~First, please accept my warmest thanks for your kind invitation. I first came to this blog due to an invitation form the lovely and talented Ms. Alexander, divine hostess of the Virtual Cocktail Party. So it’s fitting that the subject under discussion for today should be, as they used to say on Jeopardy! , potent potables.~

“So are you going to [insert name of conference here]?”

“You bet! How about you?”

“Sure am. Want to meet up?”

“Sure! Where?”

“Where do you think?”

The answer, of course, is “In the bar.” I mean, we’re writers. Where the hell ELSE would we be?

Now, there are a lot of reasons why writers gravitate to the bar. It’s a natural meeting place when you’re in a hotel far from home. But it’s an undeniable fact of this profession that a lot of us drink. And some of us drink a lot. It’s practically a tradition for those of us in the scribbling class. Poe, Chandler, Hammett, Hemingway, Fitzgerald, Faulkner, Dorothy Parker, Dylan Thomas, Sinclair Lewis, Truman Capote—all of them had what could best be described as a love-hate relationship with booze.

First the love:

• Hemingway: “I have drunk since I was fifteen and few things have given me more pleasure. When you work hard all day with your head and know you must work again the next day what else can change your ideas and make them run on a different plane like whisky? When you are cold and wet what else can warm you? Before an attack who can say anything that gives you the momentary well-being that rum does? The only time it isn’t good for you is when you write or when you fight. You have to do that cold. But it always helps my shooting. Modern life, too, is often a mechanical oppression and liquor is the only mechanical relief.”

• Dorothy Parker: “I like to have a martini, Two at the very most. After three I’m under the table, After four I’m under my host!”

• Raymond Chandler: “Alcohol is like love. The first kiss is magic, the second is intimate, the third is routine. After that you take the girl’s clothes off.”

• Faulkner: “Civilization begins with distillation.”

• H,L. Mencken: “I’ve made it a rule never to drink by daylight and never to refuse a drink after dark”

Then the hate, or at least the ambivalence:

• Truman Capote: “We’re actually drinkers with writing problems.”

• Fitzgerald: “You know that drinking is slow death?” Robert Benchley, taking a sip of his drink: “So who’s hurrying?”

• And more Benchley: “Drinking makes such fools of people, and people are such fools to begin with, that it’s compounding a felony.”

• Oscar Wilde: “Work is the curse of the drinking class.”

• Jean Kerr: “Even though a number of people have tried, no one has yet found a way to drink for a living.”

But my favorite quote on the subject of alcohol isn’t from a writer at all. It’s from a Mississippi legislator with the wonderful name of Noah “Soggy” Sweatt, and it was his response to a reporter’s question when that state was debating liquor sales: “If you mean whiskey, the devil’s brew, the poison scourge, the bloody monster that defiles innocence, dethrones reason, destroys the home, creates misery and poverty, yea, literally takes the bread from the mouths of little children; if you mean that evil drink that topples Christian men and women from the pinnacles of righteous and gracious living into the bottomless pits of degradation, shame, despair, helplessness, and hopelessness, then, my friend, I am opposed to it with every fiber of my being.
“However, if by whiskey you mean the oil of conversation, the philosophic wine, the elixir of life, the ale that is consumed when good fellows get together, that puts a song in their hearts and the warm glow of contentment in their eyes; if you mean Christmas cheer, the stimulating sip that puts a little spring in the step of an elderly gentleman on a frosty morning; if you mean that drink that enables man to magnify his joy, and to forget life’s great tragedies and heartbreaks and sorrow…then my friend, I am absolutely, unequivocally in favor of it. This is my position, and as always, I refuse to be compromised on matters of principle.”

So what’s your take on the stuff? ‘poison scourge’ or ‘philosophic wine’? Does a drink or two (or four or five) help your writing by loosening up the mental gears, does it hinder it, or does it make no difference?

Cheers! And always drink responsibly.

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J.D. Rhoades’ third novel, SAFE AND SOUND, will be released July 11th.