Tag: The Best Hangover In Fiction

Continuing our discussion, a reader submits the following exchange from Dan Jenkins’s Life Its Ownself:

“How do you feel?”
“Like I’ve been et by a coyote and shit off a cliff.”

Another reader: “I would nominate Vera Charles in Mame, who stumbles down the stairs around, pulls aside a drape at the window and moans, ‘My God, that moon is bright.'” Many more below:

The following bit from Cheever’s Bullet Park isn’t written as well as Amis’s famous hangover description. But it’s more terrifying:

When the alarm rings he mistakes it for the telephone. Their children are away at school and he concludes that one of them is sick or in trouble. When he understands that it is the alarm and not the telephone he puts his feet onto the floor. He groans. He swears. He stands. He feels himself to be a hollow man but one who has only recently been eviscerated and who can recall what it felt like to have a skinful of lively lights and vitals. She whimpers in pain and covers her face with a pillow. Feeling himself to be a painful cavity he goes down the hall to the bathroom. Looking at himself in the mirror he gives a loud cry of terror and revulsion. His eyes are red, his face is scored with lines, his light hair seems clumsily dyed. He possesses for a moment the curious power of being able to frighten himself.

He soaks his face with water and shaves his beard. This exhausts his energies and he comes back down the hall to the bedroom, says that he will take a later train, returns to bed and pulls the blankets over his face to shut out the morning. She whimpers and cries. She then leaves the bed, her nightgown hooked up over her comely backside. She goes to the bathroom but she shuts her eyes as she passes the mirror. Back in bed she covers her face with a pillow and they both lie there, groaning loudly. He then joins her on her side of the bed and they engage in a back-breaking labor of love that occupies them for twenty minutes and leaves them both with a grueling headache.

He has already missed the 8:11, the 8:22, and the 8:30. “Coffee” he mutters, and gets out of bed once more. He goes downstairs to the kitchen. Stepping into the kitchen he lets out another cry of pain when he sees the empties on the shelf by the sink. They are ranged there like the gods in some pantheon of remorse. Their intent seems to be to force him to his knees and to wring from him some prayer. “Empties, oh empties, most merciful empties have mercy upon me for the sake of Jack Daniels and Seagram Distillers.” Their immutable emptiness gives them a look that is cruel and censorious. Their labels—scotch, gin and bourbon-have the ferocity of Chinese demons, but he definitely has the feeling that if he tried to placate them with a genuflection they would be merciless. He drops them into a wastebasket, but this does not dispose of their force.

He puts some water on to boil and feeling for the wall like a blind man makes his way back to the bedroom where he can hear his wife’s cries of pain. “Oh I wish I were dead,” she cries, “I wish I were dead.” “There, there, dear,” he says thickly. “There, there.” He sets out a clean suit, a shirt, a tie and some shoes and then gets back into bed again and pulls the blankets over his face. It is now close to nine and the garden is filled with light. They hear the schoolbus at the corner, sounding its horn for the Marsden boy. The week has begun its splendid procession of days. The kettle begins to whistle.

He gets out of bed for the third time, returns to the kitchen and makes some coffee. He brings a cup for them both. She gets out of bed, washes her face without examining it and then returns to bed. He puts on some underwear and then returns to bed himself. For the next hour they are up and down, in and out, struggling to rejoin the stream of things, and finally he dresses and racked by vertigo, melancholy, nausea and fitful erections he boards his Gethsemane—the Monday-morning 10:48.

Another good one:

I am a little slow on the trigger for this, but Kerouac’s descriptions in Big Sur should be on any short list of hangovers in fiction.  The following is taken from portions of chapters one and two:

The church is blowing a sad windblown “Kathleen” on the bells in the skid row slums as I wake up all woebegone and goopy, groaning from another drinking bout and groaning most of all because I’d ruined my “secret return” to San Francisco by getting silly drunk [….] instead of going thru smooth and easy I wake up drunk, sick, disgusted, frightened, in fact terrified by that sad song across the roofs mingling with the lachrymose cries of a Salvation Army meeting on the corner below “Satan is the cause of your alcoholism, Satan is the cause of your immorality, Satan is everywhere workin to destroy you unless you repent now” and worse than that the sound of old drunks throwing up in rooms next to mine, the creak of hall steps, the moans everywhere Including the moan that had awakened me, my own moan in the lumpy bed, a moan caused by a big roaring Whoo Whoo in my head that had shot me out of my pillow like a ghost.

