Last Drink to LA

by John Sutherland

  The AA story has a distinct poetics. It is, in essence, a narrative of inexorable loss, sudden epiphany and gradual recovery. Typically, it starts with a well-ordered life, progressively disordered by drink. At the critical moment – it is conventionally a brief and irrecoverable interval – the drunkard ‘touches bottom’; he/she experiences a fleeting ‘moment of clarity’. Ideally, this is the moment of introduction to AA. One comes in. Thereafter, if it has a happy ending; the story becomes one of successful (and never-ending) struggle. ‘Recovering’. One never again goes out.

  AA is unusual in being a therapeutic organisation built on ritualised oral storytelling to an initiated audience. They do it very well (as Sylvia Plath said of her own desperate remedy, suicide). Telling tales (most of them tall, many of them self-serving) is one of the few things that booze makes you good at. Drunks are practised fictioneers; they live the creative lie and use a tissue of fibs to hold their rickety lives together. Drunks become fluent over the years at coming up with cover stories for such ticklish questions as: ‘Just how much did you have to drink last night?… Where were you until four in the morning?… How did that scrape get on the car?… Is that lipstick on your collar?’

  Two things have dominated my adult life: booze and prose fiction. I have been lucky to live in a time when both are in ample supply. With a PhD on the English novel, a fiction reviewer’s slot on various London papers and an alcoholic’s insatiable thirst, I was multiply qualified for entry to AA – when I finally got round to it.

  One of the things that first attracted me into the fellowship was its stories. For someone like me it was as magnetic as a campfire in the woods at night. One of the reasons I stopped going to meetings regularly was that, in the last analysis, I didn’t really have a good enough story myself. I couldn’t match, let alone top, the tales I heard at AA. Not, that is, if I were ‘uncompromisingly honest’, as the Program requires. In my heart, I knew I had never been a truly heroic drinker. Nor was I, in sobriety, an epic storyteller. But being in the company of those who were was, while it lasted, a thrill. When (nowadays rarely), I go to meetings it is often to hear someone I particularly admire – as, for example, I admire and seek out the latest novels of A.S. Byatt, or Julian Barnes, or Martin Amis.

  This, however, is to advance things. I touched bottom, as alcoholics like to say, on 12 February 1983 (the date is slightly fuzzy). I had just taken up a position as a professor of literature at the California Institute of Technology. Caltech, as it is popularly known, is a small, excessively well-endowed science institution in Pasadena. Pasadena itself is a small, genteel western town, seven minutes away, by freeway, from downtown Los Angeles. LA is neither small nor genteel.

  The Caltech job was, in career terms, one of those lucky breaks of which you can normally expect two or three in a professional lifetime. Playing such opportunities right is the big challenge of one’s academic career. It’s not easy. You generally have two options: you can move, or you can use the ‘offer’ as leverage to feather your present nest. Or you can play games – moving from counter-offer to counter-offer or taking yourself, as a ‘property’, to a third potential employer.

  The right call is rarely easy. In the early 1980s there were, however, circumstantial factors pushing me away from my home country; what in chess is called a forced move. The decade had become a dark age for seats of British learning – the darkest since the dissolution of the monasteries, as we muttered in our gloomy common rooms. Keith Joseph’s punitive regime of ‘cut and freeze’ had just taken hold. The Tories had hated the university sector ever since turbulent students (reds, all of them) pelted their party’s MPs with eggs and obscenities at campuses in the 1960s. Oxford’s refusal of an honorary degree for Mrs Thatcher in 1985 and 1987 sealed their enmity.

  This was payback time. In the name of ‘efficiency’ (as if this abstract commodity was what universities produced, not research and education) the DES, as it was then called, embarked on a purge of Stalinist ferocity. A whole generation of middlingly senior academics was sent into what was euphemistically called ‘early retirement’ in the name of ‘systems re-engineering’ in the higher-education sector. Colleagues were decanted by the dozen into their premature sunset years. You could hardly teach for the sound of falling timber (‘dead wood’ as the authorities liked to call it, as they lustily hacked away at the tree of British higher learning).

