Brilliant Minds Argue Positive Benefits from Alcohol

It is quite a phenomenon in the history of literature that a great number of the most influential authors have also been alcoholics. I struggle writing essays for a class sober, let alone drunk! How did they do it? It has come as quite a surprise to find that most of these authors do not find drinking to be an impediment to their writing ability. In fact, it is just the opposite. Many of them attribute their works to the effects of alcohol. It is the magical drink that allows humans to essentially escape from reality for the time being and enter a different world where our imaginations can run wild. The following are some quotes on alcohol by famous authors. Below that is an interesting article on the influence of alcohol on these writers. Overall, the consensus seems to be that alcohol enhances their writing. Maybe I will have a beer or two before I start writing my next essay.

"As I grew older I became a drunk. Why? Because I like ecstasy of the mind."
- Jack Kerouac

"First you take a drink, then the drink takes a drink, then the drink takes you."
- F. Scott Fitzgerald

"There is no such thing as bad whiskey. Some whiskeys just happen to be better than others. But a man shouldn't fool with booze until he's fifty; then he's a damn fool if he doesn't."
— William Faulkner

"I was carrying a beautiful alcoholic conflagration around with me. The thing fed on its own heat and flamed the fiercer. There was no time, in all my waking time, that I didn't want a drink. I began to anticipate the completion of my daily thousand words by taking a drink when only five hundred words were written. It was not long until I prefaced the beginning of the thousand words with a drink."
- Jack London



1970 Times Magazine Article - The Writer's Vice

Behavior: The Writer's Vice
Monday, Oct. 05, 1970

In Western literary tradition, Critic Leslie Fiedler has said, great writers need a flaw, a "charismic weakness." Often that weakness is drinking. "You're a rummy, but no more than most good writers are," Ernest Hemingway told Scott Fitzgerald, and Fitzgerald himself called alcohol the "writer's vice." Now, through a study of Fitzgerald as "an alcoholic par excellence," Washington University Psychiatrist Donald W. Goodwin has attempted to explain the remarkable statistics about the drinking habits of well-known American writers of the past century: a third to a half were alcoholic; of six Americans awarded the Nobel Prize for literature, four (Eugene O'Neill, Sinclair Lewis, William Faulkner and Hemingway) were alcoholics, and a fifth (John Steinbeck) drank heavily.

Why so? Possibly their heredity compelled it; writing ability and alcoholism may have common, partly innate roots, says Goodwin. Possibly, at least in Fitzgerald, talent and alcoholism "have a common meeting point" with another disorder that may have a genetic source: manic-depressive disease. Fitzgerald's enthusiasms were nearly manic, and he was often depressed. "In the real dark night of the soul," he wrote, "it is always three o'clock in the morning."

In his early days, Fitzgerald drank out of disappointment and poverty. Later, "success was the occasion for drinking." Whatever its origins, Fitzgerald's alcoholism rarely seemed to embarrass him, though he often felt guilty over the suffering it caused his wife Zelda. Drinking, in fact, had always attracted him: as a boy, he pretended drunkenness; as an adult, he introduced himself as "F. Scott Fitzgerald, the well-known alcoholic." He claimed that liquor "heightened feelings," and he declined psychiatric treatment because he thought he would not write as well if he stopped drinking.

Perhaps he had something there. Explains Goodwin: "Writing is a form of exhibitionism; alcohol lowers inhibitions and brings out exhibitionism. Writing requires an interest in people; alcohol increases sociability. Writing involves fantasy; alcohol promotes fantasy. Writing requires self-confidence; alcohol bolsters confidence."

Then, too, alcohol can ease the pain of the writer's lot. To write is to be lonely, Goodwin says, but alcohol assuages loneliness. To write demands intense concentration, but drink relaxes, emancipating the writer from "the tyranny of mind and memory."

To Goodwin, nonetheless, alcohol is not just a harmless stimulus to creativity. He points to the obvious fact that a man may use it self-destructively, as did Fitzgerald. In such cases, as Baudelaire said about Edgar Allan Poe, alcohol becomes a weapon "to kill something inside himself, a worm that would not die."




http://www.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,904358,00.html