Weekend Read: At war with Drunkspeare

In many ways, Steven Pressfield means us to take the title of his invaluable book “The War of Art” literally. The process of artistic creation, as he sees it, involves persistent battle with a tireless and devious enemy: resistance.

Resistance is what we face whenever we find ourselves entertaining yet another reason not to follow our primal urge to sit down and write.

For Newlove, to drink was to take refuge in delusion, a destructive yet comforting haze inimical to true artistic creation.

One of resistance's primary weapons is fear, which Pressfield makes a point of addressing with blunt honesty: “The artist committing himself to his calling has volunteered for hell, whether he knows it or not. He will be dining for the duration on a diet of isolation, rejection, self-doubt, despair, ridicule, contempt, and humiliation.”

A successful novelist and screenwriter in his own right, Pressfield has dedicated much of his life to arming his fellow scribes with the tools and the courage they need to face this challenge head on.

Writing books isn't exactly digging ditches, as many a novelist as observed in a moment of faux-humility. True enough. But an undug ditch rarely inflicts the kind of psychological and emotional distress that the blank page does.

Like many writers, Donald Newlove (who died in 2021 at 93) attempted to ease the pain of creation by drinking. His prodigious efforts earned him a few unpublishable manuscripts (the work of his rarely-sober alter ego “Drunkspeare”) and years of crippling alcoholism.

When he finally did quit in his late thirties, Newlove found he had a lot to say about the effect of alcohol on his work and on the work of other writers. In 1981 he published “Those Drinking Days: Myself and Other Writers," re-released in 2022 by Tough Poets Press.

“Those Drinking Days” empathetically yet unsparingly dismantles persistent, romantic notions linking artistic inspiration and addiction. For Newlove, to drink was to take refuge in delusion, a destructive yet comforting haze inimical to true artistic creation.

Newlove diagnoses the same problem in many of his heroes, in a passage which any sad, young, literary man biding his time in a bar may find soberingly familiar:

“[T]hese writers toweringly resist and consistently fail to recognize home truths about themselves ... False allegiances abound: to culture and place of birth, to so-called social graces, to male bonding in war or sports or hunting, to ‘literature’ and the fellowship of dead drunks, and to living companions at their manly self-sacrifice to Old Ego-giant."