The Trip to Echo Spring (10 page)

I drink because it improves my work. I drink because I am too sensitive to live in the world without it. There are hundreds more of these excuse notes, but the one that stuck in my mind wasn't by Fitzgerald at all. It came from a letter Hemingway wrote in 1950, almost a decade after Scott had died of a heart attack in Hollywood, midway – how death exposes us – through eating a chocolate bar and reading the Princeton newsletter. Hemingway was writing to Arthur Mizener, the first of Fitzgerald's biographers, and in his self-serving way he said something at once dissembling and true. He was trying to get to the bottom of his old friend's difficulties with life
and, almost as an afterthought, jotted down: ‘Also alcohol, that we use as the Giant Killer, and that I could not have lived without many times; or at least would have cared to live without; was a straight poison to Scott instead of a food.'

What a bizarre, entangling sentence this is. A food that kills giants; a poison you can't live without. It strikes the same ambiguous, riddling note as the porter's speech in
Macbeth,
which ends, ‘much drink may be said to be an equivocator with lechery: it makes him, and it mars him; it sets him on, and it takes him off; it persuades him, and disheartens him; makes him stand to, and not stand to; in conclusion, equivocates him in a sleep, and, giving him the lie, leaves him'.

I must have dropped off again, lulled by the rocking motion of the train. Next time I woke the sky was pinkening. There were buildings in the distance, one of them crowned with the ubiquitous Wells Fargo logo. Atlanta. Sure enough, the tannoy crackled into life, announcing: ‘Atlanta, Georgia is the station stop. If you'd like to leave the train and get a breath of fresh air please do so. However, please do not leave the platform. Atlanta, Georgia is the station stop.' The clock on the platform said 7:50, though I had a feeling we might have crossed a time zone in the night. I was stiff and hungry and I walked up and down sniffing the air, which seemed already softer, balmier than it had in New York.

When we pulled out again an hour later the pink had given way to gold, and all the trees we passed were green. Green! I'd vaulted winter in the night and landed altogether in the spring. Pigeons were
flying in sixes and sevens, their wings splayed back in some sort of joyous display. Beneath them, the outskirts of the city looked abandoned. I took a photograph of a broken-down brick factory. Its roof was gone and the lower windows were boarded up, the upper open to the sky. Next to it was a glasshouse that had been systematically smashed to pieces. In places there was no glass at all: only iron girders covered in kudzu, that insidious vine that despite its foreign origins has become one of the surest visual indicators of the south. Later, I'd see whole hillsides covered in it: dead hay-brown kudzu; nothing else but a few half-strangled pines.

The girl behind me was joking with the conductor. ‘We didn't pass DC yet?' she asked. ‘Cause we fell asleep a while here,' and he replied: ‘You got me there. You got me.' A few minutes later he spotted a boy in a Yankees shirt. ‘Yankees! Down in the south? Oh sir, what are you thinking? Switch in quiet for Rebels or something, then you might blend in.' I went to the dining car and got a cobbled-together breakfast: coffee and orange juice, Special K and a slab of cornbread. There was a red carnation on my table, and through the window I could see forests and farmland, white houses with porches and American flags, main streets running parallel to the tracks. We whipped through a pine forest full of little streams muddied sky blue, and those same red-tipped trees I'd seen in Washington.

I was still thinking about what Hemingway had said.
Alcohol was a straight poison to Scott instead of a food.
He'd been spinning the food line for a long time. In a letter written in Key West in August 1935, a few months before that dig at Scott for being
stinking,
he set out what amounts to a credo on the benefits of alcohol.

I have drunk since I was fifteen and few things have given me more pleasure. When you work hard all day with your head and know you must work again the next day what else can change your ideas and make them run on a different plane like whisky? . . . The only time it isn't good for you is when you write or when you fight. You have to do that cold. But it always helps my shooting. Modern life, too, is often a mechanical oppression and liquor is the only mechanical relief.

