More than a decade ago, it came as a great blow to me when my doctor phoned with the results of a biopsy. I had celiac disease. No more gluten. So what foods have gluten in them? I asked.
Well, the doctor said, bread for one. Anything with wheat in it. No pasta. No pizza. No beer.
No beer? But I’m Canadian. I can’t live without beer. I mean, there’s Molsons and Labatts, but there’s all those craft breweries too. There’s Upper Canada Lager, Sleeman’s, Creemore, Mill Street.
What the hell am I gonna do? I almost cried.
The doctor shrugged. He had no idea. His only suggestion was to stick to hard liquor. Never in a million years would I have expected a doctor to recommend that I drink Scotch. But there it was. I should have asked for it on a prescription pad. I should have billed my Laphraoig to my health plan.
I’m not an egregious drinker. Sometimes—like now for instance—I like to sit in front of my computer monitor and plunk away at my keyboard while enjoying a can of Nickel Brook Gluten Free Beer brewed just down the road in Burlington. It loosens my fingers. It relaxes my brain.
Do you think I exaggerate the effects of a good drink? Does it sound like I’m trying to rationalize a bad habit? Lately I’ve noticed a number of online snippets that seem to confirm my view: a drink helps things along.
For example, I noticed a tweet from a writer I follow on twitter. On April 22nd, 2012, he said: “I enjoy poetry most when I’m drunk.” Admittedly, he’s talking about the appreciation of poetry rather than its creation. But that’s a fine distinction.
A week later, another person on Twitter posted an image of a P.P.S. from a letter by Ernest Hemingway which reads as follows:
P.P.S. Don’t you drink? I notice you speak slightingly of the bottle. I have drunk since I was fifteen and few things have given me more pleasure. When you work hard all day with your head and know you must work again the next day what else can change your ideas and make them run on a different plane like whisky? When you are cold and wet what else can warm you? Before an attack who can say anything that gives you the momentary well being that rum does? I would as soon not eat at night as not to have red wine and water. The only time it isn’t good for you is when you write or when you fight. You have to do that cold. But it always helps my shooting. Modern life, too, is often a mechanical oppression and liquor is the only mechanical relief. Let me know if my books make any money and I will come to Moscow and we will find somebody that drinks and drink my royalties up to end the mechanical oppression.
Hemingway, of course, was an egregious drinker. To be fair, he doesn’t appear to say that you should drink while writing, but should drink all around your writing.
It’s easy to come up with a list of great writers whose writing is drenched in alcohol. Malcolm Lowry’s Under The Volcano is an extended conversation with the inebriated brain. F. Scott Fitzgerald was, in his day, renowned as much for his alcoholism as for his writing. Closer to home, we have Morley Callaghan, who sometimes drank himself into oblivion with Hemingway when the two were working together in Toronto. Dorothy Parker is famous for saying: “I’d rather have a bottle in front of me than a frontal lobotomy.” And since we’ve mentioned Hemingway, it seems only fair we mention his ex, the inimitable Martha Gellhorn. In his introduction to her Travels With Myself And Another, Bill Buford calls her a “boozy reporter of wars” and says that she tutored him “on matters of the heart, and on drinking (you could never drink enough).” She had a cottage in north Wales “where she lived alone, drank booze, read mystery novels, and wrote.” Despite her questionable habits, she lived to the ripe age of eighty-nine.
Not everyone thinks alcohol is conducive to good writing. Take, for example, Katha Pollitt’s eulogy of Christopher Hitchens in The Nation. She invites readers to remove their rose-coloured glasses and take a more honest look at the man:
His drinking was not something to admire, and it was not a charming foible. Maybe sometimes it made him warm and expansive, but I never saw that side of it. What I saw was that drinking made him angry and combative and bullying … Drinking didn’t make him a better writer either—that’s another myth. Christopher was such a practiced hand, with a style that was so patented, so integrally an expression of his personality, he was so sure he was right about whatever the subject, he could meet his deadlines even when he was totally sozzled. But those passages of pointless linguistic pirouetting? The arguments that don’t track if you look beneath the bravura phrasing? Forgive the cliché: that was the booze talking.
But a recent study from the University of Illinois and published in the journal, Consciousness and Cognition, suggests that alcohol may improve creative problem solving. In a study, subjects who had two drinks performed better than people who had nothing to drink. As one would expect, subjects who were “sozzled” couldn’t perform at all. The conclusion: a moderate amount of alcohol may enhance certain tasks involving creative thinking.
It may be that the disinhibiting effect of alcohol encourages what Edward de Bono would describe as lateral thinking. This is precisely the kind of thinking that is the stock-in-trade of a good writer.
The problem, of course, is that alcohol is an addictive substance and a CNS depressant. There may be a strong correlation between Hemingway’s alcohol consumption, his good writing, and the fact that he put a shotgun in his mouth and blew his brains out.
As I stated above, I’m not an egregious drinker; I’m not even a modest drinker, so I can’t say from personal experience whether there is a connection between alcohol and creative output. But I do have an analogous experience—severe depression. Years ago, I ended up in a heated debate with my then psychiatrist. I had been in rough shape. I remember sitting in his office a few weeks after discharge from a hospital and he said something like: “Your writing is fine and all that, but trust me, your writing would be so much better if you could achieve some measure of happiness in your life.” I didn’t believe him. Even now, I think he was dead wrong.
Although severe depression (and its treatments, like meds and ECTs) can cause cognitive impairment, the experience has a disinhibiting effect that is a lot like being drunk. Your judgment is impaired. You’re overcome by feelings of dysphoria. You can hardly tell what’s real anymore. Being suicidal can liberate your writing. If you’re willing to jump off a bridge, then you and your ego have pretty much parted company. You feel you have nothing to lose. You no longer care what other people think of you. If you’re willing to jump off a bridge, then you’re willing to take other kinds of risks too. Applied to writing, you’re willing to take the kinds of risks that make your words crackle with a detached honesty.
Although I disagreed with him, my psychiatrist was right in the ultimate sense. Your writing isn’t very good if you’re dead. Hemingway’s output was severely curtailed by his suicide, as it was for Sylvia Plath, Virginia Woolf, Jerzy Kosinski, David Foster Wallace, Hunter S. Thompson, Yukio Mishima, Arthur Koestler, Anne Sexton, Hart Crane, Primo Levi, and countless others.
Is there a way writers can enjoy the disinhibiting effect of alcohol or the detachment of severe depression without the adverse consequences?
One possibility is play.
Treat writing as play.
I think it’s fair to say that most of the best writing comes from people who never grow up. It’s not simply that play offers a fantasy world that generates good stories; but also that it happens in an unselfconscious state of mind. When we play, we don’t care what other people think of us. Play lets us take the kinds of risks that make our writing better.
How do we, as grown-ups, recover the world of play? I have no answer for that question. Maybe it starts by cracking open a fresh bottle …