Peloothered

Intoxerated by Paul Dickson


Ah, the holidays. The end of the year. When you celebrate by a cozy fire with the shiver of time in your fillings. When you cozy up to those you love best and those who therefore make you crazy. In other words, time to drink.

Melville House Books's "Definitive Drinker's Dictionary," Intoxerated, a fun compendium of annotated synonyms for the word drunk, provides the literary drinker with a smidgeon of words to go with his smahan of whiskey. (Smeahán being Irish, according to the OED, for a drop of whiskey; see James Joyce's wonderfully woeful drinking story, "Counterparts.")

Herman Melville himself, however, took a somewhat dryer approach when he launched American literature "on the high seas" (one of many sailing metaphors for drunk according to Paul Dickson's book). Having adopted some of the abstemious spirit of old Nantucket, perhaps, Melville introduces alcohol in chapter 3 of Moby Dick with a barkeep named Jonah who "dearly sells the sailors delirium and death. Abominable are the tumblers into which he pours his poison." One sailor there in the Spouter Inn abstains from drink, and when the sailor (named Bulkington) reappears in chapter 23, "The Lee Shore," it's as the type who eschews the false comforts of shore for the raw, cold, hard truths of the ocean. Under the terms of the allegory that spans chapters 3 and 23 of Moby Dick, alcohol counts among the false comforts.

Certainly, alcohol blunts reality, not least the reality of one's own self; isn't that why people need it? The many euphemisms for drunkenness are a further evasion. But as much as drinking is an honorable literary pastime, the many euphemisms for it appear relatively uncommon in literary works, perhaps because such works deal in undiluted truths, and in novels and stories alcohol is either the antidote to realities too acutely perceived or the disinhibiting solvent that liberates a character from his blinding fear.

Ernest Hemingway's hard-drinking characters in The Sun Also Rises seem to chase from bar to bar partly in flight and partly in search of liberation from self-deceptions much deeper than mere intoxication. Drinking in that novel is like a portal through which a tortured soul might claw back some semblance of pleasure, aggression, instinct, sincerity. Perhaps as a consequence, Hemingway relies mainly on the self-sufficient term "drunk," which is like onomatopoeia for the sound of the soul denting its rear fender on the telephone pole of life. There's one exception in the dialogue toward the beginning of part II: when Jake judges Bill much drunker than he is and calls him "pie-eyed" (p. 78).

Euphemisms for drunkenness are equally scarce in Ken Kesey's One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest. A multi-faceted Shame has driven the mental patients in that book into the unhealthy safety of Nurse Ratched's psych ward, and alcohol enters as a sort of holy reprieve from Shame. Drunkenness sets up a cataclysmic change in Chief Bromden that ultimately emancipates him from fear:

As I walked after them it came to me as a kind of sudden surprise that I was drunk, actually drunk, glowing and grinning and staggering drunk for the first time since the Army, drunk along with half a dozen other guys and a couple of girls--right on the Big Nurse's ward! p. 260.

Daisy Buchanan appears “drunk as a monkey” on p. 70 of The Great Gatsby, and the phrase is duly noted in Dickson’s Intoxerated, but otherwise F. Scott Fitzgerald too treats inebriation with a certain sobriety. Alcohol flows through his novel’s pages as through a human bloodstream. It’s the medium through which the characters think, a disorienting twilight between dream and reality. Of note, neither Daisy nor Gatsby are heavy drinkers (see pp. 71 and 91). They are not content to live in dreamy drunken twilight, but strive to escape into a hypothetical place where dreams turn solid and come true.

In Joyce’s story “Counterparts” and in others in Dubliners, alcohol seems to purify the element of self-destruction in characters, but the penultimate story, “Grace,” celebrates a bit of drinking, even to excess. In a spirit of self-sympathy rather than self-destruction, Joyce makes use of one of those funny synonyms for drunk: Mr Cunningham calls Tom Kernan "peloothered" (Dubliners Viking Critical Library edition, p. 160; Dickson may want to add this one, as he has "plootered" but not "peloothered" on p. 134!). Kernan was so peloothered that he fell down the steps to the lavatory and bit the end of his tongue off. The funny euphemism seems to handle Mr Kernan’s indignity with a certain care and gentleness—perhaps because Kernan and his friends have already made their peace with instinct. "Glasses were rinsed and five small measures of whisky were poured out,” Joyce writes on p. 167. “The new influence enlivened the conversation." And on p. 169 comes one of my favorite lines on drinking: "The light music of whisky falling into glasses made an agreeable interlude." “Grace” is a wonderful story about moderation, and it very consciously applies the principle of moderation to moderation itself. In other words, to be perfectly moderate, and not too abstemious, you must also be immoderate now and again.

When I arrived in Connecticut for Christmas, my brother-in-law had a nice bottle of sipping tequila, a Centenario añejo, waiting for me. It stood me in good stead through four and a half hours of assembly of a “wired control robotic arm kit” for my older son, and through other minor holiday travails. So let’s raise a glass and face the New Year ah-wat-si (“crazy-brave,” according to the Blackfeet Indians, Dickson p. 16), if not completely jugged, lock-legged, and shot in the mouth. :*)

Epiphany in Dubliners

Dubliners: Text and Criticism by James Joyce


Dubliners was James Joyce's first book, and it's his most accessible, and possibly his most influential. The critic A. Walton Litz called Dubliners “a turning point in the development of English fiction.” Marc Wollaeger, editor of the Oxford Casebook on A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, writes that “Dubliners … virtually invented the modern short story.”

