Rose Colored Glasses

“Here’s to alcohol, the rose colored glasses of life.”

– F. Scott Fitzgerald, The Beautiful and the Damned

Earlier this week, I was perusing the National Public Radio website when I saw an interview with author Olivia Laing titled ‘The Mythos of the Boozing Writer.’ Laing talked to an interviewer about her new book, ‘Trip to Echo Spring,’ which explores the alcoholism of a selection of famous, beloved American writers.

It hadn’t occurred to me that the stereotype of the ‘boozing writer’ was surrounded by mythology – in fact, I hadn’t even questioned that it was true. The alcoholism of writers such as Ernest Hemingway and F. Scott Fitzgerald seemed to me a characteristic both inextricable from their personas and intertwined with the substance of most of their work.

Although the stereotype of the heavy-drinking writer is based in reality – a huge amount of beloved American writers have been alcoholics, including 4 of the 6 Americans who have won the Nobel Prize for literature – Laing argues that many famous alcoholic writers, worked so hard to establish a romanticized idea of the boozing writer mostly in order to cover up the darker realities of their own alcoholism. Laing suggests in her interview that Hemingway in particular was responsible glamorizing the idea of the heavy-drinking writer, creating a romanticized account of alcoholism that she says is in some ways ‘addicting in itself.’

In her book, Laing focuses specifically on Raymond Carver, John Berryman, Ernest Hemingway, Scott F. Fitzgerald, Tennessee Williams, and John Cheever – all writers who have produced some of the most beautiful and beloved literature of all time, and all virulent alcoholics. Although these famous writers rarely actually wrote drunk, they certainly thought of alcohol as an intrinsic part of the creative process, and often wrote about alcoholism. Here, the difference between these writers’ accounts of their alcohol consumption and the realities of their alcohol abuse becomes a kind of sore spot for many who love their work – if we often engage with the works of these greats with the assumption that their descriptive genius can provide us with penetrating truths, unfogged by pettiness or subterfuge, are we being cheated by the accidental artifice of an active alcoholic’s take on alcoholism?

Lewis Hyde’s essay ‘Alcohol and Poetry,’ which specifically investigates the effects of alcoholism on the works of John Berryman, was one of the first explorations of the myth of the creative alcoholic. In response to critics who fear that a prejudice against alcoholic authors could in some way deprive us of a beloved literary canon, Hyde has declared that he “would shudder to think of a culture that would canonize these voices without marking where they fail us.”

In Hyde’s opinion, the active alcoholic cannot write with veracity about alcoholism. These writer’s twisted takes on alcoholism stand as accidents, artistic failures in their legacy. But many alcoholic writers have also given us tragically discerning accounts of alcohol abuse. Laing argues that the writers she researches often leave out the darker side of alcoholism, quantified in lost jobs, destroyed relationships and damaged families. But not all of these writers shy away from this side of alcoholism – in F. Scott Fitzgerald’s ‘Tender is the Night,’ we watch Dick Diver deteriorate as his drinking problem becomes increasingly destructive; John Cheever’s famous short story ‘The Swimmer’ describes the tragedy of a declining alcoholic over the course of an increasingly surreal afternoon.

With the emergence of new scientific research, Alcoholics Anonymous, and 12 step programs, writers no longer control the broader cultural narrative on alcoholism. However, the mythology they have created still seems to control the narrative on alcoholism in creative communities. How significant is it that the ‘great writer’ is still usually pictured with a drink in hand? Of all of the points that Laing made in her interview, this one stuck with me: the alcoholism of great writers was less an effect of a riotous, inspired existence and more a symptom of deep, untreated depression. This may be the true failure of the intellectual community’s embrace of the ‘mythos of the boozing writer’ – it glamorizes, and in doing so dismisses, human suffering.