Wednesday, February 28, 2018

Aid staff would pay more' / Sex workers in Haiti speak out

In an image from June 2010, sex workers in Port-au-Prince wait for clients among the debris of homes destroyed by the earthquake. Photograph: Alexandre Meneghini/

Aid staff would pay more': sex workers in Haiti speak out

On the streets of Port-au-Prince, women in the sex trade discuss the devastation of the 2010 quake – and remember the influx of clients who would offer five times what a local could

Joe Parkin Daniels in Port-au-Prince

Wed 28 Feb 2018

atasha stands alone on an unlit trash-strewn pavement at the side of the road to Pétion-Ville, the upmarket hillside suburb in Haiti’s capital, Port-au-Prince. “I’m here every night,” she says, eyeing SUVs as they speed past on a sticky February evening. “I want to do something else, but there isn’t anything … this is my only choice.”

The 31-year-old mother of three has been a sex worker in the city for nine years. Like almost everyone here, she lost relatives in the catastrophic earthquake that devastated the capital in January 2010. “My sister, nephew and cousin were all crushed by their own houses,” she says, with a dead-eyed stare. “I was living in a different house, that’s why me and my kids are still alive.”

The disaster killed between 200,000 and 300,000 people and initially displaced 2.3 million. Homes were buried in rubble, while markets and government buildings were completely destroyed, in a country already ranked the poorest in the western hemisphere. Natasha bottled up her grief and began working again later that week.

“I didn’t have a choice,” she says. “It’s the only way I could make any money.”

Aid workers from around the world arrived in their thousands to assist with the recovery. Natasha could earn big money. She says a foreigner would give her at least $100 (£72), more than five times the price a local would pay.

“They have more money but like everyone there are good guys and bad guys,” Natasha says, recalling an instance shortly after the earthquake when two aid workers picked her up.

“One of the guys wanted to have anal sex but he wouldn’t wear a condom. When I said no he got really aggressive and his friend had to stop him from hitting me. He had his arm raised already.”

Natasha adds that she always insists that the man wears a condom, which would occasionally spark altercations.

Earlier this month, Oxfam apologised to Haiti’s government over allegations of sexual exploitation. The International Committee of the Red Cross and Plan International UK, among other international NGOs, have also promised to take action against employees who paid for sex.

A number of British NGOs signed an open letter last weekpublished in the Huffington Post, announcing new measures to protect people in the places in which they work. “There can be no tolerance for the abuse of power, privilege or trust within our organisations or in our work,” the letter read.

News of the scandal has not reached the streets where Natasha works, though she says she’s not surprised by it. “They do what they want,” she says. “After the earthquake you would see [foreign workers] asking to have sex in exchange for supplies. I never did it, but I saw some people who did.”

A UN report, published in May 2015, found that members of its peacekeeping mission in Haiti traded sex for aid with more than 225 womenbetween 2008 and 2014.

Though sex work is illegal in Haiti, carrying a sentence of up to 15 years for those who knowingly use the services of a trafficked sex worker, the law is seldom enforced. It is not known how many women and girls work in Haiti’s sex industry, but experts suggest it is in the thousands.

Many sex workers find clients on the streets, while others are based in high-end bars and clubs in affluent neighbourhoods.

During the day, the verdant Pétion-Ville neighbourhood bustles with life. Pickup trucks emblazoned with NGO logos manoeuvre through the winding streets, passing heavily armed officers wearing blue helmets from the UN policing mission. Supermarkets sell imported goods from the US at prices no average Haitian can afford. The minimum wage is little over $2 a day.

At night, there is a desolate feel to the place. Fearing street crime, pedestrians stay indoors. Every restaurant or bar sits behind gates and barbed wire, protected by shotgun-carrying security guards. On the street corners, sex workers varying in age wait around for clients, huddled in groups of about five.

