Booze and the Muse

Dan Wakefield

THE myth ingrained deep in our culture that artificial stimulants, especially booze and drugs, are aids to creativity serves as a kind of paradigm of all the ways we deceive ourselves about the way to access our creative power. At the same time, a hard look at the myth points in another direction to the real key for unlocking and using creative energy.

In reality, alcohol and drugs are destructive not only to creativity, but to health, well-being, and successful functioning. Alcohol is most popular because it's legally and socially approved—and as if that weren't enough, it's given an extra boost with millions of dollars of creative, psychologically researched advertising.

On a deeper level than hype, however, there's a genuine reason for the confusion about alcohol and creativity: the craving for bottled spirits can mask the need for spirit, the real source of creation. When an alcoholic from America went to Jung for help in 1931, the psychiatric insights of the treatment did not effect the patient's drinking, and Jung finally told the man his only hope was in some kind of powerful spiritual experience or conversion. Jung wrote that “the craving for alcohol was the equivalent, on a low level, of the spiritual thirst of our being for wholeness...the union with God.”

The relationship of alcoholic thirst to spiritual thirst is something I've experienced personally. Like many other people, my own interest in anything “spiritual” didn't begin until I stopped drinking for a long enough period of time to really be sober, and not just recovering from a hangover. When I started my turning away from alcohol to a spiritual search in the early 1980s, and joined King's Chapel in Boston, I wrote to Rev. Carl Scovel, my minister, that I found myself attending his evening classes in Bible study and religious education as eagerly as I once would have hurried to free martini parties. I had not then read Jung or anyone else on the similarities of the “thirst” for alcohol and spirituality, I was simply using the only language I knew to explain what I felt, what I was experiencing. Jung went on to say in the letter quoted above, “You see, ‘alcohol' in Latin is spiritus, and one uses the same word for the highest religious experience as well as for the most depraving poison. The helpful formula therefore is: spiritus contra spiritum.”

Spirits against spirit.

The confusion of alcoholic spirits with the creative force has been perpetrated in the work as well as the lives of many of our famous artists of music, theater, painting, and literature. Carson McCullers, author of The Heart Is a Lonely Hunter, a haunting and powerful first novel that was one of the bibles of my generation, abused her body and her talent with alcohol and wrote of it rapturously. In a letter to a friend she said that a wine she drank early in the morning warmed her in “a special way,” and compared it to the radiance that the stained glass windows of a church gave to worshippers within. In “The Ballad of the Sad Cafe” she described a liquor that had “a special quality of its own” that glowed inside for a long time, and likened it to the “fire” that brings out the truth “known only in the soul.”

Spirits confused with spirit.

Perhaps because they have not only been prey to alcohol but write about it, sometimes almost as defenders and promoters, writers have come to represent in the public mind the myth of alcohol as a necessary handmaiden of creativity.

This myth of Booze and the Muse, which took hold in America in the twenties, was enshrined as an article of artistic faith by the fifties. Norman Podhoretz, literary critic and editor of Commentary magazine, observed of that era in New York in his autobiographical Breaking Ranks: “A writer was expected to drink and suspected if he didn't; and far from being frowned on, drinking heavily was admired as a sign of manliness, and of that refusal of respectability that seemed necessary to creative work.”

That myth of creativity continues to hold on and influence new generations despite the accumulation of evidence against it, and a cultural, even artistic awareness of its fallacy. Corrine Fonger, a high school teacher in Michigan, told me that as a college student in the seventies she took a writing course which the instructor convened at a bar so the class could drink beer and critique one another's works at the same time. As Corrine pointed out, it would have seemed odd for any other kind of class to meet at a bar—say, a chemistry or a history course—but it was understood that drinking and writing went together, as did drinking and all the creative arts—and so it was accepted as only natural for the writing class to meet in the bar. Christine also said that myth is still operating for many of her high school students today. No matter how much more information we have about the medical effects of drugs and alcohol, the mythology still persists, with both old and new role models.

The social and psychological machinery of the lure of drinking as fun, creative, and inspiring are as seductive today as they have always been—even as they were in that dim, receding realm of my allegedly “silent generation” of the fifties. My journey with booze may have different names and places than the contemporary journey but the plot line is still the same. I know the power of the myth, for I lived it. Luckily, I also lived to tell the tale.