And I look around the dismal cell [….] the rucksack sits hopefully in a strewn mess of bottles all empty, empty poor boys of white port, butts, junk, horror… “One fast move or I’m gone, ” I realize, gone the way of the last three years of drunken hopelessness which is a physical and spiritual and metaphysical hopelessness you cant learn in school no matter how many books on existentialism or pessimism you read, or how many jugs of vision producing Ayahuasca you drink, or Mescaline take, or Peyote goop up with — That feeling when you wake up with the delirium tremens with the fear of eerie death dripping from your ears like those special heavy cobwebs spiders weave in the hot countries, the feeling of being a bent back mudman monster groaning underground in hot steaming mud pulling a long hot burden nowhere, the feeling of standing ankledeep in hot boiled pork blood, ugh, of being up to your waist in a giant pan of greasy brown dishwater not a trace of suds left in it… The face of yourself you see in the mirror with its expression of unbearable anguish so haggard and awful with sorrow you cant even cry for a thing so ugly, so lost, no connection whatever with early perfection and therefore nothing to connect with tears or anything: it’s like William Seward Burroughs’ “Stranger” suddenly appearing in your place in the mirror — Enough! “One fast move or I’m gone.”

Another:

I think my favorite hangover description in fiction must be from Sir Henry at Rawlinson End by the late, great Vivian Stanshall. Sir Henry embodied all that was reactionary in the English aristocracy, taken to absurd extremes. Stanshall, a fascinating and sadly underappreciated character who died in 1995 and was perhaps the purest example of a Genuine English Eccentric, created the character and his equally odd extended family (including his loyal manservant “Scrotum, the wrinkled retainer”) for John Peel’s radio show. After a number of broadcasts and an LP or two, Sir Henry was immortalized on film by Trevor Howard. Stanshall’s mastery of numerous English dialects was put to good use here, as well as his wonderful Edward Lear-like facility with words. His work inspired Stephen Fry, among many others. Here’s a taste (transcribed from a broadcast):

“Filth Hounds of Hades!” Sir Henry Rawlinson surfaced from the blackness hot and fidgety. Fuss, bother, and itch. Conscious mind coming up too fast with the bends – through pack‑ice throbbing seas. Boom – sounders – blow‑holes – harsh croak – Blind Pews tip‑tap‑tocking for escape from his pressing skull. With a gaseous grunt he rolled away from the needle-cruel light acupuncturing his pickle-onion eyes, and with key-bending will slit-peered at the cold trench Florrie had left on her side of the bed. Baffling? At the base of his stomach – great swaddled hillock – was pitched a perky throbbing tent. This was so unusual he at first feared rigor mortis, but Madame Memory’s five lovely daughters jerked him to boggling attention. With grim‑mouthed incredulity he snatched for a riding crop and thrashed his impertinent member into limp submission. Bah! To Henry’s way of thinking, waking up was not the best way to start the day.

Another reader takes the thread in a new direction:

Screw the discussion about the best hangover in fiction. What about the best word for hangover in any language? The Latin for it is hard to beat: it’s crapula. Because, hey, that’s how you feel!

(Photo: Day 2 of the Oktoberfest beer festival on September 21, 2008 in Munich, Germany. By Johannes Simon/Getty Images)

A reader, defining “fiction” liberally, nominates Johnny Cash’s version of Kris Kristofferson’s “Sunday Morning Coming Down” as the best depiction of the morning after:

Another suggests a musical one-liner:

A character who awakens after a long night of drinking says, “All my teeth have little sweaters on.” That’s always been my favorite literary description of a hangover. It’s from the 1943 Broadway musical One Touch of Venus – book by S. J. Perelman, lyrics by Ogden Nash, music by Kurt Weill, so the line almost certainly belongs to Perlman.  It’s perfect.

Another points to a novel:

I feel compelled to mention the hangover of Peter Fallow, the expatriate British journalist (supposedly based on Hitch) in Tom Wolfe’s The Bonfire of the Vanities:

The telephone blasted Peter Fallow awake inside an egg with the shell peeled away and only the membranous sac holding it intact. Ah! The membranous sac was his head, and the right side of his head was on the pillow, and the yolk was as heavy as mercury, and it rolled like mercury, and it was pressing down on his right temple… If he tried to get up to answer the telephone, the yolk, the mercury, the poisoned mass, would shift and roll and rupture the sac, and his brains would fall out.

