"The Lonely City" by Olivia Laing

An audio book.

The author, lonely while she was in New York, studies the loneliness of city dwellers by looking at the lives of 4 depictors of loneliness, two of whom I knew about - Warhol and Hopper - and two I didn't - David Wojnarowicz and Henry Darger. Solanas (who tried to kill Warhol) gets coverage too, and Greta Garbo's mentioned (followed once by Warhol in the street; followed and photographed by another man for a decade). She mentions "Maskenfreiheit", and the joy of seeing without being seen. She looks at "Vertigo" and Harlow's attachment experiments.

Her mother was gay. Outed in the 80s she had to leave the village where she lived. The author writes that she felt like a gay boy, rather jealous of the ease of life at the Piers.

She mentions Klein's views on loneliness, the lost parts of Self, the value of art in putting things back together. Then she writes about how illness (terminal illness, AIDS) connects with loneliness. She spends hours online, growing lonely. Online dating engenders further identity/loneliness issues.

In the 1990s Josh Harris, "The Warhol of the web", understood "the power of loneliness as a driving force, and the fear of intimacy.

Stitching, gluing and repairing all become related to lonliness. The author comes to realise that being in pieces doesn't mean that one has failed.

Other reviews

• James Lasdun (There is always a question of balance between reticence and disclosure regarding the personal element of this kind of book. It is hard to please everyone, but to my mind Laing errs a little on the side of reticence)
• Molly McCloskey (I do have one complaint about this otherwise wonderful book, which is that it focuses almost exclusively on male artists)

"The Trip to Echo Spring" by Olivia Laing (Canongate, 2014)

A study of 6 drunk writers - F. Scott Fitzgerald, Hemingway, Tennessee Williams, Berryman, Cheever and Carver. She quotes from Lewis Hyde's "Alcohol and Poetry" - 'four of the six Americans who have won the Nobel Prize for literature were alcoholic. About half of our alcoholic writers eventually killed themselves.'. She writes that "Most of this six had - or saw themselves as having - that most Freudian of pairings, an overbearing mother and a weak father. All were tormented by self-hatred and a sense of inadequacy. Three were profoundly promiscuous, and almost all experienced conflict and dissatisfaction with regard to their sexuality" (p.9). She visits their haunts, the landscapes they fled to for recovery, goes to AA meetings and recalls her alcoholic father, how he left when she was 4, how another alcoholic, a woman, came to live with her mother, how eventually they ended up in Southsea then on an estate near Portsmouth, UK.

She 33. During the long train rides across the USA she reads their works for scenes that might be true regarding the effects of alcohol, reading much into Cheever's "The Swimmer". She reads their letters and diaries, finds out how they use drink as a cure for social anxiety. She writes about their common themes of insomnia and denial.

By p.170 a theory's beginning to emerge - "The three-way relationship between childhood experience, alcohol and writing ... A sense was building in me that there was a hidden relationship between the two strategies of writing and drinking and that both had to do with a feeling that something precious had gone to pieces, and a desire at once to mend it". She notices that "the dream of letting go into water is prevalent in the work of alcoholic writers. ... little fantasies of cleanliness, purification, dissolution and death" (p.207).

I hadn't realised that "The expansiveness Lish objected to was intimately bound up with [Carver's] own sense of recovery and renewed grace" (p.277). In the end Carver acquiesced to the removal of the happy endings.

Other reviews

• Sophia Martelli (Laing explores the causes in admirable detail and astonishingly good prose – incisive, powerful, illuminating – that rivals the output of the authors she is writing about. )
• Keith Miller (There are even fragments of what might have been a rather better book: a straightforward first-person memoir in which Laing talks about having an alcoholic stepmother. But it doesn’t seem to occur to her that her personal experiences may have made her less, not more, able to write objectively about other people’s drinking. )