A few months out of college at Columbia in 1955, a fellow student who was also an aspiring writer took me to one of the hallowed literary shrines of New York, The White Horse Tavern in Greenwich Village. One of the veteran habitués of “The Horse” showed us to the place within it that was holy of holies, the very table where the great Welsh poet Dylan Thomas had his last drink. Our volunteer guide pointed out the window to St. Vincent's Hospital, down the street, where the poet was taken to die, at age thirty-nine, of alcoholism.

I was thrilled.

Maybe I too could someday be a great writer and a romantic figure, like Dylan Thomas, and die of alcoholism before reaching the rotting age of forty! In fact I began by faithfully following in his “staggering steps.” (The current White Horse Tavern menu boasts of its famous patron that “his collapse came a few staggering steps from the front door.”) When I suddenly arrived at age forty, however, death did not seem so romantic—though it wasn't until I was just past fifty that I cut down and then stopped altogether the regular alcohol consumption that was leading me toward a similar (if somewhat delayed) end as my early hero, the drunken poet.

Dylan Thomas was of course not the only alcoholic “role model” I was given as an aspiring young writer in the 1950s. America's brightest literary lights—Hemingway, Fitzgerald and Faulkner—were held up as inspirational examples whose literary muse was allegedly dependent on their steady, gargantuan intake of booze.

Aspiring painters had their own alcoholic role models in Jackson Pollock and the abstract expressionists who drank at The Cedar Bar in the Village in the fifties (the artists' equivalent of The White Horse Tavern for writers). In The Turning Point: The Abstract Expressionists and the Transformation of American Art, April Kingsley confirms that “modern American artists, particularly the Abstract Expressionists,” followed the alcoholic patterns of their literary counterparts.

In no other professions aside from the arts are drunkards and drug addicts held up to young people as heroes or role models. Imagine a young intern being told nostalgic tales about “great drunken doctors,” or a first-year law student regaled with stories of alcoholic lawyers whose “collapse came a few staggering steps from the front door” of the courthouse!

I'm using writers as prime examples in this case study of the myth because by the very nature of their work they leave “tracks” for us to follow. They write about their experience, not only in autobiographical memoirs, but translated into stories and novels, bringing to their fiction their own attitudes about life and how to live it, projecting their own myths into the minds of readers. Writers are, for better and worse, teachers as well as chroniclers. Let's see then how the literary gurus of the twenties taught succeeding generations about the “benefits” of booze, and made hard drinking—even drunkenness—a sign of merit and sophistication.

My college friends and I called Hemingway “Papa,” and he was our generational mentor and guru, not only for literature but for life, the way to conduct yourself in the world. One of the means of doing that according to the Hemingway code of macho honor was to drink, and he told us how and why.

Malcolm Cowley, whose Exile's Return chronicled the lives of the “Lost Generation” of the 1920s, described the common trait of Hemingway's heroes: “They drink early and late; they consume enough beer, wine, anise, grappa, and Fundador to put them all into alcoholic wards, if they were ordinary mortals; but drinking seems to have the effect upon them of a magic potion.”

Drinking is the strong, manly thing to do in The Sun Also Rises, the bible of the Lost Generation. No wonder they were lost—they were too drunk to find their way home! Drinking is described in the novel as “direct action”; it “beats legislation,” keeps you warm, and even helps your memory! “Take that drink and remember,” one Hemingway character advises another.

In a paean to bullfighting and literature, Death in the Afternoon, guzzling brandy is a good way to clean your throat while traveling, as Hemingway did with his friends when he writes romantically of “riding back from Toledo in the dark, washing the dust out with Fundador.” I had never heard of Fundador till I read that passage, and when I learned it was a kind of Spanish brandy I immediately ran out and bought a bottle. I remember it as sweetish and cloying but I drank the stuff for years, thinking always of Hemingway and his pals “washing the dust out” with it. Yes, there really is a direct influence in reading about booze recommended by someone you admire and emulating his taste.

There of course are no footnotes in Hemingway's books that describe his alcohol-induced accidents, illnesses, broken marriages, depression, and the paranoia of a life ending in suicide.

Prohibition made drinking an act of rebellion for the 1920s generation, and when they were “let in” to speakeasies to drink they felt they were being let in on the rites of adulthood and sophistication. There were no Twelve Step programs or media awareness of the devastating effects of alcohol that we take for granted today. Drinking was chic, glamorous—and, oh my, literary, even “political,” as an act of rebellion.