Magdala, 25, has been working the streets for a year and spends almost everything she earns on feeding her one-year-old son. She lives with her parents in a neighbouring slum, who think she has found work in one of Pétion-Ville’s upscale bars.

“When a car pulls up, everyone is hoping it’s a foreigner because they pay so much more,” she says. “Sometimes we fight over who gets to the car window first.”

One night in December, a client pulled a gun on Magdala and stole her phone after having sex with her, leaving her stranded in an unknown part of the city. “It was terrifying, but I didn’t tell anybody,” she says, clenching a fist. “I mean who could I tell? It’s not like the police would do anything.”

All of the sex workers in Port-au-Prince who spoke to the Guardian fear reporting incidents to the police, worrying that they will be arrested themselves or dismissed as liars.

There are reports that some children have been recruited as sex workers in orphanages across the country, according to Jasper House, a women’s refuge in the Haitian town Jacmel.

“If any of these individual aid workers committed crimes, we must throw the full weight of the law against them,” says Jean Renel Senatus, a senator and former prosecutor. “Not only must they abide by the codes of their organisations, but they must also abide by the law.”

Other officials in Port-au-Prince have been similarly critical of NGOs such as Oxfam, among them the city’s mayor Ralph Youri Chevry. “I can’t say this whole scandal is a surprise,” he told the Guardian. “[Aid workers] have been doing as they please for years.”

Many women see few alternatives to sex work.

“I know that God will protect me if no one else does,” says Manushka, 21, who has been a sex worker for a year. Manushka hopes to leave Haiti one day, taking her toddler son with her. “I don’t care where – the US or Chile perhaps, because staying here means doing this forever.”

Natasha, sipping a soda while hollering at passersby, is also desperate for a way out. “I cry a lot and I pray,” she says. “I don’t have help from anyone, but my children have dreams and I want to make them real.”

THE GUARDIAN

Why does literature ignore pregnancy?

Illustration by Triunfo Arciniegas

Why does literature ignore pregnancy?

Madame Bovary, A Winter’s Tale, The Age of Innocence ... when it exists at all in fiction, childbearing generally manifests as a problem or impediment – but there is something universal to be learned from a very female experience

Jessie Greengrass

Thu 22 Feb 2018

few years ago, I spent a couple of weeks in the Wellcome Library, reading. At the time, I wanted both to write a novel and to have a baby and it didn’t occur to me that any connection might be found between the two. As far as the novel went, I knew that I wanted to write about subjectivity and I was interested in medical history – John Hunter, Freud, the early history of the x-ray – but I lacked a device to tie these thoughts together. It took me a surprisingly long time to come up with the idea of a pregnant narrator and when at last the possibility occurred to me, I dismissed it. To write about pregnancy – to try to articulate the desire for it, its uncomfortable realities, its disorientating aftermath – felt transgressive, although at the time I didn’t understand why.

Later, having found the baby easier to realise than the novel, I returned to the idea. In a haze of postnatal exhaustion it seemed easier to contemplate, somehow; I existed in a bubble, and lacked the mental resources to imagine far beyond its boundaries, and so I didn’t try. Instead, at odd hours of the night, I mulled over pregnancy in literature, only to find that my overwhelming impression was of something out of shot, a business of hot water and towels despatched elsewhere while in the centre of things a man paces a carpet. Think of Madame Bovary, whose labour is not only comically abrupt, but confirmed by her husband, as though she had somehow been absent herself:

She was confined on a Sunday at about six o’clock, as the sun was rising.

“It is a girl!” said Charles.

Although a fundamentally female experience, pregnancy exists in literature, when it does so at all, as a male problem. Sometimes it is a problem of trust, as with Hermione, heavy in her prison cell in Shakespeare’s The Winter’s Tale. Or it is a problem because it doesn’t happen at all: a wife without a child (where a child without a mother is opportunity, a Victorian stalwart of a plot).

