“Organizing around alcohol is in some ways a politically correct way to go after other immigrants,” Grinspan says in the documentary. “It’s not entirely polite to say, ‘I want to get all of the Catholics out of America.’ But it’s very polite to say, ‘Alcohol is ruining society.’”
“That’s one of the big changes in recent scholarship,” says Peter Liebhold, a curator in the division of work and industry at the American History Museum, who is also featured in the series. “A lot of people are looking at the success of the temperance movement as an anti-immigrant experience. It becomes code for keeping immigrants in their place.”
I found myself stuffing in details and anecdotes just to prove that I knew them. I found myself afraid to make a wrong choice—or, worse, an uninformed choice—until I was barely making any choices at all. After a year of working on the novel, I had to accept that I was doing something wrong. The pages I’d produced felt detailed, but also overdetermined and unsurprising; in short: dead on arrival.
The French composer Claude Debussy once complained to a friend that he found so much of the music that was popular in his time to be overworked, needlessly complicated. “They smell of the lamp, not of the sun,” he said. It was obvious that my manuscript smelled of the lamp, but less clear what I needed to do differently to let in some sun.
4:30 is my favorite time to go to the movies, and I’ve found I’m not alone in this. At 4:30 I can slip into a theater with a bottle of water. No line. Little chance it will sell out; that a tall man will, well into previews, station himself in front of me. Nothing odd about seeing a movie alone at 4:30. On Saturday night at 8:00, it’s hard not to feel too visible, pathetic. Have the urge to wear a sign: I have many friends. I am loved; drape a coat on the seat beside me until the lights go out—like Miss Lonelyhearts in Rear Window, setting a wine glass for an imaginary companion. At 4:30 I can sink back in the dark, in the company of strangers, many of whom are also alone, sip my water, and wait for those enormous figures to move across the screen. Wait to lose myself.
There is a garrulous humanity and humour in Evans’s writing – her women are both spendthrift talkers. I was diverted by the furious zest with which the bible is co-opted into Kitty’s tale. She links the possibility of her reprobate husband’s return to an unwitnessed resurrection. “How many times did he fall down and rise again like an India rubber ball?/And what was there to stop him rising/again? The body wasn’t found and no one/saw Jesus rise on Easter Sunday either.” The sense in this book is that words will save you – but only up to a point. Laughter, on the other hand, might prove no laughing matter.
The self-consciousness can occasionally feel contrived, or at least French, but the book at heart is both brave and ambitious in its determination never to let its reader, or its author, escape lightly the damaging realities it describes.