writing assignment at the age of seventeen.
Launching a new magazine called Esquire in the spring of 1933, the editor Arnold Gingrich decided to commission an article from a representative of the college generation. Woollcott recommended me, having read my work in Princeton’s literary and humor magazines, and I eagerly accepted. It didn’t occur to them or me that it might be inappropriate, even arrogant, for a freshman with less than six months of campus experience to undertake such an assignment. (“Good God,” my father said when he saw my “Princeton Panorama” in the inaugural issue of the magazine. “Isn’t any one of you going to turn out to be anything but a writer?”) My story was advertised on the cover alongside the work of Hemingway, Dashiell Hammett, John Dos Passos, and Erskine Caldwell. I was the only one of these luminaries, in fact, to receive a full-page photographic portrait. In the piece itself, I maintained that college was more important as a social experience— a place to make “contacts” and join in “bull sessions”—than for any knowledge to be acquired by the conventional academic means. I described Princeton as “one of the oldest and most refined gentlemen’s finishing schools in the country” and noted that “the curriculum is one of the best furnished in an American college, and is adequate for any gentleman.” A number of people commented favorably on my contribution, and I scarcely noticed that none of them was a Princeton upperclassman. After all, I hardly knew any Princeton upperclassmen.
I was about to leave East Hampton for my sophomore year at Princeton when Mother asked me to wait a while. She was worried about Dad’s condition, and I was the only other family member at home. David had departed for Andover and Jim for Harvard. John, after a year at Harvard and a year at the Sorbonne in Paris, was living in the city and working as a reporter for the Herald Tribune.
The last couple of years had not been good ones for my father. He had developed tuberculosis and a mounting inability to go on the wagon without confining himself to a hospital. The immediate cause of his death, at age forty-eight, was a heart attack. It was not until John died of the same cause at forty-seven that I had my first cholesterol test with its alarming count in the 400s and learned that the gene for super-high accumulations of the stuff was in the Lardner DNA. John’s son, one of my sons and a grandson were all later found to have dangerously high counts. The four of us have been surviving ever since on strong medication.
Alcohol had also played a significant part in Dad’s decline, and he had been conscious of its ill effects for years. Prior to the enactment of Prohibition, he had even briefly entertained the hope that such a law, regardless of its general soundness and consequences, might be a help to him personally in kicking the habit. In the event, however, he and his friends Grantland Rice and Rube Goldberg, who happened to be in Toledo, Ohio, to see Jess Willard fight Jack Dempsey when the reform took effect, were quick to investigate the new phenomenon of illegal liquor, and happy to learn that it wasn’t so very different, biochemically, from the legal kind. Later he expressed his considered view of the great experiment in “Prohibition Blues,” a song that became the standout hit of a feminist musical called Ladies First, starring the popular Nora Bayes.
I’ve had news that’s bad news about my best pal
His name is Old Man Alcohol but I call him Al . . .
Like many alcoholics, his efforts to stop drinking never lasted long. In at least one important respect, though, his case was peculiar. Others sought and found in liquor a release from their inhibitions about using rough language or making sexual advances. Not Dad. He had an idealized concept of marriage that made his drinking habits seem incompatible with wedded bliss. His courtship letters took it for granted that he would not drink after marriage. In practice, he switched from a pattern of regular daily drinking to alternating daily periods of abstinence and indulgence, with the latter growing steadily more intense and long-lasting as the years passed.
Mother had realized for some time that he was a dying man and that there wasn’t much she could do about it. Still, she applied all her strength and endurance to the effort, and her grief when it failed was overwhelming because he had become her main purpose in life. She was just beginning to revive her other ties to the world when, five years later, Jim was killed in the Spanish Civil War.
While no more than one in ten Americans is an alcoholic, among twentieth-century writers the proportion rises to something like one in three. Without much effort, I can summon the names of Eugene O’Neill, William Faulkner, James Thurber, Dorothy Parker, John Cheever, John O’Hara, Tennessee Williams, Ernest Hemingway, John Steinbeck, Raymond Chandler, Robert Benchley, Dashiell Hammett, Theodore Dreiser, Sherwood Anderson, Edna St. Vincent Millay, and—the first two drunks I knew and could identify as such—Sinclair Lewis and Scott Fitzgerald. Each of them in the course of an evening at our house would become, visibly and volubly, a far less attractive person. As a child, I was not aware of any similar alteration in my father’s behavior; he was noted for maintaining physical control despite considerable consumption of alcohol, and he was particularly careful in the presence of his sons. For most of his binges, he went into New York and stayed at a hotel or club. Since this was also his practice when meeting a story deadline, we had no way of distinguishing between the two. I was well into my teens before I realized that he was an alcoholic, and by that time the episodes were occurring less and less often in the face of debilitating disease and hospitalization.
There has been a lot of speculation about what makes writers become drinkers (or the other way around). Life has put me in a position to discuss this topic with some authority, and I can lend my support to a few of the standard theories: the stress of deadlines, the search for answers to difficult creative problems, the need to face internal demons on a regular professional basis. Another explanation, easily overlooked, is opportunity. If you work in a public place, as most people do, it’s difficult to go off on a bat; practical considerations force you to postpone your drinking until the working day has ended. Writers, who set their own hours of labor and diversion from labor, have an easier time sustaining a career and an addiction—for a while.
Literary critics and others have wondered about the roots of the despair that presumably provoked my father to start drinking again despite his awareness of the addiction. My prolonged empirical research into the same disease leads me to conclude that drinking is more apt to increase depression than relieve it. The alcoholic is distressed by his failure to conquer the addiction; hoping to ease his distress, he turns to drinking, which has an effect opposite to the one intended. This vicious cycle was aggravated in my father’s case by a puritanical conscience.
Watching his death happen was the first major emotional event that I can recall. But it didn’t take the form of a sudden shock. There was no surprise, just the realization that a highly-prized and dearly-loved element of my life had been taken away. After completing the cremation arrangements and taking stock of a tremendous volume of mail and cables from all over the world, we moved Mother into New York, where John would be nearby, and I headed back to college.
Catching up with my studies was far from my first priority, however. The big question confronting me on my arrival, a week late, was whether I felt up to working on Princeton’s annual Triangle Club show. In a competition held the previous spring, I had been chosen to collaborate on the script with a senior; I would be the first sophomore so honored. Without hesitation, either on family or academic grounds, I declared my readiness to proceed, although I knew I would have to put most of my energy into writing and rehearsing in order to put the show on in Princeton and New York before Christmas.
It was 1933, well before the era of co-education, and our chorus “girls” were female impersonators. Otherwise, the production attained a fairly high amateur level. The previous year’s star, Jose Ferrer—now a graduate student of architecture—dropped in to share his insights with the director, Dr. Donald Stuart, a middle-aged professor of French. “Joe, do you think that’s dirty?” Dr. Stuart asked worriedly, about a scene underway onstage. “No,” the younger man replied, “but I’ll show you how you can make it dirty.”