses, was around the corner from the Groucho on Greek Street, and had become something of a destination as people came along hoping to catch a glimpse of the legendary writer and drinker. Jeff had made a career and built his considerable notoriety around a life of excess but he wasn't just some drunk who made people laugh; he wrote with elegance and insight, was a cultured man with considerable knowledge of music and naval history, particularly his hero, Lord Nelson. He was complex and contradictory and though drinking often made him foul-tempered, he was capable of great charm.

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THE POTABLE CURMUDGEON: “The Drinker” (A Book Review).

THE POTABLE CURMUDGEON: “The Drinker” (A Book Review).

A weekly column by Roger A. Baylor.

A respectable 40-year-old businessman returns home from a normal workday to discover that the maid has neglected to replace the floor mat by the front door.

Annoyed at the omission, he tracks mud into the entryway, is mildly chided by his wife and becomes uncharacteristically angered.

A short time later, he suddenly recalls the existence of a long-forgotten, stale and vinegary bottle of red wine stashed in the cellar. Although a virtual teetotaler, a glass of this rancid wine helps to take the edge off his day, and he feels far better. The floor mat spat now forgotten, he gifts his wife with money to buy herself something special, and goes to bed.

Next thing we know, his permanent residence is an insane asylum.

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For Americans of a certain age, reading Hans Fallada’s novel The Drinker brings to mind the Simpsons episode, wherein a flashback depicts Barney’s very first drink of beer, as offered to him by Homer. With one swallow, the well-groomed and sober young dandy morphs immediately into a swollen, drunken slob, forever destined for dissolution, and hilariously so.

A similar downward trajectory awaits Fallada’s main character, Herr Sommer – and there is little humor to be found in this amazingly detailed and poetically rendered description of a descent into lunacy. However, the story of The Drinker doesn’t end with a gripping, frightening novel, because the circumstances surrounding Fallada’s fictional work hardly were imaginary at the time of its writing.

Hans Fallada’s real name was Rudolf Wilhelm Friedrich Ditzen. He was born in Greifswald, Germany in 1893, and died in Berlin in 1947. In 1944, with World War II still raging throughout the continent, Fallada managed to write The Drinker in two weeks flat while incarcerated … in an insane asylum.

It would have been an incredible feat of concentration anytime and anywhere, much less one undertaken secretively in an institution run by the Nazis, who obviously were unbound by considerations of the Hippocratic oath.

In fact, Fallada’s entire life was not easy. A severe injury to his head during adolescence seemed to have changed him, and it may have led directly to lifelong mental health issues, suicide attempts and drug addiction, and yet, in that strange way sometimes characterizing an artist’s process of creation, Fallada became an exceptionally gifted writer prone to frenetic periods of work activity followed by elongated spirals into madness.

During the 1920s, Fallada married and enjoyed an extended period of domestic harmony and commercial success, including a worldwide readership for his novel, Little Man, What Now? But a collision course with Hitler’s totalitarian regime was inevitable owing to its determination to channel all manifestations of art into approved delineations of support for the regime.

Storm clouds gathered, yet Fallada chose to remain in Germany and did not seek exile, spending the war years walking a tightrope -- neither an overt collaborator, nor seeking involvement with the resistance. From our vantage point these many years later, cohabitation with repression does not seem the ideal path for a writer possessing only a fragile grip on sanity, who already was peering into the abyss with clock-like frequency.

Fallada tried his best to wait it out. Perhaps these pressures hastened his demise, but maybe he was doomed, anyway -- just like the rest of us.

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Does Fallada’s wartime work as a writer represent acquiescence with the various Goebbels party lines, or was he endeavoring to write in the sparse available spaces between them? The debate persists to this day. Was The Drinker allegorical, suggesting the common man’s struggle to cope with oppression?

Or, was it an autobiographical work so meticulously researched from personal experience that larger themes aren’t really necessary? Of course, it’s up to the reader to decide.

