Booze gets the boot as New Yorkers reject Manhattans

Susan Cheever, among America's greatest experts on booze, is predicting the end of drinking in polite society with a self-imposed return to a sort of Chardonnay-sipping Prohibition. It makes grim news for a New Year which promises little but gloom and poverty, a prospect to be faced, if Cheever is right, without a decent draft of claret or a slug of bourbon.

Cheever, 65, believes that the social taboo that has consigned cigarettes to the butt-bin among the American middle classes is increasingly spreading to getting drunk, or even a little high. Tipsiness means being labelled as working class, or lower, and has already become completely "non-you" at the high end of New York society.

Daughter of the great American writer and one of the nation's best and brightest drunks, John Cheever, Susan rings the bell of doom in an opinion piece for the New York Times. "Does fashion trump addiction?" she asks. And she answers: yes.

"Everyone comes on time," she writes of the new etiquette, "behaves well, drinks a little wine, eats a few tiny canapes, and leaves on time."
 
Cheever speaks with unusual authority, being not only her father's daughter but having followed him faithfully to the booze herself. John Cheever was the quintessential novelist and short-story writer of American suburbia in the 1950s, the world of stay-at-home wives keeping house with new-fangled Hoovers and Oster food mixers, and with a big-finned Chevvy in the driveway.

The image of the all-American male coming home from the office in his Brook Brothers suit, dispensing a hug or two and heading for the drinks cabinet before having it off with his neighbour's wife, was essentially created by Cheever.

At the age of six, Susan was taught how to mix a proper dry martini by her grandmother. She would join the grown-ups, nibbling olives and peanuts, watching them loosen their ties and cinch-belts for a roaring good time. She couldn't wait to get started herself. "In the old days, drunkenness was as much part of New York City society as evening clothes," she writes.

But then came the hangover. John Cheever kept faith with the bottle until just seven years before he died in 1982, at the not-bad-considering age of three-score-years-and-ten, and having published his last bestseller, Falconer.

Susan did not quite have the stamina: she drank copiously and in the end compulsively for 30 years, through two marriages and many lovers before quitting in the late 1990s. She says sobriety was inspired by a third marriage and two now-adult children. "I know the savage, destructive power of alcoholism," she writes. "It's a soul stealer."

On the other hand, her three most successful books have been Home Before Dark, a memoir which revealed both her father's drunken household and his equally 1950s-repressed bi-sexuality; Note Found in a Bottle, a memoir of her own drinking; and My Name is Bill, a biography of Bill Wilson, the founder of Alcoholics Anonymous. Despite her thirst, Cheever also managed to get a degree from elite Brown University and now teaches at both Bennington College and New York University.
 
She admits to missing the wild times - "all that extreme behaviour, all those nasty but somehow amusing surprises, all that glamour even when so much of it ended in pain, institutions and early death."

The last person Cheever saw reeling away from a dinner party was a woman in a red dress. Since then, she writes, she has seen many fine women behave "with dignity and grace." But she doesn't remember them: "It's the woman in the red dress I won't forget."

We will probably all make "better decisions" without the drink as we face hard times, she concludes. But it's not going to be much fun. ·