The Trip to Echo Spring. Olivia Laing

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      Also by Olivia Laing

       To the River

      OLIVIA LAING

      The Trip to

       Echo Spring

      Why Writers Drink

images

      CANONGATE

       Edinburgh . London

      Published in Great Britain in 2013 by Canongate Books Ltd,

      14 High Street, Edinburgh EH1 1TE

       canongate.co.uk

      This digital edition first published in 2013 by Canongate Books

      Copyright © Olivia Laing, 2013

      The moral right of the author has been asserted

      For permissions acknowledgements, please see here

      Map copyright © Norah Perkins, 2013

       British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data

      A catalogue record for this book is available on

      request from the British Library

      ISBN 978 1 84767 794 5

      ePub ISBN 978 0 85786 889 3

      For my mother, Denise Laing,

      with all my love

      When alcoholics do drink, most eventually become intoxicated, and it is this recurrent intoxication that eventually brings their lives down in ruins. Friends are lost, health deteriorates, marriages are broken, children are abused, and jobs terminated. Yet despite these consequences the alcoholic continues to drink. Many undergo a ‘change in personality’. Previously upstanding individuals may find themselves lying, cheating, stealing, and engaging in all manner of deceit to protect or cover up their drinking. Shame and remorse the morning after may be intense; many alcoholics progressively isolate themselves to drink undisturbed. An alcoholic may hole up in a motel for days or a week, drinking continuously. Most alcoholics become more irritable; they have a heightened sensitivity to anything vaguely critical. Many alcoholics appear quite grandiose, yet on closer inspection one sees that their self-esteem

      has slipped away from them.

      Handbook of Medical Psychiatry, ed. David P. Moore and James W. Jefferson

      Easy, easy, Mr. Bones. I is on your side

      ‘Dream Song 36’, John Berryman

      

      CONTENTS

Map
1Echo Spring
2The Coffin Trick
3Fishing in the Dark
4A House on Fire
5The Bloody Papers
6Going South
7The Confessions of Mr. Bones
8Half of Him
Authors’ Dates
The Twelve Steps of Alcoholics Anonymous
Notes
Bibliography
Acknowledgments
Permissions Acknowledgments
List of Illustrations
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      1

      ECHO SPRING

      HERE’S A THING. IOWA CITY, 1973. Two men in a car, a Ford Falcon convertible that’s seen better days. It’s winter, the kind of cold that hurts bones and lungs, that reddens knuckles, makes noses run. If you could, by some devoted act of seeing, crane in through the window as they rattle by, you’d see the older man, the one in the passenger seat, has forgotten to put on his socks. He’s wearing penny loafers on bare feet, oblivious to the cold, like a prep school boy on a summer jaunt. In fact you could mistake him for a boy: slight, in Brooks Brothers tweeds and flannel trousers, his hair immaculately combed. Only his face betrays him, collapsed into hangdog folds.

      The other man is bigger, burlier, thirty-five. Sideburns, bad teeth, a ragged sweater open at the elbow. It’s not quite nine a.m. They turn off the highway and pull into the parking lot of the state liquor store. The clerk’s out front, keys glinting in his hand. Seeing him, the man in the passenger seat yanks the door and lurches out, never mind the car’s still moving. ‘By the time I got inside the store,’ the other man will write, a long time later, ‘he was already at the checkout stand with half a gallon of Scotch.’

      They drive away, passing the bottle back and forth. Within a few hours they’ll be back at the University of Iowa, swaying eloquently in front of their respective classes. Both are, as if it isn’t obvious, in deep trouble with alcohol. Both are also writers, one very well known, the other just cresting into success.

      John Cheever, the older man, is the author of three novels, The Wapshot Chronicle, The Wapshot Scandal and Bullet Park, as well as some of the most miraculous and distinctive stories ever written. He’s sixty-one. Back in May, he was rushed to hospital with dilated cardiomyopathy, testament to the almighty havoc alcohol wreaks upon the heart. After three days in the Intensive Care Unit he developed delirium tremens, becoming so violently disturbed he had to be secured with a leather straitjacket. The job at Iowa – a semester teaching at the famous Writers’ Workshop – must have seemed like a passport to a better life, though it isn’t quite panning out that way. For various reasons he’s left his family behind, living like a bachelor in a single room at the Iowa House Hotel.

      Raymond Carver, the younger man, has also just joined the faculty. His room is identical to Cheever’s, and immediately beneath it. The same painting hangs on both their walls. He’s come alone too, leaving his wife and teenaged children in California. All his life he’s wanted to be a writer, and all his life he’s felt circumstance set hard against him. The drinking’s been going on for a long

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