Those Drinking Days: Myself and Other Writers

by Donald Newlove

The author recounts his struggle with alcoholism and looks at the lives of other hard-drinking writers

Genres: Nonfiction, Memoir

176 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 1989

About the author

Donald Newlove was born in Erie, Pennsylvania, in 1928, and currently lives in New York City's Greenwich Village. As a reporter, book reviewer, and short story writer, his work appeared in Esquire, New York Magazine, Evergreen Review, and The Saturday Review. His first novel, The Painter Gabriel (1970), was hailed by Time Magazine as "one of the best fictional studies of madness, descent, and purification that any American has written since Ken Kesey's One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest." Newlove is the author of several other novels, a series of books on the art of writing, and the critically acclaimed memoir, Those Drinking Days: Myself and Other Writers (1981).

Reviews

[Jonathan · Rating 4 out of 5]

Read Sweet Adversity first, then this in order to see just how terrifying autobiographical the former is. His writing feels like a strange mix between Under the Volcano, Pynchon and maybe Elkin in mid-rant or Take Five by Mano...

Here he is in full flow (do not worry, much of the rest of the book is more controlled and tight, this is just one of those fun ramble-rants we know and love) describing what it was like near the bottom of the worst parts of his alcoholism:

”I was now almost two hundred and fifty pounds, red-faced, losing my hair, given to cankers and bleeding gums, pissing so often I’d use the kitchen sink instead of the toilet, finding my teeth and nails loosening, a victim of boils, my eyes were pink, tired, dry and scratchy and the lids stuck together with mucal infection when I slept, my ears rang and were super sensitive to any scrape or screech, I gave off a staleness no soap could reach, my crotch and privates were forever raw and cracked, I was losing the hair off my shins and pubis, my bellybutton stank and I shaved my armpits to no avail, my nose enlarged and capillaries split, the insides of my ears were raw from flaking, my tastebuds wore smooth at the rear and grew apart upfront so that I oversalted everything and could awaken before breakfast only with a tablespoon of salty redhot pepper sauce, my skin eroded in the creases and rubbed off in balls, I had a relentless belch for years from an ulcer, a liver that was trying to get out of me and die somewhere, shitty shorts and wine gas that ate holes in them, breath that even I couldn’t stand, sweaty cold soles and shoes I hid under the bed or in a closet if I had a girl overnight, I gasped during any kind of work and could not get a full breath even while typing, I began waking up nightly on the floor having convulsed out of my bed, wine trots were common and many hours spent near tears trying to ring out my bowels on the toilet, my pulse seem to clog and dribble, I had false angina in my upper left chest regularly, someone was going to shoot me in my rocker so I moved it away from the window, but I had a waking dream for ten years of my brain exploding on impact, I would lie unable to wake up but not asleep while strange men moved about my kitchen and living room (they weren’t there), I could not sit comfortably in any position, I smelled of stale semen between my weekly or biweekly baths, my gut bubbled day and night and I’d try to overfeed it to sleep, I had a two-year sinus cold and special flu attacks that laid me out near death, I was hoarse and kept grenadine and lime syrups and pastilles for my hack, my memory self-destructed on the phone and I’d hang up wondering whom I’d talked with or what arrangements we’d made, I often cried out “I’m coming!” when no one had knocked and I answered or heard the phone ring when it was long gone for nonpayment, I felt fungoid and sexually impotent for two years, I slept poorly and kept a pot by my bed in case I couldn’t make the sink, I heard people laughing while I was trying to read and metallic sounds that echoed, my overswollen brain rolled liquidly in my skull, I got dizzy rising from chairs or picking up a handful of spilled coins, must I mention headaches and hangovers, my bloody morning shaves with safety razors, the mental fog that had me leaning on the table trying to remember my middle name, my age or where I just laid down my glasses, my rage over a dropped spoon or lost paper lying before me on my desk or the endless drinking glasses snapping to pieces in the sink, my poor handling of kitchen knives, and the strange yellow bruises that wandered up and down my arms and biceps, my harsh nerves and weird fugue states on paralysingly gruesome images of loved people, the living dead people standing around my bed for hours on end (they’re worth two mentions), and just normal things everybody had like wanting to sob all the time, especially over the sunset beaches and bathers in vodka ads, divorced wife and kid, any lost piece of cake or life or unearned joy as a pretext for just letting go with a thirty- minute screamer on the couch, and such clinical loneliness that my cat talked to me. “


The point he makes, and from a position of one who knows from personal experience, is that our great alcoholic writers wrote despite of their drinking,
not because of it and our great mistake is to glamorise and glorify their disease

[Rick Moody · Rating 5 out of 5]

A truly seminal investigation, from inside, about American literature and its reliance on the myth of alcoholic writer.

