Addiction

In the tradition of literary lowlifes and lushes as conceived by Charles Bukowski or Jean Rhys, Keshed is a story about an alcoholic, with a distinctive 21st-century, northern English working-class setting. Formally inventive, the ‘now’ sections of the novel are not sentences but strings of words, effective and short: ‘Rancid liquid squirting chin soggy torso peristaltic rush rapid.’ One such section opens the book, setting the uncompromising tone. The protagonist, Sean (‘He was pissed when I met him and he hasn’t changed’), a bright, charismatic lad from an unnamed small Yorkshire town, has been to university in Manchester where he drank heavily. He then moved back home, and we meet him working as a plasterer, living to get smashed.

At some point in the past ten years, trauma became a joke in my household. Should any Ditum suffer a minor mishap, the correct reaction is to adopt a wounded expression, bob your head to the side and whimper: ‘My trauma!’ Not because trauma is funny, but because what Darren McGarvey refers to as the ‘trauma industrial complex’ has become so consuming, the only option is to laugh about it. By ‘trauma industrial complex’, McGarvey means the culture that treats trauma, and those who have been traumatised, as commodities. He’s a good person to write this book because he personally has been commodified in this way. His first book, 2017’s Poverty Safari, detailed his working-class background in Glasgow – a story of alcoholism, addiction, abuse and homelessness.

Oscar Nemon’s statue of Sigmund Freud at the Tavistock Clinic glares out with such a contemptuous look of superior knowledge that Freud’s housekeeper told him it made him look too angry. ‘But I am angry,’ replied Freud. ‘I am angry with humanity.’ Meanwhile, the cover image of Adam Phillips’s new book on psychoanalysis is a detail of a figure from Michelangelo’s ‘Last Judgment’, cast down to damnation, face in hand, his eyes wracked with fear and regret, his muscular ring finger grinding anxiously into his muscular forehead. If you didn’t recognise him from the Sistine Chapel you could imagine an angry Freud, not an impassive Christ, glaring at him just out of shot. Phillips, while he can possess a contemptuous glare, is at least not angry with humanity.

‘To begin at the beginning,’ intones Richard Burton with a voice like warm treacle at the start of the 1971 film Under Milk Wood. It’s hard to imagine an actor more obviously influenced by his own beginnings. The epigraph to this double biography is ‘The damp, dark prison of eternal love’, a line borrowed from Quentin Crisp. And if that’s an accurate assessment of Burton’s on-off-on-again relationship with the actress Elizabeth Taylor, it’s an even better summary of his childhood in Wales. Born Richard Walter Jenkins to a barmaid mother and a coal miner father (a ‘12-pints-a-day man’ who sometimes disappeared for weeks on end to drink and gamble), as a teenager he attempted a fresh start by moving in with a teacher named Philip Burton.

We are in the midst of a ‘psychedelic renaissance’. Not since the 1950s and early 1960s has there been so much interest in researching the therapeutic potential of psychedelics. The FDA approved a ketamine derivative for medicinal use in 2019, and has given both MDMA and psilocybin (the psycho-active ingredient in magic mushrooms) ‘breakthrough therapy’ status, putting the drugs on a fast track to approval in the US, with the UK likely to follow suit. Professor David Nutt is a neuropsycho-pharmacologist (say that three times fast) and head of the Centre for Psychedelic Research at Imperial College, London. He was the UK’s ‘drug tsar’ before getting sacked in 2009 for claiming that LSD and Ecstasy are less dangerous than cigarettes, alcohol or horseback riding.

When I was 14 my father took me to a bookmaker’s and encouraged me to place a bet. He wanted to show me the futility of gambling, I think. Big mistake. I picked a horse called Maroof at 66/1 in the Queen Elizabeth II stakes at Ascot. My father put on 50p each way. Maroof romped to victory, no problem. ‘I think I’ve just ruined your character,’ said my father, not entirely joking, as he handed over the winnings. He had. I’ll forever associate betting with that triumph – the rush of joy I felt jumping up and down on the cruddy red carpet surrounded by Irish drunks and cigarette smoke. Heaven. We should have put more on. That was 1994. Britain changed a lot in the years that followed.