“Writers write for fame, wealth, power, and the love of women.”
—Sigmund Freud
One of the leading nineteenth-century head cases was Edgar Allan Poe—short, hydrocephalic, moody. “It is my crime to have no one on Earth who cared for me, or loved me,” he wrote. After his actor father vanished and his actress mother died of TB, the three-year-old orphan was adopted by the implacable tobacco tycoon Mr. Allan. At age sixteen, the boy wrote his first poem, “Oh, Tempora! Oh, Mores!” but Allan forbade its publication for fear Edgar might get a “swelled head.” His classmates already described him as “ambitious” and “inclined to be imperious.”1
Allan discouraged his stepson from “eating the bread of idleness”—writing. After the young man was expelled from West Point for reporting to dress parade undressed, he turned full-time to literature. “For God’s sake pity me,” he wrote home, “and save me from destruction!” Allan disinherited him.
Edgar moved in with his surrogate mother, Aunt Muddy, a seamstress, and like Jerry Lee Lewis, he married his thirteen-year-old cousin, Virginia, whom he called Sissy. For the next two decades, the threesome lived on molasses sandwiches and laudanum. Poe’s average annual income was $100. In 1845 he earned a record $699, $9 of which came from “The Raven.”
After R&R at a Utica asylum in 1846, the novelist/poet/critic/editor resolved to make a fortune on “Eureka.” He wrote a friend that in this essay on the origin of the cosmos he would “question the sagacity of many of the greatest and most justly reverenced of men (such as Aristotle and Bacon) … with no unwarranted fear of being taken for a madman.”
“My whole nature utterly revolts at the idea that there is any Being in the Universe superior to myself!” he told his publisher. Adding that he had eclipsed Isaac Newton himself, he told Putnam to print a million copies, 50,000 at the very least. Putnam advanced him $14, ran 750 copies, and sold 500 at 75¢ apiece.
After the “Eureka” debacle, Sissy died of TB. On the rebound, Poe dated mother surrogates. The first, poetess Jane Locke, was smitten. “I felt as if in the presence of a god!” Then, realizing he had psychological issues, she dumped him. Fearing that he mightn’t be canonized in his own lifetime, much less deified, the poet now drank thirty times his maintenance dose of laudanum.
To his disappointment, Poe survived. Complaining again of “brain fever,” he declared, “I became insane, with long intervals of horrible sanity.”
In the end, the father of the murder mystery and horror genre was carried from a Baltimore bar to a hospital, wearing one shoe, and somebody else’s clothes, babbling incoherently.2
Literary history teaches us that declaring one’s godlike genius is mandatory for the megalomaniac.
Explaining his depression to a friend one day, Oscar Wilde said, “I’m sad because one half of the world doesn’t believe in God, and the other half doesn’t believe in me.” Another time, asked to name his hundred favorite books, he declined “because I’ve only written five.” When entering America, he told the customs official, “I have nothing to declare but my genius.” After dying penniless and disgraced, the genius was laid to rest in Paris under a stone angel whose genitals were cut off and used as paperweights by the cemetery guards.
When Theodore Dreiser was asked how he wrote Sister Carrie at age twenty-nine, he replied, “Genius, I suppose.” Later, he wrote his autobiographical novel The Genius.
While some writers decide that they’re geniuses before creating a work of genius, the humble wait.
“I am about to become a genius,” said Balzac after finishing La Comédie Humaine.
“By God, I think I have genius,” said Thomas Wolfe after finishing Look Homeward, Angel.
At age fifty-three, Truman Capote preceded his own declaration with modifiers: “I’m an alcoholic. I’m a drug addict. I’m homosexual. I’m a genius.”
Sometimes a fellow genius will disagree. After Wolfe was nine years in the ground and defenseless, Hemingway wrote their publisher, Charles Scribner: “Tom Wolfe was a one-book boy and a glandular giant with the brains and the guts of three mice.” Then he weighed in on another self-proclaimed genius, F. Scott Fitzgerald, who had connected him with Scribner in the first place. “Scott was a rummy and a liar … with the inbred talent of a dishonest and easily frightened angel.”
By then Fitzgerald had been thrown from his Gatsby high horse and was drinking himself to stupor. “His [Hemingway’s] inclination is toward megalomania and mine toward melancholy,” he wrote.3
Papa’s original mentor, Gertrude Stein, had provided a role model for self-aggrandizement. The Montparnasse matriarch had written literary scholar Samuel Putnam: “20th century literature is Gertrude Stein. The big American writers are Poe, Whitman, James, myself. The line of dissent is clear.”4 In her journal she added, “It takes a lot of time to be a genius, you have to sit around so much doing nothing.” Hemingway had no patience with such gasconade. His mentor’s talent, he wrote, had “gone to malice and nonsense and self-praise … But, I swear, she was damned nice before she got ambitious.”