Right to the end of his life, when he was keeling under the combined weight of depression and alcoholism and a string of head injuries, the complex inheritance of a life lived at full tilt, he maintained an unshakeable belief in alcohol's essential beneficence, its ability to nourish and uplift. All his writing runs brimful, but it's especially noticeable in two of his last books,
Across the River and Into the Trees
and
A Moveable Feast.
The first is a novella published in 1950 about an American colonel in Italy (that tune again), who comes to Venice just after the war to shoot ducks and see the woman he loves, a nineteen-year-old contessa he calls ‘Daughter', as Hemingway did all women he liked or desired. It's so gluttonous, so richly populated with people eating and drinking, that one feels a little liverish by the time it's finished. Grappa. Valpolicella. Martinis that are ‘icy cold and true Montgomery' and that ‘glow happily' all through one's upper body. The Colonel is obsessed with things being true, which is to say deeply anxious that they might be false or fake, and afraid even to voice the thought. His compulsion to apply it to the most unlikely of objects seems to stem from a deep sense of breakage that is ascribed to the war, though it ripples uneasily likewise through Hemingway's letters of the time.

A Moveable Feast,
which was published posthumously in 1964 and edited by his widow, is lighter on the palate, even if it shares the same desire to settle scores that marks all Hemingway's late work. It's a memoir of his years in Paris, when he was newly married and had a small son, and spent his days writing in cafés, and eating roast chestnuts and mandarins, or sausages, or watching bicycle races, or skiing in the mountains of the Voralberg in Austria, where things were very simple and very good. There's a line in it somewhere about visiting Gertrude Stein's apartment. She served ‘natural distilled liqueurs made from purple plums, yellow plums or wild raspberries. These were fragrant, colorless alcohols served from cut-glass carafes in small glasses.' How delicious these drinks sound: how edible and nourishing.

Not for Scott, that's for sure. He staggers through the book, every bit the card-carrying alcoholic. This toxic version of events begins once again in the Dingo Bar. Scott is drunk and gives an embarrassing speech on Hemingway's writing, while Hemingway sits there wincing and making a silent, spiteful assessment of his appearance: the long, perfect Irish upper lip, spotted lightly with sweat; the Brooks Brothers clothes and phoney Guards tie, the presence of which Scott later furiously denies. He even comments on how short Scott's legs are (two more inches and they'd be
normal
, an unpleasant word that underlines Hemingway's persistent, increasingly crude attempts to make himself the yardstick).

They drink a bottle or two of champagne, and after a while something strange happens. The skin on Scott's face, which has been a little puffy, begins to tighten. Then his eyes sink and he becomes abruptly ‘the colour of used candle wax. This was not my imagination. His face
became a true death's head, or death mask, in front of my eyes.' Hemingway wants to call an ambulance, but another man in the bar, who knows Fitzgerald, is unconcerned. That's just the way it takes him, he reports, and so they put him in a taxi, though Hemingway remains perturbed.

A few days later they meet again on a terrace at dusk, and sit together watching the people passing by. This time Scott is charming and self-deprecating and good-humoured, and though he drinks two whiskey and sodas there is no sign of the ‘chemical change' that overtook him in the Dingo. During their conversation, he proposes a more substantial adventure. He's left a car in Lyon.Would Hemingway like to join him to pick it up and drive it back? It is, of course, the ‘great trip' Hemingway described in his letter to Perkins in June 1925.

In this new, retrospective version, the trip is an unmitigated disaster. Scott misses the train, the car has no roof, they while away a morning wasting money on foolishly extravagant food, and inch towards Paris waiting out rainstorms under trees while sharing bottle after bottle of Mâcon. After a few hours, Scott decides he's got pneumonia, and insists they go to a hotel, where he pulls off an excellent impression of Baby Jane, demanding a thermometer be brought and that Hemingway take care of his wife and daughter after he's dead. A few whiskey sours put a stop to this nonsense and soon he's well enough to go out for another delicious dinner, accompanied by a bottle of Montagny, ‘a light, pleasant white wine of the neighborhood'.

