Drugs, dreams and nightmares

Speaking Volumes

Dirty But Clean "" that's what the DBC in DBC Pierre, this year's Booker winner, stands for. By now the world knows the story that was so eagerly lapped up by a thousand news-starved hacks: how a guy called Peter Finlay, veteran alcoholic and seasoned drug abuser, sold his mentor's house and snuck away to write a novel under a pseudonym.

The novel turned out to be Vernon God Little, a wickedly funny take on the very American hobby of high school massacres and it beat out its more sedate rivals to one of the most coveted prizes in the literary world.

It seems to me that the Booker judges have worked out a winning formula: nominate one boring work that can be categorised as pathbreakingly experimental, two dreadfully pompous books that display a ponderous, self-conscious literariness, two crowd-pleasers with satisfyingly intellectual pretensions and one dark horse.

When it comes down to decision time, pick the dark horse, which will also usually turn out to be the only truly readable work of the lot. Everyone's satisfied: the critics can't suggest that you're dragging the Booker down from its middlebrow peak to low brow levels, and the poor goons who buy a book on the basis that it has a bright shiny disc on the cover saying 'Prizewinner!' get a decent story. Meanwhile, Dirty But Clean Pierre is paying back his debts, having found catharsis, redemption and a fortune in literature.

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DBC Pierre fits the popular image of the writer as a gin-sodden, booze-tormented, vein-imploding lush who staggers out of his den every morning with eyes the colour of sunsets, mainlining unspeakable hallucinogenics in order to stoke the furnace of his art.

The truth is a little more sophisticated: many writers do drink, heavily, but very few drink when they're actually writing. For Pierre-Finlay, sitting down to write actually offered an escape from the ten years of non-stop boozing that had preceded Vernon God Little.

Faulkner and Hemingway are classic examples "" both very heavy drinkers who agreed, however, that it was impossible to write even a line when drunk. One exception to the rule was F Scott Fitzgerald, the author of the famous one-liner about boozing: "First you take a drink, then the drink takes a drink, then the drink takes you."

Fitzgerald's prose, incidentally, has the classically uneven quality characteristic of the alcoholically challenged mind struggling to assert its brilliance over the booze on the page. It worked in The Great Gatsby, but more typically, Fitzgerald produced the fractured prose of Tender is the Night, with a furious incandescence sparking and sputtering out on alternate pages. John Irving summed it up pithily: "Drunks ramble; so do books by drunks."

And Gabriel Garcia Marquez commented, in a Paris Review interview: "Bad readers have asked me if I was drugged when I wrote some of my works. But that illustrates they don't know anything about literature or drugs. To be a good writer you have to be absolutely lucid at every moment of writing and in good health."

Indian authors tend to be a fairly squeaky clean, almost prissy lot, unfortunately, but I do have two stories to share. One concerns a writer who will cheerfully get stewed to the gills at parties, but who invariably sobers up when it comes to the point of actual writing "" in other words, if he's imbibing at all, it's either between chapters or between books. (This may be why he writes very short chapters "" an interesting stylistic point for future biographers to debate!)

The other concerns a friend of mine who has carefully concealed his serious writing ambitions under the stern exterior of a Big Noise in Management Somewhere. He remains an unpublished though talented author for a very good reason "" the only time he can bring himself to write, apparently, is when he's drunk more than a bottle-and-a-half of wine.

Unfortunately what he writes at that point is always the same chapter "" it's a brilliant chapter, and seems to be a chapter from the middle of his unwritten book, but in the throes of inebriation, it's this chapter and no other part of the story that seems to surface. All that changes, oddly enough, in the names of characters and the punctuation. Otherwise he's been writing the same chapter "" literally!"" for over seven years.

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Unlike inebriated ideas for the greatest novel ever, which tend to melt away into nothingness the next morning, leaving only a hangover behind, dreams are a legitimate source of creative inspiration for many writers.

Cortazar explained once that during the period of gestation for a short story, he dreamed intensely, and always found that his dreams were full of references and allusions to what was going to be in the story. One of his most popular stories, 'House Taken Over', was an extreme case "" it came to him in a nightmare so insistent that it literally woke him up and drove him to his desk.

Our home-grown insomniac, Raj Kamal Jha, told me during the course of an interview that some of the images that find their way into his stories are plucked directly from his dreams and nightmares. He shares this with Carlos Fuentes, who for years dreamed of Mexico City in clear, sharp, insistent images.

In his teens, he often saw an apartment house which looked perfectly normal during the day, but which was transformed at night into a strange world full of dolls and flowers. That image returned to him night after night, until the story 'The Doll Queen' eventually grew out of it.

nilroy@lycos.com