Who is the least likely writer to protest against the universally hostile reception for Across the River and into the Trees in 1950? Who answered the gleeful vitriol with considered appreciation? Clue: the review was in the Tablet.

On July 15, 1961, after the suicide of the writer he admired and defended, Evelyn Waugh wrote in his diary: “Hemingway’s suicide has made me reread Fiesta [aka The Sun Also Rises, 1926]. It was a revelation to me when it first came out – the drunk conversations rather than the fishing and bullfighting.” He’s right. Hemingway manages, as Scott Fitzgerald did later in Tender Is the Night, to capture both the evanescent charm and the repetitiveness of drunken conversation. Bill Gorton regales the narrator, Jake Barnes, with a tale told like a knight’s move in chess. It involves a whimsical motif of “stuffed animals”, an arbitrary point de repèrethat returns and returns. The stuffed animals become a theme and variations, perfectly poised between tediousness and humour.

Brett Ashley, Jake’s beloved, has the drunk’s ability to riff in terse telegraphese, a combination of abrupt delivery and prolonged statement: “Then he wanted me to go to Cannes with him. Told him I knew too many people in Cannes. Monte Carlo. Told him I knew too many people in Monte Carlo. Told him I knew too many people everywhere. Quite true, too.” Hemingway’s transcriptions are accomplished.

There are other ways, more humorous, more exaggerated, of doing it. In David Copperfield Dickens patents drunk speech in its more extreme manifestation, when it resembles a headlong unpunctuated fall down a flight of stairs, a collapse and compression: “‘Agnes!’ I said. ‘I’mafraidyou’renorwell.’ ‘Yes, yes. Do not mind me, Trotwood,’ she returned. ‘Listen! Are you going away soon?’ ‘Amigoarawaysoo?’ I repeated.” Notice how Dickens glosses the more extreme distortions. “Amigoarawaysoo?” would be impossible to understand were it not preceded by the RP version.

The precipitate pile-up is a great invention that has proved useful to subsequent writers. In “Brugglesmith” (1891), Kipling takes the Dickens discovery to a further extreme: the title itself demonstrates verbal compression, language with the bends. It stands for the drunk’s address: Brook Green, Hammersmith. The narrator is wheeling a legless Scotsman home. “At the Albert Hall he said that I was the ‘Hattle Gardle buggle’, which I apprehend is the Hatton Garden burglar”: the explanation is also a handy guide. So that, subsequently, the reader can master the idiom unassisted. His home has a “To Let” sign in the window. The narrator advises the drunk to ring the doorbell and is answered: “You do know my wife. She shleeps on soful in the dorlin’ room, waiting meculhome.” The pleasure is in the difficulty, the deciphering and the delay before the sense comes through. Authentic blur succeeded by final focus.

There is an even more radical rendition in the e e cummings poem “ygUDuh”, which is set in a bar. It isn’t Henry James “painfully explaining”, in T. S. Eliot’s lovely phrase. This is a bigot, addled with alcohol, painfully explaining something simple, bigotry directed against the Japanese or Chinese: “ydoan / yunnahstan //yudoan o / yunnustan dem / yguduh ged //yunnuuhstan dem doidee / yuguduh ged riduh / ydoan o nudn…”. The particular pleasure here is the anomalous “o”, enigmatically isolated. It belongs to the previous word: “yudoan o” or “you don’t know”, a move that captures the intoxicated blockage. And the ironic pay-off? “lidl yelluh bas / tuds weer goin // duhSIVILEYEzum.”

Now and then the comedy of drunkenness is primarily situational, marginally but importantly assisted by dialogue. In The Great Gatsby (1925), a drunk driver, after a Gatsby party, is attempting to drive an automobile that has lost a wheel. “Then, very gradually, part by part, a pale, dangling individual stepped out of the wreck, pawing tentatively at the ground with a large uncertain dancing shoe … ‘Wha’s matter?’ he inquired calmly. ‘Did we run outa gas?’ ‘Look!’ Half a dozen fingers pointed at the amputated wheel – he stared at it for a moment, and then looked upward as though he suspected that it had dropped from the sky. ‘It came off,’ someone explained. He nodded. ‘At first I din’ notice we’d stopped.’ A pause. Then, taking a long breath and straightening his shoulders, he remarked in a determined voice: ‘Wonder’ff tell me where there’s a gas’line station?’ At least a dozen men, some of them a little better off than he was, explained to him that wheel and car were no longer joined by any physical bond. ‘Back out,’ he suggested after a moment. ‘Put her in reverse.’ ‘But the wheel’s off!’ He hesitated. ‘No harm in trying,’ he said.”

I could cite Sir Hector’s drunken speech, with its erratic non sequiturs, in Clough’s Bothie of Tober na Vuolich, Mrs Gamp in Martin Chuzzlewit, drunks in Evelyn Waugh, Wilfred Barclay’s drunken prose in William Golding’s The Paper Men, the address to undergraduates in The Adventures of Mr Verdant Green (“Customed syam plic speakn”), but none of these examples, each with their merits, approach Fitzgerald’s calm, precise, patient, measured exposition – his sober exposition.

Craig Raine is Emeritus Fellow in English at New College, Oxford. His most recent book is My Grandmother’s Glass Eye: A look at poetry, 2016