New enthralment

In Chicago last month I met a group of nice young Americans who wanted to be writers and were therefore learning the craft at one of America’s hundreds of creative writing schools. At one of our lunches I noticed that everyone was on Diet Cokes while I boldly sipped a glass of white wine. I wondered if at that night’s party there would be alcohol. “Oh sure,” one student said, “it’s for writers. Writers drink!” And so they do, or did: consider poor Scott Fitzgerald or Dorothy Parker or Dylan Thomas, muddling towards their ends. The student’s remark suggested that drinking still had romance for her — as though getting drunk was attractive, bohemian behaviour — which these days no longer applies in Britain. When the students began to talk about how much they or Chicagoans in general drank I could only say sadly that in Britain they would be considered near teetotallers and that whatever happened in Chicago’s bars on a Saturday night would look decorous compared to midnight scenes in the average British high street. If the novelist Fitzgerald or the poet Thomas could be brought back from the dead to witness, say, a cathedral city like Gloucester at 11.30 pm in the year 2008, they would be amazed to find so many people, so much younger than them, lurching about in an even worse condition than they were.

In Britain, the drunken young were given international recognition by last week’s Time magazine in a cover story headed “Unhappy, Unloved and Out of Control — an epidemic of violence, crime and drunkenness has made Britain scared of its young”. The story was taken up by most of the British media. At one time, the reaction would have been a shrug of British shoulders and a piece or two in the better papers pointing out that heavy drinking was part of our social history. One of the frankest accounts of alcoholic intake comes in William Hickey’s diaries, which list the daily consumption of bottles by a young Englishman in 18th-century Calcutta — lots of claret, ale and brandy, and subsequent vomiting out of the coach taking him to the levees in Chowringhee. James Boswell and his pals were no better, and many respectable Victorian ladies had their senses securely muffled by a mixture of Madeira and laudanum by the time they sat down to their brown Windsor soup. As for the working class, look no further than histories of the Industrial Revolution — crying babies hushed with gin — or the traditions of the Royal Navy, which until relatively recently doled out a free daily ration of rum to all its sailors.

This time, however, there has been no reaching back into history to reach that slightly comforting conclusion, ’twas ever thus. Possibly excluding Finland — and it has cold dark winters as an excuse — Britain must have the drunkest young people in the world. Teenage girls crawl on their knees across pavements, boys as young as nine and 10 stagger in playgrounds, many town centres become vomit-splattered debaucheries on Thursdays, Fridays and Saturdays. On the tops of buses you can hear secretaries boast about their hangovers — “God, Sarah, I got so smashed...” — while the tabloid paparazzi snap young celebrities — singers, models, footballers — stumbling out of clubs, in pictorial terms the drunker the better.

What’s to be done? A sensible precaution is to stay clear of town centres at the weekend. According to a poll quoted in Time, a fifth of Britons stay at home at night to avoid risking encounters with intimidating youths. But beyond self-preserving behaviour by the sober adult, nobody really has any idea. While it is probably true that, in the words of Bob Reitemeier, chief executive of the Children’s Society, drunken, drugged and violent behaviour is still confined to “a significant minority” of British youth, that minority grows larger with every step down the socio-economic scale. Especially but by no means exclusively among poorer whites, legless intoxication has become the supreme idea of fun, sanctioned by any ‘role model’ (Wayne Rooney, Britney Spears, Amy Winehouse) the drinker may possibly have heard of in their sober moments. Alcohol is cheap and easy to obtain, and no government, for all the moralistic tut-tutting, is going to interfere dramatically with the arrangements that suit the ‘entertainment industry’, aka the liquor trade.

In Chicago, I thought about where America’s experiment with Prohibition had led. The answer is Al Capone. Not a good path to follow therefore — and yet there are some American restrictions from that era eighty years ago that Britain could well emulate. That night’s party was held in a fashionable club and included readings by celebrated young writers such as ZZ Packer and Junot Diaz, as well as a wonderful performance by a 30-strong ensemble called the Mucca Pazza Punk Circus Marching Band. A swell event: I was an honoured guest. And yet at the door, a bouncer asked me for my ID — he needed me to prove I was over 21, the age Americans can legally drink. Only then could he give me a wrist-band that entitled me to be served alcohol at the bar. No wrist-band, no cocktail. The last time I was below age 21 was the first week of February, 1966. My age was obvious — to me, too obvious. But the bouncer persisted and I got my wrist-band.

In Britain, alcohol can be sold to anyone over 18 and few shops or pubs seem to heed even that age limit. Raising the British limit by three years might make little difference; Britain’s new enthralment to alcohol has deep causes that can’t be cured by legal tinkering and there are, after all, 10-year-olds drinking watered wine in France without grave social effects. But it might at least be a start. It won’t happen though; how can you forbid beer to an 18-year-old and at the same time ask him to go and fight in Afghanistan?

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I don’t know if an Indian university has yet set up a department of creative writing, but, never fear, one or two such departments are sure to be on their way. Writing schools flourish everywhere in the US and have recently began to grow rapidly in number in Britain, where Martin Amis has been appointed professor of creative writing at Manchester University on a salary of £80,000 for a 28-hour year — which means, as the Manchester Evening News calculated rather sourly, that at £3,000 an hour Amis is earning as much as a Premier League footballer. But it is easy to be sour about writing schools. What good do they do? Every year they churn out graduates who want to be published writers, novelists mainly, and only a very few succeed, even when success is defined as having a book of short stories published by a small press with no advance against royalties — and small prospect of royalties later. In his latest book, A Writer’s People, V.S. Naipaul takes a sharp view of the “writing-school mill” that takes small talents and grinds them into uniform styles, so that “Chinese and Indian and African experience comes out looking and feeling American and modern”. Many would agree with him, though I support the more benign view of my friend Richard Ford, who said “at least they do no harm”. As to good, the facts are that many American writers supplement their otherwise meagre living by teaching in them and that most young “literary” American writers have been to one. (It can be a neat career circle: first you study in a writing school, then you publish a book of stories, then as a published writer the same writing school hires you to teach others how to do it. Is art served in this way? It may be too soon to know. )

Iowa is probably America’s most famous writing school, its graduates most eagerly scouted by New York publishers, but Columbia College, Chicago, must be among the largest and oldest as well as the most lively and engaging. Last month on my visit there, offering whatever wisdom I have on editing and publishing, I met its two founders, John Schultz and Betty Shiflett, who began teaching writing 40 years ago. One thing has always puzzled me about writing schools: where did the idea come from? When and how was it decided that writing could be learned by ‘work-shopping’ and tutorials rather than by the lonely graft of sitting in a room and trying and (usually) failing? Schultz had an interesting answer. It was a notion of the early Soviets, who set up writers’ ‘workshops’ so that an art form could be made communal and accessible to anyone who wanted to try their hand when not building dams. And did it work? “The story goes that they sent some of their stuff to Lenin,” Schulz said, “and Lenin glanced at a few pages and then muttered that on the whole he preferred Pushkin.”

None the less, writing schools may be Leninism’s one enduring — in fact, steadily increasing — gift to the world. Schulz and Shifflet are already in talks with the Chinese authorities about starting a version of their writing programme at Fudan University, Shanghai. Despite the scepticism of V.S. Naipaul and V.I. Lenin, it will be surprising if the Ballygunge School of Creative Fiction (fees by arrangement) doesn’t open one day soon.