Writers and Drinking

Many of us associate the romantic image of the writer with drinking, and that probably isn't a healthy connection overall for aspiring writers. As the late and brilliant "This American Life" contributor David Rakoff once put it (and I'm paraphrasing), "there are real writers and those who just drink about it."  Too many writers of note could be termed serious drinkers for me to name them all here, but suffice it to say that some of our most famous and beloved American writers (Hemingway, Faulkner, Carver, Poe, London) knew the bottle intimately. To what extent drinking helped or hurt these writers' careers, to what extent they drank because they wrote or vice versa, is difficult to say. In Hemingway's case, his publisher at least said he wouldn't "have been the same person" or writer without drinking (I'll have to get that citation later). Certainly, for most people, drinking probably doesn't help you gain the clarity or maintain the intellectual rigor necessary for writing.

I think it's interesting (and this is by no means an observation unique to me) that we term alcoholism a disease, but continue to blame drinkers if they are not helped by treatment, assigning their inability to get well (sober) to a moral failure of the will (not wanting to stop drinking badly enough).  It seems we really only reserve the term "illness" for alcoholics who have stopped drinking, thereby allowing those former drinkers to shirk from the blame for misdeeds while drinking (since it is, after all, an illness). There's a lot of truth to that bit of bumper-sticker/t-shirt wisdom, "I'm not an alcoholic, I'm a drunk. Alcoholics go to meetings."

It's impossible to say why these particular famous writers were given to drink, whether it was the romantic notion of a tortured soul self-medicating or the sign of an egotist who couldn't live with himself in real and sober terms. Perhaps, though, like all alcoholics who continue to drink, these writers deserve some sympathy instead of judgment, some allowance for their humanity, as well as an acknowledgment that their humanity (including perceived character flaws) allowed them to be better writers and artists.