Wonderful book to read about writers in their fight against and often succumbing to alcoholism.
Eventually I got up to use the bathroom. The carriage was full of sleeping bodies curled up under coats and blankets. Couples huddled together, their faces almost touching, and I saw a woman feeding a tiny baby, the only other person awake in the whole coach. It's not often, in the privileged West at least, that one finds oneself in a room full of sleepers. Hospitals, boarding schools, homeless shelters: none of them places I much frequented. There was something almost eerie about it, like those Henry Moore drawing of people sheltering in the stations of the London Underground during the Blitz. They lie in rows and could be sleeping, though their boneless immobility makes one wonder if the platform hasn't been turned into an impromptu mortuary.
The plane was small and up in the air before I knew it. All around me people were falling asleep in the blue that it seats as we tacked sharply east and New Orleans was lost beneath a reef of cloud. I drank a ginger ale in a plastic cup. The wires were cut. No one would call. There was nothing now that couldn't wait. I could pick over the litter of the past or fret away at the cuticles of the future. But the present was out of my hands, slack as a paid-out line.
While back working on John Cheever's papers in the Berg Collection at New York Public Library, I stumbled across a statement about the eeriness of air travel. He described the temporal slight of hand that comes from watching the sunrise at half past one over the Atlantic, adding a little later; 'One does not travel so much as one seems incised - a picture cut out of a magazine and paste it into another landscape.'
I'd copy these phrases down because they seem to catch at a persistent attribute of his work. A kind of uncanniness produced by radical disruptions in space and time. Now shuttling through the thin air above Louisiana, I turned them over again, and this time they sparked a different association. In the early 1970s, Cheever began to be plagued by spells of what he described as otherness, though one could also use the term depersonalization or fugue states or transient amnesia. These episodes had two components, olfactory, auditory, or visual hallucinations, and a simultaneous sort of brain freeze that left him unable to access words and names.
Immediately after his release he went on the David Frost show. You can see a clip on YouTube. Tennessee looks thin and dapper in a sweater and dark trousers. He's still very handsome. His moustache neatly trimmed. Everyone laughs, and he pokes his tongue out coquettishly and drawls, "I'm allow myself o-one drink a day." Frost ask him about his homosexuality, as if it's another affliction he might have overcome. And Williams gets off a one liner that has the audience eating out of his hand. "But I've covered the waterfront." He giggles and things himself back in a chair to a great storm of applause.
He finishes up by accusing his children of eating him alive, adding that his life came "to a dead stop off on a siding... if there'd once been a fire, it gone out."
It's hard to express how disturbing I found this account, which was written at Yaddo in 1981, when Carver was five years dry. Despite his sobriety, it seems to exemplify an alcoholic cast of mind, a tendency to blame external factors rather than fronting up to one's own role in kindling trouble. Psychologists call this having an external locus of control and it's common among people with addictions. A person with an internal locus of control tends to think their own actions are responsible for their experience, while a person with an external locus of control tends to blame circumstances, to be superstitious, or to feel themselves at the mercy of forces outside themselves. In alcoholics, the sense of powerlessness tends to lead directly to drinking. (Cheever, on yet another psychiatrist: "I think my problem enforced my drinking. He claims I invent my problem to justify my drinking.")