Or, conversely, pregnancy is an impediment, freedom’s curtailment – Newland Archer in Edith Wharton’s The Age of Innocence, whose fantasies of escape are finally ended by his wife’s announcement of her pregnancy. From the outside, pregnancy might appear a gift: in A Farewell to Arms, Catherine’s pregnancy allows her lover access to an illusion of peace (before her death and that of the child shatters it). But we rarely make it so far. It is taken for granted that birth is attendant on marriage, and so stories stop at the altar. Nothing interesting can come of us afterwards, unless it is as a coda to another’s story: Jane Eyre persists so far as the birth of her first son, only so we might be reassured by the detail that Edward Rochester’s eyesight has returned.

Lately, it is true, there have been a few books on pregnancy: Rachel Cusk, Maggie Nelson, Rivka Galchen. The latter’s Little Labours deals with the transition to motherhood through a series of discrete fragments, adding up to a picture of a time that is disjointed. These are memoirs, though, and memoir is the preserve of the extraordinary, of experiences outside our own. This, I think, is the crux of it: we regard women’s bodies as absolutely strange. They are the mysterious other, going about their peculiar processes. What could we possibly learn from something so alien?

It was only very recently that I read The Argonauts, Nelson’s account of her pregnancy, and afterwards – when it was too late, because my own book was already being printed – I wondered if perhaps she had said all there was to be said. Her work is extraordinary; but still – my second thought – is there really only space for one pregnant body in all of literature? What Nelson does (and I had wanted to find a way to do) is to use pregnancy as a device to examine other things – in her case, queer family-building, embodiment, love. This is what literature offers us: the chance to take the specificities of a particular experience and to use them to articulate that which is universal. I have learned almost all I know about the world, about myself, from books, and it has been a joy, a work of love; but the consequence is that I have learned it from men. Desire, failure, fear, ambition – all have been housed in male bodies. Insofar as I have differed from this standard, I have felt myself to be somewhere between uninteresting and unspeakable.

Women’s bodies can be many things. They can be mirrors, weights, rewards; but so often they are seen from outside. Experiences that are unique to them remain anomalous, smoothly impenetrable, like bubbles of water to which significance refuses to adhere. What could we possibly learn about being human from that which only happens to half of us? This is what felt transgressive about the notion of writing a novel about pregnancy: that in doing so a female body might be required to stand both for itself and for something other, the experience of which is not uniquely female at all.

Jessie Greengrass’s novel Sight is published by John Murray, priced £14.99.
THE GUARDIAN

Tuesday, February 27, 2018

The Secret Life: Three True Stories by Andrew O’Hagan / Review

The Secret Life: Three True Stories by Andrew O’Hagan – review

Andrew O’Hagan scrutinises a trio of slippery figures in these vivid essays exploring the internet’s effect on our sense of self

Andrew Anthony
Sunday 11 June 2017

he internet has changed us, our means of communication, what we believe to be true, our identities and sense of self. That is a statement of such obviousness that we rarely stop to think about what it all actually means. But Andrew O’Hagan explores these themes with great depth and originality in three long essays – originally published in the London Review of Books – that make up his new collection, The Secret Life.

The first, entitled Ghosting, concerns that pathologically divisive figure, Julian Assange. The founder of WikiLeaks is awash with fictional potential. So much so that characters based on him regularly turn up in novels (Jonathan Franzen’s Purity) and TV dramas (Homeland).

O’Hagan, though, was commissioned to write ghostwrite Assange’s autobiography. On the surface, it was an inspired choice of author and subject. O’Hagan, a vivid and meticulous writer, was sympathetic to Assange’s cause, and he has the talent and staying power to draw even the most enigmatic characters out into the open.

But as becomes apparent in the essay, things didn’t go according to plan. This is partly because Assange is an unreliable narrator but a reliable narcissist. It’s also because he’s spent his life hiding in online shadows, where myths grow like fungus.

