Three Rules for Drinking
Frank McCourt's memoir of growing up in Limerick is a darkly humorous profile of addiction. The addict does not enjoy his addiction: this is what makes him an addict.
My edition: McCourt, Frank. Angela’s Ashes: A Memoir. 20th anniversary edition. Scribner, 2016. Originally published in 1996.1
“The Irishman sustains himself during brief periods of joy by the knowledge that tragedy is just around the corner.”
—William Butler Yeats
Frank McCourt was born in Brooklyn to Irish immigrants who at the first whiff of the Great Depression moved back when he was four. His memoir, Angela’s Ashes, tells of his life in Limerick, Ireland, up to the age of nineteen, when he managed to save enough to escape back to New York. “When I look back on my childhood I wonder how I survived at all,” he writes. “It was, of course, a miserable childhood: the happy childhood is hardly worth your while. Worse than the ordinary miserable childhood is the miserable Irish childhood, and worse yet is the miserable Irish Catholic childhood” (p. 11). The single greatest contribution to his “miserable Irish Catholic childhood” was his father’s habit of drinking away the wages while the rest of the family went to bed hungry.
Based on McCourt’s description, it seems his father could be a proper father and husband for up to three weeks at a time, long enough to rekindle hope until the day he doesn’t come home when his shift ends and mam offers up excuses for his delay like prayers but eventually they stop waiting and she cries herself to sleep and Mr. McCourt stumbles through the door in the dead of night after visiting the Guinness family singing and waking his children to stand and salute and swear to die for Ireland until he collapses on the floor and oversleeps and loses his job because he didn’t show up for his shift which he was lucky to have because everyone can hear his Northern Irish accent and that’s Presbyterian country and Limerick is a decent Catholic city. Rinse, repeat.
An addict isn’t somebody who doesn’t want to stop. It’s someone who wants to stop but can’t, and who may be fighting all the time to stop. But the fight leaves him exhausted. He stumbles back to the drink to refresh himself and get back to fighting again. Nobody hates his addiction more than the addict.
The ashes of Angela are those that fall from the receding tips of her cigarettes, which she smokes constantly and can always afford despite their poverty on account that they are the “only comfort we have in the world” (p. 64). Addiction forms a loop where the source of our wretchedness is simultaneously what comforts us in that wretchedness. A perverse irony, we find ourselves needing our addiction in order to live with our addiction. Father has the drink, but mother has her cigarettes. Both flee to their substance of choice for comfort. As the parents find no consolation in their children, so the children find no solace in their parents. This seems to be McCourt’s working definition of substance abuse: substituting the consumption of brain-altering chemicals for human connection. (Interestingly, according to this definition a substance need not lead to intoxication or behavioral change in order to be abused. Also interestingly, social media could qualify as a brain-altering substitute for human connection.)
McCourt never once uses the words addiction or alcoholism or their variants. His perspective is his childhood self, descriptive, not technical. His father does not “suffer from over-drinking”: he stumbles, sings, smells of the whiskey smell. His mother stares off blankly with a smoldering fire between her lips. Reading about his family’s substance abuse was like watching a slow-killing plague. I like the drink myself, in moderation, but this memoir is almost enough to make a person take a vow of abstinence. McCourt eventually finds solace in books, as these are the only things that open up to him and don’t slam shut again.
My description of McCourt’s life is more dreary than reading him tell it. That is because I am not Irish. I don’t know how to talk of suffering that way. McCourt is a master of musing on tragedy in a comic key. He wants us to hear about his “miserable Irish Catholic childhood” and then laugh. The writing is too warmed by affection to be cynical, too existential to be flippant, too un-self-pitying to make us feel he’s only coping. His laughter says something true. He is here to cure our optimism, the optimism that keeps us perpetually disappointed and grasping and ungrateful and rejecting the past we feel we can’t live with. Humor is the oxygen in the muscles that makes our burdens bearable. It gives victims of reality the relief they need to turn and confront their experience and rally the words to tell it. If flippancy is an escape from the pain of reality, true humor makes reality at least live-able. This is what McCourt does, and the irony is it leaves us more deeply affected than if he were trying to make us cry.
