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You Drink but You Don't Become Drunk
refers to a late-night drinking session on the Italian island of Capri.
The artist's attempt to lose himself in drunkenness was sabotaged by the strength of the desire to be drunk. He had been reading Jean Rhys' debut novel
Quartet
(1928)
NOTE
Jean Rhys (born Ella Gwendoline Rees Williams 1890 1979) was born and raised on the Caribbean island of Dominica.
Quartet
(Chatto & Windus, 1928) is Jean Rhys's debut novel. Set in Paris's bohemian café society, it is a roman à clef based on Rhys' extramarital affair with Ford Madox Ford, the English author and editor of The Transatlantic Review literary magazine. The affair occurred in Ford's Paris home under the eye of his common-law wife, Australian artist Stella Bowen, while Rhys's husband, Jean Lenglet, was in jail.
and the work of Marguerite Duras.
NOTE
Marguerite Germaine Marie Donnadieu (1914 – 1996), known as Marguerite Duras, was a French novelist, playwright, screenwriter, essayist, and experimental filmmaker. She was the author of many novels, plays, films, interviews, essays, and works of short fiction, including her best-selling, highly fictionalized autobiographical work
L'Amant
(1984), translated into English as
The Lover,
which describes her youthful affair with a Chinese-Vietnamese man. The novel was awarded the Prix Goncourt in 1984.
Both novelists evoke the bohemian but deleterious effects of alcohol.
In a 1991 interview, Marguerite Duras went so far as to admit, ‘I drank because I was an alcoholic. I was a real one – like a writer. I'm a real writer, I was a real alcoholic. I drank red wine to fall asleep. Afterwards, Cognac in the night. Every hour a glass of wine and in the morning Cognac after coffee, and afterwards I wrote. What is astonishing when I look back is how I managed to write.’