Sinclair Lewis, whom Hemingway had also dismissed as a fake, called Papa “a monosyllabic simpleton.” At a cocktail party, the Arrowsmith author informed H.L. Mencken, “Let me tell you something. I’m the best writer in this here goddamn country!” Mencken, a grandiose self-advertiser himself, called Lewis a “jackass.”5
Sinclair had the last laugh, becoming the first American to win a Nobel. Faulkner—who had declared, “I am the best in America, by God!”—collected his own nineteen years later. Five years after that, in 1954, Hemingway—who had declared, “I don’t like to write like God. It is only because you never do it, though, that the critics think you can’t do it”—was finally beatified by the Academy.
Like Nixon, Gadhafi, Hemingway, and other egomaniacs, John O’Hara referred to himself in the third person, at least when composing the epitaph on his tombstone.
Better than anyone else,
he told the truth about his time.
He was a professional.
He wrote honestly and well.
Brendan Gill, the novelist’s nemesis at The New Yorker, wondered, “Better than anyone else? Not merely better than any other writer of fiction but better than any dramatist, any poet, any biographer, any historian? It is an astonishing claim.”6
The first rock star American novelist, Mark Twain, like O’Hara and Faulkner, wrote that he wished to “outrival those whom the public most admires.”7
Twain was Hemingway’s idol. Convinced that he was without match in the United States, Hemingway took on dead European heavyweights. He claimed to have KO’ed Turgenev, Maupassant, then Stendhal. With characteristic modesty, he concluded, “But nobody’s going to get me in any ring with Mr. Tolstoy unless I’m crazy or I keep getting better.”8
At the outset of his career, Tolstoy, embarrassed by his own arrogance, whipped himself. His friend, Dostoyevsky, spoke for the two of them when he told his brother, “I have a terrible vice: a boundless pride and vanity.”9
Steinbeck agreed. “The whole early part of my life was poisoned with egotism,” he confessed. He believed that good writing came from “an absence of ego.”10 This helped him become a master of characterization, a difficult skill for the narcissist.
Fitzgerald admitted that all of his characters, even his women, were himself.11 Hemingway refused to admit the same. Of his last novel, The Old Man and the Sea, he wrote: “It will destroy the school of criticism that claims I can write about nothing except myself and my own experiences.”12 But the only thing different about his old man was that he was penniless, hadn’t been on the covers of Life, Time, or Argosy, and hadn’t tried to gaff his fellow fishermen.
One of the few colleagues Hemingway hadn’t found it necessary to cannibalize was Ezra Pound, because Pound was a poet and never bad-mouthed him. But, in private, to Archibald MacLeish, Papa wrote, “If Ezra has any sense he should shoot himself. Personally I think he should have shot himself somewhere along after the twelfth Canto, although maybe earlier.”
Pound spent twelve years in St. Elizabeth’s psychiatric hospital in Washington, D.C. He composed his later Cantos there, on toilet paper. T.S. Eliot described meeting his friend, surrounded by inmates frothing at the mouth. Deciding that he was just a “narcissist,” the doctors moved the poet to a private room. He became so comfortable at the hospital that he resisted leaving. Colleagues who were trying to spring him—Hemingway, Eliot, Auden, and others—were baffled.
After his release, Pound was asked by a reporter if he felt free. He said no. “When I left the hospital I was still in America, and all America is an insane asylum.”13
1 Kenneth Silverman, Edgar A. Poe: Mournful and Never-ending Remembrance (New York: Harper Perennial, 1992).
2 Kenneth Silverman, Edgar A. Poe: Mournful and Never-ending Remembrance (New York: Harper Perennial, 1992).
3 Jeffrey Meyers, Scott Fitzgerald: A Biography (New York: HarperCollins, 2004).
4 Noel Riley Fitch, Sylvia Beach And The Lost Generation: A History Of Literary Paris In The 20s And 30s (New York: W.W. Norton, 1985).
5 Mark Schorer, Sinclair Lewis: An American Life (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1961).
6 Brendan Gill, Here at the New Yorker. (New York: Random House, 1975).
7 Ron Powers, Mark Twain: A Life. (New York: Free Press, 2005).
8 James R. Mellow, Hemingway: A Life Without Consequence (New York: Houghton Mifflin, 1992).
9 Geir Kjetsaa, Fyodor Dostoyevsky: A Writer’s Life (New York: Viking, 1987).
10 Jay Parini, John Steinbeck: A Biography (New York: Henry Holt, 1995).
11 According to his biographer, Jeffrey Meyers, Fitzgerald wore falsies and make-up in Princeton plays. One classmate recalled: “He looked exactly like a beautiful lady and acted like one.”
12 Carlos Baker, ed., Ernest Hemingway Selected Letters 1917-1961. (New York: Scribner, 2003).
13 John Tytell, Ezra Pound: The Solitary Volcano (New York: Doubleday, 1987).