Húgues the Memorious: Wine, Depression, Introspection, Awareness

In vino veritas. 

For centuries there have been two literary visions of the wine drinker.  One has been the roisterer.  The miles gloriosus, the goliard of gaudeamus igitur fame, Falstaff and Rabelais' Pantagruel, J. P. Donleavy's The Ginger Man, the bon vivant man about town and so forth.  The merry aspect of wine-bibbing, which of course met with stern rebukes and moralistic censure in the 19th century and that artistic extension of Victorianism into the mid-20th, post-Hayes code (1934) Hollywood.

Then there's the contemplative wine drinker of literature.  The introspective, melancholy drinker whose mind may, in its self-devouring solitude, turn to thoughts of vice and murder.  Think of all those Poe narrators, of Baudelaire, not to mention the real-life boozers like Burns, Byron and Coleridge (also a junkie).  More recent examples are Hemingway, Fitzgerald, John Berryman, Anne Sexton (lots of suicides here, read A. Alvarez for more), Cheever, etc., etc.  The drunken author long ago became an institution in American literary folkways, it was and remains almost a basic job requirement.  I won't even get into the British subspecies with the likes of Dylan Thomas, Brendan Behan, Malcolm Lowry and the rest, the many rest. 

Without boring you with quotations and citations -- many of which are practically part of our folklore -- I have given you the briefest of justifications for taking on this subject, albeit from my own point of view. 
For I have suffered from a lifetime of thwarted literary ambitions (deservedly thwarted for the most part), periodic depressions, and a habit of introspection that may or may not be a genetic disposition.  And, yes, out of this miasma of disappointment, delusion and bitterness has come, at intervals, huge waves of awareness.  Not all of it welcome, believe me.  In vino veritas.

We aren't talking any cool Hellenic ratiocination here.  We're talking about a Plotinian spiritual union with the universe.  The indifferent heart of the universe.

"Don't weep for me.  I'm already dead."

Can I tell you something?  I didn't drink at all for 22 years, or close to. 

Before, I drank for many reasons, all of them having to do with being thwarted.  Thwarted in art, thwarted in heart.  In 1980, when I was 34, my wife threatened to leave me if I didn't quit drinking. She said she'd take the kids.  I remember thinking at that moment, You can go but not the kids. 

I quit immediately.   She offered to let me taper, but even with that implicit short-term victory I said no, I'll go cold turkey.  It had worked for smoking, hadn't it?  And smoking turned out to be the harder habit to quit. 

When I gave up drinking I went through this surreal period.  My senses re-awoke.  Colors were sharper, tastes more vivid, the air fresher.  I associate that time with sunlight and warmth, and with a strange glow of happiness.  Conversion experience.  The euphoria wore off.  In a year I had changed my life completely, my priorities.  I put my family on the back burner, though perhaps it wasn't quite evident to them.  I put all my effort into my job, money, status, ambition.  The usual.  I gave up my writing dreams.  I stopped taking care of myself.  I gained weight.  I drugged myself instead with schemes to get ahead, with visions of whatever it was fashionable to want in the Eighties. 

When I stopped drinking I ceased to have the desire or ability to dig very deep.  To ponder and weigh, to imagine and keep some youthful hope alive.  To be honest with myself.  My anger grew, it exploded often.  I was getting better at clubbing my homosexuality into hiding, but the cost was a more profound estrangement from myself. 

Prosperity increased.  Life fell apart.

Denying wine -- wine was my drink -- was bound up in denying everything I had been or wanted.  Well, maybe I wanted to be someone else.  After the unending sadness of my daughter's descent into mental illness and my heart attack, I certainly threw myself into more work.  When my wife got cancer and struggled for almost five years, I said to hell with my career and devoted myself to exercise.  I got healthier as she got sicker.  I told myself I had to be strong to bear us both up, to give me the stamina to deal with a dying, bitter woman.  Hell was general over all of Ireland (or Ohio), to paraphrase a grand drinker from Dublin. 

She died in December 1999.  My daughter had experienced her first psychotic break in April, 1990, ending a sort of fool's paradise.  Alone and sick at the end of the decade, I was a soul adrift.  Nothing mattered.  I was coming out, but it was nothing too comforting.  I left Ohio, returned East, got involved with some unsatisfactory people, drifted, found myself in a mediocre job that had at least familiarity to speak for it.

Then, finally, I got to Florence in the week after Christmas in 2001.  It was cold as iron all week, with scarcely a ray of sunshine.  The Florentines seemed surly, the provinciality of the town in winter was oppressive.  I've since realized that every Italian town in the off season is like a scene from I Vitelloni. 

