"The drink takes you:" Contemplations on Alcoholism and the Artistic Temperament

When we offer up our admiration, our praise, even our jealousy to the great American writers of the 20th century, we are largely doing so to a group of alcoholics, drug addicts, and general delinquents.  As Hunter Thompson said, "I hate to advocate drugs, alcohol, violence, or insanity to anyone, but they've always worked for me." There is a key point made in that declaration: just because I write about something, just because I convey my life the way it is, does not mean I'm telling you to do the same.  But this point eludes many who admire men like Thompson.  I'd love to argue that we should admire his writing alone, not him for all the shit he got himself into, but I know it is precisely that shit that made Thompson a great man, a different man and therefore a noteworthy man.  What would he have been without all the alcohol and drugs? Those things were integral parts of his life, his philosophy. 

And there we have it.  We so easily move from admiration of a talent to mythologizing a defect on the grounds that the two must be related.  My theory as to why we artist admirers and maybe even artists ourselves take part in this never-ending deluded admiration is that many of us are sufferers too; we all want to believe that our diseases, our defaults, our dysfunctions have some purpose. 

There's really nothing wrong with this desire as long as one does not inadvertently become dependent on their diseases, defaults, and dysfunctions and as long as one does not begin to see them as defining features of who they are.  Scott Fitzgerald wrote, "First you take a drink, then the drink takes a drink, then the drink takes you."  I see this as applying to more than just a specific instance of drunkenness; rather, it's the whole process of becoming an addict, of wrapping up our identity so tightly in something, something harmful, that we disappear. 

What does all of this have to do specifically with writing? Well, I recently read Stephen King's On Writing, in which he intimately discusses his severe bout with alcoholism.  What I realized is that it's only natural for writers, people who spend their days inside their heads, to struggle with addiction.  Let's face it, it's downright painful to be quietly with our thoughts that much of the time.  As I've mentioned in previous blogs, it is this very fact that has often prevented me from throwing myself into writing, particularly poetry, as much as I know I am capable.  Hell, it is that fact that holds me back now.  It's not an issue of time or dedication.  It's an issue of being willing or not willing to sacrifice a bit of my mental health for a craft.  I'm sure some will contend with me on the inevitability of that occurrence, and on certain days, I might too, but as for today, I know myself.    

So maybe it is a connection, not just admiration, that many readers and fellow artists feel toward men like Thompson.  But a point that King makes that bears repeating is that the suffering, the addiction, all those dysfunctional things, are not required to be an artist, to be a writer.  He contends that the life of the mind is one that inevitably gets along with the tendencies of alcoholism and drug dependence but that natural attraction is not one we must succumb to, and that to fight it is not to fight against creativity.