The Book That Will Make You Never Want to Drink Again

July 10, 2013 - Posted by Ian Crouch - The New Yorker

There is something to be said for reading in bars—not just in one of Hemingway’s “clean, well-lighted” places, but in any old bustling spot with taps, bottles, a firm flat surface, and a seat. At night, most coffee shops are closed, and readers looking to remain connected to the movements of the city and away from their addiction to HBO need somewhere to go. Furthermore, it’s an activity that gratifies one’s vanity: a book sets the reader apart as a contemplative figure, a person of some intelligence. It can occasionally be an invitation to conversation—“Whatcha reading?” Reading is often more interesting than watching sports-news headlines scurry across a flatscreen, and is almost always more interesting than checking e-mail.

Perhaps we inefficient barroom readers are seduced by the romance born out of the link between liquor and literature. Certain bars trade on a literary sensibility, stacking musty books into shelves along the walls or hanging snippets of framed poetry behind the bar. Some make claims to literary history: visitors to New York can go to Pete’s Tavern, where William Sydney Porter (O. Henry) is said to have sketched out “The Gift of the Magi,” or, more grimly, the White Horse Tavern, where myth holds that Dylan Thomas drank himself to death. (He died of pneumonia, but whiskey hadn’t helped matters.) How many Irish pubs in every corner of the world have hung a stern-looking portrait of James Joyce, or included Yeats’s name somewhere on the menu? Certain bars operate under the banner of patron saints. There are Joyce pubs in Baltimore, Santa Barbara, and near Tampa—and in Calgary, Madrid, Athens, and Beijing. In Boston, Bukowski Tavern (named for the grizzled novelist-poet Charles Bukowski) has two locations. And there’s a Bukowski’s in Prague. “I have the feeling that drinking is a form of suicide where you’re allowed to return to life and begin all over the next day,” Bukowski once said in an interview. It is a testament to the esteem in which many hold his dogged alcoholism that this line has appeared both in self-help guides for alcoholics and collections of writerly bon mots on drinking.

Every bar sells, along with drinks, a sense of place, and there are certainly many less tasteful atmospheric concepts than a literary one. Still, this arranging of writing, reading, and drinking into an axis of adult high-mindedness rests on several misconceptions. Whatever charming myths we may harbor about great writers and alcohol, or about alcoholic writers, they are almost always misplaced—ignoring all the cruelties of illness and misspent energy, broken confidences and promises to loved ones. 
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