The Trip to Echo Spring by Olivia Laing Page B

his eyes very red and his legs shaking. He was trying to sweat out the gin, he told her, though since he was still drinking itat the time his method seemed doomed to failure. When he said he’d been spitting blood she called a doctor and he was taken to the local hospital to dry out, something that had already happened several times back home in Baltimore. He stayed five days, and – here’s a classic Turnbull detail – finished off the story from the sanctuary of his bed.
    At some point that summer he told Laura: ‘Drink heightens feeling. When I drink, it heightens my emotions and I put it in a story. But then it becomes hard to keep reason and emotion balanced. My stories written when sober are stupid – like the fortune-telling one. It was all reasoned out, not felt.’ It’s hard not to read this as justification, particularly since he was already bitterly regretting the necessity of writing so much of Tender drunk. Later, walking in the hills above Asheville together, on the way down from Chimney Rock, he changed his mind, saying instead: ‘Drink is an escape. That is why so many people do it now. There is Weltschmerz – the uncertainty of the world today. All sensitive minds feel it. There is a passing away of the old order and we wonder what there will be for us in the new – if anything.’
    I drink because it improves my work. I drink because I am too sensitive to live in the world without it. There are hundreds more of these excuse notes, but the one that stuck in my mind wasn’t by Fitzgerald at all. It came from a letter Hemingway wrote in 1950, almost a decade after Scott had died of a heart attack in Hollywood, midway – how death exposes us – through eating a chocolate bar and reading the Princeton newsletter. Hemingway was writing to Arthur Mizener, the first of Fitzgerald’s biographers, and in his self-serving way he said something at once dissembling and true. He was trying to get to the bottom of his old friend’s difficulties with lifeand, almost as an afterthought, jotted down: ‘Also alcohol, that we use as the Giant Killer, and that I could not have lived without many times; or at least would have cared to live without; was a straight poison to Scott instead of a food.’
    What a bizarre, entangling sentence this is. A food that kills giants; a poison you can’t live without. It strikes the same ambiguous, riddling note as the porter’s speech in Macbeth, which ends, ‘much drink may be said to be an equivocator with lechery: it makes him, and it mars him; it sets him on, and it takes him off; it persuades him, and disheartens him; makes him stand to, and not stand to; in conclusion, equivocates him in a sleep, and, giving him the lie, leaves him’.

    I must have dropped off again, lulled by the rocking motion of the train. Next time I woke the sky was pinkening. There were buildings in the distance, one of them crowned with the ubiquitous Wells Fargo logo. Atlanta. Sure enough, the tannoy crackled into life, announcing: ‘Atlanta, Georgia is the station stop. If you’d like to leave the train and get a breath of fresh air please do so. However, please do not leave the platform. Atlanta, Georgia is the station stop.’ The clock on the platform said 7:50, though I had a feeling we might have crossed a time zone in the night. I was stiff and hungry and I walked up and down sniffing the air, which seemed already softer, balmier than it had in New York.
    When we pulled out again an hour later the pink had given way to gold, and all the trees we passed were green. Green! I’d vaulted winter in the night and landed altogether in the spring. Pigeons wereflying in sixes and sevens, their wings splayed back in some sort of joyous display. Beneath them, the outskirts of the city looked abandoned. I took a photograph of a broken-down brick factory. Its roof was gone and the lower windows were boarded up, the