Jim Harrison on Writing and Drinking

I like grit. I like love and death. I'm tired of irony.

Photo: Getty Images

“The simple act of opening a bottle of wine has brought more happiness to the human race than all the collective governments in the history of earth.”

—Jim Harrison

It was already apparent that you had to utterly give your life over to language with minimal chance of success though that was far from a deterrent at the time.

The indomitable mixture of hormones and the daily budget of a quart of beer carried you along. The bartender at the White Horse Tavern who was said to have served Dylan Thomas his fatal nineteen double shots of whiskey advised me water was the best writing aid but the advice didn’t take…

Long ago I misplaced the list I used to keep of writers I knew who had to quit drinking to stay alive. I remember the number had reached nineteen and it must be nearly double that by now.

Perhaps it begins with alcohol dispelling the essential loneliness of a solo art, and then for many the habit gets out of hand and swallows the life. I wish I had never seen a certain photo of Faulkner, taken after he had emerged from shock treatments in an asylum for his binge drinking.

In the photo he looked like a bruised purple plum, or an old picture of a hanged man with a posse looking on telling jokes while their horses shuffled in the dust…

Drinking causes drinking. Heavy drinking causes heavy drinking. Light drinking causes light drinking… The reason to moderate is to avoid having to quit, thus losing a pleasure that’s been with us forever. We don’t have much freedom in this life and it is self-cruelty to lose a piece of what we have because we are unable to control our craving…

In drinking, as in everything else, the path is the way. What you get in life is what you organize for yourself every day. There is an ocean of available wisdom from Lao-tzu to Jung to Rilke. It’s there in a preposterous quantity.

If you drink way too much it will kill you and the souls of those around you. If you moderate you can have a nice life.

You can find this excerpt in Jim Harrison’s fantastic memoir— Off to the Side: A Memoir.