Olivia Laing - The Trip to Echo Spring: Why Writers Drink

HERES A THING. IOWA CITY, 1973. Two men in a car, a Ford Falcon convertible thats seen better days. Its winter, the kind of cold that hurts bones and lungs, that reddens knuckles, makes noses run. If you could, by some devoted act of seeing, crane in through the window as they rattle by, youd see the older man, the one in the passenger seat, has forgotten to put on his socks. Hes wearing penny loafers on bare feet, oblivious to the cold, like a prep school boy on a summer jaunt. In fact you could mistake him for a boy: slight, in Brooks Brothers tweeds and flannel trousers, his hair immaculately combed. Only his face betrays him, collapsed into hangdog folds.

The other man is bigger, burlier, thirty-five. Sideburns, bad teeth, a ragged sweater open at the elbow. Its not quite nine a.m. They turn off the highway and pull into the parking lot of the state liquor store. The clerks out front, keys glinting in his hand. Seeing him, the man in the passenger seat yanks the door and lurches out, never mind the cars still moving. By the time I got inside the store, the other man will write, a long time later, he was already at the checkout stand with half a gallon of Scotch.

They drive away, passing the bottle back and forth. Within a few hours theyll be back at the University of Iowa, swaying eloquently in front of their respective classes. Both are, as if it isnt obvious, in deep trouble with alcohol. Both are also writers, one very well known, the other just cresting into success.

John Cheever, the older man, is the author of three novels, The Wapshot Chronicle, The Wapshot Scandal and Bullet Park, as well as some of the most miraculous and distinctive stories ever written. Hes sixty-one. Back in May, he was rushed to hospital with dilated cardiomyopathy, testament to the almighty havoc alcohol wreaks upon the heart. After three days in the Intensive Care Unit he developed delirium tremens, becoming so violently disturbed he had to be secured with a leather straitjacket. The job at Iowa a semester teaching at the famous Writers Workshop must have seemed like a passport to a better life, though it isnt quite panning out that way. For various reasons hes left his family behind, living like a bachelor in a single room at the Iowa House Hotel.

Raymond Carver, the younger man, has also just joined the faculty. His room is identical to Cheevers, and immediately beneath it. The same painting hangs on both their walls. Hes come alone too, leaving his wife and teenaged children in California. All his life hes wanted to be a writer, and all his life hes felt circumstance set hard against him. The drinkings been going on for a long while, but despite its depredations hes managed to produce two volumes of poetry and to build up quite a clutch of stories, many of them published in little magazines.

At first glance, the two men seem polar opposites. Cheever looks and sounds every inch the moneyed Wasp, though closer acquaintance reveals this to be a complex kind of subterfuge. Carver, on the other hand, is a millworkers son from Clatskanie, Oregon, who spent years supporting his writing with menial jobs as a janitor, a stockboy and a cleaner.

They met on the evening of 30 August 1973. Cheever knocked on the door of room 240, holding out a glass and announcing, according to Jon Jackson, a student who was present at the time: Pardon me. Im John Cheever. Could I borrow some Scotch? Carver, elated to meet one of his heroes, stutteringly held out a vast bottle of Smirnoff. Cheever accepted a slug, though he turned his nose up at the embellishments of ice or juice.

Sensing a dual intersection of interests, the two men immediately bonded. They spent much of their time together in the Mill bar, which only served beer, talking about literature and women. Twice a week they drove out in Carvers Falcon to the liquor store for Scotch, which they drank in Cheevers room. He and I did nothing but drink, Carver reported later, in the Paris Review. I mean, we met our classes in a manner of speaking, but the entire time we were there... I dont think either of us ever took the covers off our typewriters.

Whats odd about this wasteful year, not to mention all the disasters that followed on its heels, is that Cheever predicted it, in a manner of speaking. A decade earlier, he wrote a short story published in the New Yorker on 18 July 1964. The Swimmer is about alcohol and what it can do to a man; how conclusively it can wipe out a life. It begins with a characteristically Cheeverish line: It was one of those midsummer Sundays when everyone sits around saying, I drank too much last night.

One of those people is Neddy Merrill, a slender, boyish man with an attractive air of vitality about him. Trotting out into the sunshine for a morning dip in his hosts pool, hes struck by a delightful idea: that he will make his way home by way of a string of swimming pools, that quasi-subterranean stream that curved across the county. He names this secret road of mixed waters Lucinda, in honour of his wife. But theres another liquid path he also follows: a chain of drinks taken on neighbours terraces and yards, and its this more perilous route that leads him downwards by degrees to the storys uncanny and tragic end.

High on his marvellous plan, Neddy swims through the gardens of the Grahams and the Hammers, the Lears, the Howlands, the Crosscups and the Bunkers. As he passes on his self-appointed way hes plied with gin by natives whose customs, he thinks to himself disingenuously, would have to be handled with diplomacy if he was ever going to reach his destination. The next house he reaches is deserted, and after hes crossed the pool he slips into the gazebo and pours himself a drink: his fourth, he calculates vaguely, or perhaps his fifth. A great citadel of cumulus has been building all day, and now the storm breaks, a quick paradiddle of rain in the oaks followed by the pleasurable smell of cordite.