“‘Have you stopped drinking,’” asks the doctor?”
“Yes, I said,” alcoholics being congenital liars.
“‘Are you sure?’”
“Yes, I said, yes.”
“‘Yes? Good. Because I’ve got your tests back…and if you go on, you probably won’t see Christmas.’”
And thus the critic and writer A. A. Gill will enlist in the “genteel bedlam” of a private mental hospital in the West Country of England. That exchange and its consequence kick off the memoir Pour Me, a Life , Gill’s chronicle of the space “between two events…the year between the end of the marriage and the end of drinking.” Memoir implies memory, and for that period, thanks to the “one miserable charity of drink,” he has little: “shards and tesserae.” But they glitter. These memories carry no message, no encouragement for those who still tip the bottle. “It’s not the all or the enough, it’s not the answer. I am now closer to the last breath than I am to my last drink and I need to know.”Needs to know why he miserably, shamblingly, boringly, self-pityingly shredded a decade of his life.
It’s not likely that a single year of shards and tesserae will add up to 268 propulsive pages. But in this book Gill covers considerably more terrain than one year of his sixty-year passage. What comes as such a pleasant surprise, for both those who think Gill is a force of nature and those who think he is a bigoted sexist assassin—his encounters with the northern Welsh, Mary Beard, and a certain baboon haven’t done him any favors—is forthcoming and signifying as memoirs so often aren’t. Gill’s honesty won’t necessarily disarm you, but you will feel its fearless self-exposure.
Sober Gill excavates the drunk Gill as much as he can through the blear. He didn’t want to be drunk all the time; he just never wanted to be sober. “Understand this, it’s not death that terrifies—it’s life. Life is the horror, the unbearable living.” But even for the hard-core alcoholic, there are unavoidable moments of sobriety, and they have consequences. Like waking up. “There are mornings that are stirring but difficult,” nailed Guy Debord after a night of wine and spirits, then some beer, for beer makes one thirsty, in what I thought was the perfect cork in the bottle of alcoholism.
Gill, however, is equal to the task: “The morning I’m thinking of, I’d pulled the emergency chain on sleep”—in extremis only begins to capture his drunken dreams—“and slammed into the daylight.” The physical wrench of wakening was bad enough, but addressing the grotesquery of sadness and alcoholic despair was too much, as were the murderous blackouts. Gill shares an acquaintance’s fix, “being confronted with the possibility that he’d raped and throttled a young stranger, he couldn’t in his drunken heart-of-hearts in all honesty say it was impossible.”
“I can’t remember” is the book’s suggestive refrain, but, as it happens, Gill recalls plenty. Not the whole drunken decade of his 20s, the wreckage of which at best gets a raking over, his insights constrained to the shattered remains. (Only because he was sober can he recount the desperate prospect of a night without a drink, this in Northern Ireland in the early 1980s, and he would risk his life, brilliantly at a three-decade remove, to cauterize the panic with a pint or ten.) What he does remember are the years leading to the decade, finding there, through all the embroidery of time, the wellsprings that charted his progress: some dramatic, some inconspicuous, all momentous.
There are the various schools that cluelessly complicate his stutter, then his “tongue-tied, word-curdling” dyslexia and intractable dyscalculia (“I can’t do long division, or short division for that matter,”) but, really, “the most important lessons to learn are what to discard, what you don’t need, what doesn’t fit.” The Slade will teach him that, nurturing his “pilgrim’s awe…the quiet, intense observation and love of the seen,” but a also convince him that he would never be great as an artist – which meant, for Gill, that door was closed. . He would put that education of a keen eye to work later, having “failed into journalism,” in his unconventional but engagé foreign correspondency.
Gill’s writing is a dense hedgerow of verbiage, his similes often as wicked as blackthorn and equally often as surprising as the fruit of an Osage orange. He can be rococo to the point of a peacock’s peacock, then lay down a bell-clear zinger: something light—“She wore an air of disappointment and lily of the valley.” or sounding something preciously, impossibly deep: how one lodestar brought him to another lodestar, his love of his brother and the table. “It was Nick. It was all about Nick. I don’t often talk about Nick, my younger brother. I don’t ever talk about Nick.” Nick, the natural cook, with Parisian street creds, who vanished like smoke, whom Gill still seeks in every new city he visits.
A love of words and language may have been homegrown for Gill—conversation was currency in the Gill household—but the world of books and the breadth of English would not come easily for a dyslexic: “I could read, just slowly, and consequently my comprehension is very good.” That sentence is crucial. Hard work. Gill has always been hard at work. Being is an outsider kid is hard work, so is being a drunk (try it), as is stopping being a drunk, as is crafting a writing style so mischievously distinctive and engrossing its audience is huge, whether it savors or reviles. Being around Gill is like being around nitroglycerine in the days it was transported by stagecoach over rude and rocky trails to miners blasting for gold. Never a dull moment.
Ten years lost to the “cold echo of absent memory.” Then came the turn: “There’s nothing left to say and no one left who’s listening,” except himself, and his father when Gill asked him for money for treatment: “He said how relieved and pleased he was.” Together, they took a train to the treatment center. “I wonder what dismembered remnants will I be left mantling like an old hawk at the end. Who will share that last synaptic spark.” A. A. Gill doesn’t drink anymore, hasn’t for thirty years. Pardon him his gaffes, excoriate his stupidities, and revel in the brio and dash of his work.
The Barnes & Noble Review http://www.barnesandnoble.com/review/pour-me-a-life
Sig Nordal 