The Australian is caught between wanting to promote himself and maintain a secretive control of his image. It makes for a fascinating portrait of a prickly character who affects an egalitarian stance while awarding himself exceptional status, in which anything he does, however questionable, is by definition good because he’s the one doing it.

As O’Hagan becomes steadily more disillusioned, he can’t ignore the massive hypocrisy in which Assange indulges. For example, he makes WikiLeak employees sign contracts that threaten them with a £12m lawsuit if they disclose information about the organisation. As O’Hagan writes: “He can’t understand why any public body should keep a secret but insists that his own organisation enforce its secrecy with lawsuits. Every time he mentioned legal action against the Guardian or the New York Times, and he did this a lot, I would roll my eyes.”

O’Hagan’s eyes come in for a lot of exercise as he carefully documents a man whose ego invariably triumphs over his conscience. Gradually, the relationship comes apart as Assange attempts to play everyone off against one another. Although O’Hagan manages to get together a 70,000-word draft, Assange – then wanted for questioning in Sweden on a potential rape charge – thwarts his own book, for which he’s been handsomely paid, by refusing to sign off the manuscript.

Eventually the book comes out as a whole new genre: the “unauthorised autobiography”. This is not a hatchet job, but rather the best and most finely nuanced journalistic profile that this reviewer has read this century.

In the pantheon of internet celebrities Satoshi Nakamoto is not nearly as famous or infamous as Assange, but he is certainly more mysterious. Nakamoto is the inventor of bitcoins, the so-called cryptocurrency that has helped the illicit darknet flourish, and which, now legally traded, could one day prove the end of banks and money markets.

Nakamoto is a pseudonym that was a presence on the net during bitcoin’s development and release in 2009. Then it and its owner disappeared, prompting in their wake a search for the real Nakamoto that has turned him into the abominable snowman of the digital age.

In late 2015, O’Hagan was approached by an intermediary to write the life story of Nakamoto, who he was told was one Craig Steven Wright, another Australian who was about to become a fugitive from justice.

Intrigued but wary, O’Hagan decides to spend as much time as possible with Wright in an effort to get to the elusive truth. But in The Satoshi Affair we see that Wright is a frustratingly complex character who conceals every bit as much as he reveals. He shows O’Hagan a wealth of documentary evidence, much of it extremely technical and layman-unfriendly. Yet he stops short of providing conclusive proof that he is Nakamoto. Is this because he is a conman – he gets involved in a multimillion dollar business venture that is dependent on his being Nakamoto – or because he’s reluctant to give his true self up? The answer to that question remains, like so much that concerns the internet, enticingly out of reach.

Squeezed between these two compelling character studies is a relatively short essay entitled The Invention of Ronald Pinn. This Nabokovian-sounding figure is a dead man of around O’Hagan’s age whom the author reanimates online, creating a series of supporting fake identities on social media.

It’s a strange, slightly haunting voyage into digital life that reads as much like a short story as an essay. It ends with O’Hagan encountering the dead man’s mother. And suddenly, at the core of this excellent collection, we glimpse the unbridgeable difference between the real and the invented.

• The Secret Life: Three True Stories by Andrew O’Hagan is published by Faber (£14.99).

THE GUARDIAN

The Life and Opinions of Maf the Dog and of His Friend Marilyn Monroe by Andrew O'Hagan

John Banville admires Andrew O'Hagan's act of canine ventriloquism

John Banville
Saturday 8 may 2010

N

ot the least of the surprises awaiting readers of this unexpectedly high-toned novel is its opening: "My story really begins at Charleston, a perfect haunt of light and invention that stands in the English countryside." Charleston, the fragrant East Sussex domicile of Bloomsbury leading lights Vanessa Bell and Duncan Grant, is a far cry surely from the succession of foster homes and orphanages through which Norma Jeane Mortenson was dragged in the course of her harsh childhood. At the age of 16, in order to avoid being put into yet another institution, she married a hearty chap called Jim Dougherty, whom she addressed as Daddy – an appellation this fatherless daughter tried out on many of the men in her life, whether her heart belonged to them or not. She started out in care but until the day she died, at the age of 36 and horribly famous, she was never cared for as she deserved.

