High Life With An Evil Liver
Sydney Morning Herald
Saturday January 18, 1997
IN THIS post-Christmas, post-New Year month of lassitude and literary festivals, it is meet if not drink to pause and reflect upon our inner selves. I refer not to the soul, that elusive organ, or the heart, metaphorically viewed, but to the kidneys, the pancreas, the spleen and, above all, the liver - the "open and notorious evil liver" - as The Book of Common Prayer hath it.
Immediately before Christmas, the Herald's "Best-sellers: Non-Fiction" list was headed by an immensely successful book with surely the most unappealing title of any book, best-selling or otherwise - The Liver Cleansing Diet, subtitled Love Your Liver and Live Longer, by Dr Sandra Cabot, MD, author also of Don't Let Hormones Ruin Your Life.
"Most people struggle with excessive weight and sluggish metabolism all their lives and find that as they age they gradually gain more weight ..." Like the Bard's Julius Caesar, I could identify with that. Dr Cabot's bold solution: "I must admit it took me more than 20 years of medical practice before the solution dawned on me! The liver, the supreme organ of metabolism, had to be the missing key. It seemed so simple and yet so incredible; why hadn't someone thought of this before?"
Like Dr Cabot, I am a slow learner, but even I could have told her that someone had thought of it before. Writers have always known it. The fact that so many of them have been dipsomaniacs, drunks and lushes does not show their ignorance of this salient fact; rather their choosing to violate everything that is in the best interests of their "supreme organ" shows simply that their hearts and souls are elsewhere.
Since the days of the ancient Greeks, since Hesiod's Theogony and Aeschylus's Prometheus triple-decker, the supremacy of the liver has been at the centre of Western writers' consciousness. Prometheus, as Baz Luhrmann's rumoured forthcoming film Eat My Liver (soundtrack featuring the Eagles and a techno-version of the Eagle Rock) shows to a new generation of the post-literate, was a rebellious Greek-Australian kid who tricked the Big Daddy of the Greek gods of Fitzroy, Zeus the Moose (played by Brian Dennehy), into eating the lesser parts of human sacrifice (cf The Belly of an Architect) and then added insult to injury by stealing fire from the gods in a hollow reed that looked very like a crack vial. (The hollow reed will be played by Lou Reed.) For this transgression, Promo was chained to a rock on Mount Caucasus, whereon an eagle consumed his liver by day, the liver growing again by night, in an all-too obvious allegory of cirrhosis. After the success of Rococo & Juliet, it can barely be imagined what Mr Luhrmann will do with this old story. I see the love interest as "Greeker than the Greeks", as it is coyly called in Ulysses.
Let no-one, however, make mock of cookbooks. After all, Random House (USA) used the immense sales of the no-longer immense Oprah Winfrey's diet/cookbook to support its lesser media stars, such as Cormac McCarthy, author of the heroic drink-novel Suttree. Indeed, American writers have always understood the supremacy of the liver, and excelled at abusing it, both in their fiction and, in many cases, in real life. So much so that Mary McCarthy once wrote an essay demonstrating beyond reasonable doubt that the dominant rhythm of the American novel was that of alcohol coursing through the blood stream. She should have known, having once been married to the great Man of Letters, Edmund Wilson, who records his own Promethean drama with characteristic scrupulousness in his Journals.
Think of Edgar Allen Poe, of Scott Fitzgerald, of John Cheever, of William Faulkner, of Ernest Hemingway, of Jack Kerouac, of William Kennedy's Ironweed, of poets John Berryman and Elizabeth Bishop, and Ogden Nash:
Candy
Is dandy
Liquor
Is quicker
In a collection of essays titled, with accidental if misleading appropriateness for this column, Jack London, Hemingway, and the Constitution, the American novelist E. L. Doctorow (see his Billy Bathgate for the folly of Prohibition) writes of Papa's posthumously published The Garden of Eden : "Every day consists of a good deal of drinking - of martinis, which David mixes and garnishes with garlic olives at the small hotel bar, or absinthe, or Haig pinchbottle and Perrier, or Tavel, or carefully prepared Tom Collinses." This is small beer compared with Hemingway's earlier Fiesta.
Let us not forget the Promethean novel, Malcolm Lowry's Under the Volcano, nor let us overlook the liver god's local habitation and a name, which Manning Clark found in the curse of the "old black bottle". Let us not overlook the Japanese edition of Jessica Anderson's novel, Tirra Rirra by the Liver. Let us, above all, not forget that "Tom Collins" is not just a pretty drink, but the name of the greatest yarn-spinner in Australian fiction. Such, dear reader, is Life, and such the Liver.
© 1997 Sydney Morning Herald