“Today’s writers seem a more cautious lot, less interested in some macho image and less admiring of Hemingway and his giant fish than their elders,” feminist author Anne Roiphe wrote in 2011, contrasting the modern era with the 1950s. If she’s right, it’s not just writers who have changed—it’s Western culture. We’ve become more sensitive and less brazenly self-destructive. “Rehab” and “recovery” are no longer dirty words.
While these are all positive changes, it seems we can’t stop ourselves from romanticizing the past. Who doesn’t want to return to a time when we could drink, smoke, and have sex with impunity? “The ‘good old times,’” Lord Byron once remarked wistfully. “All times when old are good.”
As we’ve seen in Literary Rogues, the good old times were rarely as great up close as from a distance. It’s far more romantic to imagine Dylan Thomas pounding back his eighteenth consecutive shot of whiskey and keeling over on his barstool than it is to hear about him clinging to this world, brain-dead and on an oxygen machine for close to a week. Truman Capote’s and Hunter S. Thompson’s drug abuse was a riot—until it wasn’t. “My addictions and problems were not cool or fun or glamorous in any way whatsoever,” James Frey once wrote. As the saying goes, it’s all fun and games until someone chokes on the business end of a twelve-gauge shotgun.
Up close, wayward authors appear more human, less remarkable. There’s nothing special about being addicted to opium or taking a shit on a porch that made these wayward writers somehow more notable than their sane and sober colleagues. Take a look at any list of the top hundred novels of all time, and you’ll see plenty of quiet, sober names mixed in with the Fitzgeralds, Faulkners, and Hemingways. No, it ultimately wasn’t because of their shocking behavior that they left behind anything of value—it was in spite of it. They should have been nothing more than cannon fodder. Somehow, even total failures at the game of life like John Berryman have achieved immortality by virtue of their pens.
It’s easy to burn your lips on a crack pipe or ball your way through a Parisian whorehouse in the 1890s. Attempting to create something of value in a world that tells you at every turn to shut up and color inside the lines, that conformity leads to success? That’s real rebellion. Writing may be a more acceptable occupation than it was two hundred years ago, but don’t let that fool you: there are still a million things your family would rather see you do than pursue a career in literature. Hell, there are a million things society would rather have you do. In a way, all authors are literary rogues.
But, to paraphrase Joyce Carol Oates, nobody tells anecdotes about the quiet people who just do their work. As memoirists have known for years, the more fucked-up your life, the more compelling your life story. So if you’re a writer and want to be included in Literary Rogues 2, I recommend picking up an opium pipe, loading your gun, and getting to work...