To revel in the romance of sodden genius while ignoring the consequences of chronic alcoholism — and its effects on writers who, without the drink, might have accomplished so much more — is at best naïve. Opinion by Jim Coyle
A letter writer to the Star this week, offended at recent research warning of the health risks of alcohol, summoned the tired trope of linking alcohol and creative genius.
“It is obvious that the long-term effects of heavy and continuous drinking are physically and mentally deleterious and in some cases catastrophic,” he wrote. In “The Thirsty Muse: Alcohol and the American Writer,” Tom Dardis noted that a closer look at the long list of famously drunken writers “reveals that four were suicides , while nearly all the rest burned themselves out at surprisingly early stages of their careers.
In her book “The Trip to Echo Springs: On Writers and Drinking,” Olivia Laing includes an excerpt from John Cheever’s diaries to illustrate the cost of his alcoholism: As William Palmer wrote of Charles Jackson, author of “The Lost Weekend,” a novel whose success he never came close to matching, “he has the images, the ideas, the dialogue, the whole story in his head … until the next drink, and it goes.”
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