But on that very first afternoon in Florence -- the day after Christmas, when it was raining and cold and as dismal as Cleveland -- I stopped for lunch at a restaurant called Il Barroccio (the Ox-cart).  It was warm and smelled good, it was lively.  I saw a quartino of house red on the menu.  I debated with myself and finally said, "You're in Italy.  At last.  After all these years of dreaming.  Have the damned wine.  It's essential to the experience." 

I had some hearty Tuscan meal.  I drank the simple, good red wine.  A great emotion washed over me, and I told myself, "I'm home."

My rebirth really began then.  And the beginning of the end of the grief.

But here's the thing.  After a couple of days I realized that wine made me feel a little down, a little depressed.  I found, when I drank, I lacked the energy, the drive -- dare I say the manic drive? -- that had characterized me for 20 years.  This disturbed me.  I felt that I had somehow sullied myself, that I had fallen from a lofty perch (of my false self-regard or -protection, I suppose).  It was a little frightening.

Yet to taste wine, to smell and taste food with the deepest appreciation I'd ever felt, was itself a revelation.  After all those years of self-denial this was freedom and gladness, even if it did carry with it a hangover once in a while.  As in those ancient encomia to wine, I felt less awkward, more at ease, more sociable.  More eloquent, more liable to laugh, more able to appreciate and not compete, like some dog jealous of his shard of a bone, with the people I encountered.

I've been told in my severest bouts of depression, by reputable enough doctors, that alcohol (always spoken of with a slight pursing of the lips, like my grandmother, an Irish teetotaler who wasn't really) would intensify, even bring on depression if you already have a genetic predisposition.  Really?  I thought that life itself was cause enough for depression.  Any sensible person would feel that.  The more losses and pain you experience, the more likely you'll feel a weighty oppression of the soul.  It's not a clinical thing, it's the price of living, which for each of us is a mystery, a miracle and a monstrously short-lived fact. 

Can I tell you something else?  Wine is the thing that helped me retrieve a discarded self.  Gave me a new route to happiness and a vocation. 

I drink and I ponder, I remember, rant, repent.  I look inward and outward simultaneously with the warmth of wine in me, with the memories of the places I've been and the people I've met, not to mention the ones I've loved.  Some of it appears on these digitized pages.  Some of it is ineffable, as fleeting as grace. 

You drink and see.  And feel.  In vino veritas animae cordisque.

Comments

[Alfonso]

Bravo...

[Terry Hughes]

The first time I met Alice Feiring she told me, "This is your book!" If you think I want to immerse myself in all that shit again, for months at a time, you're nuts. Talk about wallowing in depression...

[Giampiero alias Aristide]

Che bravo che sei amico mio!

[Pat]

I have been reading your blog for about a year. It feels like dinner with a friend to me. I love the rapport you have with other wine bloggers(AC you were the first one I read after a trip to Italy 2 years ago and I didn't want the feeling to end) and the honesty revealed in the writing. An education in wine and creative writing(if only I spoke Italian). Great post.

[Marco]

Bravo encore

[Marco]

Oh, I wish I could write half as well as you write.

[Dr. Debs]

Rabelais would be so pleased with this bit of writing (and I suspect would understand the depression bit, too, although in those days, they just bled you until you fell into a stupor and then gave you copious amounts of emetics in an attempt to flush the bad juju out of your system). Great writing, Terry.

[Terry Hughes]

Thank you all. I have been trying to write this one for some time, in various contexts and media. It was not altogether a comfortable thing to do.

Pat, thanks very much for de-lurking. I am sort of amazed by your statement "like dinner with a friend." Wow. You must have a high tolerance for ...

Eh. Enough "negative self-tawk."

Thanks very much.

[Himself]

Dr. Debs, I think that talk of humors and so on is actually a useful way of dealing with the topic. Certainly no more misleading than Freud.

[David J]

Terry, thanks for this. In my browsing those 12-step rooms, I learned that I wasn´t the only 'terminally unique' creative soul that struggled with the inability to experience anything but mixed feelings...
I don't know what I'm driving at. His literary worth may be debatable, but Henry Miller is still an inspiration in willing oneself to transparently transform biography into literature-- & you're blazing a trail in that form of creativity yrself. Thanks for sharing.

[Himself]

Henry Miller was a fucking genius, man.

HM wrote everything in the style of fiction, because he did fictonalize. You have to, to sustain something long and complex. Otherwise it all turns out as some wretched "autobiography," "I said then he said and then we went then we ate and then we fucked and then..." But it's so flat. I detest autobiographies unless they're manifestly fake. That way there might be a kernel of truth in them.

Thanks anyway, David.