  I was 45 – mid-life-crisis years. I was a decade too young for the chop. My wood was still sappy enough. But neither was I young or flexible enough to ride the changes with the sense of infinite growing time ahead. I did not, as George Eliot put it, have my ‘35 years ahead of me’.

  There is a shadow-line in working life: the point at which you understand pensions. I was just beginning to penetrate the mysteries of the Universities’ Superannuation Scheme: about halfway, that is, through the panels of that old Pearl Insurance cartoon advertisement (‘They tell me the job doesn’t have a pension. Ho hum’). And, of course, I was also halfway through my career (40 years, as the USS actuaries calculate it). The Dantean juncture. At this point one begins to hunger for spoils, signs of success: promotion, honorific titles, high salary, ‘Top of the world, Ma!’ recognition of one’s life achievements. These awards were in short supply in British universities in the early 1980s. ‘Holding on’ was the priority. Forget slippery poles. Standing up to one’s neck in the slough of British higher education, America glowed like the city on the hill.

  The Caltech offer came through a grandee in my subject, J.J. (‘Jerry’) McGann. Jerry had himself just been appointed to head the literature group at Caltech. Teaching humanities at this exclusively scientific institution was, as colleagues ruefully observed, something of a fifth wheel on the buggy. There were, most years, no majors in literature and few graduates in any humanities subject. But, in compensation, Caltech paid humanists on the same level as scientists, and they gave their scientists what big-brains like them could expect in the commercial sector. This, they had decided, was the only way to get the best. The institute was loaded, could afford to pay top whack, and its governors were generous by nature. Caltech was a science gravy-train, but one on which humanists could hitch a ride. In short, they offered me $50,000 – three times my UK salary (add to that Caltech’s faculty housing plan and the difference was out of sight).

  McGann was the best in his field and Caltech had gone over the odds (magnitudes more than my measly 50 grand) to lure him from Johns Hopkins and all the other universities that were throwing offers at him. He was, as they liked to say, ‘hot’. More importantly, McGann was reshaping his discipline, working on new lines in ‘material bibliography’, redefining the literary object in interesting new ways. He has an indefatigably lively mind. And he was, everyone who worked with him confirmed, a good colleague: a high flyer and a nice guy. The salary that Caltech came through with in 1982, with benefits, was plausibly rumoured to be the highest for a professor of English in the US. This prize has since probably passed to Stanley Fish at Illinois. We are talking sums not far off a quarter of a million dollars. I go into this fiscal detail to stress that America was (and is) in a different league from Britain. And Caltech heads that league. It can afford to fetter its faculty with golden chains.

  McGann was by nature expansionist. He wanted to build his group, and it was my good luck that he liked my work. In his eyes, I was, if not ‘hot’, attractively warm. My line at that time was the relatively new sub-discipline of publishing history, or ‘book trade studies’. It fit nicely with McGann’s interests at the time. Caltech’s offer to me in the first instance was a one-year ‘visiting’ appointment. It would enable us to look each other over. If we liked what we saw, it was on. One could see it as a kind of trial marriage.

  My other marriage was meanwhile going to hell. My drinking had been dangerously excessive for some years. It was now spinning out of control – though usually in the form of out-of-hours, weekend or vacation binges (what, for normal married men, would be ‘t
ime with the family’). At my loved ones’ bruised insistence (blackmail!) I had been seen at the Maudsley, armed with a letter of introduction from a senior physician friend (I was no common-or-garden drunk, for God’s sake). The letter cut no ice.

  After a brief consultation with the registrar (a famous name in British alcohol studies, who was then touting a ‘controlled drinking’ field experiment), I was referred to one of his juniors. He turned out to be the nicest psychiatrist I have ever met. But his prescription was drastic. I must give up drinking altogether, he ordained. A fortnightly one-on-one meeting (which meant hours in the ghoulish waiting room for 40 minutes’ counselling) would keep me to this regime. The theory was that, if I could stay off the booze for 18 months, the ‘prognosis’ was good for permanent recovery. This was what the unit’s research was currently telling them. Perhaps they were right. I never made it to the finishing line.

