Literary drunks and addicts

A correspondent sends a link to a Life magazine gallery of “famous literary drunks and addicts.” All twenty-nine are famous, all right, but not always—Ayn Rand, Hunter S. Thompson, Truman Capote—for literature.

Is it my imagination or has alcoholism passed out of vogue for contemporary writers? Perhaps creative writing has knit together a guild of writers who protect one another’s trade secrets, or perhaps professional advancement in creative writing has itself replaced the sauce, but for the life of me I cannot think of any writer under the age of sixty-five who has a reputation for public drunkenness to rival Dylan Thomas’s or John Berryman’s. Perhaps there is simply less literary gossip to go around.

Or perhaps the conception of a literary career has changed. (A “literary career”—now there’s a contradiction in terms!) Poètes maudits are no longer tolerated, let alone celebrated. Clem Anderson, R. V. Cassill’s brilliant 1961 portrait of the unruly modern writer, whose talents forgive his trespasses, could not be written today. Where writers once chose perfection of the work, and life be hanged, more recent creative writers have reversed their priorities.