On refreshing thoughts – Patricia Highsmith in the New Yorker, her diaries:

‘may 11-30, 1948: What to say of Yaddo? I shall never forget it. A singularly dull bunch, no big names—though Marc Brandel is interesting. Bob White, Clifford Wright, Irene Orgel, Gail Kubik, Chester Himes, and Vivien K[och] MacLeod, W. S. Graham, a Scots poet, Harold Shapero & wife, Stan[ley] Levine, painter, Flannery O’Connor. Great desire to drink, after 3 days. The drunkest evening of my life after ten days. At the Maranese Restaurant btw. here & town, the place we took dinner when the kitchen moved from garage to mansion. None of us ate much. We trooped into the bar & drank as if we had never had cocktails before. Mixing was the order—for a thrill—Marc soon succumbed, with carrot hair in his carrot soup. I exchanged a revealing phrase with C. Wright, the solitary gay person here, which was carried no farther. We both know. So what? I must have had five Martinis or six. Plus two Manhattans. A near blackout at Jimmy’s with Bob & Cliff, who had passed out at the Maranese, & had to be carried by three of us into the cab. We propped him on a stool in Jimmy’s, whence he fell like an egg. We seated him in the taxi, but when we came out he was gone! The taxi fare $7.50 for Bob & me by the time we finished looking at Bob’s drawings in his studio. The driver drinking & looking, too. When we refused, we were whisked back to town, passing Cliff on the way, staggering under the dark elms of Union Avenue on his 2-mile trek back home. This night has become legendary as “the Night Clifford Fell in the Lake.” Chester tried (in his room) to kiss me. Did I mention it already? Doesn’t matter.
There are six artists here. We are all very different from one another, yet remarkably sociable, I think. What strikes me most forcibly is our basic similarity, in fact. It occurred to me last night, if any of us saw a white note being slid under the crack of our door—with a sound like thunder in the silent depths of midmorning—each of us would drop his work and spring for it. With what hope? Perhaps a friend, some sign of personal choice, of a singling out from the rest. And it followed—personal security, ego assurance, a lover. These every artist needs and wants. Even the married artist is constantly attuned to these needs. The mornings. Energy is too abundant at ten. The world is too rich to be eaten. One sits in a whirl at one’s desk thinking of drawing, writing, walking in the woods. The overwhelming flood of experience rushing in from all sides. In the morning only do I ever desire a drink to reduce my energy from 115% to 100%.’

Read more of her diaires here.

The world is too rich to be eaten, yes indeed, I need a stiff drink.

I have read many descriptions of alcoholics, autobiographical and less autobiographical, but this really made me want to become an alcoholic, at least parttime.