Donald Newlove drank and blithered for 25 years. This book is a memoir of that period of sodden prose and appalling behavior, and should be enough to make anyone who's even thinking of writing put the booze down. The second part of the book is an essay on the drinking lives of other writers -- Hemingway, Fitzgerald, Robert Lowel, Faulkner, Malcolm Lowry, Thomas Wolfe, Tennessee Williams, John Berryman, Anne Sexton, etc.

There is a problem for a writer who wants to write as a drunk: it's often just as dull, self-important, grandiose and self-indulgent as the real drunk. Newlove calls his drinking alterego "Drunkspeare" and when he summons the ghost of Drunkspeare the prose. It's no wonder much of his early work was unpublishable. Newlove's prose is the sort of prose favored by a number of 'muscular' male writers of the sixties and seventies. Lots of mouth-feel. It does get tiresome after a while because, frankly, it gets in the way of the story, and the story is powerful.

The later part of the memoir, in which Newlove gets sober, is far more interesting because its more readable and the pyrotechnics don't get in the way of the images. He is unsparing of his own self-deceit, his hideous selfish behavior and the guilt and shame that inevitably arrives when one has no choice but to put down the bottle and and face one's self in order to live. (I know whereof I speak here, since I have many years of sobriety and never wrote a single publishable thing while drinking.)

The part of the book which really sang for me was the second, in which Newlove turns his unsparing (yet still compassionate) eye on his fellow drunken writers. How he skewers their pomposity and self-justification. One only wishes he might have told them these truths to their faces. One suspects a few lives might have been saved.

He says -- "Genius is no excuse for self-destruction. . . the illness is ego, with its intolerance, hatred of change and resistance to getting well, grandiose talk and behavior."

This is a tale of resurrection, and while it might not always be comfortable to read, it doesn't need to be, it has the ring of deep truth. ( )