The same rationale of drinking as political protest was passed on to succeeding generations. The New York newspaper columnist and novelist Pete Hamill explains in his fine memoir of A Drinking Life that as a young man he “discovered Hemingway, Fitzgerald, and the myth of the Lost Generation.” From their work he “learned that drinking could be something more than mere fuel for a wild night out. It could be a huge Fuck You to Authority.”

Many of our women literary idols were carriers of the same disease of alcoholism as the male models; if macho Hemingway and romantic Fitzgerald were the principle literary salesmen of alcohol as a way of life, the top women writers of the time were hardly immune to the message. Edna St. Vincent Millay, the great lyric poet of the era, wrote of burning her candle at both ends, and part of that hard-living life style was alcohol; fellow writer and critic Max Eastman was among the friends of Millay who believed that “chemical stimulation blunted the edge of Edna's otherwise so carefully cherished genius.”

Dorothy Parker, the sharpest wit of the famous Algonquin Round Table, the New Yorker's caustically brilliant theater critic, was diagnosed as a “pathological drinker” at thirty-three. She lived the greater part of her life in what one biographer called a “Scotch mist” that dimmed and obscured her talent and drove her to numerous suicide attempts: slashing her wrists, swallowing sleeping pills, and drinking a bottle of shoe polish that made her deathly ill but didn't kill her. Though Parker “miraculously” lived to the age of seventy-three, Joan Acocella writes that “from about thirty on, she was intoxicated during most of her waking hours.” Little wonder she never realized her ambition to write a novel, or that the principal theme of her stories and even light verse was disappointment.

I laughed with other friends who were fresh out of college in the fifties when we read a widely published article reporting that, of the seven Americans who had won the Nobel Prize for Literature, five were alcoholics, one “drank heavily,” and the other was Pearl Buck. Against the evidence, the myth was that women writers weren't drunks, so that “explained” Pearl Buck. As for the others, we thought it amusing—an occasion for humor, on the level of college fraternity pranks—because writers being alcoholics seemed a matter of pride. “All good writers are drunks,” Ernest Hemingway assured Scott Fitzgerald.

There was also a deeply romantic aspect to the drunken author image, a belief in the “danger” of being a writer, based on the assumption that alcoholism was an occupational hazard of the literary life, like black lung for coal miners. So just as those daring young RAF pilots in World War II movies scrambled for their fighter planes, or race car drivers strapped on their helmets before hurtling onto the death-defying curves of the Indianapolis 500, so we aspiring authors seated ourselves before the old Smith-Corona or Royal portable, ready to risk life, limb and liver in the mission that might require in its course such consumption of liquor as to render us physically ill, depressed, shaky, or in need of electroshock therapy, like Faulkner; make us prey to an early death, like Fitzgerald; or make us kill ourselves by shotgun, like Hemingway.

If Faulkner drank all the time, and wrote those great novels, wouldn't it help us to drink, too ? The myth was that the booze acted as muse, rousing and stimulating the sleeping creative giant within.

At a conference sponsored by the National Council on Alcoholism on the subject of “Alcohol in Literature,” I found myself immersed in a deep discussion about alcohol as a stimulus to creativity, as if it were an established fact. People were even talking about genetics, and right-brain/left-brain functioning that showed how alcohol stoked creativity, something writers supposedly had known through the centuries, as all the great ones made use of spirits to rouse their creative spirit. That's a message we've been getting at least since the time of Horace, who declared (sounding like a Roman Hemingway) that “no poems can please for long or live that are written by water drinkers.”

Suddenly I stopped and recalled my disappointment when during my heavy-drinking days I learned that my hero Dostoevsky was not a rummy ! It occurred to me that neither was Tolstoy a big drinker, nor Chekhov nor Turgenev. So why, I asked, could the great Russian writers manage to create without coming to depend on alcohol, when they lived in a society famous for its overindulgence of vodka?

Someone in the audience said, now that he thought of it, the great English writers weren't alcoholics, either: Dickens, Trollope, Thackeray, Jane Austen, George Eliot...And how about the Germans someone else asked, citing Goethe, Thomas Mann, Kafka....This was getting weird. Here were all these great writers from all over the world who weren't alcoholics—I wondered if perhaps only American writers had fallen prey to this disease.

Then someone else volunteered that our own great nineteenth-century writers—Hawthorne, Melville, Whitman, Dickinson, Emerson, and Thoreau—were not alcoholics. In fact the only alcoholic in the rich pantheon of nineteenth-century American literature was Edgar Allen Poe—and, not by accident, he is the subject of more biographies than any other American writer. He satisfies our attraction to the story of the doomed creator. As Donald Goodwin observed in Alcohol and the Writer, “Wholesome geniuses are not much in demand.”