[Mark Laflamme]

I've spent most of the second half of my life looking for Donald Newlove. Is he dead? Is he alive? I have no idea. I only know that this book affected me profoundly when I was a blossoming writer, with grandiose ideas about the craft and about the crazy nuance of excess. No other writer tells a tale of drunken ego like Newlove, I think, because none can exert this kind of self-flaggellating honesty. A masterful, beautiful book that looks closely at all the great, drunken writers with the trained eye of one who has suffered of the same spirits. It should appeal to anyone who writes, drinks or, more likely, both.

[Allyce · Rating 5 out of 5]

This book will absolutely squash any romantic notions you might have about drinking and the creative process ... at least it did or me. The author chronicles his own alcoholism and the alcoholism of his peers in devastating, grimy, and tragic detail. He makes the case that most writers did their best work when sober and might have done more work if they hadn't prematurely died from alcoholism related health problems or alcohol induced suicide (i.e. Edna St. Vincent Millay allegedly falling down the stairs on her way for a drink refill, F. Scott Fitzgerald keeling over and bonking his head on a mantle or Hemingway blowing his brains out). Newlove writes incredibly well and you will find yourself laughing, cringing and going "oh my God, seriously?" all the way through this short, powerful book.

[Roger Bradbury · Rating 5 out of 5]

Of the 14 or more books Donald Newlove wrote, this maybe the only one in print. It has two parts: one is his description of his struggle with alcohol; two, is his description of the struggle of certain famous writers, two of whom won the Nobel Prize, Earnest Hemingway and William Faulkner. I understand it is nearly required reading by people involved in Alcoholics Anonymous. I have fought my own battle, but, honestly I do not believe I would have survived what Newlove did. The light at the end of his long tunnel is his membership in AA. The second part describes the immolation by alcohol of writers we all admire, maybe even worship. This is scary shit made readable by Newlove's pile on the adjectives style. An object lesson for anyone who believes alcohol is not a curse.

[Tony Bilotta · Rating 3 out of 5]

“But pot reawakened my links to alcohol and perhaps the week following a pot fest would find me slipping into an Eighth Avenue fight bar for a half-price Wild Turkey—who can pass up Wild Turkey at half-price!” (Newlove 97). Truth. Living in a legalized marijuana state and having sharpened my late teenage drinking teeth on Wild Turkey (ironic thank you Peter Gent’s novel North Dallas Forty) I found this passage sadly humorous for Newlove and myself. Maybe pathetic is more accurate. Like many artists crippled by addiction, Newlove’s book represents the best and worst of the 20th-century drunk-ass American writer struggling with his/her craft and the uncertain but unrelenting effects of alcoholism while trying to find truth. Specifically, why the fuck are we here and how are we going to handle this lovely world? Although a memoir, Those Drinking Days follows a non-academic arc of those many talented and oftentimes brilliant writers afflicted with the disease (you know the list). And ironically, although talented and successful in his own right, but not even close to the Nobel star power of the other drunk American authors and poets he recounts, Newlove was one of a couple (Cheever and Carver) who were able to dry out. Go figure. Good read if you’re into tortured souls.

[Mänsomläser · Rating 3 out of 5]

Det finns ju en hel del myter om det här med alkohol och författare: Ernest Hemingway, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Jack Kerouac, för att inte tala om vår egen Bellman. Sanningen bakom myterna är sällan lika coola eller tjosan hejsan, utan handlar ofta om förstörda författarkarriärer och liv.

Boken består av två delar. I den första redogör Newlove för sin egen alkoholism. Han trodde på fullt allvar att spriten skulle hjälpa honom att bli en bra författare, och han beskriver hur han under flera år drack litervis med vin per dag samtidigt som han skrev. Det gick inte så bra.

Andra delen består av flera korta biografier av kända (amerikanska och engelska och mestadels manliga) författare och deras alkoholism. Tragiskt, är ordet.

[Ricky Tacaraya · Rating 4 out of 5]

It didn't know it was a self-help book; but it was surprisingly well written and truthful.

[Igolder · Rating 3 out of 5]

Today's paper has an obituary for Donald Newlove, with the headline "Explored Drunkenness." That's about right but maybe not how one might envision a summation of 93 years with many acclaimed books and such. This book has a very simple thesis: drinking does not make you write gooder. And yet, it's full of examples of great writers who were also alcoholics, so... maybe sometimes? I don't know!
For a writer who was also gave out advice to others on writing style, I have to say this book's prose did not really entertain me. I gave my copy away years ago -- if you have one, they are apparently currently worth like $1,000 so don't toss it out! But also, maybe don't read it.
I guess it would be wrong to end this review with "raise a glass to Donald Newlove," but I will anyway. Cheers.

[Alexis Stefanovich-Thomson · Rating 4 out of 5]

"Some few knew the rebirth of getting unpickled. But it takes a miracle to unpickle a genius and pluck him from this barrel of manias. All nature is against it, and so is the victim. Recovery is rare. The chances against it are staggering. It's like turning a pickle back into a cucumber."

...another book I had very high expectations for...it didn't quite reach them. Lot of very memorable lines. Perhaps I need to recalibrate...