Dick Powell reading.
George Kelley mentioned this series (Paris Review-Writers at Work) last week and my university library owns most of the volumes, so I started with one.
From an interview with William Styron:
Interviewer: And what time of day do you find best for writing?
Styron: The afternoon. I like to stay up late at night and get drunk and sleep late. I wish I could break the habit but I can't. The afternoon is the only time I have left and I try to use it to the best advantage with a hangover.
The interviewer responds by next asking if he uses a notebook!!!!
We are all familiar with the problems of alcohol and writing. But with Styron, it turned out to be depression (Darkness Invisible) as it did for Carver, Cheever, Faulkner, Fitzgerald and so many others.
Lying in bed is difficult for someone who's depressed. You put it off-those hours when you are in the dark with yourself. Dark thoughts....so you medicate yourself with booze or drugs or both. Finding your way out of this chasm through writing is possibly a solution, or possibly contributes to the disease.
Any thoughts. Are there writers who are the sanest gals/guys on the block? How many writers are insomniacs too?
26 comments:
Well, the insomnia goes with the alcoholism (the Writer's Disease)...too many thoughts, sometimes in the form of voices. Shut up already.
Well-adjusted writers, yes, but none without at least some sort of rebellion, even if only against their own sense of decorum and duty.
PARIS REVIEW interviews have tended to be edited pretty well, but I doubt Styron's interviewer felt the need to press for too many shocking details...leaving aside the interviewer's sense of decorum/intrusion, Styron was unlikely to be reticent.
Do you know if they (PARIS REVIEW)did one for Richard Yates?
Styron was a good friend to Yates (and vice versa) and Yates had an imbibing issue as well. He was also one of the most unsung writers ever.
Aaron Elkins and Bill Crider are two writers I can think of who are well in every meaning of the word.
Revolutionary Road, Easter Parade, Eleven Kinds of Loneliness are among my favorite books. The recent bio on him is outstanding although enough to make you slit your wrist. I don't know if he's in the Paris Review books but he's not in the first one. I'll let you know.
Just an amazing statement to make to an interviewer unless he felt his problems were ubiquitous or he was crying out for help.
I think there are a lot of writers who don't lie awake planning their demise but other people's perhaps (fictionally).
There are probably more "well" authors than not, it's just the others get indulged and romanticized or their "creative struggle."
Same thing with musicians. I stopped watching ken Burns's history of jazz on PBS because he would spend ten minutes on Charlie Parker's trips to rehab, or missed gigs, or other irresponsible actions, then maybe a minute a mentioning that, oh, yeah, while Bird was away, Dizzy Gillespie pretty much invented Afro-Cuban jazz. Then Bird played a gig and would have made a record if he hadn't hocked his sax for heroin.
Stephen King had his share of issues, but he offers the most unapologetic description of such behavior in ON WRITING: We all look pretty much the same puking into the gutter.
Charlie--no. The only piece by Yates to appear in TPR was the story A WRESTLER WITH SHARKS in
Issue No. 13, Summer 1956. On the Richard Yates archive, Tobias Wolff's PARIS REVIEW i/v mentions him...http://www.richardyates.org/bib_wolff.html
Dana--that's hardly the only problem with Ken Burns's series, but it's typical of the many problems with it.
This may be a generational thing - all the writers I know these days are pretty well-adjusted, non-drinking tpes.
I know for me the fact that three people in three different fields - Elmore Leonard, George Carlin and Alice Cooper - all did their best work after quitting drugs/alcohol was a bit of an inspiration.
Also, realizing the difference between depression and unhappiness helped me alot.
The Yates bio was terrific. Tough, yes, but terrific. My mentor was taught by him and Vonnegut at Iowa (along with John Irving, Andre Dubus and James Crumley). Tough life but a brilliant writer. Easter Parade, yes ... wonderful.
Speaking of bios, a friend just sent me the Patricia Highsmith bio. I can't wait to start it.
That's on my list as well as the Carver one. I have the Highsmith one done by Marijane Meeker, which is great reading on its own terms.