More moving than the judgments of any critics as critique of the damaging effects of alcohol on creativity is Scott Fitzgerald's own lament about his most ambitious novel, Tender Is the Night: “I would give anything if I hadn't had to write Part III of Tender entirely on stimulant [alcohol]. If I had one more crack at it cold sober I believe it might have made a great difference.”

No doubt he was right, for when he stopped drinking toward the end of his life, he wrote most of the novel that Edmund Wilson says is his most mature, The Last Tycoon. Before he could finish he died of a heart attack at age forty-four—just five years older than Dylan Thomas.

Not until recent studies like Donald Goodwin's Alcohol and the Writer and Tom Dardis's The Thirsty Muse did true accounts of the effects of alcohol on writers become publicized. In his study of Faulkner, Hemingway, Fitzgerald, and Eugene O'Neill, Dardis reported that “the writers I consider embarked on writing and drinking careers with deadly effects on their creative powers.” This is not just the outside opinion of a critic, but comes from the little-known testimony of the writers who Dardis and Goodwin studied.

O'Neill, who is still popularly—and mistakenly—thought of as an alcoholic writer, explained that “you've got to have all your critical and creative faculties about you when you're working. I never try to write a line when I'm not strictly on the wagon.”

The popular distortion of O'Neill's drinking history is surely the most blatant example of how the mythology of alcohol as romantic inspiration prevails over the reality of recovery, which is evidently less appealing to the public! The fact is that O'Neill stopped drinking at age thirty-seven, when his work was getting more verbose and less coherent. It was only after getting sober and writing without drinking that he wrote his great plays—Mourning Becomes Electra, The Iceman Cometh, and Long Day's Journey into Night. Until I read The Thirsty Muse a few years ago, I thought O'Neill was a lush who wrote while soused, and every time I've told the true story to writer friends they're as amazed as I was to hear that he did his great work while sober.

Mark Twain, still widely regarded as a hard-drinking author who imbibed to create, testified that wine was “a clog to the pen, not an inspiration.” He said he couldn't write after a single glass. Twain's experience was echoed in the past decade by the brilliant short story writer Raymond Carver, who stopped drinking a decade before he died of cancer and reported: “I never wrote so much as a line worth a nickel when I was under the influence of alcohol.”

Under The Volcano is perhaps the most famous novel about an alcoholic written by an alcoholic—factors which have added enormously to its fame. Part of the literary mythology of the book is that it was written by a drunk while he was drunk—an amazing feat, cited as a tribute to the inspirational powers of booze! I was fascinated to learn that Lowry actually wrote the book during the one period in his life when he was at least in partial control of his drinking. He lived during this time in a shack on the beach on Vancouver Bay, rose early to swim and do calisthenics, and limited himself to a few beers during the day. It was during this time that he wrote his famous novel.

The Lowry story made me see through some of the personal mythology of my own drinking and writing history. I was still a big drinker in the early 1970s when I wrote my first two novels, Going All The Way and Starting Over. I simply catalogued those accomplishments as part of my productivity as a hard-drinking writer. The Lowry story made me think back to that time, and I realized, with a jolt, that in fact while I was doing the actual writing of those novels I was not drinking at all during the day, and having only a beer or a glass of wine when I knocked off work to have dinner at eight or nine at night. Though I drank to excess before and after writing those novels, the actual periods of writing were the most sober times of my adult life up to that point.

I simply couldn't wake up with a hangover and write, and when I was in the act of writing I was so consumed by it, so caught up in the real transport of the creative act, that I didn't feel the need to drink at my usual heavy, steady pace. The creation itself filled me up, in a way I needed the booze to do when I wasn't really writing. When I finally cut down my drinking in 1980 I was told that had I continued at that same rate of consumption I would have suffered permanent heart damage. Looking back, as I realized my creative periods were my times of relief from steady drinking, it struck me that in a very literal way, writing the novels saved my life.

The dark force of numbing is always powerful, and the substances that do it to us, from alcohol to drugs, are always there, sometimes returning after they seem to have been “defeated” or gone out of style, drawing new adherents who pay homage to their effects, like worshippers of anti-Life. The appeal is seductive, strong, and especially magnetic to young people discovering it for the first time—even more so when it is sold with the false propaganda that it's linked to creativity.