  I manfully went on a year’s white-knuckle ‘dry drunk’, as AA jargon puts it. This was 1980. It didn’t last. The nice psychiatrist moved on (the good ones always do; like academics, they get ‘offers’). He was replaced by a doctor who, however knowledgeable, seemed much more neurotic than I was. And he manifestly didn’t like me. I felt like a specimen. A cockroach and entomologist relationship, as it seemed to me. Gregor Samsa and his shrink.

  My dry spell did not last. It corroded gradually, like an old dam giving way under the pressure of that vast lake of booze on the other side. I would manage six weeks (a painfully long period, for an abstaining alcoholic) before jumping out of the groove – usually for an explosively brief bout, but long enough to smash things up. Remorse would get me back on the wagon – but for a shorter period than the last. By January 1983, when I went off to California, I was on the terrible merry-go-round of what AA calls ‘periodics’. I would be sober for weeks, sodden-drunk for days, bitterly remorseful for hours, and sober again. So the wheel turned. This is a peculiarly destructive phase of drinking, physically, and socially. Having lapsed, one drinks to madly toxic levels – making up for lost time, suffused with guilt and apprehensive of the dry, remorseful weeks to come before the next glorious release. The gross drunkenness shatters the trust others put in you. Usually after the third or fourth such lapse they give up on you. I was well past that threshold. The carousel was speeding up, like the climax of Strangers on a Train.

  Professionally, I would still be classified as a ‘high-functioning’ alcoholic. I could do my job. There were occasional disasters: drunkenly slurred lectures (à la Lucky Jim), student complaints about late return of essays (à la Butley), missed meetings, insulted colleagues, dinner-party disasters (some of which can still make me groan out loud today). But I could just about cope at work. I was experienced enough, after 20 years, to fly on automatic pilot, winging it, as they say. It helped greatly that in academic life you largely devise your own schedule. Cannily (as I thought – alcoholics love to think of themselves as smart operators), I ensured that the bulk of my lectures, tutorials and seminars were in the hung-over but clear-headed morning – before the dangerous fog of the lunch session descended on the world. If I had something important to write (a piece for the London Review of Books, say), I could stay sober.

  My head of department at UCL, Karl Miller (he was also, fortuitously, editor of the LRB), came from journalism (and, further back, from Scotland). He knew all about drunks and was infinitely patient. Domestically, it was something else. One of the problems about problem drinking is that you tend to be at your drunkest and least civilised at night – when, that is, you go home. If your family is still around, ‘scenes’ are inevitable. Few women nowadays wield the cartoonist’s rolling-pin, or throw crockery at their drunken spouse’s head. But their long-brewed disapproval scalds the alcoholic (who will already be feeling remorse, probably) like molten lead. By the time you get back, your wife has her script rehearsed to perfection.

  What defence do you have? None. Guilt makes the drunk quarrelsome and few alcoholics – when drunk and quarrelsome – are not violent, verbally and physically. Anger is, late in the game, exacerbated by sexual paranoia (the alcoholic’s impotence translates into jealousy of Othello-like intensity). And, of course, there is the sheer nastiness of the Edward Hyde everyone has inside them. Edward thrives on booze.

  On at least one occasion, I had been physically abusive to my wife and son. Drunks do these things (and worse). The horror of having done them makes it harder to sober up, paradoxically, so one does them again and again: if the victims hang around. After a while every drunk drinks to forget what he has done (and will do again) when drunk. Anger is one deadly sin the drunk is prone to. Gluttony, of course. Jealousy, yes. And lechery. I had, for some years, been having extramarital affairs.

  Another significant detail of the drunk’s timetable is that he (in my case) tends to be at his best at lunchtime. Flirting time, that is. At lunch the drunk, still not entirely tanked up, is lively, bonhomous, and well this side of stupefaction. Academic life has lots of convenient holes in the day, which one can use for alternative lives. Few university teachers have more than 20 contact hours a week. And London is the ideal city for running multiple lives and for clandestine relationships. One lies to everyone, naturally, to keep things in place. And what the alcoholic wants, most of all, is to keep his ducks in line so that he can drink. That is always the bottom line. Sexual delinquency is a symptom, not the goal.