Getting through The Drinker is like watching a cat torture a mouse before killing it. As the pages turn, Herr Sommer’s layers of dysfunction are unsparingly peeled away by the first-person narrative, and the deep-seated rot is unblinkingly exposed. It becomes clear that none of the character’s many difficulties originate with that first drink of spoiled wine; rather, the alcohol merely emboldens them.

It transpires that Sommer already has started losing grip of his business, and is growing apart from his wife, whom he resents for being efficient when he is anything but. The lies and self-deceptions merely require readily available fuel to explode into self-destructive behavior of epic proportions, and bottles of schnapps and cognac typically consumed with the speed that most of us reserve for ice water during a hot afternoon in the garden are ideal for ignition.

When describing the weeks-long binge embarked upon by Sommer, Fallada’s prose is hazy and replete with confusion, self-loathing and false bravado, but when he lands in jail and begins drying out, matters become quite clinical. Eventually transferred to the asylum to receive the “help” he quite clearly needs, the inmate offers a portrait of daily life therein that is detached, detailed and thoroughly horrendous.

By novel’s end, has anyone been saved?

It’s unlikely. There are no Hollywood-style happy endings to The Drinker, a novel that I recommend unreservedly, although not without certain caveats. If you’ve ever wondered whether your most recent drink was one too many, owing not to ordinary intoxication, but to extraordinary curiosity as to whether there might come a point when the altered state persists even after the alcohol’s gone away … well, Fallada’s tale will not be an easy read.

It wasn’t easy for me.

So, is it Happy Hour yet?

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May 23: THE POTABLE CURMUDGEON: A few beers on Estonian time (Part Two).

May 16: THE POTABLE CURMUDGEON: A few beers on Estonian time (Part One).

May 9: THE POTABLE CURMUDGEON: Hip Hops ... A look at two new New Albany breweries.

May 2: SPRING BREAK

April 26: THE POTABLE CURMUDGEON: The mouse, the elephant, and a clash of nonpareils ... part two.

April 25: THE POTABLE CURMUDGEON: The mouse, the elephant, and a clash of nonpareils ... part one.

_

From NA Confidential: "The life and death of Charles Kennedy."

This posting from my other blog isn't about beer at all. It's about a disease that far too few of us in the beer business take as seriously as we should. Moreover, it's about my fascination with a tiny factoid: Charles Kennedy spent a brief period in Bloomington at Indiana University, which at the time was legendary for partying.

The links make for sobering reading, even without political context.

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Kennedy in 1987 (photo credit to the Washington Post)

In 1988, I was fortunate to land my first and only "real" corporate job abstracting periodicals at the now long-defunct UMI Data-Courier in Louisville. I lived off my evening package store pay and bankrolled as much as I could to make what became a six-month stay in Europe in 1989.

During my tenure at UMI Data Courier, it transpired that our British and other English language publications from abroad (The Economist, The Spectator, New Statesman, even Punch) were increasingly shunted onto my stack of work by fellow staffers after it became known that the new guy rather enjoyed reading them, and more importantly, wasn’t troubled by the English essayist’s general habit of hiding the topic sentence somewhere other than the opening paragraph. We had quotas, you know.

Charles Kennedy, who recently died and has been eulogized as a somewhat tragic, Shakespearean political personage, would have been a mere stripling during the period of my abstracting career. We were just about the same age, after all, but he was already a Member of Parliament, destined for greater things -- some of which Kennedy achieved, as with his iconic speech in opposition to the UK joining George W. Bush's war against Iraq.

In the end, Kennedy was felled by drink, and I don't make the citation flippantly. Following are three links that tell Kennedy's story.

The Charles Kennedy Story, by Alex Hunt & Brian Wheeler (BBC News)

Lib Dem leader Charles Kennedy led his party to their best ever election result in 2005 but, battling a drink problem, had to resign a few months later. After his death at the age of 55, here's a look back at the life and career of one of the most influential politicians of his generation.

Kennedy's alcohol problems can be seen in a larger context.

