Thomas Mullen

Are writers crazy? Maybe not, but that sentence struck me as a particularly apt way to begin my first blog posting. I was thinking about this because I was catching up on some New Yorker reading recently, and it turns out that two issues in the past few months ran articles about famous writers who suffered from severe depression and alcoholism. The first story, about William Styron, was an excerpt of his daughter's recently published memoir; the second detailed the mysterious death of Malcolm Lowry, author of the postmodern classic (or is that a contradiction?) Under the Volcano.

The Styron article notes that, while the Sophie's Choice author could be quite the entertainer when hosting cocktail parties dotted with intellectuals and filmmakers, his heavy drinking didn't exactly make him the most pleasant father to have around the house, particularly when his writing wasn't going well. According to Syron's daugher, his depression was not necessarily a result of the wounds one normally equates with troubled writers (bad sales, cruel reviews, no money, dismal job teaching remedial writing to a community college in East Nowhere, etc). He received plenty of acclaim and what seems like more than respectable financial success for a novelist. As will happen when you're on top, he did receive his share of ire as well; The Confessions of Nat Turner, which won the 1967 Pulitizer Prize, was strongly criticized by black intellectuals who disapproved of the white author's take on Turner. Still, the New Yorker article lays the blame for Styron's troubles on subtler demons that sprang from his mother's death when he was thirteen.

The Lowry article, meanwhile, details that author's tempestuous marriage. His wife served as his editor, but also as his nurse and all-around lifesaver -- he was so addled by various mental problems that she tied his shoes for him, and his alcoholic spells were so bad he occasionally begged on street corners for spare change to buy more booze. Lowry's death was ruled accidental at the time, an overdose on various medications and alcohol. But some scholars are arguing, the story notes, that Lowry's wife, driven to exhaustion and despair by his manic extremes, may have deliberately fed him too many meds that night.

So the same magazine ran two stories, in less than three months, about depressed, alcoholic novelists. The Crazy Writer is almost a stereotype, except there's too much evidence to consider it a mere stereotype. Looking back, there indeed have been many maniacs, depressives, suicides, and other legions of the unwell in our ranks. And they're the writers who get the most attention, because they're so much more interesting -- interesting and repulsive and horrifying and sympathetic and sad and tragic -- than the more typical writer, who tends to be a quiet sort who spends far too much time alone in his or her office. We can't all be Hemingway, shooting rhinos and scaling mountains, or F. Scott, boozing with Manhattan's and Hollywood's glitziest, though journalists of course would prefer it if we could. The Crazy Writers, finally spared their torments in the placid afterlife of the canon, look down on us mortal writers from their pedestals. They are benighted saints of passionate madness, and it is as though we living authors should kneel before their books and vow to sacrifice our own mental health in the pursuit of similar artistic riches.

I read the two Crazy Writer stories with a mix of fascination and terror, thinking, could this happen to me? Could the sting of bad press, or, the opposite, the dizzying impossibility of high expectations, ground me down to such a lowly place? Fortunately, I don't think so. I had a healthy upbringing, and I have a supportive family -- this seems to disqualify me from about 90 percent of literary breakdowns. I don't agree with the theory that writers or artists are all a bit crazy, and that this craziness is what drives us to create, and that the crazier we are, the better our art. Thank God for the example set by folks like Michael Chabon and Jeffrey Eugenides, hugely talented and successful writers who also, as far as I know, seem to lead sane and healthy lives.

Soon after I got my first book deal, I saw Bret Easton Ellis give a reading at Olssons Books here in D.C. At the time I'd only read his first novel, Less Than Zero. That book helped Ellis achieve widespread fame and literary success at an insanely young age, something that he has admitted was both a blessing and a curse. Ellis was on tour that night to promote his new book, Lunar Park, which I later read and enjoyed very much. The main character of Lunar Park is an approaching-middle-age writer named Bret Easton Ellis who is haunted by a man who looks just like he did back when he wrote Less Than Zero. He is also being stalked by a man who looks just like the terrifying protagonist of his ultraviolent later novel, American Psycho. So, although I wasn't yet an expert on the cult of Ellis, it seemed irresistibly symbolic for me, the newly minted writer, to attend the reading of a novel about a writer who goes crazy, written by a writer who himself may or may not have gone crazy.

Ellis has a deadpan sense of humor and put on a fun show. But during the Q&A, it was one of the unfunny things he said that has stuck with me. He was asked about his writing routine, how he does it, how long, what time, etc, and one of the points he made was that, in order to write well, you "have to be healthy." I had never thought of that before. Maybe it's because I myself, despite having written a novel about an epidemic, have been blessed with a largely healthy life. But I think it's a great point Ellis made, and I get it more now than I did back in that September of 2005, as I myself not only have gone through the full publishing cycle but also have had my first child and have dealt with the attendant sleep-deprivation, family illnesses, emotional stresses, etc. You have to be healthy. Writing when you haven't had any sleep and are subsisting on espresso in the daytime and bourbon at night might sound romantic, and might fit perfectly with all those Crazy Writer stereotypes, but it won't result in great art, and you'll likely go crazy. Writing on Quaaludes and speed sounds edgy and wild but will leave you with some awfully long, incomprehensible sentences that, odds are, will not be studied in the kinds of Postmodern Fiction courses that first got you really into Pynchon and Beckett. Writing when you're emotionally and psychologically unwell and unsafe might sound therapeutic, but it also might be the wrong way to deal with some important issues you need to deal with.

(And yes, I know, a few Great Works have been created this way, sure, and yes, you could argue that artists occasionally need to experience life at the extremes in order to get new perspectives, to find bizarre and original sources of inspiration, etc, okay, but even then I would argue that they need to recalibrate themselves before sitting in front of that word processor. And yes, I also have admitted when asked that one of the reasons I write is because it "keeps me sane," and there is a lot of truth in the notion that a writer, if deprived of his artistic outlet, might go a little looney, and yes, I see this, definitely, but here again there is a fine line.)

So I want to share Mr. Ellis' sage advice to any aspiring writers out there. I try to remember it on days when I'm too foggy from a long night up with a sick toddler, or when I myself am losing a fight with the flu or am otherwise overstressed or freaked out or unwell. I want to write, I want to create, I want to push envelopes and cross lines and tear down old buildings, but first I have to be healthy. I want to push and push and push, but in my art, and not in my life. I want inspiration and creativity and new ways of seeing, but I don't want to inspire my daughter to write a memoir about my many foibles, or inspire my wife to kill me. The New Yorker will have to find another crazy novelist to write about -- and no doubt they'll find one.


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