Paul Thomas: A toast to literature's excess stories

Paul Thomas

We'll have to wait for the posthumous hatchet jobs - otherwise known as unauthorised biographies - for confirmation, but the current generation of writers seems to conform to the spirit of these health-conscious times.

For most of last century, though, it appeared the literary fraternity - yet again the womenfolk can be largely excused - were hell-bent on establishing the truth or otherwise of William Blake's axiom that the road of excess leads to the palace of wisdom.

Raymond Chandler, the Shakespeare of the crime novel, was prone to the sort of amnesia-inducing benders which he summarised as going out for a beer and waking up in Singapore with a full beard.

It's hard to know which is more cautionary - the morose reclusion into which he sank in later life or the fecklessness of his bar-fly period: "I can remember sitting around with two or three congenial chumps and getting plastered to the hairline in the most agreeable manner. We ended up doing acrobatics on the furniture and driving home in the moonlight, missing pedestrians by a thin millimetre and laughing heartily at the idea of a man trying to walk on two legs."

Welsh poet Dylan Thomas defined an alcoholic as "someone you don't like who drinks as much as you do". According to legend, he died aged 39 shortly after telling his girlfriend of the moment that he'd just knocked back 18 whiskeys - "I think that's a record."

The weight of evidence now indicates that the actual cause of death was a severe lung infection compounded by medical ineptitude. The idea that he died of self-administered alcohol poisoning was probably planted by the celebrity physician whose misdiagnosis led to the worst possible treatment.

Novelist Kingsley Amis wrote three practical guides, now in one volume briskly titled Everyday Drinking.

Until the crippling financial pressures imposed by six marriages and eight children forced him to tone down, few could match Norman Mailer's intake or his deranged behaviour under the influence.

Writer and academic John Sutherland's slim memoir Last Drink to LA breezily records the various stages in the drunk's downward spiral. Presumably on the basis that you have to reach the end of the line before you can turn back, the hitherto heterosexual Sutherland chose as his terminus a gay bar in Pasadena. After waking up next to a man with an amputated penis - the first step, he assumed, towards a sex change - Sutherland decided to call the AA.

Even in this company Malcolm Lowry (Under the Volcano) stands out for his determination to drink himself to death. He once drank an entire bottle of olive oil, believing it to be not Galliano or yellow Chartreuse, but hair tonic. His daily intake peaked at 3 litres of red wine and 2 litres of rum.

The career of Anthony Burgess, best known for A Clockwork Orange, is testament to what certain individuals can achieve despite a booze habit that would reduce lesser beings to perpetual stupefaction.

Unpublished till the age of 40, Burgess then churned out another 67 volumes of fiction and non-fiction and innumerable articles, reviews, screenplays, and musical compositions over the next 36 years. "I refuse no reasonable offer of work," he wrote, "and very few unreasonable ones."

Martin Amis, whose collected journalism includes typically stylish and entertaining pieces on most of the above, made the mistake of having lunch with Burgess in Monte Carlo where he was a tax exile. "We began with gin and tonics (two each), followed by a tremendous amount of cheap red wine. I did my best to keep pace with Burgess who by 5 o'clock was drinking double brandies: three swallows and then the glass held up for more. At six he ordered a gin and tonic." He figures

Burgess then headed back to his apartment to get down to some serious work. Amis himself went on to endure "an authentically frightening hangover which lasted for half a week. At 8 in the evening on the day after the day after, I was still sitting in an armchair and saying, 'Dear oh dear oh dear'."

Among his achievements Burgess listed the invention of a cocktail called Hangman's Blood. "Into a pint glass doubles of the following are poured: gin, whiskey, rum, port, brandy. A small bottle of stout is added and the whole thing topped off with champagne. It tastes very smooth, induces a somewhat metaphysical elation, and rarely leaves a hangover."

If you're tempted to put these propositions to the test, good luck to you.