GoKawiilThe history of art in general, and literature in particular, is full of alcoholics, opium addicts, cocaine users, and junkies of all sorts. And the process is always the same: the chemical muse kills first the work, and then the artist. “Then I was drunk for many years, and then I died,” F. Scott Fitzgerald wrote in a diary.
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Interestingly, one drug that had its moment among creators was coffee: Voltaire drank fifty coffees a day, Balzac forty, and Flaubert paired his dozens of daily cups with glasses of ice water. Nietzsche was addicted to chloral hydrate, a sedative made from chloroform; Freud and Robert Louis Stevenson, to cocaine; Ramón del Valle-Inclán smoked hashish heavily—just as Baudelaire had done in 1840, as a member of the Club des Hashischins, together with writers such as Honoré de Balzac, Théophile Gautier, Gérard de Nerval, and the painter Eugène Delacroix. Opium in particular has always had a strong following. “Of all drugs, opium is the drug,” said Jean Cocteau. “It gives form to the formless.” And isn’t that what all artists are seeking?
Opium was used by Shelley, Wordsworth, Byron, Keats, Flaubert, Rimbaud. Thomas De Quincey enthused that opium drew back the veil “between our present consciousness and the secret inscriptions on the mind.” Incidentally, the badly addicted De Quincey ended up suffering terribly, experiencing severe dissociation and horrific nightmares. Not to mention perhaps the most famous opium addict in the history of literature, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, whose renowned poem “Kubla Khan” came to him in a drug-induced dream (he woke up and hurriedly jotted down the lines, but could only remember part of it). Even someone like Octavio Paz, a formidable writer who gave the impression of being a very formal and serious gentleman, once said: “Drugs […] give life to analogy, put objects in motion, make of the world a vast poem of rhythms and rhymes.”
I understand what led them to alcohol. It’s as we said at the beginning: to heighten the emotions, enhance disinhibition, quell the controlling self.
As for cocaine, once it was first extracted from coca plants in 1860 it was immediately hailed as a miracle substance: the market was flooded with coca pills, syrups, and elixirs. Jules Verne thought it “a wonderful tonic.” The young and enterprising Mark Twain contemplated setting up a business that consisted of going to the Amazon to harvest coca in order to “open up a trade in coca with all the world.” For months he pondered the project, even setting off for Peru with a 50 dollar bill in his pocket that he’d found on the street, but he only made it as far as New Orleans. This incredible story is recounted by Sadie Plant in her fascinating book Writing on Drugs. She also reveals that, according to some authors, the visions of St. Teresa of Jesus and other mystics may have been facilitated by psychoactive substances, such as ergot. Ergot is a fungus that attacks cereal crops; consuming the infected flour of these crops can lead to a disease called St. Anthony’s Fire, which was quite common in the Middle Ages and causes terrible symptoms: seizures, dementia, and fatal gangrenous infections. However, if taken in small quantities, it can induce hallucinations. Ergot contains an alkaloid, ergoline, from which LSD was synthesized in 1938.
Before that, ergotamine had also been extracted from it, a medication for migraines that I have taken in large doses throughout my life (this has nothing to do with the story: I was just stunned to discover it). I’d previously read about the probable influence of ergot on painters such as Bosch (those kaleidoscopic deliriums), but I was unaware of the mystics. And Sadie Plant goes on to recount something even more shocking: scientist John Mann apparently discovered a connection between certain historical events and periods when the climate was favorable to the growth of ergot, which may have provoked a kind of collective hallucination. He points to the Salem witch trials in Massachusetts in the 1690s and the “Reign of Terror” during the French Revolution.
There are many drugs we haven’t even touched on yet: Truman Capote’s barbiturates, Philip K. Dick’s amphetamines…Although amphetamines have typically been more the politician’s drug of choice than the artist’s: Kennedy, Churchill, British Prime Minister Anthony Eden…and Hitler, who injected methamphetamine eight times a day. Other writers experimented with mescaline, like Jean-Paul Sartre, who spent years seeing crustaceans chase after him; or with peyote and, above all, LSD, the drug of Timothy Leary and his crackpots. It also fascinated Aldous Huxley, who argued that he needed to get high to “access [his] subconscious life” (just like we were saying). There is something he did at the end of his life that I’ve always found chilling. As he lay dying of oral cancer, he asked his wife—in writing because he could no longer speak—to inject him with LSD in his final moments. And she did. So Huxley died in the middle of an acid trip; he refused morphine because he said he wanted to die with as much mental clarity as possible. Although, as a child of the LSD age, I don’t know if that can truly be called mental clarity.
But the queen of drugs for artists, and especially the literati, is alcohol. “Drink heightens feelings. When I drink, it heightens my emotions and I put it in a story… My stories written when sober are stupid… all reasoned out, not felt,” Fitzgerald said to a friend early into his descent into hell. Incidentally, I think the oxymoron in Fitzgerald’s last sentence is beautiful: the more reason is used in art, the less sense it all makes. It’s what we were saying before, about needing to anesthetize the self.
Alcohol is the great plague of writers, especially during the 20th century. Of the nine U.S.-born Nobel laureates in literature, five were hopeless alcoholics: Sinclair Lewis, Eugene O’Neill, William Faulkner, Ernest Hemingway, and John Steinbeck. To which we could add dozens more authors, such as Jack London, Dashiell Hammett, Dorothy Parker, Djuna Barnes, Tennessee Williams, Carson McCullers, John Cheever, Raymond Carver, Robert Lowell, Edgar Allan Poe, Charles Bukowski, Jack Kerouac, Patricia Highsmith, Stephen King, Malcolm Lowry… Americans have been incredibly good at drinking themselves to death, but of course they are not the only ones; there’s also Dylan Thomas, Jean Rhys, Marguerite Duras, Oscar Wilde, Ian Fleming, Françoise Sagan… And we’re not talking about occasionally having a few too many, but about real personal catastrophes, delirium tremens, a total destruction of life.
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