Why Charleston? It is from here in June 1960 that the terrier later to be known as Mafia Honey, or Maf for short, sets out on a grand adventure that will take him to New York and Hollywood and into the arms of the greatest screen goddess of them all. Mrs Bell's gardener, a Mr Higgens, had purchased him as a pup from a farm in Aviemore in the raw north, and now he is being sold on to Mrs Maria Gurdin of sunny Sherman Oaks in Los Angeles, Russian émigré, mother of Natalie Wood, and dealer in canine pets to the stars. Presently Mrs Gurdin will pass the pooch on to Frank Sinatra, who in turn will present him to his sometime lover Marilyn Monroe. It's a dog's life.

But what a dog, and what a life. Maf, whose "pedigree was terrifically intact", would have us know he is no ordinary hound: "We Maltese — we bichon maltais, the Roman Ladies' Dog, the old spaniel gentle, the Maltese lion dog, or Maltese terrier – are suffered to know ourselves to be the aristocrats of the canine world. A great relative of mine was famous as the boon companion to Mary, Queen of Scots; another one gained the ravenous affections of Marie Antoinette . . ."

As to how Maf came by his feeling for history or his fancy prose style, not to mention an impressive knowledge of the works of numerous philosophers, especially Plutarch, the answer, it seems, is metempsychosis. Most people, he observes, imagine they have only one life to live, but they are sorely mistaken: "God is not in his place of work and is not answering his phone – get it? You don't get saved, brothers and sisters, you get reassigned."

Maf opens his picaresque narrative with two splendid set-pieces, the one at Charleston, where we glimpse the literati at lunch and hear Cyril Connolly surmising that "Virginia's little novel Flush was a joke on Lytton"; and then at the rackety home of Mrs Gurdin, known, more or less affectionately, as Muddah, and her alcoholic husband Nick, who spends much of his time watching Bonanza and other cowboy dramas on television – "'This,' said Mr Gurdin, looking across the room at me through tired eyes, 'is a very beautiful show. A very very beautiful show, I tell you that for free, Dogville'" – while idly menacing the screen with his rifle. Their daughter Natasha – Natalie – is a fearsome product of her milieu: "The new swimming pool is crawling with frogs. They're all dying. You argued for a salt water pool, Muddah. Better for the circulation, you said. Now we have a fucking biblical plague down there. Isn't that just dandy?"

Into the midst of the ongoing Gurdin soap opera steps the world's favourite crooner. "Frank's neat row of teeth rhymed perfectly with the white line of handkerchief cresting the top pocket of his suit." The portrait of Sinatra is one of the glories of the book, catching with aching accuracy the arrogance and violent insecurity of a man so successful and so famous he no longer knows quite who he is or what exactly he wants – "Frank's needs always came out like urgent threats" – yet who penetrates to the very heart of American power politics, rallying his Hollywood cronies to "Back Jack", only to be cast aside by the Kennedys because of his ties to the underworld. "Who's feeding this shit to the newspapers – Mr Sinatra's 'connections', Mr Sinatra's 'associations'? I'll feed their fucking children to the piranhas at Oceanworld, d'you hear me?" Later, after Sinatra has been evicted from Camelot, there is a frighteningly funny scene in which he rampages through his luxury home in the desert, screaming in the pain of his betrayal, and ending by making a bonfire of the vanities when he drags out from a guest room the clothes and swimming gear left there by Peter Lawford and his family and sets them on fire beside the pool –"See this, Norma Jeane? See this, you two-bit whore?"