Charles Kennedy’s alcohol problem was also Britain’s alcohol problem, by Hadley Freeman (The Guardian)

For the past decade, Charles Kennedy was treated by too many people as little more than a joke. This is, and was, in no way a reflection on the reportedly delightful man himself or his excellent abilities as a politician. It might not be so comfortable for some to remember now, seeing as the coverage of his very sad and all too early death has been focusing on Kennedy’s many strengths, with much emphasis being placed on his stand against the Iraq war.

Yet until yesterday, I hadn’t heard much mention of this for 10 years. Instead, whenever Kennedy’s name has been invoked on topical news shows – by half-assed comedians, by too many members of the public – it has been followed by a joking reference to his drinking problem.

Note the title of this 1999 profile of Kennedy, written as he was about to assume leadership of the Liberal Democrats. His brief period living in Bloomington, Indiana during a time when Indiana University enjoyed a nationwide reputation as a "party" school makes me wonder whether any friends ever crossed paths with him.

Profile: Charles Kennedy - The liberal party animal, by Donald MacIntyre (The Independent)

(Kennedy) was president of the university union before winning a Fulbright scholarship to Indiana University where he went to do to a PhD - and teach - political rhetoric after a spell working as a seasonal radio reporter in the BBC Highland office in Inverness. He was at Indiana University when the Liberal/SDP Alliance candidacy for the seat of Ross, Cromarty and Skye came up. Among several people he consulted was his former colleague - and later the BBC's hugely respected Scottish political editor - the late Kenny Macintyre, who had been something of a mentor and had urged him to have a crack at it. His father Ian toured the constituency, the largest in Britain - "two million acres of mountain glen and moors" as Kennedy junior described it - with his son, playing the fiddle to attract the more apolitical to meetings. At one, in Skye, a wag urged him not to prolong his speech shouting: "Aye, we know who you are, now come on Ian give us another tune."

Kennedy won the election at the tender age of 23. He was only 55 when he died.

Perhaps sometimes, being precocious isn't the best design for life.

This may be the only honest piece of "beer writing" I've read in 2014.

This may be the only honest piece of "beer writing" I've read in 2014 ... and that includes my own scribbling. Writing well is very, very hard, and the best way to approach it is to tell the truth and write what you know. Sometimes, what you know is awfully hard to write with honesty.

The King has left the building, by John King (at LouisvilleBeer.com)

No teaser. Just hit the link and read it.

Thanks, John. I didn't know ... and it's fairly miraculous that you held out this long.

AB-InBev guilty of exploiting Native Americans AND Bud Light Lime-A-Rita.

I recall a minor episode in Shakespeare's "Julius Caesar," wherein the mob mistakes a poet named Cinna for a conspirator of the same name.

Cinna the Poet. Truly, my name is Cinna.

First Citizen. Tear him to pieces; he's a conspirator.

Cinna the Poet. I am Cinna the poet, I am Cinna the poet.

Fourth Citizen. Tear him for his bad verses, tear him for his bad verses.

In like fashion, there's no need to tear Anheuser-Busch InBev (let's not omit the multinational connection, Nicholas) to pieces solely on one persuasive count of exploiting Native Americans. Just tear AB-InBev over its bad beer.

A Battle With the Brewers, by Nicholas D. Kristof (New York Times)

After seeing Anheuser-Busch’s devastating exploitation of American Indians, I’m done with its beer.

The human toll is evident here in Whiteclay: men and women staggering on the street, or passed out, whispers of girls traded for alcohol. The town has a population of about 10 people, but it sells more than four million cans of beer and malt liquor annually — because it is the main channel through which alcohol illegally enters the Pine Ridge Indian Reservation a few steps away ...

... For now, Pine Ridge’s alcohol problem is matched only by Anheuser-Busch’s greed problem. Brewers market beers with bucolic country scenes, but the image I now associate with Budweiser is of a child with fetal alcohol syndrome.

That’s why I’ll pass on a Bud, and I hope you’ll join me.