Another nomination:

Neil Gaiman, in his Anansi Boys, does a decent job. Must be an English thing:

Fat Charlie was thirsty and his head hurt and his mouth tasted evil and his eyes were too tight in his head and all his teeth twinged and his stomach burned and his back was aching in a way that started around his knees and went up to his forehead and his brains had been removed and replaced with cotton balls and needles and pins which was why it hurt to try and think, and his eyes were not just too tight in his head but they must have rolled out in the night and been reattached with roofing nails; and now he noticed that anything louder than the gentle Brownian motion of air molecules drifting softly past each other was above his pain threshold. Also, he wished he were dead.

Another:

Surely Malcolm Lowry of Under the Volcano fame deserves a mention in this context. There are so many passages both in his masterpiece and in his other works (all more or less autobiographical) that explore the experience of waking up with a hangover that it’s difficult to point to a representative instance. They are also so tightly entangled with the particular concerns of the book in which they appear that quoting them would not evoke the kind of visceral response Dixon’s experience provides the reader, an experience by the way that seems to me rather shallow, focused as it is more on the physical consequences of drinking a lot (and finding the right metaphors to convey it) than on the psychological consequences an alcoholic like Lowry might experience.

As delightful to read as Amis’ bravura passage may be (despite Dixon’s acute discomfort), Lowry registers the deeper truth of hangovers: that they can be occasions for acute mental anguish. But that’s as it should be. Lucky Jim is a comic novel. Under the Volcano is not.

A Dish reader flags the above video, in which Boris Johnson nominates Kingsley Amis’ famous account from Lucky Jim. Here’s the passage in question:

Dixon was alive again. Consciousness was upon him before he could get out of the way; not for him the slow, gracious wandering from the halls of sleep, but a summary, forcible ejection. He lay sprawled, too wicked to move, spewed up like a broken spider-crab on the tarry shingle of the morning. The light did him harm, but not as much as looking at things did; he resolved, having done it once, never to move his eyeballs again. A dusty thudding in his head made the scene before him beat like a pulse. His mouth has been used as a latrine by some small creature of the night, and then as its mausoleum. During the night, too, he’d somehow been on a cross-country run and then been expertly beaten up by a secret police. He felt bad.

Do readers have a better suggestion? For those unfamiliar with Amis’s novel, there might be no better introduction than this essay from Hitch, which particularly emphasizes what makes the book so funny:

I happened to be in Sarajevo when Kingsley Amis died, in 1995. I was to have lunch the following day with a very clever but rather solemn Slovenian dissident. She knew that I had known Amis a little, and she expressed the proper condolences as soon as we met. Feeling this to be not quite sufficient, however, she added that the genre of “academic comedy” had enjoyed quite a vogue among Balkan writers. “In our region zere are many such satires. But none I sink so amusing as ze Lucky Jim.”

This, delivered with perfect gravity in the lugubrious context of the Milosevic war, made me grin with inappropriate delight. How the old buzzard would have gagged, with mingled pride and disdain, at the thought of being so appreciated by a load of Continentals—nay, foreigners. And what the hell can his masterpiece be like when rendered into the Serbo-Croat tongue?

Just try to suggest a more hilarious novel from the past half century. Something by Joseph Heller? Terry Southern? David Lodge or Malcolm Bradbury? Yes, the Americans can be grotesque and noir; and the Englishmen have their mite of irony. (In fact, the academic comedy is now a sub-genre of Anglo-Americanism.) But even so. The late Peter de Vries—much admired by Amis for his Mackerel Plaza—depended too much on the farcical. No, the plain fact is that Amis managed in Lucky Jim (1954) to synthesize the comic achievements of Evelyn Waugh and P. G. Wodehouse. Just as a joke is not really a joke if it has to be clarified, I risk immersion in a bog of embarrassment if I overdo this; but if you can picture Bertie or Jeeves being capable of actual malice, and simultaneously imagine Evelyn Waugh forgetting about original sin, you have the combination of innocence and experience that makes this short romp so imperishable.