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The White Logic: Alcoholism and Gender in American Modernist Fiction

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John W. Crowley deals competently with the historical shift in understandings of alcoholism, from the temperance-led view of moral deficit to the illness concept of the `alcoholism movement'. Whilst covering some of the same ground as Tom Dardis' s seminal work `The Thirsty Muse', this book nevertheless raises some interesting insights into the lost generation of American writers and their antecedents. Possibly it is most compelling where it considers the context of the era, as characterized by the collective post traumatic stress precipitated by the Great War and the unique restrictions of the Prohibition years. What Crowley adds to this well-worn ground is his linkage to socially constructed gender roles in turmoil - though his account is not unproblematic in its approach. `The White Logic' usefully rehearses the prevalent psychoanalytic view of that time in discourses treating alcoholism as a dysfunction of repressed homosexuality. Indeed, Crowley almost alludes to male alcoholism as a `feminised' or emasculated space. He also highlights the extremes socially allocated the female drinker, the either/or paradigms of (un-sexed) lesbian or (over-sexed) slut. Rather than developing this aspect of the argument farther, the book falls foul of its own trap in its inclusion of only one female writer - Djuna Barnes - arguably selected as representative of both these polarities.

`Drunk narratives' by WD Howells, Jack London and John O'Hara - plus the obligatory Hemingway and Scott Fitzgerald works - are deftly utilized. The author's selection of texts does appear to hamper a fruitful line of inquiry into the rise and drink-related decline of each individual writer's creativity. O'Hara's `Appointment at Samarra', for example, is a first novel, whilst `Tender is the Night' is a later work from an established writer in the grip of his addiction and already on a creative downward spiral. The most commendable chapter is chronologically the last. Crowley's method of inflecting literary text with biographical context is at its best here in his examination of Charles Jackson's `The Lost Weekend'. It marks the ascendance of the `illness concept' which still remains dominant, largely due to the medicalization of alcoholism and the prevalence of Alcoholics Anonymous, post World War II. Crowley also traces the increasing willingness of Hollywood to engage with narratives promoting alcoholism-as-illness. This is a strategy which of course accelerates after the successful transition of Jackson's novel to screen in 1945 - but with its ending changed to accommodate Hollywood's appetite for upbeat resolution.

Overall, `The White Logic' is a comprehensive survey - perceptive and accessibly written. It runs the risk though of leaving the reader with a somewhat reductive impression - distilling modernism itself to a privileged class monologue, in the spuriously heroic pursuit of absolution through dissolution.

John Crowley's study of alcohol and gender in Modernist fiction is, I think, the most aware of the numerous books which are considered fundamental reading in this field. Where Tom Dardis' _The Thirsty Muse_ is too limited in its scope and completely fails to acknowledge the arean of gender within the context of alcohol and addiction, Crowley's scholarship takes the woman alcoholic into consideration, by including a chapter on Djuna Barnes. Too, some of the other texts within this area, like Gilmore's _Equivocal Spirits_, Newlove's _Those Drinking Days_, and Goowin's _Alcohol and the Wirter_ fail in their attempts to provide a comprehensive or inclusive anaolysis of the ways that alcohol has functioned in the lives and the works of twentieth century writers.

Certainly, Crowley's addressing of gender within this field is not unproblematic. Providing Djuna Barnes as a mere foil to his dicussion of the masculinity and homosociality he discusses London, Hemingway, and Fitzgerald seems dismissive of the important issues women's writing and women's alcoholism provoke. Nonetheless, Crowleys seems light years ahead of the predecessors.

The book itself is easy reading, his prose style critical and literary critic-esque enough to garner professional respect while still remaining lively and interesting and non sleep-inducing.