I don't know if Joyce invented the modern short story, but I can see pretty much everywhere in contemporary fiction the influence of Dubliners, of its Shakespearean / Chekhovian trope of self-discovery affixed with a technique of beautiful naturalistic symbolism--the blend of ancient artistic modes which Joyce called "epiphany." Joyce's writing style in Dubliners has more in common with Hemingway than it does with Virginia Woolf or William Faulkner (and Hemingway's best short stories clearly reflect Joyce's influence), but the characters in Dubliners are generally somewhat warmer and more vulnerable than Hemingway characters and Joyce depicts men and women with equal grace.

Brewster Ghiselin said in 1956 that the stories are organized according to the seven Christian virtues and the seven deadly sins, with each of the first fourteen stories assigned to a virtue or sin and the fifteenth story, the masterpiece "The Dead," thrown in for a delicious baker's dozen of tales of inner torment. I think it's obvious that Joyce did use that structure, though he turns vice and virtue on its head in the manner of Henrik Ibsen as he attacks the damaging institutions of psychological paralysis and self-mortification.

"The Sisters," the first story in this collection and the one that formally introduces the topic of psychological paralysis, is my personal favorite, but the two most famous stories, "Araby" and "The Dead," deserve all the praise they get.

I like the Viking Critical Library edition, at least the one that was published in 1976; the essays in the back are unusually helpful.

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Jack Kerouac's Harmonica and Mary Shelley's Hair

The Museum of Modern Art defines a Wunderkammer like this:

Wunderkammern, or cabinets of curiosities, arose in mid-sixteenth-century Europe as repositories for all manner of wondrous and exotic objects. In essence these collections—combining specimens, diagrams, and illustrations from many disciplines; marking the intersection of science and superstition; and drawing on natural, manmade, and artificial worlds—can be seen as the precursors to museums.

To celebrate its 100th anniversary, the New York Public Library has unleashed from its storehouse of artifacts a Wunderkammer to rival even those in the Morgan Library, which owns more Gutenberg Bibles than I do televisions. On Thursday, I decided to work for a bit at the library at 42nd Street before a lunch meeting.

However, I couldn't work there, because I was ensnared by the unexpected Wunderkammer there on the first floor. Within, I saw in glass cases: e.e. cummings's typewriter (a Royal); Hemingway's Nobel acceptance speech, which he wrote inside the back cover of John P. Marquand's Thirty Years (because it was blowing so hard that day by the pool in Havana); Charlotte Bronte's writing desk; Charles Dickens's letter opener, apparently ivory and of rapier length, with "C.D. In Memory of Bob 1862" engraved on it and bearing a handle made from the paw of his deceased cat (Bob); Virginia Woolf's diary and the cane that Leonard Woolf found floating in the River Ouse after she killed herself; a lock of Mary Shelley's hair (which Mary had sent to Thomas Jefferson Hogg as a token of affection at the behest of Percy, who encouraged her to have affairs so that he could in good conscience have his own); Jack Kerouac's harmonica and Valium pills; George Washington's handwritten farewell address (never delivered orally, but evidently the precedent for many later empty farewell platitudes); a letter from Picasso to Jean Cocteau; a Gutenberg bible (just one, though--point to Morgan Library); a funny typed letter from Groucho Marx to Harold Robbins of The New Yorker, signed; a Beethoven score messily handwritten (by Beethoven); Jerome Robbins's colorful diaristic collage including tickets to shows, programs, drawings, and scribblings; a book hand-painted by Joan Miró; a marked-up draft of Jorge Luis Borges's story "The Lottery in Babylon," written on graph paper in his micrographic hand (each letter is about three millimeters high); the first photographically illustrated book (Photographs of British Algae--Cyanotype Impressions by Anna Atkins, 1880); Richard Wright's diaries; Malcolm X's diaries (he wrote the most mundane things in them--apparently he took a lot of naps); a signed copy of Mein Kampf; a Kiki Smith self-portrait that's described as having been painted with her "hair" (when it's fairly obvious it was painted with her pubic hair); a Thomas Edison "Gem" Wax Cylinder Phonograph in pristine condition; a typed draft of "The Wasteland" by T.S. Eliot with handwritten comments and suggestions from Ezra Pound (such as "Wonderful!" alongside some now famous verse as if "The Wasteland" were a high school term paper and T.S. Eliot the student!); and thirty or more small cuneiform tablets from several millennia ago, one of which was juxtaposed with a plugged-in MacBook showing Thursday's New York Times, digital edition, with an image in the middle of it of a poster of Vladimir Putin.

I was enthralled--until I began to feel a little like I did while going through my wife's great aunt's personal effects at her house in South Bend, Indiana after she was dead. (There was nothing in the great aunt's house so rarefied as Mary Shelley's hair, but there were jugs of Canadian Mist whiskey and Fleischman's vodka on the floor of her bedroom closet.) I told an editor enthusiastically about Virginia Woolf's cane and he said ironically, "Do you think you have a morbid side, Austin?" I realize now that the rarest and most exotic items in the NYPL Wunderkammer were indeed also the most morbid. It occurs to me that even a one-of-a-kind painting gives out a faint scent of the morgue; but the huge reproduction of Kiki Smith's pubic hair, besides focusing the viewer's mind on genitals, was also redolent of life because it wasn't entombed in the coffin of a solitary glass case. It was a participant in the present and the future--in some way alive in the way that living things are alive. It was replicated, propagating itself through many doors, into many spaces, many minds, moving, engaging, interacting, changing others (if itself incapable of change) and incorporating itself into others and so into the future, alive, alive, alive, like Shelley's monster, alive.

Which is to say: I don't think I can join Walter Benjamin in his gloom over the prospects for art in the age of mechanical reproduction.