There is alcoholism on both sides of my family, beginning with my earliest Scotch-Irish ancestors to settle in the New World and ending only three generations ago, when my grandfathers on both sides of my family got religion. I grew up in a dry household with all the cautionary tales, such as of my great-grandpa who’d get so desperate he’d gulp down after-shave lotion. My own father, a discerning man, was thinking of our family history teetering on both ends when he made it a rule that no alcohol be allowed in the house. “It’s a battle I don’t want to fight,” he explained to me, when I was old enough to ask about it.
Addiction is no mere matter of having “disordered loves,” of placing a higher love below a lesser love. I love my wife but I also love Pilot G-2 pens. If my wife breaks or loses a Pilot G-2 pen, and if I respond in anger, that is a case of disordered love: I have, however momentarily, placed the pen above my wife and allowed my grief for its loss to outrank my desire to safeguard my marriage. Addiction is not like this. McCourt’s father’s problem wasn't that he loved the drink more than his family. The agony of addiction is it makes a man reject for alcohol (or porn or drugs or new books) the family he loves more than alcohol, and he must watch himself do it and hate himself for it. One doesn’t become an addict by loving something “too much.” An addict does not love drink but abuses it. Maybe Frank McCourt’s father loved the drink once, but one cannot love something and be addicted to it at the same time. Addiction is a failure to love; indeed, it is the pursuit through the drink of something beyond the drunk. At any rate, an addict does not enjoy his addiction. That is what makes him an addict.
An addict is a fragmented personality: the one who wants to stop drinking and the one who can’t. In biblical terms, these personalities correspond to the will and the flesh.2 Addiction is saying to yourself all the time, “I shouldn’t be doing this, I don’t want to do it,” and doing it anyway, as the flesh leads the will along as if by a leash. The child McCourt observed the many versions of his father in terms of his Catholic catechism: “I think my father is like the Holy Trinity with three people in him, the one in the morning with the paper, the one at night with the stories and the prayers, and then the one who does the bad thing and comes home with the smell of whiskey and wants us to die for Ireland” (p. 210). An addict lacks integrity; that is, he is not a single whole, but diffused, fragmented, a multitude. Like Gollum, he is not an I, but a we.
The way to drink and really enjoy it, and therefore to not be a drunkard, is to drink in a way that serves one’s integrity. It brings you back to the self, rather than multiplying selves. The aim of the drink is the same as that of a poem or a joke, which Owen Barfield defined as “a felt change of consciousness.”3 The mind-altering properties of alcohol (and caffeine) made it prohibitive for feminists and other fundamentalists, but the wider and religious experience of alcohol connects it, like the poem or the joke, to a reorientation to a new way of being. The most sacred ritual in Christianity is a communal drinking of wine, double transmuted from fruit to wine, then from wine to blood. The Psalmist sings that the gladdening which wine rouses in the heart is a work of God (Ps. 104:14–15).
To drink is essentially celebratory, as it sets the body aglow on the occasion of something new coming into the world. Walker Percy supposed the explanation for modern attitudes toward alcohol has to do with the loss of the festival. The ancients and the medievals knew how to party, but modern parties are painfully frantic and dull: “Hence the booze. Unlike the use of spirits in the past, the purpose of alcohol is not to celebrate the festival but to anesthetize the failure of the festival.”4 In modern parties, alcohol is rendered a necessity: The party is no fun without it. At worst, we think the drinking is the party. But nothing festive is truly necessary. G.K. Chesterton, a prodigious drinker, wrote, “Never drink because you need it, for this is rational drinking, and the way to death and hell. But drink because you do not need it, for this is irrational drinking, and the ancient health of the world.” Accordingly, I have three rules for drinking, all of which are derived from Chesterton’s aphorism, “Drink because you are happy, and never because you are miserable,”5 which you can take as the fourth, implicit rule governing the following three:
I. Never drink alone.
If what I have said is true, that drinking is essentially a celebration, then it follows any celebration yearns to draw others into its circle. For this rule, others need not be drinking alcoholic beverages, necessarily. What is essential is you are with others, drinking. To avoid abuse, the drink facilitates a human connection.
