The Perspiring Writer Magazine

Oh, weren’t Scott and Zelda a fun couple while they lasted, legendarily splashing in the fountains of youth while toasting the dawn?

Fun -- or sad and pathetic. All depends on how you look at it.

The roll call of famous writers who were boozers is long and famously includes Fitzgerald, Truman Capote, William Faulkner, Ernest Hemingway, Hunter S. Thompson, Raymond Chandler, Tennessee Williams, Dorothy Parker, Jack Kerouac, Dylan Thomas, James Joyce, Raymond Carver, and on and on.

For a long time, folks seemed to look at a writer’s drinking the same way we looked at cigarette smoking when Humphrey Bogart did it on screen -- dashing and romantic, part of the image. But alas, cigarettes kill you, and alcohol eats up brain cells, livers, and great gobs of time, all rather important to the well-being and productivity of a writer.

One of the myths about writers has it that alcohol and other drugs fuel creativity and free the muse from restraint, but there’s ample anecdotal evidence that excessive use of drugs cripples the writer and the writing. And for many, “excessive” is one drink.

Prolific bestselling storyteller Stephen King revealed much about a writer’s sick dance with alcohol in his brilliant review of a biography of Carver (credited with creating the modern school of minimalist fiction) in the New York Times Book Review. (Raymond Carver: A Writer’s Life, by Carol Skienicka, November 22, 2009.) King has himself waged war with the bottle and knows a fellow drunk when he encounters one.

“In 1973, when my first novel was accepted for publication,” King writes, “I was in similar straits [to Carver]; young, endlessly drunk, trying to support a wife and two children, writing at night, hoping for a break.” He got that break, he says, not so much from the $2,500 advance he got from Doubleday for Carrie, but in discovering AA meetings.

“As brilliant and talented as he was,” King notes, “Ray Carver was also the destructive, everything in the pot kind of drinker who hits bottom, then starts burrowing deeper. Longtime AA’s know that drunks like Carver are master practitioners of the geographical cure, refusing to recognize that if you put an out of control boozer on a plane in California, an out of control boozer is going to get off in Chicago. Or Iowa. Or Mexico.”

In his second marriage, to Tess Gallagher, Carver found stability and sobriety, but his new life lasted only a decade. He died at age 50 in 1988.

Ernest Hemingway was always a heavy drinker and succumbed to alcoholism in later life. After being released from a mental hospital, where he was being treated for severe depression, he shot himself to death.

His contemporary, William Faulkner, managed to abstain from drinking while he was writing but binged when he wasn’t but perhaps could have been.

Can I really state with certainty that drinking hurt their writing or cut down on their productivity? I cannot. No one can. The words "What might have been" are not only the saddest of tongue or pen, they’re also a futile game to play.

But I have my strong opinion on the subject, and I pass it on to you for what it may be worth to you. In my view, the writer’s relationship to alcohol is adversarial, not collaborative. You don’t write better when you’re drinking, and you don’t write at all when you’re too drunk to see the keys or hold the pencil.

I think it likely that, for every Faulkner or Joyce, who managed to make major contributions to literature while pursuing a lifelong affair with alcohol, there may have been hundreds of other potential literary lights who never got their books written because of booze.

So to the admonition that a writer should “keep the day job,”  I would add this one: show up sober for that day job-- and for the real work of your heart, your writing.

Marshall’s working on a book on how writers learn what they really need to know. Share your thoughts on the subject with Marshall at mcook@dcs.wisc.edu.