Youthful death is still part of the “doomed artist” tradition, tragically acted out in the nineties by the suicide of Seattle rock star Kurt Cobaine who sought relief from the pressures of sudden fame, hype, and money with booze and drugs (his group was “Nirvana”). His own suicide was soon followed by that of another Seattle rocker, the female bassist in his wife Courtney Love's band. They ended their lives in the sick tradition of OD'd stars of former generations like Janis Joplin, Jimi Hendrix, and actor John Belushi. In the same year, movie star River Phoenix OD'd on cocaine and alcohol.

The alcohol-and-writers myth took a back seat in the sixties to the drugs-and-musicians myth. Death by overdose was hyped as glamorous, and Jim Morrison's early grave from drugs became the rock version of Dylan Thomas's killing himself with alcohol.

The revised myth was that drugs—especially the newly popular hallucinogens—would open what Aldous Huxley (paraphrasing William Blake) called in his book of the same name The Doors of Perception (the title inspired the name of the rock group The Doors.) The illusion and hope of salvation by ingestion was much the same as that of alcohol, but hyped now by a new breed of fast-talking prophets in hip clothing. The exciting promise was that these new drugs derived from “the magic mushrooms” or created in the laboratory like LSD, would not only bring visions of brilliant insight and understanding (instant nirvana, spontaneous satori, no need for all that tiresome meditation and discipline, just swallow a pill—gulp) but in the process unlock our creative powers, allow us to tap into the universal source of creativity.

That fantasy evaporated before my very eyes in Allen Ginsberg's apartment on the Lower East Side of Manhattan one Sunday afternoon in 1961. I had gone there to interview Ginsberg for an article I was writing about marijuana, and found a number of poets and writers on hand, including Jack Kerouac. Also present was a young psychologist who had come down from Harvard named Timothy Leary, who told me he was conducting a “scientific experiment” with a new drug called psilocybin. Leary said the drug stimulated creativity, which is why he wanted to give it to the assembled writers to see what amazing results it might produce—perhaps an epic poem on the spot, a sudden story of unimagined eloquence.

Another benevolent side effect of the drug, Leary said, was that it made people “mellow.” He suggested I go talk to Kerouac, who was often hostile, but now mellowed out under the influence of the drug. When I introduced myself to Jack, he recalled I had written an article making fun of a drunken reading he gave at a Village nightclub. He threatened to throw me out the window.

I retreated, deciding the drug hadn't taken effect. Leary urged me to stick around, though, so I could witness what he said was most important—psilocybin's stimulation of creativity. I dutifully stood by as Leary gave Kerouac a pencil and a piece of blank paper and told him to create, to write something in his famous style of “bop prosody.” Kerouac groggily turned away, expressing no interest. Leary then reminded Jack that he was taking part in a scientific experiment, and if he didn't do his part by writing, he wouldn't get any more of the drug; if he wrote something, though, he'd be rewarded.

This got Kerouac's interest; he made a grunting sound of agreement, and applied the pencil to the paper as Leary and I looked on, with heightened anticipation. Leary hovered over the scene as if expecting a miracle, and for a moment I wondered if perhaps the avatar of the Beats, with the aid of the alleged miracle drug, might spew forth the beginning of his own hallucinogenic War and Peace or turned-on Moby Dick.

I held my breath as Kerouac drew his pencil across the blank piece of paper; instead of words, he had drawn a straight line; then he drew another. Perhaps the drug had stimulated his artistic rather than literary impulse, and he'd create a breakthrough work of visual art, some kind of mind-blown Mondrian. Jack patiently continued to fill up the paper with these parallel lines; then, thoughtfully, he turned the paper sideways and drew another series of lines through the original ones. Then he handed the paper to Leary and went to lie down. Leary looked at the paper, and laughed nervously. He said there might be another burst of creativity later, but I thought I'd seen enough.

I took it lightly at the time, and only recently did I learn that afternoon's “scientific experiment” was not just a fiasco for Leary. Kerouac wrote later in the Chicago Tribune that he believed the psilocybin had harmed him. Dennis McNally writes in Desolation Angel that Jack at age forty-one spoke of his psychedelic experience with Leary as “a frightening descent into lostness that Kerouac now swore had ruined him. ‘I haven't been right since,' he confided.”

Visit Dan Wakefield as Image Artist of the Month for December 2000

Issue #14 • Summer 1996