It's pretty funny, this story, but it leaves a bad taste in the mouth (reading it, John Cheever commented that it was like encountering ‘some marble-shooting chum of adolescence who has not changed'). Fitzgerald's inability to tolerate alcohol evidently both puzzled and
disgusted Hemingway. Musing in the knowledgeable, faintly medical tones of the doctor's son from Oak Park, Illinois, he wrote:

It was hard to accept him as a drunkard, since he was affected by such small quantities of alcohol. In Europe then we thought of wine as something healthy and normal as food and also as a great giver of happiness and well-being and delight . . . I would not have thought of eating a meal without drinking wine or cider or beer . . . and it had never occurred to me that sharing a few bottles of fairly light, dry, white Macon could cause chemical changes in Scott that would turn him into a fool. There had been the whisky and Perrier in the morning but, in my ignorance of alcoholics then, I could not imagine whisky harming anyone who was driving in an open car in the rain. The alcohol should have been oxidized in a very short time.

Normal as food.
A few lines on, he added crossly: ‘Anything he drank seemed to stimulate him too much and then to poison him.'

Very little of this analysis is accurate. For a start, alcohol
is
a poison. One unit contains 7.9 grams of ethanol, a depressant of the central nervous system that has considerable short– and long-term effects on the human body. Large amounts consumed rapidly can cause respiratory depression, coma and death, while a chronic consumption damages the liver and many other organs, among them the peripheral nervous system, heart, pancreas and brain.

He was also mistaken in that pseudo-scientific statement about oxidisation (properly oxidation). Alcohol tends to accumulate in the
blood because absorption is more rapid than oxidation and elimination, which occurs largely by way of the liver. His most telling statement, however, concerns Fitzgerald's sensitivity to alcohol. What Fitzgerald was probably experiencing was the abrupt and often profound loss of tolerance that can occur in some cases of late-stage alcoholism. It was, as Hemingway figured, a sinister sign. But what it didn't mean – and what he evidently assumed it did – was that high tolerance was somehow either healthy or desirable.

Hemingway's tolerance to liquor was legendary. In a letter written a few weeks after the Lyon trip he boasted about being able to ‘drink hells any amount of whiskey without getting drunk'. What he didn't know, at least back then, is that tolerance is one of the defining symptoms of alcoholism, and that high tolerance tends to be accompanied by profound physical dependence. What's more, recent research suggests low sensitivity and high natural tolerance to alcohol may be contributory factors in the development of the disease.

As the
Merck Manual
puts it: ‘There is evidence of genetic or biochemical predisposition, including data that suggest some people who become alcoholics are less easily intoxicated; ie, they have a higher threshold for CNS effects.' Or take John Cheever on the same subject, boasting of his prowess against even the notably hard–drinking Russian writers, the spelling of whose names he never quite mastered: ‘I can drink Yevtushenke to the floor and in southwest Russia when the
tamadan
orders
bruddershaft
I can drain my glass again and again without any trouble, while my companions sometimes fall down.'

Looked at through these uncompromising lenses, it's evident that Hemingway, who'd been drunk since he was fifteen and put more
faith in rum than conversation, was engaged in as dangerous a relationship with alcohol as Fitzgerald, even before one takes into account the staggering volumes he regularly consumed. If you want an example of someone flat-out denying their own disease, there are worse places to start than with this sour, comical story, particularly when one considers the circumstances in which it was written.

As legend has it,
A Moveable Feast
was inspired by a chance discovery. In November 1956, Hemingway and his fourth wife Mary stayed at the Ritz in Paris, where he was presented by the management with two mouldy suitcases, which he'd stored for safekeeping back in 1927 and had completely forgotten to reclaim. According to one of several accounts written by Mary after Hemingway's death, he was given ‘two small, fabric-covered, rectangular boxes, both opening at the seams . . . The baggage men easily pried open the rusted locks, and Ernest was confronted with the blue-and-yellow-covered penciled notebooks and sheaves of typed papers, ancient newspaper cuttings, bad water colors done by old friends, a few cracked and faded books, some musty sweat shirts and withered sandals.'