The Trip to Echo Spring by Olivia Laing

impediments to the diagnosis of alcoholism are the denial seen in alcoholics and the low index of suspicion held by most physicians.’
    The desire to drink, and the repercussions it has on the drinker’s physical, emotional and social selves, are buried beneath excuses, elisions and flat-out lies. An alcoholic might be understood in fact to live two lives, one concealed beneath the other as a subterranean river snakes beneath a road. There is the life of the surface – the cover story, so to speak – and then there is the life of the addict, in which the priority is always to secure another drink. It’s not for nothing that the first step of the Twelve Step Programme is simply ‘to admit we were powerless over alcohol – that our lives had become unmanageable’. This single step can take a lifetime to face up to, or never be achieved.
    In the particular case of the writer who drinks, the ways in whichautobiographical material is used requires more than ordinary scrutiny, since what denial means in practice is an inconsistent mass of material that moves bewilderingly between honest accounting, self-mythologising and delusion. Intermittently. It doesn’t bother me much. Generously. Bad. None of these words could be taken at face value. They were carrying out a secret function, sometimes directly at odds with what was apparently being said. Perhaps this is what made ‘Now I Lay Me’ so compelling: the sense that one’s hook is snagging on something far beneath the bright waters of the surface.
    I once came across a statement that captured this tendency towards concealment so precisely it made me reel. I was reading The Impossible Profession, Janet Malcolm’s short, incisive book on psychoanalysis. During a discussion of the profession’s founding principles, she quoted Sigmund Freud on the apparently universal disinclination of humans to be transparent on the subject of sexuality.
    Instead of willingly presenting us with information about their sexual life, they try to conceal it by every means in their power. People are in general not candid over sexual matters. They do not show their sexuality freely, but to conceal it they wear a heavy overcoat woven of a tissue of lies, as though the weather were bad in the world of sexuality.
    The weather, it seems, is also bad in the world of alcoholism, and those heavy overcoats are favoured by almost all its inhabitants. And yet, without falling too far into the honey-trap of romanticism, I was also aware of a corresponding desire in all these writers to expose and scrutinise themselves in ways that seemed almost abnormallycourageous. Imagine writing that quarterback fantasy down, let alone sending it out for publication. It must have been like undressing in public – though this, it must be admitted, is something else Fitzgerald was prone to do. Once, in the 1920s, he stripped to his underclothes in the audience of a play. Another time, according again to Mencken, he shocked a Baltimore dinner party ‘by arising at the dinner table and taking down his pantaloons, exposing his gospel pipe’. But even undressing is an act of concealment sometimes. You can yank down your pants and show off your gospel pipe and still be a man in mortal terror of revealing who you are.

    We reached DC at 6 p.m. The tannoy sang out, ‘This is a smoking stop. This is a rest stop,’ and people began to get up and shift their bags. I was starving. I waited till we pulled out again and then went to the dining car. So much for the urban myths. The food was wonderful: steak and jacket potato with sour cream and a chocolate peanut butter pie. After dinner I napped a while and was woken at half past ten by my phone. The woman beside me was still talking. ‘Freak it, am I on speakerphone? No, no, hell no. She asked about cutting it and I said no, hell no.’ She was massive and dressed all in black, with a hooded leather jacket pulled up