John--It probably helps that we don't much romanticize addiction any longer (it isn't rebellion, and it doesn't make you better--surprise!). Now if we could quit romanticizing Miles Davis's abuses of others as the epitome of cool, we'll be further along...
Patti--Meeker's other memoir, ME ME ME ME ME: NOT A NOVEL, published as by M. E. Kerr and aimed primarily at her YA readers, is still good reading about her youth, education (going to college with Richard Matheson, among other things), and early career (working for Gold Medal and helping get Matheson published there, and publishing there herself). A full Meeker autobio will be welcome.
Patti--I don't know when the Styron interview took place, but if it was in the 1960s or 1970s, I suspect the interviewer didn't follow up the comment about alcohol because he (I'm making the sexist assumption that the interviewer was a "he")didn't think there was anything to have to follow up. Heavy drinking was part and parcel of the times and the culture (just look at the movies from that era). So when Styron said, "I get drunk," the interviewer probably thought, "you along with everybody else."
I don't remember who wrote "The Thirsty Muse," but it was a very interesting book about alcohol and American writers, focusing on Hemingway, Faulkner, Fitzgerald, and O'Neill. Major writers--and drinkers.
1954, by the editors of TPR:
http://www.parisreview.com/viewinterview.php/prmMID/5114
(or the link on my name) for a PDF of the interview.
WILLIAM STYRON The Art of Fiction No. 5
Interviewed by Peter Matthiessen and George Plimpton
Issue 5, Spring 1954
Thanks Todd--and, since the interview took place in the 1950s, that makes it even more likely that the interviewers (both "he's" I see) didn't think there was anything to follow up when a writer stated that he got drunk every night.
Grazie, Todd.
Rick posted on this topic today too. I know from experience that drinking will lead to depression and worsen the whole thing. Although trying to self medicate is understandable.
Deb-I wonder how normal that may have seemed at the time. People seemed to have imbibed an inordinate amount based on movies and books of that era. THE THIN MAN movies make you drunk just watching them. And MAD MEN reminds us too.
I just finished a collection of John O'Hara's short stories (written between 1927 until 1966) and the casual references to people drinking, getting drunk (or "tight"), having hangovers, etc., are on-going. I don't think it occurred to people, by and large, that many of their "other" problems were either caused or exacerbated by their drinking.
Would love to read that. What's the title?
The full title is: The Collected Short Stories of John O’Hara, selected and with an introduction by Frank MacShane. It was published in 1984. I purchased it at a recent Friends of the Library book sale and I can't recommend it highly enough. I don't think we realize how significant O'Hara's contribution was to the development of what we think of as the "New Yorker" short story. (But, to return to the theme of your original post, there's a lot of drinking going on in those stories!)
Glad you're enjoying THE PARIS REVIEW interviews, Patti. You have plenty to look forward to in the next volumes! For a generation, drinking was part of the writer's life. Look at Fitzgerald and Sinclair Lewis and Hemingway. There's a lot of drinking in Hammett and Chandler, too. Any one of John O'Hara's collections will reveal how pervasive boozing and "social" drinking was in the Forties and Fifties.
Now drinking scenes in novels are usually there to indicate a problem. I don't think readers/writers viewed it thusly fifty years ago.
Well, as Deb was pointing out, drinking, frequently to excess, was as common as chain-smoking among a lot of people. It's a wonder we haven't seen an even more pervasive drug problem with illegal pharma than we have. A gram is better than a damn.
I've known a number of writers and artists afflicted with depression. There is a tendency to automatically link their creativity to their mood disorder that is not helpful for them coming to grips with the nature of the affliction. Drinking, of course, makes it much worse, since alcohol is itself a systemic depressant.
I've been wondering whether or not writing can be used as a more positive activity to "get things out of their system" method for some writers who would otherwise experience much deeper episodes.
I'm so glad you posted about this topic, pattinase. I learned a lot here from your post and those who stopped by to comment.
Drink and rock'n'roll was what kept Hunter S Thompson going.
But is it not the end result that matters? The words that they wrote.
Anyone interested - how authors affected my childhood on my blog.
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