HE COULD ONLY write if he was tight. The literature of the 1920s and 1930s is a goldmine of outdated slang and references. Songs, novels, newspaper headlines of the day, discarded politicians, drinks in favor, hairstyles, and the like. It was the first truly modern era, the era of radios, telephones, automobiles, reading and leisure. It was a time where women could already vote, drink, smoke, and revel in their promiscuity, long before the 1950s ad men did them in with sexist advertising. And into the most extravagant Ritz Bar walks the lonesome Minnesota Irish Catholic writer Scott Fitzgerald and he orders another drink. He sips his hard stuff the way I sip my tiny cups of hot brown stuff. He can only write, he thinks, if he is tight, liquored up, inebriated, loose. Only then can the anxiety recede, the words flow freely. Just a thunderbolt of sweet cognac to undo his writer’s tie. Such was Scott Fitzgerald’s Irish curse. Dependency, dependency ….
north! 