Where Have All the Artist-Addicts Gone?

THE QUESTION OF whether or not artists are extra vulnerable to abuse, or whether or not we’ve traditionally simply preferred to suppose they’re, reverberated all through the twentieth century. The consuming and drug habits of varied writers grew to become a topic of morbid curiosity for his or her public, who proceed to gather anecdotal proof of habit as if it had been the important thing to understanding genius. When requested by “silly psychiatrists” why he used heroin, the narrator in William S. Burroughs’s autobiographical first novel, “Junky” (1953), responded, “I would like it to remain alive.”

The chest-thumping, romantic notions of writer-addicts aren’t unique to white males, although there’s, after all, a double commonplace. For white males, intoxication has lengthy been a type of social foreign money, an attention-grabbing quirk of the thoughts, whereas girls and minorities who take pleasure in themselves an excessive amount of are breaking one in all our final remaining cultural taboos. People don’t appear to expertise the identical curiosity relating to a Black or brown author’s addictions however one thing nearer to worry — certainly, the poisonous fantasy of the Black drug person as a menacing prison has fueled many years of racist legal guidelines which have overwhelmingly focused and incarcerated anybody who isn’t white. Feminine addicts, too, are seen as not heroic however mentally unwell. Heather Clark, early in her 2020 biography of Sylvia Plath, quotes the literary biographer Hermione Lee as writing, “Ladies writers whose lives concerned abuse, psychological sickness, self-harm, suicide, have typically been handled, biographically, as victims or psychological case histories first and as skilled writers second.” For ladies artists, substance use is usually grouped below the bigger umbrella of insanity, traditionally a type of ratline to institutionalization, typically in opposition to their will, for girls starting from Zelda Fitzgerald to Britney Spears.

Which brings us to Papa. It could be not possible to debate habit amongst artists with out mentioning the immense privilege Ernest Hemingway continues to take pleasure in as a standard-bearer of virile masculinity and genius, even supposing alcohol brought about him monumental ache. Within the 2020 Danish comedy “One other Spherical,” a gaggle of pals experiment with spending most of their waking lives barely drunk, citing a debunked thought {that a} fixed, low degree of intoxication — the equal of being perpetually below the affect of 1 to 2 glasses of wine — is the optimum state for human beings. (“You’re extra relaxed, and poised and musical and open,” one of many pals says. “Extra brave basically.”) They take a look at this concept by holding themselves to what they declare, nevertheless dubiously, to be Hemingway’s personal commonplace: Cease consuming every day by 8 within the night so as to be recent within the morning. The plan, like many involving medication or alcohol, works nicely till it doesn’t.