'We Had a Drop Together. Welcome Home!'

“His life began to change. He stopped drinking (and would stay on the wagon until the 18^th Amendment became law, when he took up whiskey again in protest) and was once more writing poetry.”

 

Those with first-hand knowledge of alcoholism and the thinking that inevitably accompanies it will appreciate the impotent spectacle of protesting Prohibition by resuming the consumption of whiskey. Alcohol is a corrosive. It dissolves body, mind and soul, creating all the problems it seems at first to solve, and adding new ones along the way. Alcoholics are contrary and baffling to family and friends. Drunks doggedly defend the drink. Alcoholic thinking is epitomized by a wisecrack attributed to Dylan Thomas: “An alcoholic is someone I don’t like who drinks as much as I do.”

 

The passage at the top is from the late Robert Mezey’s introduction to The Poetry of E.A. Robinson, published by the Modern Library in 1999. Mezey’s thirty-page piece joins Yvor Winters’ monograph and essays by J.V. Cunningham and Irving Howe as essential accompaniments to one of our finest poets.

 

When considering American writers with drinking problems, scholars and critics customarily leave Robinson off the long, familiar alcoholic litany (Faulkner, Cheever, Berryman, et al.). Why? Let’s face it: Robinson, a century ago the most popular poet in America, with three Pulitzer Prizes, gets little attention, critical or readerly. If not cancelled, he is misshelved, effectively lost. See Dana Gioia’s discussion of Robinson’s standing among readers, and other matters. In addition, Robinson was a periodic drinker. He had long dry spells, unlike his father and his brother Herman, both of whom died of the cumulative effects of protracted drinking. His eldest brother, Dean, was a pharmacist who became a morphine addict and took his own life with an overdose. His drinking may have shortened the poet's life but it had little impact on the quality and quantity of his work.     

 

Robinson seldom treated drinking or alcoholism in his poems. “Mr. Flood’s Party” is a rare exception. Eben Flood, an old man who lives alone, has walked into town to fill his jug.  He pauses in the dark, places the jug on the ground, “With trembling care, knowing that most things break,” and talks to himself. Flood addresses Flood:      

 

“‘Well, Mr. Flood, we have not met like this

In a long time; and many a change has come

To both of us, I fear, since last it was

We had a drop together. Welcome home!’”

 

Critics have dragged in the Rubáiyát (“A Jug of Wine, a Loaf of Bread—and Thou”) and La Chanson de Roland to explicate a poem about a drunk falling off the wagon. We’re witnessing what’s known in recovery parlance as a “slip,” and potentially a fatal one, given Flood’s advanced age. The self-addressed monologue is histrionic and typical of alcoholics, who like to dramatize their psychodramas. Flood sings, as many of us have, when primed with whiskey. Who are we to condemn a superannuated drunk who lives alone for taking a drink?

 

“He raised again the jug regretfully

And shook his head, and was again alone.

There was not much that was ahead of him,

And there was nothing in the town below—

Where strangers would have shut the many doors

That many friends had opened long ago.”

 

Robinson’s tone, here and in most of his poems, is elusive and one of the things I like most about him. He reports. He confides. He seldom raises his voice when telling a story. Even when one of his poems is arch or satirical, he never makes fun of his people or condescends to them. He’s like a tight-lipped, articulate, New England version of Sherwood Anderson. He revels in the complexity of his characters, seldom taking sides. In this, Robinson writes poems like a good novelist – unexpectedly, Bernard Malamud comes to mind, the Malamud of The Assistant and some of the early stories. As Mezey writes in his introductory essay:

 

“Our taste and bias are still mostly for the romantic and sensational, the dazzling and difficult, whereas Robinson was and thought of himself as essentially a classicist. Most of our famous contemporary poets are true-blue Romantics and Emersonians at heart, but Robinson . . . absorbed and reconstructed for himself most of what was left of the old and desiccated Puritan tradition, and I would say there is more of the sin-obsessed but merciful Jonathan Edwards in him than of Emerson.”   

 

Robinson died on this date, April 6, in 1935, at age sixty-five.

 

[See “The Long Poems of E. A. Robinson” by Daniel Mark Epstein in the April issue of The New Criterion.]