And then there is the star of stars. For both Maf and Marilyn it is love at first sight. Monroe had always been fond of dogs and recognised their tragic predicament, by turns fawned on and kicked, just like her. When she was seven and virtually an orphan, her first pet, a dog called Tippy, was run over by a car and killed, although in Marilyn's own version an irate neighbour, infuriated by Tippy's barking, attacked the creature with a hoe and sliced it in two. For Norma Jeane there were no half measures.

The author, although he largely has the measure of her – "Marilyn was a strange and unhappy creature, but at the same time she had more natural comedy to her than anybody I would ever know" – is plainly in thrall to his subject, and his narrative, so measured and sceptical elsewhere, rises to the level of rhapsody when he is writing about her. Yet for all the loving concentration he lavishes on her, she remains an elusive presence. "Her hair was pale and her skin beautifully clear; it was as if the world had bleached her with attention," he writes, perhaps realising, consciously or otherwise, that he too is taking part in the bleaching process. Life for Norma Jeane was the ceaseless task of maintaining Marilyn Monroe in bright and burnished existence: "Some women need a fully accompanying silence to help them speak, and that was how it seemed sometimes to be with my owner, the pupils of her eyes engorged in front of the mirror as she completed her rituals of becoming."

Writing of the wonderful times they had together, Maf recalls how they would go out into the city, "Marilyn sometimes in a headscarf and sunglasses, completely unknown, running into the wind with our mouths open, and hungry for experience". One recalls the anecdote told by another of the star's friends of walking along Fifth Avenue with her one day and remarking how no one was taking any notice of her. "Oh, but I'm not her," Marilyn said. "Do you want me to be?" Taking off her sunglasses she went into that walk – "Like jello on springs," as Jack Lemmon's character lip-smackingly puts it in Some Like It Hot – and within a minute she was being mobbed by fans. This was fame and more than fame; this was divinity, a goddess come among men.

Andrew O'Hagan has taken on the voice of a dog to write a subtle, funny and moving study of America on the eve of one of its periods of greatest crisis. The lonely and sordid death of Marilyn Monroe in 1962 ushered in, did we but know it, not the age of Aquarius but of Thanatos, and the fact that it was a daughter of Eros who had died makes the moment all the more tragic. Maf the Dog, like Lolita, like The Great Gatsby, is a threnody for lost innocence. At a literary party at Alfred Kazin's that Marilyn attends, Maf listens to the medleyed voices of the new world's leading intellectuals – Edmund Wilson is there, "like a grand and busy bumble bee" – and what he hears is the sound of "old Europe boiled down to its modern sap, the sons and daughters of immigrants claiming America's newness for themselves". Maf the canine savant is a shrewd observer of the modern age and of the American century, a veritable Tocqueville for our times: "It has never been easy for us Trotskyists to face, but it was America, dear, golden, childish America, that joined the narrative of personal ambition to the myth of a common consciousness, making a hymn, oh yes, to the future, the spirit, and the rolling land. It was all about hope."

John Banville's The Infinities is published by Picador.

THE GUARDIAN

Monday, February 26, 2018

’Tis a strange serpent /10 of the most entertaining drinking bouts in literature

The Bitter Drunk
by Adriaen Brouwer

’Tis a strange serpent – 10 of the most entertaining drinking bouts in literature

From Viking magical mead poetry to Evelyn Waugh’s Decline and Fall, here’s how writers have encapsulated an eternal boozy truth

Mark Forsyth

Friday 1 December 2017

here have been drunken poets and poetic drunkards ever since the dawn of time, or, to put it more properly, since the sun first rose over the yardarm of history. The Vikings believed that all poetry came from some magical mead that Odin had stolen from a giant, downed, and then regurgitated in Asgard. They even believed this of bad poetry because, according to them, Odin had regurgitated most of it, but, in the heat of the moment, some of it had leaked out of his arse.

That is the reason that some great literary drinking bouts are better than others. Some stories sum up an eternal boozy truth, some pinpoint perfectly how one particular culture saw their alcohol. Here are 10 of the best.