  Keeping the Sutherland show on the road was not easy. My wife every so often walked out with our young son. She was, after 15 years with me, something of a co-alcoholic, an ‘enabler’ (as the AA lexicon puts it). But she had her pride and her breaking point. She had, I knew, seen a solicitor – and, as I suspected (in my alcoholic’s paranoia), possibly someone unprofessionally as well. I don’t now think that she had. But who could have blamed her?

  It was a mess. Alcohol didn’t make things simpler, but it blurred them temporarily into invisibility. Leaving the country for a new start in southern California was a heaven-sent ‘geographical’ cure. More so since the Caltech offer was so munificent and, thanks to the tax amnesty, all net income. I could be ostentatiously generous – something that drunks love to be (it allays their sense of guilt at drinking up the housekeeping money for all those years). I could, assuming I could find time and energy to live them, afford several lives.

  Caltech was easy street. Teaching was minimal (six hours a week, 20 weeks a year, small classes); the students were clever, well mannered and intellectually docile (all they really wanted was to preserve their perfect 4.0 GPA – grade-point average). And there were no administrative chores. Who knew, I might even get round to doing some research at the nearby Huntington Library. (‘If I died and went to heaven,’ a colleague once told me, ‘it would be like having an eternity fellowship at the Huntington’.) If all else failed, there was always Disneyland.

  I left the UK in high spirits, arriving in the US for New Year. My wife, working with a prestige London publisher, was not inclined to accompany me. The bonds holding us together were frayed to breaking point. If it was a trial marriage with Caltech, it was a trial divorce with her. There was an unspoken agreement that if I cleaned up things might mend. But, for the moment, I was free as air.

  I got a small apartment near campus, ingratiated myself by day – and promptly disgraced myself at night by getting drunk and boorish at various welcoming functions. It wasn’t misjudgement: more like taking deliberate aim and shooting yourself in the foot.

  It is a peculiarity of alcoholics that, when things go well, they sabotage themselves. This death wish is often pondered at AA meetings. My personal view is that drunks do not want the responsibility of a successful life. It involves too many decisions and too much stress. ‘Keep it simple’ is truly the drunk’s motto. Nothing simpler than disaster. Smash the crockery and you never have to wash it up.

  Another favourite explanation is that by misbehaving drunks are confirming to themselves that, however extreme their misbehaviour, someone will alwa
ys be there to look after them. They want to regress to that childhood state when they could soil their nappy and still be loved (‘Who’s a bad boy, then?’). Who knows? But I realised quite early on that in America there were no safety nets. In the UK, however obnoxious, I had some credit with those whose patience I regularly tested to destruction and beyond. I was tolerated, even at my worst. I might be a drunken son of a bitch, but I was their son of a bitch. People felt responsible for me; some even owed me for favours done while sober. There was always a wagon to climb back on. In America, there was nothing: just disgrace, freefall and a one-way ticket to skid row, the closed ward, or the mortuary. The absence of a net underneath me added a cutting edge of riskiness to my drinking, nudging me over the brink on which I had been teetering for years. I felt, excitingly, that I was dicing with ruin (and, beyond that, the noseless one). I felt ‘bad’; Homo malcolm-lowriensis, living under my personal volcano. Looking back, I see it as the delusion of grandeur which is common with the terminal alcoholic – nothing existential, just another telltale symptom.

  There were pressing difficulties of a humbler nature. Oddly, finding somewhere to drink convivially was one of them. Pasadena is a ribbon, stretched out on the five-mile length of Colorado Boulevard (the same route that the Rose Parade takes every New Year’s Day; I watched this grotesque festival in 1983, in blinding sunshine, with a thumping head and a parched throat). The whole of LA County is constructed for the automobile (and before that, the horse; and before that, the lizard).

  One of the problems for a pedestrian drinker like myself was that there were no bars within walking distance. I had, as yet, no car. A new colleague had sold me an English Raleigh, a young fogey’s bicycle, complete with handlebar basket. If I wanted to drink, I would have to pedal for it. Or, as a last resort, drink in my apartment. I longed for London’s ubiquitous pubs.