Volume 27, Number 14 · September 25, 1980
This Critic and This Gin and These Shoes
By Gore Vidal
The Thirties: From Notebooks and Diaries of the Period
by Edmund Wilson, edited by Leon Edel
Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 753 pp., $17.50
On February 2, 1821, gin-drinker Lord Byron wrote in his Ravenna Journal: 'I have been considering what can be the reason why I always wake at a certain hour in the morning, and always in very bad spirits—I may say, in actual despair and despondency, in all respects—even of that which pleased me overnight…. In England, five years ago, I had the same kind of hypochondria, but accompanied with so violent a thirst that I have drank as many as fifteen bottles of soda-water in one night, after going to bed, and been still thirsty…. What is it?—liver?'
Review, 4638 words
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