The Epic of Gilgamesh

The first ever work of literature is about Gilgamesh and Enkidu. Gilgamesh is the musclebound king of Uruk and Enkidu is a musclebound wild man who lives happily among the animals. Enkidu is completely at one with nature until a beautiful woman offers him beer.

Enkidu eats food till he was satiated. Ale he drinks, seven goblets. His spirit is loosened, he becomes hilarious. His heart becomes glad and his face shines. The barber removes the hair on his body. He is anointed with oil. He becomes manlike. He puts on a garment, and he is like a man.

And after that he can never go back to the animals. They shun him now. Alcoholhas made him a human. That’s exactly the same thing that happens at the end of Animal Farm (written a mere 4,000 years later). The animals peek in the window to see pigs drinking with the humans and “the creatures outside looked from pig to man, and from man to pig, and from pig to man again: but already it was impossible to say which was which”. It’s alcohol that divides us from the animals.

That’s not scientifically true, by the way. Most of the higher apes love to get drunk, providing that they can get their opposable thumbs on the stuff. Darwin recorded that the best way to catch a baboon was to offer it beer and then grab it when it was hungover.

Letters, Lord Byron

When not shagging his way across Europe or swimming his way across the Hellespont, Byron liked a drink. It’s not that he was a better drinker than anybody else, but he was much better at describing it. It’s probably best to simply let him speak for himself. This is from a letter to Thomas Moore dated 31 October 1815:

“Yesterday, I dined out with a largeish party, where were Sheridan and Colman, Harry Harris of Covent Garden and his brother, Sir Gilbert Heathcote, Ds. Kinnaird, and others, of note and notoriety. Like other parties of the kind, it was first silent, then talky, then argumentative, then disputatious, then unintelligible, then altogethery, then inarticulate, and then drunk. When we had reached the last step of this glorious ladder, it was difficult to get down again without stumbling;—and, to crown all, Kinnaird and I had to conduct Sheridan down a damned corkscrew staircase, which had certainly been constructed before the discovery of fermented liquors, and to which no legs, however crooked, could possibly accommodate themselves. We deposited him safe at home, where his man, evidently used to the business, waited to receive him in the hall.

Both he and Colman were, as usual, very good; but I carried away much wine, and the wine had previously carried away my memory; so that all was hiccup and happiness for the last hour or so, and I am not impregnated with any of the conversation.”

‘Experimental literary chaos …’ An illustration by Gustave Doré from the novel Gargantua by François Rabelais. Photograph: Corbis via Getty Images

Antony and Cleopatra, William Shakespeare

Shakespeare always gets things right. Though Falstaff is his most famous drunk, there’s one aspect of the business that the Bard nailed in Antony and Cleopatra.The three rulers of the known world – Antony, Octavius and Lepidus – are drinking together and Lepidus is very, very drunk. He’s so drunk that he doesn’t just say things, he insists on them.

“Nay, certainly, I have heard the Ptolemies’ pyramids are very goodly things; without contradiction, I have heard that.”

As though some invisible figure keeps contradicting him – something that I (and you) do after a few glasses. They’re so smashed that, when Lepidus asks Antony what Egyptian crocodiles are like, Antony replies: “It is shaped, sir, like itself; and it is as broad as it hath breadth: it is just so high as it is, and moves with its own organs: it lives by that which nourisheth it.”

And Lepidus is just about capable of considering this answer, nodding like he understands and saying, after some thought: “Tis a strange serpent.”