II. Always accompany a drink with a song, toast, or prayer.
What is a celebratory occasion without one (or more) of these?
My prayer of choice:
This is the day that the LORD has made; we will rejoice and be glad in it. (Ps. 118:24 TNCB)
My toast of choice:
There is nothing better for a person than that he should eat and drink and find enjoyment in his toil. This also, I saw, is from the hand of God, for apart from him who can eat or who can have enjoyment? (Eccl. 2:24–25 ESV)
III. Drink no more than a single serving within a twenty-four hour period.
Too little or too much of a good thing and it ceases to be good. In my experience, a second or third serving seldom pleases so much as the first; and I do not enjoy the first so much if I have already decided I will have a second or a third. Moderation is not at all about playing it safe, for it objects to too little as well as too much. It avoids all excess, including excessive abstinence. While it is appropriate to speak of moderation as the mean between extremes—“the middle state between,” to use Aristotle’s favored phrase (NE II.1)—the soul of moderation is not so much to avoid excess as to fully appreciate the goodness of a thing, which requires delimiting that goodness so that you may partake in proportion to your capacity for goodness, rendering every moment of partaking good and nothing less and nothing more than good.
It was recently St. Patrick’s Day 2024. Accordingly, the Glen Ellyn Public Library set up a display of titles related to Irish history and culture, mostly memoirs. Angela’s Ashes was among them; the title seemed familiar, though I can’t recall from where, but I needed only read as far as the (apparently famous) opening paragraph to be convinced to check it out.
Augustine famously analogized worldliness to addiction. Walking through the streets of Milan, he came upon a merry drunkard. Augustine mused to his friends that while they agonized over their pursuit of the glories of “honors, wealth, and marriage, …. it appeared that this beggar had already beaten us to the goal, a goal which we would perhaps never reach ourselves” (Conf. VI.6, 9). Augustine saw that he and the beggar desired the same thing, but the drunkard’s joy was carefree, whereas Augustine’s misery came by enormous skill and effort. While the drunkard did not have true joy, only carnal joy, Augustine was a drunkard of a higher and more “perverse” order (Conf. VI.6, 9). The beggar was an addict, but he was an honest addict. His joy was lesser, but at least it was real and in his possession, whereas the joy Augustine desired was illusory. Not only did the beggar have the greater dignity of participating in reality, but he was less a captive to his addiction than Augustine was to his. Let’s put it this way: Which is worse, addiction to drink or to nothing? The latter. You can take away the drunkard’s drink, and he will get sober. Meanwhile, the one addicted to nothing, to unreality, cannot be parted from his addiction. It exists in his mind, forever debilitating his reason. He is never not drunk and staggering after more. So long as we order our lives according to glory or happiness (worldly joy), rather than to the cross (heavenly joy), we are all addicts. One finds here in Augustine, in seed form, Martin Luther’s doctrine of the bondage of the will.
Owen Barfield, Poetic Diction: A Study in Meaning (Wesleyan University Press, 1984), 48.
Walker Percy, Lost in the Cosmos: The Last Self-Help Book (Picador, 1984), 185.
“Drink because you are happy, but never because you are miserable. Never drink when you are wretched without it, or you will be like the grey-faced gin-drinker in the slum; but drink when you would be happy without it, and you will be like the laughing peasant of Italy.” G.K. Chesterton, Heretics (Hendrickson Publishers, Inc., 2007), 54.