Translated by Owen Good

A parlour story about the writer who after speaking at an event was crawling on all fours among the student audience. Whether it happened yesterday or twenty years ago (maybe sixty) doesn’t matter. It’s a classic, the audience go wild for it. The age of our hero is unknown. One thing’s for sure: their eternal partner, alcohol will never grow old.

It annoys me that others watch the literary community like a fairground attraction. In fact, often literally as a freak show. “Any good gossip?” I’m often asked. Addiction, hardship, personality disorders, abuse all break down into a kind of social glue. Bourgeois monotony is replaced by the artistic community’s self-destruction, in a live show. Faces plastered with indulgent smiles or disgusted grimaces. Scandals are useful things. The scandalously alcoholic writer – from a necessary distance – diverts attention and guides the spectators’ modus of observation: uncompassionate, cynical, impartial. Something to chat about tomorrow. As if the social setting needed this theatrical deviance. Because the crawling, half-naked, wailing drunk becomes the professional alkie, who has often entered this sphere from more adverse circumstances. That person becomes the reassuring “compared to such and such”. The caricature, the symbol, the well-known role, who’s essential in (also) masking the others and their own litres of wine, their vulgar jokes, their parlour aggressions. They get away scot free and avoid making the news, the gossip, the cautionary tale.

Of course that’s the kind of country Hungary is. On the cutting edge of sport of alcoholism and suicide. The national strategy as regards alcohol however goes no further than the licensing of home distilleries. A fact we like to ignore, especially in the middle-class social stratum which is perfectly suited to cover-ups. However, no Hungarian home would be complete without a couple of bottles of booze: in the dresser, on the kitchen shelf, in the fridge, on top of the cupboard, in the shed. So there’s always something to hand. When guests visit, after a day’s work, in times of mourning, before a day’s work, in times of joy, in stressful times, when you want to forget, when you want to celebrate. But there’s always something to celebrate, isn’t there. If you’re from an alcoholic family and had to confront the behavioural repertoire of drunk (tipsy, inebriated, shitfaced) adults from a young age, you develop a heightened sensitivity. And won’t be surprised that we Hungarians are in a podium position in terms of international alcoholism rankings, even based on self-declared information (that is, on very distorted numbers). Whether this means one or two million citizens or perhaps five million depends on definitions and focus questions. One thing’s for sure: the literary crowd is also distinctly affected by the problem.

It’s interesting how this relates to our image (our notion) of writers: the figure of the self-sabotaging, heavy-drinking, beastly, destructive writer has been growing in the national cultural subconscious since the time of Bálint Balassi in the 16^th century. Because Hungarian writers are big drinkers. Drink is both muse and refuge. “In Borsod, beer is a refreshment.” Besides, how would the artist bear their colleagues without? The constant epithet of the Hungarian writer is how well they hold their drink (even though new research shows that heavy drinkers don’t metabolise alcohol any more easily, merely they become less sensitive to its impairing effects). In comparison, a colleague in London thinks the “English writer” is completely different in the national imagination: a reticent old man who, withdrawing into his own heart, silently observes nature. Of course, there is in this image an air of elitism, but it still points in a very different direction. Shock, horror: the writer is allowed to be well. To unwind in the forest. To jog. To drift. To be happy. Great works aren’t born from constant suffering.

Because in the end drinking is a counter to pain. As physician Gábor Máté wrote: “Not why the addiction but why the pain”. When the literary/family/social milieu don’t recognise the alcoholic writer as one of its own, but as a freak, an outsider, a system error, then it basically quashes their chances of reform too. The system’s mentality remains untouched. There is no healing, there is no change. The toxin is taken to be a natural solution. It carries on tradition as a behavioural strategy, as a means of survival, as the lesser evil. But with time it will become the greater.

Luckily today there are civil attempts, social campaigns: in Hungary for example there is Dry November relating to the Blue Point Foundation for substance users. (In the UK there is Dry January, and Sober October.) The point being that the participants agree for one month not to drink alcohol. None, not a drop. Most likely the challenge itself marks a watershed: enabling many to confront how far along they are on the road to addiction and loss of control. Whether thirty days without alcohol is too much. Whoever, at the drop of a hat, rejects, rules out, or rebukes this thought experiment arguably no longer has a healthy relationship (is there such a thing?) with alcohol. A couple of years ago in a literary camp, when, for the umpteenth time, I refused a proffered alcoholic drink, repeating that I hadn’t drunk anything for years, I saw a flash of bafflement and terror in my colleague’s eyes: “There’s another way?” Of course there is, though one’s perception, one’s personal and social experience naturally differs. In fact my impression is that one’s social surroundings are weirdly tested more by practising abstinence than by the contrary: the scale of reaction veers from anger and hostility, to incomprehension, or to pure disappointment. My favourite is when a more aggressive person (not an alcoholic, of course, in their opinion) slams a shot glass down on the table: “but you’ll drink with me”. Which happens in family, social, work, literary settings, one and all. This whiny need for dominance reveals both a reinforcement of (perceivably) normative modes of behaviour, or a complete lack of self-knowledge, mixed with a dash of malicious narcissism.

My own life, since I was a child, has been hounded by alcoholics, be they conscious and self-confessed, hiding and in denial, or (less so) reformed teetotallers. I’ve watched them from a close distance, perhaps too close. Their ploys, lies, desparation, deterioration, hopelessness, wickedness, and unhealthy way of loving have marked my life. From which position (also) I know that seeking recovery on someone else’s behalf is impossible. We can only alter and change a way of doing things for ourselves, and for our own sake. And so one day, maybe, the hunger for spectacle will be replaced by solidarity.