Alcoholics have a special place in our imagination. There are countless jokes about them. In film, they tend to be portrayed more sympathetically than drug addicts. Often, they’re shown to be clowns, drunkenly falling over their own feet. Or they’re imagined to be abusive and violent. Both types exist, sometimes in the same person, but the alcoholics I have known were less flashy, more functional, and more tragic.
The Legend of the Holy Drinker, a short book by Austrian novelist Joseph Roth, offers a rare insight into the mind of an alcoholic. Roth published it shortly before he died in exile in Paris in 1939. Roth was writing about what he knew: He was an alcoholic himself. Like many of his kind, Roth remained a functional author despite his heavy drinking. The Legend of the Holy Drinker is fiction, but fiction informed by real life. I know of no other prose that so believably describes what it’s like to be afflicted, and how difficult it is for them to retain their dignity. There’s also the melancholy that comes from the alcoholic’s awareness of the possibilities their life offers slipping away with each new drink. It’s that melancholy that I associated with drinkers more than the clownishness or aggression of the movie alcoholics.
Nehaveigur 