Dempsey when the reform took effect, were quick to investigate the new phenomenon of illegal liquor, and happy to learn that it wasn’t so very different, biochemically, from the legal kind. Later he expressed his considered view of the great experiment in “Prohibition Blues,” a song that became the standout hit of a feminist musical called Ladies First, starring the popular Nora Bayes.
I’ve had news that’s bad news about my best pal
His name is Old Man Alcohol but I call him Al . . .
Like many alcoholics, his efforts to stop drinking never lasted long. In at least one important respect, though, his case was peculiar. Others sought and found in liquor a release from their inhibitions about using rough language or making sexual advances. Not Dad. He had an idealized concept of marriage that made his drinking habits seem incompatible with wedded bliss. His courtship letters took it for granted that he would not drink after marriage. In practice, he switched from a pattern of regular daily drinking to alternating daily periods of abstinence and indulgence, with the latter growing steadily more intense and long-lasting as the years passed.
Mother had realized for some time that he was a dying man and that there wasn’t much she could do about it. Still, she applied all her strength and endurance to the effort, and her grief when it failed was overwhelming because he had become her main purpose in life. She was just beginning to revive her other ties to the world when, five years later, Jim was killed in the Spanish Civil War.
While no more than one in ten Americans is an alcoholic, among twentieth-century writers the proportion rises to something like one in three. Without much effort, I can summon the names of Eugene O’Neill, William Faulkner, James Thurber, Dorothy Parker, John Cheever, John O’Hara, Tennessee Williams, Ernest Hemingway, John Steinbeck, Raymond Chandler, Robert Benchley, Dashiell Hammett, Theodore Dreiser, Sherwood Anderson, Edna St. Vincent Millay, and—the first two drunks I knew and could identify as such—Sinclair Lewis and Scott Fitzgerald. Each of them in the course of an evening at our house would become, visibly and volubly, a far less attractive person. As a child, I was not aware of any similar alteration in my father’s behavior; he was noted for maintaining physical control despite considerable consumption of alcohol, and he was particularly careful in the presence of his sons. For most of his binges, he went into New York and stayed at a hotel or club. Since this was also his practice when meeting a story deadline, we had no way of distinguishing between the two. I was well into my teens before I realized that he was an alcoholic, and by that time the episodes were occurring less and less often in the face of debilitating disease and hospitalization.
There has been a lot of speculation about what makes writers become drinkers (or the other way around). Life has put me in a position to discuss this topic with some authority, and I can lend my support to a few of the standard theories: the stress of deadlines, the search for answers to difficult creative problems, the need to face internal demons on a regular professional basis. Another explanation, easily overlooked, is opportunity. If you work in a public place, as most people do, it’s difficult to go off on a bat; practical considerations force you to postpone your drinking until the working day has ended. Writers, who set their own hours of labor and diversion from labor, have an easier time sustaining a career and an addiction—for a while.
Literary critics and others have wondered about the roots of the despair that presumably provoked my father to start drinking again despite his awareness of the addiction. My prolonged empirical research into the same disease leads me to conclude that drinking is more apt to increase depression than relieve it. The alcoholic is distressed by his failure to conquer the addiction; hoping to ease his distress, he turns to drinking, which has an effect opposite to the one intended. This vicious cycle was aggravated in my father’s case by a puritanical conscience.
Watching his death happen was the first major emotional event that I can recall. But it didn’t take the form of a sudden shock. There was no surprise, just the realization that a highly-prized and dearly-loved element of my life had been taken away. After completing the cremation arrangements and taking stock of a tremendous volume of mail and cables from all over the world, we moved Mother into New York, where John would be nearby, and I headed back to college.
Catching up with my studies was far from my first priority, however. The big question confronting me on my arrival, a week late, was whether I felt up to working on Princeton’s annual Triangle Club show. In a competition held the previous spring, I had been chosen to collaborate on the script with a senior; I would be the first sophomore so honored. Without hesitation, either on family or academic grounds, I declared my readiness to proceed, although I knew I would have to put most of my energy into writing and rehearsing in order to put the show on in Princeton and New York before Christmas.
It was 1933, well before the era of co-education, and our chorus “girls” were female impersonators. Otherwise, the production attained a fairly high amateur level. The previous year’s star, Jose Ferrer—now a graduate student of architecture—dropped in to share his insights with the director, Dr. Donald Stuart, a middle-aged professor of French. “Joe, do you think that’s dirty?” Dr. Stuart asked worriedly, about a scene underway onstage. “No,” the younger man replied, “but I’ll show you how you can make it dirty.”
I completed my sophomore year in June of 1934, a few months shy of my nineteenth birthday. Besides the Triangle show, I had written a monthly column for the Princeton Tiger called “Under the Table with Ring Lardner, Jr.,” and I had represented the university on bridge and debating teams. The fact that I had made some kind of mark, at least socially, was indicated two years later in the yearbook of the graduating Class of 1936. Amid photographs and membership lists of all the standard extracurricular organizations was a page with a photo of several of my classmates and the unexplained initials “L.O.L.A.” Unknown probably to anyone but them and me, the letters stood for “Loyal Order of Lardner Admirers.”
What I clearly had not yet achieved was any record of academic accomplishment or any other benefits sufficient, by my reckoning, to justify the drain on Mother’s reduced income as a result of Dad’s death. John and Jim had already dropped out of Harvard. Now she acceded reluctantly to my decision as she had to theirs (and would later to David’s to leave Yale). In my case, she squeezed five hundred dollars out of her budget for a summer in Europe before I embarked on a career. I arranged cheap steamer passage on the Hamburg-Amerika Line, which many people were boycotting because of Hitler’s accession to power, and a tour of the Soviet Union at the lowest Intourist rate of five dollars a day, which was to cover travel, hotel, and meals.
A few days in Hamburg and Berlin and, on my way back from Russia, three weeks in Munich left me with a highly unfavorable impression of the New Germany. In Munich, I stayed with an architect’s family, getting into a number of debates with one of the young men of the household, who was a member of the Hitler Youth Corps. “We really have nothing against the Jews,” he assured me. Nothing, he went on to say, except their disproportionate representation in the ranks of lawyers and doctors. A fairly polished and cerebral spokesman for the new order, he gave the Jews credit for intelligence and hard work, and lamented that many Germans were not as industrious. But the bottom line of his analysis—the point that struck me, anyway—was his relentless need to distinguish between Germans and Jews. That the one could not also be the other seemed to go without saying.
My reaction to Soviet Russia, on the other hand, was enthusiastic. My own country was paralyzed by unemployment, want, and fear. Western Europe was stricken by the same miseries. In Russia, I saw construction everywhere and planning for the future on a grand scale. Despite the language barrier, the feeling I got, even from people seriously deprived by American standards, was one of hope and optimism at a time when most of the world seemed to be bogged down in stagnation and gloom or, like Germany, marching ardently backward toward barbarism.
It may come as a surprise to modern readers that in those days Socialism and Communism were associated with new, radical trends in social behavior, sexual