Right Ho, Jeeves, PG Wodehouse

For the pure unadulterated joy of drinking, you can’t really beat Wodehouse. Indeed it’s hard to beat him for pure unadulterated joy full stop. He had wonderful phrases for it – “tanked to the uvula” or “oiled, boiled, fried, plastered, whiffled, sozzled and blotto”. He also has the wonderful story of Gussie Finknottle’s first encounter with alcohol. Gussie is a shy man who is shyly in love with Madeline Bassett. But he doesn’t have the nerve to propose to her. Bertie tries to persuade him that a stiff drink will give him the requisite Dutch courage. Gussie refuses and Bertie decides to spike Gussie’s orange juice. Unfortunately Jeeves also decides to spike Gussie’s orange juice, and Gussie himself then decides that he’ll do as Bertie suggested and downs half a decanter of whisky, which he washes down with the doubly-spiked orange juice. The result is a new Gussie Finknottle, who acts as though he could bite a tiger. “Make it two tigers. I could chew holes in a steel door.”

He proposes to Bassett, who joyously accepts. But he then has to give a speech at the school prize-giving in Market Snodsbury, and his drunkenness, now begun, must run its course through the classic stages of jocose, bellicose and morose, before finally arriving at comatose, by which time Bassett has called off the engagement.

The King in Yellow, Robert W Chambers

The story of an American in Paris in the 1880s who falls in love with a Parisian girl, but is too prim, proper and embarrassed to even introduce himself. So far, so Henry James. But this hero differs from James’s, because after a few bottles of wine, and a brief attempt to start a fight with the Arc de Triomphe (“Its size annoyed him”), he realises that it would be a fantastic idea to visit her street, and, once there, that it would be a fantastic idea to climb up to her window, and a simply superb idea to break in. Finally, they come face to face, but he still hasn’t the courage to speak, and, in a beautiful tragicomic ending, he retreats, wordless, with a rose.

Gargantua, François Rabelais

Long before there was James Joyce, there was the experimental literary chaos of Rabelais. The Discourse of the Drinkers is a crazy dialogue where you can’t work out who’s saying what or why, but everybody wants to drink. “The concavities of my body are like another hell for their capacity … There is not a corner, nor cunniborow in all my body where this wine doth not ferret out my thirst.” NB: a cunniborow is a rabbit-hole.

‘Bite-of-the-nail suspense …’ Alec Guinness (right) and Ernie Kovacs in Our Man in Havana (1959). Photograph: Ronald Grant

Decline and Fall, Evelyn Waugh

Decline and Fall starts with the famous drunk scene where Paul Pennyfeather is debagged by the Bollinger Club, but it ends with a better one. Waugh not only captures perfectly the ability of a drunkard to repeat himself ad nauseam, but he also uses those repetitions to make the final conversation of the book into a literary symphony of theme, repetition, variation and motif. And when the drunkard is told he drinks too much, he replies: “Oh, damn, what else is there to do?”

Our Man in Havana, Graham Greene

This is the only drunk scene I can think of that has edge-of-the-seat bite-of-the-nail suspense. The main character, Wormold, has to render the head of Cuba’s secret police unconscious. So he challenges him to a game of draughts played with whisky miniatures. When you take a piece, you have to drink it, thus handicapping yourself. The police chief begins to realise what’s happening and is caught in a battle between the desire to win, the desire to keep his head and the alcohol. A board game, some drinks, and the casual question: “Do you keep your gun loaded?”

The Prose Edda, Snorri Sturluson

The Vikings believed that all poetry came from alcohol, specifically from the magical Óthrerir, the Mead of Poetry. This was guarded by a giant in the middle of a mountain, but Odin managed to break in, down it in one and then fly back to Asgard in the form of an eagle and regurgitate into a cauldron. Unfortunately, he was being chased by the giant and he was in such a hurry that, though most of it came out of his mouth, some sprayed out of his godly arse. All good poetry, believed the Vikings, came from the former; all bad poetry from the latter.

Lucky Jim, Kingsley Amis

Let us end with a hangover, as these things usually do. There have been some great descriptions, but this is the greatest. Dixon finds himself “too wicked to move, spewed up like a broken spider-crab on the tarry shingle of the morning”. But the line that clinches it is: “His mouth had been used as a latrine by some small creature of the night, and then as its mausoleum.”

• A Short History of Drunkenness is published by Viking.

THE GUARDIAN