[W]hen writer Tony Whedon first moved to Vermont’s northern backcountry nearly a half-century ago, he was a globetrotting Renaissance man turned self-described “drunk in the woods.”
“It’s not for nothing that Bob Smith and Bill Wilson, AA’s founding fathers, were from Vermont, where six-month winters turn people to drink,” he notes.
Then Whedon put down the bottle to become, as peer and Pushcart Prize winner David Jauss sums up, “drunk on the woods.”
“My life changed in recovery,” the 77-year-old says. “I’ve experienced a natural kinship with the woods.”
It’s a connection Whedon chronicles in his new memoir “Drunk in the Woods,” a 252-page paperback recently released by Vermont’s Green Writers Press.
“Sometimes,” he writes, “I think there’s such a thing as an alcoholic landscape — a drunk landscape, as opposed to the sober one I live in now, the same trees, eight years later, the same brook, but with more clarity.”
A New York native raised by artist parents on Long Island, Whedon didn’t consider it unusual to start playing the trombone at age 9 or to go on to tell stories about dating a girl who lived in the house designated as Daisy Buchanan’s in “The Great Gatsby.” He spent childhood summers in New England learning about Ralph Waldo Emerson and Henry David Thoreau — and well as his own ancestors.
“I come from an alcoholic family — uncle, aunt, grandfather, and God knows who else, dating back to when man first crushed grapes,” he writes. “Actually, both sides of the family drink. My mother’s father died of cirrhosis when he was 40; Mom’s sister went in and out of AA, finally succumbing to a lethal cocktail of gin and tranquilizers; my father’s brother committed suicide — after a bout of heavy drinking — at the age of 26.”
Whedon inherited the same thirst. Enrolling at Goddard College in Plainfield in 1959, he eventually was kicked out of the school that didn’t grade students because of alcohol. (“I got a letter that said, ‘We think your creative endeavors would be better suited to a place like Greenwich Village,’” he once recounted to a reporter.)
Whedon briefly worked as a jazz trombonist and taught art history and humanities at Atlanta’s Morehouse College before writing in France, Greece and Spain. Returning penniless to the United States in his mid-thirties, he settled in a one-room cabin without electricity or running water on the Vermont-Quebec border and became a professor at Johnson State College and founding editor of the literary magazine Green Mountains Review.
The one constant amid all the change: Alcohol.
“My own drinking landed me in dozens of scrapes,” he writes. “I’ve been thrown in jail for public drunkenness in three countries, thrown out of bars, got a broken ankle, a fractured skull, a busted jaw in fights I provoked; I’ve been sued for things I did while drunk, and have lost dozens of friendships.”
With the help of Alcoholics Anonymous, Whedon stopped drinking in 1990.
“There’s this thing in AA called the fourth step: You make a thorough moral inventory,” he says in an interview. “What I did is write my story, then I started to publish the damn things.”
Previous essay and poetry collections including “A Language Dark Enough” and “Things to Pray to in Vermont” led to Whedon’s current book.
“I hope these essays express the naturally inebriated state of consciousness living in the woods provides,” he writes in the memoir. “They are about a borderland existence, the marginal life between the pastoral and the wild, and the shaky peripheries of sobriety and drunkenness. They’re about people, too — a marvelous assortment of souls who’ve helped keep me sober all these years.”
Whedon doesn’t take that temperance for granted.
“My wife and I rarely talk about my drinking, but beneath our serenity, there’s a tacit understanding that all this is provisional: the farther away I am from drinking, the closer I am to another drink,” he writes. “That’s the paradox.”
And perhaps why Whedon no longer spends six-month winters in northern Vermont. Instead, he’s currently savoring the Southern bayou of Georgia, anticipating his return with spring.
