The Pub Wherein Firmin: On Writing Drunk
Writing drunk is composition on the piss. There is, however, another meaning of “writing drunk”. One where the intoxication escapes the bodily boundaries of the writer and seeps onto the page. In such cases it is the prose that is pissed; the sentences themselves that are intoxicated. Confused and free-flowing, they begin to lose the regimented clarity of sobriety and slip into the blurred confusion of being on the bend. Write drunk, edit drunk, be drunk. There are, in my mind, two exemplary novels that display this prose. They are Malcolm Lowry’s Under The Volcano (1947) and J.P. Donleavy’s The Ginger Man (1955).
By Duncan Stuart.